Medium Fakes (British History)

[Mick Harper]

I have taken to re-posting stories from Medium as a way of starting the day with lightweight activity before getting down to the grind of creativity. I find three a day does the job nicely. But as one subject gets exhausted (no snarky comments, thank you) so another front has to be opened. In this thread they will be stories -- mainly about fakes'n'forgeries -- drawn from British history.
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Ten Important Books That Are In Fact Fakes April 6, 2023

I have no doubt in my mind that all the following books are fakes, i.e. not written by the person named on the cover. Who did write them — insofar as that is known to me — I will reveal if anyone shows any interest. On the whole, people prefer things the way they are but there might be some adventurous souls out there.

The Canterbury Tales
Officially written by Geoffrey Chaucer, late 14th century, in England

The Pepys Diaries
Officially written by Samuel Pepys, 1660–1669, in London

Candide
Officially written by Voltaire, about 1760, in Switzerland

The Book of Kells
Officially copied by unknown monks, in the 9th century, Iona, Scotland

Casanova’s Memoirs
Officially written by Giacomo Casanova, 1790’s, in Bohemia

The Mabinogion
Officially compiled by unknown scribes, 11–13th centuries, in Wales

The New Testament
Officially written by various hands, 1st century AD, in the Middle East

Beowulf
Officially by an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet, 8th-10th centuries, in England

The Encyclopédie
Officially compiled by Diderot and d’Alembert, 1750’s, in France

De Bello Gallico
Officially written by Julius Caesar, around 50 BC, in Rome

[Mick Harper]

Trying to slip in theories without tipping off the innocent Medium readership they are your theories is an art.
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English, my English April 8, 2023
But not your English

Ever wondered why I’m writing to you in English? Probably not, there’s a lot of it about on Medium. What I meant was

[Mick Harper]

This proved to be my most popular Medium story when the subject matter was not a crowd-pleaser. And deservedly so, even if I do say so myself. It illustrates the difference between a conspiracy theory and a theory of a conspiracy.
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Wanna Hear A Conspiracy Theory That’s Actually True(ish)? April 22, 2023

We constantly hear about conspiracy theories, but did you know academic historians go in for them too? Here’s a nice one I came across in my endless toils as an applied epistemologist. It concerns something called The Secret Treaty of Dover and involves those two memorable characters from history, Charles II and Louis XIV. The Merry Monarch and the Sun King respectively.

They had a lot in common, apart from being cousins. Like wearing extravagant wigs and having famous mistresses e.g. Nell Gwyn and the Marquise de Montespan (respectively, not in common).

They also shared a close relationship with Princess Henrietta-Ann who was Charles II’s sister and Louis XIV’s sister-in-law. Minette, as she was always known, was Charles’s all-round favourite person and, though married to Louis’ brother, the Duke of Orleans, was rumoured to be Louis’ mistress on the side. As it were.

Minette was a key go-between in the negotiation of the Treaty of Dover and died, aged 26, in mysterious circumstances shortly after it was signed. You can’t get more conspiracy theory than that.

The treaty concerned something else the two kings had in common, the Dutch. Neither England nor France, be they ever so mighty, could rid themselves of these midget upstarts who were besting both of them in what seventeenth century Europe held dear — war, religion, empire-building, trade, industry — everything except high wigs and low women. The two men agreed, they had to go. The Dutch I mean. So where’s the conspiracy theory?

[Mick Harper]

Not, strictly speaking, history but knocking on.
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The Origins of Agriculture October 17, 2023
The present explanation — ‘it just happened’ — is no longer good enough

The only people in the world today that are both successful and use pre-agricultural methods are the Sámi reindeer-herders of Sweden and Finland. So it does not seem unreasonable to look to them for clues about the vexed question of how agriculture came about.

It may not have been the Sámi and it may not have been reindeer, but if we shift the Sámi model back to c. 40,000 BP, before domestication of either plants or animals, what are our prospects out there on the Eurasian steppe?

