d^mmvobovion 
 Sodetip's . . . 
 publications. . 
 
 
 CoTO "^ 
 
 
 Jill arouna tDe Ulrekin. 
 
 BY 
 
 Professor SIR JOHN RHYS, M.A., D.Litt., 
 
 Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. 
 
 From "Y Cfmmrodor", Vol. XXI (Printed November 1908). 
 
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 All around the Wrekin, 
 
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Lettsotne^ Llangollen. 
 
 Pillar of Eliseg, shewing the Modern Inscription. 
 
Cjmmro&nr* 
 
 Vol. XXI. "Caeed boeth yb encilion." 1908. 
 
 Bv Pbofessoe sir JOHN RHYS, M.A., D.Litt. 
 
 Some two miles and a half to the south-west of Wellington 
 is the Wrekin, a long and isolated hill which rises some 
 nine hundred feet above the level of the country round, 
 except on the north-east, wh§re there is another and a 
 more irregular hill, called Ercal. They are separated by a, 
 deep little glen, along which a very pretty brook winds its 
 way ; the line of the hills is, roughly speaking, north-east 
 and south-west. The ridge of the Wrekin forms a sort of 
 long street, except that there are no houses to obstruct the 
 view on either hand, but here and there plenty of trees. 
 The whole hill is an ancient stronghold, forming a double 
 camp two thousand feet long ; the fortifications are now 
 somewhat effaced in parts, but enough remains to show 
 that they consisted of a double vallum and fosse, with out- 
 works. I take these details from the proof-sheets kindly 
 lent me of the article on "Earthworks", in the first volume 
 of the Victoria County History of Shropshire; for a full 
 description of the hill the reader must be referred to the 
 forthcoming volume, but I have given enough to shew that 
 the Wrekin is one of the most remarkable fortifications in 
 the British Isles. That is apart from the fact pointed out 
 
 i-L 
 
2 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 by Mr, Davies in his Eandhoole to the Wrehin (Shrewsbury, 
 1895), that this hill is geologically one of our most 
 primeval landmarks. 
 
 I now proceed to quote a passage from Miss Burne's 
 Folk-lore, Legends and Old Customs, reprinted from her 
 Memorials of Old Shropshire (Bemrose & Sons, London), 
 as follows : — 
 
 "Wrekin Wakes, held on the first Sunday in May, 
 were distinguished by an ever-recurring contest between 
 the colliers and the agricultural population for the posses- 
 sion of the hill. This is said to have gone on all day, 
 reinforcements being called up when either side was worsted. 
 The rites still practised by visitors to the Wrekin doubtless 
 formed part of the ceremonial of the ancient wake. On the 
 bare rock at the summit is a natural hollow, known as the 
 Kaven's Bowl or the Cuckoo's Cup, which is always full of 
 water, supposed to be placed there as it were miraculously, 
 for the use of the birds. Every visitor should taste this 
 water, and, if a young girl ascending the hiU for the first 
 time, should then scramble down the steep face of the 
 cliff and squeeze through a natural cleft in the rock 
 called the Needle's Bye, and believed to have been 
 formed when the rocks were rent at the Crucifixion ; should 
 she look back during the task, she will never be married. 
 Her lover should await her at the further side of the 
 gap, where he may claim a kiss, or, in default of one, the 
 forfeit of some article of clothing — a coloured article, such 
 as a glove, a kerchief, or a ribbon, carefully explained the 
 lady on whose authority the last detail is given." 
 
 Having read this about the Wrekin Wakes some years 
 ago, I had long wished to make closer acquaintance with 
 the old camp, and on the 13th of September 1907, in the 
 interval of two of the many meetings which Welshmen 
 have to attend at Shrewsbury, I escaped to Wellington, 
 and had a most agreeable walk to the summit of the 
 Wrekin, though the latter portion of it was a pretty stiff 
 climb. One can, however, break the climb at a con- 
 veniently situated refreshment place on the shoulder of 
 
All around the Wrekin. 3 
 
 the hill, before you come in sight of the camp. The 
 weather was dry, and I was disappointed to find the 
 Eaven's Bowl empty, but a rock hollow, not far off, held 
 water still, which my companion's dog found most wel- 
 come. Perhaps that should have been the Eaven's, and 
 the other the Cuckoo's, separate provision being made for 
 the two birds. The most probable view, however, is that 
 the Cuckoo is to be discarded altogether as a mere intruder 
 there as elsewhere. Glimpses of many counties may be 
 caught from the top of the Wrekin, but I am more inter- 
 ested in a spot only some few miles away, namely, the site 
 of the Eoman fortress of Viroconium, in English, Wroxe- 
 ter, on the Severn. For till I visited the "Wrekin I could 
 never understand why the Eomans built a fortress at 
 Wroxeter ; but the moment I saw what the Wrekin camp 
 is like I saw also that Wroxeter was meant to keep it in 
 check, that is, until it could be made untenable by the 
 conquest of all the surrounding country. The Wrekin 
 would not be the sort of nest which the Eomans would 
 care to occupy any more than the Celts would have elected 
 to fortify the site of Wroxeter on the level ground. In 
 Eoman times the inhabitants of the district would seem 
 to have been the Brythonic tribe of the Cornavii. 
 
 I. 
 
 If you search the volumes of the Archoeologia Gambren- 
 sis for the years 1863 (pp. 134-56, 249-54, 334) and 1864 
 (pp. 62-74, 156-76, 260-62) you will find the record of a 
 lively controversy between three men of eminence in the 
 field of history and archaeology, to wit, Edwin Guest, 
 Thomas Wright, and Thomas Stephens: they have all 
 passed away. The subjects of the discussion were Viro- 
 conium, or Uriconium as they called it, the Wrekin, and 
 
 the Elegy to Cyndylan in the Red Book of Hergest, a poem 
 
 b2 
 
4 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 which was subsequently published at length in Skene's 
 jFowr Ancient Books of Wales, vol. ii, pp. 279-91. The 
 elegy consists of over a hundred stanzas, and it has been 
 usually ascribed to Llywarch H^n. Stanza 80 mentions a 
 place called Dinlle TJreeonn, which Stephens understood 
 to mean the site of Viroconium, the lie 'place' of its din 
 'fortress', for of course he regarded the fortress itself as 
 a thing of the past. Guest and Wright took it to mean 
 the camp on the Wrekin, and I have no doubt that they 
 were right. Guest and Stephens agreed in their analysis 
 of the word Dinlle : they regarded it as a compound, 
 meaning, literally, a 'fortress place', which Guest inter- 
 preted as the place of an actual stronghold, that on the 
 Wrekin, while for Stephens it was the place where a 
 fortress had been at some time or other previously. It 
 happens that they were both wrong : not only is their 
 compound improbable in itself, but we have another 
 Dinlle, the history of the name of which is clear and easy 
 to understand. I mean the great mound known as Diuas 
 Dinlle, on the Arvon coast to the west of the western 
 mouth of the Menai Straits. 
 
 Now the Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy informs 
 us that NantUe, in the same county, took its name 
 from Llew Llawgyffes, whose older name was Lieu;' 
 but the Southwallian scribe of the Bed Booh was not 
 familiar with that name or with the name of Dinlle ; 
 so when he found Nantilev and Dinftev in his original, he 
 made them into Nant y tte6 and Dinas Dinttef,' though the 
 pronunciation meant was Nanttteu and Diniteu, or rather, 
 perhaps, Nant Lieu and Din Lieu. In fact, it was the 
 compression of the two words into one, with the accent on 
 the first, that brought about the shortening of the final 
 
 1 Ehys, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 398-400. 
 
 2 Rhys & Evans, MMnogion, pp. 71, 78 ; see also ed. note, p. 312. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 5 
 
 syllable so as to make the present forms, NantUe and 
 Dinlle. This gluing together of two words under one 
 accent is a favourite way of treating place-names in North 
 Wales : take for example Gastellmarch and Aberffraw. The 
 surmise as to the old pronunciation of the names in ques- 
 tion is established by the rhymes in one of the Tomb 
 Englyns given in the Myvyrian Archaiology, i, 78'', which, 
 put into a somewhat normalized spelling, runs thus : — 
 
 Y bed yngorthir Nantlleu The grave in the upland of NantUe — 
 
 Ny 6yr neb y gynnedfeu Nobody knows its properties : 
 
 Mabon fab Modron gleu. It is Mabon's, son of swift Modron. 
 
 The relation between LUw and Lieu is obscure : possi- 
 bly Llew was arrived at as the result of a popular tendency 
 to change Lieu into a more familiar word, and llew, 'a lion', 
 may have been regarded as quite satisfactory, though the 
 story of Lieu never gives him the shape of a lion, but, for 
 a while, that of an eagle. The old form of the name Lieu 
 should be Llou, and we seem to meet with it in the 
 Nennian Genealogies, contained in the British Museum 
 MS., Harleian 3859; see the Gymmrodor, vol. ix, 176, 
 where we have Louhen map Gvdd gen, that is Llou hen 'LI 
 the ancient', son of Gruidgen. The latter name was pro- 
 bably the full compound name of Grwydion, the father of 
 Lieu, GwydAon itself being the hypocoristic and secondary 
 formation from the compound ; the latter seems to occur 
 as Gwydyen in an obscure passage in the Booh of Aneirin, 
 where we have eryr Gwydyen,^ which, as meaning Gwydion's 
 Eagle, would exactly describe Lieu his son. The name is 
 
 1 Verse xl, Skene, ii, 75, Stephens's Oododin, p. 242. Since the 
 foregoing was written Professor Anwyl has pointed out another 
 instance of Gwydyen in the Myvyrian Arch., i, 230*' where one of the 
 names with which it rhymes is the singular one of Fobyen ; there 
 is, he tells me, a Caer Bobien between Aberystwyth and Machynlleth. 
 With Gwydion the Booh of Taliessin (Skene, ii, 158) associates a cer- 
 tain Gwytheint ; the name occurs as Gwideint in the Life of St. 
 
6 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 further reduced to Gwyden, which occurs in the Booh of 
 Taliessin (Skene, ii, 190, 193) . Further, the name Lieu has 
 been usually identified by me with the Irish hero, whose 
 name was Lug Lamfada, 'Lug of the long hand'. Li 
 Medieval Irish, to which Lug belongs, the genitive was 
 Loga ; and the Welsh Lou, to which Lieu has been traced, 
 is the etymological counterpart of Lug, Loga. 
 
 We have other instances of vowel-flanked g yielding 
 Welsh u, not w. The Latin word pugillares, meaning writ- 
 ing tablets, was borrowed into Welsh, where it appears as 
 •peullaSr, used in one of the Taliessin poems (Skene, ii, 141) 
 in the sense of 'books'. There is a still older form, with 
 ou, namely poulloraur, as a gloss on pugillarem paginam ; 
 see the Gapella Glosses, edited by Stokes, in Kuhn's 
 Beitrcege, vii, 393. The next instance I wish to mention is a 
 native one, meudwy, 'a hermit': the word is to be analysed 
 into mevr-dwy, meaning 'servus Dei', from dwy for dwyw, 
 'god', and meu, which has corresponding to it in 
 Medieval Irish, mug, genitive moga, 'a slave, a thrall'. 
 The relation between Lieu and Irish Lug, Loga, is exactly 
 the same as that between meu (in meudwy') and Irish mug, 
 moga. This is not proof direct of the identity of the 
 former words, but if you calculate you will find that the 
 chances against the identity being a mistaken one are 
 overwhelming, and in matters of etymology you can 
 seldom obtain a higher order of proof. 
 
 Having practically identified Lieu with the Irish Lug 
 we know where we are and how to proceed further. For 
 
 Beuno in the Elucidarium Volume of the Anecdota Oxoniemia, p. 124. 
 It is there given to the donor of Celynnog Fawr, in Arron, to the 
 Saint ; in the Record of Carnarvon, pp. 257, 258, it has been printed 
 Qtoithenit, which is probably less correct. 
 
 1 It would be interesting to know whether the pronunciation 
 tmudioy, that is moydiBy, is still to be heard in Dyfed or Morgannwg 
 in case of the word forming a part of some obscure place-name. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 7 
 
 the latter name occurred as that of Lugus in Gaulish;' 
 he seems, in fact, to have been one of the most popular 
 gods of the Continental Celts. Holder, in his AltcelUsch&r 
 8pr(ichschats, counts no fewer than fourteen towns on the 
 Continent called after Lugus, from Lyons to Leyden, and 
 probably dedicated to him as their special divinity. His 
 citations shew that the oldest form of the city name was 
 Lugudunon, but as Gaulish seems to have had a tendency, 
 like that of Welsh, to lay the stress on the penult, it 
 became Lugdunon, written in Latin Lugdunum. Compare 
 Holder's Bothmaros from Roto-mdros, and Mogitmdros from 
 Mogitvr-maros, with vnogitu == Welsh vnoed in Gweithfoed. 
 Lugudunon is a compound meaning 'the Lieu fortress', 'the 
 Lug town' ; for duno-n is represented in Welsh by din, of 
 much the same meaning as its Welsh derivative dinas, *a 
 fortress, a town or city' ; Irish had the related form dun, 
 genitive diine, of the same meaning and use, as in Dun- 
 garvan, Dunlavin and the like, in Anglo-Irish topography. 
 You will have anticipated my next proposition, that 
 Din-Lieu is nothing else than the compound Lugu-dunon 
 resolved into a quasi-compound or syntactical arrange- 
 ment, meaning 'the fortress of Lieu or Lug'. This 
 resolution of the old compounds is characteristic of the 
 later stages of Brythonic : thus an old compound like 
 Gwyndy is rare in Wales as compared with the looser 
 name of Ty gwyn, though they mean equally 'the White 
 House'. So to the fourteen Luguduna on the Continent, 
 we have practically two to add in this country, one on 
 the Wrekin and one near the Menai Straits — I have 
 quite recently heard of traces of a third. The compound 
 equivalent to Lugudunum would be, in modern Welsh, 
 
 ' For more notes on Lugus one may consult my sectional address 
 at the third Congress for the History of Religions, recently held at 
 Oxford : see the Transactions, vol. ii, pp. 218-24. 
 
8 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 Lleudm, and I should not be surprised if it were to be 
 discovered yet, say, in an obscure passage in one of the 
 Welsh poets. 
 
 At the Lugudunum now called Lyons, the festival of 
 Lug was probably held on the first day of August, the 
 month called after the emperor Augustus. On that day 
 also was dedicated there an altar to Rome and Augustus:' 
 the identity of the day for the two festivals was doubtless 
 not the result of accident, and the name of the emperor 
 was presumably thereby helped not a little to the popu- 
 larity which it acquired in Gaul. This day fell near a 
 great harvest day in the Coligny Calendar, namely, the 
 fourth day of the month of Eivros, approximately August, 
 called after Rivos, the name probably of the harvest god, 
 at any rate of the only divinity recognized in the frag- 
 ments of that document, namely, twice within the month 
 of Rivros. In Ireland, the feast on the First of August 
 was called Lugnasad after Lug, Lunasda in Scotland, and 
 Luanistyn in the Isle of Man ; but in Wales Augustus has 
 usurped the place of Lieu, so the feast is known as Gwyl 
 Awst 'the feast of Augustus', for I venture to translate it 
 so rather than as 'the feast of August'. The English for 
 it is Lammas, which is explained in the New English 
 Dictionary as derived from the Old English hldfmoBsse, 
 that is, literally, 'loaf-mass', for in the early English 
 Church the first of August, "Festum Sancti Petri ad 
 Vincula" in the Roman calendar, was "observed as a 
 harvest festival, at which loaves of bread were consecrated, 
 made from the first ripe corn". These indications seem 
 to associate the god Lieu-Lug with the corn harvest. 
 
