From fragmentary historical sources it seems he reached the far north of Britain and won a great battle in early summer before returning south to York.
The ancient historian or the medievalist has often to wring his conclusions from fragmentary and inadequate sources.
Sima Qian wrote of the problems with incomplete, fragmentary and contradictory sources.
"Well, there is one fragmentary source which alludes to it as a "Negative Twist of Nothingness.
Palestine Judaism was not a unitary religion but a collection of sects: it is possible, even from the fragmentary sources, to enumerate as many as twenty-four.
The main account of Douglas's murder comes from the Auchinleck Chronicle, a near contemporary but fragmentary source.
A few other fragmentary sources also survive
Very few notated rounds have survived, but fragmentary sources and frequent mentions in other writings indicate that the practice was widespread.
The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived.
From these fragmentary sources, it's possible to glean a few facts.