CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 801 



beheld the great Eoman paved causeway which ran 

 across the face of the country from London to Caernar- 

 von, they seemed to have imagined that such a mighty 

 work could not have been the handicraft of men ; and 

 just as the Arabs ascribe the rock-hewn houses of Petra 

 to the architectural fancy of the Devil, so our old English 

 ancestors ascribed the Eoman road to the Titanic Watlings. 

 Even in our own day, it is known along its whole course 

 as Watling Street. Verulam stands right in its track, 

 and long contained some of the greatest Eoman remains 

 in England ; so the town, too, came to be considered as 

 another example of the work of the Watlings. Baeda, 

 in his Latinised Northumbrian, calls it Vaetlinga ceaster, 

 as an alternative title with Verlarna ceaster ; so that it 

 might nowadays have been familiar to us all either as 

 Watlingchester or Verlam Chester. This is one of the 

 numerous cases where a Eoman and English name lived 

 on during the dark period side by side. In some of Mr. 

 Kemble's charters it appears as Walinga ceaster. But 

 when Offa of Mercia founded his great abbey on the very 

 spot where the Welsh martyr Alban had suffered during 

 the persecution of Diocletian, Eoman and English names 

 were alike forgotten, and the place was remembered only 

 after the British Christian as St. Albans. 



There are other instances where the very memory of a 

 Eoman city seems now to have failed altogether. For 

 example, Basda mentions a certain town called Tiowul- 

 finga ceaster that is to say, the Chester of the 

 Tiowulfmgs, or sons of Tiowulf. Here an English clan 

 would seem to have taken up its ,bode in a ruined Eoman 

 station, and to have called the place by the clan-name 



