But why this particular height rather than any other of the dozen that jut out into the plain? Well, there we get at another fundamental point in hill-top town history. Fiesole had water. A spring at such a height is comparatively rare, but it is a necessary accompaniment, or rather a condition precedent, of all high-place villages. In the Borgo Unto you will still find this spring--a natural fountain, the Fonte Sotterra--in an underground passage, now approached (so greatly did the Fiesolans appreciate its importance) by a Gothic archway. The water supplies the whole neighbourhood; and that accounts for the position of the town on the low _col_ just below the acropolis.
Who first chose the site it would be impossible to say; the earliest stockaded fort at Fiesole (enclosing the town and arx above) must go back to the very dawn of neolithic history, long before the Etruscans had ever issued forth from their Rhaetian fastnesses to occupy the blue and silver-grey hills of modern Tuscany. Nor do we know who built the great Cyclopean walls, whose huge rough blocks still overhang the modern carriage road that leads past Boccaccio's Valley of the Ladies and Fra Angelico's earliest convent from the town in the Valley. They are attributed to the Etruscans, of course, on much the same grounds as Stonehenge is attributed to the Druids--because in the minds of the people who made the attribution Etruscans and Druids were each in their own place the _ne plus ultra_ of aboriginal antiquity. But at any rate, at some very early time, the people who held the valley of the Arno erected these vast megalithic walls round their city and citadel as a protection, probably, against the people who held the Ligurian sea-board. Throughout the early historical period at least we know that Faesulae was an Etruscan border-town against the Ligurian freebooters, and we can see that the arx or acropolis of Faesulae must have occupied the hill-top now occupied by the Franciscan monastery on the height above the town, while the houses must have spread, as they still do within shrunken limits, about the spring and over the _col_ at its base.
Faesulae was not one of the great Etrurian cities, not one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League. Volterra occupies the site of the large Tuscan town which lorded it over this part of the Lower Apennines. But Faesulae must still have been a considerable place, to judge by the magnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it must have gathered into itself the entire population of all the little Arno plain. As long as _fortis Etruria crevit_, Faesulae must always have held its own as a frontier post against the Ligurian foe. But when _fortis Etruria_ began to decline, and Rome to become the summit of all things, the glory of Faesulae received a severe shock. Not indeed by conquest--that counts for little--but the Roman peace introduced into Italy a new order of things, fatal to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbled Faesulae, did far worse than that: he planted a Roman colony in the valley at its foot--the colony of Florentia--at the point where the road crossed the Arno--the colony that was afterwards to become the most famous commercial and artistic town of the mediaeval world as Florence.
The position of the new town marks the change that had come over the conditions of life in Upper Italy. Florence was a Fiesole descended to the plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that made Bishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its lofty hill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon. Roads, communications, internal trade were henceforth to exist and to count for much; what was needed now was a post and trading town on the river to guard the passage from north to south against possible aggression.
Fiesole had been but a mountain stronghold; Florence was marked from the very beginning by its mere position as a great commercial and manufacturing town.
Nevertheless, just as in mediaeval England the upper town on the hill, the castled town of the barons, often existed for many years side by side with the lower town on the river, the high-road town of the merchant guilds--just as Old Sarum, for example, continued to exist side by side with Salisbury--so Faesulae continued to exist side by side with Florentia. As a military post, commanding the plain, it was needful to retain it; and so, though Sulla destroyed in part its population, he reinstated it before long as one of his own Roman colonies. And for a long time, during the ages of doubtful peace that succeeded the first glorious flush of the military empire, Faesulae must have kept up its importance unchanged. The remains of the Roman theatre on the slope behind the cathedral--great stone semicircles carved on a scale to seat a large audience--betoken a considerable Roman town. And from a very early period it seems to have possessed a Christian church, whose first bishop, according to a tradition as good as most, was a convert of St. Peter's, and was martyred, says his legend, in the Neronian persecution. The existing cathedral, its later representative, is still an early and very simple Tuscan basilica, with picturesque crypt and raised choir, of a very plain Romanesque type. It looks like a fitting church for the mother-town of Florence; it seems to recall in its own cold and austere fabric the more ancient claims of the sombre Etruscan hill-top city.
