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.