Science in Arcady

Among the most corrupted forms of all, Exeter may rank first. Its Latin equivalent was Isca Damnoniorum, Usk of the Devonians; Isca being the Latinised form of that prevalent Celtic river name which crops up again in the Usk, Esk, Exe, and Axe, besides forming the first element of Uxbridge and Oxford; while the tribal qualification was added to distinguish it from its namesake, Isca Silurum, Usk of the Silurians, now Caerleon-upon-Usk. In the west country, to this day, ask always becomes ax, or rather remains so, for that provincial form was the King's English at the court of Alfred; and so Isca became on Devonian lips Exan ceaster, after the West Saxon conquest. Thence it passed rapidly through the stages of Exe ceaster and Exe cester till it finally settled down into Exeter. At the same time, the river itself became the Exe; and the Exan-mutha of the Chronicle dropped into Exmouth. We must never forget, however, that Exeter, was a Welsh town up to the reign of Athelstan, and that Cornish Welsh was still spoken in parts of Devonshire till the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Wroxeter is another immensely interesting fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned it into Uriconium; but after their departure, it was captured and burnt to the ground by a party of raiding West Saxons, and its fall is graphically described in the wild old Welsh elegy of Llywarch the Aged. The ruins are still charred and blackened by the West Saxon fires. The English colonists of the neighbourhood called themselves the Wroken-sætas, or Settlers by the Wrekin—a word analogous to that of Wilsætas, or Settlers by the Wyly; Dorsætas, or Settlers among the Durotriges; and Sumorsætas, or Settlers among the Sumor-folk,—which survive in the modern counties of Wilts, Dorset, and Somerset. Similar forms elsewhere are the Pecsætas of the Derbyshire Peak, the Elmedsætas in the Forest of Elmet, and the Cilternsætas in the Chiltern Hills. No doubt the Wroken-sætas called the ruined Roman fort by the analogous name of Wroken ceaster; and this would slowly become Wrok ceaster, Wrok-cester, and Wroxeter, by the ordinary abbreviating tendency of the Welsh borderlands. Wrexham doubtless preserves the same original root.

Having thus carried the Castra to the very confines of Wales, it would be unkind to a generous and amiable people not to carry them across the border and on to the Western sea. The Welsh corruption, whether of the Latin word or of a native equivalent cathir, assumes the guise of Caer. Thus the old Roman station of Segontium, near the Menai Straits, is now called Caer Seiont; but the neighbouring modern town which has gathered around Edward's new castle on the actual shore, the later metropolis of the land of Arfon, became known to Welshmen as Caer-yn-Arfon, now corrupted into Caernarvon or even into Carnarvon. Gray's familiar line about the murdered bards—'On Arvon's dreary shore they lie'—keeps up in some dim fashion the memory of the true etymology. Caermarthen is in like manner the Roman Muridunum or Moridunum—the fort by the sea—though a duplicate Moridunum in South Devon has been simply translated into English as Seaton. Innumerable other Caers, mostly representing Roman sites, may be found scattered up and down over the face of Wales, such as Caersws, Caerleon, Caergwrle, Caerhun, and Caerwys, all of which still contain traces of Roman occupation. On the other hand, Cardigan, which looks delusively like a shortened Caer, has really nothing to do with this group of ancient names, being a mere corruption of Ceredigion.

But outside Wales itself, in the more Celtic parts of England proper, a good many relics of the old Welsh Caers still bespeak the incompleteness of the early Teutonic conquest. If we might trust the mendacious Nennius, indeed, all our Casters and Chesters were once good Cymric Caers; for he gives a doubtful list of the chief towns in Britain, where Gloucester appears as Cair Gloui, Colchester as Cair Colun, and York as Cair Ebrauc. These, if true, would be invaluable forms; but unfortunately there is every reason to believe that Nennius invented them himself, by a simple transposition of the English names. Henry of Huntingdon is nearly as bad, if not worse; for when he calls Dorchester 'Kair Dauri,' and Chichester 'Kair Kei,' he was almost certainly evolving what he supposed to be appropriate old British names from the depths of his own consciousness. His guesswork was on a par with that of the schoolboys who introduce 'Stirlingia' or 'Liverpolia' into their Ovidian elegiacs. That abandoned story-teller, Geoffrey of Monmouth, goes a step further, and concocts a Caer Lud for London and a Caer Osc for Exeter, whenever the fancy seizes him. The only examples amongst these pretended old Welsh forms which seem to me to have any real historical value are an unknown Kair Eden, mentioned by Gildas, and a Cair Wise, mentioned by Simeon of Durham, undoubtedly the true native name of Exeter.

