MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Matters Arising (The History of Britain Revealed)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 229, 230, 231 ... 239, 240, 241  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Not really. It's just capitalism. Everybody's operating on wafer-thin margins. You can't even blame the consumer -- anybody who's prepared to shell out £12.99 for a book when they can get it for next to nothing in any number of other ways is a moron. Aren't you, dear reader?
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

M. Matejtschuk
1.0 out of 5 stars
20 November 2018

Abject nonsense

The linguistic equivalent of believing in a flat earth, alien invasion and the Illuminati, based on travesties such as the idea that there are hardly any Middle English texts. Rude, silly and totally frustrating to read, if you have ever looked into the history of our language

And what language would that be, Mr Matejtschuk?
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

One of the claims made by THOBR is that pre-historic British houses were built of stone not wood. Archaeologists are adamant it was the other way round. So it was a blow to hear last night from archaeology's current frontman, Alice Roberts, that back in 2016 they'd found a whole goddamn iron age village made of wood.

After three seasons of digging they still haven't produced a single personal belonging of the inhabitants or any other evidence of actual habitation. But they're still calling it 'a village'. Just like all the other 'villages' they've found.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

It’s good to see THOBR is still at the forefront of debate. This was posted up a coupla weeks ago on one of the more established websites, Historum, re Hengist and Horsa

You need to stop reading discredited material by people like Oppenheimer or, worse still, Harper. It's all pseudo history. Start by reading something authoritative like Hachmann's 'The Problem of the Belgae' and forget the 'earn a quick buck' from the outrageous authors. Your 'they spoke French' and 'they spoke German' is right out of Mike Harper's 'The History of Britain Revealed - The Shocking Truth About the English Language'. It's a hoax, written in the same vein as the Henry Root Letters. It's not history. If you want to know more about the Gallic Litus Saxonicum, read the section on the Gallic Evidence, from page 331 in The Saxon Shore.

Being bracketed with Oppenheimer is surprising and better for me than for him. I would be proud to be bracketed with Henry Root in any other context, though he is the only one of us making quick bucks so maybe that's the way to go.
Send private message
Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

There seems very little known about the Saxon Shore except for one doc

The only contemporary reference we possess that mentions the name "Saxon Shore" comes in the late 4th century Notitia Dignitatum, which lists its commander, the Comes Litoris Saxonici per Britanniam ("Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain"), and gives the names of the sites under his command and their respective complements of military personnel.

Notitia Dignitatum is said to be unique and is naturally suspect unless proven otherwise

It is usually considered to be accurate for the Western Roman Empire in the AD 420s and for the Eastern or Byzantine Empire in the AD 390s. However, the text itself is not dated (nor is its author named), and omissions complicate ascertaining its date from its content.

Well, it could be 'accurate' seeing as how no contemporaneous document exists to gainsay the account. No matter, copies exist albeit written a thousand or more years later

There are several extant 15th- and 16th-century copies of the document, plus a colour-illuminated iteration of 1542. All the known, extant copies are derived, either directly or indirectly, from Codex Spirensis, a codex known to have existed in the library of the Chapter of Speyer Cathedral in 1542, but which was lost before 1672 and has not been rediscovered.

In 1980 Augsburg University Library 'acquired' a parchment sheet containing a copy of Itinerarium provinciarum/ Itinerarium maritimum antonini. It has three 16th century annotations in the margins. Speyer Cathedral was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981 so is not to be seen as a nest of forgers.

The story is that the text was copied in the Dark Ages -- of which, five hundred years later, a single leaf survived.

The Codex Spirensis, an illuminated manuscript written in the middle Rhine area of Germany in the late ninth or early tenth century, and discovered at the Cathedral Library at Speyer in the fifteenth century, no longer survives except for a single leaf. Because of the copies made of this codex in the fifteenth century, the codex preserved thirteen different texts, of which perhaps the most significant were the Notitia Dignitatum, Dicuil's Offsite Link De mensura orbis terrae, and the Anonymous, De rebus bellicis.

No mention of the Codex appears after 1566 (when it was listed in an inventory of books in Neuberg castle) suggesting it either no longer exists, has been misidentified and/or printed copies were widely available.