 A fabulous story about the founding of Lyons is given 
 by the Pseudo-Plutarch, who introduces ravens into it ; 
 by itself it carries no weight, but coins occur on which 
 1 Hirsohfeld, Corpus Inacnptionum Latinarum, XIII, i, pp. 227 249. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 9 
 
 the genius of Lugudunum is attended by a raven.' Irish 
 literature represents Lug's son, Cuchulainn, commonly 
 attended by ravens. This I am prompted to mention in 
 connection with the Eaven's Bowl, pointed out on the 
 Wrekin rock, to which Miss Burne calls attention. 
 
 The mimic warfare for possession of the Wrekin hill 
 seems to form a vivid reproduction of more serious strug- 
 gles in the distant past between the Cornavii and their foes, 
 whoever they may have been. What may be the explana- 
 tion of its being fixed on the First of May I do not 
 know ; but that has always been an important day in the 
 Celtic calendar. The year began on iVos Galan-gaeaf, 'Night 
 of the Winter Calends', that is November Eve : second 
 only in importance to this was Nos Galan-mai, 'Night of 
 the May Calends', or May Eve. The third great day in the 
 calendar was the First of August already mentioned ; and 
 the fourth should be about the First of February, for filling 
 which Welsh folklore and literature do aot seem to help. 
 The Irish calendar, however, supplies Saint Bride,^ "chaste 
 head of Erin's nuns". Her attributes suggest that she 
 represented an earlier goddess of fire; in that case the 
 First of February was not badly chosen as the great day of 
 her cult. 
 
 1 See Holder, s.v. Luffudunon, ii, col. 313. 
 
 2 Her name in Irish was Brigit, genitive Brigte, but she was 
 almost singular in being also oaUed Sand Brigit, genitive Sanct 
 Brigte : so when her cult was imported into Wales her name became 
 Sanjfreid: it appears so in Evans's Facsimile of the Black Book of 
 Carmarthen, fo. 42°'- In modern Welsh it is — or should be — Sanffraid, 
 with the stress onffraid as in Llansanffraid. Sanffreid seems to imply 
 Saneta Bi-egit where the b had to be softened to v and the name to 
 become 8ant Vreid : but the contact of the voiceless mute t with v 
 made the latter also become voiceless. Thus arose Sant Ffreid, 
 whence Sanffreid, Sanffraid. Pymtheg 'fifteen', often wrongly ex- 
 plained, is a parallel : pempe-dec- hecame pymp-^eg, whence pymp-theg, 
 
lO All around the Wrekin. 
 
 II. 
 
 It is now clear, I hope, that Dinlle Ureconn was not 
 the Welsh name of Viroconium : Dinlle was a distinct 
 name meaning Luguduno-n, the stronghold of Lug, in 
 this instance the one on the Wrekin, Urecown,, more cor- 
 rectly Urecon, being added to prevent its being confounded 
 with another Dinlle. Urecon it may be pointed out here 
 was pronounced as a dissyllable Urecon ; in fact, had DMle 
 not been treated as a feminine we should have had DinUe 
 Gurecon, with the g developed before u or w according to 
 the usual Welsh rule, which, however, it is unnecessary to 
 dwell upon at this point. In Binlle Urecon the latter name 
 served as that of the district, and we have it in a slightly 
 different form in a much older manuscript than the Bed 
 Booh of Hergest. 
 
 I allude to a list of the Cities of Britain appended 
 to the Historia Brittonum, usually associated with the 
 name of Nennius. Those cities differ in their names 
 and their numbers in the manuscripts ; but one of them 
 mentions a Cair Guricon, which appears in another as 
 Cair Guorcon.' The spelling of this last is due to con- 
 fusion of the representative of uiro with the prefix which 
 in Gaulish was uer, as in Vercinqetorvc and VercassiveUau- 
 nos : in Welsh it became gwor or gwur, modern gm, and in 
 Irish /er and /or. Now Cair Guricon should be the caer or 
 fortress of Guricon, just as Cair Geint in the same manu- 
 script meant the Fortress of Kent. Such Cair Guricon, 
 that is Cair Guricon, would more correctly be Cair Uricon, 
 since cair was feminine. This was undoubtedly Viro- 
 conium, the site of which, near the village of Wroxeter, 
 
 1 ]?or both names see Mommsen's Historia Brittonum cum Addita- 
 mentu Nennii (published in the Chronica Minora Scec IV V VI VID 
 vol. Ill, i, 211. ■ > > , h 
 
All around the Wrekin. ii 
 
 is about three miles from the foot of the Wrekin and 
 visible from the Dinlle on the top of that hill. Here I 
 wish to mention that Guricon occurs as a woman's name in 
 Gurycon Godheu, one of Brychan Brycheiniog's many 
 daughters enumerated in the Lives of the Gambro-British 
 Saints, p. 274;' the same lady is called Gwrgon or 
 Gurgon in the lolo US8., pp. Ill, 120, 140. 
 
 Prom an early date in the sixth century vowel flanked 
 tenues seem to have been mutated, and the pronunciation 
 of these names was Gwrygon and Gwrgon, although one 
 went on for centuries writing c, t, p, just as if they had 
 remained wholly unaffected. This question is to be 
 touched upon later; here it will suffice to state the 
 conclusion that what we have taken as a district name 
 turns out to have been the proper name of a man or 
 a woman. Naturally the further inference is that the 
 Cornavii of the locality considered themselves descendants 
 of a common ancestor or ancestress, whose name was 
 Guricon, Gurecon, or Gurcon. In that way the personal 
 name became practically that of the district, which the 
 local toast in our day describes comprehensively as : "All 
 friends round the Wrekin". In the days of the Cornavii 
 they may have called themselves in the plural, Virocones ; 
 at all events there is no ti-ace of a formation like the 
 Latin Viroconium. The case is different with the possibly 
 related name of Ariconivm,, which may be related also to 
 Arcunia' and Hercynia (SilvaJ. It survives in Welsh as 
 
 1 See the "Brychan Documents", carefully edited by the Rev. A. 
 W. Wade-Evans in the Cymmrodor, xix, 26. 
 
 2 Holder's article on this name, and Walde's on quercui (in his 
 Latin Dictionary), require to be purged of the bogus Welsh words 
 introduced into them: these latter have been discussed briefly by me 
 in the Arch. Camb. Journal, 1907, pp. 87-8. As to cychioynnu, meaning 
 'to rise', add references to the Anecdota Oxoniensia (Jones & Rhys), 
 pp. 133, 135, 280. 
 
12 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 Ergyng, and in English in the district name of Archen&eld. 
 in Herefordshire. The former is given in the Historia 
 Brittonum as Ercing, and by GeofErey of Monmouth as 
 Hergi/n, while in the Liber Landavensis it has a variety 
 of spellings from Ergm to Ercicg, all pointing back to 
 some such a form as Ariconio-n, with an i in the second 
 syllable and a j in the last. 
 
 In Dinlle Urecon and Cair Uricon we have a common 
 element to equate with the Virocon- of the Latin forma- 
 tion Viroconium; for this seems to be the best attested 
 spelling. To explain the equation it is to be noticed that 
 the unaccented syllable vir, that is to say wir, was shortened 
 into iir, reducing the whole into Urocon-. The next point 
 to be noticed is that subsequent to the shortening into 
 Zfro-con-, this had associated with it, and eventually 
 substituted for it, an alternative Uri-corv-, perhaps also 
 Zfro-con- ; for the thematic vowel of the first element in 
 a compound was subject to much fluctuation. Thus our 
 post-Eoman inscriptions supply such instances as the 
 following: — Seng-magU and Sene-^magli, Vendesetli and 
 Vermi-setli, Vendur-magli and Vinne-magli. Compare such 
 variants in Gaul as Augustodunum and Augustidunum, 
 Orgetorix and Orgetirix, and others to be found in 
 Holder's pages. This being so JJriconium may very 
 possibly have been a real form of the Latin name, but 
 not so old as Viroconiwn, or even as Uroconium, which 
 may also have been one of its forms. The manuscripts of 
 the Antonine Itinerary, and of Ptolemy's Geography, 
 contain these and some more forms, which cannot be 
 discussed here. 
 
 Other compound names, beginning with viro as their 
 initial element, will be found given by Holder, but 
 in all of them viro is the stem of the word for 
 ' man', Welsh gwr, Old Irish fer, modern Irish fear, Latin 
 
All around the Wrekin. 13 
 
 vir. Analogy suggests that gwr represents a Gallo- 
 Brythonic mr6s, plural vvn, which should have given 
 singular wr, plural gwyr. Gwr may, however, have 
 obtained its initial g from the plural : in any case the 
 English Wrekin for Guricon shows no trace of any sound 
 before the w. So it would seem that the development of 
 u into gu dates after the coming of the English into the 
 district, or that, more correctly speaking, the sound was 
 there but not such as to make itself perceptible to the 
 English ear. For it is a feature characteristic not only of 
 Welsh, but of Cornish and Breton likewise, in which our 
 giur is written gour : the severance of these dialects may 
 be dated probably some time in the fifth century. The 
 shortening here in question took place in an unaccented 
 syllable; I gather that there was primarily another con- 
 dition, to wit, that the vowel in the next syllable should be 
 a broad one, 0, u, or a. 
 
 In the instances mentioned it was 0, as we have 
 had only the one element, uiro, to deal with; that 
 this extended to other words may be inferred from 
 the fact to be mentioned presently more in detail, that 
 unaccented ui or ue, followed by a narrow vowel in the 
 next syllable, is reduced to Welsh u, approximately of the 
 same sound as German u, not to Welsh w. Once, however, 
 wi/ro had become gwr, there might be a tendency to extend 
 the latter beyond its etymological limits, but Welsh Gwriad 
 for early Uiriatos, where the second * was i, and not 
 reckoned as a vowel, is not in point : compare the well- 
 known Irish name Ferad-aeh, later spelling Fearadhach. 
 
 In the Idber Landavensis a number of the compounds 
 involving uindo-s, modern Welsh gwyn 'white, blessed', 
 begin with gun, such as Gwnda, from Umdo-tamos, Ghmguas 
 from Vimdo-missos, Gunva from Umdo-magus, and the 
 Bishop of LlandafE's palace is called St. Teilo's Gwndy 
 
14 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 (p. 120), as if it were Uindo-tegos 'White House'. Most 
 names of the kind are liable in book Welsh to have the 
 y of gwyn re-inserted. We have an instance which has 
 resisted this kind of 'correction' in the name of the Car- 
 diganshire church of Llanwnnws or Gwnnws, probably 
 from Uindo-gustus, but the s of Gwnnws for st looks like a 
 touch of Goidelic influence. One may here also quote 
 from one of the MSS. of the Mistoria Brittonwm, loc. cit., 
 p. 193, the name of Gwrtheym's grandfather, Guttolion, 
 derived from Vitalianus, which occurs on one of the 
 bilingual monuments at Nevern, in Pembrokeshire. 
 
 But this phonetic change is by no means confined to 
 the vocables just mentioned ; we have it in forms of great 
 antiquity, representing the Indo-European perfect of one 
 of our few strong verbs. The Mahinogion, for instance, 
 have the following forms, gwdom, gwdam 'we know', 
 gwdawch, gwdoch 'you know', gwdant 'they know';' since 
 the Middle Ages they have y inserted after the analogy 
 of the other forms of that verb, such as gwydwn 'I knew', 
 gwyhyd 'will know', and gwyhod' 'the fact of knowing, 
 knowledge'. 
 
 ' I am indebted for a tabular survey of the tenses of the verb in 
 question, which occur in the Mahinogion, to Prof. J. Moms Jones, one 
 of whose pupils is preparing to publish on the verbal forms in those 
 tales. I should add to them gwdost, ' knowest ', which I cannot ex- 
 plain. Mod. Welsh gvyddost, in Breton gouzoud. The first person 
 singular was gwnn, now written gion, which looks like a contraction of 
 the form which has yielded Breton gouzonn, rather than derived from 
 a verb corresponding to Irish finnaim 'I find, I know'. 
 
 2 This implies uidi-bot- or uide-bot- with the thematic vowel 
 dropped before the d and b were mutated ; so uid-bot- yielded idpot-, 
 gwybod; but there was apparently a later compound with the con- 
 sonants mutated and yielding gwydfod ' immediate personal presence' 
 — yn ei wff^od = gn ei wgd 'within his knowledge or consciousness 
 as derived from his sense of sight, hearing, and touch'. The etymo- 
 logical equivalent in Breton seems to be gouzoud 'the fact of knowing'- 
 and the compounds with the verb 'to be' are on the same level for 
 
All around the Wrekin. 15 
 
 The corresponding forms in the kindred languages 
 make the structure of our Maiinogion verb at once 
 intelligible : take Sanskrit veda, Greek olSa 'Iknow', 
 Sanskrit plural yidma, Greek 'iSfiev 'we know'. Here the 
 root part of the verb appears in its strongest form in the 
 singular, while in the plural it is in its weakest ; Sanskrit, 
 moreover, represents the old accentuation, which explains 
 the Brythonic gwdom, for instance, as standing for some 
 such a form as uid-o-mos^ which was weakened into vdomSs, 
 whence, when penultimate accentuation became the rule, 
 udomo and (g)4dom, gwdom. The treatment was the same 
 in the second and third persons of the plural ; and so in 
 Breton, where the corresponding persons are (1) gouzomp, 
 (2) gouzoc'h, (3) gouzont; in Cornish (1) godhon, (2) 
 godhough, (3) godhons ; but, according to Jenner's Hand- 
 hook of the Garnish Language, pp. 147-8, from which I copy, 
 godh- has been spread almost over the whole of the con- 
 jugation. 
 
 This explains the etymological difference between 
 the perfect goruc or gorug, and goreu 'did, fecit'. The 
 former has by its side gorugum 'I did', and gorugost 
 'thou didst', but when this stem invaded the plural in 
 such forms as gorugam 'we did', and gorugant 'they did', 
 it was encroaching on the domain of goreu-, which, in its 
 
 instance goufenn 'I should know', probably for ffouz-venn, and so in the 
 case of afzjnaout = Welsh adnabod 'to be acquainted with', as to which 
 see my Celtic Insoriptions of France and, Italy, p. 9. The thematic 
 vowel belonging to the first part of gvjyhod and gwydfod was probably 
 i or e which we have in the Latin cognate verb vide-o. It emerges as 
 iin the Medieval Welsh form gwyctyvm 'I knew, je savais', gwydyei 
 (Skene ii, 69), and gwydyad 'he knew, ilsavaW : compare the Cornish 
 godhyen, godhya, and see Norris's Ancient Cornish Drama, ii, 263, 267. 
 
 1 As to some of the difficulties connected with the plurals of verbs 
 of the perfect tense, such as the connecting vowel, the unmutated m 
 and similar questions, see Brugmann's Orundriss, ii, 1205-7, 1212, 
 1245-9, 1354. 
 