It was the middle ages, however, that finally brought down Fiesole in earnest to the plain. Pisa had been the earliest Tuscan town to attain importance and maritime supremacy after the dark days of barbarian incursion; but as soon as land-transit once more assumed general importance, Florence, seated on the great route from the north to Rome by Siena, and commanding the passage of the Arno and the gate of the Apennines, naturally began to surpass in time its distanced rival. As early as the Roman days a bridge is said to have spanned the Arno on the site of the existing Ponte Vecchio. The mediaeval walls enclosed the southern _tete du pont_ within their picturesque circuit, thus securing the passage of the river and giving Florence its little Janiculus, the Oltrarno, with its southern exit by the Porta Romana. The real 'makers of Florence' were the humble workmen who thus extended the firm hold of the growing republic to the southern bank. By so doing, they gave their city undoubted command of the imperial route from Germany Romeward, and brought in their train Dante and Giotto, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Fra Angelico and Savonarola, the Medici and the Pitti, Michael Angelo and Raffaele, and all the glories of the Renaissance epoch. For as at Athens, so in Florence, art and literature followed plainly in the wake of commerce. But the rise of Florence was the fall of Fiesole. Already in the eleventh century the undutiful daughter had conquered and annexed her venerable mother; and in proportion as the mercantile importance of the city in the plain waxed greater and greater, that of the city on the hill-top must slowly have waned to less and less. At the present day Fiesole has degenerated into a mere suburb of Florence, which, indeed, it had almost become when Lorenzo the Magnificent held his country court at the Villa Mozzi, or even earlier, when Boccaccio's lively narrators fled from the plague to the gardens of the Palmieri, though it still retains the dignity of its ancient cathedral, its municipal palace, its gigantic seminary, and its great overgrown Franciscan monastery, that replaces the citadel on the height above the town. Nay, more, with its local museum, its bishop's palace, and its quaint churches, it keeps up, to some extent, all the airs and graces of a real living town. But in reality these few big buildings, and the graceful campanile which makes so fair a show in all the neighbouring views, are the best of the little city. Fiesole looks biggest seen from afar. All that is vital in it is the ecclesiastical establishment, which still clings, with true ecclesiastical conservatism, to the hill-top city, and the trade of the straw plaiters, who make Leghorn straw goods and pester the visitor with their flimsy wares, taking no answer to all their importunities save one in solid coin of good King Umberto.
One last question. How does it come that in these southern climates the hill-top town has survived so much more generally to our own day than in Northern Europe? The obvious answer seems at first sight to be that in the warmer climates life can be carried on comfortably, and agriculture can yield good results, at a greater height than in a cold climate. Olives, vines, chestnuts, maize will grow far up on Italian hill sides, and that, no doubt, counts for something; but I do not believe it covers all the ground. Two other points seem to me at least equally important, especially when we remember that the hill-top town was once as common in the north as in the south, and that what we have really to account for in Italy is not its existence merely, but rather its late survival into newer epochs. One point is that in Southern Europe the state of perpetual internal warfare lasted much longer than in the feudal north. The other point is that each little patch of country in the south is still far more self-supporting, has had its economic conditions far less disturbed by modern rearrangements and commercial necessities, than in Northern Europe. In England every town and village stands upon some high road; the larger stand almost invariably upon some railway or some navigable river. In Italy it is still quite possible, where agricultural conditions are favourable, to have a comparatively flourishing town perched upon some out-of-the-way mountain height. Even a carriage road is scarcely a necessity; a mule path will do well enough for wine and oil and the other simple commodities of southern life. The hill-top town, in short, belongs to an earlier type of civilisation than ours; it survives, unaltered, on its own pinnacle wherever that type of civilisation is still possible.
And I sincerely hope our pretty American friend will pardon me for having thus publicly answered, at so great length, her natural question.
A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY.
Standing to-day before the dim outline of Orcagna's "Hell" in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence, and mentally comparing those mediaeval demons and monsters and torturers on the frescoed wall in front of me with the more antique Etruscan devils and tormentors pictured centuries earlier on the ancient tombs of Etrurian princes, the thought, which had often occurred to me before, how essentially similar were the Tuscan intellect and Tuscan art in all ages, forced itself upon me once more at a flash with an irresistible burst of internal conviction. The identity of old and new seemed to stand confessed. Etruria throughout has been one and the same; and it is almost impossible for any one to over-estimate the influence of the powerful, but gloomy, Etruscan character upon the whole tone, not only of popular Christianity, but of that modern civilisation which is its offspring and outcome.
I suppose it is hardly necessary, "in this age of enlightenment" (as people used to say in the last century), to insist any longer upon the obvious fact that conquest and absorption do not in any way mean extermination. Most people still vaguely fancy to themselves, to be sure, that, when Rome conquered and absorbed Etruria, the ancient Etruscan ceased at once to exist--was swallowed, as it were, and became forthwith, in some mysterious way, first a Roman, and then a modern Italian. And, in a certain sense, this is, no doubt, more or less true; but that sense is decidedly not the genealogical one. Manners change, but blood persists. The Tuscan people went on living and marrying under consul and emperor just as they had done under _lar_ and _lucumo_; Latin and Gaul, Lombard and Goth, mingled with them in time, but did not efface them; and I do not doubt that the vast mass of the population of Tuscany at the present day is still of preponderatingly Etruscan blood, though qualified, of course (and perhaps improved), by many Italic, Celtic, and Teutonic elements.
