Portum Adurni
Attested: Portum Adurni twice in the Notitia Dignitatum. A numerus exploratorum ‘company of scouts’ was based there.
Where: Rivet & Smith suggested Portchester Castle, an idea that has generally been accepted, despite their reasons for preferring it over other Saxon Shore forts being invalid. Its walls still impressively survive at SU62440459, at the back of Portsmouth Harbour.
Name origin: Uncertain. The least bad parallel may be English dern ‘to hide’, from dyrne, dierne ‘hidden’, possibly from PIE *dher- ‘to hold’, which was common in later place names and is appropriate for this fort's location, but has no obvious cognate outside Germanic. Initial a- is a common prefix in English, with a sense of intensification or of away/up.
Words for ‘hand’ survive in the Celtic languages, such as Breton durn or Irish dorn, and are said to come from Gaulish *durnos (Delamarre,2003:156) and to have passed into Vulgar Latin as durnus. Portsmouth Harbour is shaped rather like a human hand with fingers, whose relative sizes might not have been accurately mapped in Roman times. Plenty of Roman place names were ad something, but the final I looks like a genitive, so maybe a word got simplified out of ad-something-durni ‘at the middle of a hand’ to yield adurni. No good parallels for those Celtic words have been found, so they may have come from pre-Indo-European speech, and attempts to argue that the primary sense was ‘fist’ are unconvincing.
Much the same argument could hold for the bottom of a Grecian urn and Latin urna, especially since urns could be a good metaphor for a supplies depot, or if pottery was exported via Portchester.
Notice also Basque adar ‘horn’, which probably survives from an ancient non-Indo-European language and passed into Berber and Irish. Graeco-Latin adarca meant a salt deposit on the herbiage of marshes. Another Basque word is adur ‘luck’. Gascony/Aquitaine (=Roman Aquitania) and the port of Bordeaux had strong trading links with medieval Britain and ‘horn’ is an excellent fit to the topographical situation at the back of Portsmouth harbour.
Hesychius equated Galatian αδες with Greek ποδες ‘feet’: Delamarre (2014) proposed that in Gaulish personal names *adu- meant ‘pot’ (by loss of initial P from PIE *ped-/*pod- ‘container, vat’, meaning a container that could stand upright) so that the family name Adurienus (attested in Italy) was *adu-reno- ‘flowing pot, generous’. This might make a suitable name for Portchester Castle, which was much more of a supplies depot than a war-fighting site, as indeed were some other Saxon Shore forts.
Latin ad began many place names and ordinary words, sometimes coupled with another element imported from another language. One might argue that Portsmouth harbour is shaped a bit like a Breeze (2004) found an unconvincing Celtic parallel in ADIUNE on a post-Roman memorial near Swansea.
Notes: Many place names that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle linked with early founders of Wessex, including Cerdic, lie in the Fareham/Portchester/Wight area. The western Roman army was heavily Germanic by the dates that Portchester Castle was built and later the Notitia was written. Much has been made of Dagodurnus, a potter's name known from 3 finds, and of the fort at Durnomagus, modern Dormagen. Both have very Germanic links, and were Celtic only in the classical sense of northern barbarians, not of modern insular languages.
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Last edited 11 January 2025 To main Menu.