Gloucester

I went for a walk in my neighborhood a few days ago and it started to drizzle on the way back. Just the sort of weather to make me think of the word moisty, as in one of my favorite nursery rhymes:

The Old Man of Gloucester
One misty moisty morning,
When cloudy was the weather,
I chanced to meet an old man,
Clothed all in leather.
He began to compliment
And I began to grin.
How do you do? And how do you do?
And how do you do again?

I thought, "Maybe there's a post in the word moisty." Was that a word that English-speaking people use outside of nursery rhymes, I wondered. According to the Urban Dictionary, the word has acquired a vulgar meaning, a moisty being the feminine version of boner.

Now, if you are comfortable using moisty or boner in casual conversation and informal writing, good. But I am not.

So, moving on . . . .

"Maybe there's a post in Gloucester." One time I read that British towns whose names end in caster, like Lancaster, chester, like Winchester, cester, like Worcester, were originally Roman camp towns.

Through hundreds of years of fielding armies and occupying countries, the Romans had developed an almost unassailable plan for the castrum or fortified camp. The soldiers lived in the camp when they were not marching or fighting; on occasion, they retreated to it to save their skins. So when they occupied Britain, or Provincia Britannia, from 43 to 409 CE, they built many such camps to accommodate the men, and these became towns and cities.

For a legion of 5000 to 6000 soldiers, officers experienced in camp construction would lay out a square 450 to 550 feet on each side, with headquarters (the praetorium) in the middle. They would supervise digging a trench around the perimeter, raising the wall, and laying the criss-cross of roads with gates at each end of camp. On the road, every soldier marched with his palus, or fence-post, which became part of the palisade around the top of the wall. The camp was complete in six hours at most, and could be built, if necessary, while the legion was under attack.

Gloucester (pronounced "gloster") became a market center in about 48 CE and a Roman colonia, or retirement center, in 97 CE. The Roman word glevum (the first part of Gloucester) means
bright place or caer glow in Celtic.

Layout of a Roman camp.

Kastell Theilenhofen Iciniacum (English). CC BY-SA 3.0. Mediatus.

Paladin

The city of Rome grew out of the settlements of seven hills, including the first settled, the Palatine Hill. The Palatine Hill includes Bronze Age remains from as early as 1000 BCE as well as the Lupercal, the legendary cave where orphaned twins Romulus and Remus were nursed by a she-wolf in 771 BCE.

Livy (59 BCE to 17 CE), ventured a guess that the Palatine Hill got its name from the Arcadian settlement of Pallantium. Other ideas put forth include origin in the word palis, Latin for stake, as in a fence made of stakes, or palātum, Latin for palate. In short, we don't know.

At any rate, the emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE) lived on the hill and later emperors, less chary of showing off their imperial status than Augustus, built their palaces here. The word palace comes to us from Palatine.

Whew! Long way around. Anyway, the word paladin, meaning knight or official of the emperor, comes from the same root word, Palatine. The word first shows up in English in 1592, in the first work of a minor poet, Samuel Daniel (1562 to 1619), but came to us by way of the Old French word paladin, used in the Song of Roland (mid-twelfth century) and other early chansons de geste.

The paladins, also known as the Twelve Peers, were in Charlemagne's service just as the Knights of the Round Table were in Arthur's. They were the best of the French warriors, sent to battle the Saracens (the early word for Muslims) in the Crusades.

I first came across the word paladin in 1957, when Have Gun--Will Travel premiered on television. The hero of the show is Paladin (actor Richard Boone), an educated, gentlemanly "knight without armor" who compares his methods to the movements of the knight on a chess board. He says the knight is an "attack piece, the most versatile on the board. It can move eight different ways, over barriers, and [is] always unexpected." ("The Road to Wickenburg," Season 2, Episode 7, October 25, 1958, Have Gun--Will Travel, CBS, Television.)

Our modern-day Paladin does not wear armor, but he does dress distinctively. On the trail he wears all black, and this struck me, even though I was only eleven, because I was an avid consumer of Western movies and tv shows, and the hero always (or almost always) wore a white hat. In other words, the hero was unremittingly good, never tempted, never wrong.