Matters Arising (The History of Britain Revealed)

[Wile E. Coyote]

He is winning me over as a super-enthusiastic, throwing out of ideas type of guy. OK, he is temperamentally just not suited for "the long duree" but isn't that creative tension exactly why he is so entertaining?

Britannia: Rome's Afghanistan? is a representative chapter, wherein he tries to explain the extensive Britannia fortifications, the walls and forts etc, and then, eureka, discovers more Roman glass and pottery in one museum in Normandy than contained within all the museums in Britain put together.

He reminds me of my mate Tony the tiger. Greeaaat!

[Mick Harper]

I entirely agree. It's a case of new brooms sweeping fresh corners even though they're in the wrong room. For those who want to dive into it, the paper can be read/downloaded from here https://www.academia.edu/16346563/The_Frisian_Enigma?email_work_card=view-paper&li=0

[Mick Harper]

The Kindle version of THOBR is available for download in return for two and a half of your English pounds here

https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Britain-Revealed-English-Language-ebook/dp/B0C2ZV5JQ9/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+history+of+britain+revealed&qid=1682006831&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

I haven't read it myself but I'm told it is vastly improved from the printed version and I should know it took me yonks to do it. In fact I sincerely hope it becomes the standard version from now on.

[Mick Harper]

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Wile E. Coyote]

It seems to Wiley that what is now known as Middle English was a highly commendable attempt by Johhny Foreigner to donate a few of their rewritten texts and develop us a writing sytem that would be a good logical phonetic match to our spoken words. Surely we should celebrate their efforts? They at least tried, even if they failed.

[Mick Harper]

If you can point me to some Middle English texts I will explore your idea.

[Mick Harper]

I'm just putting these reviews from Goodreads here for posterity because they are re-organising.
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David Cheshire January 13 2013
This is a firecracker of a book, funnily written, racy and jaw-dropping in the reckless way the author wades into "anomalies" in many disciplines and also academics for choosing to ignore them.

Harper loves anomalies; he attacks them fearlessly. The key argument - for which I bought the book - is that the traditional story of how the English language and people were created in a neat sequence of Celtic-Roman-Anglo Saxon "invasions" needs drastic revision.

This is not apparently original to Harper, but in the complete absence of references of any kind it's hard to judge the originality or reliability of anything he says. This becomes utterly impossible when he widens his aim and lets rip against current thinking in nearly every discipline you can think of, from history, archaeology and linguistics to genetics, geology and evolutionary biology, all of which he condemns as fundamentally misguided.

Although his sustained rants are often persuasive and amusing, the problem is that unless you're like him, i.e. a (presumably?)super-polymath, how do you judge whether they're brilliant or just loopy? It's a sparky read, but do I believe a word of it? If so, which bits? It's interesting to have basic knowledge challenged but, despite his critique of such academic flummery, the absence of references and peer review leave the reader with fundamental doubts. Untl these are resolved, the book remains an eccentric curiosity.

Gary Bonn October 14, 2015
An utterly hilarious and enlightening attack on paradigms, doctrines and science. Yes it's informative but it's massively entertaining. A rampant epistemological bull in a shop of very fragile china - this is a great way to learn how to critically evaluate and challenge all you've been told to believe.

Caomhghain June 22, 2025
What a hoot! Take a knowledge of a child's history of early Britain from thirty or forty years ago, ignore all developments since, then have a theory of the way languages work (a language is a language is a language) or the histories of any languages (they don't have a history), and you have a work which is quite amazing.

It's so bad it's good, as they say. It's almost worth reading alone for the complete misunderstanding of Vulgar Latin. And all because historians, archaeologists, philologist and linguists are secretly conspiring together to fool everyone else. One can only ask why.

I came across my copy in a charity, second hand bookshop. Brings to mind the Fomenko Theory.