Still we have a few indubitable Caers in England itself surviving to our own day. Most of them are not far from the Welsh border, as in the case of the two Caer Caradocs, in Shropshire, crowned by ancient British fortifications. Others, however, lie further within the true English pale, though always in districts which long preserved the Welsh speech, at least among the lower classes of the population. The earthwork overhanging Bath bears to this day its ancient British title of Caer Badon. An old history written in the monastery of Malmesbury describes that town as Caer Bladon, and speaks of a Caer Dur in the immediate neighbourhood. There still remains a Caer Riden on the line of the Roman wall in the Lothians. Near Aspatria, in Cumberland, stands a mouldering Roman camp known even now as Caer Moto. In Carvoran, Northumberland, the first syllable has undergone a slight contraction, but may still be readily recognised. The Carr-dyke in Norfolk seems to me to be referable to a similar origin.

Most curious of all the English Caers, however, is Carlisle. The Antonine Itinerary gives the town as Luguvallium. Bæda, in his barbarised Latin fashion calls it Lugubalia. 'The Saxons,' says Murray's Guide, with charming naïveté, 'abbreviated the name into Luel, and afterwards called it Caer Luel.' This astounding hotchpotch forms an admirable example of the way in which local etymology is still generally treated in highly respectable publications. So far as we know, there never was at any time a single Saxon in Cumberland; and why the Saxons, or any other tribe of Englishmen, should have called a town by a purely Welsh name, it would be difficult to decide. If they had given it any name at all, that name would probably have been Lul ceaster, which might have been modernised into Lulcaster or Lulchester. The real facts are these. Cumberland, as its name imports, was long a land of the Cymry—a northern Welsh principality, dependent upon the great kingdom of Strathclyde, which held out for ages against the Northumbrian English invaders among the braes and fells of Ayrshire and the Lake District. These Cumbrian Welshmen called their chief town Caer Luel, or something of the sort; and there is some reason for believing that it was the capital of the historical Arthur, if any Arthur ever existed, though later ages transferred the legend of the British hero to Caerleon-upon-Usk, after men had begun to forget that the region between the Clyde and the Mersey had once been true Welsh soil. The English overran Cumberland very slowly; and when they did finally conquer it, they probably left the original inhabitants in possession of the country, and only imposed their own overlordship upon the conquered race. The story is too long a one to repeat in full here: it must suffice to say that, though the Northumbrian kings had made the 'Strathclyde Welsh' their tributaries, the district was never thoroughly subdued till the days of Edmund the West Saxon, who harried the land, and handed it over to the King of Scots. Thus it happens that Carlisle, alone among large English towns, still keeps unchanged its Cymric name, instead of having sunk into an Anglicised Chester. The present spelling is a mere etymological blunder, exactly similar to that which has turned the old English word igland into island, through the false analogy of isle, which of course comes from the old French isle, derived through some form akin to the Italian isola, from the original Latin insula. Kair Leil is the spelling in Geoffrey; Cardeol (by a clerical error for Carleol, I suspect) that in the English Chronicle, which only once mentions the town; and Carleol that of the ordinary mediæval historians. The surnames Carlyle and Carlile still preserve the better orthography.

