Under Another Sky (24 page)

It began when William Stukeley received a letter, on 11 June 1747, from one Charles Julius Bertram, a teacher of English language in the Royal Marine Academy of Copenhagen. The letter was, Stukeley later wrote, ‘full of compliments, as usual with foreigners’ (Bertram was in fact an émigré to Denmark from Britain). It also mentioned a medieval manuscript that Bertram said he had seen, composed by one Richard of Westminster. The text was a history of Roman Britain, along with an ‘antient map’. Stukeley recalled: ‘I press’d Mr Bertram
to get the manuscript into his hands, if possible. Which at length, with some difficulty, he accomplished: and on sollicitation, sent to me in letters a transcript of the whole; and at last a copy of the map.’

On studying the transcript, Stukeley identified Richard of Westminster with Richard of Cirencester, a known fourteenth-century chronicler. Richard’s work, titled
De Situ Britanniae
(
On the Situation of Britain
), drew on known texts about Roman Britain, such as Caesar, Tacitus, the
Antonine Itineraries
and Solinus. (The
Antonine Itineraries
were ancient route planners: of uncertain imperial date, they describe journeys through various parts of the Roman empire by listing the places through which a traveller would pass to get from one point to another. Several deal with routes through Britain – giving, for example, directions from Caerwent to Silchester.) But the revelation was that he appeared to have had access to a host of lost original sources, as well as an entirely fresh crop of Antonine Itineraries – indeed, a great deal of significant geographical knowledge that had allowed him to come up with a comprehensive map of the British Isles under the Roman empire. Among this wealth of fresh material came evidence of a previously unknown province of Britain. Scholars already knew of the division, in the last years of the third century or early years of the fourth, of Britain into four provinces – Prima, Secunda, Flavia and Maxima – which between them made up the ‘diocese’ of Britain. They also knew of the disputed, possibly non-existent or only briefly existent Valentia, somewhere in the north of Britain. Richard of Cirencester’s map fixed the location of Valentia between Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall; and, most excitingly of all, introduced the notion of a further province of Vespasiana, in the Highlands of Scotland.

Stukeley revealed the manuscript’s contents in a series of papers to the Society of Antiquaries, published in 1757 as
An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of his Works
. ‘He gives us more than a hundred names of cities, roads, people and the like: which till now were absolutely unknown to us. The whole is wrote with great judgment, perspicuity, and conciseness, as by one that was altogether master of his subject,’ he enthused. The ‘highland part of Brittain’, he added, was described ‘very particularly’. The map and new
Antonine Itineraries
– one describing the mighty journey between Inverness and Exeter – gave Roman names to places that no one had imagined had had the slightest Roman contact. By applying the information
contained in Richard’s map to known locations, Stukeley was able to identify numerous Latin place names: Falkirk was Ad Vallum Antonini, Inverness was Alata Castra, Aberdeen was Devana, and the Grampians were Montes Grampium (which was a dead giveaway if anyone had chosen to see it, given that the Grampians became the Grampians only after that 1476 misprint of Mons Graupius). Some of the names even had a Hellenic flavour: Dumbarton was identified as Theodosia – Greek for ‘God’s gift’, though perhaps it was primarily intended to recall the general Theodosius, who put down a northern British insurgency in the fourth century.

In 1759, Charles Bertram published the Richard of Cirencester manuscript as part of his
Britannicarum Gentium Historiae Antiquae Scriptores Tres
(
Three Ancient Writers on the History of the British People
). Thanks to Stukeley’s passionate advocacy, its authenticity as a genuine medieval document was not questioned – despite the fact that, as Stukeley himself recorded, his requests to be shown the original manuscript were, mysteriously, fruitless. The best he got was a copy of the handwriting of the first few lines, ‘which I shewed to my late friend Mr Casley, keeper in the Cotton library, who immediately pronounced it to be 400 years old’. If there were any immediate doubts about the discovery, they were confined to the truthfulness of Richard as a historian rather than to the intentions of Charles Bertram; and Roy was one of many antiquaries who wasted oceans of ink in trying to square his own accurate on-the-ground observations with the document’s fantasy geography.
De Situ Britanniae
had a new burst of life when, in 1809, it was brought out in a new edition, with an English translation by Henry Hatcher, whose preface defended Richard as ‘scrupulously exact’.