Again, when we remember that Florence, Pisa, Siena, Perugia are all practically in Tuscany, and that Florence alone has really given to the world Dante and Boccaccio, Galileo and Savonarola, Cimabue and Giotto, Botticelli and Fra Angelico, Donatello and Ghiberti, Michael Angelo and Raffael, Leonardo da Vinci and Macchiavelli and Alfieri, and a host of other almost equally great names, it will be obvious to every one that the problem of the origin of this Tuscan nationality must be one that profoundly interests the whole world. Nay, more, we must remember, too, that Etruria had other and earlier claims than these; that it spread up to the very walls of Rome; that the Etruscan element in Rome itself was immensely strong; that the Roman religion owed, confessedly, much to Tuscan ideas; that Latin Christianity, the Christianity of all the Western world, took its shape in semi-Tuscan Rome; that the Roman Empire was largely modelled by the Etruscan Maecenas; that the Italian renaissance was largely influenced by the Florentine Medici; that Leo the Tenth was himself a member of that great house; and that the artists whom he summoned to the metropolis to erect St. Peter's and to beautify the Vatican were, almost all of them, Florentines by birth, training, or domicile. I think, when we have run over mentally these and ten thousand other like facts, we will readily admit to ourselves the magnitude of the world's debt to Tuscany--social, artistic, intellectual, religious--both in ancient, mediaeval, and modern times.
And what, now, was this strong Tuscan nationality, which persists so thoroughly through all external historical changes, and which has contributed so large and so marvellous a part to the world's thought and the world's culture? It is a curious consideration for those who talk so glibly, about the enormous natural superiority of the Aryan race, that the ancient Etruscans were the one people of the antique European world, who, by common consent, did _not_ belong to the Aryan family. They were strangers in the land, or, rather, perhaps they were its oldest possessors. Their language, their physique, their creed, their art, all point to a wholly different origin from the Aryans. I am not going, in a brief essay like this, to settle dogmatically, off-hand, the vexed question of the origin and affinities of the Etruscan type; more nonsense, I suppose, has been talked and written upon that occult subject by learned men than even learned men have ever poured forth upon any other sublunary topic; but one thing at least, I take it, is absolutely certain amid the conflicting theories of ingenious theorists about the Etruscan race, and that one thing is that the Rasennae stand in Europe absolutely alone, the sole representatives of some ancient and elsewhere exterminated stock, surviving only in Tuscany itself, and in the Rhaetian Alps of the Canton Grisons.
At the moment when the Etruscans first appear in history, however, they appear as a race capable of acquiring and assimilating culture with great ease, rapidity, and certainty. No sooner do they come into contact with the Greek world than they absorb and reproduce all that was best and truest in Greek civilization. 'Merely receptive--European Chinese,' says, in effect, Mommsen, the great Roman historian: to me, that judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh indeed on a wider view, when applied to a people who begot at last the 'Divina Commedia,' the campanile of Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and the glories of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. It is quite true that the Etruscans themselves, like the Japanese in our own time, did at first accept most imitatively the Hellenic culture; but they gradually remoulded it by their own effort into something new, growing and changing from age to age, until at last, in the Italian renaissance, they burst out with a wonderful and novel message to all the rest of dormant Europe.
One of the most persistent key-notes of this underlying Etruscan character is the solemn, weird, and gloomy nature of so much of the true Etruscan workmanship. From the very beginning they are strong, but sullen. Solidity and power, rather than beauty and grace, are what they aim at; and in this, Michael Angelo was a true Tuscan. If we look at the massive old Etruscan buildings, the Cyclopean walls of Faesulae and Volterrae, with their gigantic unhewn blocks, or the gloomy tombs of Clusium, with their heavy portals, and then at the frowning facade of the Strozzi or the Pitti Palace, we shall see in these, their earliest and latest terms, the special marks of Tuscan architecture. 'Piled by the hands of giants for mighty kings of old,' says Macaulay, well, of the Cyclopean walls. 'It somewhat resembles a prison or castle, and is remarkable for its bold simplicity of style, the unadorned huge blocks of stone being hewn smooth at the joints only,' says a modern writer, of Brunelleschi's palatial masterpiece. Every visitor to Florence must have noticed on every side the marks of this sullen and rugged Etruscan character. Compare for a moment the dark bosses of the Palazzo Strozzi, the '_apre energie_' of the Palazzo Vecchio, the '_beaute sombre et severe_' of the mediaeval Bargello, with the open, airy brightness of the Doge's Palace, or the glorious Byzantine gold-and-blue of St.
Mark's at Venice, and you get at once an admirable measure of this persistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan architecture is massive and morose where Venetian architecture is sunny and smiling.
Now, Tuscan religion has in all times been specially influenced by the peculiarly gloomy tinge of the Tuscan character. It has always been a religion of fear rather than of love; a religion that strove harder to terrorize than to attract; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures, and horrors; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion of dragons and monstrosities, and flames and goblins. In the painted tombs of ancient Etruria you may see the familiar devil with his three-pronged fork thrusting souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, as Orcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its more modern Christian successor. All Etruscan art is full throughout of such horrors. You find their traces abundantly in the antique Etruscan museum at Florence; you find them on the mediaeval Campo Santo at Pisa; you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is the 'Inferno'--the part that gloats with minute and truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have every horror of the heathen religion incongruously mingled with every horror of the Christian--gorgons and harpies and chimaeras dire are tormenting the wicked under the eyes of the Madonna; centaurs are shooting and prodding them before the God of Love from the torrid banks of fiery lakes; furies with snaky heads are directing their punishments; Minos and aeacus are superintending their tasks; and, in the centre of all, a huge Moloch demon is devouring them bodily in his fiery jaws, with hideous tusks as of a Japanese monster.
