26 APRIL 2008, Page 25

Our origins

Sir: In his Spectator’s Notes of 19 April, Charles Moore writes that John Buchan’s idea of ‘Old English’ is ‘historical rubbish (who were these Old English who were here even before the Angles arrived to bring the word “England” to our shores?)’. But it is not historical rubbish; DNA research in the past decade or so has revealed how little is the input from successive waves of Vikings, Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Normans. The earliest ‘English’ came from the western coast of Spain and France to establish our race. Why should they not be called Old English? Charles Moore should read Stephen Oppenheimer’s masterly The Origins of the British and stop sneering at Buchan.

David Hancock

Witney, Oxfordshire