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. In that time, it was highly influential for the reconstruction of the history of Roman Britain and contemporary Scotland, to the extent of appearing in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and being used to direct William Roy's initial Ordnance Survey maps. Bertram "discovered" the manuscript around the age of 24 and spent the rest of his life a successful academic and author. Scholars contested various aspects of the Description, but it was not recognized as unquestionably a forgery until 1846.