CHESTER-LE-STREET has a nostalgic Roman name.
So Chester comes from the Anglo-Saxon ceaster meaning ‘Roman fort’ or, at a stretch, ‘Roman town’, though when the Anglo-Saxons first saw this ceaster it would have been a wrecked shell: Roman settlements were abandoned or, at best, depopulated as Roman Britain came crashing down in the fifth century.
One Anglo-Saxon even referred to an empty Roman city he saw – perhaps Bath – as a ‘City of Giants’, impressed as he was by ruined Roman houses and engineering works – something the Anglo- Saxons never came close to emulating. Indeed, so extraordinary were such remains to Dark Age visitors, it was as if these towns belonged not just to the past,but to another race. And Chester-le-Street was home to a Roman fort whose ruins evidently caught the attention of the Anglo- Saxon successors of Rome.
As to ‘Street’ this came from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning, no surprises, ‘road’ and more particularly ‘Roman road’, a reference to the paved Roman way that once connected Chester-le-Street to York and ultimately to Rome and down which messengers galloped on fast Italian palfreys.
What we have here then is the Roman Fort on the Roman Road. But, again, it would be a capital mistake to imagine a pristine Roman Fort on a well-maintained Roman Road, a view that Chester-le-Street would have offered any passer-by in 200 or 300 or 400 AD.
Rather this name was coined several hundred years later when what we really had was the Wreck of the Roman Fort on a Disintegrating Roman Road.
Chester-le-Street is thus not a Roman name, but a memory of Rome name.
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