Laudator Temporis Acti

F.M. Powicke, Ways of Medieval Life and Thought: Essays and Addresses (London: Odhams Press Limited, 1949), pp. 67-68:

The search after truth plays strange tricks with an historian. He sets out to tell a plain straightforward story, and he finds himself running about in all sorts of places. Insensibly the interest of his story is merged in the excitement of the chase. He cannot bring himself to believe that his readers will not be as interested as he has been in seeing how one point leads to another, how this fact throws light on that, why one clue has to be discarded, and another pursued to the end. As Maitland once wrote: "Out of the thicket may fly a bird worth powder and shot"; but the thicket must be a clue, not any thicket, and the bird must be worth powder and shot, not any bird. If this condition is observed, the story becomes more than a story; it breathes a troubled life of its own as part of a living past. The things which first stirred interest, the picturesque, the amusing, the dramatic, are still there, but are no longer the essential things. Sometimes, as I work at a series of patent and close rolls, I have a queer sensation; the dead entries begin to be alive. It is rather like the experience of sitting down in one’s chair and finding that one has sat on the cat. These are real people, this casual official letter is telling something that really happened, it was written on the impulse of a real emotion.