278 CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 



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. In- 

 deed, 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 

 Eoman 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 Eoman 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. Ehys, the Celtic professor at Oxford, who 

 thinks that all south-eastern Britain was conquered and 

 colonised by the Gauls before the Eoman invasion. If so, 

 it maybe only the western Welsh who said Caer ; the east- 

 ern may have said castrum, as the Eomans 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 



