IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 216

At Christmas 1085 William the Conqueror, who had ruled England since 1066, held his court at Gloucester and ordered an inquiry into the kingdom he had won. He needed to know who held each piece of land, how much it was worth and, above all, how much it could be taxed. The work was carried out with remarkable speed, and within about a year the findings had been gathered into a single volume. Later generations gave the survey a name of its own: Domesday, the Day of Judgement. Few medieval documents are as famous, and few reveal so much about how ordinary people lived, worked and paid their dues.

The inquiry was organised by circuits. Commissioners, travelling in small groups, visited an assigned set of counties and summoned public meetings at which a jury of local men gave evidence on oath. For every manor the jurors had to say who had held it in the time of King Edward, who held it now, how many ploughs there were, how much woodland, meadow and pasture, how many mills and fishponds, and what the estate had been worth then and what it was worth now. The commissioners were therefore comparing two countries rather than describing one, and the comparison lies at the heart of the record: England as it had been before the Norman Conquest, and England as the Normans were remaking it.

Contemporaries understood that nothing was to be left out. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a text unsympathetic to the king, complains that he sent his men over the whole of England to write down how much land every man possessed and what it was worth, and that not one hide, one ox, one cow or even one pig escaped the record. A hide was a unit of land used for assessing tax, nominally enough to support a household. The monk who wrote those lines meant them as a criticism of royal greed, but he also left historians an unusually precise description of what the survey was.

What survives today is not the mass of raw returns but a fair copy, now known as Great Domesday, written throughout in the hand of a single scribe. It is a summary: the local evidence was compressed into short, formulaic entries in Latin, each beginning with the name of the tenant-in-chief. Three counties in eastern England, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, were never reduced to this form; their returns survive as Little Domesday, a far more detailed record which occupies more pages than the rest of the country put together. Historians have argued ever since about why these counties were treated differently and what the difference reveals about how the book was made.

The survey was incomplete in other ways. London and Winchester, the two largest towns, are missing, perhaps because their citizens were too wealthy, or too troublesome, to be assessed in the same manner as a village. The far north, including Northumberland and Durham, lay beyond the king's effective control and was not covered at all. Nor does the book describe people who owned no land: labourers, most women and the very poor appear only indirectly, if at all. Even the villages it lists are recorded chiefly as sources of rent and service rather than as communities.

The name Domesday seems to have come into use in the later twelfth century. It likened the book to the Last Judgement, in which, Christians believed, every person's deeds were written down and from which there was no appeal. The comparison was apt in a practical sense as well: the survey settled disputes over land, and its verdicts were treated as final for centuries.

Other documents allow historians to see behind the fair copy. The Exon Domesday, a manuscript covering the south-western counties, appears to be a draft, closer to the original returns and much less tidy than the final text. From such fragments scholars have reconstructed the machinery of the inquiry: how the commissioners' findings were gathered, checked and abbreviated by clerks at the royal treasury, probably at Winchester, and how decisions about what to include were reached.

For all its gaps, the Domesday Book remains the richest single source for eleventh-century England. It lists more than thirteen thousand places, and from it historians can estimate the population, trace the distribution of woodland and marsh, follow the building of Norman castles and churches, and measure how severely the north had been devastated by the campaigns of 1069 and 1070. It also counts a category of people described as slaves, a reminder that the society it records was not simply a world of lords and peasants. Above all it shows a system of landholding transformed: a small number of Norman tenants-in-chief now held most of England, and English landowners had all but disappeared.

Modern readers no longer need to travel to the National Archives at Kew to consult it. A printed edition appeared in the 1780s, and a photographic facsimile followed in the 1860s. In 1986, to mark the nine-hundredth anniversary, the BBC assembled a new Domesday, a digital record of British life compiled by schools and community groups; the technology on which it was stored has since become obsolete, while the original has been translated and placed online, where it can be searched as easily as a modern database.

