In the recent exhibition 'Fake? The Art of Deception' at the British Museum, there were two maps among the hundreds of other faked or forged objects on display. These were the Vinland map and William Stukeley's well known map of Roman Britain, believed to have been produced by one Richard of Cirencester in 1338. Stukeley's map, engraved in 1757, was based on information sent to him from Copenhagen by Charles Bertram. The unfinished saga of the Vinland map, which is brought up-to-date by Helen Wallis elsewhere in this issue, revolves around the authenticity of the existing map as a physical artifact. The credibility of the Stukeley-Bertram map belongs to a different order of deception and is well worth while recounting, nearly 250 years after the event[1].

FAKES AND FORGERIES ARE FASCINATING because of their dual characteristics: the skill of the forger and the gullibility of those deceived. Both facets were present in the Stukeley-Bertram hoax and (as so often is the case) the personae dramatis were somehow unwittingly drawn together to magnify the scenario surrounding the map and its provenance with the result that the imposture was not to be seriously challenged for a hundred years.[2] Indeed, the whole affair became one of the most audacious and successful literary and cartographic forgeries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is all the more surprising because – and this needs to be stated at the outset – never has any genuine map of Roman Britain by Richard of Cirencester (nor by any other medieval contemporary) ever come to light.

The scene opens in June 1747 when Charles Bertram, a young English student of twenty-three living in Copenhagen, opened up a tentative and respectful correspondence with the celebrated antiquarian Dr William Stukeley in England. Stukeley was then approaching sixty, one of the most distinguished classical antiquarians of the eighteenth century, an active field archaeologist, a keen gardener and an amateur physician. His Itinerarium Curiosum, which had been published in 1724, has several maps in it by Herman Moll, among them the map of Britain describing the Antonine Itinerary. From Stukeley's writings one gets the impression of an acute but misguided intellect with perceptions more related to the sixteenth century than to his own more enlightened age. He was described after his death in 1756 by a contemporary as 'a learned and honest man, but a strange compound of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstitution and antiquarianism.'[3]

The forged map of Roman Britain as drawn and engraved by Charles Bertram in 1755 and first published in Denmark in 1757. North is to the left. The large numbers of Roman place-names on the map were substantially more than those known hitherto from traditional classical sources. (By courtesy of Rodney Shirley)


When Stukeley re-engraved Bertram's map for publication in England he turned it round so that north was at the top. With only slender critical scrutiny the Bertram-Stukeley picture of Roman Britain, based on the supposed account by Richard of Cirencester, was accepted by nearly all intelligentsia and academia for nearly 100 years. This is the map which was on display at the British Library exhibition 'Fake? The Art of Deception.' (By courtesy of the British Library)