Res gestae,”things done,” all circumstances surrounding and connected with a happening.

…The antiquarians delved into what Sir Francis Bacon termed “history defaced, or remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” He depicted it as a kind of salvage operation “though the memory of things be decayed and almost lost, yet acute and industrious persons, by a certain persevering and scrupulous diligence, contrive out of genealogies, annals, titles, monuments, coins, proper name & styles, etymologies of words, proverbs, traditions, archives and instruments as well public & private fragments of histories scattered about in books not historical,    — contrive, I say, from all these thongs or some of them, to recover somewhat from the deluge of time.”

Bacon in (Swann 2001, p108)

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