Richard of Cirencester

Richard of Cirencester, an early English chronicler, whose life falls between 1335 and 1401. His name is found in 1355 in the list of monks of the Benedictine monastery of St Peter, Westminster. In 1391 he obtained a license from his abbot to visit Rome, and he died in 1401. The only known work of his extant is a poor compilation in four books, the Speculum Historiale de Gestis Regum Angliæ 447-1066, edited for the Rolls series by Professor J. E. B. Mayor (2 vols. 1863-69). It is of some independent value for the history of Westminster Abbey and Edward the Confessor. But Richard's name is best known in connection with the notorious forgery, De Situ Britanniae, long accepted, to the serious detriment of history, as an authoritative work on the antiquities of Roman Britain. This work was first printed in 1758 by its ingenious author, Charles Julius Bertram (1723-65), teacher of English in the naval cadets' school at Copenhagen, who professed to have discovered it in the Royal Library there. In the same volume were included the works of Gildas and Nennius, the title of the whole being Britannicarum Gentium Historiæ Antiquæ Scriptores tres, Ricardus Corinensis, Gildas Badonicus, Nennius Banchorensis. A new edition of the treatise, with an English translation, appeared at London in 1849; a reprint forms one of the 'Six Old English Chronicles' in Bohn's 'Antiquarian Library' (1848). Dr William Stukeley, with whom Bertram had corresponded since 1747, received the book warmly on its appearance; Gibbon commends 'a genuine knowledge of antiquity very extraordinary for a monk of the 14th century'; all the historians, even Lingard and Lappenberg, trusted it; and even so late as 1886 we find it gravely treated as an authority in a work by James Grant on the Tartans of the Clans of Scotland. Some later scholars, such as Guest, had doubted, if not condemned it, but its authenticity received its death-blow in the series of papers contributed to the Gentleman's Magazine (1866-67) by Mr Woodward, librarian of Windsor Castle. Again in Professor Mayor's preface the various sources of the forgery are elaborately set forth, and everything satisfactorily accounted for but the credulity of its dupes.