Re: OT: Of Angles and Saxons

On Tuesday, December 14, 2004, at 01:46 , Michael Poxon wrote:
[snip]
> .......................The spelling "Logres" looks all too
> familiarly like those awful Latinizations-of-everything by Saxo
> Grammaticus
> and his
> ilk.
I think it is almost certainly Frenchification, probably from Breton.
Appending -(e)s would be an odd way of Latininizing the name. The Latin
version _Loegria_ wss used IIRC by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

> I'd always imagined Leicester was Romano-British Llyr-Cester.
Well, *Leircester at least. The assimilation of /rs/ --> /s/ is not
unknown, cf. Worcester, pronounced 'Wooster'  :)

The name certainly has nothing to do with the old Roman name Ratae
(Coritanorum) and, on all that has been said so far on this thread,
nothing to do with Lloegr either.

> Viriconium
> (from memory) I think is the modern Wroxeter which (again from memory) is
> Staffordshire.
Viroconium (Cornoviorum) is indeed Wroxeter in Shropshire. It was he
capital of _Civitas Cornoviorum_, the Civitas of the Cornovii.

[snip]
>> I used to think M. John Harrison's Viriconium was whole-cloth, now I
>> find there's am actual Viriconium buried somewhere in the Midlands if my
>> memory serves me right.  What's below the sod in Leicester might be quite
>> interesting.)
I imagine it actually is - lots of stuff from recent centuries, from
medieval settlements, from the Saxon _Ligeraceaster_ as well from the
Roman _Ratae_.

Ray
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