significance, for here we find a name with a special Old English designation, having an Old English custom. The custom points to Somersetshire, the dialect of Pembrokeshire and Gower point to the same part of southern England, and there are traditions which indicate this locality as the district whence the Old English colonists of South Wales largely came. Gower is visible in clear weather from the West Somersetshire coast looming in the distance across the Severn Sea. Rhys has drawn attention to a tradition[1] in connection with the Welsh Arthurian legends, which makes Melwas king or lord of a winterless glass island. This he identifies with Glastonbury in the Æstivo regio, or summer region—i.e., Somersetshire. Another and a different tradition makes Melwas king of Goire, or the peninsula of Gower seen from the Somerset coast. Thus, by mixing the two versions of the myth, the writers of romances came to speak of the kingdom of Melwas as Goire, and of his capital as Bade or Bath. The curious aspect of these traditions is that there may have been a basis for connecting Gower with Somerset; and, as Max Müller says on the growth of myths, there may have been circumstances or words, ‘understood, perhaps, by the grandfather, familiar to the father, but strange to the son, and misunderstood by the grandson.’
As regards the settlement of north-east Gloucestershire, Beddoe has observed the blonde character of the population in the country around Moreton-in-the-Marsh, and considers it evidence of West Saxon colonisation northwards.[2] He notes that the distribution of colour of hair and eyes in this district resembles that found in other Saxon districts in England, and also in parts of Flanders, Holland, Friesland, and Westphalia, with the same tendency to the conjunction of hazel and dark eyes with lightish hair, rather than of light eyes with dark hair.
