name. Constantine had turned Byzantium into
a new city, and it has ever since been known as _Constantinople_, or
the "city of Constantine."

We can nearly always tell from the names of places something of their
history. If we think of the names of some of our English towns, we
notice that many of them end in the same way. There are several whose
names begin or end in _don_, like _London_ itself. Many others end in
_caster_ or _chester_, _ham_, _by_, _borough_ or _burgh_.

We may be sure that most of the places whose names begin or end in
_don_ were already important places in the time before the Britons
were conquered by the Romans. The Britons were divided into tribes,
and lived in villages scattered over the land; but each tribe had its
little fortress or stronghold, the "dun," as it was called, with walls
and ditches round it, in which all the people of the tribe could take
shelter if attacked by a strong enemy. And so the name of London takes
us back to the time when this greatest city of the modern world,
spreading into four counties, and as big as a county itself, with its
marvellous buildings, old and new, and its immense traffic, was but a
British fort into which scantily-clothed people fled from their huts
at the approach of an enemy.

But the British showed themselves wise enough in their choice of
places to build their _duns_, which, as in the case of London, often
became centres of new towns, which grew larger and larger through
Roman times, and on into the Middle Ages and modern times.

The great French fortress town of Verdun, which everybody has heard of
because of its wonderful resistance to the German attacks in 1916, is
also an old Celtic town with this Celtic ending to its name. It was
already an important town when the Romans conquered Gaul, and it has
played a notable part in history ever since. Its full name means "the
fort on the water," just as _Dundee_ (from _Dun-tatha_) probably meant
"the fort on the Tay."

By merely looking at a map of England, any one who knows anything of
the Latin language can pick out many names which come from that
language, and which must have been given in the days when the Romans
had conquered Britain. The ending _caster_ of so many names in the
north of England, and _chester_ in the Midlands, _xeter_ in the west
of England, and _caer_ in Wales, all come from the same Latin word,
_castrum_, which means a military camp or fortified place. So that we
might guess,