Historians have always listened to people, but the practice known as oral history is a twentieth-century invention. What distinguishes it from the older habit of interviewing the famous is that it records the testimony of ordinary people, usually on audio or video, and keeps the recording itself as a document. The term is often confused with oral tradition, which refers to stories, genealogies and songs passed between generations over long periods. Oral history, by contrast, is first-hand recollection, created when a researcher sits down with a witness and asks about a life or an event. The distinction matters, because the two kinds of material raise different problems and call for different methods.

The practice grew out of new technology. In the United States, the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s sent interviewers to collect the life stories of ordinary Americans, and one of its programmes, carried out between 1936 and 1938, recorded interviews with more than two thousand people who had been born into slavery. In 1948 the historian Allan Nevins established an oral history office at Columbia University, at first to record the memories of leading political and business figures. Portable tape recorders in the 1960s freed interviewers from the study and made it possible to record in kitchens, factories and villages, and the cassette recorder later allowed witnesses to keep copies of their own words.

From the 1960s the field expanded quickly, particularly in Britain, where social historians began to interview miners, dockers, mill workers and their wives — groups who had left few written records of their own. A society for oral historians was founded in the early 1970s, and the first British handbook on the subject, published later in the same decade, became a standard text for a generation of researchers. Similar movements appeared in Scandinavia, Germany and Australia, and in Italy, where memories of the war and of fascism gave the work an urgency it has never quite lost. Community projects multiplied too, often recording the history of a single street or factory rather than that of a nation.

Elsewhere the study of spoken testimony had a different purpose. In the 1950s and 1960s, as African countries approached independence, historians set out to reconstruct the pre-colonial past of societies that had kept no written archives. The Belgian scholar Jan Vansina, who worked among the Kuba peoples of the Congo, argued that oral traditions could be used as historical evidence if they were collected carefully and compared with one another. His study of the subject, published in the early 1960s, set out rules for doing so: record many versions, learn the language, understand the conventions of the genre, and ask who benefits from a particular account of the past.

Such confidence was soon challenged. Critics pointed out that memory is not a recording but a reconstruction, reshaped each time it is recalled and coloured by what the narrator has learned since. Witnesses forget, confuse dates and, without meaning to deceive, fit their stories to the expectations of the person asking. Interviewers, for their part, bring assumptions of their own and may steer a conversation without realising it. In the 1980s a sceptical strand of scholarship warned that spoken testimony was being used more enthusiastically than rigorously, and urged historians to treat it as one source among several rather than as a substitute for written documents.

Defenders of the method replied that these objections rest on a misunderstanding. A recorded interview is not a window onto the past but a document of the present — of how a particular person, at a particular moment, makes sense of what happened. Silences, hesitations and apparent errors are evidence in themselves, revealing what a narrator values, what a family or a community finds too painful to discuss, and which version of events has come to seem acceptable. The interview, in this view, is a collaboration between two people, and the historian should analyse the collaboration as carefully as the information it yields.

The method raises practical questions as well. Who is chosen to be recorded? Collections have often over-represented the confident and the willing, and under-represented people who distrust researchers or whose language the archive does not accommodate. Transcribing speech inevitably loses tone, pace and laughter, so a recording and a transcript are not interchangeable. There are ethical obligations too: narrators may say more than they intended, may name other people, or may ask for part of a recording to be closed to the public for a period. Archives therefore usually require written consent, and good practice gives narrators a chance to review and correct the transcript before it is deposited.

None of this has diminished the value of the method. Oral history has given historians access to experiences that were seldom written down: the routines of domestic work, the texture of a factory shift, the arrival of electricity in a village, the fear of deportation. It has allowed communities to record their own past rather than being described by outsiders, and it has preserved the voices of survivors of war and genocide while they were still alive to speak. The largest collections of such testimony, including video archives of Holocaust survivors begun in the 1990s, now run to tens of thousands of hours, and they will remain available long after the last witness has died.

