Saxon
Shore Fort Names Look Germanic
Roman-era names for the nine
forts of the Saxon
Shore can all be explained with the
aid of Germanic languages plus Latin in ways that accurately fit
their topographical situations. This pattern also extends inland to
other ancient names. Very few, if any, ancient place names in
south-east England were derived from Celtic languages.
The forts of
the
Saxon Shore have been much discussed. Were they built to
defend against seaborne Saxon attackers? Or was the coastal belt of
south and east England already settled by Germanic peoples in Roman
times?
This issue goes to the heart of a
mystery about the English language. Why does it contain almost no
early Celtic loanwords? Is it really true that something like 3
million people shifted from speaking language(s) like early Welsh in
AD 400 to speaking Anglo-Saxon by AD 700? Could such a social
transformation really be wrought by the few tens of thousands of
Germanic immigrants who crossed the North Sea after the Roman army
left?
Most
archaeologists no longer believe in an Anglo-Saxon “invasion”
because they generally observe no great interruption in the
settlement patterns of rural areas during the Dark Ages. Therefore
archaeologists tend to be sympathetic to an idea, expressed most
prominently by Oppenheimer (2006), that the Iron-Age boundary between
Celtic and Germanic languages lay well inside Britannia rather than
at the North Sea.
On the other
hand,
many historical linguists are very protective of
established
chronologies, especially that
of Jackson (1953), for changes in the pronunciation and meanings of
words. Therefore linguists often express views like this: “when
the first Anglo-Saxon fleets arrived ... Celtic dialects were spoken
throughout most parts of Britain” (Laker, 2002).
Everyone agrees
that south-east of a line across England
from
the Wash to the Solent there are very
few places with a Celtic-looking name. But is their number
artificially low? Is Coates (2002) correct in claiming that “the
level of Celtic survival in England, as shown by place-names, is
somewhat greater than has been admitted until now”? Or are many
supposedly Celtic etymologies in south-east England a mistaken
hangover from 19th-century nationalism? Will better information and
more careful study make their number tend towards zero?
Goormachtigh
and
Durham (2009) examined place names in and
near Kent that are widely cited as evidence for Celtic speech in
Roman times, and found alternative (often better) Germanic
explanations for all of them. That first paper needed more
sophisticated following up, which this paper (and several others) try
to supply.
Unexpectedly,
this
paper develops a focus on the Saxon Shore forts, all of whose
names can be
explained (in the sense of fitting their topographical situations and
purpose) better with the aid of Germanic languages (plus Latin) than
with Celtic. It also presents evidence that this pattern holds for
inland place names as well as the forts on the coast. and extends
from Kent almost to the Wash and the Solent.
Forts of the
Saxon
Shore
The definitive
list of Saxon Shore forts is in the Notitia Dignitatum, a sort of
Roman Army order of battle dating from about AD 400, which exists now
only in late medieval copies of copies. From the available
manuscripts Seeck (1876) compiled a master version, which is widely
reprinted on the Internet. Under Comes
Litoris Saxonici per Britanniam these
fort names are listed:
|
Roman
|
Modern
|
|
Portum Adurni
|
Portchester Castle
|
|
Anderidos
|
Pevensey Castle
|
|
Lemannis
|
Lympne
|
|
Dubris
|
Dover
|
|
Rutupis
|
Richborough
|
|
Regulbio
|
Reculver
|
|
Othonae
|
Bradwell
|
|
Gariannonor
|
Great Yarmouth
|
|
Branoduno
|
Brancaster
|
Archaeological
work
on Saxon Shore forts was summarized by
Johnston (1977) and more recently by Pearson (2002). For a reasoned
argument that the forts were not so much military bases as guarded
warehouses for taxes paid in kind, see Pryor (2004). For place name
information, prime sources are Rivet and Smith (1979) for Roman
Britain, Gelling and Cole (2003) and Mills (2003) for England, and
Sims-Williams (2006) for Celtic Europe.
Abbreviations used here are: ND =
Notitia Dignitatum, AI = Antonine Itinerary, ME = modern English, OE
= Old English or Anglo-Saxon, PIE = proto-Indo-European, PG =
proto-Germanic, RC = Ravenna Cosmography. All the main ancient
documents may be consulted online, as well as dictionaries of OE
(Bosworth-Toller), PIE (Pokorny, 1959), and PG (Orel, 2003). In what
follows, the ND forms of names are used, with no attempt to shift
them into a Latin nominative form, or to replace them with a
consensus spelling based on multiple documents.
Anderidos
Pevensey Castle
was
built on top of a Saxon
Shore
fort,
which in
Roman times lay on a peninsula of land rising above coastal marshes. The –rid-
part of its name has hitherto been attributed to Celtic ritu
‘ford’, based largely on Jackson (1948), who wrote that “to the
eye of the Celticist the correct form is obviously Romano-Britain Anderitum”. He was
apparently influenced by the common
phonological evolution of
T into D, a variant manuscript reading Anderitos,
and an Anderitum in Aquitania.
