The word port in the sense of ‘town or city’, is absent in French, but appears already in Old English. The OED etymology (port n.2, see also MED port n.3) considers the word a special development of portus (‘harbour’), perhaps by association with porta (‘gate’), cf. Anglo-Norman port¹ and porte¹. However, it appears in Anglo-Norman as part of compounds such as portman, portreve and portsokne, and porteis, rather than a deviant plural of portur¹ (cf. AND¹), belongs to this group. Just like portman, the word would be equivalent to Dutch poorter (cf. Rough 12.n3 for further discussion): burgher, inhabitant of a town. The same text appears in Bor Cust i 144, where the word has been (unnecessarily?) emended to port[er]es. The word may have overlapped semantically with portur¹, ‘person employed to carry goods’, especially where that term seems to refer to a role with more authority than simply one who loads or unloads cargo from a ship.