Wentabury

A couple years ago Francis M. Morris and Martin Biddle wrote about Venta Belgarum, which may be their home town. They call it "Winchester" now. Craig Davis has a review out.

I have never set foot in that place; I'm probably not going to anytime soon, unless this blog and/or my books get me extradited. We do, here, hold some interest in the previous time Britain (and other nations) fell out of Christianity into a dark age. Also I've long been interested in shared suffixes in placenames, here how a -castr suffix became -chester.

The site entered the Roman world as an "oppidum", a hill fort. The Celts called such briga or maybe dunum, the Germans burg. But the Romans did not name this site like that. They called it "The Belgic Mart". They didn't install a colonia at the site; people just worked there.

...until the late AD 300s. After Jovian's grovelling capitulation to the Sasanians, the barbarians out West figured that Rome for a joke anymore. The Irish, the Picts, and the Saxons between them figured, what would the Philistines do. In AD 367 they all hit the Romans' Britannia at once. Emperor Valentinian sent over one Flavius Theodosius, who restored the best part of Britain to the Romans, renaming the province "Valentia". Such a loyalist could never survive his patron's death; luckily, Flavius' son survived the purge, to become Theodosius the Great.

According to Davis, the book claims that the market town grew in population, but not in prosperity. Once more it was a fortress. Presumably the region was by then Romance-speaking, hence *Venta-Castrum rather than, say, "Wentabury". When the Wessex state took it over, it became Wintanceastre thus Win(t)chester.