In August 1552 Speyer was occupied by troops of the margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. They plundered the cathedral and its associated buildings. The margrave had in mind to hand the books to his stepfather and had them brought to the nearby house of the Deutsche Orden. But the books were saved for the library owing to the hurried departure of the troops on 24 August.

All the known and extant copies of the Notitia Dignitatum, a unique document of the Roman imperial chanceries and one of the very few surviving documents of Roman government, are derived, either directly or indirectly, from the Codex Spirensis which is known to have existed in the library of the cathedral chapter. The codex contained a collection of documents (of which the Notitia was the last and largest document, occupying 164 pages) that brought together several previous documents of which one was of the 9th century. It is last attested in the available documents in 1550-1551


The lost copy from which all the other copies derive is sixteenth-century. Was there a particular need for a counter-narrative to offset the national histories being noised abroad and if so, when? The original manuscript has to have been seventeenth century since there is no earlier one thanks to the Carolingian copyists' bad luck or carelessness

The lost Carolingian copy is known to have been in the library of the Speyer Cathedral until the 17th century.

No catalogue or inventory of the cathedral library survived the fire of 1689 that destroyed the library.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Fun Fact No 154

THOBR is available in 154 libraries worldwide.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Are there stirrings in THOBR land? It all began with this tweet

Prof Susan Oosthuizen @DrSueOosthuizen
'The Emergence of the English' coming in March 2019 : Placing post-Roman Britain in the context of preceding centuries reveals the English emerging from late Romano-British communities - evolving, adapting, and innovating in a new, post-imperial world

You will all recognise this as same old, same old. It has been worded cutely to take account of all this rather inconvenient genetic data that has emerged since THOBR came out, but the two weasel phrases are ‘emerging from’ and 'late Romano-British communities'. Nevertheless, someone spots the gap

Dave Holden‏ @DHolden Replying to @DrSueOosthuizen
As a layman who has read the current `no mass migration' version of post Roman British history I've always been puzzled by the adoption of a new English language. Does your book address this please?

Prof Susan Oosthuizen‏ Replying to @DHolden61
Yes, it does

Dave Holden‏ Replying to @DrSueOosthuizen
Thank you. Added to my shopping list.

Oops! Susie remembers just in time that she may have gone too far in her claims re this perplexing and still unresolved mystery

Prof Susan Oosthuizen‏ @DrSueOosthuizen
I should add that it clarifies but does not resolve the question

At which point, a decidedly august figure enters the fray...
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Tom Holland‏ Retweeted Prof Susan Oosthuizen
I am SO excited to read this. The possibility that the origins of the 'English' are to be found in the Roman period is one that I have become increasingly fascinated by.

This is very good news for me since a) Tom Holland is a biggie in the world of British history and b) I am the originator of the theory that English was spoken in England during the Roman period, though not of course originating at that time. Some one pops up to tell Holland of this

SDValentine @SDValentine17 Replying to @holland_tom
Wasn't this one of the theories put forward by Mick Harper in his odd book about the origins of the English language?

Looks like I'm about to get attention in high places

Tom Holland‏ Replying to @SDValentine17
I don't know. Thank you for the tip off.

Until an old friend who’s clearly got me on speed dial looms into view

Levi Roach‏ @DrLRoach
It's a terrible book by a conspiracy theorist whose most recent contribution has been to suggest that the Holocaust was not such a bad idea, after all. I'd give it a pass.

It’s difficult to say what is the greater box office poison, being labelled a conspiracy theorist or being outed as a fan of the Holocaust. Either way it seems to have done the trick

SDValentine @SDValentine17
I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the info.

But that’s not my biggest crime

Levi Roach‏ @DrLRoach
I seem to receive all his new books unsolicited now.

He was sent a review copy of Forgeries on account of him being the leading authority on medieval manuscript forgeries, and he was sent Unreliable because of the helpful furore he made over Forgeries, though he denied receiving it at the time. He clearly did. But if we’d known he wasn’t also a fan of the Holocaust we’d have probably left him off the distribution list altogether. How could we have possibly known?
Send private message
Boreades


In: finity and beyond
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I've just learnt that M'Lady Boreades knows a BBC Producer who knows Philomena Cunk who's just done Series One of a history of Britain.

e.g. Episode 1
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09yp1hx/cunk-on-britain-series-1-episode-1

