The Name and Office of Port-Reeve.
By James Hurly Pring, M.D.
PART II.
(Continued from Vol. IV. p. 266.)
THE transference of the significance of words beyond the scope to which it was originally applied, is so obvious and generally recognised a fact, that I did not consider it necessary to insist more particularly upon it in my former paper.
Many of your readers would doubtless be able to call to mind numerous examples of the kind, and, indeed, I did not credit any of them with being unacquainted with so common and notorious a fact, and one which suggests itself so readily in the instance of the word port which was the word here specially under discussion.
It may, however, under the circumstances, be well to call attention to that very remarkable instance of the kind which has been made familiar to us by Mr. Isaac Taylor, in his “Words and Places.” He states (p. 309) that “on the Mons Palatinus—a name the etymology of which carries us back to the time when the sheep were bleating on the slope—was the residence of the Roman emperors, which, from the site, was called Palati(n)um, or Palatium. Hence the word PALACE has come to be applied to all royal and imperial residences.” And he goes on to observe, that “it is one of the curiosities of language that a petty hill-slope in Italy should have thus transferred its name to a hero of romance, to a German State, to three English counties, to a glass-house at Sydenham, and to all the royal residences in Europe.” The example thus cited is doubtless very marked and extreme of its kind, very different in this respect to the easy and obvious transference of the word port to a city enclosed within gates, the contracted word port itself being derived from the Latin porta, a city-gate.
When indeed it is considered that, like other Roman towns, each of the numerous cities or towns of Roman Britain which subsequently became a Saxon burh or borough was empowered not only to collect tolls in respect of the objects actually sold at its gates, but also (as at present in Continental towns) to levy octroi (ansaria) on all provisions and wares brought within the gates for subsequent sale at the markets (the Fora venalia) inside, it is easy to understand not only how such towns speedily came to acquire a mercantile character, but also how the word port, originally restricted to the gates where such extensive transactions were carried on, would at no distant period become applied also to the town itself.
When, therefore, the learned Professor Stubbs, now Bishop of Chester, derives the word port from porta, as referring to “a mart or city of merchants,” it is only reasonable to suppose that the recognition of this change was present to his mind, and that he had in view that advanced period in Saxon times when the word port had already become transferred from the gates themselves to the town which was enclosed within them, and was apparently applied indifferently to either. But however this may be, we may at least be absolutely assured that he never intended to imply that porta, which carries us back to the original derivation, a portando aratrum, did not primarily and originally mean a city-gate.
It is not my intention to follow Mr. Round through all his erratic criticisms of my paper. The greater part of them may safely be left to the discretion of your readers; at the same time, the want of candour by which some of his remarks are characterised, will not fail to be noted. Thus, for example, when he dilates upon the occurrence of the word “underlying,” instead of “unlying,” in my reference to the Laws of Athelstan, everyone will at once perceive that this accidental error of transcription (for which I cannot account) is at least quite immaterial to the point at issue, which turns entirely upon and is wholly centred in the question of the signification of the word port. It is to an examination, therefore, of Mr. Round’s strictures on my use of this word port that I shall now advert.
Mr. Round objects to the use of the word port as synonymous with gate where it occurs in the words “out of port,” or as I have rendered it “outside the port,” in the Laws of Athelstan; he rejects the identification with or derivation from porta, of the word “port,” as insisted on by Professor Stubbs, and he limits the word port to mean only “a market or trading town,” totally discarding the notion of its having anything whatever to do with “a gate.”
