Ardwick-le-Street in Yorkshire, and Chester-le-Street in Durham, and such names as Stratford, Stretton, Stratton, and Streatham, occurring in several parts of the country, indicate with unerring certainty the lines of these wonderful roads. 6. The fortified stations of the Romans were called castra, and their sites are easily discovered by the modifications of that word in the present name. Thus we have Chester, Chichester, Leicester, Lancaster, Casterton, and Caistor. The large number of places ending in cester or caster tells very plainly how completely the country was under Roman power. The word colonia, a settlement, still survives in the towns of Colchester and Lincoln, and the two rivers Colne, one in Hertfordshire, the other in Essex. The absence of these Latin words in Scottish names is a convincing proof that the Roman rule was never very firmly established in the northern part of the island. The 7. England is pre-eminently the land of hedges and inclosures. A love of privacy is a distinguishing feature of English character, and it is indelibly stamped on the surface of the country in the numberless plots of land containing dwellings guarded carefully from intrusion. This peculiarity is faithfully reproduced in the Saxon names studded so thickly over the land. Some of the older Celtic names seem to denote inclosures, especially llan, which is a very common prefix to Welsh towns. most common Saxon names denote something walled in, hedged, or protected in some way. The ending ton or town, which occurs frequently in England, and less frequently in the south of Scotland, meant originally a place surrounded by a hedge, or rudely fortified by a palisade. In Scotland a solitary farmstead still goes by the name of the town; and in many parts of England the rick-yard is called the barton, that is, the inclosure holding the crop which the land bears. 8. The words yard and garden signify that which is girded round; a stoke is a place surrounded with stocks or stakes, and a fold is a plot protected by felled trees. The suffix worth indicates a place warded off, as in the name Tam-worth. The common ending borough or burgh is derived from a Saxon word meaning to hide or to bury, and came to signify a hill fortress, while the ending ham points out the one secret and sacred place-the home. 9. Another very general name-ending is ing. It signifies sons or descendants or followers. The Saxons no doubt came over in clans or tribes. The head of a family obtained a ship, and embarking with his children, his freedmen, and his neighbours, he established a family colony on any shore to which the winds might carry him. Such adventurers would land chiefly in the south-eastern part of England, and it is in the south-eastern counties that names ending in ing are by far the most common, as can be easily seen by even a cursory glance at a map of England. 10. The most important test-words indicating the settlement of the dreaded Danes in this country are by and thorpe. These endings are very common in the north riding of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire, and in Leicestershire. In Lincolnshire alone there are one hundred names ending in by, while south of Rugby there are extremely few. 11. The absence of bridges is clearly shown by the number of places ending in ford on the banks of rivers; but that ending when given to places on the sea-coast signifies an arm of the sea like the fiords of Norway and the friths of Scotland. 12. Tourists to the Isle of Man may notice the artificial mound near St. John's between Douglas and Peel, known as the Tynwald Hill. In order to understand this name we must turn to Norway. The legislative assemblies of Norway were called Things, and the parliament of that country now goes by the name of Stor-thing or great council. This Tynwald Hill, which every year is the scene of a quaint ceremony, as a memorial of the former self-government of the island, is a remnant of the Norwegian supremacy. The name of the highest hill in the island, Snae-fell, is also Norse, and tells of that remote period when, along with the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and the northern extremity of Scotland, the Isle of Man formed a part of the kingdom of Norway. 13. The name of Battle Flats, near Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, tells of the spot where the last Saxon King Harold gained a decisive victory over the rival King of Norway; and Battle Abbey, at the other extremity of the kingdom, in Sussex, was erected in memory of the fatal conflict with William, Duke of Normandy, in which, in less than a month afterwards, that same king lost both his kingdom and his life. The two Lichfields, one in Staffordshire and the other in Hampshire, signifying "the field of corpses," tell of some battle or slaughter about which history says nothing. 14. We can often learn something about the physical features of the country in remote ages by the names of places. The vast tract in Kent and Sussex which is now called The Weald (or wood) is the remains of a forest in Saxon times. In this district almost every local name ends in hurst, ley, den, or field. The hursts were the parts of the forest where the trees were most thickly grown; the leys were the more open parts, where the cattle love to lie; the dens were the deep-wooded valleys; and the fields were little patches of "felled" or cleared lands in the midst of surrounding woods. Henley in Arden and Hampton in Arden are vestiges of the great Warwickshire forest which once stretched from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire to Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. 15. Cæsar, who has given us the earliest account of Britain, tells us that no fir was found in the country. It is a very strong proof of Caesar's accuracy, that in none of the Anglo-Saxon charters do we find a single name suggesting the existence of fir. The only fruit-tree frequently found in connection with our local names is the apple: thus we have Appleby and Applethwaite in Westmoreland, Applegarth near Dumfries in Scotland, and Appleton near Oxford, and many other similar names. 16. Animals now extinct in this country retain the traces of their former existence in the names of several places. Beverley in Yorkshire means "The Beavers' Haunt," and the well-known valley in North Wales, Nant-Francon, is the Celtic name for "The Beavers' Dale.' 17. The numerous Beacon hills throughout the land call to mind the rude though efficient means by which, before the days of the electric telegraph, the tidings of great events could be communicated from one end of the island to the other. Probably none are now alive who can remember looking out, the last thing every night, in the early part of this present century, towards the Beacon Hill, to know if the dreaded landing of Bonaparte had actually taken place. The name of Flamborough Head reminds us of the fires of coal or wood that once flamed by night on that dangerous Yorkshire headland as a warning to seamen. 18. A chipping was the old English term for a marketplace. Cheapside and Eastcheap were the old marketplaces of London. The towns which have the prefix chipping, like Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, and such terms as Chepstow and Chippingham, are ancient market-places. The word market, as in Market Bosworth and Stowmarket, shows that the commercial importance of these towns dates from a more recent period. 19. The very few instances we have given may serve to show that names of towns or villages, of rivers or mountains, were not given by chance, and that very often an interesting history may lie concealed in some familiar roadside name. Thus the Great Britain of to-day has been gradually formed during many preceding ages, each one leaving an indelible trace on the land, and every town, every village, every obscure railway-station thus speaks to us of a distant but not forgotten past. 1. Observe the insect race, ordained to keep At length assured, they catch the favouring gale, |