It would be a curious question to inquire how far these old and ingrained Etruscan ideas may have helped to modify and colour the gentler conceptions of primitive Christianity. Certainly, one must never for a moment forget that Rome was at bottom nearly one-half Etruscan in character; that during the imperial period it became, in fact, the capital of Etruria; that myriads of Etruscans flocked to Rome; and that many of them, like Sejanus, had much to do with moulding and building up the imperial system. I do not doubt, myself, that Etruscan notions large interwove themselves, from the very outset, with Roman Christianity; and whenever in the churches or galleries of Italy I see St. Lawrence frying on his gridiron, or St. Sebastian pierced through with many arrows, or the Innocents being massacred in unpleasant detail, or hell being represented with Dantesque minuteness and particularity of delineation, I say to myself, with an internal smile, 'Etruscan influence.'
How interesting it is, too, to observe the constant outcrop, under all forms and faiths, of this strange, underlying, non-Aryan type! The Etruscans are and always were remarkable for their intellect, their ingenuity, their artistic faculty; and even to this day, after so many vicissitudes, they stand out as a wholly superior people to the rough Genoese and the indolent Neapolitans. They have had many crosses of blood meanwhile, of course; and it seems probable that the crosses have done them good: for in ancient times it was Rome, the Etrurianised border city of the Latins, that rose to greatness, not Etruria itself; and at a later date, it was after the Germans had mingled their race with Italy that Florence almost took the place of Rome. Nay, it is known as a fact that under Otto the Great a large Teutonic colony settled in Florence, thus adding to the native Etrurian race (especially to the nobility) that other element which the Tuscan seems to need in order that he may be spurred to the realisation of his best characteristics. But allow as we may for foreign admixture, two points are abundantly clear to the impartial observer of Tuscan history: one, that this non-Aryan race has always been one of the finest and strongest in Italy; and the other, that from the very dawn of history its main characteristics, for good or for evil, have persisted most uninterruptedly till the present day.
CASTERS AND CHESTERS.
Everybody knows, of course, that up and down over the face of England a whole crop of places may be found with such terminations as Lancaster, Doncaster, Manchester, Leicester, Gloucester, or Exeter; and everybody also knows that these words are various corruptions or alterations of the Latin _castra_, or perhaps we ought rather to say of the singular form, _castrum_. So much we have all been told from our childhood upward; and for the most part we have been quite ready to acquiesce in the statement without any further troublesome inquiry on our own account. But in reality the explanation thus vouchsafed us does not help us much towards explaining the real origin and nature of these ancient names. It is true enough as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. It reminds one a little of Charles Kingsley's accomplished pupil-teacher, with his glib derivation of amphibious, 'from two Greek words, _amphi_, the land, and _bios_, the water.' A detailed history of the root 'Chester' in its various British usages may serve to show how far such a rough-and-ready solution as the pupil-teacher's falls short of complete accuracy and comprehensiveness.
In the first place, without troubling ourselves for the time being with the diverse forms of the word as now existing, a difficulty meets us at the very outset as to how it ever got into the English language at all.
'It was left behind by the Romans,' says the pupil teacher unhesitatingly. No doubt; but if so, the only language in which it could be left would be Welsh; for when the Romans quitted Britain there were probably as yet no English settlements on any part of the eastern coast. Now the Welsh form of the word, even as given us in the very ancient Latin Welsh tract ascribed to Nennius, is 'Caer' or 'Kair;' and there is every reason to believe that the Celtic _cathir_ or the Latin _castrum_ had been already worn down into this corrupt form at least as early as the days of the first English colonisation of Britain. Indeed I shall show ground hereafter for believing that that form survives even now in one or two parts of Teutonic England. But if this be so, it is quite clear that the earliest English conquerors could not have acquired the use of the word from the vanquished Welsh whom they spared as slaves or tributaries. The newcomers 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 of Leicester or Gloucester from Welshmen who knew those towns only as Kair Legion or Kair Gloui. It is clear that this easy off-hand theory shirks all the real difficulties of the question, and that we must look a little closer into the matter in order to understand the true history of these interesting philological fossils.
Already we have got one clear and distinct principle to begin with, which is too often overlooked by amateur philologists. The Latin language, as spoken by Romans in Britain during their occupation of the island, has left and can have left absolutely no directs marks upon our English tongue, for the simple reason that English (or Anglo-Saxon as we call it in its earlier stages) did not begin to be spoken in any part of Britain for twenty or thirty years after the Romans retired.
Whatever Latin words have come down to us in unbroken succession from the Roman times--and they are but a few--must have come down from Welsh sources. The Britons may have learnt them from their Italian masters, and may then have imparted them, after the brief period of precarious independence, to their Teutonic masters; but of direct intercourse between Roman and Englishman there was probably little or none.