OE rið
‘small stream’ (from PG *riþaz,
PIE *rei
‘to flow’) is just as good. Its archetypal descendant place name
is Ryde (the childhood home of one author), where one can still see a
topographical situation that perfectly parallels ancient Anderidos,
where a stream used to open into a marsh and then across a dover,
i.e. a 'two sided or split beach'. The word was used in Anglo-Saxon charters in phrases like
‘on
ð riþi’, and as a dialect term
it
is still applied in Hampshire to the small channels through mud at
low tide in Portsmouth and neighbouring harbours (Grundy, 1922;
Coates, 1991).
The Ande-
part has prompted much discussion, with a majority view holding that
there was a Celtic intensive prefix *ande-
(seen in some Gaulish names), so that the whole name meant ‘great
ford’. However, Germanic languages have
better ways to explain ande:
PG *anda-
‘along, etc’ has numerous modern descendants in words that begin
with ont-, ent-, on-,
and and-,
while the Latin/Greek prefixes anti-
‘against’ and ante-
‘before’ are related. Everything converges on a sense of ‘close
to’. So a fluent ME translation of Anderidos would be ‘brookside’.
Branoduno
This Saxon
Shore
fort, plus an apparent precursor smaller fort and an adjacent
settlement, are visible from the air as crop marks between Brancaster
and Brancaster Staithe, on the north coast of Norfolk, near the Wash
(Edwards & Green, 1977). A Celtic word bran-
‘crow, raven’ has been suggested to
explain the first part of the name Branoduno (Rivet and Smith 1979).
The second part, dunum,
was a common component of Latin place names, originally a Celtic loan
word, whose sense developed from hill to fort and ultimately to town.
In fact Branoduno does sit on a slight elevation, the nearest
approach to a proper hill that exists in that part of East Anglia.
The element
Bran- in
English place names is variously explained as ‘broom’, ‘brain’,
‘burnt’ and a personal name, but much the most likely root here
is PG *brunnon
‘spring, fountain’. The modern river Burn runs just too far away
to provide fresh water to the site of Branoduno, though the
configuration of the coast has changed since Roman times because of
silting and agriculture. It seems likely that there were other
stream(s) running off chalky higher ground to the south, of the type
often called bournes. The A in bran-
is unremarkable because so many vowels appear in words that embody an
idea of fire or water springing up, such as modern brand, brew, broth
and burn. In summary, rather than ‘crow fort’ Branoduno makes
better sense as ‘stream fort’.
Dubris
Dover is probably
the place name most commonly cited as evidence for Celtic speech in
south-east Britannia, because it was called Dubris in Latin. The
standard argument was set out by Rivet and Smith (1979) in these
words: “the British name was *Dubras
‘waters, stream’ (perhaps ‘streams’), plural of *dubro-
‘water’ (Welsh dwfr, dwr,
Cornish dofer, dour,
Breton dour;
Old
Irish
dobur)
… all records of the name, even those
of the Antonine Itinerary set in a grammatical structure, show it as
a locative plural in -is”.
There are three
separate difficulties with this logic. The first is a matter of
Latin grammar: dubris was
almost certainly not plural, and probably not locative. The noun
cases in Latin of place names are often misinterpreted (Arias, 1987;
Williams, 2007). The ancient wording ad
Portum Dubris occurs twice in AI,
a document from about AD 300 but probably based on Roman army
marching orders from before AD 100. Ptolemy, writing in about AD
140, did not mention Dover. Then, as a single word, Dubris
occurs once in ND, once in Tabula Peutingeriana, and twice in RC
though once mis-spelled Durbis.
So dubris
was most likely a genitive singular. After ad
portum, mediaeval Latin writers
unhesitatingly used the genitive not the locative. In classical
Latin, the Itinerarium Maritimum uses an apparent genitive plural in ad portum ritupium. And
Julius Caesar wrote ad
portum itium
about his departure point for the invasion of 55 BC, where itium
has been interpreted as an adjective but looks suspiciously close to
genitive plural ituum
‘departures’.
The second
difficulty is also linguistic. Most English place names are duplexes
(qualifier plus generic) among which a
simplex ‘waters’ would be a rarity, while ‘port of the waters’
looks daft. However, if a watery meaning is considered acceptable,
Celtic is not the best source. The PIE root *dheub-
has many descendants, including the English words dub (northern
dialect for a dark or muddy pool) plus deep, dimple, and dip. According
to Pokorny (1959), the exact word dubris
existed in Illyrian. This sounds remote, but Illyrian was the first
language of many of Rome’s best soldiers and sailors, including
officers up to the level of emperor and part of the Britannia
garrison between at least AD 105 and 400. Julius Caesar spent the
winter of 55 BC in Illyria, near modern Dubrovnik, between his two
trips to Dover. In fact, Illyrian was just one of a band of ancient
languages that got squeezed out when Latin expanded towards Germanic
or Celtic.