And first, as Mr. Round asserts that my rendering “outside the port or gate” “is a mere gloss of my own on the word port,” perhaps he will be good enough to tell us in what light he regards the instance which he himself adduces of “Newport gate in Lincoln”? Would he in this case, according to his own rule, have the word port rendered New market-town gate? Again, in the case of the “Port of East-gate,” (portam de East Gatâ,) to which reference is made in the Charter of Henry I. to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, it is quite manifest that here, as indeed in Newport gate, the Anglo-Saxon “geat,” on which Mr. Round dwells so fondly, is nothing more than the frequently observed reduplication of synonyms,[24] caused in this instance by the Saxons affixing this additional name of their own to the object, which under the Roman name of port or porta conveyed to them no intelligible signification. When, therefore, Mr. Round stigmatises my “rendering outside the port or gate” as “a mere ‘gloss’ of my own on the word port,” he must surely have overlooked these and similar instances in which the word port is used synonymously with gate, and more especially the fact that precisely the same rendering of the word port was given nearly three hundred years ago by no less an authority than Camden. Referring to the great Roman wall, Camden states that the “two forts called Castle steeds are to be seen in the wall, and then a place called Port-gate[25] where (as the word in both languages fairly evinces) there was formerly a Gate (or sally-port) through it.[26]”
And here if we take the word sally-port thus presented to us, and I may add to this also the word port-cullis, there are few, I apprehend, except Mr. Round, who would contend that in these instances the word port means a “market town,” and has no reference to “a gate.” Even in the case of the actual word port-reeve itself, Sharon Turner is found giving the word “port” its true meaning when he explicitly states that “the port-gerefa, or the gerefa of the gate, was witness to all purchases without the gate”[27] thus in fact showing how this eminent Saxon historian and scholar read and understood the passage in the Laws of Athelstan. Numerous examples of the same kind might easily be adduced, and I might refer to those given in my former paper, which, like the common occurrence of the term extra portam, and similar illustrations of the use of porta, Mr. Round seems to have found it convenient to ignore. It is needless, however, to multiply further instances to the same effect.
Mr. Round next proceeds to point out that “the markets were held in the forum,” “that we should consequently expect the name of a market town to be derived from forum rather than from porta,” and that the “forum so far from being at the gate (porta) was unquestionably in the very centre of the settlement,” and that “as the markets were in no sense held at the porta, we are precluded from deriving port from porta”! This unique and somewhat anomalous specimen of argument, together with the unnecessary piece of information as regards the relative situation of the forum and the porta, which Mr. Round feels “compelled” to point out in order to correct the error of Professor Stubbs “in identifying ‘port’ with the Latin porta,” may all be confidently remitted to the just discrimination of your readers. I would, however, observe with respect to Mr. Round’s remarks on the position of the forum, that it was scarcely necessary for him to go to Silchester and to Cilurnum in exemplification of the well-known fact that the forum was situated in the centre of a Roman town or city. This fact, indeed, is even now amply attested by the lines of conformation discoverable in many of our old borough towns, of which Taunton itself, the town from which I write, affords a very apt and striking illustration.
I think it well here to state that the foregoing observations were written in reply to Mr. Round’s first paper, but it was deemed advisable to defer their publication until after the appearance of a second promised paper, in which Mr. Round undertook to prove that port in Port-reeve was derived from portus, and not from porta, and stated that he would offer “a most satisfactory explanation,” which would “completely justify us in accepting the portus derivation.” Now, however, that the second paper has appeared, it would seem that he must have found the handling of this “portus derivation” a more awkward business than he had anticipated, for the result is that he abandons it altogether, and arrives at the conclusion that the Romans could never “have called an inland town a portus,” nor in his opinion “a porta” either!
Having thus made a summary despatch of this “most satisfactory derivation,” Mr. Round next shifts his ground in toto, and calls on us in his second paper to accept a new theory of his own, which he is about to propound, and by which he “claims port as an English word, in itself distinct from the Latin words Porta and Portus.” Whether he will be more successful with this new “theory” than he has been with his unfortunate “portus derivation” we are to be left in uncertainty until the appearance of his third paper. In the meantime, if in claiming port as an English word Mr. Round means an Anglo-Saxon word, I would observe I am aware of its occurrence in Lye’s “Anglo-Saxon Dictionary” (fol., vol. ii.), where we find “Port, a port. Portus. To tham porte, ad portum, Bed. 4. I. Civitas. Oppidum. Into tham porte. In civitatem; Ælfr. Gr. c. 5. Potius tamen, Porta civitatis vel oppidi.” Thus, then, we see port even here referred back to porta, a city-gate, as the source of its original and most accurate derivation or meaning.
