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Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (British History)
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Ishmael


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That is the Catch-22. The more knowledgeable people are on the subject, the more hostile they are to a radical, new idea that threatens all of their assumptions. So I say it's best to target virgins. And if I might suggest I know a thing or two about seducing virgins, I think you have to remember while writing that you are writing for virgin ears.

Explain everything. Assume nothing.

That's the tack I've taken with Deserts. Now some have criticized me that some of the deserts book goes on a bit long in the explanations at times. Maybe it does. But I do think it's better to err on this side of the toss than the other. So far no one has gotten so bored with the explanations that they've given up the book. I've tried to keep the expository material entertaining. Sometimes I've succeeded.
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Mick Harper
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You are correct(ish), Ish. I'm doing that with the next book (the war stuff). Even so it was rather depressing finding I'd missed my mark even with a virgin-whore such as yourself. Others who have read the book might care to adjudicate.on this important question.
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Mick Harper
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Forgeries has finally got a proper technical review from a ‘neutral’ so in celebration I will post it up in the usual chunks and with the usual waspish commentary.

In my pigeonhole at Queen Mary recently, I found an unsolicited copy of a book with the title Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries, by M. J. Harper. According to the cover blurb, it is a debunking of Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, about which I said something here. Perhaps the publishers sent it to me because of my post about the earlier book.

Cameron, a maths professor at London University, was sent a review copy because he had reviewed de Hamel in connection with his own interest in medieval astronomy. https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/a-surprise/

In fact, it is not quite what the cover says. The blurb ends up by saying “The author has bigger fish he wants to fry”, and indeed on the first page of the text he mentions “my long-term goal of getting the universities abolished”, which hardly endears him to me. I must say that, on the strength of this book, universities needn’t start quaking in their boots just yet.

Possibly a tactical error on my part but I have a tendency to lose my temper with these people.

De Hamel describes twelve manuscripts, of which only two are claimed to be forgeries by Harper, the Gospels of St Augustine and the Book of Kells.

A fair point. As he says, I had more important fish to fry..

In particular, the LeidenAratea, on which I commented, doesn’t draw his fire, even though de Hamel describes its production by what might count as an earlier version (at the court of Charlemagne) of the production lines Harper regards as being responsible for forging other early manuscripts.

When I read Cameron’s piece (after the book had gone out) and spent five minutes on routine fact-checking, it did indeed turn out to be a forgery. Some of you might want to check my working.

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Mick Harper
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[de Hamel] starts with an admission that mediaeval monks copied manuscripts, and while we find something wrong with this, they clearly did not

This is a bit po-faced. Nobody, least of all me, has any beef against copying.

Before the printing press, copying was essential to ensure wide circulation.

After the printing press, copying was essential to ensure wide circulation. It’s called printing.

Indeed, it often happened that the copy was a finer manuscript than the original, in which case it appears they felt no compunction to carefully preserve the original.

Well, for starters, it would have contributed to a wider circulation just as much as the copy but the idea that legal, sacred, historical and scientific documents sufficiently valuable to be worth copying in the first place are of little account when it comes to preserving the originals is not so much weird as silly. Though, as I point out in the book, for it to happen every time is not so much weird as straight, plain, unbelievable.

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Hatty
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De Hamel describes twelve manuscripts, of which only two are claimed to be forgeries by Harper, the Gospels of St Augustine and the Book of Kells.

A fair point. As he says, I had more important fish to fry..

On a technical point, the other ten manuscripts in De Hamel's book are medieval, fourteenth-century if memory serves, so there's no reason to call them out as forgeries.

The other point is the Gospels of Augustine and the Book of Kells contain land charters. They are books of 'history', not decoration or devotion.
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Mick Harper
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Anyway, Harper claims that the two manuscripts I mentioned are both “forgeries”, produced in Durham in the twelfth century.

I don't but for all I know they might have been.

He describes the Benedictine order as the “Thomas Cook of their day”, arranging itineraries for pilgrims, and as a profitable sideline, producing “ancient” manuscripts for the pilgrims to see on their journeys.

I do indeed.

He claims that Durham was an important centre of this manuscript production. The secular clergy of Durham cathedral were replaced by Benedictine monks in the twelfth century, and the Bishop of Durham ensured that he was master of the County Palatine, and that the Sheriff of Northumberland had no authority in Durham.

I do indeed except the Benedictine monks were not replacing anyone -- they were building the damn thing.

The other reason for the monks to forge “ancient” gospel books was to record the charters documenting their claim to various properties. Certainly, mediaeval monks transcribed legal documents of this sort into spare pages in gospel books.