1 6 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 turn, should not have appeared in the singular, but only- 
 help to make up such a form as gorevMm 'we did' for an 
 early uo-(u)rogom6s, whence uo^ogom, (g)uo-rog6m, guo- 
 rouom, gormom, or goreuam. Gorewom and goreuant are 
 not known to occur, for the reason, perhaps, that they have 
 not been looked for. In the singular, not only was the 
 root vowel lengthened, but the mute consonant was pro- 
 vected;^ both are processes which were probably carried 
 out under the stress accent. Thus, the third person 
 singular set out from uo-(u)roce, whence uo-roce, guo-mce, 
 guoruc, gorug. The corresponding Old Cornish was gwruk, 
 wruh, rule, rug, later gwrig 'did'. The present tense of 
 this verb in Welsh occurs in the compound cy^weiriaf 'I 
 put into working order', from the root verg, and is of the 
 same conjugation as the Old Irish do-airci (for do-vaircij 
 'efBects, prepares', Anglo-Saxon wyrcan 'to work, to build'.* 
 A shortening before the stress syllable, parallel to that 
 of uiro into uro, has taken place in the name TJrien, written 
 JJrhgen in the Ristoria Brittonum {he. cit. 63), the same name 
 most likely as that of the Helvetian pagus mentioned by 
 Caesar (i, 27) as Verbigenus. We have the Irish form possibly 
 in the proper name Fergen, in case that represents Ferbgen. 
 Another instance is Welsh uceint, now ugain 'twenty', 
 which points back to uicention; the Irish wasjfeAe 'twenty', 
 genitive fichet. We seem to have a third instance in 
 Welsh ucher 'evening', from uecsero-s = ueqsero-s, for 
 uesqueros of the same origin as Greek eowepo<s and Latin 
 vesper 'the evening'. The Old Irish was fescor, rtowfeascar 
 'evening'. All these cases differ from the previous ones, 
 in the contraction being not into w, but into the very 
 
 1 For instances of such provection see a paper of mine in the 
 Xevue Celtique, ii, 331-3. 
 
 ^ See the Ctrammatioa Celtica, pp. 591-3 ; Jenner, pp. 129-31 ■ 
 Stokes's UrkeltiscJier Sprachschatz — s.v. verg 'to work', p. 273. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 17 
 
 different vowel m: the probable explanation is that here 
 the accented syllable had the narrow vowel e, which 
 exercised an umlauting influence on the foregoing syllable. 
 None of these, it will be noticed, shows any trace of an 
 initial g in Welsh. 
 
 III. 
 
 Before proceeding any further, I wish to say a word 
 on early Celtic accentuation and desinence. The former 
 is not infrequently assumed to have been the same in 
 Brythonic as in Groidelio, but nothing could be more mis- 
 taken. In both, it is true, the accent, as far back as we 
 can trace it, was a stress accent, but in Goidelic it was fixed 
 on the first syllable in nouns and adjectives, while in 
 Brythonic it had only the range of the three last syllables 
 as in Greek. The older accentuation of Latin' appears to 
 have been on the first syllable, as in Goidelic, but in the 
 historical period it is found confined to the last three 
 syllables, as in Brythonic, which was probably the case also 
 with Gaulish. Within the three-syllable limit, Brythonic 
 — also probably Gaulish — tended to drive the accent to 
 the penultimate, and by so doing to put an end to both 
 oxytones and proparoxytones. The former would, in any 
 case, be probably few, containing among their number the 
 vwo-s 'man' already mentioned. The latter were common 
 enough in Gaulish in such names as the following, where 
 the position of the accent is practically indicated by the 
 forms taken in French by such place-names as ArgentS- 
 magus 'Argenton', Glaudio-magus 'Clion', Novio-magus 
 'Nyon and Noyon', Boto-magus 'Rouen', Gamho-ritvm, 
 
 ' Did the Umbro-Samnites, the neighbours of the Romans, accent 
 their words only within the last three syllables ? and, if so, had their 
 influence anything to' do with the change of accentuation in Latin ? 
 
1 8 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 'Chambort', NoviS^itum 'Niort and Fort'.' In Brj- 
 thonic we have instances in such names as Brigo-maglog, 
 Bridmail, Bridfael, and the like to be mentioned presently. 
 Some of the proparoxytones might have penultimates 
 with longvowels: take, for instance. Oaf w^jgres anABitu-riges, 
 whence the French place-names Charges and Bowrges. But 
 such a form as Bitu-riges may have had a tendency to become 
 Bitu-riges, which seems to be re-echoed in the province name 
 Berry. ^ Similarly Lugdwno-n, if it was Gaulish, must have 
 superseded the longer form, which was probably accented 
 Imgvr-duno-n, and later Lugu-duno-n, before the pretonic 
 part of the word was curtailed. A good instance of this 
 occurs in the case of the Gaulish preposition are, in Welsh 
 ar 'on, upon, at, irapd, irapai', as a prefix in the Gaulish 
 Aremorica, probably Aremorica, reduced early to Armorica 
 — the manuscripts of Csesar de Ballo Gallico show no trace 
 of the pretonic e. The same shortening is attested by the 
 Gaulish man's name Atpomarus, as compared with the more 
 usual form Atepomaros, to be mentioned again presently. 
 Holder, in his AUceltischer 8prachschate, i, 224, has an 
 Artegia, which is now Arthies in the department of Seine-et- 
 Oise: this stands for Are-tegia, where tegia represents 
 tegiha := tegisa, the neuter plural of tegos ' a house or hut ', 
 Old Irish tech, Welsh ty 'house'. With the Gaulish pre- 
 position translated into Latin ad we have ad tegia and ad 
 teia, which appears to have entered the place-name* Adtegia, 
 now called Athies, in the department of the Somme, and a 
 common noun attegia 'a hut or tent', not to mention that 
 tegia survives, for instance, in the Tyrol as thei, tai *an 
 
 1 See Meyer-Liibke in the Sitzungsberichte der kais. Akademie der 
 Wissenschaften in Wien, oxlii, ii, 40, 44 ; see also the separate 
 names in Holder's AUceltischer Sprachschatz, which is arranged 
 alphabetically. 
 
 2 See, however, Meyer-Liibke, loc. cit, p. 10. " 
 
All around the Wrekin. 19 
 
 Alpine hut', with which compare the Welsh iai 'houses', 
 Med. Welsh lei for tegia from iegesa.^ 
 
 One or two other instances will help to illustrate the 
 difference between Irish and Welsh with regard to accen- 
 tuation. One of the words in point is the Old Irish neuter 
 dorus 'a door', from some such a stem as duorestii-, in 
 Welsh drws from duorosf/u-, which must have been accented 
 duorSstu, otherwise the first syllable could not have been 
 reduced to the consonants dr: compare Graulish Duro- 
 casses, yielding in French the place-name Dreux. In Irish 
 this could not have happened, as the stress accent 
 would there be on the first syllable. A similar instance 
 offers itself ,in the name of the Denbighshire church 
 and town of Llanrwst, that is the llan of Gurgust. 
 When the second g of that name was dropped, the 
 pronunciation became monosyllabic Gwrwst or Gurust, 
 which, when preceded by the feminine llan = landa, became 
 Llanurust, whence the modern pronunciation of Llan 'rwst. 
 The original compound was Uiro-gustu-s, which made 
 Uro-gustu-s, and, subject to the tendency of the accent to 
 rest on the penultimate, became (G)uro-gustu-s, and later 
 Gurgust. For Irish the compound was Vira-gustu-s, bub 
 being accented on the first syllable the resultant form is 
 the well-known name Fergus. 
 
 The next instance to be mentioned is one in which 
 I cannot vouch for the correct sequence of the phono- 
 logical modifications involved : Old Irish had a neuter 
 noun aithesc, which comes from dti-segua-n, which 
 became dthesgua-n, cUthesc-n, For Brythonic this would 
 
 1 See Mayer-Liibke, loa. cit., pp. 12-13, who has been improved on 
 by Holder in several respects ; but from not knowing that tegia was 
 etymologically a plural itself, he has suggested ad tegia(») and are 
 tegia(s), with an s, which the authors of most of the old documents 
 to which he refers did not think necessary. See also Walde's 
 Lateinisches eti/moloffisehes Worterbuch, a. v. attegia. 
 
 2 
 
20 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 be ate-hepo-n, probably ate-hepo-n, whence ade-h&po-n, ode- 
 hep, ad-hep, dtep, dteh 'answer'. We have possibly traces 
 of this word in Gaulish : Holder gives two proper names, 
 Atepomaros and Ateporlx. They are usually explained with 
 some trouble, with the aid of the Gaulish epos 'a horse'; 
 but we have so much 'horse' in Gaulish nomenclature 
 that it is a relief to find something else. Should the 
 conjecture that atepo-n (for ate-hepo-n) enters into those 
 two names, the compounds must have meant respectively, 
 'One who is great in his replies' and 'One who answers 
 like a king'. It is needless to say that those great names 
 had shortened and hypocoristic forms: one of these 
 Holder gives as Atepihs, and from Latin contexts Atepa, 
 Atepatus, Atepiccus, Atepilla and Atepo, genitive Aleponis. 
 A Gaulish parallel to atepo-n would be ar&po-n^ from 
 are-hepo-n. I have no proof of its having existed, but in 
 Irish we have its counterpart in airesc 'a saying', in 
 Welsh di-areh 'a proverb', now pronounced dihdreb, plural 
 dia/rhehion. 
 
 There is no need to dwell in general terms on the con- 
 nection between the case endings of a word and the accent 
 which falls in that direction, as it did in Brythonic. 
 
 1. One of the points of principal importance to notice 
 is the fact that the endings of the nominative case in the 
 vowel declensions o-s, u-s, t-s, fell away so early that they 
 have not perceptibly affected our mutation system in Bry- 
 thonic. 
 
 ' This reminds me that Holder has are-pos suggested by the re- 
 versible words : SATOR They will be found in the Berlin C. I. L., 
 AREPO xii, 202*, where it is suggested that they 
 TENET are not earlier than the seventh century. 
 OPERA Holder mentions two translations which 
 ROTAS have been proposed of the puzzle ; they are : 
 o aireipav Uporpov Kparei cfyya rpoxovs, and "Le laboureur Arepo 
 tient aveo soin les roues". 
 
All arottnd the Wrekin. 21 
 
 2. There is no apparent reason why this remark should 
 be limited to the nominative endings just mentioned : it is 
 probable that their history was bound up with that of the 
 other short-vowel endings ; that is, they were all swept 
 away by the same phonological tendency, and in the same 
 period. The principal endings in point would be the 
 vocative singular e of the declension, the a of the 
 neuter plural in the nominative and accusative of all 
 declensions, the o-s of the genitive singular of the con- 
 sonantal declensions, the e-s of the nominative plural, 
 masculine and feminine of the same declensions, and the 
 e of the nominative and accusative dual in the same.' 
 
 3. On the other hand, the long-vowel endings are 
 supposed to have lasted longer, so that while the others 
 were wholly dropped the long vowel was only curtailed, 
 not completely dropped, for some time later. Thus, while 
 in the masculine mndo-s became (g)uind, gwynn, gwyn 
 'white', the feminine uindd only became uenda, whence 
 later (g)uend, gwenn, gwen. At all events the feminine 
 ending a aa a remained long enough to leave its mark 
 permanently on our mutation system. Take a common 
 instance like the feminine llaw goch 'a red hand', derived 
 Erom lama cocea, the c between the two vowels being 
 mutated to g by the influence of those vowels. Other 
 instances would be the genitive singular of the declen- 
 sion, which ended in J like the Latin domint, the 5 (or u) 
 of the dative of that declension, like Latin domind, and 
 the nominative plural in I like Latin domini. To these 
 should be added the ending 5 of the nominative, vocative, 
 and accusative of the dual in the declension, and of the 
 genitive dual in all the declensions. The vowels in question 
 
 ' A glance at Stokes's Celtic Declension, especially his tables, 
 pp. 100-04, or those in Brugmann's Grundriss, ii, 736-59, will make all 
 this clear. 
 
22 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 were probably reduced to i, o ox u before they ceased 
 altogether to be pronounced, which took place late enough 
 for them to have affected the mutation system. Why they 
 did not do so in the case of the plural is explained by the 
 endings : there was a lack of unanimity to establish a 
 mutation : the nominative plural of the declension, for 
 instance, ended in i, while the corresponding feminine had 
 as and the consonantal declensions es. Not so with the 
 dual, which, though comparatively little used, has left the 
 soft mutation to mark its presence in the background even 
 in Modern Welsh : witness, for instance, the Welsh word- 
 ing of the Church of England's bans of marriage, where 
 we have y deudyn hyn 'these two persons' : here the 
 softened d, in both instances, is due to the ancient dual. 
 For that number had a vowel termination in all the cases 
 except the dative, which had a dissyllabic ending : this is 
 not quite certain. But the others agreed in leading up to 
 the soft mutation, and a remarkable instance offers itself 
 in the elegy, already mentioned, to Cyndylan, stanza 28, 
 where we have the following lines : — * 
 
 Stauell gyndylan yspeitha6c [?] heno 
 
 g6edy ketwyr uoda6c 
 Eluan kyndylan kaea6c. 
 
 "Cyndylan's chamber, it is desolate to-night : 
 Gone the two contented warriors, 
 Blvan and torque-wearing Gyndylan." 
 
 1 See Skene's Four Ano. Books of Wales, i, 452, ii, 282, 445. In his 
 notes Skene writes as follows: — "The first 57 stanzas of this poem 
 have been carefully translated by Dr. Guest in the Archeeologia Cam- 
 brensis, ix, p. 142, and the translation has been, with his permission, 
 adopted. The reader is referred to the notes by Dr. Guest on this 
 part of the poem. The remaining stanzas have been translated by 
 Mr. Silvan Evans." In this instance, Skene's process of 'adopting' 
 Guest's translation involves changing the latter's "contented" into 
 "contended", and misrepresenting the sense of the original* for 
 Guest was practically right here, though he was not by any means 
 
All around the Wrekin. 23 
 
 The words in question more particularly are ketwyr 
 uodadc, which seem to point back to an early combination 
 catvr-idro bodoco which, as regards the case ending of the 
 dual, might be nominative, accusative, or genitive. The 
 preposition guedy 'after' should decide, but it is not known 
 what case it governed. In Old Welsh it is found as guetig 
 and guotig,^ but the etymology is obscure. If it involves 
 a nominal element it probably governed the genitive ; of 
 the three cases, the only other one which the sense would 
 seem to admit is the accusative, which appears less likely 
 than the genitive. 
 
 We may now examine the alternative forms Qwricon 
 and Gurcon from the point of view of their etymology, so 
 as to shew in what sense they are entitled to be regarded 
 as equivalents. It happens that we have the exact 
 equivalent of Gurcon or Gv/rgon, in the Irish name 
 Ferchon, which is nought else than the genitive of a 
 compound which is in the nominative Ferchu,' to which 
 corresponds exactly the Old Welsh Gurcu in the Liber 
 Landavensis, later Gurci, sounded Gwrgi : it is matched by 
 Gurcon in the same manuscript, which supplies a number 
 of other similar instances, such as Flcu or Elci, and Elcwn 
 or Ficon, Guidci and Gvddcon. But though those ending 
 in con or cun were, etymologically speaking, the genitives 
 of those ending with cm, ci, they are there treated as 
 distinct names. This would have been impossible here in 
 
 equal to the task he had undertaken. If Silvan Evans had trans- 
 lated the 67 stanzas we should have had a correct rendering of the 
 portions then intelligible to a man well trained in literary Welsh. 
 Skene, however, does not appear to have known enough Welsh to 
 help him to judge correctly as to their respective merits in the 
 matter of translating. 
 
 1 See the Grammatica Celtica, p. eSS""- 
 
 2 See Windisch's Tdin B6 CHailnge, 2,893, 2,914, and The Book of 
 the Bun Cow, f. 82''- 
 
24 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 Old Irish, as Ferchon would at once be associated with 
 Ferchu, cu, genitive' con, being words familiar to all who 
 spoke Irish. It was different in a language where, as in 
 Brythonic, the system of case-endings had gone to pieces. 
 So we find the same thing happening in other instances : 
 take, for example, the Latin word for city or state, civitas, 
 genitive civitatis ; in Welsh the one yielded regularly 
 eiwed and the other ciwdawd or ciwdod. Here the 
 language has utilized both; ciwed has now the sense of 
 'a rabble', and ciwdod that of the people or population of 
 a city. We have another instance in trined and trindod, 
 from Latin trinitas, genitive trinitatis 'a trinity'. Here 
 the language, having seemingly found no special use for 
 trined, lets it become obsolete. Lastly, we have a native 
 instance in Ghuyned and Crwyndod (for Gwyndot), from an 
 early Venedos, genitive Venedotos, which occurs in a Latin 
 inscription as Venedotis, to wit, at Penmachno in Carnarvon- 
 shire. Gwynett is the form in ordinary use, while Gwyndod 
 is left to the poets, and to be the base for Gwyndodes 'a, 
 Venedotian woman', and Gwyndodeg 'the Venedotian 
 dialect of Welsh'. 
 
