appear as a race capable of acquiring and assimilating culture with
great ease, rapidity, and certainty. No sooner do they come into
contact with the Greek world than they absorb and reproduce all that
was best and truest in Greek civilization. 'Merely receptive--European
Chinese,' says, in effect, Mommsen, the great Roman historian: to me,
that judgment, though true in some small degree, seems harsh indeed on
a wider view, when applied to a people who begot at last the 'Divina
Commedia,' the campanile of Florence, the dome of St. Peter's, and the
glories of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. It is quite true that the
Etruscans themselves, like the Japanese in our own time, did at first
accept most imitatively the Hellenic culture; but they gradually
remoulded it by their own effort into something new, growing and
changing from age to age, until at last, in the Italian renaissance,
they burst out with a wonderful and novel message to all the rest of
dormant Europe.
One of the most persistent key-notes of this underlying Etruscan
character is the solemn, weird, and gloomy nature of so much of the
true Etruscan workmanship. From the very beginning they are strong, but
sullen. Solidity and power, rather than beauty and grace, are what they
aim at; and in this, Michael Angelo was a true Tuscan. If we look at
the massive old Etruscan buildings, the Cyclopean walls of Fæsulæ and
Volterræ, with their gigantic unhewn blocks, or the gloomy tombs of
Clusium, with their heavy portals, and then at the frowning façade of
the Strozzi or the Pitti Palace, we shall see in these, their earliest
and latest terms, the special marks of Tuscan architecture. 'Piled by
the hands of giants for mighty kings of old,' says Macaulay, well, of
the Cyclopean walls. 'It somewhat resembles a prison or castle, and is
remarkable for its bold simplicity of style, the unadorned huge blocks
of stone being hewn smooth at the joints only,' says a modern writer,
of Brunelleschi's palatial masterpiece. Every visitor to Florence must
have noticed on every side the marks of this sullen and rugged Etruscan
character. Compare for a moment the dark bosses of the Palazzo Strozzi,
the '_âpre énergie_' of the Palazzo Vecchio, the '_beauté sombre et
sévère_' of the mediæval Bargello, with the open, airy brightness of
the Doge's Palace, or the glorious Byzantine gold-and-blue of St.
Mark's at Venice, and you get at once an admirable measure of this
persistent trait in the Etruscan idiosyncrasy. Tuscan architecture is
massive and morose where Venetian architecture is sunny and smiling.
Now, Tuscan religion has in all times been specially influenced by the
peculiarly gloomy tinge of the Tuscan character. It has always been a
religion of fear rather than of love; a religion that strove harder to
terrorize than to attract; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures,
and horrors; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion of dragons
and monstrosities, and flames and goblins. In the painted tombs of
ancient Etruria you may see the familiar devil with his three-pronged
fork thrusting souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, as
Orcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its more modern
Christian successor. All Etruscan art is full throughout of such
horrors. You find their traces abundantly in the antique Etruscan
museum at Florence; you find them on the mediæval Campo Santo at Pisa;
you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, in the work
of the great Renaissance artists. The 'ghastly glories of saints' the
Tuscan revels in. The most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan
poem is the 'Inferno'--the part that gloats with minute and truly
Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned in every department of
the mediæval hell. And, as if still further to mark the continuity of
thought, here in Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have
every horror of the heathen religion incongruously mingled with every
horror of the Christian--gorgons and harpies and chimæras dire are
tormenting the wicked under the eyes of the Madonna; centaurs are
shooting and prodding them before the God of Love from the torrid banks
of fiery lakes; furies with snaky heads are directing their
punishments; Minos and Æacus are superintending their tasks; and, in
the centre of all, a huge Moloch demon is devouring them bodily in his
fiery jaws, with hideous tusks as of a Japanese monster.
It would be a curious question to inquire how far these old and
ingrained Etruscan ideas may have helped to modify and colour the
gentler conceptions of primitive Christianity. Certainly, one must
never for a moment forget that Rome was at bottom nearly one-half
Etruscan in character; that during the imperial period it became, in
fact, the capital of Etruria; that myriads of Etruscans flocked to
Rome; and that many of them, like Sejanus, had much to do with moulding
and building up the imperial system. I do not doubt, myself, that
Etruscan notions large interwove themselves, from the very outset, with
Roman Christianity; and whenever in the churches or galleries of Italy
I see St. Lawrence frying on his gridiron, or St. Sebastian pierced
through with many arrows, or the Innocents being massacred in
unpleasant detail, or hell being represented with Dantesque minuteness
and particularity of delineation, I say to myself, with an internal
smile, 'Etruscan influence.'
