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Naming Roman Britain

The study and location of Romano-British place-names has always exercised its own fascination; but enthusiasm and imagination, as R & S show, must always be rigorously controlled by sound textual and linguistic scholarship. Even this is not always sufficient; one or two instances are noted below where, even in this book, greater judgment based on awareness of archaeological or historical controls or knowledge of the ground could have led to different conclusions, or at least to the offering of alternative identifications. An unimportant example is the gratuitous suggestion (p. 371) that the small hill-fort on Bennachie could have been 'the British battle base' at Mons Graupius; it is too small, too far off, and lacks a view of much of the field. The present generation has had the advantage of several scholarly studies of various aspects of these place-names as in Richmond on Roman Scotland {PSAS lvi (1921-2)), Richmond and Crawford on the Ravenna Cosmography {Archaeologia xciii (1949)), Rivet on the Antonine Itinerary (Britannia i (1970)) and in several works of Jackson. The great merit of the present book is that within a single volume are collected all the sources with critical assessment of their evidence. Thus ends an epoch of desultory studies and a firm foundation is laid for future work. Two of the chapters are revised and expanded versions of earlier published studies. Many ancient authors had occasion to mention Britain, or events there, in summary or detailed reference; R & S give a list of 114 (though omitting Pseudo-Hyginus), and they summarise the information on place-names which these give. The range of sources is surprisingly wide, but few in fact do more than mention the island itself. R & S might here have given more guidance on the difference, if any, between Britannus and Britto. Our knowledge of the bulk of Romano-British place-names comes from five further written sources: Ptolemy's Geography (c. 150 names), the Antonine Itinerary (c. n o names), the Notitia Dignitatum (46 names), the Peutinger Map (16 names) and the Ravenna Cosmography (c. 300 names). Their evidence can sometimes be checked against, or supplemented by, the evidence provided by inscriptions; these have the virtue of being both contemporary and uncorrupted by scribal transmissions; but in Roman Britain the supply of names from epigraphic sources is meagre on the one hand and on the other often vitiated by the abbreviated formulae employed. For instance the Lincoln milestone {RIB 2041) reads A L S MP XIIII {A Undo Segelocum MP XIIII: 'from Lincoln to Littleborough 14 miles'). Such texts were doubtless intelligible to the contemporary traveller, but hardly help us over the correct form of the names even though they do help over location. R & S draw attention to a milestone four miles from Lancaster inscribed L MP HIT. Presumably the name is connected with that of the Lune, and this would rule out this reviewer's earlier identification of the fort with Olenacum.