CASTERS AND CHES7ERS. 279 



doubt that they had borrowed it long before their settle- 

 ment in our island at all. 



However this may be and I confess I have been a 

 little puritanically minute upon the subject the English 

 settlers learned to use the word from the first moment 

 they landed in Britain. In its earliest English dress it 

 appears as Ceaster, pronounced like Keaster, for the soft 

 sound of the initial in modern English is due to later 

 Norman influences. The new comers Anglo-Saxons, 

 if you choose to call them so applied the word to every 

 Eoman town or ruin they found in Britain. Indeed, all 

 the Latin words of the first crop in English those used 

 during the heathen age, before Augustine and his monks 

 introduced the Eoman civilisation -belong to such 

 material relics of the older provincial culture as the 

 Sleswick pirates had never before known : way from via, 

 watt from vallum, street from strata, and port homportus. 

 In this first crop of foreign words Ceaster also must be 

 reckoned, and it was originally employed in English as a 

 common rather than as a proper name. Thus we read in 

 the brief Chronicle of the West Saxon kings, under the year 

 577, ' Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Welsh, 

 and offslew three kings, Conmail and Condidan and 

 Farinmail, and took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and 

 Ciren ceaster and Bathan ceaster.' We might modernise 

 a little, so as to show the real sense, by saying ' Glevum 

 city and Corinium city and Bath city.' Here it is 

 noticeable that in two of the cases Gloucester and 

 Cirencester the descriptive termination has become at 

 last part of the name ; but in the third case that of 

 Bath it has never succeeded in doing so. Ages after, 



