He wrote two books on this subject, called Redecraft and Speechcraft. In his preface to Speechcraft he announced it as "a small trial towards the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon speech and the ready teaching of it to purely English minds by their own tongue." It was his fancy to replace all foreign and derived words with words based on Saxon roots. The following are selected from his glossary of Latinised words, with their Saxon equivalents facing them:—

Accelerateto on-quicken.
Accentword-strain.
Acousticssound-lore.
Aeronautair-farer.
Alienateto un-friend.
Ancestorfore-elder.
Aphorismsthought-cullings.
Botanywort-lore.
Democracy folkdom.
Deteriorateworsen.
Equilibriumweight-evenness.
Equivalentworth-evenness.
Foliateto leafen.
Initialword-head.

Thomas Hardy's note on the genius of his dead friend is a generous estimate: "Unlike Burns, Béranger, and other poets of the people, Barnes never assumed the high conventional style, and he entirely leaves alone ambition, pride, despair, defiance, and other of the grander passions which move mankind, great and small. His rustics are as a rule happy people, and very seldom feel the sting of the rest of modern mankind—the disproportion between the desire for serenity and the power of obtaining it. One naturally thinks of Crabbe in this connection, but though they touch at points, Crabbe goes much further than Barnes in questioning the justice of circumstance. Their pathos, after all, is the attribute upon which the poems must depend for their endurance; and the incidents which embody it are those of everyday cottage life, tinged throughout with that 'light that never was,' which the emotional art of the lyrist can project upon the commonest things. It is impossible to prophesy, but surely much English literature will be forgotten when Woak Hill is still read for its intense pathos, Blackmore Maidens for its blitheness, and In the Spring for its Arcadian ecstasy."

In 1896 he published a copy of Early English and the Saxon English. In this he traces both Angles and Saxons. It was his idea that the ancient dykes which cut up so much of our land were delved by them to mark their settlements rather than to use in the case of warfare. He also sturdily asserted that the Britons were accomplished road-makers before the Romans came, and that the Romans merely improved roads already existing.

The poem of Woak Hill is based on a Persian form of metre called The Pearl, because the rhymes are supposed to represent a series of beads upon a rosary. The pearl, or sequence of assonance, is shown in the second word in the last line of each stanza:

"When sycamore-trees were a-spreading

Green-ruddy in hedges

Beside the red dust of the ridges

A-dried at Woak Hill,

I packed up my goods all a-shining