Fran November 5, 2022
Very thought provoking book, I feel history should always be subject to revision if new evidence comes to light. I particularly like the notion that the English language has been spoken for far longer in a form similar to now, and that Anglo Saxon (or what has been called Old English) may have been a 'German' import around 600AD and spoken by a ruling elite. If you want to think outside of the box, and why shouldn't you? this is a book for you.

Justin Neville January 14, 2018
I will write a review when I've calmed down and have processed what my lawyer friend has advised me to say or, rather, what not to say when I describe what I think about the author.

Icon Books November 17, 2011
'Mind-blowing, incredibly entertaining stuff.' Daily Mail
'Unusual, funny and provocative, Harper wears his learning lightly but has a serious point to make - fascinating.' New Statesman
'The best rewriting of history since 1066 And All That.' Fortean Times
'Witty, provocative, persuasive and original. This book brings a blast of fresh air to British History.' Rupert Sheldrake
'Punchy and Polemical - an interesting and provocative book.' Metro

Do you think you know where the English language came from? Think again. In gloriously corrosive prose, M. J. Harper destroys the cherished national myths of the English, the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and - to demonstrate his lack of national bias - the French. In doing so he also shows that most entries in the Oxford English dictionary are wrong, the whole of British place-name theory is misconceived, Latin is not what it seems, the Anglo-Saxons played no major part in history or language, and Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning but deluded academics.

Iconoclastic, unsentimental and truly original, The History of Britain Revealed will change the way you think about history, language and much else besides.

Richard Olney October 24, 2015
Sometimes a wandering and a wondering enticement to think differently, but mostly a rant. I could have done without the swearing and i really hope that the francophobia and the attacks on academia are meant to be considered as jokes, if not then they're appalling. Either way it's not very nice.

The central idea that no-one knows anything and so we should be careful to consider unfounded theories as being orthodox and therefore true, is appealing. However, the book then goes on to give its own answers to the questions about the history of the English Language, and that the author's own conclusions seem to be founded on even less evidence undermines his argument.

So, it's ideal for the long bath, or the dreich Autumn day which was when i read it, but for me it's tabloid history. Ok to enjoy it, and to take away that one shouldn't trust everything one's told but don't take it's facts it too seriously.

Graham Tapper August 6, 2011
A very thought provoking book about who we, the English, really are, where we came from and what is the origin of the language we all speak. Harper comes up with some very challenging ideas in which he suggests that the the Historians may have got it all arse about face. A sort of linguistic, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?".

A very interesting and amusing treatise. Even if you end up not agreeing with all of his ideas, it will give you pause for thought. Next time someone starts banging on about "Our Anglo-Saxon heritage" you will be able to ask, "So, what heritage is that, exactly? Show me the proof. Oh, that old chestnut! Well, that doesn't actually prove anything!".

Sarah June 27, 2012
Good god what a stupid, stupid book. I guarantee you, anyone who highly-rated this book (or "The Secret History of the English Language", its later repackaging) has no background in linguistics or non-modern languages. Avoid.

Penny September 12, 2013
It started out with good promise, but it became a bit repetitive towards the end. I'm a bit dissapointed as there are few good books out there that deal with language

Paula Wharton November 19, 2013
Even if you don't agree with it, it'll make you think. Love this book.

Stephen Hampshire April 24, 2017
Superficially intriguing, but ultimately a silly, pompous, book. I hope it's an elaborate in-joke about how easy it is to write this kind of pseudo-academic "revisionist" drivel. If not, the straw man arguments Harper constructs are easily and comprehensively demolished by people who understand the linguistics or (pre)history at question.

David Allen White April 13, 2020
I read this for the second time, mainly because I'm watching The Last Kingdom, and in one episode there was a reference to "speaking English." The story is set in the 9th century, and I commented that in the 9th century the English language did not exist, that it was a product of the Norman Conquest. That is a generally accepted theory which is not really capable of proof, and this author takes a different view.

