70 NAMES OP PLACES 



name, before it has become obscured by use in a foreign 

 tongue and by more or less successful attempts at phonetic 

 transcription, and how remote from the elaborate and 

 artificial significance often sought to be read into it. In 

 the old days of guesswork the explanation of the name 

 Exeter found ready currency to the effect that it was the 

 hail of the look-out on a Roman ship — Ecce terra! — 

 ' Land-ho ! ' To this day there are numbers of worthy 

 citizens of Exeter who would indignantly repudiate any 

 other interpretation. Nevertheless it only requires a 

 reference to the oldest written form of the name in 

 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — namely, Exaceaster — to be 

 certain that the significance is perfectly commonplace, 

 the ceaster or camp beside the Exe, the Saxon population 

 having already adopted the Celtic word uisc, the water, 

 which they found attached to their river. Analogy is 

 easily found in Doncaster, the camp on the Don, which 

 is probably a contraction of the Celtic dubh amhuinn, 

 black water, and in Lancaster, the camp on the Alauna, 

 the latinised form of the Celtic amhuinn leamhean (avon 

 lawn), river of the elms, which we now speak of as the 

 Lune. 



The simplicity of place-names, the absence of inventive 

 effort in framing them, are what impress every one who 

 devotes study to them. If it is not beyond the power 

 of man to sit down and arrange a number of unmeaning 

 syllables to denote a given locality, at all events, it is 

 totally opposed to human behaviour. We have all heard 

 of the invalid lady who begged the clergyman to read a 

 certain chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that she might 

 derive consolation from that blessed word Mesopotamia. 

 Well, Mesopotamia was applied to a physical configuration 



