er and Bathan
ceaster in our old documents, so that it might have become
Achemanchester or Bathceter in the course of ordinary changes.
Canterbury, again, the Roman Durovernum, dropped through Dorobernia
into Dorwit ceaster, which would no doubt have turned into a third
Dorchester, to puzzle our heads by its likeness to Dorne ceaster in
Dorsetshire, and to Dorce ceaster near Oxford; while Chesterton in
Huntingdonshire, which was once Dorme ceaster, narrowly escaped
burdening a distracted world with a fourth. Happily, the colloquial
form Cantwara burh, or Kentmen's bury, gained the day, and so every
trace of Durovernum is now quite lost in Canterbury. North Shields was
once Scythles-ceaster, but here the Chester has simply dropped out.
Verulam, or St. Albans, is another curious case. Its Romano-British
name was Verulamium, and Baeda calls it Verlama ceaster. But the early
English in Sleswick believed in a race of mythical giants, the
Waetlingas or Watlings, from whom they called the Milky Way 'Watling
Street.' When the rude pirates from those trackless marshes came over
to Britain and first beheld the great Roman paved causeway which ran
across the face of the country from London to Caernarvon, they seemed
to have imagined that such a mighty work could not have been the
handicraft of men; and just as the Arabs ascribe the rock-hewn houses
of Petra to the architectural fancy of the Devil, so our old English
ancestors ascribed the Roman road to the Titanic Watlings. Even in our
own day, it is known along its whole course as Watling Street. Verulam
stands right in its track, and long contained some of the greatest
Roman remains in England; so the town, too, came to be considered as
another example of the work of the Watlings. Baeda, in his Latinised
Northumbrian, calls it Vaetlinga ceaster, as an alternative title with
Verlama ceaster; so that it might nowadays have been familiar to us all
either as Watlingchester or Verlamchester. This is one of the numerous
cases where a Roman and English name lived on during the dark period
side by side. In some of Mr. Kemble's charters it appears as Walinga
ceaster. But when Offa of Mercia founded his great abbey on the very
spot where the Welsh martyr Alban had suffered during the persecution
of Diocletian, Roman and English names were alike forgotten, and the
place was remembered only after the British Christian as St. Albans.

There are other instances where the very memory of a Roma