The third
difficulty
is topographic. More than 170 place names around England contain an
element ofer,
or
its
variants
ufer, yfre,
and ora
(Gelling and Cole, 2003). Why should Dover in Kent (and a few other
places ending in –dover) be different from all the other –over
places for which an Anglo-Saxon origin is not disputed?
The exact
meaning of
OE ofer
and its relatives is complex, and there may have been two distinct
forms of the word. The
one with a long vowel O, like its modern Dutch or German cognates,
could mean river bank or shore. Ekwall (see Mills, 2003) thought it
primarily applied to a firm beach or gravelly shore, which suggests
that Caesar’s landing on the beaches could have been remembered
like D-day in 1944. The ofer
with a short O may have evolved into ME over, with links to upper,
hyper, super, etc. Whatever the precise etymology, ofer
place names are associated with a distinctive topographical feature –
a flat-topped ridge with a convex shoulder, like the end of an
upturned canoe, usable as a landmark by ancient travellers on land or
water.
Near the south
coast, ora
was the commonest name element for this type of landmark. In Latin ora
meant
‘sea shore’ and Latin would have been the language of command in
the Classis Britannica and perhaps merchant ships too, so Cole (1990)
wondered if ora
came to mean ‘land ahoy’, then passed as a loan-word into Saxon
speech to partially supplant a native Germanic ofer
that was retained in Anglian areas further north.
All round the
coast,
from Exeter in the west to Maidenhead high up the Thames, every port
of any significance in Roman times seems to have been
marked by at least one ofer/ora
place. More than 20 ofer/ora
place names cluster near the Isle of Wight, where to this day boats
navigate mostly by reference to lighthouses, seamarks, forts, church
steeples, etc. A sailor proceeding east from there along the coast
and round into the Thames Estuary would pass by the following
landmarks, all distinctively visible though often not particularly
high:
|
The Owers
|
near Bognor, probably “Cymene’s Ora”
|
|
Oreham
|
inland from
Shoreham
|
|
Ore
|
near Hastings
|
|
Drellingore
|
west of Dover
|
|
River
|
inland from
Dover
|
|
Stonar
|
south-east
end of Wantsum Channel
|
|
Oar Farm
|
north end
of Wantsum Channel
|
|
Oare
|
near Faversham
|
|
The Nore
|
near Sheerness
|
|
Upnor
|
in the Medway
|
Within this
list,
Drellingore and River are actually the weakest candidates to be ofer/ora
names, so an obvious suggestion is that the cliffs of ancient Dover
were the landmark for its small port. Cole (1990) argued that ofer/ora
landmarks needed to be green hills not white cliffs, but perhaps she
was just intimidated by the traditional Celtic etymology. The sheer
visibility of Dover’s notch in white cliffs (plus its smaller
neighbours at Shakespeare’s Bay and St Margaret’s) cannot have
failed to impress every local seaman and the Classis Britannica.
If the name dubris (or a hypothetical nominative singular *duber) described this seamark, the
critical
issue
is how PG *obera-
(Philippa, Debrabandere & Quak, 2007) could have picked up an
initial D. Ancient scribes were not entirely consistent in how they
wrote down phonemes that were
not familiar in Latin, including D versus
TH, U versus O, and B versus V or F, but early post-Roman spellings
(Dofras, Dobrum, Doferum, Doferan, etc) seem to have stuck with an
initial D.
In fact many
modern ofer/ora place
names have developed astonishingly far from their probable originals,
often by gaining just a single letter prefix, presumably by transfer
from a preceding word. They include several instances of The Nore
(formerly atten ore)
and River (probably built from atter
‘at there’), plus Hever. How then did Dover get its initial D? Was it
from something like Dutch aan de
oever ‘on the shore’ or OE æt
ofer ‘at the shore’? Or maybe
Latin dua orae
‘two shores’?
The answer can
be
found at two places well known to the present authors. In Bruges, Dijver
or Dyver
is
the name of a historic boat-unloading basin flanked by two beaches. In
the Isle of Wight, duver
or dover
is a generic local word for “a low-lying piece of land along the
coast, subject to occasional inundation by the sea” (Pope, 1989). The
common feature uniting all four duvers (Hamstead, Ryde, Seaview,
St. Helens) is that they are (or were) more in the nature of a
sandbar than a beach, because they had water or marsh on their
landward side.
