Note 13 — INTRODUCTION.

It is curious how difficult it is to get rid of the effects of an imposture of this kind, even after it is detected.

Mr. C. H. Pearson is one of those who has most conclusively demonstrated the forgery, and yet in his historical maps of England, published in 1869, he places the Roman provinces of Britain according to an arrangement for which the so-called Richard of Cirencester is the sole authority. Mr. Burton also denounces this work as a forgery (vol. i. p. 61, note); but he elsewhere says, ‘Thus there were Scots in Ireland and Scots in Britain, and a practice arose among British writers of calling the latter Attacotti, which has been explained to mean the hither Scots or Scots of this side’ (vol. i. p. 256). This statement is apparently taken from Pinkerton, who identified the Attacotti with an early settlement of Scots in Argyll solely on the authority of Richard of Cirencester. The opinion is quite untenable, and the etymology preposterous. It was, however, rather unexpected to find Mr. W. Fraser, in a work printed in 1874 (The Lennox), adopting the whole of the spurious matter of the so-called Richard of Cirencester as genuine.