ABSTRACT
The problems that the historian has to face in the examination and interpretation of his material have been foreshadowed to some extent in the preceding pages, and in any case this is not the place for a full discussion of them. His immediate problem is to assess the trustworthiness of his sources. Investigations devised to answer such questions must be undertaken before any entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can be used as a reliable and meaningful historical statement. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides but one set of examples of the historians problems. The critical appreciation of historical sources is of comparatively recent growth. There is a world of difference between, say, a statement in Egils Saga and one in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Or between any one chronicle or manuscript and another. The philologist often derides the historians apparently specious arguments, and the archaeologist not infrequently disregards, to his own downfall, the complexity of the historians sources.