OE to-
was a prefix denoting separation or division, common in OE words like tofær
‘departure’ or tobriting
‘destruction’, which have generally been superseded by ME words
beginning with the equivalent Latin prefixes dis-
or di-. So
what at ancient Dover could justify a name with a sense of ‘double
bank’ or ‘split beach’? Maybe its clefts in the cliffs
constituted double seamarks as discussed above?
However, there is another
possibility
to consider. North of Dover, the Goodwin Sands lie about 6 miles off
the coast and can be partially exposed at low tides. South of Dover,
deeper and further out, lies the Varne Bank. These sandbanks are
notorious for swallowing ships, but they also created the historic
sailing-ship anchorage off Deal known as the Downs. Sandbanks tend
to move and the whole coastline of Kent has changed greatly since
Roman times, especially since sea levels in the Channel have risen
relative to the land by at least a metre since then. So it is
entirely plausible that there was a substantial offshore sandbank at
or near ancient Dover.
On balance,
the original meaning of Dover/Dubris
is most likely to have been the same as dover/duver in the Isle of
Wight: something like ‘double beach’.
The old Celtic ‘waters’ etymology is wrong and must stop being
cited as evidence for Celtic speech in Kent.
As an
interesting
afterthought, ofer/ora
places distinctively mark the routes of long-distance trade arteries
into and inside England. Conventional thinking that the Saxons
arrived in AD 450 has difficulty explaining why there are several
inland ofer/ora
places in Kent and Sussex that make sense only as landmarks for
transport of iron smelted in the Weald at sites that ceased operation
well before the Romans left.
Gariannonor
The precise spelling of this name
is
open to discussion (Rivet & Smith, 1979), but clearly it refers
to the river Yare (Ptolemy’s Γαριεννου ποταμου, OE
Gerne) near Great Yarmouth. The Saxon Shore fort itself was probably
at Caister-on-Sea (described on an English Heritage web site) but it
was backed up by other Roman-era forts some way inland at Burgh
Castle, and possibly at Reedham.
For the start
of the
name, Celtic *gar-
‘to shout’ (cognate with garrulous) has been suggested, but this
is unconvincing for such a gentle river. Garan, Welsh for ‘crane’
(Breeze, 2006) is better. However, Germanic gar
‘spear’ provides much the best fit, perhaps best known in the
name Garibaldi. Among its many derivatives was gara
‘promontory’, or Gore in modern place names. This perfectly
describes the spit of land on which Great Yarmouth sits. At the end
of the name, -or
(OE ‘bank’) makes one think of Spitbank Fort, off Portsmouth,
built in AD 1859. However, more prosaically, -or
was a common ending of verbal nouns in Latin.
The really
interesting part of the name lies in the middle. In Latin, annona
militaris was the annual tax or payment
in kind levied on places such as Britannia to pay for the army. One
of the major functions suggested for Saxon Shore forts was to
collect, store, and export annonae. So the name Gariannonor can be confidently translated
as something
like ‘tax collecting depot on the
promontory’.
Lemannis
The name of
this
fort, at modern Lympne is often explained
with a Celtic word for elm. The Germanic interpretation based on
similarity to PG *laimon,
Latin limus,
Greek
λειμον,
etc
(Goormachtigh
&
Durham,
2009),
seems
better
linguistically
and
topographically. Appropriately, Lemannis
“has seen greater post-Roman changes in its environment than any
other shore fort” (Burnham, 1989). Estuaries silted up during the
Roman era because light loess soils of the Kentish Weald eroded
rapidly once trees were cut down for the iron industry and
agriculture. So Lemannis meant something like ‘marshy’ or
‘silted-up’ or ‘muddy’.
Othonae
This fort lay
near
Bradwell, on the seaward side of the Dengie peninsula in Essex, south
of the estuary leading to Colchester and
Chelmsford. Its name (which later evolved into Ythancaestir) has
long been a puzzle, and TH is not a normal letter combination in
Celtic, though Coomes (2002b) managed to construct a meaning
‘ox-place’ in Celtic. More possibilities are available in the
Germanic languages (notably based around the root that led to OE æðel ‘noble’
and oðel
‘home’), but the best ones arise from the prefix oþ-,
which evolved into modern out-. In particular, oþirnan
‘to run away, escape’, gave ic
oþierne ‘I
depart’. As the closest Saxon Shore
fort to London, to the economic heartland of Roman Britannia, and to
the mouths of the Rhine, Othonae has a logical claim to be translated
as something like ‘departures’.
Portum Adurni
This fort is
generally accepted to be Portchester Castle, at the north of
Portsmouth Harbour. No satisfactory etymology for its name has been
offered, but a Germanic possibility lies in
the archaic English word dern, meaning hidden, secret, etc, found in
place names and surnames like Durnford, Dornford, and Darnford, plus
possible Continental cognates. Recorded dictionary spellings include
dierne, darn, durn, and dyrne, from PG *darnjaz.
