It is apparent to anyone who visits the battlefield of Grandson fought over by the Swiss and their Burgundian opponents, and tried to use Oman's account as a guide that he had never visited the site. His whole description of the events is misleading, although relatively detailed. I recommend that you read Richard Vaughan's biography of Charles the Bold for a better account of the battle.

For many years, Sir Charles Oman occupied a position of enormous respect as a medieval military historian. His great work, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages in two volumes was first published in 1885 and more recently in 1991. The view of medieval warfare expressed by Oman in his books was common around the turn of the last century and influenced the writing of medieval military history for many years.

Today, it is generally recognized that this view, so well expressed by Oman, is at best misleading. Like many of his contemporaries, Oman did not stray from the halls of academia in search of physical evidence to supplement the written accounts, which formed the only source of information, or visit the places that he wrote about. Now we expect scholars to travel and explore our world because travel is so much easier today, even for the everyman tourist.

Sir Charles Oman's influence has been particularly pervasive because of the continuing availability of his work. While in many respects Oman's study remains valuable, more re-cent research has clearly shown that many of his assumptions and conclusions were seriously flawed, particularly with regard to the level of competency of medieval commanders and capabilities of their armies.

Another reason for Oman’s longevity is the number of writers, who have chosen to quote from his text. This is known as historical commonplace. The more times an author is quoted, the more likely his material will be considered valuable whether or not the infor-mation has been proven or simply asserted. In Oman’s case, he has certainly been quoted a lot since his books were first published over 100 years ago.

Most dedicated practitioners of historical fencing are well aware of the inaccuracies, and try to eradicate the ones they know about. Unfortunately, many historians spend the rest of their careers defending their original concepts in the face of opposing views and new information.

Chroniclers are not reporters or even historians in the modern definitions of the words. Sir Charles Oman’s theories for example (including the superiority of the longbow) have been almost entirely discredited, but it is his research that "frames the discourse" in which we are now speaking and reading, and his texts are essential reading for medieval military history.

What this means is simply that practitioners should never accept a researcher's arguments at face value, but instead, assuming one is discussing matters with an open-minded audience, be free to make serious critiques of a researcher’s ideas. Conversely, when one has access to a person of learning in this field, it is never enough to say "what do you think of this X’s or Y’s work?" One must also find out why the person thinks so, and decide whether or not to agree. A serious researcher must be willing to change his position on an issue every time he is presented with new arguments or fresh information. This critical-mindedness seems like something that everyone should have learned in basic schooling, but the habit of quoting the "Authority" seems to be with us, and over and over again we see people playing a kind of "follow the leader" when dealing with certain issues rather than actually considering the merits of the arguments and counter-arguments.

Some commonplaces, however, are more difficult to nail down: what about the English longbow? There is no question that this bow was powerful. But the truth is that the most powerful bows were from Asia and, despite their small size, there are instances known of arrows being fired across the breadth of the Bosporus (that's roughly 900 metres!). An average Asiatic horse archer’s weapon was light, yet could have a draw weight of 70 or more pounds combined with a mechanical efficiency that puts the best contemporary European bows or longbows to shame.

My own approach to studying history by reading at least three books by different authors, and check to see what sources were used by reviewing the bibliography. I check to see how many sources are common to the books and which are different. This helps to determine what influenced the authors.

This is similar to using triangulation in navigation with three or more known points used to confirm a position. So the more I read, the more I am likely to understand whether or not there is consensus among the authors as to what happened. This is not always possible so sometimes I go searching for the source mate-rial to read what others, particularly contemporaries of the events, wrote.