 Similarly, the accent has left us a certain number 
 of compound proper names with two forms each, as 
 Urbagen or Urbeghen, and Urbgen,^ later Urien; Tutagual 
 and Tudwal ; Dumnagval and Dyfnwal ; Dinogat or Dinagat 
 and Dingad. The early nominatives of these last were 
 Toutovalos, Dubnovalos or Bumndvalos, and Diinocatvs, to 
 which may be added Brigomaglos, which became later 
 Bridmail, Bridfael. This accentuation has been proved in 
 the case of names of similar composition, and the same 
 number of syllables in Gaulish; see p. 17 above. But, as 
 
 1 See the Historia Brittonum, loc. cif., 206-7 ; Nicholson's "Filius 
 Urbagen" in Meyer & Stern's Zeitschrift fiir celtische Philologie, 
 iii, 104-11. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 25 
 
 in our instances the endings -os and -us were discarded 
 early, the nominatives became, for example, Toutoval and 
 DunScat, which provided a stable position for the accent. 
 That is proved by the later forms being Tutdgual (or 
 Tuddwal) and Dinogat (or Dvndgat), without any shifting 
 of the accent. This would apply probably also to the 
 corresponding Brythonic accusatives, To-utovalon and 
 Dunocatun ; but when we come to case-endings with a long 
 vowel, which would remain longer intact, a shifting of the 
 accent probably took place : thus the genitives Tout6-vali 
 and Du7i6-catdus or Buno-catos, became probably Touto-vdli 
 and Duno-cdtos, whence resulted Tout-udli, Bwn-gdtos, 
 whence Tududl, Dingdt, and later, Tudwal, Dmgad. The 
 resulting forms in the dative, ablative, locative, and 
 instrumental would, if they existed, be probably identical. 
 One of the steps here guessed, namely, that from Touto-valt, 
 let us say, to Tout-udli, recalls a Gaulish proper name 
 already mentioned as Atepilos, that is probably Atepilos. 
 We seem to meet with its genitive variously written AtpiU 
 and Atpilli, which were accented, probably AtpiU, Aipilli. 
 See Holder s.v. Atpillos, Atpilos, nominatives for which, be 
 it observed, he cites no authority. 
 
 The foregoing instances belong to the declension 
 (Toutovalos) and the U declension CDunocatus) ; when we 
 come to the consonantal declension it is not so clear what 
 has happened, but the same general rules of accentuation 
 may be assumed to have applied. The results, however, 
 differ conspicuously from those in the vowel declen- 
 sions, for here we may have not two forms but three. 
 Unfortunately the names to our purpose are only two : 
 they have both been already partly discussed, G-v/rcu and 
 Mailcu. The nominatives must have been Uirocu, 
 Maglocu, accented probably on the cu ; this would lead to 
 the elision of the immediately preceding the stress 
 
26 Alt around the Wrekin. 
 
 syllable, and, with the consonants softened previously, we 
 should have [Glwrgii (written [G]wrcu.), Gwrgi, Gwrgi (written 
 Gurci). Similarly with Mailcu, Elcu, and the like. Next 
 comes the genitive^ which should have been Uirocunos or 
 Uiroconos, reduced to Uroconos, with optional forms 
 Ureconos or Urieonos. These fall into the same accentua- 
 tion as Brigomaglos, ToutSvalos, and the like, yielding 
 accordingly Vreconos or Urieonos, and, when the short- 
 vowel case ending went, Urecon or TJricon, whence the 
 attested forms Ureconn, Gwricon, Gurycon. There remains 
 Gurcon, which may be explained in one of two ways. 
 (1) The gwr of Gurcon may be due simply to the analogy 
 of Gurcu in the nominative, and the formation may have 
 been meant as a genitive, which in due course superseded 
 Guricon. (2) It is, on the whole, more probable that it 
 represents another case, say, the dative. So we set out from 
 TJrSconl with a final t as in Latin hominl, and assume that 
 it would take longer time for the i to be dropped than in 
 the case of a short-vowel termination. So we may set 
 down JJrgSm as the next stage, whence one arrives at 
 TJrgSn, Gurgon, Gwrgon (written Gurcon). 
 
 One would reason similarly as to Mailcon or Mailcvn, 
 and we have a trace of the genitive as Meilochon in Brvde 
 mac Meilochon, the name of more than one Pictish king : 
 the father of the first of that name has sometimes 
 been supposed to have been Maelgwn, king of Gwyned. 
 It is remarkable that B. mac Meilochon comes in Bede's 
 Ecclesiastical History, iii, 4 : in Irish annals it is more 
 usually mac Mailcon or mac Maelchon. In Meilochon, 
 as well as in Maelchon, the ch is an Irish touch, which 
 must be due to the scribe who first wrote it in this name 
 being aware of the fact that in Brythonic the original c 
 was mutated to g, whether written so or not, and that the 
 corresponding Irish mutation was to ch, which he accord- 
 
All around the Wrekin. 27 
 
 ingly used in his spelling of this genitive, Meilochon : that 
 is to say, he knew that the Brythonic pronunciation was 
 Mailogon, probably Mailogon ; we have possibly the same 
 formation in Breton, to wit, in Maelucun, which occurs in 
 the Cartulary of Landevennec, published by MM. Le Men 
 and Ernault. Gildas, addressing Maelgwn in the voca- 
 tive, calls him Maglocune, which suggests that he would 
 have used Maglocunus as the nominative in Latin. With 
 this agrees the bilingual inscription lately discovered at 
 Nevern, in which the Latin genitive is Maglocuni, though 
 the Goidelic genitive is Maglicunas.^ It is interesting to 
 find GeofBrey of Monmouth producing a faint echo of the 
 purely Brythonic declension of the name in his Malgo, 
 genitive Malgonis, accusative Malgonem. 
 
 On looking back at our conclusions, which have been 
 drawn from the foregoing instances, we seem at first sight 
 to have a difiiculty in the fact that the longer forms 
 Dinocat, and Tutdgual, appear to have been nominatives, 
 and the short ones Bingat, Dingad (as in Llan Dmgad) and 
 Tutgwal, Tudwal (as in Tnys Tudwal) to have been, let iis 
 say, genitives, while Guricon or Gurecon, and Meilochon, 
 that is, Mailogon must be genitive, and the shorter ones, 
 Gwcu, Gwrgi, and Mailcu, Elcu, nominatives. There is no 
 real difficulty; it has been shown practically that the 
 former belong to the vocalic declensions and the latter to 
 the consonantal ones. The discrepancy between them was 
 connected with the break up of the older and fuller in- 
 flection of the noun. In fact, this difEerence of declension 
 was possibly one of the things which helped to accelerate 
 that result. The state of things which this indicates 
 may be appositely compared to what happened in Old 
 French when the Latin declensional system broke up. 
 There one finds, for example, the cas regime of the mascu- 
 1 See the Archceologia Cambrensis, 1907, p. 84. 
 
28 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 line singular identical in form with the cas sujet of the 
 plural, and often enough the cas svjet of the masculine 
 singular with the cas regime of the plural.' The question 
 how the declensional system in Brythonic disappeared is 
 one of great difficulty, owing chiefly to a great scarcity of 
 data ; but, in fact, the few data available have never been 
 studied and forced to give up their latent evidence. 
 
 The Nevern Ogam, with the genitive Maglicunas, proves 
 beyond doubt that the second element is the word for 
 'dog', nominative cu, genitive cunas, dative cwni, which in 
 Brythonic were probably cimos, cum. In Celtic names 
 this word had the secondary meaning of guardian, 
 champion, or protector: so Uiro-cu, Ghircu, Irish Ferchu, 
 would mean, literally, a 'man guardian' or 'man protector'. 
 In the other compound, the one with maglo-s, Modern 
 Welsh mael, and Irish mdl 'a nobleman, a prince, a king', 
 that vocable is supposed to come from the same root as 
 Greek /leyaXr), Gothic miJeils 'great', and Scotch michle 
 'great, much'. In Irish annals the name should appear 
 as Mdlchu, genitive Mdlchon, but I have no note of meet- 
 ing with an instance except in the Nevern Ogam. The 
 name should mean a ' prince guardian' or 'king protector'. 
 This use of the word for dog or hound in Celtic personal 
 names is very remarkable, and is borne out by Celtic 
 history : the Gauls, for instance, used dogs in their wars, 
 and Strabo tells us that dogs fit for hunting and for war 
 used to be exported to Gaul from this country. The Irish 
 word cu is epicene, and in Welsh names it is not restricted 
 to men : witness Gwrgon and Gurycon as the name of one 
 of Brychan's daughters already mentioned, to which may 
 be added from the Book ofLlan Ddv a Leucu (Hiugel's wife), 
 p. 236, later Lleuci.' So with y Weilgi 'the wolf-dog', as a 
 
 1 See Nyrop's Orammaire historique de la Langiie franqaise, ii, 184-9. 
 ' D. ab Gwilym, poem clxvi, has Lleucu, however, to rhyme with 
 
All around the Wrekin. 29 
 
 poetic term for the sea, which, though of the same com- 
 position as the Irish man's name Faelchu, is a feminine.' 
 
 IV. 
 
 A word must now be said of the English forms of the 
 name in question, and here I am very pleased to acknow- 
 ledge my complete indebtedness to the kindness of 
 Mr. Stevenson, the learned editor of Asser's Life of King 
 Alfred. According to him WreJein derives directly from 
 Wreoeen, which he treats as a Mercian modification of 
 an original Wrekun or Wrikim, the form taken in Old 
 English by WriJcon, that is the Celtic Uricon. The name 
 Wrocwardine is, in its first part, of the same origin, and 
 represents what must have been in Old English Wreocen- 
 weordign "Wrekin village or Wrekin farm". This became 
 successively what is found written WroJcewwrdin or (with 
 Norman ch = h) Wrochewurdi/n, later Wrochwwrdin or 
 WroewurSin : that is, Wreoeen is first reduced to Wroke, 
 and then to Wroc, in the "compound. The case of 
 Wroxeter must have been partly similar. For, setting 
 out from Wreocen-ceaster, we get a form written Wrocce- 
 eestre, and French influence makes cestre into sestre, so one 
 arrives at Wrockesestre, which readily becomes Wroxeter.' 
 
 The English form Wrekin, and the others derived from 
 the same Celtic original, suggest conclusions as to that 
 
 I>yddgu, in which the second syllable possibly represents cu 'dear, 
 beloved'. But in any case one is tempted to ask why Lleucu is not 
 modified into Zleuci, Lleugu, or Lleugi. The same is the case with 
 gwenci, a feminine, which is the word in North Cardiganshire for a 
 weasel. 
 
 1 See the Blaoh Book of Carmarthen, f . 38b., and Skene, ii, 40. 
 In the curious passage about the river fabled to have once separated 
 Britain and Ireland, y teymassoed should be emended into y 
 theyrnassoed 'her realms': see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 35. 
 
 * As Mr. Stevenson's monograph is rather too long for a footnote, 
 it will be found printed at length at the end of this paper. 
 
30 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 original which are of interest from the point of view of 
 Brythonic phonology. Setting out from Uirocoi^, we tnow 
 that before it was adopted by the English uiro had not 
 only become uro, but uro and its alternative iiri or ure had 
 further become monosyllabic, wo, wri. This latter process 
 of shortening may be dated as near as you like to the 
 conquest of the Wrekin district by the English, provided 
 it be treated as dating before that conquest and not after 
 it. The antecedent change of mro into iiro occurs beyond 
 Welsh in the Breton language, where the word spelt in 
 modern Welsh gwr 'a man, vir' is written gow. In other 
 terms we may probably regard uro for uiro as common 
 Brythonic, and an accomplished fact before the separation 
 of Welsh and Breton, say some time in the fifth century. 
 In the other direction it had not taken place at the time 
 when the Romans first became acquainted with the 
 Cornavii of the district. This can hardly have been later 
 than the presence in this country of the Roman general 
 Ostorius Scapula, who received command here in the year 
 50, and proceeded, among other things, to maintain a 
 boundary extending from the Severn to the basin of the 
 Trent. It may be guessed to have reached from the site 
 of Viroconium to that of Pennocrucium. In fact it is 
 possible that Ostorius it was that selected the former 
 site and began to fortify it. 
 
 The next point of importance to be mentioned is that 
 when the English borrowed the word which became 
 Wrekin, the Brythons had not as yet mutated the vowel- 
 flanked c into g, otherwise the Old English Wreocen would 
 not have c or k, but g, or else a sound derived from g. 
 One naturally asks next when did the English first become 
 familiar with the district and its name : no certain answer 
 has ever been given that question. It is true that an 
 entry in the Saaion Chronicle has been supposed by some 
 
All around the Wrekin. 31 
 
 to supply it. Under the year 584 we read to the following 
 effect: — "In this year Ceawlin and Cutha fought against 
 the Britons at the place which is named Fethanleag, and 
 Cutha was there slain ; and Ceawlin took many towns 
 and countless booty ; and, wrathful, he thence returned to 
 his own." The difficulty is to identify Fethanleag ; some 
 have suggested a place in Gloucestershire, in which case 
 the entry would be irrelevant here ; but Dr. Guest argued 
 for its identity with a place now called Faddiley, near 
 Nantwich, in Cheshire. In that case Ceawlin, marching 
 up the Severn valley, could hardly avoid having to do with 
 the people of the Wrekin district : he could not have ven- 
 tured further north without getting possession at least of 
 Viroconium, or of effecting its destruction, that is to say if 
 its destruction had not happened some time or other 
 previously. 
 
 This is, however, not a very satisfactory way of 
 trying to date a phonological change, so I would now 
 turn to Bede. It has already been suggested that the 
 Meilochon in his Ecclesiastical History seems to imply that 
 the name had, in Brythonic pronunciation, been modified 
 from Mailocon into Mailogon. But the same work contains 
 other names in point, such as that of Caedmon, the first 
 Northumbrian poet. He died in 680, and his name is a 
 form of that which Welshmen went on writing for a long 
 time afterwards as Gatman, now Gadfan. Similarly with 
 Gaedualla, both as the name of the Venodotian king, called 
 in Welsh Gatguollaun, later Gadwallon, who was blockaded 
 in the Isle of Glannog, or Priestholme, by the English in 
 629, and as the name of a West Saxon king who, according 
 to Bede, gave up his throne in 689, The early Celticform 
 of the name must have been Gatwuellaunos, the plural of 
 which is attested as the name of the Catuvellauni, one of the 
 most powerful tribes in Britain in the time of Caesar. Bede 
 
32 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 mentions, also, a Welsh king Cerdic : his words are "sub 
 rege Brettonum Cerdice", and Mr. Plummer, the editor of 
 Bede's historical works, rightly suggests that this was 
 probably the Ceretic whose death is given in the Annales 
 Gambrioe, a.d. 616. The same name occurs also in the shorter 
 spelling Gertie, given in the Mistoria Brittonum to the king 
 of Elmet, expelled by Edwin of Northumbria. That is, 
 there were two Brytlionic forms, Geretic and Gertie, parallel 
 to such pairs as Dinogat and Bi/ngat, Tudawal and Tudwal ; 
 and the shorter form Gertie had reached Bede, with the t 
 reduced in pronunciation to d; so he wrote Gerdde.^ 
 
 Here it may be asked, what about the unmutated c in 
 this name ; but the rule as to vowel-flanked consonants 
 does not apply. Mr. Plummer kindly informs me that it 
 was Bede's habit to place the proper name in apposition 
 to the appellative accompanying it, which means here that 
 the ending e of Gerdice has to be regarded as the Latin 
 ablative case termination supplied by Bede, the name as he 
 got it being Gerdie. Now a final consonant was not sub- 
 ject to more than half the mutational inducement which 
 was exercised on a consonant not preceded only, but also 
 followed, by a vowel. As a matter of fact the consonant 
 proves to have resisted much longer, and this persistence 
 has left its impress on the spelling down to the late Middle 
 Ages : witness the final t and c (less often p) regularly re- 
 tained in the spelling usual, for instance, in the Mabinogion 
 in the Eed Book of Rergest. The same remarks apply to 
 Bede's "in silva Elmete": he had the name as Elmet, 
 
 1 See Plummer's Bede, i, 256 (book iv, 23), ii, 247, and the Historia 
 Brittonum, loc. cit., p. 206 ; see also p. 177, where Vortigern's inter- 
 preter's name is variously given as Ceretic and Cerdic. StiU more 
 remarkable is the debftt in the Saxon Chronicle, a.d. 495, of a prince 
 whose name Cerdic or Certio suggests intermarriage with Celts even 
 earlier than can be implied by the case of Caedwalla, 
 
All around the Wrekin. 2)% 
 
 which in Welsh is now Mfed, in English Elmt, as the 
 name of a district containing the parish church of Cynwyl 
 Elfed, so called to distinguish it from Cynwjl Gaeo, both 
 in Carmarthenshire. It is this Elvet, probably, that I seem 
 to detect in the bilingual inscription at Trallwng, near 
 Brecon, where the Ogam version reads Gunacennivi Ilvveto 
 'the Grave or Place of Cunacenniu of Elvet': this shows 
 the Welsh reduction of Im to Iv, for Im would have per- 
 sisted had the word been purely Irish. The Latin version 
 of the inscription will be mentioned later. Elmet, Elfed 
 was possibly not a very uncommon pl^ce-name : Bede's 
 instance survives in 'Elmet Wood', near Leeds. 
 