How interesting it is, too, to observe the constant outcrop, under all
forms and faiths, of this strange, underlying, non-Aryan type! The
Etruscans are and always were remarkable for their intellect, their
ingenuity, their artistic faculty; and even to this day, after so many
vicissitudes, they stand out as a wholly superior people to the rough
Genoese and the indolent Neapolitans. They have had many crosses of
blood meanwhile, of course; and it seems probable that the crosses have
done them good: for in ancient times it was Rome, the Etrurianised
border city of the Latins, that rose to greatness, not Etruria itself;
and at a later date, it was after the Germans had mingled their race
with Italy that Florence almost took the place of Rome. Nay, it is
known as a fact that under Otto the Great a large Teutonic colony
settled in Florence, thus adding to the native Etrurian race
(especially to the nobility) that other element which the Tuscan seems
to need in order that he may be spurred to the realisation of his best
characteristics. But allow as we may for foreign admixture, two points
are abundantly clear to the impartial observer of Tuscan history: one,
that this non-Aryan race has always been one of the finest and
strongest in Italy; and the other, that from the very dawn of history
its main characteristics, for good or for evil, have persisted most
uninterruptedly till the present day.
CASTERS AND CHESTERS.
Everybody knows, of course, that up and down over the face of England a
whole crop of places may be found with such terminations as Lancaster,
Doncaster, Manchester, Leicester, Gloucester, or Exeter; and everybody
also knows that these words are various corruptions or alterations of
the Latin _castra_, or perhaps we ought rather to say of the singular
form, _castrum_. So much we have all been told from our childhood
upward; and for the most part we have been quite ready to acquiesce in
the statement without any further troublesome inquiry on our own
account. But in reality the explanation thus vouchsafed us does not
help us much towards explaining the real origin and nature of these
ancient names. It is true enough as far as it goes, but it does not go
nearly far enough. It reminds one a little of Charles Kingsley's
accomplished pupil-teacher, with his glib derivation of amphibious,
'from two Greek words, _amphi_, the land, and _bios_, the water.' A
detailed history of the root 'Chester' in its various British usages
may serve to show how far such a rough-and-ready solution as the
pupil-teacher's falls short of complete accuracy and comprehensiveness.
In the first place, without troubling ourselves for the time being with
the diverse forms of the word as now existing, a difficulty meets us at
the very outset as to how it ever got into the English language at all.
'It was left behind by the Romans,' says the pupil teacher
unhesitatingly. No doubt; but if so, the only language in which it
could be left would be Welsh; for when the Romans quitted Britain there
were probably as yet no English settlements on any part of the eastern
coast. Now the Welsh form of the word, even as given us in the very
ancient Latin Welsh tract ascribed to Nennius, is 'Caer' or 'Kair;' and
there is every reason to believe that the Celtic _cathir_ or the Latin
_castrum_ had been already worn down into this corrupt form at least as
early as the days of the first English colonisation of Britain. Indeed
I shall show ground hereafter for believing that that form survives
even now in one or two parts of Teutonic England. But if this be so, it
is quite clear that the earliest English conquerors could not have
acquired the use of the word from the vanquished Welsh whom they spared
as slaves or tributaries. The newcomers could not have learned to speak
of a Ceaster or Chester from Welshmen who called it a Caer; nor could
they have adopted the names of Leicester or Gloucester from Welshmen
who knew those towns only as Kair Legion or Kair Gloui. It is clear
that this easy off-hand theory shirks all the real difficulties of the
question, and that we must look a little closer into the matter in
order to understand the true history of these interesting philological
fossils.
Already we have got one clear and distinct principle to 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
we call it in its earlier stages) did not begin to be spoken in any
part of Britain for twenty or thirty years after the Romans 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 Roman 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 Rother 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 would be certain
to pick up a few Latin words, especially such as related to new
objects, unseen in the rude society of their own native heather-clad
wastes; and amongst these we may be sure that the great Roman
fortresses would rank first and highest in their barbaric eyes. Indeed,
modern comparative philologists have shown beyond doubt that a few
southern forms of speech had already penetrated to the primitive
English marshland by the shores of the Baltic and the mouth of the Elbe
before the great exodus of the fifth century; and we know that Roman or
Byzantine coins, and other objects belonging to the Mediterranean
civilisation, are found abundantly in barrows of the first Christian
centuries in Sleswick--the primitive England of the colonists who
conquered Britain. But if the word _castrum_ did not get into early
English by some such means, then we must fall back either upon our
second alternative explanation, that the townspeople of the
south-eastern plains in England had become thoroughly Latinised in
speech during the Roman occupation; or upon our third, that they spoke
a Celtic dialect more akin to Gaulish than the modern Welsh of Wales,
which may be descended from the ruder and older tongue of the western
aborigines. This last opinion would fit in very well with the views of
Mr. Rhys, the Celtic professor at Oxford, who thinks that all
south-eastern Britain was conquered and colonised by the Gauls before
the Roman invasion. If so, it maybe only the western Welsh who said
Caer; the eastern may have said _castrum_, as the Romans did. In either
of the latter two cases, we must suppose that the early English learnt
the word from the conquered Britons of the districts they overran. But
I myself have very little doubt that they had borrowed it long before
their settlement 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 Roman 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
Roman civilisation--belong to such material relics of the older
provincial culture as the Sleswick pirates had never before known:
_way_ from _via_, _wall_ from _vallum_, _street_ from _strata_, and
_port_ from _portus_. 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, in the reign of King Alfred, we still find the
word used as a common noun; for the _Chronicle_ mentions that a body of
Danish freebooters 'fared to a waste ceaster in Wirral; it is hight
Lega ceaster;' that is to say, Legionis castra, now Chester. The grand
old English epic of Beowulf, which is perhaps older than the
colonisation of Britain, speaks of townsfolk as 'the dwellers in
ceasters.'
