Roman Roads in Britain.

About Roman Roads in Britain

Roman Roads in Britain (1903) was a book written by Thomas Codrington and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in autumn 1903. Codrington deplored the impact of the spurious Itinerary attributed to Richard of Cirencester by the eighteenth-century forger Charles Bertram, published in 1757 as De Situ Britanniae. For nearly a hundred years this forgery had a major impact on antiquarian understanding of the Roman roads of Britain. It was not until 1847 that Friedrich Carl Wex used intertextual analysis to debunk the forgery. This was subsequently confirmed by John E. B. Mayor when he published an edition of a genuine text by Richard of Cirencester. However Codrington bemoaned "Though that was long ago shown to be a forgery, statements derived from it, and suppositions founded upon them, are continually repeated, casting suspicion sometimes undeserved on accounts which prove to be otherwise accurate.". Furthermore, the mass production of Ordnance Survey maps in the late 19th century had further popularised Bertram's fabrications.