 Bede gives a still simpler instance, loc. cit., i, 82, namely, 
 'Dinoot abbas', the abbot of Bangor, who met Augustine 
 in one of the first years of the seventh century. In later 
 Welsh the name was Bwnawt, now Dimod, being the Latin 
 Dondtus, borrowed and pronounced at the time to which 
 Bede refers, probably as Dunot, with u tending to the 
 unrounding characteristic of the pronunciation of Welsh 
 u. When exactly the mutation of Welsh final consonants 
 took place in our Welsh texts has not, as far as I know, 
 been carefully studied. It is relevant to mention that the 
 sister dialects of Welsh, namely, Cornish and Breton, 
 appear never to have carried this mutation through. If 
 one consult Le Gonidec's Dictionary of Breton, one finds, 
 for instance, such alternatives' as tat and iad corresponding 
 to Welsh tad 'father', bet and bed to Welsh byd 'world'. 
 So with many more, including words where Le Gonidec 
 
 ^ I take the forms ending with the tenues to be the older, but the 
 rules as to the use of the two sets do not seem to have been 
 exhaustively studied. Professor Joseph Loth has kindly referred me 
 to an article in which he has touched on them : see the Annates de 
 Bretagne, xviii, 617, also x, 30, where one of his pupils has discussed 
 an aspect of the same question, 
 
34 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 suggests no option, such as oam/ih 'a little lamb', Welsh 
 oemg ; troadeh 'having feet, having big feet', Welsh troediog 
 'having nimble feet, active on one's feet', which is the com- 
 mon meaning given the vford in Gwyned; hevelep 'equal, 
 similar', Welsh cyffelyb 'similar', partly of the same origin 
 as the Breton adjective. It is possible that we have some 
 instances in Welsh itself : they would be short-vowel mono- 
 syllables of which there is no lack in Welsh ; but most of 
 them, when examined, prove to be English loanwords. 
 
 The foregoing notes on the proper names, preserved by 
 Bede, suggest two questions : the first is, when did the 
 English become familiar with the Brythonic names which 
 he gives as Gaedmon, Gaedualla, and Gerdic-e : perhaps 
 Aehhercwrn-ig 'Abercorn' should be added to them : see 
 Bede, i, 12. The Annales GambrioB carry us, in the case 
 of Cerdic, probably back to 616. We do not know 
 for certain when Csedmon, and Csedwalla of Wessex were 
 born, but before they were called by those names, time 
 enough must be allowed to have elapsed for intermarriage 
 or other processes of race amalgamation to render it 
 possible for Brythonic names to have had a chance of 
 emerging among the conquerors. On the whole the open- 
 ing of the seventh century appears by no means too early 
 as the approximate date of the earliest acquaintance of 
 the English with those three names. If that should prove 
 tenable one might, roughly speaking, lay it down that the 
 mutation of vowel-flanked tenues was an accomplished 
 fact by the year 600. The absence of that mutation in 
 the name Wrekin and its congeners does not enable us to 
 fix on a very much earlier time for the change, at most, 
 perhaps, half a century : so let us say 650, or thereabouts. 
 Nevertheless, the subtle and imperceptible beginnings of 
 the tendency to mutate the consonants, to slacken the 
 contacts made in pronouncing them, must date earlier, 
 
All around the Wrekin. 35 
 
 since the same mutation system is characteristic of all the 
 Brythonic dialects. 
 
 The other question is, when did the mutation of final 
 tenues take place in Ceredic, Dunaut, Elmet, and similar 
 vocables. It will be found on enquiry that the tendency 
 to make that change had probably exhausted itself before 
 the period when the mass of English loanwords in colloquial 
 Welsh found their way into "Wales j for in them this 
 mutation is seldom found carried through. The following 
 may seiTe as instances, to which many more might be 
 added : adargop or adyrgoh ' a spider', a word in use in the 
 Vale of Clwyd, and derived from Old English attereoppe 'a 
 spider', also Welsh copa, cop or coh from coppe 'a spider': 
 the more common term for spider is in Welsh eopyn or pryf- 
 copyn. Another instance is clwt 'a rag or clout', from 
 some English form other than clout, which, in the sense of 
 a blow, has yielded the Welsh clewt 'a box on the ear'; 
 and, lastly, Uac, from English slack, the meaning of which 
 it retains; whop 'a blow, stroke, or slap' (D. ab Gwilym, 
 poem 196), more frequently used as an adverb meaning 
 'with the suddenness or quickness of a blow', pronounced 
 in Cardiganshire whap, and in Glamorgan wap, while the 
 verbal noun in the former county is wahio 'to beat'. The 
 origin is to be sought in the dialectal English whap, wap 
 'to strike sharply or with a swing ; a blow, a knock, a 
 smart stroke': see Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. 
 
 There remains to be mentioned one of the most common 
 words in South Wales (except North Cardiganshire), one 
 that has always struck me as not of Welsh origin : it is 
 the word crwt 'a lad, a small boy', with its derivatives 
 crwiyn of the same meaning, and the feminine croten 'a 
 lass, a little girl'. To recognize the origin of these words 
 one has only to turn to Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, 
 and, in its proper place, one finds the word crut explained 
 
 d2 
 
36 
 
 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 as meaning "a dwarf ; a boy or girl, stunted in growth". 
 The word is there stated to belong to Northumber- 
 land, Yorkshire, and Pembrokeshire, and the reader is 
 referred further to cvit and croot. Of these, trii is 
 explained as having, among other meanings, those of 'the 
 smallest of a litter' and 'a small-sized person', while 
 croot is given as the form usual in Scotland, meaning 'a 
 puny, feeble child ; the youngest bird of a brood ; the 
 smallest pig of a litter'. All this raises the question when 
 and whence crwi was introduced into Welsh: it looks as 
 though it was from Little England below Wales. When, 
 in that case, one bears in mind the former hostility 
 between Wales and that isolated England, it will not sur- 
 prise one that the word is not admitted into Welsh prose. 
 Similar questions attach to most examples of this class, 
 and few of them are regarded as literary words to be found 
 in Welsh dictionaries. An exhaustive and carefully classi- 
 fied list of them is much wanted. When made it would 
 probably throw much needed light on the intercourse 
 between the Welsh and the English from the time of 
 King Alfred down. An excellent beginning was made 
 some years ago, in his own dialect, by Prof. Thomas Powel 
 in the Gymmrodor; but search requires to be made in all 
 the Welsh dialects, as they have not always borrowed the 
 same words. This would form a good subject for research 
 work by one or more of the scholars trained by the 
 professors of Celtic at our University Colleges in the 
 Principality. 
 
 Reference has been made to the bilingual inscription on 
 a sepulchral stone at Trail wng, near Brecon : the Latin 
 version has been misread by me, and, T believe, by others. 
 What I make of it now, on the strength of a photograph 
 given me by the late Mr. Eomilly Allen, is the following : — 
 
All around the Wrekin. '^'J 
 
 CVNOCENNI FrLIV[S?] 
 CVNOqENI HIC lACIT 
 
 That is to say : "The grave or the cross of Cunocenn : the 
 son of Cunogeii lies here." In the Ogam the equivalent 
 for Cuno-cermi is Oima-cennivi, and one perceives that there 
 was here a decided wish to keep to family names with the 
 same initial element Owno-, Goidelic Guna-, which has 
 already occupied us. In other terms, the two names 
 GvMocenn and Gunogen have to be carefully distinguished : 
 the former became in Welsh Goncenn (Goncen) or Gincenn, 
 and later Gyngen, pronounced Gyng-gen, while the latter 
 became successively Gongen, Gingen, with a soft spirant, gh, 
 which might either become i or else disappear. In the 
 former case we might expect Ginyen, which I have not 
 met with, and in the other Ginen, which would have, how- 
 ever, to be written Ginnen, as the first vowel remained a 
 blocked one and the later pronunciation and spelling were 
 Gyn-nen,'' not Gy-nen. The Booh of Llan Ddv^ carefully 
 distinguishes Goncenn from Gongen, as in the names of the 
 three abbots : "Concen abbas Carbani uallis, Congen abbas 
 Ilduti, Sulgen abbas Docguinni." Substantially this is also 
 the case with the oldest MS. of the Amiales Gcmhrice, and 
 with the Nennian Genealogies, both published (from the 
 British Museum MS., Earleian 3,859) by Mr. Phillimore in 
 the 9th volume of the Gymmrodor. There they are Gincenn 
 (or Gineen) and Ginnen, but some of the later MSS. of the 
 Annales Gawhriae, by retaining the g, which had ceased to 
 be heard, and writing Gyngen or Kengen (for Kennen), 
 appear to have misled not only Williams Ab Ithel, but 
 even more recent writers. The personal name enters into 
 
 ' It is possible that Cennen is a variant of this name, to wit, in 
 Carreg Cennen, 'Cennen's Rock', on the top of which the ancient 
 Carmarthenshire castle of Carreg Cennen stands. At the foot of 
 that remarkable site flows the river Cennen. 
 
 ^ See pp. 152, 154, 155, and others duly given in the Index. 
 
^8 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 that of a farm called Cyneinog and Gyneiniog at the top 
 of the basin of the Eleri in North Cardiganshire. It 
 analyses itself into Cyn-ein-i-og = Owno-gen-i-aco^n,, and 
 compares with Bhufoniog from Bhufawn, Bhufon, 'Eoman 
 -us', PeuUniog from Poulin, Peulin, 'Paulinus', and 
 Anhumyawc, Anhmviog from Anhun 'Antonius'. 
 
 The Ounocenwi of the Latin of the Trallwng bilingual 
 has corresponding to it Gunacennivi in Goidelic, and from 
 Dunloe, in Kerry, we have a related form Gunacemi, where 
 the final a is all that remains of a genitive ending which 
 was probably ias. Later in the language one meets with 
 a feminine Gonchenn or Gonchend, genitive Gonchinni or 
 Gonchmne : the masculine also occurs, to wit, as Gonchend 
 or Goinchemi, genitive Goinchinn or Gonchind,^ correspond- 
 ing exactly to Gunocenn-d, Welsh Goncenn (Goncen), Cincenn, 
 Gyngen. The element cuno, Groidelic c^ma, in these names 
 has already been discussed, and the question remains what 
 we are to make of the other, cenno, Groidelic cenna. I am 
 now disposed to regard it as representing an earlier quenno, 
 Irish cenn, ceann, Welsh penn, pen, ' head or top, the end in 
 any direction'. We have another — probably an earlier — 
 instance of simplifying a medial qu into c, namely, in the 
 Carmarthenshire bilingual, which has Voteporigis in Latin 
 for Votecorigas in Groidelic. If this conjecture proves 
 admissible we can equate Gunocenn- with the GaUo-Roman 
 Gunopenn-ns, cited by Holder from Brescia, in North Italy, 
 G. I. L., V, 4216. The name would mean 'dogheaded', or 
 more probably, 'a head who is a dog', that is to say, dog 
 in the sense of a champion or protector, as usual in Celtic 
 names of this kind.'' 
 
 Historically, the most important bearer of the name 
 
 1 See the Sev. Celtique, xiii, 290 ; 6 Huidhrin, note 597 to p. 109 ; 
 Book ofLeinster, flf. 325'' 325''' 326»- 351*- 
 
 2 See the Archceologia Camhrensis for 1895, pp. 307-13; 1907,pp.85-9. 
 

 J, Percy Clarkcy Llangollen. 
 
 Pillar of Ellseg, shewing the Concenn Inscription. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 39 
 
 Concenn or Cincenn was one mentioned in the Nennian 
 Genealogies in the British Museum MS., Harley 3859 : 
 see PhiUimore's Pedigree xxvij {Oynwnrodor, ix, 181), where 
 he is called Cincen, son of Catel, also spelt Catell, later 
 Cadell. This latter is probably to be identified with 
 Cadell king of Powys, mentioned as Catell Pouis in the 
 Annales Gambrice, which record his death under the year 
 808, while the names of two sons of his occur under the 
 year 814, Griphiud and Elized. Now a monument of 
 capital importance, known as the Pillar of Elisseg, was 
 erected by Concenn in the neighbourhood of Valle Crucis 
 Abbey, n6t far from Llangollen. The Pillar had been 
 broken and fragments of it had been lost some time or 
 other before the inscription was examined in 1696 by our 
 great antiquary and philologist, Edward Llwyd. In a letter 
 written that year he sent a facsimile of what remained of 
 the writing to a friend, the letter and the copy are now. in 
 the Harleian collection in a volume which is alphabetical 
 and numbered 3,780. Since 1696 what Llwyd was able to 
 read has 'become nearly all illegible : so it has been deemed 
 expedient to have a photograph of Llwyd's copy submitted : 
 see pages 40, 41. This was rendered all the more necessary 
 owing to the astounding carelessness with which Gough, 
 Westwood, and Hubner have treated Llwyd's texb; but I 
 cannot go into details at present, as this paper has already 
 grown much longer than was intended.' It should be 
 
 ' Gough printed both Llwyd's letter and his text in his Camden's 
 Britannia (London, 1789), vol. ii, 682, 583, plate xxii. The letter 
 was printed also in the Cambro-Briton in 1820, pp. 55, 56, and 
 recently a copy of it has been included in Mr. Edward Owen's 
 Catalogue of the MSS. relating to Wales in the British Museum, part ii, 
 410. That part, even more than the previous one, reflects great 
 credit both on the compiler and those who have the direction of 
 the Cymmrodorion Record Series. The letter is reproduced for 
 reference' sake at the end of this paper. 
 
(2) FirtufrSROhcmccaBRohc/TiecLF/iivr 
 
 (3) eLire5 ELrre-5 FiLnir-Biio/uGCqc 
 
 (5) EdJFicauir Ai/wc iapidem proccvo 
 
 (6) roo eure^ -^iprc err Ciircs 9V' 'Jecr. 
 
