114 
4. That the separate points all along the range of the 
Cotteswold hills—especially the more prominent ones—bear 
Welsh names still; and that the Roman roads do so. 
And 5. That the neighbouring ranges of the Mendips and 
the Malverns are only known by British or aboriginal designa- 
tions. The writer next referred to the evidence afforded by 
old chronicles and histories, quoting those of Nennius, Henry 
of Huntingdon, and Asser. He then turns to the present 
spoken dialect of the country (east of Severn) and shows not 
only that separate words have come down to us from the 
Welsh, but, what is of far more weight, that even some 
of the grammatical forms are unmistakably from the same 
stock. 
To sum up then—with the evidence derived from 
I. Names of places still Celtic ; 
Il. The inference from documents; and 
III. From the present dialect of the Vale of Severn, we must 
conclude that the British language held its own in this part far 
too long and too firmly for the name of a long line of hills to 
have passed away after the Saxon invasion. To imagine, as 
CampEN does, that ‘‘ Cots” is from sheep cots, would require us 
to suppose that the hills were first farmed, and, after being 
covered with sheep pasturages, named! On the other hand, 
the very frequent occurrence of the syllable ‘‘ cot,” or “cote,” 
in the names of places, both on the Cotteswolds and elsewhere, 
in places either wooded or once wooded, points pretty clearly to 
“‘eoit,” or “coet,” the old Welsh word for wood, being the first 
syllable of that name. 
He took the original appellation to be “‘coet is gwél”—the 
“woods under the plain,” and that the Saxons altered the sound 
of the last syllable to “wold,” a hill. Asa matter of fact, at 
the present day the “w” is not sounded by the Cotteswold 
peasantry, who say “ Cots’ells.” The writer however attached 
no great weight to this, but considered the enquiry chiefly 
interesting from its bearing on the early state of this part of 
England, as regards the exodus or otherwise of the aboriginal 
populations on the approach of the Saxons. 
