In Praise of Gobbets

As the teaching year begins, one of the routine tasks historians in many UK institutions face is explaining to puzzled students (and sometimes new colleagues too) what we mean by “gobbets”.

This is a venerable and (I suspect) distinctly British form of examination in which students are provided with a series of text extracts or images, and expected to write something about them in a short period of time: typically, 20 minutes for each extract (or ‘gobbet’). They are sometimes labelled old-fashioned – but in fact they’re ideally suited to the 21st-century classroom.

As an example, here’s a gobbet that we’ll be studying in my class:

“The holy Roman Church, as the mother and teacher, nurse and instructress of all churches, is to be consulted about all doubtful and obscure things which concern the continuity of the right faith or the dogmas of piety, and her healthful admonitions are to be kept”.

– Hincmar of Rheims, De Divortio, 860

How might one ‘respond’ to or comment on this gobbet? Well, a good response might observe that this, the opening line of the treatise by Hincmar of Reims, suggests the pope should be consulted: this signals Hincmar’s cautious fence-sitting, for fear of being proved wrong at this early stage of the controversy over King Lothar II’s marriage.

It might also pick up on the ‘doubtful and obscure things’; an issue that lay at the heart of the treatise and the divorce scandal as a whole.

It could connect this passage to Hincmar’s often fraught relation with the papacy, noting how in this passage he framed papal authority as primarily pedagogical (and that in practice he recommended holding a general council rather than going straight to the pope).

Finally, it could finish by noting that the Roman church indeed did end up being consulted in the case, and that Pope Nicholas made great efforts to ensure that his ‘healthful admonitions’ were kept.

These are just the comments that spring to my mind as I write this blog: Quite certainly other interesting things could be said about the content, context and significance of this short passage.

You’ll notice that these comments are all quite specific, and probably won’t make much sense unless you already know quite a lot about the history of Lothar II’s divorce (as all right-thinking people should). That’s because the strength of the gobbet examination is that it blends assessing precise historical knowledge of the sources with interpretative creativity. You can’t bluff your way through them; but it’s not a test of how much you know, it’s a test of how you use that knowledge to make a point based on exactly what’s in front of you. If your commentary could apply to any extract from the text in question, then it’s probably too generic. Good responses tend to pick on the precise wording of the extract to make observations grounded in a wider knowledge; the best can surprise and enlighten even the person who chose the extract in the first place.

According to legend, gobbets go back to Victorian period civil service exams: That may be so, but they seem to be coming back into fashion. In some ways that’s not surprising. After all, the contemporary world is all about “discontinuous reading”, it’s all about the fast-paced analysis of screenfuls of text. If the gobbet examination didn’t already exist, we’d have to invent it.

And if gobbets are in this way surprisingly “aligned” with the wider world, they’re also neatly aligned with history as it’s practised today: Rigorous but imaginative source analysis is after all at the heart of all historical writing worth its salt. No wonder gobbets are a jewel in the crown of final year examinations, alongside other assessment forms such as dissertations: They’re an excellent means of simultaneously assessing – and promoting – both knowledge of a broad range of historical sources and a methodological sophistication in historical interpretation, all with reference to the particular as well as the general. And isn’t all that still at the heart of what historians actually do?

Updates

Update Feb 2018:
Jonathan Healey has pointed out on Twitter that as part of a court case, there is now a judicial discussion of a gobbet paper, with the priceless opening observation that ‘The word “gobbet” does not generally evoke a pleasant picture or a comfortable feeling’. I’m optimistic that my students wouldn’t agree!