page_title: Charles Bertram
section_title: The Description of Britain
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Bertram / The Description of Britain
caption_attribution_description: English: A color map (335×400 cm) from Charles Bertram's forged account The Description of Britain (Latin:&#160;De Situ Britanniae). →→→A historical forgery and not to be used as an accurate map.←←← Text: Mappa Britanniae Facie i Romanae Secundum Fidem Monumentorum Pervertum Depicta Tabulam hanc Geographicam Antiquitatis Patriae Cimelium celeberrimo viro Gulielmo Stukeley M.D., C.L.M., F.R.S.eet observantiae testandae ergo D. D. Carolus Bertramus 1755.C. Bertramus ipse delin: ab orig. &amp; sculpsit. [motto:] Si Sit Rudent
context_page_description: Charles Julius Bertram was an English expatriate in Denmark who "discovered"—and presumably wrote—The Description of Britain, an 18th-century literary forgery purporting to be a mediaeval work on history that remained undetected for over a century. In that time, it was highly influential for the reconstruction of the history of Roman Britain and contemporary Scotland, to the extent of appearing in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and being used to direct William Roy's initial Ordnance Survey maps. Bertram "discovered" the manuscript around the age of 24 and spent the rest of his life a successful academic and author. Scholars contested various aspects of the Description, but it was not recognized as an unquestionable forgery until 1846.
context_section_description: In 1746, Bertram composed a letter to the English antiquarian William Stukeley on Gram's recommendation. He hesitated sending it and Stukeley did not receive it until 11 June 1747. He found it "full of compliments, as usual with foreigners", and his reply brought a "prolix and elaborate Latin epistle" from Gram in Bertram's favour. Gram was widely known and respected in English universities. After a few further letters, Bertram mentioned "a manuscript in a friend's hands of Richard of Westminster,... a history of Roman Brittain... and an antient map of the island annex'd." He eventually "confessed" that another Englishman, "wild in his youth, had stolen it out of a larger manuscript in an English Library", permitting its use to Bertram upon his promise of secrecy. Stukeley was considering retirement but, receiving a new position in London and hearing of Gram's death, he renewed the correspondence and received a "copy" of its script made by Bertram. David Casley, the keeper of the Cotton Library, "immediately" described it as around 400 years old. Stukeley thereafter always treated Bertram as reliable. He "press'd Mr Bertram to get the manuscript into his hands, if possible... as the greatest treasure we now can boast of in this kind of learning." Bertram refused his attempts to purchase the original manuscript for the British Museum, but Stukeley had received copies of the text piecemeal over a series of letters and had a version of the map by early 1750. Poste notes that the volume appeared in no manuscript catalogues of the era but offered that it could have been stolen at the time of the Cotton Library's fire in 1732. There had been a monk named Richard at Westminster Abbey in the mid-15th century and Bertram suggested this date to Stukeley. Stukeley preferred instead to identify Bertram's "Richard of Westminster" with Richard of Cirencester, who had lived at Westminster in the late 14th century and was known to have compiled another history. Stukeley made the text and map available at the Arundel Library of the Royal Society.
  Stukeley examined the text for years before reading his analysis of the work and its itineraries before the Society of Antiquaries in 1756 and publishing its itineraries in 1757. He was excited that the text provided "more than a hundred names of cities, roads, people, and the like: which till now were absolutely unknown to us" and found it written "with great judgment, perspicuity, and conciseness, as by one that was altogether master of his subject". His account of the itineraries included a new engraving, reorienting Bertram's map to place north at the top. Later in 1757, at Stukeley's urging, Bertram published the full text in a volume alongside Gildas's Ruin of Britain and the History of the Britons traditionally ascribed to Nennius. Bertram's preface noted that the work "contains many fragments of a better time, which would now in vain be sought for elsewhere". The preface goes on to note that, "considered by Dr. Stukeley... a jewel... worthy to be rescued from destruction", Bertram printed it "from respect for him". This volume's map was the earlier one and Stukeley later employed it for his own Itinerarium Curiosum published posthumously in 1776.
  The work was studied critically and various aspects of Pseudo-Richard's text were universally rejected, including his claimed province of Vespasiana in lowland Scotland. Gibbon considered Pseudo-Richard to be "feeble evidence" and Pinkerton tersely noted that, where the two differ, "Ptolemy must be right and Richard must be wrong." Nonetheless, the legitimacy of the text itself was unquestioned for decades despite no actual manuscript ever being seen by another person. Instead, Bertram always provided credible reasons why the actual document could not be made available and provided copies to satisfy each new request for information.
caption: Bertram's 1755 engraved map.
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