Someone suggested a copy of THOBR might be good material for Series Two. M'lady's going to slip her one.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Can you slip m'lady one on my behalf. Being endorsed by Philomena Cunk is not everything I was hoping for but it goes out just before Newsnight so we might get some attention from serious people tuning in for that. Also, research I've seen says that thirty seven per cent of Ms Cunk's audience believe it to be straight documentary. Indeed, forty-four per cent of those said, unprompted, "Shouldn't this be on BBC-4?" But I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

People who bought The History of Britain Revealed also bought


CELTIC GREY SEA SALT FINE - GUERANDE SEL MOULU 1KG £7.68

One always likes to know one's readers. Clearly well-heeled to afford salt at these prices. Not too particular in the hygiene department since 'grey' means it's still a bit dirty, and definitely simple-minded if they believe for one minute that Guerande is Celtic. Or maybe it is, I'll have to ask Hatty. I saw the exact same box in her kitchen the other day.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

New from my Google spies

THOBR gets a favourable mention halfway down but depressingly plays no further part in the exchanges. However it is heartening that so many people can go on for so many pages (six) over so many days (twenty plus) on the subject in 2020. I haven’t read it in any detail but it is noticeable how few people actually want to answer the question. In fact it is astounding how much they seem very much not to want to. They go off in every other direction but, unlike us, not in illuminating directions. In fact, compared to us they are pretty much rubbish. All learned discourse and no wisdom.

The site itself, Stolen History, is new to me and sounds promising. Anyone familiar with it?
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

After wading through the really quite turgid offerings of all and sundry -- the discussion is twice as long as any of the other threads -- I decided I might throw a small pebble in by posting this up

I actually invented this subject some twenty years ago with a book what I wrote. Strange but true. Strange because, to my very great surprise, nobody had ever asked the question before, and true because it turned out that the answer was "Of course it didn't and nobody would ever assume it had unless they already believed it." Your deliberations, I am afraid, have not been very deliberative. The basic question you should all be struggling to deal with is "When in the entire annals of recorded history, did a few boatloads of barbarians persuade several million far more advanced people to stop speaking their language and start speaking the barbarians' one?" And that will tell you quite a lot about 'recorded history'.

but this was greeted with careful ignoral (possibly not even that) and the discussion resumed where it left off with this

Blimey! Change William 'Bill IV' Dodd's name and he could be Orm, change it again and he could be Robert 'Bob' Manning (reminder: that's Robert of Bourne, who wrote Handlyng Synne). All three were writers, all three were clergy, all three were - at one time or another - big in Bourne. Where did Dodd study? Cambridge! Where did Robert 'Bob' Manning study? Cambridge! What is Dodd known for? Repenting sin. What is Robert 'Bob' Manning known for? Handlyng Synne! What was Dodd's dad's name? William ('Bill V'). What was Robert 'Bob' Manning's dad's name? William! (that's 'Bill VI').
More 'vernacular English writers' oddness from Bourne, plus dates for fires, fireballs, floods and plagues.
First, we have another Bourne-based writer named Manning: Frederic Manning (22 July 1882 – 22 February 1935) was an Australian poet and novelist.

You can see what I mean. Erudite, they are; on point, they are not.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I've finally made it into the halls of academe

ZESZYTY NAUKOWE UNIWERSYTETU RZESZOWSKIEGOSERIA FILOLOGICZNAESZYT 81/2013
STUDIA ANGLICA RESOVIENSIA Ian UPCHURCH

According to Harper (2006), most stories of the origins of the British people and nation are actually creation myths. He suggests that the dominant attitude is: "Tell us, for God’s sake, tell us where we came from. And make sure we’re special." These myths can develop as there is a lack of evidence about historical facts and, at the same time, a strong desire to know that all history has been mere preparation, leading up to us as the peak of development.

I wouldn't necessarily include you, Ian, but welcome aboard anyway.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Aubrey Burl has died. He was the only archaeologist who ever had a kind word for me -- he got sent a review copy of THOBR and quite liked it. If you read this https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jun/12/aubrey-burl-obituary you will see exactly what made him one of us rather than one of them. Also, getting a full page obit in the Guardian, without even being a telly-archaeologist, shows all hope should not be lost.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 229, 230, 231 ... 239, 240, 241  Next

Jump to:  
Page 230 of 241

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group