135 ON SOME OF OUR EARLY INSCRIBED STONES. IN the course of last summer Mr. Peter1 of Bala, who has a remarkably keen eye for antiquities, made me aware of the existence of an early inscribed stone in the neighbourhood of Llandudno. We arranged to inspect it together, and under the guidance of the wellknown archæologist the Rev. Owen Jones, now resident at Llandudno, we had no trouble in finding it. It stands by the road side, near a small cottage called Tyddyn Holland, about a mile and a half from the town. We were sorry to find that we could not make anything very satisfactory out of the inscription, which is both incomplete, owing to a piece of the stone having been broken off and lost, and to its having been tampered with by a former tenant of the cottage, who undertook to deepen the letters for the benefit of English tourists. The accompanying sketch will give an idea of its present appearance. I guess what remains of the three first lines to have been SANCT FILIVS The fourth line one can make nothing of: it looks as if it had been 1618, with the enclosed spaces frayed off by a clumsy inscriber. If it belongs to the old epitaph, it was probably an epithet to the father's name, and it would be hopeless to guess what it was. Before going to see it, Mr. Jones kindly called our attention to a reference to the stone in one of Canon Williams's books, "The History and Antiquities of the town of Aberconwy and its Neighbourhood, with Notices of the Natural History of the District, by the Rev. Robert Williams, 1 While penning these lines, the sad news of Mr. Peter's very unexpected death has reached me. B.A., Christ Church, Oxford, curate of Llangernyw" (Denbigh, 1835). On page 137 it is stated that the following inscription was copied from the stone in ques1731 :year tion in the SANCT ANVS SACRI ISIS I have no doubt that what is here given as ANVS is the same part of the epitaph which I have guessed to be FILIVS. The CT in the first line look now like a big D reversed, the beginning of the second line is only guessed to be FILI, and in the third line I guess CE to consist of a c with an E in its bosom, which gives it the appearance of an . The first lines might, I think, be completed thus: SANCTANVS or SANCTAGNVS FILIVS SACERDOTI (s) The son's name may have been Sanctus, but Sanctagnus or Sanctânus would have in its favour the following fact, which makes it certain that such a name was once not unknown among Christians in Britain. A passage in the preface to Sanctán's Irish hymn in the Liber Hymnorum, is thus rendered by Mr. Whitley Stokes: "Bishop Sanctán made this hymn, and when he was going from Clonard westward to Matóc's Island he made it; and he was a brother of Matóc's, and both of them were of Britain, and Matóc came into Ireland before Bishop Sanctán." According to another account they were grandsons of Muireadhach Muindearg, king of Ulidia, who is said to have died in the year 479: see the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters (Dublin, 1856), ii, 1190. Matóc is undoubtedly an earlier form of our later Madog. However, Sanctus is by no means out of the question, as St. David's father is said to have borne the name Sant, and the Liber Landavensis records, page 200, a name Saith, which, provided its ai be the O. Welsh antecedent of our Mod. Welsh ae, would be a more regular representative of Sanctus than the comparatively modern Sant, which may have simply taken its place owing to a reintroduction of Sanctus into Welsh. It would be a satisfaction to me, and perhaps to others of the readers of the Journal, if Canon Williams could lay his hand on the source from which he copied so long ago the note I have referred to above, and kindly place it at the disposal of the editor. In a case like this every stray bit of information has its value. About the end of July I managed to go to see the Trefgarn stone, in the neighbourhood of Haverfordwest. The inscription has been carefully described by Mr. Allen in a recent number of the Journal. Before returning home I was able also to inspect, with Mr. Roberts, the vicar of Newchurch, several stones in the neighbourhood of Carmarthen, which he had discovered or looked up since the Carmarthen meeting. Among them was Careg Fyrddin on Tyllwyd farm, near Abergwili. The stone seems to show traces of Ogams, but I can make nothing intelligible or continuous of them. There is a legend attached to the stone, which I have forgotten. It would be well to have it placed on record in the Archæologia Cambrensis. Later in the day Mr. Roberts led the way to a cottage called Pantdeuddwr, near Felin Wen in the same