Given the very nature of oral means of transmitting and constructing the past, there is much in the popular historical sense which is for us unknowable. Nonetheless, there are various ways of approaching it. Even though they go in part through the unrepresentative route of self-educated working people, David Vincent's studies of popular autobiography and of literacy and popular culture are revealing. He has shown how autobiographers drew on a rich and vital store of private oral histories, circulating within as well as concerning families and communities. Such histories were by no means solely oral, but sometimes drew upon a popular print culture apparent in chapbooks and ballads. Quite clearly, the idea of an ‘oral culture’ is a misnomer to the extent that it fails to register the centuries-old symbiosis of oral and printed forms of communication, an association particularly close in Britain and western Europe.

When applied to these ‘histories’ perhaps the term history is another misnomer. Vincent indicates that they served the needs of the present, very much in the key of custom. They served to amuse, to intimidate and instruct new generations, and to console or edify older ones. These functions are evident enough in the history which writing and print made possible, but the differences between this and oral histories are clear enough. Contemporary consideration of ‘popular memory’ shows this selectivity and utility at work in present oral culture as well.