“Port” and “Port-Reeve.”
By J. H. Round, M.A.
PART IV.
(Completed from p. 24.)
TURNING now to ceaster, I claim it, as I claim port, as a distinctively English word. Just as, ever on the same principle, I see in the use of weal (wall)—a word etymologically derived from vallum—for a stone wall (murus), an indication that the Teutonic rovers, struck by a phenomenon to them so strange as a fortification even of earth, formed for themselves, out of vallum, a word denoting a barrier irrespective of its material, so I contend that they formed for themselves, from a phenomenon so strange as that castrum which faced them on the border of “the Saxon shore,” the word ceaster by which to denote a walled enclosure, irrespective of its size. Is it not a striking thought that, in these English rovers, we have the forefathers of those to whom, as they gazed on the Norman donjon,—
“Both the name and the thing were new.... Such strongholds, strange to English eyes, bore no English name, but retained their French designation of castles.”[36]
Thus, to return, as when they made the acquaintance of a stone wall (murus), they would apply their word weal to it, so, when they reached the large Roman towns of the interior they would apply to them, as being walled enclosures, their own word “ceaster,” totally independent of the proper name by which they were known to Roman or Briton.
Now here we have an instance of the striking results that may follow from minute analysis of “these interesting philological fossils.” For it follows, as a corollary from the above proposition, that the point of view from which all historians, whatever their school of thought may be, have hitherto agreed to look at “-ceaster,” is entirely erroneous and misleading. So far from being essentially a Roman, I shall prove it to be essentially an English termination. Thus, though in no way a follower of Mr. Freeman’s sweeping theories, I go, it will be seen, in this matter of fact, even beyond the exponent of the extreme “Teutonic” view.
Let us ask ourselves, in the first place, what we mean when we talk of towns with the -ceaster termination having retained their “Roman names.” Mr. Pearson, for instance, who is a follower of Mr. Coote, asserts that—
“Roman local names were preserved by the conquerors as they found them.”[37]
Even Mr. Allen, though an independent thinker, contends 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.”[38]
And he goes, indeed, so far as to assert that—
“There are nowhere any traces of clan nomenclature in any of the cities. They all retain their Celtic or Roman names.”[39]
Take, then, the case of Gloucester. Mr. Freeman and Prebendary Scarth undoubtedly represent, on these questions, the opposite extremes of thought. The former would minimise, and the latter would make the most of the survival of “Roman names,” yet on this point they are at one. “A few great cities,” says Mr. Freeman,
“and a few great natural objects, London on the Thames and Gloucester on the Severn, still retain names older than the English Conquest.”[40]
“London and Lincoln,” says Prebendary Scarth,
“and Gloster are noteworthy examples of places retaining, like many others, the Latinised forms of still earlier names.”[41]
And yet, as Mr. Allen most truly observes—
“To say that Glevum is now Gloucester is to tell only half the truth; until we know that the two were linked together by the gradual steps of Glevum castrum, Gleawan ceaster, Gleawe cester, Gloucester, and Gloster, we have not really explained the words at all.”[42]
It is the advantage of an unflinching analysis such as this that we are immediately confronted in black and white with a form of which the existence is necessarily involved, though hitherto surely overlooked. That form is “Glevum castrum.” This then is the question that we have to ask: was “Glevum castrum” ever the name of Gloucester? “Glevum” we know, and “Gleawan ceaster;” but if we cannot demonstrate the existence of a form “Glevum castrum,” the continuity of the chain is severed; there is between them a missing link.
Now for this form, although, as I have said, it is a necessary postulate to the accepted theory, there is absolutely, we may at once assert, no evidence whatever. Indeed, as in this same article Mr. Allen has himself observed,—
“The new comers could not have learned to speak of a ceaster or chester from Welshmen who called it a caer; nor could they have adopted the names Leicester or Gloucester from Welshmen who knew those towns only as Kair Legion or Kair Gloui.”[43]
Thus, then, as the Roman name was “Glevum,” and not “Glevum castrum,” we see that “Gloucester,” the English name, is not the “Roman name” preserved—is not even, though Mr. Freeman would admit it, “older than the English Conquest.”