In OE
charters, dierne was applied to natural objects that one comes across
at the last moment, because they are hidden from view till close at
hand (Grundy, 1922). This fits the situation of Portchester Castle,
because to see it a mariner needs to leave the open Solent, pass
through the narrow entrance of Portsmouth Harbour, go to the north of
a huge lagoon, and then into one of many side creeks.
Modern English
uses A as a prefix in the sense of ‘at’ (especially in nautical
examples like astern, aboard, ashore) or as an intensifier (in await,
aplenty or a-hunting) though most would be considered grammatical
adverbs rather than adjectives. ‘Port
a-hiding’ might not be dictionary
English but it would certainly be understandable.
Regulbio
Reculver is
regularly described as coming from Celtic ‘great headland’, which
is manifestly wrong for the coastline there, even allowing for two
millennia of erosion. In fact Reculver preserves an ancient name of
the Wantsum Channel, combining two elements like the English sailing
terms reach and whelve, from PG *raikjanan
and *xwelbanan,
so
Goormachtigh
and
Durham
(2009)
confidently
translated
it
as
‘curved reach’.
Rutupis
The
ancient port near modern Richborough may have been named something
like ‘red tops’
because it had prominent salt-making operations like the Red Hills of
ancient Essex (Durham and Goormachtigh, in press).
Other forts
Besides the
nine
Saxon Shore forts listed in ND, there were other coastal forts that
may have formed part of the same Roman military system. Walton
Castle, lost to the sea off Felixstowe
had OE name Dommoc, but its Roman name is unknown. Other
possibilities include Carisbrooke, in the centre of the Isle of
Wight, and Brough-on-Humber. And on the other side of the Channel
there were coastal sites that formed part of the same Roman military
system, near modern Aardenburg,
Boulogne, St. Malo, and Brest.
One such fort
had an
interesting name, Clausentum, suggestive
of Latin clausus
‘enclosed, secret’ and reminiscent of adurni
perhaps meaning ‘hidden’. Clausentum is generally taken to have
been at Bitterne, up the river Itchen, off Southampton Water, but
that location is uncertain, because manuscripts of AI appear to miss
out a line next to it.
Other Roman-Era
Names
This paper can
fill
in some information missed by Goormachtigh
and Durham (2009). Vennemann (2006) discussed Thanet
at length and firmly rejected a Celtic etymology, but suggested an
origin from the Punic goddess Tanit. We continue to prefer some precursor to Middle English ed
ten ende ‘at the end’, making
Thanet analogous with Land’s End and Finisterre.
Noviomago,
mentioned in AI, has long been a puzzle since it does not correspond
with any obvious Roman remains. However, the mystery was in fact
solved by Arias (1987), who noticed that Romany army marching routes
often bypassed named places (just like modern main roads), sometimes
at considerable distances, and that road junctions were indicated by
a grammatical marker, the accusative case, which was not always
correctly transmitted by medieval copyists. Many apparent anomalies
in AI disappear once this fact is recognized and allowed for. Noviomago
in AI actually indicates a junction where the road coming
from Noviomagus (Chichester and/or Fishbourne) met the
Canterbury-London road.
Rivet (1980)
recognized that the element Duro-
occurred distinctively in Belgic areas, but did not fully abandon the idea
of a
Celtic root like Latin durus
‘hard’ in favour of something like PIE *dhur-
‘door’. It is now possible to expand the list of place names
beginning with Duro-
in Britain (Goormachtigh & Durham, 2009) with these ones from the
Continent:
Durocatalaunum Châlons-en-Champagne,
north-east
France
Durocortorum
Reims,
north-east France
Duroicoregum Domqueur,
north France, near the Channel
Duronum
Etroeungt,
north France, near Belgium
Durocassium Dreux,
France, west of Paris
Durotincum
Villejoubert,
south central France
Durostorum
Sinistra,
Bulgaria, on the Danube
The bias towards northern, Belgic
France is clear, but the two outliers are interesting. Durostorum
lay on the south side of the Danube where the Roman Empire bordered
on Germanic (Gothic) tribes. There may have been more than one
Durotincum, but the best candidate lay within territory that became
the Germanic kingdom of Toulouse.
Causeways
The element ver
in Durovernum Cantiacorum (Canterbury, the crossroads of Kent) may
also be present in two other ancient names, Verulamium and
Durnovaria, which were topographically similar. So it is worth
exploring the idea that ver
had a specific meaning that one might translate ‘causeway’ or
what could become the common English place name Longford. Gelling
and Cole (2003) recognised OE fær
‘passage, perhaps difficult passage’ in modern Denver (on the Fen
Causeway) and Laver (also in East Anglia). It descends
from
PG *faranan
‘to travel, especially over water’,
had one obsolete meaning ‘street’, and survives in ME seafarer,
wayfarer, ferry, etc.