Three ways out of this difficulty might possibly be suggested by any humble imitator of Mr. Gladstone. First, the early English pirates may have learnt the word _castrum_ (they always used it as a singular) years before they ever came to Britain as settlers at all. For during the long decay of the empire, the corsairs of the flat banks and islets of Sleswick and Friesland made many a light-hearted plundering expedition upon the unlucky coasts of the maritime Roman provinces; and it was to repel their dreaded attacks that the Count of the Saxon Shore was appointed to the charge of the long exposed tract from the fenland of the Wash to the estuary of the Rother in Sussex. On one occasion they even sacked London itself, already the chief trading town of the whole island. During some such excursions, the pirates would be certain to pick up a few Latin words, especially such as related to new objects, unseen in the rude society of their own native heather-clad wastes; and amongst these we may be sure that the great Roman fortresses would rank first and highest in their barbaric eyes. Indeed, modern comparative philologists have shown beyond doubt that a few southern forms of speech had already penetrated to the primitive English marshland by the shores of the Baltic and the mouth of the Elbe before the great exodus of the fifth century; and we know that Roman or Byzantine coins, and other objects belonging to the Mediterranean civilisation, are found abundantly in barrows of the first Christian centuries in Sleswick--the primitive England of the colonists who conquered Britain. But if the word _castrum_ did not get into early English by some such means, then we must fall back either upon our second alternative explanation, that the townspeople of the south-eastern plains in England had become thoroughly Latinised in speech during the Roman occupation; or upon our third, that they spoke a Celtic dialect more akin to Gaulish than the modern Welsh of Wales, which may be descended from the ruder and older tongue of the western aborigines. This last opinion would fit in very well with the views of Mr. Rhys, the Celtic professor at Oxford, who thinks that all south-eastern Britain was conquered and colonised by the Gauls before the Roman invasion. If so, it maybe only the western Welsh who said Caer; the eastern may have said _castrum_, as the Romans did. In either of the latter two cases, we must suppose that the early English learnt the word from the conquered Britons of the districts they overran. But I myself have very little doubt that they had borrowed it long before their settlement in our island at all.
However this may be--and I confess I have been a little puritanically minute upon the subject--the English settlers learned to use the word from the first moment they landed in Britain. In its earliest English dress it appears as Ceaster, pronounced like Keaster, for the soft sound of the initial in modern English is due to later Norman influences. The new comers--Anglo-Saxons, if you choose to call them so--applied the word to every Roman town or ruin they found in Britain.
Indeed, all the Latin words of the first crop in English--those used during the heathen age, before Augustine and his monks introduced the Roman civilisation--belong to such material relics of the older provincial culture as the Sleswick pirates had never before known: _way_ from _via_, _wall_ from _vallum_, _street_ from _strata_, and _port_ from _portus_. In this first crop of foreign words Ceaster also must be reckoned, and it was originally employed in English as a common rather than as a proper name. Thus we read in the brief _Chronicle_ of the West Saxon kings, under the year 577, 'Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Welsh, and offslew three kings, Conmail and Condidan and Farinmail, and took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and Ciren ceaster and Bathan ceaster.' We might modernise a little, so as to show the real sense, by saying 'Glevum city and Corinium city and Bath city.'
Here it is noticeable that in two of the cases--Gloucester and Cirencester--the descriptive termination has become at last part of the name; but in the third case--that of Bath--it has never succeeded in doing so. Ages after, in the reign of King Alfred, we still find the word used as a common noun; for the _Chronicle_ mentions that a body of Danish freebooters 'fared to a waste ceaster in Wirral; it is hight Lega ceaster;' that is to say, Legionis castra, now Chester. The grand old English epic of Beowulf, which is perhaps older than the colonisation of Britain, speaks of townsfolk as 'the dwellers in ceasters.'
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 'the 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. 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 at Ceaster'; or that 'aethelberht 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 Hunts, and elsewhere. At times, too, we get an added English termination, as at Casterton, Chesterton, and Chesterholme; or a slight distinguishing mark, as at Great Chesters, Little Chester, Bridge Casterton, and Chester-le-Street.
All these have now quite lost their old distinctive names, though they have acquired new ones to distinguish them from _the_ Chester, or from one another. For example, Chester-le-Street was Conderco in Roman times, and Cunega ceaster in the early English period. Both names are derived from the little river Cone, which flows through the village.
Before we pass on to the consideration of those _castra_ which, like Manchester and Lancaster, have preserved to the present day their original Roman or Celtic prefixes in more or less altered shapes, we must glance briefly at a general principle running through the modernised forms now in use. The reader, with his usual acuteness, will have noticed that the word Ceaster reappears under many separate disguises in the names of different modern towns. Sometimes it is _caster_, sometimes _chester_, sometimes _cester_, and sometimes even it gets worn down to a mere fugitive relic, as _ceter_ or _eter_. But these different corruptions do not occur irregularly up and down the country, one here and one there; they follow a distinct law and are due to certain definite underlying facts of race or language. Each set of names lies in a regular stratum; and the different strata succeed one another like waves over the face of England, from north-east to south-westward. In the extreme north and east, where the English or Anglian blood is purest, or is mixed only with Danes and Northmen to any large extent, such forms as Lancaster, Doncaster, Caistor, and Casterton abound. In the mixed midlands and the Saxon south, the sound softens into Chesterfield, Chester, Winchester, and Dorchester. In the inner midlands and the Severn vale, where the proportion of Celtic blood becomes much stronger, the termination grows still softer in Leicester, Bicester, Cirencester, Gloucester, and Worcester, while at the same time a marked tendency towards elision occurs; for these words are really pronounced as if written Lester, Bister, Cisseter, Gloster, and Wooster. Finally, on the very borders of Wales, and of that Damnonian country which was once known to our fathers as West Wales, we get the very abbreviated forms Wroxeter, Uttoxeter, and Exeter, of which the second is colloquially still further shortened into Uxeter.
