188 RICARDUS CORINENSIS. 



his critical responsibility. Eicbard's description of Britain, he says, 

 " appears to be made up of very discordant materials. How much was 

 really the work of a monk of Westminster, and how much we owe to 

 the modern editor, Bertram of Copenhagen, it is not easy to say, for 

 the manuscript has very strangely disappeared. It appears, however, 

 that the old monk had before him a Roman itinerary similar to that of 

 Antoninus, or perhaps a map, from which he extracted the part rela- 

 ting to Britain. That this Itinerary was not invented by Bertram 

 seems clear from the circumstance that his roads, though they are not 

 always the same as thos^e in Antoninus, have been traced where he 

 traces them, and that their existence was certainly not known in Ber- 

 tram's time;" and so having thus asserled the genuineness of the 

 Itinerary, he proceeds to insert it as the legitimate link between that 

 ascribed to Antoninus Augustus, assigned to A.D. 320, and another 

 derived from the Cosmography of the anonymous writer of Ravenna, 

 compiled not later than the seventh century. 



This process of inserting the spurious document between two 

 genuine ones was first adopted by Bertram himself; and, while the 

 authentic Gildas and Nennius, selected by him for the purpose, gave 

 an air of genuineness to their new found associate; the reputed monk- 

 ish antiquary of the fourteenth century appeared to no slight advantage 

 alongside of those credulous Celtic chroniclers. But, in reality the 

 forging of such an Itinerary as Bertram produced required neither 

 learning nor ingenuity. '' It appears that the old monk had before 

 him a Roman itinerary similar to that of Antoninus," says the author 

 of the " Celt, Roman, and Saxon," and so it "seems clear" to him 

 that Bertram could not have invented it. But what if Bertram, him- 

 self, had the Antonine Itinerary before him, along with any map of 

 Roman Britain, the feat of making such a one as he produced to Dr. 

 Stukeley lay within the compass of any ordinary school boy's capacity 

 for invention. The Itinerary is nothing more than a series of local 

 names, arranged in columns, in geographical sequence, with the dis- 

 tances in thousand paces, stated in Roman numerals : though this 

 indispensable requirement of an itinerary is omitted by Richard when- 

 ever he is in more than usual uncertainty; or, as Mr. Thomas Wright 

 says : " The text of Richard's Diaphragmata is in some parts imperfect, 

 from the damaged state of the manuscript.'' In reality the whole Iter 

 Britanniarum of Antoninus is engrafted into Richard's Itinerary, with 

 the exception of less than a dozen towns. The series are broken occa- 



