I must ask that all replies and offers of assistance shall be sent to me as early as possible, marked outside “Dr. Johnson’s Centenary.” If they are of such a nature as to indicate the prospect of a thoroughly successful observance, I will at once convene a meeting of those favourable to the project, and do what I can, privately and officially, to secure its success. If, on the other hand, the replies indicate a reasonable doubt as to the success or desirability of the undertaking, I shall (after consultation with others interested in the matter) feel myself at liberty to abandon the proposed movement. I therefore wish it to be understood that the celebration, if any, will be set on foot at the desire of those who by replying to this communication express themselves in favour of it. I think this is the better way to deal with the subject; at all events it will relieve me, as Mayor, of personal responsibility should the attempt to secure some notice of the death of our chief citizen fail for want of the requisite enthusiasm. I would press on everyone really interested to give me the assistance of their opinion and advice by the date indicated.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
Thomas H. Hunt, Mayor of Lichfield.
Lichfield Close, September 17.
PORTS AND CHESTERS.
Sir,—Your readers may have observed, and with some amusement, that the simultaneous assault on my position by Dr. Pring and Mr. Hall, in your last issue, has ended in the somewhat untoward result of their discovering that they are themselves hopelessly at issue on the fundamental point of all! Dr. Pring persists that the “port” in “port-reeve” is derived from the Latin porta, a city gate (p. 114): Mr. Hall asserts with equal confidence that it comes “by transition from the Latin portus,” a haven (p. 149). Dr. Pring appeals to “the learned Professor Stubbs” (p. 114), but “seems” (to adopt his own expression) “to have found it convenient to ignore” that I have shown Dr. Stubbs’ rendering of the passage from the Laws of Athelstan to be simply destructive of his own. I repeat, that when Dr. Pring renders it “outside the port or gate” (p. 115), the words “or gate” are, and should be distinguished as, a mere gloss of his own, and must not, therefore, be appealed to by him as evidence. My own quotation: “Newport Gate,” in Lincoln (p. 115), is no gloss of my own at all, but a verbatim copy. Dr. Pring must indeed be hard up if he falls back on the Latinisation of East Gate as portam de East Gatâ (temp. Henry I.), since by the mediæval scribe, as by the modern schoolboy, a gate would be rightly styled in Latin a porta (“East gate” being suffixed as a proper name for the sake of distinction). What conceivable bearing has this on the use of the term “port” (for a market town) in Anglo-Saxon times? Yet such is the disingenuous argument of my critic, who proclaims that I “must surely have overlooked these and similar instances”! And if he had done me the honour to read my paper with common care, he would have seen that I carefully distinguish the “port” of proper names, such as “Newport Gate,” from the “port” in “port-reeve.” This destroys his criticism.
When Dr. Pring appealed to Dr. Stubbs, as laying down that “port” was derived from “porta,” because the gate was the place where the markets were held, I proved by demonstration that the markets were not held at the gate, but in the heart of the town, and that consequently the argument breaks down. What does Dr. Pring do? He ridicules this disproof of the very argument he had appealed to as “scarcely necessary” (p. 116), and as based on “a well-known fact”! Verily, we have here, to quote his own words, a “unique and somewhat anomalous specimen of argument.”
Dr. Pring’s arguments could similarly be rebutted at every point, but lest I weary the patience of your readers, it will probably be sufficient if I invite them to observe that on the one hand, Dr. Pring, deriving “port” from porta, declares the process by which a town came to be called a gate, so “easy and obvious” (p. 114), that he need not (i.e., cannot) explain it; while, on the other, Mr. Hall, deriving port from portus, is equally confident that an inland town would, in the natural course of things, be known as a sea-port (portus)! When Dr. Pring has converted Mr. Hall, or Mr. Hall has converted Dr. Pring, it will then, and not before, be time for them to think of uniting their forces in a combined attack on my own theory, which sees in the Anglo-Saxon “port,” as found in “port-reeve,” &c., a word with a denotation different from that either of portus or of porta. At present it remains, unimpugned, as the only rational and consistent theory. It will, doubtless, like all original theories, be viewed at first with suspicion and dislike, but I hope, in time, to have it cast at me, more Pringensi, by those who do so, that it is “scarcely necessary” to prove it, as it is to all “a well-known fact.”
J. H. Round.
TO CORRESPONDENTS.