Charles Bertram

Charles Julius Bertram (1723–1765) was an English expatriate in Denmark who "discovered"—and presumably wrote—The Description of Britain (Latin: De Situ Britanniae), an 18th-century literary forgery purporting to be a mediaeval work on history that remained undetected for over a century.

[13] 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.

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.

"[14] 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.

"[16] Bertram refused his attempts to purchase the original manuscript for the British Museum,[18] but Stukeley had received copies of the text piecemeal over a series of letters and had a version of the map by early 1750.

[19] Beale Poste noted 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.

[24] 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".

Later in 1757,[a] at Stukeley's urging,[16][26] Bertram published the full text in a volume alongside Gildas's Ruin of Britain, and the History of the Britons traditionally ascribed to Nennius.

[3] 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.

Edward Gibbon considered pseudo-Richard to be "feeble evidence"[28] and John Pinkerton tersely noted that, where the two differ, "Ptolemy must be right and Richard must be wrong.

[9] The terminology and accent system he employed in his works, despite claims to originality, seem to broadly mimic Jens Høysgaard's[31] and Bertram passed unmentioned by the Danish Biographical Dictionary.

[3] In 1827, John Hodgson fully rejected the text as spurious on account of its absence from Bertram's papers in Copenhagen, errors in the "extract"'s palaeography, and the work's highly unusual Latin style.

Mayor complemented this by thoroughly comparing the Description with the Historial Mirror written by the real Richard of Cirencester (his only surviving work), which he had been reviewing and editing for the Rolls Series.