Left to our own devices, we are not well suited to grasslands. We cannot eat the grass and there are few alternatives ripe for the picking. Nor are we designed to catch animals designed not to be caught by the many and varied predators already there.

What to do?

There is one abundant food source we can ‘keep up with’ — the vast slow-moving herds always to be found on grassland plains. They may be wildebeest, they may be bison, but let us assume for these purposes they are reindeer.

These toothsome beasts may be fearfully difficult to catch and kill on an individual basis, but a whole herd of them may welcome a spot of symbiosis if everyone plays their cards right. For instance

Human beings can keep predators away

Or, if they can’t, they can warn the reindeer they’re coming. Herbivores have more to fear from four-legged predators than lumbering two-legged ones. Looked at from the reindeer’s POV, this might be worth the price of co-operation.

Especially if that price is little more than allowing these bipedal fellow-travellers to dine on the sick, the lame and the dead rather than the usual scavengers dining on the sick, the lame and the dead.

Before you know it, it’s a permanent arrangement.

The reindeer can peaceably continue their annual migrations north and south in search of new grass, the human beings can start dreaming up ways of building on this new relationship. They did, after all, possess IQ’s similar to our own.

Both sides to the bargain had a vested interest in increasing the number of reindeer and all grazers are limited by the same factor: the availability of grass in the dry season — or in the case of reindeer, the cold season.

Can human beings do anything to help?

They can try. If some of them are excused herd-following duties they can keep competing herbivores away from what grass there is and the reindeer will be only too grateful to be ‘directed’ to pristine green pastures. A good start but not decisive. There may be more reindeer and more humans but it’s not what you would call transformative.

There is though one new factor

that has been introduced into the Palaeolithic: a bunch of people professionally concerned with maximising grassland pastures and nothing to do all day except saying boo to herbivores intent on minimising it.

So what did they do with all this spare time, invent cricket? No, perforce, they turned their attention to Mother Nature who was doing plenty of minimising on her own account.

Uneaten grass waits for no reindeer

That which does not wither is dispatched to the four winds. Our left-behind (or sent on ahead) would-be agronomists had thirty thousand years to observe this melancholy fact and think about what to do about it. To summarise their better ideas:

* Everything we think of today as human cereal consumption — from bread to beer — should be reinterpreted as by-products of experiments to make animal feed more nutritious, more easily transportable, storable for longer. What was good for the reindeer goose was found to be good for the reindeer-following ganders. What is muesli but bran-plus-reindeer milk?

* Everything we think of today as farm animals are really designed — domesticated as we would call it — to exploit these new protected pastures: a main grazer (cattle), a short grass specialist (sheep), a rough grazer (goats) and a what’s left omnivore (pigs). Semi-domesticated reindeer could be left to the Sámi.

* Everything we think of today as ‘civilisation’ happened when the southern pastures were full and there was only semi-arid savannah and full desert to the south. Let’s invent irrigation!

[Mick Harper]

Now that to my mind is worth a Nobel Prize in itself. If you have a browse around among orthodox explanations for how agriculture came about--you'll all remember that Palaeolithic housewife who threw some weed grains out the back door and hit the midden--you will soon be aware that 'We don't know' rather overstates the case.

My account is simple, logical, all-embracing and stitches pre-history and history together. It's epochal in the annals of several academic disciplines. Yet despite appearing in the mediumly-successful Megalithic Empire and in this little-read but widely distributed Medium account, the theory has disappeared as surely as those housewifely grains.

If you forced it onto the attention of any relevant specialist you would get roundly abused for being anything from a mugwump conspiracy theorist to a Lapland nationalist.

I formally protest!

[Grant]

So who did write The Canterbury Tales?

[Mick Harper]

One of the Elizabethan or Jacobean poets would be my guess. It not being Chaucer is all laid out in Revisionist Historiography.

