270 



The Names of Places in Wiltshire. 



not far from Alderbury. In Domesday these last are spelt 

 Wadone, and Waddene. There can be little doubt as to the 

 former syllable in all being a form of the Welsh coed (=wood) 

 and that they mean respectively the " village/'' and the "hill/' 

 or, it may be, the " dean " (= valley) by " the wood/' 

 Wallop. The name of three villages in Hants close on the Wilt- 

 shire border. The derivation we are not able to give, but 

 the word is included in the list because it is incidentally an 

 illustration of one of those fragmentary notices by our early 

 annalists, to which we are indebted for what little light we 

 have, with which to grope our way through the darkness of 

 pre-historic times. We may infer from our legendary tradi- 

 tions, as well as from such fragments of real history as have 

 come down to us, that, after the termination of the Roman 

 rule- in Britain, in the former part of the fifth century, there 

 were two great political parties in the country. There was, 

 first of all, the native or British party, properly so called, 

 who were headed by Vortigern ; and then there were the 

 Romanised Britons who acknowledged as their chiefs the 

 descendants of the usurper Constantine, or, in other words, 

 members of the family of Ambrosius, a name well known to 

 students of our early annals. Between these two rival parties 

 there came at last an open rupture, and the memory of one 

 t>f their conflicts seems to be recorded in the following frag- 

 ment preserved by Nennius, and probably taken by him from 

 some British chronicle : — u A regno Guorthigerni usque ad 

 discordiam Guitolini et Ambrosii, anni sunt duodecim, quod 

 est Gualoppum, id est Catguoloph/' Dr. Guest, after 

 shewing the mistakes that Usher, Lappenberg, and others 

 have made in intepreting this obscure passage, suggests the 

 following as the only feasible translation of it : — " From the 

 beginning of Vortigern^s reign to the dissensions headed by 

 Guitolinus and Ambrosius, are twelve years. This is the 

 Gualoppum, i.e., the battle of Gualoph/' He adds: — "As 

 we have reason to believe that the family interest of Am- 

 brosius lay in Wiltshire and its neighbourhood, and as, near 