To complete the subject, it will be well to say a few words about those towns which were once Ceasters, but which have never become Casters or Chesters. Numerous as are the places now so called, a number more may be reckoned in the illimitable chapter of the might-have-beens; and it is interesting to speculate on the forms which they would have taken, 'si qua fata aspera rupissent.' Among these still-born Chesters, Newcastle-upon-Tyne may fairly rank first. It stands on the Roman site, called, from its bridge across the Tyne, Pons Aelii, and known later on, from its position on the great wall, as Ad Murum. Under the early English, after their conversion to Christianity, the monks became the accepted inheritors of Roman ruins; and the small monastery which was established here procured it the English name of Muneca-ceaster, or, as we should now say, Monk-chester, though no doubt the local modernisation would have taken the form of Muncaster. William of Normandy utterly destroyed the town during his great harrying of Northumberland; and when his son, Robert Curthose, built a fortress on the site, the place came to be called Newcastle—a word whose very form shows its comparatively modern origin. Castra and Ceasters were now out of date, and castles had taken their place. Still, we stick even here to the old root: for of course castle is only the diminutive castellum—a scion of the same Roman stock, which, like so many other members of aristocratic families, 'came over with William the Conqueror.' The word castel is never used, I believe, in any English document before the Conquest; but in the very year of William's invasion, the Chronicle tells us, 'Willelm earl came from Normandy into Pevensey, and wrought a castel at Hastings port.' So, while in France itself the word has declined through chastel into château, we in England have kept it in comparative purity as castle.

York is another town which had a narrow escape of becoming Yorchester. Its Roman name was Eburacum, which the English queerly rendered as Eoforwic, by a very interesting piece of folks-etymology. Eofor is old English for a boar, and wic for a town; so our rude ancestors metamorphosed the Latinised Celtic name into this familiar and significant form, much as our own sailors turn the Bellerophon into the Billy Ruffun, and the Anse des Cousins into the Nancy Cozens. In the same way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak of Aix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name, thus distorted, our forefathers of course added the generic word for a Roman town, and so made the cumbrous title of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almost universal form in the earlier parts of the English Chronicle. This was too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon, so we soon find a disposition to shorten it into Ceaster on the one hand, or Eoforwic on the other. Should the final name be Chester or York?—that was the question. Usage declared in favour of the more distinctive title. The town became Eoforwic alone, and thence gradually declined through Evorwic, Euorwic, Eurewic, and Yorick into the modern York. It is curious to note that some of these intermediate forms very closely approach the original Eburac, which must have been the root of the Roman name. Was the change partly due to the preservation of the older sound on the lips of Celtic serfs? It is not impossible, for marks of British blood are strong in Yorkshire; and Nennius confirms the idea by calling the town Kair Ebrauc.

Among the other Ceasters which have never developed into full-blown Chesters, I may mention Bath, given as Akemannes ceaster and Bathan ceaster in our old documents, so that it might have become Achemanchester or Bathceter in the course of ordinary changes. Canterbury, again, the Roman Durovernum, dropped through Dorobernia into Dorwit ceaster, which would no doubt have turned into a third Dorchester, to puzzle our heads by its likeness to Dorne ceaster in Dorsetshire, and to Dorce ceaster near Oxford; while Chesterton in Huntingdonshire, which was once Dorme ceaster, narrowly escaped burdening a distracted world with a fourth. Happily, the colloquial form Cantwara burh, or Kentmen's bury, gained the day, and so every trace of Durovernum is now quite lost in Canterbury. North Shields was once Scythles-ceaster, but here the Chester has simply dropped out. Verulam, or St. Albans, is another curious case. Its Romano-British name was Verulamium, and Bæda calls it Verlama ceaster. But the early English in Sleswick believed in a race of mythical giants, the Wætlingas or Watlings, from whom they called the Milky Way 'Watling Street.' When the rude pirates from those trackless marshes came over to Britain and first beheld the great Roman paved causeway which ran across the face of the country from London to Caernarvon, they seemed to have imagined that such a mighty work could not have been the handicraft of men; and just as the Arabs ascribe the rock-hewn houses of Petra to the architectural fancy of the Devil, so our old English ancestors ascribed the Roman road to the Titanic Watlings. Even in our own day, it is known along its whole course as Watling Street. Verulam stands right in its track, and long contained some of the greatest Roman remains in England; so the town, too, came to be considered as another example of the work of the Watlings. Bæda, in his Latinised Northumbrian, calls it Vætlinga ceaster, as an alternative title with Verlama ceaster; so that it might nowadays have been familiar to us all either as Watlingchester or Verlamchester. This is one of the numerous cases where a Roman and English name lived on during the dark period side by side. In some of Mr. Kemble's charters it appears as Walinga ceaster. But when Offa of Mercia founded his great abbey on the very spot where the Welsh martyr Alban had suffered during the persecution of Diocletian, Roman and English names were alike forgotten, and the place was remembered only after the British Christian as St. Albans.

