CASTERS AND CHESTERS. 277 



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 v^e call it in its earlier stages) did not 

 begin to be spoken in any part of Britain for twenty or 

 thirty years after the Homans 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 Bo an 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 

 Bother 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 



