"Whilst doing a geology degree I started to look at the world in a very different way - the pursuit of empirical evidence to substantiate or discount theories and scientific speculation (which is often as wayward as any other)."

With all the due respect a bucket of cold water can bring "which is often as wayward as any other" it is not as wayward as any other. The stuff we call science is pretty well coherent. Almost all the science in the world is believed by all the people who study it. The only division is at the edges of knowledge and understanding.

Science, like nearly all scholarly study, moves forward in the same way. Information is gathered and hypothese are constructed and tested. They are open to the rest of the scientific community to knock about.

It is clearly much more difficult to study the History of a 1000 years ago than it to study bees and that is why historians are very careful about primary source knowledge.

When people make stuff up and pull together different collections of information I am not sure what it is. Is it fiction? Fiction can be excellent but The Bard and Peeps were doing different things and what they wrote has to be treated in different ways.