f 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:
_