SIR,--Your readers may have observed, and with some amusement, that the simultaneous assault on my position by Dr. Pring and Mr. Hall, in your last issue, has ended in the somewhat untoward result of their discovering that they are themselves hopelessly at issue on the fundamental point of all! Dr. Pring persists that the “port” in “port-reeve” is derived from the Latin _porta_, a city gate (p. 114): Mr. Hall asserts with equal confidence that it comes “by transition from the Latin _portus_,” a haven (p. 149). Dr. Pring appeals to “the learned Professor Stubbs” (p. 114), but “seems” (to adopt his own expression) “to have found it convenient to ignore” that I have shown Dr. Stubbs’ rendering of the passage from the Laws of Athelstan to be simply destructive of his own. I repeat, that when Dr. Pring renders it “outside the port _or gate_” (p. 115), the words “or gate” _are_, and should be distinguished as, a mere gloss of his own, and must not, therefore, be appealed to by him as evidence. My own quotation: “Newport Gate,” in Lincoln (p. 115), is no gloss of my own at all, but a _verbatim_ copy. Dr. Pring must indeed be hard up if he falls back on the Latinisation of East Gate as _portam de East Gatâ_ (temp. Henry I.), since by the mediæval scribe, as by the modern schoolboy, a gate would be rightly styled in Latin a _porta_ (“East gate” being suffixed as a proper name for the sake of distinction). What conceivable bearing has this on the use of the term “port” (for a market town) in Anglo-Saxon times? Yet such is the disingenuous argument of my critic, who proclaims that I “must surely have overlooked these and similar instances”! And if he had done me the honour to read my paper with common care, he would have seen that I carefully distinguish the “port” of proper names, such as “Newport Gate,” from the “port” in “port-reeve.” This destroys his criticism. When Dr. Pring appealed to Dr. Stubbs, as laying down that “port” was derived from “porta,” _because the gate was the place where the markets were held_, I proved by demonstration that the markets were _not_ held at the gate, but in the heart of the town, and that consequently the argument breaks down. What does Dr. Pring do? He ridicules this disproof of the very argument he had appealed to as “scarcely necessary” (p. 116), and as based on “a well-known fact”! Verily, we have here, to quote his own words, a “unique and somewhat anomalous specimen of argument.”