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
Heathen Gods in Old English Literature Christianity. In his book, "The Elder Gods: The Otherworld of Early England" (2011), the English Anglo-Saxonist Stephen Pollington noted that North's book had been criticised for being "too free" in the interpretation of sources, but felt that it nonetheless "relieved the researcher from the emasculating fear of making an assumption or two and testing them against the evidence." Heathen Gods in Old English Literature Heathen Gods in Old English Literature is a historical study of the literary references for several pagan deities in Anglo-Saxon England. Written by the English studies scholar Richard North of University College London, it was first