(d) Fossa is found in the names Fossway, Fosbrooke, Fosbridge, and others.
(e) Colonia is found in Colne, Colchester, Lincoln, and others.
(f) Portus appears in Portsmouth, Portsea, Bridport, and some other names.
[23.] THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE SECOND PERIOD (i).—This element was not introduced by the Romans themselves, but by Christian missionaries who came from Rome, sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert, not the Britons, but the English, to Christianity. A band of forty monks, with St Augustine at their head, landed in Kent in the year 597. For four centuries from this date a large number of Latin words came into the English language, chiefly words relating to the church and church observances.
Church Terms.—Calic, from calix, a cup; cluster, from claustrum, a closed place; priest, from presbyter, an elder; sanct, from sanctus, a holy man; sacrament, from sacramentum, a sacred oath; predician, from prædicare, to declare; regul, from regula, a straight piece of wood. But the old form of most of these words has disappeared, to make room for Norman-French forms from the same Latin source. Along with these were adopted a few Greek words—such as bishop, from episkopos, an overseer; angel, from anggelos, a messenger; apostle, from apostolos, a person sent; monk, from monăchos,[7] a person who lives alone; and a few others.
[24.] THE LATIN ELEMENT OF THE SECOND PERIOD (ii).—The introduction of Christianity proved to be the beginning of an intercourse with Rome, Italys, and the Continent; and this intercourse brought with it commerce. Commerce imported many new things; and the names of these things came into the island along with the things themselves. Thus we have butter from butŷrum; cheese from caseus; and tunic from tunica. We have also fig from ficus; pear from pirum; lettuce from lactuca, which itself comes from lac—milk (and hence means the milky plant); and pease from pisum. (Pease is really the singular; and pea is a false singular—not a plural.) We have also from the same source some names of animals. Such are camel from camēlus; lion from leo; oyster from ostrea; trout from trutta. A few miscellaneous words have also come to us from this quarter—such as pound from the Latin pondus, a weight; candle from candēla; and table from tabŭla. The Latin word uncia, which means the twelfth part of anything, is, as it were, split up into two—and gives the two words inch and ounce, which are fundamentally but two forms of one word. (But with regard to this class of words also it should be observed that the words directly introduced from the Latin have either been greatly changed in form; or they have been subsequently borrowed again from the French.)
[25.] THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (i).—In the year 787, the Northmen, Norsemen, or Normans of Scandinavia, began to make descents on the east coast of England. These attacks were so dreaded by the English that prayers were regularly used in the churches against them; and a part of the Litany of the time contained the utterance: ‘From the incursions of the Normans, good Lord, deliver us!’ These attacks went on for three centuries. In the ninth century, these Danes obtained a permanent footing in the northern and eastern parts of England; and by the eleventh century they had become so strong that Danish kings sat upon the throne of England from 1016 to 1042. These Norsemen were Teutons. They were Teutons who had migrated to the north. As northern people generally do, they preferred hard sounds to aspirates. They preferred a k to a ch; a p to an f. The probable reason is that, in the cold mists of the north, they had learned not to open too much their mouths and throats; and thus they formed the habit of using a shut sound like k to a sound like ch (in loch), which requires a stream of air to be passed through the throat. We must not forget that it was the spoken language of England that was affected by the Danes; not the written language; for the simple reason that, in these times, not more than one man in a thousand—either among Danes or Englishmen—could read and write.
[26.] THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT (ii).—The Danish contribution is, like the Keltic, of two kinds: (a) Names of places; and (b) Common words.
(a) The most remarkable example of the place-name is the noun by, which means town. There are in England more than six hundred names ending in by. Almost all of these lie to the north and east of Watling Street; to the south of it, there is scarcely one. Thus we have Whitby, the White Town; Tenby, in Wales, Dane’s town; and Grimsby, the town of Grim. We find the word by also in the compound by-law. The following words are also derived from the Danes:
| Thorpe, a village (Drup in Jutland, where there are scores of towns with this ending.) | Althorpe (old); Bishopsthorpe; Burnham-Thorpe (where Nelson was born). |
| Fell, a hill or table-land | Scawfell, Crossfell, Goat Fell. |
| Dale, a valley | Ribblesdale, Grimsdale. |
| Thwaite, a forest clearing | Applethwaite. |
| Toft, a homestead | Lowestoft (the form in Normandy is tôt). |
| Wick, a creek or bay | Ipswich, Greenwich, Berwick. (Viking = a creeker.) |
| Oe or ea, an island | Faroe, Chelsea (= chesel ea, the shingle island). |
| Ness, a nose or cape | Sheerness, Caithness, Fife Ness; the Naze (in Essex, etc.). |