Modern
Canterbury
still has a road called The Causeway, lying a few hundred metres
north of the most likely location where causeway(s) over the river
Stour would have needed to exist in Roman
times. St Albans museum confidently shows one ancient causeway
approaching Verulamium, one was archaeologically excavated at Strood
(Jessup, 1932), and many more can be inferred from the landscape, for
example approaching Rutupiae. In fact, causeways were common in the
ancient landscape, wherever traffic needed to cross a broad, marshy
river valley, and Pryor (2004) discusses the ritual symbolism that
prehistoric societies used to organise their construction.
Durnovaria
became modern Dorchester, where two channels of the river Frome run
through what would once have been a marshy area. The natural Celtic
translation of Durn
(something like ‘fist’) is much harder to accommodate than the
natural Germanic ‘hidden’, 'to spot at the last
moment', discussed above. At Great
Durnford, in Wiltshire, a long ford across the river Avon must be
very ancient because it is overlooked by Ogbury hill-fort and marked
with several tumuli. So a plausible translation of Durnovaria is
‘hard-to-find causeways’.
Verulamium
(near St Albans) was one of the earliest written place names recorded
in Britain, on coins bearing inscriptions such as VERLAMIO. Rivet
and Smith (1979) discussed and rejected all proposed Celtic
etymologies, though Coates (2005) constructed a Celtic explanation as
‘place of a man named Crooked Hand’. In fact Celtic is almost
the only language family in which the element lam
is not trivially simple to explain. Anglo-Saxon
lam ‘clay,
mud, mire, earth’ was recognized by Gelling and Cole (2003) in
modern place names Lamas and Lamarsh, both in formerly marshy areas
of East Anglia. It descends from PIE *lama
then PG *laimon,
and its relatives include Latin lama
‘bog’ and limus
‘slime’, plus ME lime and slime, plus Portus Lemannis discussed
above. Therefore Verulamium can be confidently translated as
‘causeway over marsh’.
Orthography
on ancient coin inscriptions in general seems to have adapted to
changes in spoken language sooner than manuscripts, and naturally
tended to err on the side of easier letters to engrave. Nevertheless, one may ask why an initial
letter V was chosen for the initial
consonant of fær
by the coin mint of Tasciovanus, when the
Roman alphabet already had a letter F available. Pronouncing initial
F as V is a known regional feature of speech in south-west England
and parts of Germany, and has long been suspected of originating much
earlier than mediaeval documents can prove (Voitl, 1988).
Glacial
landscapes
Combs in
Suffolk was
explained by Gelling and Cole (2003) as derived from OE camb, PG *kambaz ‘comb’. They knew that comb is a
common place-name element in northern Britain, meaning a ridge a bit
like a cock’s comb, but for Suffolk they could only speculate that
it meant a series of low ridges running up to a river. In fact kaims
or kames are what
modern geologists call the elongated mounds of gravel deposited by
melting glaciers, which can impose a wiggly course upon a river. One
famous example of such a glacial feature, the Blakeney Esker, was
left in Norfolk by the last Ice Age, but the glacial deposits further
south in Suffolk were left by the Ice Age before that.
Camborico
and Combretovium
were two ancient places mentioned by AI, just inland from the Saxon
Shore in Suffolk. Camborico (presumably an oblique case of
Camboritum in messy
handwriting) lay where the Icknield Way crosses the river Lark, near
modern Lackford and West Stowe, while Combretovium lay further south,
near modern Baylham. Both are widely assumed to contain a Celtic
root *kambo-
‘crooked’ and therefore to mean ‘curved ford’. However, PG
*kambaz
plus *riþaz
‘stream’ provides a Germanic alternative as ‘comb
stream’.
Nowadays the
landscape signature of glacial deposits is often a series of
worked-out, water-filled gravel pits, so it is
hard
to
know
exactly
what
ancient
people
recognised
there
and
called
‘crooked’ or a ‘comb’. Was it
up-and-down changes in ground level (drumlins), side-to-side wiggles
of a river, poor farmland due to stones and sand, or a combination? Clearly it is wrong to assume (as many
authors do) that Camb- in place names is diagnostically Celtic or can
be safely translated as ‘curved’.
However, Camb- may not be
diagnostically Germanic either. Camboglanna fort on Hadrian’s Wall
lies in a very Celtic area, yet “Extensive accumulations of sands
and gravels, formed in part by glacial meltwaters, form highly
distinctive hummocky country, notably around Brampton” (UNESCO,
2008). Similar comments can be read about Morecambe (in Lancashire,
Ptolemy’s Μορικαμβε), Kempten (in Bavaria, Strabo’s
Cambodunum), and De Kempen (in Belgium).