Some of the document’s spurious Roman names persist indelibly. The hill range that runs like a spine through northern England from the Derbyshire Peaks to the Northumberland Cheviots had no single name by the early nineteenth century. However, when Daniel Conybeare and William Phillips came to compose their pioneering work of 1822,
Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales
, they decided that it would ‘be useful to distinguish this ridge of mountains by some collective appellation’. They noted that ‘Richard of Cirencester’s description of the Roman state in Britain’ had ‘denominated them the PENINE ALPS’. (Bertram almost certainly had the idea from Camden,
who, in his
Britannia
, likened the range to that other mountainous backbone, the Apennines of Italy.) Conybeare and Phillips announced that as the hills had ‘clearly a title to this, as their earliest known, if not their original designation, we shall therefore henceforth call them the PENINE CHAIN’.

It took until the mid nineteenth century for Charles Bertram’s work to be definitively revealed as a forgery. Doubts grew in the 1850s; and then, between 1866 and 1867, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
ran a series of splendidly acidulated articles by Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and librarian-in-ordinary to the Queen, which finally demolished its claims to authenticity. His grounds were numerous: Richard’s Latin was ‘more or less good idiomatic English put into Latin words, and apparently by the help of a dictionary’; he had clearly been working from a dodgy edition of Tacitus – ‘a very badly edited printed one of the 17th or 18th century’; indeed, in order to have consulted Tacitus at all, the putative Gloucestershire monk would have had to have read the works in manuscript, which in his day languished, unremarked, in continental European libraries. Some of the place names he had put forward were derived from medieval linguistic roots. He had repeated mistakes that Camden had introduced in the sixteenth century. In short, it had ‘every mark of being the production of such a man as Bertram translating bad English into worse Latin’.

And yet it was a clever and stupendously successful deception; it wove its inventions seamlessly into the accounts of Britain by known classical authors, and lavishly fed the eighteenth-century antiquarian interest in the origin and etymology of place names. Its revelations were significant and surprising, but not so fanciful, at least to its immediate audience, to raise suspicion. In fact, the credulity of antiquaries was sufficiently notorious to be pilloried, not least by Sir Walter Scott. In his 1816 novel
The Antiquary
, the title character Jonathan Oldbuck was – like the real Stukeley, Clerk, Gale and Gordon – engaged in a voluminous, committed correspondence with ‘most of the virtuosi of his time, who, like himself, measured decayed entrenchments, made plans of ruined castles, read illegible inscriptions, and wrote essays on medals in the proportion of twelve pages to each letter of the legend’. A marvellous scene in the novel has Oldbuck showing his new young friend, Mr Lovel, an ‘entrenchment’ that lies upon his Scottish lands,
and attempting to persuade him that it marks the site of Agricola’s camp at the battle of Mons Graupius. This looks reasonably convincing, until a local beggar appears and announces that he himself ‘minds the bigging’ of the trench, some twenty years before; and the inscription ‘A.D.L.L.’ marked on a wall, tortuously interpreted by Oldbuck as referring to Agricola, in fact stands for ‘Aiken Drum’s Lang Ladle’. (The scene is surely a joke at Alexander Gordon’s expense: he had made a similarly tendentious interpretation of a series of letters once said to have been inscribed on Arthur’s O’on.)