They did indeed though I say they wrote the gospel books for that express purpose. There’s a minor application of Occam’s Razor to be made here. We have incredibly few property charters from the early medieval period, we have incredibly few books from the early medieval period. Draw your own conclusion.

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Mick Harper
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I used to have a lovely book on the history of Eynsham Abbey (alas, I can no longer find it) which describes such practices. Presumably something written in a gospel book was less likely to be challenged than if it was on a loose piece of vellum in the abbot’s study.

When mathematicians employ terms like 'presumably' and ‘less likely’ they are using what is called probability theory, something I know one or two of you are a bit hazy about so I will recast Professor Cameron's argument into lay person's language.

We take a statistical universe of all known discrete bodies of writing that 'might be challenged’ for the period Mesopotamia c 3000 BC to Kew c 2000 AD and we divide them into two categories:
1. those that were kept as ‘loose documents’ (whether in abbots' studies or some more specialised environment)
2. those that were copied into gospel books (or some similar medium bearing no relation to the documents)
Add ‘em up, compare the numbers, do some other stuff and you've got your 'less likely'.

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Mick Harper
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Harper claims that there is no archaeological evidence of early monasteries on either Iona or Holy Island. I have never been to Iona.

A fascinating piece of careful ignoral. Millions of people have been to Iona without encountering any archaeological evidence of early monasteries. Why does our esteemed professor think his visiting or not visiting the place has any bearing on the question? Still, it avoids the Ionan part of my argument, what about Lindisfarne?

It is true that there is nothing old to see on Holy Island. I am not sure what this proves.

Blimey O’Reilly, does he not know that early archaeology can’t be seen? Later ruins can be seen but the early stuff has to be dug up by archaeologists and thus far they haven't dug anything up. Never mind, that disposes of Harper good and proper.

Harper’s claim is that St Cuthbert’s Gospels and the Lindisfarne Gospels could not have been produced there.

I do not say that at all. What I do say is that they cannot have been produced on Holy Island in the eighth century because there were no ecclesiastical buildings on Holy Island before the twelfth century. I may be proved wrong by future archaeological excavations but at this moment in time it is Cameron that is lacking the evidence. This might give Peter the Mathematician pause for thought but Peter the Professor knows full well that in academia it is not evidence that is nine-tenths of the law.

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Mick Harper
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Another manuscript in his sights is the Llandeilo Gospels, claimed to be an ancient Welsh book, produced in Llandeilo, but according to Harper produced in another forgery factory, this time in Lichfield.

Love that ‘this time’. A maths professor wouldn’t be expected to know that early medievalists now acknowledge that it was in fact produced in Lichfield.

He takes issue with the usual derivation of the name “Llandeilo” as the place of St Teilo, and instead interprets it as “an enclosure where dung was spread”.

Well, I say it means ‘a place where animals are collected together’ (the dung follows on) but anyway we’ll let this pass.

The Wikipedia article for “llan” confirms that “[t]he various forms of the word are cognate with English land and lawn and presumably initially denoted a specially cleared and enclosed area of land.”

Okay, I’ll go with that.

But it adds, “In late antiquity, it came to be applied particularly to the sanctified land occupied by communities of Christian converts” and goes on to add that nearly all of the 630 placenames in Wales containing this element “have some connection with a local patron saint.”Perhaps Harper wants to close down Wikipedia as well as the universities?.

It’s a funny thing but people (not just academics) cite Wiki with smug approval when it suits them and denounce it ferociously when it doesn’t. For the record, I regard it as the best source around for most practical purposes. Which includes writing books showing that Wiki can get it wrong.

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Mick Harper
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Harper grumbles at the Welsh writing Llanfair for “St Mary’s parish” as being unable to spell the name of the second most important person in the world, but I believe that this is actually a correct translation. Welsh declines the beginning, rather than the end, of a word: Merthyr Mawr, but Fforest Fawr. I wonder what experts on mediaeval Welsh make of all this?

They’d be as impressed by your diligence as I am. While you’re about it could you ask them why it is, in the countless times Mary appears in Welsh sources, that the M remains stubbornly an M. Apart, as we know, in the case of Llanfair place names where all the M's have turned to F's. Is the Queen of Heaven beaming down on her very own special Llanfairs or is she irritated that all these ‘places of the fair’ have been awarded to her for no better reason than every llan has to be given to one saint or another and she’s been lumbered with these? Suffice it to say, not one of the 630 llans has an unequivocal saintly connexion but all of them can get one if you try hard enough.