Sometimes these tracts approach very closely to one another, as on the banks of the Nene, where the two halves of the Roman Durobrivae have become castor on one side of the river, and Chesterton on the other; but the line can be marked distinctly on the map, with a slight outward bulge, with as great regularity as the geological strata. It will be most convenient here, therefore, to begin with the _casters_, which have undergone the least amount of rubbing down, and from them to pass on regularly to the successively weaker forms in _chester_, _cester_, _ceter_, and _eter_.
Nothing, indeed, can be more deceptive than the common fashion, of quoting a Roman name from the often blundering lists of the Itineraries, and then passing on at once to the modern English form, without any hint of the intermediate stages. To say that Glevum is now Gloucester is to tell only half the truth; until we know that the two were linked together by the gradual steps of Glevum castrum, Gleawan ceaster, Gleawe cester, Gloucester, and Gloster, we have not really explained the words at all. By beginning with the least corrupt forms we shall best be able to see the slow nature of the change, and we shall also find at the same time that a good deal of incidental light is shed upon the importance and extent of the English settlement.
Doncaster is an excellent example of the simplest form of modernisation. It appears in the Antonine Itinerary and in the _Notitia Imperii_ as Danum. This, with the ordinary termination affixed, becomes at once Dona ceaster or Doncaster. The name is of course originally derived in either form from the river Don, which flows beside it; and the Northumbrian invaders must have learnt the names of both river and station from their Brigantian British serfs. It shows the fluctuating nature of the early local nomenclature, however, when we find that Baeda ('the Venerable Bede') describes the place in his Latinised vocabulary as Campodonum--that is to say, the Field of Don, or, more idiomatically, Donfield, a name exactly analogous to those of Chesterfield Macclesfield, Mansfield, Sheffield, and Huddersfield in the neighbouring region. The comparison of Doncaster and Chesterfield is thus most interesting: for here we have two Roman Stations, each of which must once have had two alternative names; but in the one case the old Roman name has ultimately prevailed, and in the other case the modern English one.
The second best example of a Caster, perhaps, is Lancaster. In all probability this is the station which appears in the _Notitia Imperii_ as Longovico, an oblique case which it might be hazardous to put in the nominative, seeing that it seems rather to mean the town on the Lune or Loan than the Long Village. Here, as in many other cases, the formative element, vicus, is exchanged for Ceaster, and we get something like Lon-ceaster or finally Lancaster. Other remarkable Casters are Brancaster in Norfolk, once Branadunum (where the British termination _dun_ has been similarly dropped); Ancaster in Lincolnshire, whose Roman name is not certainly known; and Caistor, near Norwich, once Venta Icenorum, a case which may best be considered under the head of Winchester. On the other hand, Tadcaster gives us an instance where the Roman prefix has apparently been entirely altered, for it appears in the Antonine Itinerary (according to the best identification) as Calcaria, so that we might reasonably expect it to be modernised as Calcaster. Even here, however, we might well suspect an earlier alternative title, of which we shall get plenty when we come to examine the Chesters; and in fact, in Baeda, it still bears its old name in a slightly disguised form as Kaelca ceaster.
First among the softer forms, let us examine the interesting group to which Chester itself belongs. Its Roman name was, beyond doubt, Diva, the station on the Dee--as Doncaster is the station on the Don, and Lancaster the station on the Lune. Its proper modern form ought, therefore, to be Deechester. But it would seem that in certain places the neighbouring rustics knew the great Roman town of their district, not by its official title, but as the legion's Camp--Castra Legionis.
At least three such cases undoubtedly occur--one at Deva or Chester; one at Ratae or Leicester; and one at Isca Silurum or Caerleon-upon-Usk.
In each case the modernisation has taken a very different form. Diva was captured by the heathen English king, aethelfrith of Northumbria, in a battle rendered famous by Baeda, who calls the place 'The City of Legions.' The Latin compilation by some Welsh writer, ascribed to Nennius, calls it Cair Legion, which is also its name in the Irish annals. In the _English Chronicle_ it appears as Lege ceaster, Laege ceaster, and Leg ceaster; but after the Norman Conquest it becomes Ceaster alone. On midland lips the sound soon grew into the familiar Chester. About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slight difficulty, for it assumes in the _Chronicle_ the form of Laegra ceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter; and the later Welsh writers seized upon the form to fit in with their own ancient legend of King Lear. Nennius calls it Cair Lerion; and that unblushing romancer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir, the city of Leir. More probably the name is a mixture of Legionis and Ratae, Leg-rat ceaster, the camp of the Legion at Ratae. This, again, grew into Legra ceaster, Leg ceaster, and Lei ceaster, while the word, though written Leicester, is now shortened by south midland voices to Lester. The third Legionis Castra remained always Welsh, and so hardened on Cymric lips into Kair Leon or Caerleon. Nennius applies the very similar name of Cair Legeion to Exeter, still in his time a Damnonian or West Welsh fortress.