neighbourhood. By the door lay for whetting purposes the stone which he has briefly described in a letter published recently in the Archæologia Cambrensis. The inscription, which is illegible only in its last word, reads in very fair capitals: CORBAGNI The A of the father's name is certain, and I think the second letter is L, but one cannot go further, though the name Alhorti, found on the Llanaelhaiarn stone, naturally occurs to one's mind. Corbagni is a name which is met with also in Ireland, and is of the same origin, no doubt, as our Corbalengi on the Penbryn stone; but what is the later Welsh representative of Corbagni? I have none to suggest but Carfan in Nantcarfan and Llancarfan. The Liber Landavensis gives us Nant Carban and Vallis Carbani. But the vowels o and a offer a difficulty. However, I am inclined to think that the common nouns carfan and corfan show the same variation of vowel, that is if we suppose them to be desynonymized forms of one and the same word. The meaning of the former will appear from the following instances-carfan gwely, 'a bedstead', carfan gwehydd, a weaver's beam', carfan o wair, hay laid out in rows', which I copy from Dr. Pughe's dictionary, where one will also find the following words quoted from William Salisbury: "Eisteynt yn garfanau o fesur cantoedd a deg a deugeiniau", they sat down in rows of the number of hundreds and of fifties.' So I can hardly believe that carfan was originally a different word from corfan, which now only means a metrical foot or a bar of music. The simpler word occurs in the O. Cornish glosses, as corbum, which seems to have meant a saddle-bow, and in that sense it appears in Welsh as corf, corof, coryf, and has been extensively confounded with corff, a body'. Moreover, the halls of the Welsh princes were divided into an upper and a lower part, said to be respectively uch corof and is corof; but what would that mean? Perhaps archæologists who have made a study of the structure of ancient residences could give us some assistance on this point. I should have also added that Cormac in his glossary mentions an Irish word corb, which meant a chariot. Was this its meaning in proper names such as Corbagni, Corbalengi? As I was not satisfied with examining the Merthyr stone in the twilight in the course of the Carmarthen excursion, I did not leave the neighbourhood now without seeing it again. This time Mr. Roberts went with me, and we came to the conclusion I expected, namely, that the first name was neither Caturus nor Caturug, but Caturugi, with a horizontal I, which is now very faint. faint. The entire inscription is CATVRVGI FILI LOVERNACI On my way to the Abergavenny meeting I called at Goodrich Court, the princely residence of George Moffatt, Esq., to see the Tregaron stone, brought there by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick. The stone, which is only a fragment of the original, is built into the wall of the chapel, and has been read Potenina Malher, which has given rise to several most fanciful attempts at interpretation. But what remains of the epitaph is simply POTENINA MVLIIER It is to be noticed that the t and the e are HibernoSaxon, the N's are formed the wrong way, and the v is upside down, which lead to its being read A, which, together with the two I's, and a superficial crack in the stone making an H, as it was thought, yielded the traditional reading Malher. Lastly, I notice in my rubbing traces of a stroke over the first N, which suggested to me an abbreviation that would enable us to read, not Potenina, but Potentina. But it did not attract my attention when examining the stone itself, and on referring it afterwards to Mr. Moffatt, he kindly tells me that it is only an unevenness in the stone, and not the work of the inscriber. Besides the Potenina stone there is another in the chapel, with an inscription in a somewhat peculiar Hiberno-Saxon character, which, thanks to a suggestion of Professor Westwood, I would now read Eneuiri. Besides this one name, which is all the inscription on the stone, it shows a good deal of ornamentation. I was unable to learn where the stone came from. Contrary to one's fears, the stone said to have been found long ago at Llanwinio, and as to which no further information was for some time forthcoming, was last summer traced to Middleton Hall, near Llanarthney, by Mr. Roberts, who kindly sent me a rubbing which was exhibited at the Abergavenny Meeting, together with one by Colonel G. Francis, and a very excellent one by Mr. Davies, vicar of Llannon, who suggested that what had been given as ACI, AVI, or ALI, was to be read |