CASTERS AND CH ESTERS. 295 



England proper, a good many relics of the old Welsh 

 Caers still bespeak the incompleteness of the early 

 Teutonic conquest. If we might trust the mendacious 

 Nennius, indeed, all our Casters and Chesters were once 

 good Cymric Caers ; for he gives a doubtful list of the 

 chief towns in Britain, where Gloucester appears as Cair 

 Gloui, Colchester as Cair Colun, and York as Cair 

 Ebrauc. These, if true, would be invaluable forms ; but 

 unfortunately there is every reason to believe that 

 Nennius invented them himself, by a simple transposition 

 of the English names. Henry of Huntingdon is nearly 

 as bad, if not worse ; for when he calls Dorchester ' Kair 

 Dauri,' and Chichester ' Kair Kei,' he was almost 

 certainly evolving what he supposed to be appropriate 

 old British names from the depths of his own conscious- 

 ness. His guesswork was on a par with that of the 

 schoolboys who introduce ' Stirlingia ' or ' Liverpolia ' 

 into their Ovidian elegiacs. That abandoned story-teller, 

 Geoffrey of Monmouth, goes a step further, and concocfcs 

 a Caer Lud for London and a Caer Osc for Exeter, 

 whenever the fancy seizes him. The only examples 

 amongst these pretended old Welsh forms which seem 

 to me to have any real historical value are an un- 

 known Kair Edon, mentioned by Gildas, and a Cair 

 Wise, mentioned by Simeon of Durham, undoubtedly the 

 true native name of Exeter. 



Still we have a few indubitable Caers in England itself 

 surviving to our own day. Most of them are not far 

 from the Welsh border, as in the case of the two Caer 

 Caradocs, in Shropshire, crowned by ancient British 

 fortifications. Others, however, lie further within the 



