Note 49 — “Port” and “Port-Reeve.”

P.S.—As it would seem, from the letter of “A. H.” (ante, p. 47) that there are people who believe that the Anglo-Saxon “port” was the “equivalent of haven,” or sea-port (portus), it may be worth referring to the English Chronicle, where, so late as 1088, Worcester, the town most distant from the sea, is spoken of distinctively as a “port.” The passage is thus rendered by Mr. Freeman: “They came to the port itself, and would then the port burn.” (W. Rufus, i. 47, 48.) In Earle’s “Philology of the English Tongue” (3rd Ed.) it is explained that by port was “signified, in Saxon times, just ‘a town, a market-town.’ This is the sense of it in such compounds as Newport Pagnell” (p. 19). It is, however, erroneously there too “derived from the Latin porta, a gate.” It is also worth noting that in the Quarterly Review, No. 315 (July, 1884), p. 9, it is asserted that “a port-reeve is the equivalent of a shire-reeve (!): and has nothing to do with portus, but much with porta”—the very error of which, I hope, I have now effectually disposed.