Inventing History : forgery: a great British tradition (British History)

[Mick Harper]

Two of the guiding principles of Applied Epistemology is that orthodoxy (a) does all the work for us and (b) is the chief prosecution witness in its own demolition.

[Mick Harper]

I posted this up on Medium under the title Casket of Dreams. Of all our dreams but as it got only one reader, I have changed it to Bury this casket! It will kill us all. Under a pic of the Franks Casket I opined

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This is the Franks Casket. It is the centrepiece of the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collection and is perhaps the most important extant Anglo-Saxon artefact. It features regularly in books and documentaries about religion, linguistics, art history, the Dark Ages, history in general, cultural advance in general. It is the subject of an astonishing array of specialist papers by scholars from every corner of the academic and antiquarian world.

The ‘Franks’ in Franks Casket is Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks KCB FRS FSA who donated it, in 1867, to the British Museum of which he was the guiding light for the rest of the century. It is widely acknowledged the British Museum as we know it today is essentially his creation, and has in turn provided the template for national museums everywhere.

The Franks Casket is pretty damn important.

You’ve guessed! It’s a fake, made in France around 1850. Franks was a mountebank and crook of epic proportions. The vast preponderance of the 20,000 exhibits he inveigled onto the plinths in the British Museum are fakes. The Museum has had to lie and cheat for the whole of the twentieth century, dragging in other museums notably the Louvre in Paris and the Bargello in Florence, to keep the whole thing from blowing up in their faces and setting the entire museum world back to the depths of tawdry criminality from whence it first emerged into the light of day. I thought you probably would.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

So a counter explanation would be that the English resistance used rasied barrows on the flooded fens, "The holy land of the English", as protection against the invading Normans.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is on this new extra strong Japanese coffee, so.........

[Wile E. Coyote]

Fenland=England

It's no different than, say, Finland.

[Mick Harper]

There is a new Big Thing called mushroom coffee one type of which, my dealer on Radio 4 tells me, is good for creativity. Check it out. You may not need it but I do, it's all greatest hits at the moment.

[Wile E. Coyote]

According to that well known rag, the Crowland Chronicle, the undefeated Hereward (The last true Englishman) and King William actually came to terms and so Hereward lived a long peaceful (chrisian?) life before finally being buried at the abbey.

I have previous;y posted that Hereward is best understood as Harold Redivivus.

But I now see this might be wrong (I have never understood why this is not a uncomon experience for Wiley).

If you look at Hastings as an imaginary battle (as I do), there are a number of strange features.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Because of, err, bad fortune, Harold ends up (No cavalry, No Nobles) by having to adapt similar tactics to what Hereward did during the English fen resistance, you use the barrows and flooded fens to help your defence against the superior forces.

The fen resistance has been reinvented to beome a national battle we think of as Hastings.

[Wile E. Coyote]

I need another mug of Fugi roast.

[Mick Harper]

I dismiss Hastings too on the grounds you don't build an abbey to commemorate the site and then have no physical evidence of the battle. I am inclined to see the post-Eddie the Confessor manoeuvrings as more a coup by the Norman faction at court than anything else.

I'd like to be able to dispense with Stamford Bridge too but I haven't gone into it. 'The harrying of the north' is clearly bogus, as written, so maybe that was the final reckoning with the Scandinavians.

[Wile E. Coyote]

So, to recap, archaeologists have been digging in Anchor Church Field just to the north of Crowland in the belief that they will find evidence of the first settlement of Saint Guthlac. They have uncovered pottery and an elaborate bone comb. While ortho says these objects cannot be definitively associated with the saint, they want to believe that Anchor Church field was indeed the location of Guthlac’s fenland retreat.

Who was Guthlac?

Wiley's guess would be Saint Good Luck. But heyho....

Where did he come from?

Mercia...It's marsh land, fen land.....

What is he known for?

Early years. Known for early military prowess....Which famously he then gives up (you should too). Then his abstinence (You should as well.) If not (also known for multiple vistations from devils).Calm down dear, and with St Good Luck all will be well.

He is the Norman peacekeeper......to Herewald's insurgent. ?

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is getting the demons.