It seems somewhat strange, amid the great uncertainty attending his own views, as shown by the variety of derivations which he has proposed, that Mr. Round should have failed to avail himself of the opportunity afforded him by the Celtic. In the excellent dictionary, the “Antiquæ Linguæ Britannicæ Thesaurus,” by the Rev. T. Richards, we find “Porth, a door, a porch, a haven,” and we learn that the same word exists in the Armoric. I am quite aware of the great similarity, or as it has been termed “the cognate character,” of many Celtic and Latin words, but notwithstanding this knowledge, and all that Mr. Round has also advanced on the subject, I would still maintain, in the instance of port-reeve, the usually adopted derivation of port from the Latin porta.
All notice has likewise been omitted by Mr. Round of the word port way, and the customarily accepted Roman significance attaching to it, and also of the common words porter (a door-keeper), and portal, the derivation of which is, I believe, universally referred to the Latin porta.
The July number of The Antiquarian Magazine has now brought us Mr. Round’s third paper. Instead, however, of its containing, as we had been led to expect, some more fully developed account of his “natural and intelligible process by which the English word port was formed,” and some evidence in proof of his strange and as yet unsupported assertion that the word port was originally “coined by the English,” we find that he merely reverts to a further consideration of the word port, touching on the question of Newport gate, and barely alluding to the Welsh porth, two points to which it will be observed that I have here just adverted somewhat more fully.
I now apprehend that I have been mistaken, but must confess that it never occurred to me that Mr. Round’s conjecture in his second paper as to the manner in which the minds of “the English pirates” would be likely to be affected by the word portus, was all he meant to tell us respecting “the natural and intelligible process by which the English word port was formed,” or that he could seriously propose to put forward this crude assumption of his own for general acceptance on a question of this kind.
Mr. Round’s observations in his third paper are not of a character to make it necessary for me in any way to alter or modify anything that I have already said. Indeed, so far as his introduction of the authority of Mr. Freeman is concerned, he has contributed only to strengthen my position, for the passage which he quotes from Mr. Freeman’s “English Towns and Districts,” (a work which I have not enjoyed the advantage of seeing,) may, mutatis mutandis, be equally well applied to the word port-reeve.
If we merely substitute the word port for “name of the gate,” and in Port-reeve for “Nova Porta,” the sentence will read thus: “The abiding Latin port, in port-reeve, of itself goes far to show that there could have been no long gap between Roman or British and English occupation.” With this slight and quite legitimate alteration, (for the whole force of Mr. Freeman’s statement hangs on the presence of the word porta,) it would be difficult to express the point for which I have been contending in more apposite terms, and the circumstance that Mr. Round sees fit to question Mr. Freeman’s statement because he can “find no evidence for it,” is a matter regarding which I do not feel myself called upon to enter.
As Mr. Round now informs us that his paper is “to be continued,” and it appears to be uncertain when it will be brought to a conclusion, I deem it best no longer to defer forwarding this reply, more especially as he proposes to make some other words, with which I do not find myself in any way concerned, the subject of his future criticisms.
In conclusion, I would observe that the result of my former paper was to bring me many interesting communications on the subject of which it treats.
From the general tenor of these communications, as well as from other sources, I gather that the ancient office of port-reeve is rapidly falling into desuetude, though in some comparatively rare instances the Port-reeve still remains the chief officer of the borough, and is invested with considerable power and privileges. Thus, in an obliging communication which I received from the Port-Reeve of Tavistock, that gentleman is good enough to inform me that he not only still remains the returning officer of the borough, but that he also enjoys a seat on the County Bench, as J.P. for Devon, solely by right and in virtue of his office as Port-reeve, a fact which I conceive is sufficiently rare and interesting to merit being placed on record.