However this may be--and I confess I have been a little puritanically minute upon the subject--the English settlers learned to use the word from the first moment they landed in Britain. In its earliest English dress it appears as Ceaster, pronounced like Keaster, for the soft sound of the initial in modern English is due to later Norman influences. The new comers--Anglo-Saxons, if you choose to call them so--applied the word to every Roman town or ruin they found in Britain. Indeed, all the Latin words of the first crop in English--those used during the heathen age, before Augustine and his monks introduced the Roman civilisation--belong to such material relics of the older provincial culture as the Sleswick pirates had never before known: _way_ from _via_, _wall_ from _vallum_, _street_ from _strata_, and _port_ from _portus_. In this first crop of foreign words Ceaster also must be reckoned, and it was originally employed in English as a common rather than as a proper name. Thus we read in the brief _Chronicle_ of the West Saxon kings, under the year 577, 'Cuthwine and Ceawlin fought against the Welsh, and offslew three kings, Conmail and Condidan and Farinmail, and took three ceasters, Gleawan ceaster and Ciren ceaster and Bathan ceaster.' We might modernise a little, so as to show the real sense, by saying 'Glevum city and Corinium city and Bath city.' Here it is noticeable that in two of the cases--Gloucester and Cirencester--the descriptive termination has become at last part of the name; but in the third case--that of Bath--it has never succeeded in doing so. Ages after, in the reign of King Alfred, we still find the word used as a common noun; for the _Chronicle_ mentions that a body of Danish freebooters 'fared to a waste ceaster in Wirral; it is hight Lega ceaster;' that is to say, Legionis castra, now Chester. The grand old English epic of Beowulf, which is perhaps older than the colonisation of Britain, speaks of townsfolk as 'the dwellers in ceasters.'