Portsmouth enrols 23,000 students and is ranked among the world's best modern universities. Portsmouth is also the birthplace of author Charles Dickens and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Romans built Portus Adurni, a fort, at nearby Portchester in the late third century. The city's Old English name "Portesmuða" is derived from "port", meaning a haven, and "muða", the mouth of a large river or estuary. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" has a warrior called Port and his two sons killing a noble Briton in Portsmouth in 501. Winston Churchill, in his "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", says that Port was a pirate
Portsmouth for Portsmouth Association Football Club, an amateur team not to be confused with the later professional Portsmouth Football Club. Rudyard Kipling, poet and author of the "Jungle Book", and H. G. Wells, author of "War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine", lived in Portsmouth during the 1880s. Sir Walter Besant, a novelist and historian, was born in Portsmouth, writing one novel set exclusively in the town, "By Celia's Arbour, A Tale of Portsmouth Town". Historian Frances Yates was born in Portsmouth and is known for her work on Renaissance esotericism. Sir Francis Austen, brother of Jane Austen, briefly lived