 (7) ^^hepedrca'ce/npoi/op.ipc.-'iTjoR-c 
 
 (8) CcC^Em p€R y/m- ' € Po-iEfrrec^ECcnsto 
 
 (lo) _>— — . ./mqtiE RecfeUERi-c tn aiiercp-r-p 
 
 ->=j7i c|ec ^e^cjic-criopfem rqpe 
 — ^-n eLire-sHHiPrEcrccoMce^/' 
 
 (12) 
 
 (13) 
 (H) 
 (IS) 
 
 .jgv ^ — ^'^1 ''^r=.a.lpl^ca.^irl 
 
 [40] 
 
(ly) , — ' — — ' — — ■'Ji'n~€m~-fnotivan 
 
 (i8) -^ "'"^ """^ 
 
 (19) — iLs—hc--ifnoftcLf\chicx.m 
 
 (20) — ecu mctximiir Sni-cc-ccpinaie 
 
 ^2j) //// pccjxep — mccqncciiiiccii 
 
 (23) _.(|^£6£/'£d-"5ERmsf^yrq76 
 
 (24) — =pep£r;'s €ire-mce ^a/GcmOCXimi 
 
 (25) — sirqyjoccicfrc/^eBew Ro/napo 
 
 (26) /^qm'^cojJmccRchPipxi'c^ioc 
 
 (2;) c/i 1 ROB h^fF ae-se r^5© porcep-ce 
 
 (28) concep^^Se/ieJicciodfTi/Rcop 
 
 (29) cePH ecirnT'co-cccf=am!Lis3ji|r 
 
 (30) g-^ /I T:o"ca Eo&s/o/Je poiroir 
 
 (31) ypcjqeip 
 
 [41] 
 
42 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 mentioned that Llwyd some ten or eleven years later 
 endeavoured to give in printed characters a facsimile of 
 lines 23-28 of the inscription. They are to be found in 
 his ArchoBologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), i, p. 229", where 
 he uses among other letters a Greek /* for N, and several 
 letter-forms now used only in writing Irish. Put into 
 ordinary English letters, the lines in question run as 
 follows, differing slightly from the copy in 1696, which 
 has here been submitted in photography : — 
 
 .... bened .... Germ anus que 
 
 .... peperit ei se . . ira filia Maximi 
 
 regis qui occidit regem Romano 
 
 rum * Conmarch pinxit hoc 
 
 chirograf u rege suo poscente 
 
 Concenn ^ &c. 
 
 The Llwyd copy, reduced to what is intelligible at a 
 glance, but extended by the insertion of individual words 
 suggested by the context, and of certain formulae of a well- 
 known description, will stand somewhat as follows : — 
 
 (1) fConcenn fiUus Cattell CatteU (i) 
 
 (2) Alius Brohcmail Brohcma[i]l filius 
 
 (3) Elise^ Eliseg filius Guoillauc 
 
 (4) fConcenn itaque pronepos Eliseg (ii) 
 
 (5) edificavit hunc lapidem proavo 
 
 (6) suo Eliseg f Ipse est Eliseg qui (iii) 
 
 (7) .... hereditatem Pouo[i]s 
 
 (8) ... per viiii' [anwos] e potestate Anglo- 
 
 ' After I had made repeated attempts to understand the text, my 
 friend Professor Sayce kindly came to my assistance, and he has 
 carried the interpi'etation further than I could. Thus, for instance, 
 at the end of line 6 and the beginning of line 7 he would read nacttis 
 erat ; and here, I believe, I owe to him the reading viiii, for 
 Llwyd's dots seem only to suggest vim. Before leaving for the 
 Soudan he gave me to understand that his emendations would be 
 
All around the Wrekin. 43 
 
 [rum] in gladio suo parta in igne 
 [tQuicjumque recit[a]verit manescrip- (iv) 
 
 [turn lapid]eu] det benedictionem supe- 
 [r anima] in Eliseg f Ipse est Concenn (v) 
 
 manu 
 ad regnum svum Pouo[i]s 
 et quod 
 
 montem 
 (One line wanting, perhaps more) (vi?) 
 
 monarchiam 
 Maximus Brittanniae 
 [Conce]nn Pascen[t . . . . ] Maun Annan 
 [ tJBritu a[u]t[e]m filius Guarthi (vij) 
 
 [read Guorthi] 
 
 23) [girn] quern bened[ixit] Germanus quem- 
 
 24) [qu]e peperit ei Se[v]ira filia Maximi 
 
 25) [re]gis qui occidit regem Eomano- 
 
 26) rum t Oonmarch pinxit hoc (viij) 
 
 27) chii-ografum rege suo poscente 
 
 28) Concenn f Benedictio dojwini in Con- (ix) 
 
 29) cenn et svos in tota[m] familia[m] eius 
 
 30) et inw tota eagionem [reati in totam earn 
 
 regionem] povois 
 (31) usque in [diem iudicij 
 
 To check the lacunae, more or less, we have Llwyd's 
 spacings, but they cannot be relied on so much as the 
 number of letters to the line. TJp to line 25 inclusive, the 
 lines that permit of being counted make an average 
 exceeding 28 letters a line. From line 25 onwards the 
 
 published in the Arehceologia Cambrensis as part of his address to the 
 Monmouth meeting of the Cambrians in September last. The 
 October number has been issued, but does not contain the account 
 of that meeting : it will probably be in the January part. 
 
44 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 inscriber has taken more room, and the average falls to 24, 
 The whole inscription was divided into paragraphs, with a 
 cross placed at the beginning of each. The third of the 
 paragraphs begins with Ifse, estEUseg qvd, etc., a very Celtic 
 construction, meaning 'It is Eliseg who' did so and so. 
 The paragraph seems to relate how Eliseg added to his 
 dominions by wresting from the power of the English a 
 territory which he made into a sword-land of his own, 'in 
 gladio' suo'. 
 
 Paragraph v is mostly hopeless, but it seems to 
 summarize the achievements of Concenn himself, especially 
 as regards the additions which he made to his realm of 
 Powys. Then followed probably a paragraph stating that 
 Eliseg's mother was Sanant, daughter of Nougoy (or Noe), 
 descended from Maximus (Ped^ ii and xv), and closing with 
 a sentence giving the names of five sons of Maximus. I am 
 not clear how the sentence ran, but possibly thus : — "Prius- 
 quam enim monarchiam obtinuit Maximus Brittannise, 
 Concenn, Pascent, Dimet, Maun, Annan genuit." Goncenn 
 is a mere guess : perhaps Maucann would be better, but 
 any name in nn is admissible. Bimet, which in the 
 Pembrokeshire bilingual inscription at Trefgarn Each -is 
 Demet-i, seems to fit the lacuna, and a bearer of that name 
 
 1 The full term in Irish appears to have been 'to clean or clear a 
 sword-land', or 'to make a land of the sword' of it. The land itself 
 was called claideb-thir or tir claidib, which came to be called simply 
 claideb or cladeom 'sword'. Possibly in the case of the two Pembroke- 
 shire rivers Cleddau 'sword', the word originally meant the districts 
 drained by them, and seized by the Dfissi as their sword-lands in 
 Dyfed. See Celtic Britain, p. 196, Skene's Chronicles of the Picts and 
 the Scots, pp. 10, 319, 329, and the Book of Leinster, f. 383»' SSS"' 
 Compare also Meyer's " Expulsion of the Ddssi " in the Cymmrodor, 
 xiv, 116, 117, where we meet with the phrase do aurglanad rempu 
 'to clear (the land) before them' of its inhabitants. In igne, mean- 
 ing 'with Are, by means of fire', is a literal rendering from Celtic: see 
 the same story, pp. 114, 115. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 45 
 
 is mentioned as a son of Maximus in Pedigree ii, which 
 makes Dimet an ancestor of Coneenn through Bliseg's 
 mother Sanant. Maximus is said to have been a native of 
 Spain, but Dimet's name is of importance as indicating a 
 connection between Maximus and Dyfed, the country of 
 the ancient Demetse, perhaps through his supposed British 
 wife, the Elen Liiydog of Welsh legend. Add to this the 
 fact of that legend associating him with Caerleon and 
 Carmarthen, and, above all^ calling a Dyfed mountain top' 
 after him Gadeir Vaxen 'Maxen or Maxim's seat'. Annan is 
 probably to be corrected into Annun, given as Anthun son 
 of Maximus in Ped. iv. It is the Latin Antonius, with the 
 nt reduced into nn as in Maucann, by the side of Maucant 
 ii) Ped^ xxii and xxvii : it is otherwise spelt Annhun or 
 Anhun as already mentioned. The MS., Jesus College xx, 
 gives Maximus {Cymmrodor, viii, 84, 86, 87) three other sons 
 all with their names derived from Latin Owein, older spelling 
 Eugein = Bugenius, Gustennin = Gonstantinus, and Dunadt 
 = Ddndtus. 
 
 The next paragraph runs as follows, beginning in a 
 Celtic fashion without a copula: — "Britu autem filius 
 Guorthigirn, quem benedixit Germanus quemque peperit 
 ei Severa filia Maximi regis qui occidit regem Romanorum." 
 For 8evira is doubtless a spelling of Severa, but whether a 
 daughter of Maximus of that name is mentioned anywhere 
 else I cannot say. To put this important statement right 
 
 1 See 'Maxen's Dream' in the Oxford MaMnogion, p. 89 : the 
 Pedigrees give the name as Maxim, but even that is not really 
 ancient : the old form would have been Maisiv, later Maesyf, which 
 must be supposed superseded by the book form Maxim. It is a 
 difficulty ; and there is another, namely, how Maxen came to supersede 
 Maxim. The former recalls Maxentius, without, however, being 
 correctly derived from that name. Mr. Wade-Evans, in the Cymmrodor 
 xix, 44, note 4, suggests that our man was a Maxentius, and not the 
 Maximus who became emperor in the West. 
 
46 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 with the Nennian Pedigrees, the latter have first to be 
 corrected in certain particulars. One of the foremost 
 things to attract one's attention is the fact that they never' 
 mention Gruortheyrn or Vortigern. For his name they 
 substitute "Cattegirn, son of Catell Durnluc" : this seems 
 done partly for the sake of CateU or Cadell, the pet 
 convert in the story of St. Germanus's miracles as given in 
 the Historia Brittonwm, he. cit., p. 176. There the Saint 
 is made to tell Cadell, one of the servants of Benlli, that 
 he, Cadell, would be king, and that there would always be 
 a king of his seed. The story proceeds to exaggerate the 
 prophecy as follows : — " Juxta verba Sancti Germani rex 
 de servo factus est, et omnes filii eius reges facti suat, et a 
 semine illorum omnis regio Povisorum regitur usque in 
 hodiernum diem." So the Nennian Pedigree xxii ends 
 with "map Pascent | map Cattegirn | map Catel dunlurc", 
 though the Fernmail Pedigree in the Historia Brittonum, 
 loc, cit., p. 193, has "filii Pascent filii Guorthigirn Guor- 
 theneu", without a trace in any of the MSS. of either 
 Cattegirn or of Catell. Pedigree xxvii, however, emphasises 
 Ped. xxii, as it ends with "map Pascent | map Cattegir[n] | 
 map Catel | map Selemiaun". Here the father of Cadell 
 seems to have been an unnamed man belonging to Cantrev 
 Selyv, in Brecknockshire. This looks ingenious on the 
 part of the scribe, as Cadell was described in the Germanus 
 legend as rex de servo factus. The difficulty is avoided in the 
 MS., Jesus College xx {Gymm., viii, 86), where we have words 
 to the following efPect: — Cassanauth Wledig's wife was 
 Thewer, daughter of Bredoe, son of Kadell deernlluc, son 
 
 1 In studying these pedigrees I have found Mr. Phillimore's edition 
 of them in the Cymmrodor, vol. ix, invaluable, and next to that 
 Mr. Anscombe's "Indexes to Old Welsh Genealogies" in Stokes «& 
 Meyer's Archiv fiir celt. Lexikographie, i, 187-212. See also p. 514, 
 where he has anticipated me as 1;o Severa. 
 
All arotmd the Wrekin. 47 
 
 of Cedehern (= Cattegirn), son of Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu. 
 This makes Cadell grandson of Gwrtheyrn or Vortigern. 
 The Bredoe of this pedigree I take to be the same name as 
 Brittu in the Nennian Ped. xxiii, which ends with "map 
 Brittu' I map Cattegirn | map Catell". Making here the 
 correction found necessary in the other cases we get 
 "map Brittu | map Guorthegirn". That this hits the mark 
 is proved to a demonstration by the "Britu autem filius 
 Guarthigirn" of the Elisseg Pillar. 
 
 If we try to look now at the inscription as a whole we 
 perceive that the object which Concenn had in view was 
 the glorification of himself and Eliseg (1) on the score of 
 their own achievements, and (2) by reference to their 
 ancestors, the Emperor Maximus and the King Gwrtheyrn 
 or Vortigern. The Powys dynasty was Goidelic, and prob- 
 ably the "Welsh epithet in Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, which 
 Williams ab Ithel, at the beginning of his edition of Brut 
 y Tyivysogion, has rendered into English as 'Vortigern of 
 Eepulsive Lips', simply meant that Gwrtheyrn spoke a 
 language which was not intelligible to his Brythonic 
 subjects, or at least that he spoke their language badly. 
 Here one cannot help realizing that the inhabitants of 
 what is now Wales could not then have had any collective 
 name meaning men of the same blood or men who spoke 
 the same language. They could hardly adopt any name 
 in common, which was not comparatively colourless. So 
 there eventually became current an early form of the word 
 Oymry, which only meant dwellers in the same country. 
 In fact Cymry connotes the composite origin of our Welsh 
 nationality. By the beginning of the ninth century, 
 however, the dynasty had practically become Welsh, 
 
 ^ The name occurs in one of the Tomb Verses, no. 36, in lit/d 
 Britu 'Britu's Ford', so the modern prominciation should probably 
 be Ehyd Bridw, 
 
48 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 which possibly made it all the more necessary in the 
 opinion of Concenn and his Court to place on record what 
 they considered a true account of Gwrtheyrn's position 
 with regard to Maximus and to St. Germanus, as con- 
 trasted with the ugly stories which the Brythons associated 
 with his name. There is, therefore, no hope of reconciling 
 the testimony of the Pillar of Elisseg with the legends in 
 the Historia Brittonum in so far as they concern Gwr- 
 theyrn's character. 
 