There are other instances where the very memory of a Roman city seems now to have failed altogether. For example, Bæda mentions a certain town called Tiowulfinga ceaster—that is to say, the Chester of the Tiowulfings, or sons of Tiowulf. Here an English clan would seem to have taken up its abode in a ruined Roman station, and to have called the place by the clan-name—a rare or almost unparalleled case. But its precise site is now unknown. However, Bæda's description clearly points to some town in Nottinghamshire, situated on the Trent; for St. Paulinus of York baptized large numbers of converts in that river at Tiowulfinga ceaster; and the site may therefore be confidently identified with Southwell, where St. Mary's Minster has always traditionally claimed Paulinus as its founder. Bæda also mentions a place called Tunna ceaster, so named from an abbot Tunna, who exists merely for the sake of a legend, and is clearly as unhistorical as his piratical compeer Hrof—a wild guess of the eponymic sort with which we are all so familiar in Greek literature. Simeon of Durham speaks of an equally unknown Delvercester. Syddena ceaster or Sidna cester—the earliest see of the Lincolnshire diocese—has likewise dropped out of human memory; though Mr. Pearson suggests that it may be identical with Ancaster—a notion which appears to me extremely unlikely. Wude cester is no doubt Outchester, and other doubtful instances might easily be recognised by local antiquaries, though they may readily escape the general archæologist. In one case at least—that of Othonæ in Essex—town, site, and name have all disappeared together. Bæda calls it Ythan ceaster, and in his time it was the seat of a monastery founded by St. Cedd; but the whole place has long since been swept away by an inundation of the Blackwater. Anderida, which is called Andredes-ceaster in the Chronicle, becomes Pefenesea, or Pevensey, before the date of the Norman Conquest.

It must not be supposed that the list given here is by any means exhaustive of all the Casters and Chesters, past and present, throughout the whole length and breadth of Britain. On the contrary, many more might easily be added, such as Ribbel ceaster, now Ribchester; Berne ceaster, now Bicester; and Blædbyrig ceaster, now simply Bladbury. In Northumberland alone there are a large number of instances which I might have quoted, such as Rutchester, Halton Chesters, and Little Chesters on the Roman Wall, together with Hetchester, Holy Chesters, and Rochester elsewhere—the county containing no less than four places of the last name. Indeed, one can track the Roman roads across England by the Chesters which accompany their route. But enough instances have probably been adduced to exemplify fully the general principles at issue. I think it will be clear that the English conquerors did not usually change the names of Roman or Welsh towns, but simply mispronounced them about as much as we habitually mispronounce Llangollen or Llandudno. Sometimes they called the place by its Romanised title alone, with the addition of Ceaster; sometimes they employed the servile British form; sometimes they even invented an English alternative; but in no case can it be shown that they at once disused the original name, and introduced a totally new one of their own manufacture. In this, as in all other matters, the continuity between Romano-British and English times is far greater than it is generally represented to be. The English invasion was a cruel and a desolating one, no doubt; but it could not and it did not sweep away wholly the old order of things, or blot out all the past annals of Britain, so as to prepare a tabula rasa on which Mr. Green might begin his History of the English People with the landing of Hengest and Horsa in the Isle of Thanet. The English people of to-day is far more deeply rooted in the soil than that: our ancestors have lived here, not for a thousand years alone, but for ten thousand or a hundred thousand, in certain lines at least. And the very names of our towns, our rivers, and our hills, go back in many cases, not merely to the Roman corruptions, but to the aboriginal Celtic, and the still more aboriginal Euskarian tongue.

THE END