ester elsewhere--the county
containing no less than four places of the last name. Indeed, one can
track the Roman roads across England by the Chesters which accompany
their route. But enough instances have probably been adduced to
exemplify fully the general principles at issue. I think it will be
clear that the English conquerors did not usually change the names of
Roman or Welsh towns, but simply mispronounced them about as much as we
habitually mispronounce Llangollen or Llandudno. Sometimes they called
the place by its Romanised title alone, with the addition of Ceaster;
sometimes they employed the servile British form; sometimes they even
invented an English alternative; but in no case can it be shown that
they at once disused the original name, and introduced a totally new
one of their own manufacture. In this, as in all other matters, the
continuity between Romano-British and English times is far greater than
it is generally represented to be. The English invasion was a cruel and
a desolating one, no doubt; but it could not and it did not sweep away
wholly the old order of things, or blot out all the past annals of
Britain, so as to prepare a _tabula rasa_ on which Mr. Green might
begin his _History of the English People_ with the landing of Hengest
and Horsa in the Isle of Thanet. The English people of to-day is far
more deeply rooted in the soil than that: our ancestors have lived
here, not for a thousand years alone, but for ten thousand or a hundred
thousand, in certain lines at least. And the very names of our towns,
our rivers, and our hills, go back in many cases, not merely to the
Roman corruptions, but to the aboriginal Celtic, and the still more
aboriginal Euskarian tongue.

THE END.

HENDERSON & SPALDING, LTD., 3 & 5, MARYLEBONE LANE, W.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Science in Arcady, by Grant Allen

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCIENCE IN ARCADY ***

***** This file should be named 16325.txt or 16325.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/3/2/16325/

Produced by Clare Boothby, Peter Yearsley and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!)