The New Bloomfield, Pa. times. (New Bloomfield, Pa.) 1877-188?, 1881-11-01
THE ORIGIN OF LONDON.


A PPARENTLY, the very first Lon
n don was a Welsh village--an an
Client British village, the history books
would say-which crowned the top of
Ludgate Hill, near where st. Paul's now
stands. The old Welsh, who owned
Britain before the English took It, were
race half hunters, half cultivators, as
Cesar tells US. In his time, the Drltons
of the southeastern country, which con-
sists of open cultivated plains, were
tillers of the soil while those of the hilly
northwest were still nomads, or savage
hunters, dwelling in movable villages,
and having mere empty forts on the
hill-tops, to which the whole population
retreated with their cattle in case of eva
sion. These duns, or hill-forts, still ex-
ist in numbers over all England, and
are generally known as "British Camps.
such as Sinodon, Brendon, and Wimble-
don still preserve their memory while
we are familiar with the Latinized from
in Camalodunum, and Branodunum,
Dunedin, Dunbar, dundee, and Dunkeld,
give us Scotch forms of like Implication
DosCn and Dun survive as modified mod.
ern words from the same root. AS q
rule, the syllabes dun and don in place
names are sure indications of an old hill
fort. The ''castles" or rude earthwork
which crown almost every height among
the South Downs and the western hills
are the last remains of these old Welsh
strongholds. Maiden Castle, near Dor.
chester, and the earthworks at Cissbury,
Silchester, and Ogbury, are familiar in
stances. Even before the Romans came,
however, the river-valleys of the south
east of Briton were inhabited by agricul-
ture tribes, with fixed habitations and
considerable towns. There are two great
basins in England which have always
possessed the highest agriculture impor--
tance; the one is that of the Thames,
the other that of the Yorkshire Ouse.-
So long as England remained mainly an
agriculture country, the two greatest
cities of the land were the respective
centres of the basins, London and York.
And there has been more than one NOM
ent in our history when it might have
seemed doubtful which was to become
ultimately the capital of the whole
kingdom. Now, what made London
the centre of the Thames valley? for
that of course was the first step towards
making it the metropolis of the British
Empire. Well, the Welsh tribe which
inhabited the lower part of the valley
must have originally needed dun like.
all their neighbors. But there are not so
many CONSPICUOUS hills in the flat basin
of the Thames between Richmond and,
the sea and Ludgate Hill was perhaps.
the best that the Trinobantes of
Middlesex could get. To be sure, il
could not compare with the dun at
Edinburgh, at Dunbarton or at Stirling;
but it was high enough to make ma
tural fort, and it stood just above the
point where the tide is distinctly felt.
Thus, as the old Welsh became more
and more civilized, a regular town grew
up around the low dun, and bore from
the very first its modern name of Lon
don, for no name in England has alter
ed so little with the wear and tear of
centuries. 1t was not without natural
advantages of situation; for belt of
marshes girt it around on every side,
from the estuary of the Lea and the.
Finsbury flats to the Fleet river and
London Fen, where the Strand now
stretches. In the interval between Ca
sius Csesar's abortive attempt upon
Britain and the reduction of the south
coast under Claudius, we know that
considerable trading town developed
around the cid village.