Reflections on the Mapping Medieval Chester Festival
It’s now a week since the Mapping Medieval Chester Festival, a week in which I’ve been reflecting on what I learned. It really was a fantastic event and I was very touched by how enthusiastic Cestrians were to hear about some of their forebears.
The literary tour was extremely well attended, and, to judge from the kind comments we received, Cestrians were fascinated to hear how the space of their streets was understood in the Middle Ages. I read Lucian’s rather involved allegorical reading of the crossroads in the centre of Chester, in which he connects the two crossing streets to the two sticks collected by the Widow of Sareptha (for a refresher, see 3Kings 17:9-16) and to the two pieces of wood which formed the cross on which Christ was crucified. I think Lucian would have been quite gratified to hear one listener’s response of ‘how interesting’. It was, I think, also interesting for the project’s researchers to read their texts in situ. Often, the destruction of the ancient cities and buildings we study forces us to use our imagination to envisage how they must have looked, and sometimes, unfortunately, this methodology is generalised even when there are extensive physical remains. For example, I had forgotten just how prominently Wales is visible from Chester, particularly from the north of the city, which forced me to think about whether Lucian’s comment that ‘all evil’ is arrayed outside the North Gate, should be read as a slur on the Welsh.
One of the real surprises of the literary tour for me was to learn that the local pronunciation of the ‘Cestrian’ is ‘Sestrian’. Lucian calls the locals ‘Cestrenses’. My wonderful Welsh Latin teacher, the inimitable DBE, so hammered into my mind that Latin [c] is always hard, that I had never considered the possibility that it would be pronounced anything other than ‘Cestrian’. Nonetheless, the OED gives the pronunciation ‘Sestrian’. During the launch of the website in the Grosvenor Museum, we had a very interesting question which again picked up my pronunciation and suggested that the word is pronounced ‘Sestrian’ on analogy with places like Leicester and Worcester. The second element in these place names is Old English ‘ceaster’ which would have been pronounced with a ‘ch’, hence ‘cheaster’ (and whence the modern name ‘Chester’). We don’t know a great deal about medieval Latin pronunctiation, but it seems likely ‘Cestrenses’ was actually pronounced ‘Chestrenses’… Please do comment if you know why it’s pronounced ‘Sestrian’!
I’d like to close by thanking Sue Hughes of the Grosvenor Museum for all her work in organising the day and making it such a success, as well as all the Cestrians / Sestians / Chestrians who turned out and showed such enthusiasm for our project. Thank you!