Some Personal
Names
Ancient
personal
names from south-eastern Britannia also seem more Germanic than
Celtic, though the argument cannot yet be taken as far as with place
names. Boudicca is discussed at length by Durham
and
Goormachtigh
(2011),
while
south-eastern
Britain’s
last
pre-Roman
king
and
his
three sons had names that can now be analysed
as Latin endings on Germanic cores.
Cunobelinus
(Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) lived until about AD 40 and
(appropriately for a contemporary of Jesus) had a name that could
mean ‘son of the god Belenus’. The first part, cuno-
is usually described as Celtic for hound, making it analogous with
the wolf in many Germanic names. An alternative interpretation is PG *kuniz,
OE cyning,
ME
king, related to kin and to Latin genus,
and liable to be confused with several other roots that led to ME
cunning, keen, ken, can, con, etc. Plenty of related Germanic names
show up in the earliest records, from about AD 600, such as the Gepid
leader Cunimundus or Anglo-Saxon Cynegils, Cynefrid, Cynerburga and
Cynwise.
Adminius
(or Amminius) may mean something like ‘great’. His name is potentially confusable with multiple Roman
names,
including the historian Ammianus and Ammius Flaccus, mentioned by
Pliny, but the most likely parallel is his contemporary Arminius, who
defeated the Romans in AD 9 at the Teutoberg Forest. Arminius is
generally translated as modern Herman, from PG *erminaz
‘strong’, which also gave OE eormen ‘great, universal’. Related
names include Eormenric and Eormenred in Kent around AD 550,
Ermanaric king of the Goths around AD 370, plus modern Ermintrude and
Emma.
Caratacus
probably meant ‘bold counsel’. His name is usually likened to later Welsh Caradog,
with a first
syllable meaning ‘love’, but there are better parallels in modern
Kurt and Conrad, or in the Anglo-Saxon kings called Cenred (Wessex,
about AD 600, Mercia, about AD 700). The first element, PG *koniz
‘bold’ survives in ME keen, while its second element is like OE ræd
‘counsel’ perhaps best known from King Rædwald (of Sutton Hoo)
or modern German Rathaus
‘town hall’. The ending acus
is sometimes claimed to be distinctively Celtic but in fact also
exists in Latin, Greek and other languages.
Togodumnus
is essentially the same word as modern ‘dukedom’ but can be
translated better as ‘leader of the
nation’, the type of name favoured by
many 20th-century dictators. Its tog
part is in OE togian ‘tow’,
distantly related to tug, duke and educate. Its second part dum
is like OE and ME –dom
‘jurisdiction (etc)’, used as a suffix in modern words like
kingdom and freedom, or German Eigentum
‘property’, and which also survives in ME ‘doom’.
Some
Tribal Names
Much effort has
been
expended finding etymologies for ancient tribal names (De Bernardo
Stempel, 2008). Some proposed Celtic roots are highly debatable, so
it seems only fair to draw attention to a possible OE tragan
‘drag/draw’ in the Durotrages,
who controlled the ancient trade routes, trans-isthmus Avon to Avon,
and across the sea to the Durocasses in Normandy.
Trinovantes
is pure Latin for ‘three renewings’. Rivet and Smith (1979)
realised that the Trinovantes possessed three of something that the
Novantae tribe in Dumfries and Galloway had only one of, but no one
seems to have pointed out the obvious answer – three river
estuaries with substantial ports. In the north, the rivers Orwell
and Stour merge to reach the sea past the Roman fort at Felixstowe. In
the centre, the Colne past Colchester
(ancient Camulodunum) and the Chelmer past Chelmsford (Caesaromagnus)
merge into one big gulf. In the south, lies the river Crouch, with
plentiful prehistoric remains. ‘Renewing’ obviously fits a
river, and RC refers to Novitia,
which is generally taken to mean the modern river Nith, but it also
refers to Anderelio Nuba
and to Novia,
which
are
taken,
like
Ptolemy’s
mention
of
Νοουίου
ποταμοΰ
εχβολαί
as
referring to the mouth of the Sussex river Ouse
near Pevensey. So it seems reasonably certain that Trinovantes is
Latin for ‘three estuaries’.
Some
River Names
River names can
be older than place names, so they are often used to illuminate
ethnic origins. However, much published logic needs to be questioned
because early linguistic guesses conflict with modern topographical
or archaeological information. For example, we discuss the rivers
Cray (in Kent and elsewhere) at length in a forthcoming paper.
The common name
Avon
is routinely described as derived from Celtic abona
‘river’, but all the English Avons are in positions to be trans-isthmus trade routes, as defined
by
Sherratt (1996), important in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, but not
later. It is therefore arguable that avon
meant a particular type of river, based on PIE *ab-
‘water, river’ and, because words most often evolve semantically
from particular to general, it was a loanword into Celtic, not from
Celtic.
