What Problems Does the Historian Face in Utilising Contemporary Accounts of the English Civil War?

As historians we are always looking at documents written by other people sometimes an extremely long time ago. The first obstacle with using these documents is we need to understand why these people wrote what they did and what the documents mean we can’t just study the document by itself. We have to have knowledge of what was going on at the time the document was made and other documentation to back up our findings before we can come to a genuine conclusion.   When relying on accounts of others we have to be careful. People often embellish their own roles in events sometimes through no fault of their own. If they are in the middle of a huge event for example a battle and there is a lot of action it is probably easy to get caught up in the melee and believe you have done a lot more that you actually have. Time can also affect the mind and sometimes you will miss out crucial information because you have simply forgotten it during the time the event occurred and the time you wrote it down. Prejudices can obviously affect someone’s opinion and they can make their enemies out to be monsters while their friends are portrayed as heroes even if this may not be the total case. It’s important not to take the opinions in the documents we study for facts they can help us understand others feelings toward the people they were talking about but we will need a lot more supporting information to build a clear case for their opinion being factual.
Looking to the civil war in particular this is a time of great turmoil. A great war was being fought between the royalists and the parliamentarians no-one could know at the time what the outcome would be with entire families were torn apart by choosing the different sides.   This would mean different people believing different things due to the area that they were in or perhaps the side that they were on or even perhaps the propaganda that they had access to in their area. With such a mix of opinion and strife it is difficult to find the...