 The Historia, however, throws a ray of light on 
 Gwrtheyrn's origin; for in Fernmail's pedigree he is 
 said in two of the MSS., one in the Vatican and 
 the other in Paris, to have been the son of Guitaul, 
 son of Guitolion or Guttolion;^ but those names are 
 simply the Welsh adaptations of the Latin Vitalis and 
 Vitalianws. Most of the MSS., it is true, have instead of 
 Guitolion the form Guitolin, but this was a different though 
 kindred name derived from the distinct Latin name 
 Yitalinus, In fact Guitolin occurs later in the Historia 
 Brittonum, namely, in sec. 66. Most of the scribes have, 
 
 ^ See the readings given in Mommsen's edition, loc. cit., § 49 
 (p. 193), § 66 (p. 209); and for his account of the MSS. see pp. 119- 
 21. The Vatican MS. was published by Uunn (London, 1819): for 
 its reading of the Fernmail pedigree see p. 78. It is remark- 
 able for combining such old spellings as JEmbres and Tebi with 
 such a comparatively late form as Teudor, in Mommsen's text 
 Embreis, Teibi, TeudvMr respectively. The first element in this last 
 name is tew 'thick', used probably with the force of 'very, exceedingly', 
 and the second, dvjnr, became successively dwfr, dior, so the later 
 form of the name is Tewdwr. Compare Welsh dvbr, dwfr 'water', 
 which in colloquial Welsh is always dwr. The meaning, however, 
 of dubir, dwr in the personal name has to be guessed from the 
 probable equivalents in other languages, such as English, where it is 
 dapper, Modern German tapfer 'valiant'. Old Slavonic dobr& 'beautiful, 
 fine, good'. Some would also connect the Latin faber 'smith' as 
 meaning the man of a cunning art or craft. So Tewdwr may have 
 signified 'very good, very fine, very clever', or possibly 'very vaUant', 
 
All around the Wre'kin, 49 
 
 not unnaturally, made ChittoUon or Gwitolion into Gfuitolin, 
 except the two which I have specified: for them the 
 temptation to reduce the name in -ion into Guitolin prob- 
 ably did not exist, as their texts do not appear to contain 
 sec. 66. IsTow the former name occurs on a bilingual 
 tombstone at Nevern, which reads in Ogam simply 
 Yitaliani, meaning 'the monument or place of Vitalianus 
 or Guttolion', and in Latin letters of the most ancient 
 type perhaps to be found in our non-Roman inscriptions : — 
 
 VITALIANI 
 
 EMERETO 
 
 This is so condensed that it is difficult to be sure of tlie 
 exact meaning, but it seems to suggest that the deceased 
 was regarded as holding some rank in the Roman army, 
 and the ease may be compared with the later Dyfed 
 bilingual from Castell Dwyran,' where the deceased has the 
 Roman title given him of 'protector'. Such cases help to 
 answer the question how it was that during the later years 
 of the Roman occupation the troops of whom we read were 
 all in the north and east of the Province; for it would 
 seem that the west was to be looked after by the chiefs of 
 the Dessi. The latter, on the other hand, appear to have 
 pursued a more or less romanizing policy, as may be 
 gathered from the Latin names to be found in Goidelic 
 inscriptions both in Wales and Ireland, such, in the 
 former, as Pompeius and Turpilius, Severus and Seuerinus, 
 and, in the latter, such as the VitaUnus already mentioned. 
 For besides the D^ssi who came over to Dyfed, there were 
 others who coasted westwards and landed in Kerry. It is 
 to them, probably, one has to refer an Ogam inscription 
 including the name Vitalin, found at Ballinvoher, in the 
 
 ' See ArchcBologia Cambrensis, 1895, pp. 307-13, and the Cymmrodor, 
 vol. xviii, = 'The Englyn', pp. 72-4. 
 
50 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 barony of Corkaguiny in that county. At a well near 
 Stradbally, in co. Waterford, the land, to this day, of the 
 Dessi, I have seen an inscription involving the genitive 
 AgracoUn-i, which T take to be a derivative from Agricola. 
 The motive here was doubtless admiration for the fame of 
 the great Roman general of that name. In the case of a 
 group like Vitalis, Vitalianus, and Vitalinus, the motive was 
 different but not far to seek : the names were chosen as 
 involving mta 'life', probably by a family whose Goidelic 
 names began with an early form of the vocable beo, in 
 Welsh hyw 'alive, quick', such as Beodn, Beoe, Beo-aed, 
 Beo-gjM, which was borrowed into Welsh early, and 
 modified eventually into Beu-gyio, Beuno. Time would fail 
 me to do justice to all the conclusions to be drawn from 
 the facts to which I have called attention. There is one, 
 however, on which I wish to lay stress, and it is this : the 
 Vitalianus stone at Nevern probably marked the grave of 
 the grandfather of Gwrtheyrn, son-in-law of the Emperor 
 Maximus. 
 
 VI. 
 
 To return to the Pillar of Elisseg, it has always struck 
 me that it is a column obtained from some Eoman building 
 of respectable dimensions ; but where? The inscription 
 upon it must, when perfect, have formed a historical 
 document, with which we have absolutely nothing of the 
 same importance to compare. There remains one thing to 
 be done to lessen our loss from the treatment to which the 
 stone had been submitted before Ed. Llwyd's examination 
 of it, and that is to have a thorough search made for the 
 missing fragments. Regardless of expense the little 
 mound, on which has been set up what remains of the 
 original pillar, should be carefully sifted, and the hedges 
 near should be ransacked until the broken pieces have 
 
All around the Wrekin. 51 
 
 been found. In any case they cannot be far away, and 
 they have probably escaped the weathering which has 
 reduced almost to illegibility the exposed portions of the 
 pillar. Let us hope that some generous Cymmrodor will 
 come forward to help us in the search which I have sug- 
 gested. It is also highly desirable that good' casts should 
 be made of the pillar as it is and before ^ it has become 
 completely illegible. 
 
 The fact that Concenn, king of Powys about the 
 beginning of the ninth century, bore an Irish name, has, 
 as far as I know, never been detected, and still less, if 
 possible, that his great-grandfather Eliseg's name was also 
 Irish. So I have to dwell a little on the latter : Edward 
 Llwyd has copied it as Eliseg the five times which it 
 occurs in the inscription ; but in the Genealogies it is 
 usually Elised, as also in the Annates Gambrice, a.d. 814, 
 
 943, 946. On the other hand the Liber Landavensis 
 regularly spells it Mised, and so with the Latin genitive 
 Elised-i in the Book of St. Chad ; but a form Elisse also 
 occurs, as, for instance, in Brut y Tywysogion, a.d. 815, 
 
 944, while under 1202, in the same, we have it twice as 
 Elisy.^ These, without the final d, practically prove the 
 consonant to have been sounded as the soft spirant d or 
 dd, a sound wliieh was sometimes represented in Old Welsh 
 by t. Hence the final t of Mitet in Pedigree xxvij (p. 181) : 
 the other t of that spelling was probably a result of the 
 scribe misreading a or a reversed s as t.' Thus the older 
 spellings in Welsh practically reduce themselves to three, 
 
 g, Mised, and Elized. The Irish name occurs in a 
 
 ' Possibly Elisei, which occurs once as the name of a witness in the 
 Liber Landavensis, p. 216, is to be regarded as an instance of this 
 name. 
 
 ^ How this can have happened may be seen from the way in which 
 Oriali or Crisdi in a Margam Abbey inscription used to be read 
 Critdi: see the Archeeologia Cambrensis, 1899, p. 142. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 genealogy of the Dessi in the Book of Leinster, fo. 328'', as 
 Heslesach. The man so named stands twelfth in descent 
 from Artcorb, whose son Eochaid was leader of those of the 
 Dessi who took possession of a part of Dyfed about 265-70. 
 The initial aspirate forms no etymological part of the 
 name ; so the more regular spelling was doubtless Eslesach, 
 which would be that of the nominatiye. The genitive 
 should be Eslesaig, and it occurs in the same MS., fo. 340", 
 spelt Eislesaig, where the apex means that the pronuncia- 
 tion of esl had been modified in actual speech into el. 
 Welsh made si into stl, while Irish reduced it into I or II, 
 with or without vowel compensation. Thus Welsh gwystl 
 'a hostage' is in Irish giall, of the same origin as German 
 geisel, Old H. German gisal : in fact, the German was 
 probably a loan from some Celtic language of the Con- 
 tinent. Or take the Welsh name Ygeestyl, Engistil, the 
 Irish, equivalent of which is found written in Irish, 
 Ingcel and IngelU The pronunciation of the g at the 
 end of a genitive of this kind was that of a very evanescent 
 palatal gh, and the retention of the g of Miseg was 
 historical rather than phonetic. But the Irish sooner or 
 later treated every dh as if it had been gh ; and Irish gh, 
 influenced by the vowel i or e, passed into the semivowel or 
 consonant, i or y,' which Welsh pronunciation had once a 
 habit of converting into tf, now written dd, as for instance 
 in Iweryd (for lueriiu), Iwerdon (for luerion-os), Irish Eriu 
 genitive Erenn, 'Ireland'. 
 
 It remains to say something about the spelling with 
 z, a letter which looks equally singular in Welsh and 
 in Irish, for neither language has the soft sibilant in 
 
 1 For more instances see Rhys's Celtic Heathendom, p. 567, and 
 Celtic Folklore, p. 542 ; also Archaologia Cambrensis, 1898, pp. 61-3. 
 
 2 See my Manx Phonology, pp. 118-23; and as to Welsh tf f rem 
 i or y, my British Academy paper Celtts S; Galli, p. 13, note. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 53 
 
 its pronunciation. But in Medieval Irish z was treated 
 as an orthographic equivalent for sd or st; so we have in 
 the later portion of the Book of Leinster, ff. 357", 357'', 
 358'', SSS"!, 364^ Zepliani for Stephani, and ff. 341, 353% 
 364'', Zrafain for what is there otherwise written Srafain 
 and Srafddn, nominative Srafan, seemingly for an earlier 
 Strafan: Stokes, in his Martyrology of Gorman, p. 397, 
 cites 8trofan from the Martyrology of Tamlacht. Vice 
 versa we have Elisdabet^ for Elizabeth, and Steferus' for 
 Zephyrus. More illuminating, however, is the name of an 
 Irish bishop given in the Martyrology of Oengus as Nazair, 
 July 12, and p. 168. It occurs also in the Booh of Leinster, 
 ff. 812", 315% 335'', 348', 351", 351', as Nazair, both 
 nominative and genitive, but the genitive of what appears 
 to be the same name occurs, fo. 337^, as Nadsir. This 
 suggests that the name is to be regarded as syntactically 
 made up of Nad-sdir, with nad as the unaccented form of 
 nioth 'nephew', and sder 'artificer'. In that case the z of 
 Nazair represents here, not sd or st, but ds or ts, and the 
 origin of the spelling with the z becomes clear at a glance. 
 It is to be sought in such Greek spellings as SSeu? for 
 Zeu9, and the like, and in the teaching of the old gram- 
 marians that 5 was pronounced ah or else So-.' In a Latin 
 list of bishops ordained by St. Patrick, one detects the 
 name Nazair made into Nazarius, and that form, coming, 
 as it does, from the Booh of Armagh, a MS. finished in the 
 year 807, carries the z back to the eighth century.* 
 
 ^ Stokes's Martyrology of Oengus, p. 110, a propos of April 1. 
 
 2 O'Donovan's Battle of Magh Bath, p. 238. 
 
 ^ In either combination the sibilant meant the sonant s which in 
 English and French is written a. See Georg Curtius's Erlduterungen 
 zu meiner griechischen Grammatik (Prague, 1870), pp. 17-19, and Blass, 
 fiber die Aussprache des Griechischen (Berlin, 1888), pp. 113-122. 
 
 ' See Stokes's Patrick, p. 304, Stokes & Strachan's Thesaurus 
 Palteohibernicus, ii, 262, also pp. xiii-xv. One of the most singular 
 
54 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 All this would seem to imply that the name was 
 Eslestach, when the spelling with » was first applied to 
 it : Irish reduces sd, st, ds, and ts all to ss or s, though how 
 early it happened in the case of sd, st, it is hard to say. 
 The name might in that case be regarded as a contraction 
 of some such a longer form as Eselestach, derived from 
 Eselest or Eseles. I suggest this because we have at the 
 top of Ped. xxiij, a name esselis, the initial letter of which, 
 like other initials in the Nennian Pedigrees^ the rubricator 
 neglected to insert. I guess it to have been an h to help 
 to make up Hesselis, which, with the accent on the first 
 syllable, would be liable to be contracted in. Irish to Eislis 
 or Eisles — there was an Irish name Aneisles, Aneislis — 
 whence probably our Welsh name Eli-s, spelt also Ellis with 
 English II. The only other name which the -esselis of the 
 
 things connected with the letter ^- in Irish is that one of the Ogam 
 symbols, not yet found in an ancient inscription, namely, the 14th, is, 
 in a tract on Ogttiic alphabets in the 14th century MS. of the Book 
 of Ballymote, named xmif, S. 309a' lines 21, 45; 309''' 1. 33; 310». 1. 40. 
 O'Donovan, in his Grammar, p. xxxii, treats this as straif, and inter- 
 prets it as "the sloe tree"; for it belongs to an alphabet which has the 
 individual symbols called by tree-names. From this arose the 
 untenable notion that the Ogam in question stood for st or z. The 
 sound originally meant was probably that of / or ph, a phonetic 
 reduction sometimes of Indo-European sp or sp'h. This / has since 
 been mostly changed into s, and the symbol is lost in favour of the 
 Ogam originally representing s. The change, into s took place 
 initially, while / still remained as a non-initial, and the man who 
 first called the/ Ogam «f)m/ could, doubtless, not find an instance of 
 its use as an initial, so the name straif may be regarded as aptly 
 chosen. In Irish, initial / stands, since the eighth century or 
 thereabouts, mostly for the provected sound of v or lo, and not for 
 an original / at all ; but among other instances of /, derived from 
 original sp, and still remaining / in Welsh (now written ff)t i^^V te 
 mentioned Irish seir 'a heel ', nominative dual dd seirith, but accusative 
 tria adipherid 'through his two heels' (Stokes's Celtio Declension, p. 26) : 
 the Welsh is ffer 'the ankle', Greek trct>vp6v, the same. See also 
 his Urlceltischer Sprachschatz, p. 299, where he cites 'bd tri .sine' 'of a 
 cow of three teats', otherwise ' bd triphne', where sine anA-phne are pro- 
 
All around the Wrekin. 55 
 
 MS. could possibly suggest is what is .usually treated as 
 Ll&oelis or LlefeUn : this ought, doubtless, to be Llewelis 
 or Lleuelis, to be analysed Lleu-elis, As to this use of 
 Lieu compare Old Welsh Lou-hrit or Leu-brit to be equated 
 with Logu-qurit- in an Ogam inscription (in the Nat. 
 Museum, Dublin), later Luicrith : it would mean 'one 
 who has the form or countenance of Lieu or Lug'. 
 
 The five names in the first clause of the legend on the 
 Pillar of Elisseg^ are, as read by Ed. Llwyd, Concenn, Cattell 
 (wrongly Catteli), Brohcmail and Brohcmal, Eliseg, and 
 Gruoillauc. Of these Concenn and Eliseg have been shown 
 to be of Goidelic origin. Broccmail is a name common to 
 Brythonic and Goidelic, or else a loan from Goidelic : the 
 common Welsh spelling is Brochmael, and the Old Irish 
 would be Broccmdl, genitive Broccmail, but at present I 
 
 bably f ormii of the same origin as Anglo-Saxon spana 'teats or speani<\ 
 Other names in the tract in the Book of Ballymote for the / Ogam 
 are the following, ff. SIO". Is. 34, 48; Sli"' 1. 4 :— (1) A place-name 
 Si-uthar, derived probably from sruth 'a stream', Welsh jfno(i, possibly 
 from the same root as German sprudel 'a well, a fountain'. (2) Sust, 
 which is the Latin word fmtis borrowed, as is the Welsh equivalent 
 ffust 'a flail'. (3) Sannan, a saint's name, probably identical with 
 Fanon-i in the Latin of a Devon bilingual, now in the British Museum. 
 Compare Fannuc-i from a Latin inscription in South Pembrokeshire, 
 which recalls Irish Sannuck, the name of one of St. Patrick's monks. 
 See Stokes's Patrick, pp. 305, 412, but take note of Sanuous, Sanucin-o, 
 C. I. L., V, 2080, XIII, 5258. (4) There are other names there of 
 which I know not what to make, such as Zur, that of a 'linn' or water, 
 hardly Siuii- 'the Suir', and Zeulce, the name of a dinn or height, and 
 zorcha 'light or bright'. 
 
 ' Since this was written my attention has been drawn to the 
 pedigree of Cerdio in the Saxon Chronicle, a.d. 552, where one reads 
 that Cerdic was Elesing, that is, son of Blesa, and Elesa was Esling, 
 that is, son of Esla. Here there is not only a striking similarity 
 between Eliseg and Elesa, but two names, Elesa and Elsa, to compare 
 with the two Eliseg and Elis, or rather, with the Goidelic forms from 
 which they derive. Even were it to be urged that Elesa and Esla are 
 due to a meaningless duplication the residue of similarity is signiiieant. 
 
