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]