Verolamium
Attested: Coins VER, VERL, VERO, VERLAMIO, VIR, etc; Ptolemy 2,3,21 Ουρολανιον, a πολις of the Κατουηλλαυνοι;
Verolamio on iter 2, Verolami on iter 6 , and Verolamo on iter 8 of the Antonine Itinerary; Virolanium at position 96 in the Ravenna Cosmography;
Tacitus Annals 14,33 Verulamio, but notice how little basis there is for a letter U in the middle of the name.
Where: The Roman town of Verolamium around TL134073 lay inside walls shaped like a letter D, flat against the river now called Ver, and across from modern St Albans. Lying upon Watling Street, it probably replaced an earlier tribal centre, possibly at Wheathampstead. It rose to become one of the most important towns in Roman Britain, whose role in pre-Roman tribal politics has been much discussed, but did not get built over as a major post-Roman city. A possible Roman fort has been found nearby.
Name origin: Ver- is one of those troublesome short syllables that have many potential meanings, but here the best sense may be like PIE *wer- ‘to look out, be aware, keep watch’, whose many descendants in modern English include wary, warden, guard, revere, Wearde, etc, and whose relatives in other languages include Latin vereor ‘to show respect’ and verecundus ‘modest’. The -lamium part resembles Latin lama, from PIE *lama- ‘swamp, puddle’. A sense of ‘lakeside lookout’ would be an excellent fit to archaeology of the Roman town.
Notes: Old English wær ‘on guard’ and lam ‘mud, loam’ offer an excellent parallel for this name and for the archaeology, but that is hard to reconcile with those early coins, which were minted before the main Roman conquest. Were local people already speaking a language ancestral to English? Was the Roman army in Britain heavily Germanic right from the start? Could Verolamio have been created purely in Latin, which has no attested word to explain Ver- better than veru ‘fencepost’?
Parallels in insular Celtic languages are generally unconvincing; see Rivet & Smith, Delamarre (2003 pp 195,317), or Coates (2005) for details. They seek to translate ver- as ‘over’ (like hyper or fore-) or *veru- as ‘large’, though -lamium might match Irish lam ‘hand’. Might a meaning of ‘crooked hand’ fit a multi-road junction?
It is hard to know the ancient condition of the river Ver, whose name Ekwall (1928) reckoned was a back-formation from the place, because it has been so much altered by humans, and anyway the name might have been transferred from a pre-Roman oppidum elsewhere. However, the former presence of watermills and the adjacent place name Redbourn (named from reeds?) suggests that the town could have fronted onto a substantial lake or swamp.
You may copy this text freely, provided you acknowledge its source as www.romaneranames.uk, recognise that it is liable to human error, and try to offer suggestions for improvement.
Last edited 25 January 2024 to main Menu