Now, Mr. T. Kerslake, of Bristol, who has applied himself with singular acumen to the unravelling of sundry knotty points of our ancient history, is inclined to hold that the Totnes of the chronicles was a distinct place, and he has pointed out that the Welsh chronicles contain “early forms of the names of this favourite British port that has got to be thus confounded with Totnes.” In the “Brut Tysilio,” for example, the place of the landing of Brutus is called “Talnas” (at least, this is the printed form given in the Myvyvian Archæology); “Brut Gr. ab. Arthur” reads “Totonys”; and in a third, the “Hafod Chronicle,” we have “Twtneis.” Mr. Kerslake, therefore, treats “Talnas” as the earliest form of the word, and thereon builds the hypothesis that “the name given by the British writers to their port would resolve itself into ‘’t-aln-as’ and if Christchurch Haven should be conceded to be Ptolemy’s estuary of Alaunus, it would also be the port called by the Britons ‘Aln’ or ‘’t-Aln-as,’ from which Vespasian advanced up to Alauna Sylva, or Caer Pensauelcoit—the City in the Head of the High Wood.”
There can be little doubt, I think, that Mr. Kerslake is right in regarding Penselwood as the site of Caer Pensauelcoit, given as Exeter by Geoffrey of Monmouth, not apparently on the authority of his British original, but, as in other cases, for his own gloss; and thenceforward cherished most fondly as one of the worthiest memories of the “ever-faithful” city by its chief men and antiquaries. If it was at Totnes town, or in Torbay, into which some critics have expanded the idea of the “Totonesium littus,” that Vespasian landed immediately before his siege of “Kairpen-Huelgoit,” then there is considerable force in Geoffrey’s comment, “quæ Exonia vocatur.” If Penselwood, on the borders of Somerset, Dorset, and Wilts, were this “Primæval British Metropolis,” then we must give up the idea that Vespasian landed at Totnes town, or anywhere in its vicinity. However, it by no means follows that there was such a place as Totnes in the Talnas sense, as localised by Mr. Kerslake. Talnas is the single exception, so far as I am aware, to an otherwise general concord of agreement in favour of Totnes, at a date when Totnes town had not yet risen into such prominence as to justify or explain its appropriation of this tradition. The general sense of the language used when Totnes and the Totnes shore are mentioned, lead me, as I have already said, to the conclusion that it was rather the name of a district than of a town or port; and it was evidently understood in this sense by Higden, who in his Chronicle quotes the length of Britain as 800 miles,“a totonesie litore,” rendered by Trevisa, “frome the clyf of Totonesse,” which I take to be only another form of expression for the Land’s End.
My suggestion is that what we may call the Older Totnes is really the ancient name for the south-western promontory of England, and perhaps may once have been a name for Britain itself, in which case we can understand somewhat of the motive which led early etymologists to derive Britain from Brute or Brutus. The myth may be so far true that an elder name was supplanted by that which has survived, and that it lingered latest in this western promontory, perhaps as a name for the district occupied by the Kornu-British kingdom in its more extended form. Whether the modern Totnes is nominally the successor of the ancient title, the narrow area into which this vestige of far antiquity had shrunk, may be doubtful; for the name is as capable of Teutonic derivation as of Keltic. In my Notes on the Historical Connections of Devonshire Place-names, I pointed out that a Saxon derivation that “would fit Totnes town quite as well as any other would be from ‘Tot,’ an ‘enclosure,’ and ‘ey,’ an ‘island’—Totaneys, allied to Tottenham, and associated with the island by the bridge, one of the Dart’s most notable features.” For the original Totnes I suggested: “Perhaps instead of ‘ness,’ a ‘headland’ (Scandinavian), we should read ‘enys,’ an ‘island,’ and Tot may be equivalent to the Dod or Dodi, which we have in the Dod of the well-known Cornish headland, the Dodman.... Then we may read Toteneys the ‘projecting or prominent island’; or, if ‘Dod’ is read as ‘rocky,’ the ‘rocky island.’” I am satisfied that it is somewhere in this direction we have to look for the origin of the name, which would seem, however, to be corrupted from its earliest form when we first light upon it, and which may, indeed, be a relic of the giant race whom the followers of Brutus extirpated.
The last sentence may sound somewhat strange, but my enquiries into this curious story have led me to attach more importance to it than at first sight it seemed to deserve. Stripped of the dress in which it was decked out by Geoffrey, improving on his predecessors; deprived of its false lustre of classicism; cleared from the religious associations of a later day—this myth of Brutus the Trojan loses its personality, but becomes the traditionary record of the earliest invasion of this land by an historic people, who, in their assumed superiority, dubbed the less cultivated possessors of the soil whose rights they invaded “giants,” and extirpated them as speedily as they knew how.
Moreover, though Totnes town has to surrender its mythical hero, it preserves a record of an elder name for this England of ours than either the Britain of the later Kelts or the Albion of the Romans; and if that name be indeed a survival from these early times, makes certain what the general aspect of the story renders highly probable—that it was into this corner of Britain the pre-Keltic or Iberic inhabitants of our island first entered, and that it was here their rude predecessors—who to the diminutive Turanians might indeed appear as “giants”—made their final stand, just as in later days the non-Aryan invaders had to fly before the Kelt, and the Kelt in turn before the Saxon, until the corners of the island became the refuge not only of a gallant, but of a mingled race, with one language, one faith, and a common tradition.
Thus much, indeed, I think we may safely infer from the local associations of the story, supported as that inference is by the yet current traditions of the giant enemies of the Cornish folk.
THE ROYAL COURTENAYS.
By H. M. Imbert-Terry, F.R.L.S.
When in that incomparable romance, Les Trois Mousquetaires, the source and parent of every historical novel of to-day, the author, Alexandre Dumas, wished to impute to the leader of his trinity of heroes the possession of a high and exalted chivalry, he called him Athos.
Probably the intention was to institute a comparison between the lofty attributes of the character and the altitude of the celebrated Greek mountain. Possibly, however, the talented Frenchman may have bestowed this title on the chief personage of his story because he, the author, conceived that no more fitting designation could be given to the embodiment of distinguished and aristocratic qualities than the actual name borne by the founder of one of the most illustrious families that has adorned the brilliant roll of French nobility, has given Emperors to the East, and subsequently established in this land of Devon a noble house which is inseparably connected with the traditions and history of the county.