CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 283 



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 castrutn, 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 impor- 

 tance 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 Imperil 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 Campodonurn that 

 is to say, the Field of Don, or, more idiomatically, Don- 

 field, 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 Eoman Stations, each of which must once have had 

 two alternative names ; but in the one case the old 