He has been roundly dismissed in some of the reviews on Amazon, but I find some of what he says to be, well, maybe not quite convincing, but worth thinking about. He also has something to say about the origin of Latin which I find intriguing. I have always been interested in languages, how they develop, how they are related. I really think this book is worth reading.

Moira September 16, 2009
Hilariously funny in places, but the author is plainly a man with an axe to grind. A BIG one. My theory is that he was bitten by an academic when he was a baby. I wouldn't completely discount what he says - that the Anglo-Saxons were not the major formative influence on the English language as received wisdom would have us believe - but he'd have been more convincing if he'd been a little less rabid.

Gary Bonn August 20, 2012
Somewhere on the cover of this book are the words, 'The most outrageous book I've ever read'. Quite.

Harper is a fierce bull and the world of academia a china shop. It gets very messy (and entertaining) as theories tumble to their destruction like falling Ming vases. Brilliant and uttely hilarious.

Clair October 16, 2016
I've finished reading this, but only because I cannot read anymore. As I said in my earlier update...he is a very angry man yelling about academics whilst not providing any proof or backing up any of his arguments. He basically just hates historians and has a temper tantrum for the entire book.

James Keelaghan September 5, 2011
i love conspiracy theories and those who promote them. I guess reading these kind of things is like my version of reality TV.

Michael Harper's basic premise is that English is not an Anglo Saxon, or Germanic language, but was the language that was being spoken in the British isles when the romas arrived, survived them, and the Celts and the angle and the Saxons, and , o by the way, it was also the language they spoke in Ireland and Scotland as well.

What makes it particularly entertaining is that every 20 pages or so he goes an a page long rant about how all academics are bastards and just can't break out of their hidebound ways of thinking to accept his radical new thinking. Just make sure you pass it on to people of weak brain and loud voice so that the theory can spread o talk Radio!!

Anna July 30, 2011
Petulant, histrionic, self-congratulatory, and lacking any visible credentials, MJ Harper might make one or two interesting points, but they're completely overshadowed by how much any sane person must hate him. The best part about this book? It's full of dubious facts and grand, sweeping generalizations, and no bibliography, no citations, no references in sight. Unless you'd like to spend a couple of hours being irritated, and ultimately come away with nothing other than the claim that Latin was an unspoken shorthand language derived from French, avoid this piece of crap.
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and one for Meeting with Remarkable Forgeries

Stephen Sorensen December 30, 2021
There are some core issues with this book. The author attempts to argue that a collection of the world's most famous manuscripts are forgeries but does so after stating that science and scholarship won't be presented because "the forgeries are so childish". There is a long tradition of detecting and exposing forgeries and ignoring the sciences and scholarship that have arisen from this tradition is a mistake.

Aside from that issue above, there are many claims that are problematic and I (as of now) can't justify spending time going through them one by one.

Last note, the Amazon description (and the Gooreads details) for this book contains false advertising. This book does not touch anything from the early Christian era.

[Mick Harper]

It turns out the US version, The Secret History of the English Language, is also on Goodreads including one from last month! I don't think Charles Dickens was still getting reviews twenty years later.
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Jeff Samuelson September 2, 2024
Fun read. Good for awakening dogmatic slumbers. You don’t have to accept all the authors premises for this to be worthwhile.

Colin May 12, 2008
What a trainwreck! This is one of the worst attempts at pseudo-linguistics I have ever read (and that's saying a lot). The main premise of the book is that English is not at all derived from Anglo-Saxon, but in fact is the indigenous language of Britain (in other words the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes never invaded Britain, they were from there), and linguists are involved in covering up this fact or choose to remain blind to it.

Shoddy history, extremely shoddy linguistics, and quite a bit of profanity for what claims to be a serious scientific investigation into the "true" history of English round out this awful book. I'm glad I borrowed this book from Borders rather than buying it. I encourage anyone with a firm grounding in linguistics to read it. You might want to drink heavily while so doing.