But as yet we have only ascertained that “Gloucester” (that is to say, “Gleawan Ceaster”) was a new, an English, name. We have still to learn how it was evolved, and what the name really meant in the mouths of “the English conquerors.”
To solve this further problem, there are two points that must be borne in mind. The first of these points is that “ceaster,” though now only found in place names, and therefore, naturally, to our ears, a component of proper names, was, in the mouths of the earliest English, not a proper but a common name. We are reminded, for instance, by Mr. Grant Allen, that in Beowulf the city-folk are described as the “dwellers in ceasters;” and even so late as the days of Alfred, Chester, as Mr. Freeman loves to remind us, is spoken of as “a waste ceaster,” that is a deserted city. How, then, did this English word ceaster, a word formed to denote an object for which, being new to English eyes, a new word had been added to their speech, pass out of use as a general term, and become a component of certain proper names, embalmed in which it has descended even to our own day? Mr. Allen contends (though the suggestion surely is irreconcilable with his previous hypothesis of Glevum castrum having existed as a Latin form) that
“Sometimes they [i.e., the English] 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, and introduced a totally new one of their own manufacture,” &c.[44]
Now this brings me to the second of the two points of which I spoke; this is, that in the names we are considering, such as Gloucester and Doncaster, we have to deal with two component parts, and that the nomen ipsum, the real English name, is always to be sought in the second part, and not, as has hitherto, it would seem, thoughtlessly been assumed, in the first. That is to say, that in Gleawan ceaster, as an instance of the original form, we are to seek the true English name in the ceaster, and not in the Gleawan. So far from seeing in this form “the Romanised title alone, with the addition of ceaster,” we ought to see the English word ceaster imposed by the conquerors upon the city of Glevum, a prefix to ceaster being only added where necessary to distinguish it from other ceasters. This is illustrated by the parallel case of the three Romanised forms, Venta Icenorum, Venta Belgarum, and Venta Silurum. In each of these three forms the true place-name was Venta (Gwent), and the tribal names are mere suffixes, added for the sake of distinction. This parallel will also illustrate the contrast between the Roman and the English Conquests. For whereas the Romans were contented to Latinise “Gwent” as Venta, the English, settlers rather than conquerors, acting as their descendants have done in America, not as they have done in Hindostan, ignored the Roman or, more accurately, the Latinised British name, and, in their own tongue, called Glevum “Ceaster.” Here I must again quote from Mr. Allen’s able paper, as clearly establishing this proposition, although the inferences we draw from it are not the same:—
“Thus, in the north, Ceaster usually means York, the Roman capital of the province; as when the ‘Chronicle’ tells us that ‘John succeeded to the bishopric of Ceaster;’ that ‘Wilfrith was hallowed as Bishop of Ceaster;’ or that Æthelberht the Archbishop died at Ceaster.’ In the south it is employed to mean Winchester, the capital of the West Saxon kings and overlords of all Britain; as when the ‘Chronicle’ says that ‘King Edgar drove out the priests at Ceaster from the Old Minster and the New Minster, and set them with monks.’ So, as late as the days of Charles II., ‘to go to town’ meant, in Shropshire, to go to Shrewsbury, and in Norfolk, to go to Norwich. In only one instance has this colloquial usage survived down to our own days in a large town, and that is at Chester, where the short form has quite ousted the full name of Lega Ceaster. But in the case of small towns, or unimportant Roman stations, which would seldom need to be mentioned outside their own immediate neighbourhood, the simple form is quite common, as at Caistor in Norfolk, Castor in Hants, and elsewhere.”[45]
I must explain very carefully the difference between Mr. Allen’s point of view and my own. While I see the true English name in the English word “Ceaster,” and look upon its prefixes as merely added to distinguish one “Ceaster” from another—just as in “East Bergholt” (Suffolk) and “West Bergholt” (Essex), or in the widely separated “East Grinstead” and “West Grinstead” of Sussex, we recognise the original name of each village as “Bergholt” and “Grinstead” respectively—Mr. Allen, by the absolutely converse process, would see the true English name in the full compound, such as “Glewanceaster,” whether formed by simply Anglicising a Latin “Glevum castrum” (see p. 423), or, as he elsewhere holds (p. 434), by using the “Romanised title alone, with the addition of ‘Ceaster.’ ” He consequently sees, in the simple “Ceaster,” not the original form, but a corruption, a “colloquial usage:”—
