encouraged the use of it, with the result (says Tacitus) that the
Britons, who had hitherto hated and refused the foreign tongue, became
eager to speak it fluently. About the same time Plutarch, in his tract
on the cessation of oracles, mentions one Demetrius of Tarsus,
grammarian, who had been teaching in Britain (A.D. 80), and mentions him
as nothing at all out of the ordinary course.[1] Forty years later,
Juvenal alludes casually to British lawyers taught by Gaulish
schoolmasters. It is plain that by the second century Latin must have
been spreading widely in the province. We need not feel puzzled about
the way in which the Callevan workman of perhaps the third or fourth
century learnt his Latin.

[Footnote 1: See Dessau, _Hermes_, xlvi. 156.]

At this point we might wish to introduce the arguments deducible from
philology. We might ask whether the phonetics or the vocabulary of the
later Celtic and English languages reveal any traces of the influence of
Latin, as a spoken tongue, or give negative testimony to its absence.
Unfortunately, the inquiry seems almost hopeless. The facts are obscure
and open to dispute, and the conclusions to be drawn from them are quite
uncertain. Dogmatic assertions proceeding from this or that philologist
are common enough. Trustworthy results are correspondingly scarce. One
instance may be cited in illustration. It has been argued that the name
'Kent' is derived from the Celtic 'Cantion', and not from the Latin
'Cantium', because, according to the rules of Vulgar Latin, 'Cantium'
would have been pronounced 'Cantsium' in the fifth century, when the
Saxons may be supposed to have learnt the name. That is, Celtic was
spoken in Kent about 450. Yet it is doubtful whether Latin 'ti' had
really come to be pronounced 'tsi' in Britain so early as A.D. 450. And
it is plainly possible that the Saxons may have learnt the name long