3 comments

Mat
How closely did you read the book? The book does not claim that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes never invaded Britain, nor that they were native to the island. The argument is that it's very unlikely that a few boatloads of invading rulers managed to convince nearly the entire population of Britain to stop speaking their native language and start speaking Anglo-Saxon - a language which, we know from the written record, is also unrecognizably different from the English that was written down only 500 years later (and which is nearly identical to the language that we speak today). It is a pretty reasonable argument.

Colin
It's not a particularly reasonable argument if one is familiar with the large corpus of Middle English works that show transitional stages from Old English. If you look at the record, you can *see* the evolution of Middle English from Old English happen - it's not as if scholars of English just made it up, or are part of a secret conspiracy to hide the true history of English.

I mean, I can read a fair bit of Old English. I can read a fair bit more of Middle English - but the earlier stuff is hard to tell apart from a form of Old English, and the later stuff clearly evolves from it. I should think that familiarity with the corpus of writings in English from the periods involved would prove the author's hypothesis incorrect.

I'm not a specialist in English; I'm a Latinist with a strong background in linguistics. Old and Middle English are just a hobby for me, and the evidence seems cleaar to me. I would assume that the author would have researched his hypothesis - and in so doing, ought to have come across evidence. I don't see how the hypothesis this book presents could be even vaugely justified by anyone who has studied the language forms involved.

Colin
Incidentally, I shall concede the point that my understanding of the author's hypothesis of the invasion was a muddled. It didn't make a bit of sense to me given the historical and archaeological record. I thought that he was trying to prove that no invasion ever took place, but perhaps I just missed some crucial point. As I said, I found the whole book to be kind of a trainwreck.

J July 25, 2023
Several things:

1. I bow down to the author’s mastery of snark.

2. Why did no one ever tell me there is a career field other than law school (Applied Epistemology) where I can pick apart people’s arguments all day every day?

3. I wish I’d known before I started reading and become very invested in the author’s argument that the About the Author section contains zero bona fides or credentials, nor are there (seemingly) any available online.

4. Therefore, read with caution. This was going to get five stars until issue #3 popped up.

Andy Daitsman May 19, 2025
The author of this book is a crank. They are very smart, well educated in linguistics, but their analysis is completely polluted by their far right wing political ideology. They believe nothing ever changes, and at the end of the book they praise National Socialism for its approach to cultural identity.

Jordan March 31, 2020
A long winded explanation of where the English language may have stemmed from. A sort of roundabout linguistic analysis that is interesting, but doesn’t provide enough evidence for the claims it makes. Still a good read and something that is interesting to think about.

Erik April 18, 2009
For several centuries, linguists (and philologists before them) have taken for granted the long-standing theory that English has its roots in Anglo-Saxon – a language whose only evidence comes from such archaic documents as Beowulf and a few other odd poetic fragments.

This theory has not just stood the test of time, but also modern academic scrutiny. Harper, a cheeky bloke who makes his home in London, blows many holes in this prevailing assumption about the roots of the English language by arguing that it is entirely ass-backwards.

Not only does he pointedly argue the applied epistemological viewpoint that is wrong-headed, but he also posits that the roots of English are in the language itself – whose pre-Chaucerian form has never been Anglo-Saxon. In fact, he fervently suggests that what we call Anglo-Saxon has no direct roots in German – as so much of the cultural and archeological remains in no way suggest that an “invasion” of a supposed Germanic horde ever occurred.

He also makes the observation – one that I recently and casually did in my last review – that the language of Beowulf is not in the least bit English, and more Welsh. (Which give precedence to its possible roots or kinship with Gaelic.)

On a related point, Harper also puts the spin on the equally long-standing assumption that the Romance languages of French (including Occitan in the southwest), Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Catalan, and Romansch are direct descendants of Latin. Which always sounded strange to me. Surely these indigenous people were speaking another, completely unrelated language prior to the arrival of Caesar and his troops?