As a rule, each particular Roman town retained its full name, in a more
or less clipped form, for official uses; but in the ordinary colloquial
language of the neighbourhood they all seem to have been described as
'the Ceaster' simply, just as we ourselves habitually speak of 'town,'
meaning the particular town near which we live, or, in a more general
sense, London. Thus, in the north, Ceaster usually means York, the
Roman capital of the province; as when the _Chronicle_ tells us that
'John succeeded to the bishopric of Ceaster'; that 'Wilfrith was
hallowed as bishop at Ceaster'; or that 'Æthelberht the archbishop died
at Ceaster.' In the south it is employed to mean Winchester, the
capital of the West Saxon kings and overlords of all Britain; as when
the _Chronicle_ says that 'King Edgar drove out the priests at Ceaster
from the Old Minster and the New Minster, and set them with monks.' So,
as late as the days of Charles II., 'to go to town' meant in Shropshire
to go to Shrewsbury, and in Norfolk to go to Norwich. In only one
instance has this colloquial usage survived down to our own days in a
large town, and that is at Chester, where the short form has quite
ousted the full name of Lega ceaster. But in the case of small towns or
unimportant Roman stations, which would seldom need to be mentioned
outside their own immediate neighbourhood, the simple form is quite
common, as at Caistor in Norfolk, Castor in Hunts, and elsewhere. At
times, too, we get an added English termination, as at Casterton,
Chesterton, and Chesterholme; or a slight distinguishing mark, as at
Great Chesters, Little Chester, Bridge Casterton, and Chester-le-Street.
All these have now quite lost their old distinctive names, though they
have acquired new ones to distinguish them from _the_ Chester, or from
one another. For example, Chester-le-Street was Conderco in Roman
times, and Cunega ceaster in the early English period. Both names are
derived from the little river Cone, which flows through the village.
Before we pass on to the consideration of those _castra_ which, like
Manchester and Lancaster, have preserved to the present day their
original Roman or Celtic prefixes in more or less altered shapes, we
must glance briefly at a general principle running through the
modernised forms now in use. The reader, with his usual acuteness, will
have noticed that the word Ceaster reappears under many separate
disguises in the names of different modern towns. Sometimes it is
_caster_, sometimes _chester_, sometimes _cester_, and sometimes even
it gets worn down to a mere fugitive relic, as _ceter_ or _eter_. But
these different corruptions do not occur irregularly up and down the
country, one here and one there; they follow a distinct law and are due
to certain definite underlying facts of race or language. Each set of
names lies in a regular stratum; and the different strata succeed one
another like waves over the face of England, from north-east to
south-westward. In the extreme north and east, where the English or
Anglian blood is purest, or is mixed only with Danes and Northmen to
any large extent, such forms as Lancaster, Doncaster, Caistor, and
Casterton abound. In the mixed midlands and the Saxon south, the sound
softens into Chesterfield, Chester, Winchester, and Dorchester. In the
inner midlands and the Severn vale, where the proportion of Celtic
blood becomes much stronger, the termination grows still softer in
Leicester, Bicester, Cirencester, Gloucester, and Worcester, while at
the same time a marked tendency towards elision occurs; for these words
are really pronounced as if written Lester, Bister, Cisseter, Gloster,
and Wooster. Finally, on the very borders of Wales, and of that
Damnonian country which was once known to our fathers as West Wales, we
get the very abbreviated forms Wroxeter, Uttoxeter, and Exeter, of
which the second is colloquially still further shortened into Uxeter.
Sometimes these tracts approach very closely to one another, as on the
banks of the Nene, where the two halves of the Roman Durobrivæ have
become castor on one side of the river, and Chesterton on the other;
but the line can be marked distinctly on the map, with a slight outward
bulge, with as great regularity as the geological strata. It will be
most convenient here, therefore, to begin with the _casters_, which
have undergone the least amount of rubbing down, and from them to pass
on regularly to the successively weaker forms in _chester_, _cester_,
_ceter_, and _eter_.