As to Charles Bertram himself: he died, aged forty-two or forty-three, in 1765, his deception intact. Little is known of him: his silk-dyer father was one of a number of Britons who decamped to Copenhagen in the retinue of Princess Louise, George II’s daughter, when she married Prince Frederick of Denmark. He himself was born in 1723, studied at the University of Copenhagen, and was the author of English-language grammars and textbooks for Danish speakers, as well as an
Essay on the Excellency and Style of the English Tongue
. Among his English-language aids is a collection of moralising maxims: sayings such as ‘The World oftener rewards the Appearances of Merit, than Merit it self’; ‘Tis a great Weakness to be credulous, nothing being more common than Lying’; and ‘The too great Goodness of a virtuous Man exposes him to Tricks and Deceits.’ Also: ‘Patience is the surest Remedy against Calumnies: Time, soon or late, discovers the Truth.’ His contribution to linguistics, one modern scholar has judged, was ‘not inconsiderable’. His patron was the Danish royal librarian Hans Gramm, a figure known as a distinguished scholar to British antiquaries, and whose letter of introduction to Stukeley lent Bertram’s correspondence a reassuring tint of respectability. (This correspondence with Stukeley, spanning nearly a decade, is, alas, lost.) Bertram’s motivations for perpetrating the forgery can only be guessed at. Stukeley mentioned that he had havered for a year before sending his first letter, which perhaps suggests some doubt that the fake could be pulled off. Perhaps he wanted the attention and scholarly kudos; perhaps he was all the time laughing at the gullibility of Stukeley. His own words, from his Latin preface to his edition of
De Situ Britanniae
of 1759, are both revealing and oddly wistful. ‘It contains,’ he wrote of the document, ‘excellent fragments of a much better age, which you would seek in vain to find elsewhere.’

Hence it may be gathered in what and how great estimation Yorke was in those daies, seeing the Roman Emperours Court was there held.

William Camden, 1607

‘No city or town, in the united kingdoms, can present to the Author so great a variety of wonderful events, for enriching the page of history; or exhibit to the Antiquary so many mouldering relics of former ages, as York, the ancient and venerable capital of the North.’ So began W. M. Hargrove’s 1818
History and Description of the Ancient City of York
. Notwithstanding Hargrove’s hyperbole, it is quite true that the later history of York is inextricably bound up with its origins as Roman Eboracum. The archbishopric here (the primate still signs himself ‘Ebor’) sprang up because of York’s past as a great Roman centre. York was the springboard of invasion, the base of operations for the legions as they advanced to Hadrian’s Wall and beyond. When the province of Britain was split into two administrative chunks in the third century, the city became the capital of the northern portion, Britannia Inferior, or Lower Britain. The first fortress was established in
AD
71 as the troops marched their way towards Caledonian conquest. The emperor Septimius Severus settled his imperial court here between
AD
208 and 211 while he and his sons, Caracalla and Geta, waged war against the northern tribes of the Caledonians and Maeatae. A century later, in 306, the commander Constantius Chlorus died here; and it was in this city that his son, Constantine the Great, was acclaimed emperor by the legions. Six years afterwards, Constantine would change the destiny of the empire by converting to Christianity at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, outside Rome. There are indeed moments when York has been cast on to the great stage of world affairs.

When archaeologists were brought in to dig beneath the mighty Norman heights of York Minster in 1969, their aim was to discover the Anglo-Saxon church that the Venerable Bede had described as being the site of the baptism of King Edwyn of Northumbria in 627. What they actually found was a corner of the Roman
principia
, or fort headquarters, the elaborately frescoed walls of which are now displayed
in situ
in the minster’s undercroft. Also here was a roughly bullish sculpted head that may, or may not, have been meant to represent Constantine the Great himself. By way of Christian aetiology for the spot, the minster authorities had to make do with a rather grubby terracotta tile fragment with XP – chi-rho, the first two letters of ‘Christ’ in Greek lettering – very faintly marked on it. This too is on show, with some flourish, its label making the suggestion that late Roman York had a ‘considerable Christian community’. (In fact there are only the faintest traces of Christianity in the archaeology of Roman York, though the city is known to have sent a bishop to the Council of Arles in 314.) As I wandered through the dark spaces under the minster, it seemed to me that there was something appropriate in the Roman fortress’s having asserted itself in this way, beneath the soaring spaces of York’s most famous monument. The Norman minster, and no doubt its elusive Anglo-Saxon predecessor, were built here precisely because the fort headquarters represented the ancient seat of power. This was a potent spot; the place from which authority had to be wrested away and repurposed for a new Christian age. There is a beautifully preserved eighth-century Anglo-Saxon helmet in the Yorkshire Museum, which was found by a JCB operator in the city in 1982. The inscription that runs along the metal band on its crest tells us that its owner was Oshere, and that he was a Christian. The words themselves are in Latin – as if Oshere was borrowing the old rulers’ power, as well as their language.