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. Elton presented his writings on the nature and methods of history not as philosophy, but as an account of what working historians like himself did. To make such an account coherent and convincing it was necessary to explicate and defend the fundamental assumptions underpinning the discipline's traditional practices. The cumulative result of Elton's efforts was a sustained defence of what may be called a human action account of the past: the view that history was not the result of social structures, objective forces or (as some postmodernists argue) linguistic discourses, but of autonomous human agents and that to explain and comprehend the past, historians must provide an account of those agents' actions in their own terms, as they were lived and played out at the time.

4. Elton's view of the nature of history and its study had a very simple starting point: in the past there were people like us, reasoning people with thoughts, feelings, ambitions, concerns and problems. These people lived and made choices and what they did produced the events, effects, creations and results which is history. When people acted in the past, exercised their will and made choices they made their futures and created our present. History for Elton was explicable, but the varieties, complexities and vagaries of human reasoning and thinking in diverse situations made it unpredictable.

Everything in history--the events of the past--happens to and through people