(See ante, pp. 47, 96.)
Sir,—Mr. Round adds nothing of value to what has gone before.
(1) As to the alleged “borrowing,” the word port must, on Mr. Round’s own showing, have been taken up, adopted, or borrowed by the so-called English pirates, before they incorporated it into their language; the question is, when?
Bosworth says that A.S. port means town in English, but that scholar has now fallen into discredit, for others doubt or deny his accuracy; further, we find it used as a compound, thus: portreeve, portsoken, portman. Portreeve is, I affirm, by transition from the Latin portus. The port of London extends from Yanlett Creek to Staines, so that the “city” itself is dwarfed by the larger jurisdiction appended to it; we can readily explain the anomaly, but the usage appears to have extended to other places where the hythe or haven, i.e., boat-shelter, is not so clearly marked and then the word is thrust back upon us in a sense that we repudiate.
It is further complicated with “gate” or “doorway”; portsoken, for, instance, means a liberty outside the gate or port of Aldgate, and in many northern towns where the Danes settled in force, we find the word port used for gate, as thus: Westport, Eastport, but it is not to be read as west or east-town; so the portman might mean a burgess told off to keep watch and ward over any particular gate of his own town; just as we have “wards,” i.e. guards, in London, originally confined to gates but extended to intermediate parts of the entire wall, for that was the primitive arrangement.
The Viking invaders used boats that could be pushed up comparatively narrow streams, and it might be contended that any inland place thus reached would be a port of debarkation.
(2) My word “ramify” expresses a real difficulty; I did try to spread out or extend Mr. Round’s argument under its different heads and branches, i.e., to follow up the various ramifications of his literary matter, with a view to the extraction of a tangible meaning; and I still contend that his words do imply that caer was put for castrum; but it is certain that this “native form” was unknown on the south-eastern coast, for the transliteration shows that the Romans met with dune or dinas, not caer or ker.
A. Hall.
A BAKER BLESSED.
(See ante, p. 44.)