Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/29

 early Welsh bards called Dinlle Urecon. Sir J. Rhŷs has adduced strong reasons for believing that Dinlle means 'the fortress of the god Lugus', and the name of the tribe was appended in order to distinguish this particular fortress from others of the same name. The English settlers in the district preserved only the second part of the Welsh name, so that the hill is now called simply Wrekin. A place in the neighbourhood, now called Wrockwardine, was in the thirteenth century Wrocheumrthin; here we find the Wrocen- of Wroxeter combined with the Old English worðign, an estate or farm.

The name of the god Lugus, mentioned a little before, appears to be the first element in Luguvalium, now Carlisle. The modern name represents, in its second syllable, the later pronunciation of Luguvalium in the Welsh dialect of Cumbria; the first syllable is the word caer, city or fortress, which the Welsh have prefixed to many of the ancient names of cities.

Inasmuch as the Romans in Britain must often have found it necessary to erect towns or military stations in places that were uninhabited and had not native names, we might have expected to find that they often gave Latin names to these new foundations. As a matter of fact, names of Latin etymology are almost entirely absent from the lists of towns and stations given in Roman military documents. What the Romans usually did, when they had to find a name for a station in a place that had no native appellation, was to take the British name of the adjacent river, and use it as a place-name. Thus Dānum, now Doncaster, is from the name of the river Don; Isca, now Exeter, is from the Exe; Dēva, now Chester, is from the Dee; Derventio is the Roman name of two places on rivers still called Derwent; Cunētio was on the river Kennet. In cases of this kind, where the Roman name of an inhabited place is simply identical with the British name of a river, without any native affix such as