from the settlers having made a quarry of the ruins. Almost all the stones in the walls of Roman Uriconium were removed, as well as the ruins of its buildings, and from the wrecked city there can be no doubt many a house, or even in later centuries a church, was partly built, as may be traced around Silchester, where the destruction was less complete. The Wrocensetna have either left their name in that of Wroxeter, the village on the site of Uriconium, or derived their name from it, the wrecked ceaster. The name survives also in those of Wrockwardine and the Wrekin. The pagus or province of the Wrocensetna is mentioned in a charter of Burgred, King of Mercia in 855,[1] and in one of Eadgar, dated 963.[2] The survival of the word ‘wrocen’ or ‘wrekin,’ as probably a reference in Saxon nomenclature to the ruins of a Roman city, is unique among English topographical names.
The ancient name Ombersley in Worcestershire, whose early settlers are called the Ombersetena, is as old as the Saxon period.[3] These people, whose name has come down to us in the genitive plural, are probably the same as the Ymbras or Ambrones—i.e., the tribe of Old Saxons south of the Humber. This colony of them in Worcestershire was probably a migration from their district on the Amber River in Derbyshire, from Nottinghamshire or Lincolnshire, along the Roman roads that passed from Chesterfield through Lichfield into Worcestershire. They apparently gave their new settlement the same name, which some of the tribe had brought from the Ambra River in Old Saxony.
In Shropshire an interesting peculiarity has been observed in the country dialect. This, according to Prince L. L. Bonaparte, is the verb plural ending in n, as ‘we aren’ for ‘we are,’ and also the form ‘we bin’ for ‘we are.’ This he points out as an interesting instance of the