Every summer millions of visitors walk around ruined abbeys, castles and temples, and almost all of them, at some point, try to imagine the building whole. Roofs, floors and plaster have gone; what remains is a shell that is often beautiful precisely because it is incomplete. Should it be put back? The question is asked with growing frequency, partly because new stone-cutting and digital techniques make reconstruction more practicable, and partly because tourism and civic pride create a demand for buildings that look as they did in their prime.

The modern conservation movement has usually answered no. In the middle of the nineteenth century the English critic John Ruskin argued that restoring a building amounted to destroying it, since the work of centuries could not be replaced by the work of one generation. His view, tempered by more pragmatic continental approaches, shaped the Venice Charter of 1964, the international statement of conservation principles that still underpins much heritage legislation. The charter rules out reconstruction in advance and permits only anastylosis, the reassembling of pieces that have survived — the re-erection, for example, of a fallen column from its own drums.

The charter's caution has a practical basis. A ruin is an archaeological deposit as well as a building: the soil within and around it holds evidence of how it was constructed, used and abandoned, and clearance for rebuilding destroys that evidence for ever. Reconstruction also demands knowledge that frequently does not exist. Where a wall stands two metres high, the height of the roof, the shape of the windows and the design of the vault are guesswork, and guesswork carried out in stone is hard for a visitor to distinguish from fact.

The objection loses much of its force, however, once the word reconstruction is unpacked. At one end of the scale is anastylosis, which almost every conservation body accepts. At the other is speculative invention, the erection of a complete building on the strength of a single drawing. Between them lie dozens of possibilities: rebuilding a collapsed arch from stones that were numbered and stored, replacing a lost roof with a modern structure of clearly different design, or reconstructing one façade while leaving the interior as an open ruin. Arguments about reconstruction usually go wrong because the disputants are thinking of different points on the scale.

There are also cases in which rebuilding is defensible. When a building has been deliberately destroyed within living memory, reconstruction can be an act of commemoration as much as of conservation. The Old Town of Warsaw, blown up by German forces in 1944, was rebuilt after the war with the help of paintings, drawings and old photographs, and was inscribed on the World Heritage List as an outstanding example of a near-total reconstruction. The Frauenkirche in Dresden, left as a heap of stone for fifty years, was reopened in 2005 with much of its original masonry back in place.

None of this settles the matter, and the arguments against remain serious. Reconstructed buildings can be used to promote a version of the past that suits those in power, smoothing away the awkward phases a genuine building records: the alterations of later centuries, the workshop, the prison, the slum. There is a commercial temptation as well, since a rebuilt monument attracts visitors more readily than a field of foundations, and the work is sometimes paid for by turning the interior into a shopping arcade or a hotel. The concrete restorations Arthur Evans made at Knossos in Crete a century ago are still argued over by archaeologists.

The argument about authenticity has also been challenged from outside Europe. The Nara Document on Authenticity, agreed in Japan in 1994, questioned the assumption that authenticity resides principally in original material, and recognised that in some traditions the regular rebuilding of a structure is itself the means by which its form and meaning are preserved. The great shrines of Ise, in Japan, have been dismantled and rebuilt on adjacent sites every twenty years for more than a thousand years. To call such a building a copy would be to impose an idea of originality that the tradition does not hold.

My own view is that the answer depends on what a reconstruction is for and on what it would destroy. Where a building was lost recently, is well documented, and is wanted back by the community that lost it, and where no archaeology would be sacrificed, rebuilding can be justified — provided that the new work is honest about itself: distinguishable on close inspection, recorded in a public archive, and labelled for what it is. Where the evidence is thin, or the site still holds deposits that have not been studied, the case collapses. What can never be justified is a reconstruction presented as an original, for the convenience of tourists or the glory of a state.

A third option has meanwhile become available. Digital modelling allows visitors to see a building as it may have looked without a single stone being moved, and virtual reconstructions of the Roman Forum and other ancient sites now circulate widely online. Such models have dangers of their own, but they can be corrected, compared and argued about in a way that a rebuilt wall cannot. For many sites, that may prove the most honest answer of all to the visitor's question about what once stood there.