As befits one with such a hatred of scholars, his book has no table of contents

It was normal in the nineteenth century for books to have a table of contents (a practice retained in scholarly papers) but it would be pretty unusual today. A good reason to adopt the practice for my next book. Thanks, prof.

and no bibliography.

A fair point. I could have listed the works consulted (or more often, Hatty consulted) but Wiki, Wiki, Wiki, Welsh National Library website, Wiki, Wiki, Durham Cathedral Library website would have got repetitive.Very occasionally we did have to dig deeper but saying so would have looked like showing off.

He quotes various things from other books, but with the exception of de Hamel’s book, he doesn’t tell us what these are.

See above but I explain specifically why in the introduction.

Fortunately he does have an index, without which I would have had a much harder job writing this account.

Glad to hear it. We slaved over it!

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Mick Harper
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Quite an affable (and lengthy) chat about Forgeries on the neo-Velikovskian SIS site. It's in an even longer piece about Heribert Illtig and Phantom Time hypotheses.

-----------------------------------------------

I recently read an amusing book by NJ Harper, 'Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries' (available at Amazon and other book sellers) which is a wind up of a scholarly work of the same title, which takes a cynical look at the conclusions by the academic and suggests that many ancient texts of the Anglo Saxon era were actually written in the 12th century or later, and provides reasons why this may have been so.

He claims that pilgrims were big business in the high Middle Ages and different religious establishments vied to attract them and the monies they produced that kept their monasteries, churches, and cathedrals thriving and in good repair etc. It is thought provoking as we actually have a clear record of this occurring at St Albans abbey, the new town of St Albans being laid out deliberately to way lay pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Saint Alban, England's purported first martyr. If it could have happened at St Albans it could also have happened at Canterbury, the premier focus of pilgrims in Britain, Kells in Ireland, Lindisfarne in Northumbria, Iona in Scotland and Llandaff (Cardiff) and Llandeilo in Wales - even St Davids is brought into the picture by Harper as it stands at the port from where the Anglo Normans set sail to establish the Pale settlement in Ireland, and remained their major supply point thereafter.

Attracting pilgrims was big business in Europe as well as in Britain and Ireland - and we have all sorts of tales about missionaries from Ireland and Britain bringing Christianity to the elite in control of barbarian ruling dynasts, much as we have the tale of St Augustine in England. The latter is a rather obscure figure - except in England. If Augustine is a questionable character, as Harper intimates in a rather cheeky manner, this might explain why Christianity in England (inherited from the Romans) has been airbrushed out of our national historical narrative, in the post-Roman era, even though Gildas in the 6th century seems to indicate it remained a strong force (he even mentions a shrine at St Albans).

Bede, who is closely bound up with the Augustine version of Christianity, also mentions a shrine (and church) at St Albans in the 7th century and Offa of Mercia, a hundred years later, repeats the same, lolling out royal patronage and monies to create what became the abbey. It seems very likely that Christianity existed from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and 400 years of its history was deleted as a result of accommodating Augustine as the primary saint at Canterbury (and therefore of England). Is that not a conspiracy?

http://www.sis-group.org.uk/news/phantom-time-hypothesis.htm
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Hatty
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Good SIS review though cautious to a fault.

Christianity in England (inherited from the Romans) has been airbrushed out of our national historical narrative, in the post-Roman era

The person who wrote the article has completely missed the point. Christianity wasn't airbrushed out of history, the period in question didn't exist. Surprisingly obtuse for SIS of all people.

And then
It seems very likely that Christianity existed from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and 400 years of its history was deleted

There is no Christian archaeology either in Britain or in Europe. Not a single Dark Age monastery has been found. So why is SIS saying that "it is very likely that Christianity existed"?

Attracting pilgrims was big business in Europe as well as in Britain and Ireland

In the 12th century, yes. See above.

- and we have all sorts of tales about missionaries from Ireland and Britain bringing Christianity to the elite in control of barbarian ruling dynasts

It's known Christianity was itnroduced by the Romans, propagated by the Normans. The barbarian Irish fill the gap.
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Mick Harper
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Two tremendous tweets today from our Glorious Leader, Kate Wiles

Currently reading my second account of Anglo-Saxon charters being found in a drawer, this time in Chichester Cathedral. People! Check your drawers!

Charter revelation that almost no-one will care about: did you know Henry Sweet and W. de Gary Birch were brothers-in-law??