Latin amnis
‘river’ is related to avon
but also obviously to the river Eems/Ems (Latin Amisius),
around whose mouth the Anglo-Saxons, and hypothetically the Belgae,
originally lived. Thames (Latin Tamesis)
has been a hard name to explain, but it looks very like the Ems plus
an initial T transferred from a previous word, as often happed to
mediaeval names with OE æt
‘at the’. Such a process has not hitherto been accepted as
happening in Roman times, but it is implied by the discussions of
Dover and Thanet above, and could explain other puzzling river names
such as Severn (Sabrina)
and Humber.
King’s Lynn
is widely described as having a name like modern Welsh llyn
‘pool’. In fact it almost certainly came from Anglo-Saxon hlinn
‘torrent’. (OE initial HL regularly evolved into ME plain L.) Nowadays
the Great Ouse is generally very placid, but the
configuration of land, rivers, and sea around the Wash has changed
greatly since Lynn was founded in about AD 1200 (Clarke, 1973). The
phrase “torrential rain” trips off the tongue in English, and
according to the Environment Agency: “The catchment has a history
of flooding, generally due to high rainfall which has led to
watercourses and drains being overwhelmed”. In the other
direction, coming from the sea, King’s Lynn harbour has some of the
strongest tidal currents known to yachtsmen, while wind and tide can
combine to create a tidal bore even in the much-modified modern river
system. The great east coast floods of 1953 had a precursor in 1216
when, in the words of Charles Dickens, King John lost his treasure in
the Wash as he “saw the roaring water sweep down in a torrent.”
Beult
was suggested as possibly Celtic by Breeze (2010). In fact, the
river Beult is notorious for flooding, because its catchment area,
the Kentish Weald, acts like a giant clay-lined pond, with only a
limited exit through the North Downs. PIE *bhel-
‘swell’ led to modern German es
beult ‘it bulges’ and many other
descendants. So Beult can be confidently translated as something
like ‘overflower’.
Brenchley
is like a local opposite of Beult, lying on higher ground where
several springs act as sources of streams, so one may suspect a link
with PG *brunnon
‘spring, fountain’. Breeze (1998) suggested that it might
contain a Cornish personal name, which is a reminder that ancient
Britain was probably multi-ethnic enough for minorities to give rise
to some place names.
General Discussion
The central conclusion of this paper is that almost 100%
of place names
in Britain south-east of a line from the Wash to the Solent can be
explained better with the aid of English than Welsh. This fact holds
true for names that can be traced back before the traditional date of
first arrival of Anglo-Saxons. It may also hold true for ancient
personal names in that area.
Four possible explanations seem
worth
considering. First, maybe this whole paper is mistaken and the
classic all-Celtic Britannia idea need not be declared dead. Many
historical linguists doggedly defend the idea that Germanic languages
did not much differentiate until after AD 400. Therefore (they
argue) early Germanic-seeming names must all be blamed on
linguistically naive investigators being fooled by chance
coincidences and the differential survival of words in different
language branches.
In fact, all
writing
about place names needs to come with a "hazard warning" that it contains
mistakes. There is only a limited amount of data available, with no
easy way to create more by experiments, so all scholars are forced to
speculate and sometimes to be wrong. The fact that our papers
sometimes contradict Eilert Ekwall, Kenneth Jackson, and Margaret
Gelling in no way lessens our admiration for their brilliance. They
just had less information available than nowadays from archaeology
and the Internet.
The second
possible
explanation is that ancient place names were differentially created
by a Germanic minority, such as Roman
troops and administrators, traders from across the North Sea, or laeti
or foederati
settled in Britain by the empire. This explanation, like the first,
is hard to reconcile with the sheer thoroughness with which Celtic
names are absent from the south-east. Why would any minority, no
matter how militarily or economically dominant, bother to change the
name of every tiny village or hillfort that had been occupied for
centuries if not millennia?
The third
possibility is that there was a whole band
of languages that died out between Latin and Insular Celtic or
Germanic. There is some epigraphic evidence for Lusitanian (Prosper
Perez, 2008), Illyrian, Ligurian, and Raetian, and one might wish to
add hypothetical Belgic, Icenic, and proto-Kentish dialects to that
list. In effect, this would half-accept the viewpoint of Schrijver
(2007) that some sort of common dialects prevailed around the North
Sea, except that he sees them as closer to Celtic than to Germanic.
The fourth
possibility, the one we favour, is that all
across south-eastern Britannia local peasants spoke a Germanic
language (“proto-English”) that would have been more readily
understood across the North Sea in Frisia or Flanders than in Wales
or Ireland. In effect, this would accept the viewpoint of Alinei
(2008) that Indo-European languages in general, and Germanic dialects
in particular (Ballester, 2005), diversified many centuries earlier
than textbooks now state. If correct, this means that much
historical writing about Roman Britannia needs to be revised.
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