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
Fortifications of Portsmouth I's reign saw yet more work on the bastions and the first bridge at the Landport gate which was constructed in about 3 years starting 1586. During this time there also appears to have seen a fair amount of repair work. Sometime around 1600 a new gate known as point gate replaced the North Gate in controlling access to Portsmouth point. At the time of the Civil War, the fortifications mounted around 100 guns and when properly manned were considered by some to be able to withstand a siege of 40,000 men. In one of the first actions of the