ear 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 o