BERTRAM, CHARLES (17231765)

This article appears in Volume V03, Page 814 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BEC-BER

BERTRAM, CHARLES (17231765) , English literary impostor, was born in London, the son of a silk dyer. In 1747, being then teacher of English at the school for Danish naval cadets at Copenhagen, he wrote to Dr William Stukeley, the English antiquarian, that he had discovered a manuscript written by a monk named Richard of Westminster, which corrected and supplemented the Itinerary of Antoninus in Britain. He subsequently sent to Stukeley a copy of various parts of the

work

WORK

and a facsimile of a few lines of the manuscript. These were so cleverly executed that they quite deceived the English palaeographers of the period. Stukeley, finding that a chronicler of the fourteenth century, Richard of Cirencester, had also been an inmate of Westminster Abbey, identified him with

Bertram

BERTRAM, CHARLES (1723–1765)

's Richard of Westminster, and, in 1756, read an analysis of the " discovery " before the Society of Antiquaries, which was published with a copy of Richard's map. In 1757

Bertram

BERTRAM, CHARLES (1723–1765)

published at Copenhagen a volume entitled Britannicarum Gentium Historiae Antiquae Scriptores Tres. This contained the works of Gildas and Nennius and the full text of Bertram's forgery, and though Bertram's map did not correspond with that of Richard, Stukeley discarded the latter and adopted Bertram's concoction in his Itinerarium Curiosunt published in 1776. Although

Thomas

Reynolds in his Iter Britanniarum (1799), an edition of the British portion of Antoninus' Itinerary, was distinctly sceptical as to the value of Bertram's manuscript, its authenticity was generally accepted until the middle of the 19th century. No

original

ORIGINAL

of the manuscript could then be found at Copenhagen, and B. B. Woodward, librarian of Windsor Castle, proved conclusively, by a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of articles in the

Gentleman

GENTLEMAN (from Lat. gentilis, " belonging to a race or gens," and " man "; Fr. gentilhomme, Span. gentil hombre, Ital. gentil huomo, in its
original
- ORIGINAL
and strict signification, a term denoting a man of good family, the Lat. generosus (its invariable transl

's Magazine in 1866 and 1867, that
the supposed facsimile of calligraphy produced by Bertram was a blend of the style of various periods, while the greater portion of the idiomatic Latin in the book was a mere translation of 18th century English phraseology. Nevertheless, as

late

LATE

as 1872, a translation of Bertram's forgery was included in

Bohn

's Antiquarian Library as one of the Six English Chronicles, and there is no doubt that the

work

WORK

had a wide and misleading influence upon many antiquarian writers. Bertram died in 1765.

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