60 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
time of their appearance. Wanting continuity, the old names 
would have been lost. 
Only in the titles of the smaller streams do we distinctly see the 
Saxon. There is no need to name the lesser rivers when the 
population is sparse ; and there are nameless brooks in Devon even 
now. The ' y ' in the names of so many of our secondary rivers 
is not a diminutive, but the universal 'water,' whether it be 
derived from the Kymric wy, the Kornu gy, or the Saxon ea — Yeo ; 
and we find the same method of nomenclature at work still. For 
example, the stream that descends from Brendon parish into East 
Lyn is ' Brendon-water,' 1 and that at Dawlish, ' Dawlish-water.' 
It is very remarkable how little contemporary history we have 
for Devon before the Norman Conquest, not merely in the absence 
of direct statement, but of material for inference. A very few 
lines sum up the whole. 
Gildas, the earliest of our chroniclers, writing, in the sixth cen- 
tury, from the British standpoint, speaks of the remnant of the 
Britons taking up arms against the Saxons, under the command of 
Aurelius Ambrosius, and calls a Constantine " the tyrannical whelp 
of the unclean lioness of Dumnonia," which seems to attribute to 
the West a certain independent action. 
Bede (673-735) in his Ecclesiastical History, a valuable work, 
notwithstanding the enormous admixture of monkish legend, says 
nothing of Devon. 
Nennius, a chronicler of presumably British origin, variously 
placed between 796 and 994, takes us no further. He calls Am- 
brosius one of the kings of Dumnonia 2 ; gives a list of cities, 
1 There is an interesting illustration of the individual character of early 
Saxon colonization on Dartmoor in the fact indicated by Mr. C. Spence Bate 
in his "Etymology of Dartmoor Names" (Trans. Devon. Assoc. vol. iv. pp. 
525-6) that the streams on the Erme are known by the name of lakes, those 
on the Avon as brooks, those on the Dart as burns ; whilst elsewhere we have 
the Norse beck ; and on the south coast the Saxon fleet. We learn too that the 
Saxons pushed their way into Dartmoor along the rivers from the coast. Such 
distinctions as East and West Teign, East and West Dart, &c, came from men 
who traced the streams upwards to their sources at a time when the Keltic 
names of the tributaries, if they had any, had been lost. 
2 If Arthur have any one historic prototype, probably we may find him in 
the almost equally uncertain Ambrosius, who in his turn is mixed up with 
Merlin. 