Equally interesting have been the fortunes of the three towns of which Winchester is the type. In the old Welsh tongue, Gwent means a champaign country, or level alluvial plain. The Romans borrowed the word as Venta, and applied it to the three local centres of Venta Icenorum in Norfolk, Venta Belgarum in Hampshire, and Venta Silurum in Monmouth. When the first West Saxon pirates, under their real or mythical leader, Cerdic, swarmed up Southampton Water and occupied the Gwent of the Belgae, they called their new conquest Wintan ceaster, though the still closer form Waentan once occurs. Thence to Winte ceaster and Winchester is no far cry. Gwent of the Iceni had a different history. No doubt it also was known at first as Wintan ceaster; but, as at Winchester, the shorter form Ceaster would naturally be employed in local colloquial usage; and when the chief centre of East Anglian population was removed a few miles north to Norwich, the north wick--then a port on the navigable estuary of the Yare--the older station sank into insignificance, and was only locally remembered as Caistor. Lastly, Gwent of the Silurians has left its name alone to Caer-Went in Monmouthshire, where hardly any relics now remain of the Roman occupation.
Manchester belongs to exactly the same class as Winchester. Its Roman name was Mancunium, which would easily glide into Mancunceaster. In the _English Chronicle_ it is only once mentioned, and then as Mameceaster--a form explained by the alternative Mamucium in the Itinerary, which would naturally become Mamue ceaster. Colchester of course represents Colonia, corrupted first into Coln ceaster, and so through Col ceaster into its present form. Porchester in Hants is Portus Magnus; Dorchester is Durnovaria, and then Dorn ceaster.
Grantchester, Godmanchester, Chesterfield, Woodchester, and many others help us to trace the line across the map of England, to the most western limit of all at Ilchester, anciently Ischalis, though the intermediate form of Givel ceaster is certainly an odd one.
Besides these Chesters of the regular order, there are several curious outlying instances in Durham and Northumberland, and along the Roman Wall, islanded, as it were, beyond the intermediate belt of Casters.
Such are Lanchester in Durham, which maybe compared with the more familiar Lancaster; Great Chesters in Northumberland, Ebchester on the northern Watling Street, and a dozen more. How to account for these is rather a puzzle. Perhaps the Casters may be mainly due to Danish influence (which is the common explanation), and it is known that the Danes spread but sparingly to the north of the Tees. However, this rough solution of the problem proves too much: for how then can we have a still softer form in Danish Leicester itself? Probably we shall be nearer the truth if we say that these are late names; for Northumberland was a desert long after the great harrying by William the Conqueror; and by the time it was repeopled, Chester had become the recognised English form, so that it would naturally be employed by the new occupants of the districts about the Wall.
No name in Britain, however, is more interesting than that of Rochester, which admirably shows us how so many other Roman names have acquired a delusively English form, or have been mistaken for memorials of the English conquest. The Roman town was known as Durobrivae, which does not in the least resemble Rochester; and what is more, Baeda distinctly tells us that Justus, the first bishop of the West Kentish see, was consecrated 'in the city of Dorubrevi, which the English call Hrofaes ceaster, from one of its former masters, by name Hrof.' If this were all we knew about it, we should be told that Baeda clearly described the town as being called Hrof's Chester, from an English conqueror Hrof, and that to contradict this clear statement of an early writer was presumptuous or absurd. Fortunately, however, we have the clearest possible proof that Hrof never existed, and that he was a pure creation of Baeda's own simple etymological guesswork. King Alfred clearly knew better, for he omitted this wild derivation from his English translation. The valuable fragment of a map of Roman Britain preserved for us in the mediaeval transcript known as the _Peutinger Tables_, sets down Rochester as Rotibis. Hence it is pretty certain that it must have had two alternative names, of which the other was Durobrivae. Rotibis would easily pass (on the regular analogies) into Rotifi ceaster, and that again into Hrofi ceaster and Rochester; just as Rhutupiae or Ritupae passed into Rituf burh, and so finally into Richborough. Moreover, in a charter of King Ethelberht of Kent, older a good deal than Baeda's time, we find the town described under the mixed form of Hrofi-brevi. After such a certain instance of philological blundering as this, I for one am not inclined to place great faith in such statements as that made by the _English Chronicle_ about Chichester, which it attributes to the mythical South Saxon king Cissa.
Whatever Cissanceaster may mean, it seems to me much more likely that it represents another case of double naming; for though the Roman town was commonly known as Regnum, that is clearly a mere administrative form, derived from the tribal name of the Regni. Considering that the same veracious _Chronicle_ derives Portsmouth, the Roman Portus, from an imaginary Teutonic invader, Port, and commits itself to other wild statements of the same sort, I don't think we need greatly hesitate about rejecting its authority in these earlier and conjectural portions.
Silchester is another much disputed name. As a rule, the site has been identified with that of Calleva Atrebatum; but the proofs are scanty, and the identification must be regarded as a doubtful one. I have already ventured to suggest that the word may contain the root Silva, as the town is situated close upon the ancient borders of Pamber Forest. The absence of early forms, however, makes this somewhat of a random shot. Indeed, it is difficult to arrive at any definite conclusions in these cases, except by patiently following up the name from first to last, through all its variations, corruptions, and mis-spellings.
