ROMAN WAREHAM AND THE CLAUDIAN INVASION. 119 



of the north-west quarter, as furthest from the Danish and other 

 attacks by sea, the fury of each attack being felt, of course, most 

 where the contest was hottest. 



At the time I was privileged to put before the Dorset Naturalists' 

 Club an outline of the present paper I was not aware that any 

 coins or Roman pottery had been found in Wareham ; indeed I had 

 been informed that nothing of the sort had ever been discovered 

 there. Several of the members will, however, recollect that we 

 picked up fragments of Roman ware in our walk round the walls 

 after the meeting, and we were invited to inspect a most interesting 

 and really beautiful collection of coins, Samian (beginning with 

 Vespasian), black Upchurch, and other Roman ware, in the Town 

 Hall, where they had been placed by the kind thought of 

 W. Drew, who had collected them in the past few years, and 

 to whom the lovers of Dorsetshire archeology owe a grateful 

 acknowledgment for their preservation. But besides the evidence 

 of these remains and the unmistakeable identity of the ground 

 plan of Wareham, not merely with that of a Roman camp of the 

 first class, but with such a camp as it v as connected in the century 

 of our era, we have some linguistic traces which have not hitherto 

 received the attention they deserve. 



First, there are the names of West Port and North Port. If the 

 walls had been of Saxon origin these would have been called West 

 Gate and North Gate, and the Latin form would not have been 

 continued. In the Roman time the speech of the people was 

 bilingual, the officials using Latin, the masses a tongue like Welsh 

 or Cornish, into which some Latin words got absorbed, such as 

 Port (from Porta). When the Saxon rule replaced the British, 

 some of the names used by the latter were retained ; others were 

 translated; and where a word had two meanings it sometimes 

 happened that the wrong one was taken in the translation. Thus 

 the Britons had the word Gor Main or Great ; and in the name of 

 the great moorland leading from Wareham to Sherford and More- 

 don the Saxons translated part of the name that meant heath, 

 but left the adjective Gor as it was so that the district is now 