And why would they all so quickly abandon their mother tongues in quick order? (Never has this occurred with any other language – even with English in the past six hundred years after countless movement of peoples and eve- increasing industrialization. If it has happened with our language in the time of greatest human innovation and rapid change, then it sure as heck didn’t occur during the supposed “Dark Ages” when not much changed in the last half of the first millennium.)

Rather, Harper suggests that Latin came directly from these collective Romance languages, and was used as a lingua franca – one which has hasn’t changed a bit in two thousand years. (Which recalls to my mind the modern invented languages of Swahili, Hebrew, and Esperanto.)

Why in the world would so many people and languages so quickly adopt the supposed language of the conquerors? (After all, Latin as we know it was never actually spoken on a day-to-day basis by anyone within the Republic. Rather it was a legal language used for formal occasions.) It makes much more sense that Latin is derived from them. But let’s get back to the main issue of Harper’s narrative.

Whatever the true history of English prior to Chaucer, several things can be confirmed. There is little evidence – if any – that Anglo-Saxon (if that’s what we want to call it) is the mother language of modern English.

In addition, language change is typically very slow, even in these last two remarkable centuries in which English has spread far and wide. (Chaucer’s English being much more akin to ours today than his was to the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf, which is much closer chronologically to his.)

Harper does contemporary linguistic theory and history a number by calling them on their inaccuracies and stubborn refusal to question not just their methodologies, but also their long-held assumptions. (In effect, he also calls into question most historical research practices and prevailing paradigms. Does this guy just want to throw rocks in glass houses for the sheer joy of it?)

If you want to have your head spin, as well as muse on an alternate theory as to the true roots of the English, look no further. Harper is your man to get your blood roiling, and your mind swirling with the possibilities. (But I will take a pass on his idea – albeit tentative -- that English is the mother tongue of most European languages. One that even he admittedly believes is whacked. And, oh, how whacked it is.)

Bryan November 4, 2012
If The Secret History were not such an enjoyable read, it would only deserve two stars. I am disappointed that after plausibly arguing, albeit with little evidence besides his genius to offer: that English does not derive from Anglo-Saxon/Old English, that the Celtic peoples never occupied more of Europe than the rocky, western fringes; that English has always been spoken in most of Great Britain and Ireland; that the "Romance" languages do not derive from Latin; that there are some basic flaws in Darwin's Theory of Evolution; and that academics are a bunch of idiots.

M.J. Harper fails to prove his final hypothesis, which I think is that the "Latinate" vocabulary in English is not, in fact, derived from Latin or even French, but was always present in our glorious mother tongue - long may she rule.

Mat May 10, 2008
I couldn't put this book down - not surprising, given my interest in both linguistics and suggestions that things are not as they seem. Harper makes a convincing argument that many of the assumptions underlying our understanding of the development of English (and a number of other familiar languages) are fairly unreasonable, and offers a simpler explanation of how things might have actually happened.

The claim that English, in a form that would be recognizable to speakers of the language today, has been spoken in Britain and Ireland for thousands of years is only the first of his iconoclastic hypotheses - and he saves the best one for the end. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in language and an open mind.

Paula March 6, 2009
What's great about this book is the logic behind the author's claim that English is the original language spoken by the people in England way before the Anglo-Saxons ever showed up. Harper's argument also claims that French and German are versions of English. Ha! And the commentary on academia is right on. So far I've read the book twice, the applied epistomological approach is a challenge to understand. I would love to hear a linguist's viewpoint on this.

Melville House Publishing February 12, 2008
"Mind-blowing, incredibly entertaining stuff...A well-written and funny book." -- Daily Mail

Blair September 27, 2008
Entertaining, if you're interested in language history. Harper has many very novel ideas about the development of English, but unfortunately they are rather unbelievable.

Molly Brodak September 26, 2009
talk about having a chip on one's shoulder. Still, some interesting theories here, even if a bit radical; I'm glad I read it.