De Situ Britanniae - Modern Impact

Modern Impact

There has not been a focused effort to root out Bertram's fictions from actual history, even to the modern day. Disagreements over history are often contentious, particularly when professional, ethnic, or national pride are involved. Modern historians are likely to ignore the impact of De Situ Britanniae on their own work (assuming that they are even aware of it), and just as likely to ignore its impact on their competitors' works, lest claims and counter-claims lead to the disrepute of everyone's work. However, for the sake of illustrating that De Situ Britanniae remains as an influence to the modern day, a rather trivial example is provided:

The first use of the name Pennines to describe the English mountain range is from De Situ Britanniae. Quoting:

This province is divided into two equal parts by a chain of mountains called the Pennine Alps, which rising on the confines of the Iceni and Carnabii, near the river Trivona, extend towards the north in a continued series of fifty miles.

In 1853, Arthur Hussey listed several names in De Situ Britanniae that he could not trace to another source, and the Pennine Alps was one of them.

In his 2004 book Names and History: People, Places and Things, George Redmonds provided a modern assessment. He comments at length on the strange omission of the etymology of the Pennines in the serious literature regarding that area of England, including publications on place-name origins of Derbyshire and Lancashire by respected authors. He finally learns that the origin of the name is from De Situ Britanniae and that "nor do we know any name for the whole range before the eighteenth century." There follows a discussion of the forgery and the fact that a number of its inventions had found their way into the Ordnance Survey maps; and that the true origin of the name was known by serious authors, most of whom simply chose not to speak of it. He also notes that the mountains had been called by various names in the past, and that there were allusional references to the mountains as "our Apennines" as early as the 1630s (and perhaps before that), so likely Bertram simply invented a name that was easy for people to accept as fact.

Another example is the supposed Roman naval base of Theodosia at Dumbarton, taken from Bertram's work, which is now rejected by historians, but could still be found in some reference works some years after Bertram was exposed (e.g. the 1911 Britannica).