[Mick Harper]

A bit of froth after the last one
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English History Is Rubbish January 28, 2024
Nothing but kings and queens

In the days when we we were taught proper history — Tudors and Stuarts — every English schoolchild was treated to a heartwarming but cautionary tale that went like this:

[Mick Harper]

Modern history gets forgotten in a hurry too. This one has become topical because the Europeans are making noises about doing something about the present Israeli humanitarian blockade.
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The US Built a ‘Gazan’ Harbour Once Before
It didn’t turn out well March 8, 2024

In June 1944, the Anglo-Americans launched their cross-Channel attack on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The chief problem facing the Allies was not the Atlantic Wall, that was manned by Poles and Ukrainians and lasted about half an hour. The problem was that vast mechanised armies need vast mechanised ports to keep them supplied, and there weren’t any where they were going.

So they took their own. Codenamed ‘Mulberries’, these were prefabricated caissons, jetties, moles, walkways et al that were floated across the Channel in kit form, to be bolted together on the French side. Two armies needed supplying, one American and one British, hence two mulberries, one for each.

The trucks of the Red Ball Express would soon be loading up with supplies from their artificial docksides for onward delivery to the armies fighting the good fight. But how soon? To use the term President Biden employed in his recent State of the Union speech, it would be ‘within weeks’.

All was going smoothly, and the mulberries were taking shape before the wide-eyed amazement of the world. Then a great storm hit the Channel and the partly-constructed mulberries were in a world of pain. The British — whose pet scheme the hugely expensive mulberries were — bent to the task of returning their crown jewels to a modicum of working order.

The Americans — who knew a thing or two by now about British civil engineering timescales — abandoned their mulberry and told the sceptical Brits they would, from now on, be bringing stuff directly over the beaches using roll-on/roll-off ferries. And do you know what? They were right. They were soon having to supply the Brits as well.

We roll the years on to 2024.

President Biden: We’ve gotta get supplies into Gaza. Those kiddies dying of malnutrition on ventilators are killing my poll figures.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Give the word and we’ll start airdrops. The sky’s the limit.

President Biden: That’s no use. How do you film airdrops for the six o’clock news? The networks don’t have enough boots on the ground.

CoJCoS: Okay, we deliver anything you want over any Gazan beach you want, using standard roll-on/roll-off supply ships. We imbed reporters on the ro-ro’s.

President Biden: No. That bastard Netanyahu would never allow it.

CoJCoS: OK, you announce we’re going to build a whole new port of our own without reference to the Israelis. It won’t be up and running much before November anyway.

President Biden: But it could be sooner?

CoJCoS: I guess.

President Biden: Like weeks rather than months?

CoJCoS: Don’t specify the number of weeks.

President Biden: Roger that.

[Grant]

I bought Revisionist Historiography!

I'll revisit it

[Mick Harper]

You make it sound like Pentonville.

[Mick Harper]

This is what started my own personal expedition into British, then other people's, fakes'n'forgeries. Although it has been a tumultuous and enjoyable ride I'm still not entirely sure it was worth it, in terms of discoveries made times splash made.
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Bury this casket! It will kill us all. April 5, 2024



This is the Franks Casket. It is the centrepiece of the British Museum’s Anglo-Saxon collection and probably the most important extant Anglo-Saxon artefact there is anywhere.

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 that the British Museum, as we know it today, is essentially his creation and has in turn provided the template for all national museums.

[Wile E. Coyote]

That's the important bit. Made in France.

Just three words by Harper cracked it.

[Mick Harper]

You're very kind but I cannot say for sure the Casket was made in France. When it comes to undiagnosed historical criminal activity you might be able to establish that it is criminal--and I believe I have done that in RevHist-- you are unlikely to be able to pinpoint times, places and names with much success. Only the.. um... end-user is identifiable.

Mid-nineteenth century France is the home of legitimate 'gewgaw' manufactory, their Welsh dressers are full of the stuff. [We preferred china plates.] So it is a reasonable assumption that a lot of the illegitimate stuff comes from there too. Most of the sales certainly were.

Since the known history of the Casket takes place entirely in France and Belgium, it is unlikely anyone else was involved. The evidence, for what it's worth, is that Lyon is the chief centre of the illicit trade.

[Wile E. Coyote]