Is Chester a Roman city?

Yes: a legionary fortress and the town around it

The Roman army chose a low sandstone ridge in a bend of the Dee and built a fortress there in the mid-70s AD. The first builders were the Second Legion Adiutrix; from about AD 88 the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix took over, and stayed for three centuries. English Heritage, writing about the amphitheatre just outside the walls, describes it as having been built in the late first century AD “just outside the south-east corner of the Roman legionary fortress”. That fortress is the reason Chester exists.

Around the fortress a civilian town, the canabae, grew: traders, families of soldiers, workshops, inns, temples. By the 2nd century it was a busy Roman town as well as a military headquarters. For the full story, from the first ditches to the end of Roman rule, see our history of Roman Chester.

You can still see pieces of it. The amphitheatre at Newgate is Britain’s largest known Roman military amphitheatre and free to visit. A length of the north wall, near the cathedral, is Roman at its base. The Roman Gardens display columns, altars and a rebuilt hypocaust. Finds from across the fortress fill the Grosvenor Museum, including altars and tombstones with the name Deva on them.

The Roman name was Deva

The Romans named Chester after the river. Deva is a Latin writing of a British word for the Dee that probably meant “the goddess” or “the holy one”: the Dee seems to have been a sacred river long before the legions arrived. You will also see the older spelling Dewa, which some local businesses still use; it is the same word.

Deva Victrix is the fortress by its full modern label. The “victorious” is borrowed from the full title of the Twentieth Legion, Legio XX Valeria Victrix. That gives us two different things to keep apart: the name of the place (Deva) and the title of the legion (Valeria Victrix). On the stones themselves, soldiers at Chester carved LEG XX V V or LEG XX VV to say which legion they belonged to. One such stone, RIB 450, was dug up in 1693 on Eastgate Street and is now in the Grosvenor Museum. For a fuller tour of the names, see what Chester was called in Roman times.

So where does “Chester” come from?

Not from Rome. After the Roman army left Britain, around AD 410, the fortress walls kept standing and people kept living inside them. The Anglo-Saxons who later took control needed a word for an old Roman town. They used ceaster, which they had taken from the Latin castra, “military camp”. Dictionaries give ceaster as “a city or walled town, originally one that had been a Roman station”.

For Chester, that word was tied to the legion. The Anglo-Saxon name was Legeceaster, “the city of the legions”. Over the centuries the Lege- fell away, and Chester was left. Cheshire, the county, began as the shire of Chester.

Is Chester a Roman word? Only through Latin

So “Chester” is not a Roman word. It is an English word with a Latin root, remembering the Romans. The same thing happened across England. If you draw the -chester, -caster and -cester names on a map you are, in effect, mapping where the Roman army built forts or walled towns.

• -chester: Chester, Manchester, Winchester, Colchester, Dorchester, Chichester, Rochester.
• -caster: Lancaster, Doncaster, Tadcaster.
• -cester: Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Cirencester, Towcester.

All three endings come from the same Old English word ceaster, and so, in the end, from castra. Different regional accents in Anglo-Saxon England wore the word down in different ways.

Is there a Roman town inside today’s city?

Yes, but mostly beneath the streets. The map of Roman Chester overlays the fortress on the modern city and shows how the four main streets, Eastgate, Watergate, Northgate and Bridge, follow the Roman ones. The circuit of the walls, “about two miles long” in the council’s words, began as the Roman defences and was extended by Anglo-Saxon and Norman work until it made “a completed circuit around Chester” for the first time since the Romans. You walk a Roman line, on medieval stone, past Georgian additions.

If you were looking for the English Heritage site at Chollerford on Hadrian’s Wall, that is a different place called Chesters Roman Fort: a small cavalry fort about 130 miles north-east of Chester. The shared name is a coincidence of English, not a Roman connection.

In short

Chester is a Roman city: it was founded as the fortress of Deva in the mid-70s AD and has been lived in ever since. But the word “Chester” itself is Old English, from the Latin for a camp. The Roman name is Deva, the English name remembers them, and on the ground the two are the same place.