“As a rule, each particular Roman town retained its full name (?), in a more or less clipped form, for official uses; but in the ordinary colloquial language of the neighbourhood they all seem to have been described as ‘Ceaster’ simply, just as we ourselves habitually speak of ‘town,’ meaning the particular town near which we live, or, in a more general sense, London.”[46]
Let me take, as an illustration, a well-known passage, in which the “Chronicle” tells how the West Saxons, in 577, “took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and Ciren ceaster, and Bathan ceaster.” Now, each of these cities would be severally known as a “ceaster,” and, in due course, as the “ceaster”—just as “forum” was developed by the Romans, and as “market” has been by ourselves (vide ante, v. 250)—but when, as here, mentioned together, they would have to be distinguished from one another. The hams and tuns which covered the land were so distinguished by prefixing to them the names of their English owners. This could not be done with the ceasters, which did not become the homesteads of English owners. The distinctive prefix was, therefore, sought in some existing (although, to the invaders), meaningless name, either that of the river on which it stood, as “Exan ceaster” (the Chester on the Exe), or that of the place itself, “Glewan ceaster,” a form which may be paralleled in the “Fort Chipewyan,” “Fort Winebago,” &c., of their descendants in North America.[47] It is often, of course, most difficult to say whether the prefix is derived directly from the river, or indirectly, through the original place-name. But, in any case, we must dismiss the hypothesis that the prefix was “the Romanised title” of the town, for the termination “an” (“Exan,” “Gleawan”) is found in cases where the Roman forms differed so widely as “Isca” and “Glevum.” We must guard against the idea that such prefix was ever the “Roman name” itself, used in apposition to “ceaster.”
To resume, then, we have seen that there is no ground for supposing “castrum” to have ever formed part of the “Roman names” of those cities whose modern names end in “Chester,” &c. From this it has followed that the terminal in question is the result and badge of the English invasion, representing the English word “ceaster,” the invaders’ term for a walled town, and not the equivalent of a mere castrum, though etymologically derived from it in the first instance. We have also seen that the terminal in question was not a mere “addition” to the “Roman name,” but was itself the new name imposed by the conquering English, to which, when and where necessary, a prefix was in time permanently added, for the sake of distinction. It is not, surely, too much to say that if these conclusions were satisfactorily established, they must gravely modify, if not revolutionise, the view which has hitherto universally prevailed, and which is based, I think, on a too hasty induction from the resemblance between the English and the Latin words.
I shall not here pursue further the vicissitudes and the fate of “port” and “chester,” but shall content myself with noticing the instructive fact, that, while these words have come down to us, similarly, in compound forms alone, “chester” is a component in the names of places, and “port” in the names of things (including, thereby, offices). Now, if “a walled town” was the meaning of ceaster, and “a trading town” the meaning of port, why should we find this marked difference in the use of words which, in sense, appear to have differed so slightly? Why does “chester” end words, and “port” begin them? Why is a town called a “chester,” when its governor is a “port-reeve,” and its court a “port-manmote?” The answer is to be found in this distinction: the ceaster was the town objectively, that is, viewed as a natural object, a walled enclosure; the port was the town subjectively, that is, relatively to trade, “in its character of a mart or city of merchants.”[48]
Thus it was that while ceaster retained its sturdy objectivity, and was merely qualified, as a place-name, by the addition of a distinctive prefix, port, on the other hand, referring as it did to the town viewed in a particular aspect, was only strong enough to become itself a prefix, used, for the purpose of distinction, in a quasi-adjectival sense. In port-mote it served to distinguish the moot held in the “port” from the scir-mote and tun-mote; in port-reeve it served to distinguish the reeve of the “port,” or trading town, from the scir-reeve, the wic-reeve, and reeves other innumerable.[49]
Messrs. Burns & Oates have announced the intended publication of a series of reprints of scarce ascetical books, many of which exist in the possession of private collectors, as heirlooms of old Catholic families, and in the libraries of religious houses. Among them are “Three Ways of Perfection,” (1663); “Sweet Thoughts of Jesus and Mary,” (1658); “Memorial of a Christian Life,” (1688), &c. The works will be edited by Mr. Orby Shipley, M.A.