The _Cesters_ are even more degraded (philologically speaking) than the _Chesters_, but are not less interesting and illustrative in their way.
Their farthest northeasterly extension, I believe, is to be found at Leicester and Towcester. The former we have already considered: the latter appears in the _Chronicle_ as Tofe ceaster, and derives its name from the little river Towe, on which it is situated. Anciently, no doubt, the river was called Tofe or Tofi, like the Tavy in Devonshire; for all these river-words recur over and over again, both in England and on the Continent. In this case, there seems no immediate connection with the Roman name, if the site be rightly identified with that of Lactodorum; but at any rate the river name is Celtic, so that Towcester cannot be claimed as a Teutonic settlement.
Cirencester, the meeting-place of all the great Roman roads, is the Latin Corinium, sometimes given as Durocornovium, which well illustrates the fluctuating state of Roman nomenclature in Britain. As this great strategical centre--the key of the west--had formerly been the capital of the Dobuni, whose name it sometimes bears, it might easily have come down to us as Durchester, or Dobchester, instead of under its existing guise. The city was captured by the West Saxons in 577, and is then called Ciren ceaster in the brief record of the conquerors. A few years later, the _Chronicle_ gives it as Cirn ceaster; and since the river is called Chirn, this is the form it might fairly have been expected to retain, as in the case of Cerney close by.
But the city was too far west not to have its name largely rubbed down in use; so it softened both its initials into Cirencester, while Cissan ceaster only got (through Cisse ceaster) as far as Chichester. At that point the spelling of the western town has stopped short, but the tongues of the natives have run on till nothing now remains but Cisseter. If we had only that written form on the one hand, and Durocornovium on the other, even the boldest etymologist would hardly venture to suggest that they had any connection with one another. Of course the common prefix Duro, is only the Welsh Dwr, water, and its occurrence in a name merely implies a ford or river. The alternative forms may be Anglicised as Churn, and Churnwater, just like Grasmere, and Grasmere Lake.
I wish I could avoid saying anything about Worcester, for it is an obscure and difficult subject; but I fear the attempt to shirk it would be useless in the long run. I know from sad experience that if I omit it every inhabitant of Worcestershire who reads this article will hunt me out somehow, and run me to earth at last, with a letter demanding a full and explicit explanation of this silent insult to his native county. So I must try to put the best possible face upon a troublesome matter. The earliest existing form of the name, after the English Conquest, seems to be that given in a Latin Charter of the eighth century as _Weogorna civitas_. (Here it is difficult to disentangle the English from its Latin dress.) A little later it appears in a vernacular shape (also in a charter) as Wigran ceaster. In the later part of the _English Chronicle_ it becomes Wigera ceaster, and Wigra ceaster; but by the twelfth century it has grown into Wigor ceaster, from which the change to Wire ceaster and Worcester (fully pronounced) is not violent. This is all plain sailing enough. But what is the meaning of Wigorna ceaster or Wigran ceaster? And what Roman or English name does it represent? The old English settlers of the neighbourhood formed a little independent principality of Hwiccas (afterwards subdued by the Mercians), and some have accordingly suggested that the original word may have been Hwiccwara ceaster, the Chester of the Hwicca men, which would be analogous to Cant-wara burh (Canterbury), the Bury of the Kent men, or to Wiht-gara burh (Carisbrooke), the Bury of the Wight men. Others, again, connect it with the Braunogenium of the Ravenna geographer, and the Cair Guoranegon or Guiragon of Nennius, which latter is probably itself a corrupted version of the English name.
Altogether, it must be allowed that Worcester presents a genuine difficulty, and that the facts about its early forms are themselves decidedly confused, if not contradictory. The only other notable _Ceasters_, are Alcester, once Alneceaster, in Worcestershire, the Roman Alauna; Gloucester or Glevum, already sufficiently explained; and Mancester in Staffordshire, supposed to occupy the site of Manduessedum.
Among the most corrupted forms of all, Exeter may rank first. Its Latin equivalent was Isca Damnoniorum, Usk of the Devonians; Isca being the Latinised form of that prevalent Celtic river name which crops up again in the Usk, Esk, Exe, and Axe, besides forming the first element of Uxbridge and Oxford; while the tribal qualification was added to distinguish it from its namesake, Isca Silurum, Usk of the Silurians, now Caerleon-upon-Usk. In the west country, to this day, _ask_ always becomes _ax_, or rather remains so, for that provincial form was the King's English at the court of Alfred; and so Isca became on Devonian lips Exan ceaster, after the West Saxon conquest. Thence it passed rapidly through the stages of Exe ceaster and Exe cester till it finally settled down into Exeter. At the same time, the river itself became the Exe; and the Exan-mutha of the _Chronicle_ dropped into Exmouth. We must never forget, however, that Exeter, was a Welsh town up to the reign of Athelstan, and that Cornish Welsh was still spoken in parts of Devonshire till the days of Queen Elizabeth.