Nothing, indeed, can be more deceptive than the common fashion, of
quoting a Roman name from the often blundering lists of the
Itineraries, and then passing on at once to the modern English form,
without any hint of the intermediate stages. To say that Glevum is now
Gloucester is to tell only half the truth; until we know that the two
were linked together by the gradual steps of Glevum castrum, Gleawan
ceaster, Gleawe cester, Gloucester, and Gloster, we have not really
explained the words at all. By beginning with the least corrupt forms
we shall best be able to see the slow nature of the change, and we
shall also find at the same time that a good deal of incidental light
is shed upon the importance and extent of the English settlement.
Doncaster is an excellent example of the simplest form of
modernisation. It appears in the Antonine Itinerary and in the _Notitia
Imperii_ as Danum. This, with the ordinary termination affixed, becomes
at once Dona ceaster or Doncaster. The name is of course originally
derived in either form from the river Don, which flows beside it; and
the Northumbrian invaders must have learnt the names of both river and
station from their Brigantian British serfs. It shows the fluctuating
nature of the early local nomenclature, however, when we find that Bæda
('the Venerable Bede') describes the place in his Latinised vocabulary
as Campodonum--that is to say, the Field of Don, or, more
idiomatically, Donfield, a name exactly analogous to those of
Chesterfield Macclesfield, Mansfield, Sheffield, and Huddersfield in
the neighbouring region. The comparison of Doncaster and Chesterfield
is thus most interesting: for here we have two Roman Stations, each of
which must once have had two alternative names; but in the one case the
old Roman name has ultimately prevailed, and in the other case the
modern English one.
The second best example of a Caster, perhaps, is Lancaster. In all
probability this is the station which appears in the _Notitia Imperii_
as Longovico, an oblique case which it might be hazardous to put in the
nominative, seeing that it seems rather to mean the town on the Lune or
Loan than the Long Village. Here, as in many other cases, the formative
element, vicus, is exchanged for Ceaster, and we get something like
Lon-ceaster or finally Lancaster. Other remarkable Casters are
Brancaster in Norfolk, once Branadunum (where the British termination
_dun_ has been similarly dropped); Ancaster in Lincolnshire, whose
Roman name is not certainly known; and Caistor, near Norwich, once
Venta Icenorum, a case which may best be considered under the head of
Winchester. On the other hand, Tadcaster gives us an instance where the
Roman prefix has apparently been entirely altered, for it appears in
the Antonine Itinerary (according to the best identification) as
Calcaria, so that we might reasonably expect it to be modernised as
Calcaster. Even here, however, we might well suspect an earlier
alternative title, of which we shall get plenty when we come to examine
the Chesters; and in fact, in Bæda, it still bears its old name in a
slightly disguised form as Kaelca ceaster.
First among the softer forms, let us examine the interesting group to
which Chester itself belongs. Its Roman name was, beyond doubt, Diva,
the station on the Dee--as Doncaster is the station on the Don, and
Lancaster the station on the Lune. Its proper modern form ought,
therefore, to be Deechester. But it would seem that in certain places
the neighbouring rustics knew the great Roman town of their district,
not by its official title, but as the legion's Camp--Castra Legionis.
At least three such cases undoubtedly occur--one at Deva or Chester;
one at Ratæ or Leicester; and one at Isca Silurum or Caerleon-upon-Usk.
In each case the modernisation has taken a very different form. Diva
was captured by the heathen English king, Æthelfrith of Northumbria, in
a battle rendered famous by Bæda, who calls the place 'The City of
Legions.' The Latin compilation by some Welsh writer, ascribed to
Nennius, calls it Cair Legion, which is also its name in the Irish
annals. In the _English Chronicle_ it appears as Lege ceaster, Læge
ceaster, and Leg ceaster; but after the Norman Conquest it becomes
Ceaster alone. On midland lips the sound soon grew into the familiar
Chester. About the second case, that of Leicester, there is a slight
difficulty, for it assumes in the _Chronicle_ the form of Lægra
ceaster, with an apparently intrusive letter; and the later Welsh
writers seized upon the form to fit in with their own ancient legend of
King Lear. Nennius calls it Cair Lerion; and that unblushing romancer,
Geoffrey of Monmouth, makes it at once into Cair Leir, the city of
Leir. More probably the name is a mixture of Legionis and Ratæ, Leg-rat
ceaster, the camp of the Legion at Ratæ. This, again, grew into Legra
ceaster, Leg ceaster, and Lei ceaster, while the word, though written
Leicester, is now shortened by south midland voices to Lester. The
third Legionis Castra remained always Welsh, and so hardened on Cymric
lips into Kair Leon or Caerleon. Nennius applies the very similar name
of Cair Legeion to Exeter, still in his time a Damnonian or West Welsh
fortress.