Oh we care, Kate, we care a lot. Or we will when Hatty runs down these gents. Metaphorically, dear!
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Hatty
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Henry Sweet is known, to Anglo-Saxonists, as The Father of Old English

Henry Sweet (1845-1912): A formidable scholar with an abrasive personality

Henry Sweet is known as one of the founding fathers of the scholarly study of Old English: a reputation he owes to his highly popular textbooks of Old English: The Anglo-Saxon Reader and The Anglo-Saxon Primer. Even today, many students of Old English will own one or more of Sweet’s works (his Primer and Reader remained classroom texts for at least a century after their publication and can be bought for a penny in most second-hand book stores).

but is, perhaps tellingly, better known abroad than in England according to this Dutch-Anglo-Saxonist blogger https://dutchanglosaxonist.com/2016/05/29/henrysweet/

Henry Sweet was more respected abroad than he was in England. Despite his impressive list of publications, he had to wait until 1901, when, aged fifty-five, he was offered a position at a university: the readership of phonetics at the University of Oxford. By contrast, as MacMahon (2004) outlines, institutions outside of Britain were more appreciative of Sweet: he was awarded an honorary PhD degree in 1875 by the University of Heidelberg and he was made a member of various academic societies abroad, including the Munich Academy of Sciences, the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Danish Academy and the International Phonetic Association (which he served as its president from 1887 to his death). He had also been offered various university chairs on the Continent, where the study of Old English and comparative philology was much more advanced than in Britain. Sweet had declined those offers, because he felt he had a mission back home.


The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, founded 1984, espouses, ironically, quite an international approach juding by its mission statement http://www.henrysweet.org/

Walter de Gray Birch was a (mainly Anglo-Saxon) manuscript specialist and scholar who published loads of academic books on the subject

Walter de Gray Birch (1842-1924) came up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1860, and worked in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1864 until 1902.

Details of his publications are on the Kemble site http://dk.usertest.mws3.csx.cam.ac.uk/node/171

and also here http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Birch%2C%20Walter%20de%20Gray%2C%201842-1924
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Hatty
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In 1891 some 25 ancient charters were found in a concealed drawer in an old oak table in Chichester Cathedral; and amongst these were documents dating before and after the reign of Cnut. The most important was a charter of the year 780 A.D., recording grants made by Oslac, ruler of the South Saxons; and on the back of this deed, King Offa of Mercia gives his approval of the transaction.

http://www.wilcuma.org.uk/wanderings-in-anglo-saxon-britain/relics-of-the-reign-of-cnut/

There are no known authentic documents before 1066 for churches in Sussex (the last area in England to be evangelised according to historians) so to find a stash of 25 must have caused quite a stir.

Most of the documents that do survive are later copies or forgeries which has made it impossible to reconstruct a detailed history before the Norman Conquest.

West Sussex Records Office therefore has some doubts about the Chichester charter

It was very unusual to have a deed of title or grant at that time. More important was the ceremony that took place – the handing over of a rod or piece of turf, symbolic of the land itself, and then the procession around the property so that everyone was aware of its boundaries and new owners.

The grant doesn’t follow the pattern for a deed that we might be used to. Instead, only the first seven lines deal with the property. After a religious preamble, Oslac states that he is to ‘give certain lands, for the good of my soul, to the church of St Paul the Apostle; the property being in Earnley and Tielesora, with woods and fields adjoining. Given in the year 780 at a place called Selsey’. The scribe should probably have given more territorial information at that point, but he has omitted the location and area of the property. After that Oslac says he has signed it by his own hand, and the names of the witnesses are given. The format of the text suggests they have actually signed the deed, but the script is all one. At the end there is a clause which threatens anyone trying to undo the grant or make the decree invalid; such a perpetrator would be sent to the ‘lowest hell’.

Commentators have suggested that the document is crude; the scribe was unfamiliar with the script he has tried to use, the Latin grammar doesn’t work. But we archivists are only too grateful for such a small piece of Anglo-Saxon history to have survived.


Perhaps West Sussex Records is persuaded by it being a one-off. We could be looking at another 'first'

A brief unofficial survey suggested it’s the oldest original document in a local authority archive. Almost all charters of this period only survive as copies in chartularies of the 13th and 14th centuries.

The charter is described as 'a proven original' though, as the Records Office points out, its survival is something of a mystery

Folded into small squares, it has withstood the move of the See to Chichester, the assault on the cathedral by the parliamentary forces in the seventeenth century, and various Victorian attempts to tidy up and clear out. It was ‘restored’ by the Public Record Office in the 1950s. Now it’s in a stable environment and in safe hands.


Interestingly, Henry Sweet's Second Anglo-Saxon Reader doesn't include it, nor does his Oldest English Texts which lists fifty-nine charters.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/515162?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
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