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Of Romano-British Canterbury,
we know both much and little. The name of the place is happily
quite certain. It is Durovernum, which seems to be good Celtic
for ‘the fortress or possession of Vernos,’ Vernos being
an otherwise well-attested Celtic personal name. The evidence
for it is excellent. The Antonine Itinerary states that Roman
roads ran from the three Kentish ports, Dover, Lympne and
Richborough to Durovernum, 14 miles from Dover, 16 miles from
Lympne, and 12 from Richborough, and then a single road
continued on to Rochester (27 miles) and London. The roads can
still be followed to their common centre, Canterbury, and the
distances agree. Other ancient sources lend confirmation,
though with slightly distorted spelling. Ptolemy, as already
stated, names ‘Darouernon’ as a town of the Cantii. The
anonymous Ravennas puts ‘Duroaverno Cantiacorum’ in close
neighbourhood to Dubris and Rutupis, Dover and Richborough.10
The Peutinger Table or Map (P1.
VI), which contains a fragment of eastern Britain, marks
‘Duroaverus’ in an appropriate position in East Kent.11
The name is further and more strongly attested by
a proof which is rarely available for Romano-British
place-names. Canterbury is one of the few English sites whose
Romano-British names survived into English times in their
Roman forms. Most of the names which lived on, did so in
truncated shapes, generally as the first syllable of a later
English appellation. Such, for instance, are Richborough,
Winchester, Litchfield, which embody the first letters of
Rutupiae, Venta and Le(c)tocetum. At Canterbury and at two or
other sites in Kent, and rarely elsewhere in England, the
English kept the old name, practically unaltered, when they
wrote Latin. An ‘abbas de Doroverno attended the Council of
Paris in 614. Pope Boniface V, writing to Justus of Canterbury
in 622, uses the phrase civitas Dorobernia. An early
gold coin, minted probably in the 7th century, bears the
legend Dorovernis civitas. Early charters of that and
succeeding centuries mention the civitas Doruvernis, and
Bede is only following a false analogy in grammar when he uses
Doruvernis and Doruverni as genitive and
ablative of the name for Canterbury.12 The
name Doruvernum was plainly familiar to the early English ;
and when after A.D. 600 they began to use Latin freely, they
used that name for Canterbury.13
10 Cantiaci
occurs only in the Ravennas and is probably a late equivalent
for Cantii. Two parallels may be cited, Parisiaci for Parisii,
which appears for Parisii—often as an adjective and
sometimes as a noun—in late writers, and once (as an
adjective) on an early 1st-century altar at Paris (C. xii 3026
nautce Parisiacl); and Osismiaci, which the Notitia
twice substitutes for Qsismii. The termination in all three
cases is probably (as Schulze, Lateinische Eigennamen,
init. thinks) not the Greek iakos, but the Celtic âcos.
The proper function of this suffix is, indeed, to make
place-names, but it seems to have been also used sporadically
to form tribe-names. An early parallel is supplied by the
British tribe Segontiaci, mentioned in Ceasar’s Gallic
War, who must have derived their name from some Segontium
or Segontios.
11 Itin. Ant. 472,
473; the best MSS. read Durouerno, others Duroruerno,
Durarueno, Duraruenno, or the like, always with u in
the first syllable. Ptolemy ii, 3, I 2, Δapovepvov,
a spelling which is followed by Holder in his Sprachschatz,
but which seems wrong. Ravennas, p. 428, Peutinger Table,
ed. Miller. For the derivation see D’Arbois de Jubainville, Mots
Gaulois, p. 210.
12 For the council of Paris see Mon.
Hist. Germ. Concilia aevi Meroving, ed. Maassen, p. 192;
for the papal letter, Wilkins, Concilia, i, 32, hence
Mansi Nova coll. x, 553. The coin is discussed by Longpérier,
Numism. Journal, ii (1838), 232, and Revue Numism. 1841,
p. 437; Cartier, Numism. Chron. ii (1839), 204; D. H.
Haigh, ibid.. (1841), 120; C. F. Keary, English
Coins in the Brit. Mus., Anglo-Saxon series, introd. etc.;
its date seems fairly certain. Dorobernia and similar forms
abound on Kentish coins of the 9th and following centuries,
though one of the earliest of those usually cited, that
inscribed DOROBREBIA CIBIT, contains the Roman name of
Rochester, p. 81. For early charters, see Kemble, nos. vii,
ix, xiv, etc. Post-Conquest writers use Dorobernia often for
Dover: so Will, of Malmesbury (Rolls Ser.), p.
376; Higden, ibid. ii, 56; Flor. of Worc. Chron.
A.D. 1051.
13 Faussett, Arch.
Journ. xxxii, 382, suggests that the knowledge of the name
Durovernum was reimported into Britain by continental clergy.
But there is no known source from which these clergy could
have learnt it on the Continent. Certainly they did not
possess the Itinerary. See Engi. Hist. Rev. Oct. 1895. |