56 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 cannot lay my finger on an instance. The Welsh Broch- 
 mael should regularly be pronounced Brochvael, or rather 
 Brychvael, but what has come down to us is Broehwel,^ 
 which is a modification of the Irish genitive BroecmdU, 
 pronounced Brocwel with the accent on the first syllable, 
 accompanied with a shortening of the second. This leads 
 me to expect that Cattell or Gatel may prove to have been 
 Goidelic too : the name which in that case it represents 
 must have be^en the Irish Gathal, genitive Gathail, for an 
 early Gatyxil-i = Gatu-uaUi, in Welsh Gatwal, Gadwal. 
 Possibly it is in the name of some Irish Gathal that we 
 have to seek for the Gadwal after whose name the commot 
 of Gedweli or Gydweli was called : the English spelling is 
 now Kidwelly, with the accent on the second syllable 
 and II pronounced as in English. Somewhat similar 
 remarks might be made on Guoillauc, which occurs in 
 pedigree xxvii as Gwilauc. 
 
 Enough has now been said to shew that the Powys 
 dynasty of Eliseg was a Goidelic one, and I will only add 
 a mention of a passage in the MS., Jesus Gollege xx, § 23 ; see 
 the Gymmrodor, viij, 87, where the mothers of Einion and 
 Cadwallon Lawhir, the father of Maelgwn Gwyned, are 
 described as daughters to Didlet, king of Gwydyl Fichti in 
 Powys. Whether these were Goidels or Picts is not 
 certain, nor is there any indication where in Powys they 
 were located." The question suggests itself whether at 
 
 * My previous attempts to account for this form have been 
 unsatisfactory ; and for one or two other instances of the popular form 
 of a name in Wales being more Irish than Welsh see my Celtic 
 Folklore, pp. 641, 542. Compare the case of Docmael, Dogmael : two 
 of that saint's churches are called Han-Ddogwel and ' St. Dogwel's,' 
 and a third Llan Dydoch (= Do-Tocc-), in English 'St. Dogmael's', 
 retaining an old quasi-official spelling Doyniael. See Rice Rees's 
 Welsh Saints, p. '211. 
 
 ^ Who were the five chiefs Wydyl Ffichti mentioned in the short 
 poem, xlix, in the Book of Taliessin (Skene, ii, 205) ? The number. 
 
All around the Wrekin. 57 
 
 the outset the Goidels of Powys extended their power to 
 that region from the direction of Buallt and the Wye, or 
 from Gloucester and the Severn. On the one hand, 
 Fernmail, descended from Pascent sou of Gwrtheyrn, was 
 king of the Wye districts of Buallt and Gwrtheyrnion 
 about the end of the eighth and the beginning of the 
 ninth century.' On the other hand, legend associates a 
 branch of the Dessi with Caer Loyw' or Gloucester, 
 apparently the same branch which was descended from 
 Pascent son of Gwrtheyrn. In other words the ancestors 
 of the Eliseg family may have pushed northwards along the 
 Severn valley in the direction of Pengwern Amwythig and 
 Wales. All this, however, is merely touching the surface 
 of the history of the Dessi in Wales and the Marches, but 
 even so we have stumbled across some important data for 
 the writing of a new chapter on the most obscure period 
 of Welsh history. It only remains for me to mention one 
 or two subjects which it would be desirable to have studied 
 in connection with it. Such, among others, are the distri- 
 bution of Goidelic inscriptions in South Wales, the preva- 
 lence of Goidelic proper names in the diocese of LlandafE, 
 as attested by the lAher Landavensis, and the so-called 
 hreiniau or privileges of the Men of Powys.^ Finally, 
 should the evidence point to the conclusion that the Dessi 
 pushed their conquests up the vale of the- Severn, it 
 could not help suggesting at the same time the question, 
 whether it was not they that destroyed Viroconium. 
 
 five, suggests the men in the first clause of the Blisseg inscription, 
 though none of them can have been contemporary with Cadwallon 
 Lawhir's mother's father. 
 
 ' See the Ristoria Brittonmn, loc. cit., p. 193, and Zimmer's 
 Nemdus Vindicatus, p. 71. 
 
 2 See my paper on " The Nine Witches of Gloucester", in the volume 
 of birthday essays, presented to E. B. Tylor (Oxford, 1907), pp. 285-93. 
 
 ^ See the Myvyrian Archaiology, i, 257, and Aneurin Owen's Ancient 
 Laios and Institutes of Wales, ii, 742-7. 
 
58 Ail around the Wrekin. 
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 Mb. Stevenson's Monograph on the name Weekin. 
 (See, f. 89 above.) 
 
 The earliest mention of the Wrekin occurs in the dating 
 clause of a charter of 855, derived from the late eleventh 
 century Worcester chartulary "quando fuerunt pagani in 
 Wreocensetun" {Cart. Sax., ii, p. 89). This is an older 
 name than Shropshire for the district about the Wrekin 
 (or, strictly speaking, the people of the Wrekin). They 
 are probably the Wocensoetna (gen. pi.) of the list of early 
 territorial names {Cart. Sax., i, p. 414) upon which Pro- 
 fessor Maitland has conferred the name of the Tribal 
 Hidage. This is derived from a tenth or eleventh century 
 MS., which contains many corruptions. A thirteenth cen- 
 tury copy {Ibid., p. 415) reads Porcenseteve (by confusion of 
 the O.E. sign for W with P, which it greatly resembled), so 
 that the original probably read Wroeen-soBtna. This form 
 occurs in another Winchester charter dated 963 (Ibid., iii, 
 355, from the twelfth century Godex Wintoniensis) "in pro- 
 vincia Wrocensetna". 
 
 The Wrekin itself is mentioned in a charter, derived 
 from the same chartulary of 975 {Ibid., iii, 650) "on 
 Wrocene", "andlang Wrocene" in boundaries near Up- 
 pington, CO. Salop. Here the name is, apparently, de- 
 clined as a feminine 6-stem, with a nom. sing. Wrocen and 
 a short vowel in the root syllable. The absence of the 
 demonstrative pronoun proves that Wrocene is the name 
 of some local feature and is not a common noun. Celtic 
 local names usually appear in the O.E. charters without 
 inflexion and without the demonstrative pronoun, as 
 pointed out by Professor Sievers in Paul and Braune's 
 Beitrage eur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 
 ix, p. 251. 
 
 The Abingdon chartulary contains a charter of 944 
 {Ibid., ii, 557), which mentions in the boundaries of Blew- 
 bury, CO. Berks, "be eastan Wrocena stybbe Jjset swa to 
 Wrocena stybbe, Jjonne of Wrocena stybbe". In form 
 this seems to be a genitive plural, but no such word is 
 recorded in O.E. One would expect a tree-stump to be 
 
AU arozmd the Wrekin. 59 
 
 known by a man's name or by an adjective or partici- 
 pial compound. This name is probably unconnected with 
 that of the Wrekin. 
 
 Apart from this last instance, we have evidence that 
 the name fluctuated between Wreocen and Wrocen. The 
 instances are too numerous to be ascribed to clerical errors, 
 and it is evident that the two forms existed both in the 
 name of the Wrekin and in the local names formed from it. 
 Professor Napier suggests that the Wrocen form arises from 
 Wreocen through labialisatiou of the r produced by the 
 initial W. The variation seems to be clearly due to phonetic 
 action, and not to arise from different forms originally. 
 
 In this case we may regard Wreocen as the original 
 form. This may be explained as a Mercian development 
 (with the change of e or i to e.%, iu, later eo, produced by a 
 following u) from an original Wrekun or Wrikun. The 
 latter would have been the form necessarily assumed in 
 O.E. by an early Celtic Wrikon-. 
 
 From the evidence of the forms it is obvious that 
 Wreocen was exempt for dialectal or other reasons from 
 the Anglian "smoothing" before c, by which Wreocen 
 should have become Wrecen. The modern form of the 
 name descends from Wreocen. The Wrocen forms seem to 
 shew that the diphthong was sometimes accented on the 
 second vowel. 
 
 Wrocwardine, Salop, represents an O.E. Wreocen- 
 weor^ign (the latter part of the compound usually becomes 
 -wardine in local names in this district; it is related to 
 weorS, weor^ig 'village, farm'). It appears in Domesday 
 several times as Recordin(e), where the Norman scribe has 
 not represented the initial w of the O.E. form, as is 
 usually done in the Survey. But the Rec- represents 
 regularly, with the exception of the suppression of the 
 initial consonant, the O.E. Wreoc-. The initial T^is repre- 
 sented in the usual Norman way with a parasitic vowel 
 between it and the r in Werecorddna, the spelling of this 
 name in a charter of William the Conqueror printed in the 
 Monasticon from an Inspeximus of Henry VI. In com- 
 pound names the Norman scribes usually represent wur by 
 or, so that Wreoc-wur^ine (dat. sing.) would be represented 
 by them as Werecordina. The name is written Worocordina 
 in a charter of Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury, 1094-1098, 
 printed in the Monasticon, iii, 520b, which represents the 
 
6o All around the Wrekin. 
 
 Wroc- form. The original O.E. form must have been 
 TFreoce«-weor"5ign, which became by the eleventh century 
 Wreoce- by the weakening and dropping of the n in the 
 weak-accented syllable, and the Normans seem to have 
 failed to hear the resultant -e before \he wu ov weo, which 
 is not unnatural in such a polysyllabic word. But we have 
 traces of the persistance of this -e in late twelfth century 
 forms in the Pipe EoUs, which sometimes write the name 
 without it (probably as the result of dictation) and some- 
 times with it. The name is written Wrohe^lmr(Un in the 
 Roll for 21 Henry II, and in the chancellor's counterpart 
 for the 23 and 24 years. It is written with the Jc expressed 
 by the Norman ch as Wrochewv/r^n in the 18, 19 and 20 
 years. The syllable in question is entirely ignored in the 
 forms Wroch-wur^in, Wroc-wwr^in in the 22, 23 and 24 
 years, and in the first of Richard I. 
 
 Wroxeter similarly seems clearly to represent an O.E. 
 Wreocen-ceaster, reduced to Wreoce-ceaster. It is written 
 Bochecestre in Domesday, where ch has the usual Norman 
 value of k. The initial Wis represented in Wrochecestre 
 which occurs in an early twelfth century charter recited in 
 a confirmation of Henry III in the Monasiicon, iii, 522b, 
 and in the Wroccecestre of the Hundred Roll of 1255 cited 
 by Eyton. Through French influence cestre became pro- 
 nounced sesire, and so TFrocZ;eses<re easily becomes Wroxeter. 
 
 Wroxall, in the Isle of Wight, occurs in a Winchester 
 charter of 1038-1044 as Wrocces-heale (dat. sing.) in Kem- 
 ble. Codex Bvplomaticus, iv, 76. This Wrocc seems to be the 
 gen. of a masc. personal name. It also occurs in Wraxhall, 
 Wilts, Weroches-hale in Domesday ; Wroxton, co. Oxford, 
 in Domesday, Werochestane ; and Wraxall, Somerset, in 
 Domesday, Werocosale. Wroxham, Norfolk, and Wroxhall, 
 CO. Warwick, and Wroxhill, co. Bedford, seem to have 
 the same origin. 
 
 The name of Wrexham appears to be unconnected. It 
 occurs in a charter of 1236 as Wredesham (Calendar of 
 Charter Bolls, ii, p. 459;, and in 13 16 as Wryghtlesham 
 (Calendar of Close Bolls, p. 347^, 
 
All around the Wrekin. 6i 
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 Edward Llwyd's Letter to the Rev. De. Mill, 
 Principal op Edmund Hall, Oxford. 
 
 Copied from the Oymmrodorion Record Series, No. 4, p. 410. 
 (See page 39 above.) 
 
 "Swansey, Sept. 14, [16] 96. 
 " Rev'd. Sir. I have here presum'd to trouble you with 
 a copy of an inscription,' which amongst several others I 
 met with this summer in North Wales. The monument 
 whence I took it was a stately pillar of very hard stone; of 
 the same kind with our common millstones. 'Twas of a 
 cylinder form; above twelve foot in height, seaven in cir- 
 cumference at the basis where it was thickest, and about 
 six near the top where smallest. The pedestal is a large 
 stone, five foot square and 15 inches thick; in the midst 
 whereof there's a round hole 12 inches deep wherein the 
 monument was placed. Within a foot of the top 'tis 
 encompassd with a round band or girth, resembling a cord ; 
 from whence 'tis square to the top, and each square adornd 
 with a ring, reaching from this band to the top and meet- 
 ing at the corners. It was erected on a small mount which 
 seems to have been cast up for that purpose ; but in the 
 late civil warres (or sooner) 'twas thrown down and broken 
 in several pieces, whence the inscription is so imperfect. 
 The reason I trouble you with it, is because I remember 
 amongst Usher's Letters one from Dr. Langbain to him, 
 wherein he writes to this purpose — ' I have received both the 
 inscriptions J and shall send you my thoughts of that a,t Vale 
 Grucis; but for the other, I give it over for desperat.' Now 
 this I send you is the IS. at Vale Crucis; and I doubt not, 
 but the vale receiv'd its name from this very stone, tho' 
 'twas never intended for a crosse. The copy Dr. Lang- 
 baine receiv'd was perhaps taken before the stone was 
 broke, and you may possibly meet with it amongst his 
 
 ' This letter was printed also in the Cambro- Briton, 1820, pp. 55, 56, 
 where the editor appended the following footnote : — 'This inscription, 
 which from its imperfect state, it would be of very little use to tran- 
 scrihe here, Mr. Llwyd entitles "An Inscription at Maes y Groes, in 
 the parish of Llandysilio, in Denbighshire, transcribed anno 1696.'" 
 
62 All around the Wrekin. 
 
 papers and letters, if you know where they are lodg'd ; or 
 direct me to search for it when I come to Oxford which 
 will be a month hence at farthest. 
 
 "The inscription would be legible enough were it entire. 
 It begins Concenn filius GaUeK, Gattel films BrochmaU, 
 Brochmal filius EUseg, EUseg filius Guoillauc. Concenn 
 itaque pronepos EUseg edificavit hunc la^idem proa/vo suo 
 EUseg &c- 'Tis remarkable that adjoyning to this monu- 
 ment there's a township calld Eglwysig, which name is 
 corrupted doubtlesse from this EUseg, th6 our greatest 
 critics interpret it Terra ecclesiasiica. Thus, in Caermardhin- 
 shire we find this epitaph : Servatour [pro servator] fidsei 
 patrieqwe semper amator Hie Paulinus jacit cultor pientis- 
 simus Bequi. The place where the stone lies is calld Pant 
 y Potion i.e., the Vale of Stakes, corruptly for Pant Powlin 
 Planities Paulini, I find other places denominated from 
 persons buryed at or near them; whence I gather they 
 were anciently men of great note, who had inscriptions on 
 their tombs be they never so rude and homely. But I 
 trouble you too much with trifles, so shall adde no more 
 but that I am, 
 
 "Worthy S"^, Your most obliged and humble servant, 
 
 "Edw. Lhwtd." 
 
 PosTSCEiPT : see p. 7. 
 
 My address in the Transactions of the Oxford Congress 
 for the History of Religions touches ground covered by this 
 paper : see II, 211, where I have suggested correcting 
 Eueyd into Eved, and equating it with Irish Ogma, Gaulish 
 Ogmios. The form required is Euvyd, which would be 
 written Ewwid or Euuyd : it occurs as Euuyd, and, misread, 
 as Mmyd. See Skene, ii, 200, 303, and Stephens' Gododin, 
 p. 377 {Ihmydd) ; also Skene, ii, 108, where it is leSyd, with 
 an intrusive i. The points of the equation are : (1) Gaulish 
 and Brythonic Ogmios was pronounced Ogmiios, and ii 
 makes yd in Welsh ; (2) gm or ghm behaves like Im, which 
 becomes Iv in Welsh, but remains Im in Irish; (3) Og or 
 ogh, becomes in Welsh ou, later eu. So Ogmios has its 
 exact equivalent in Euuyd in Welsh. Space fails me to 
 give analogies, to discuss texts, or draw conclusions.