[108] I have re-examined the passage, and I have no doubt that the editors were wrong in printing Gregyn: the manuscript has Grugyn, which comes in the last line of column 841. Now besides that the line is in part somewhat faint, the scribe has evidently omitted something from the original story, and I guess that the lacuna occurs in the first line of the next column after the words y llas, 'was killed,' which seem to end the story of Grugyn.
[109] Those who have discovered an independent Welsh appellative wy meaning water are not to be reasoned with. The Welsh wy only means an egg, while the meaning of Gwy as the name of the Wye has still to be discovered.
[110] This name also occurs in a passage quoted in Jones' Brecknock, ii. 501, from a Carte MS. which he treats as relating to the year 1234: the MS. is said to be at the Bodleian, though I have not succeeded in tracing it. But Jones gives Villa de Ystraddewi, and speaks of a chapel of St. John's of Stradtewi, which must have been St. John's Church, at Tretower, one of the ecclesiastical districts of Cwm Du: see also p. 497. The name is probably to be treated as Strad or Strat d'Ewe.
[111] A river may in Welsh be briefly called after anybody or anything. Thus in North Cardiganshire there is a stream called Einon, that is to say 'Einion's river,' and the flat land on both sides of it is called Ystrad Einon, which looks as if one might translate it Einion's Strath, but it means the Strath of Einion's river, or of the stream called Einon, as one will at once see from the upper course of the water being called Blaen Einon, which can only mean the upper course of the Einon river. So here yw is in English 'yew,' but Ystrad Yw and Llygad Yw have to be rendered the Strath of the Yew burn and the Eye of the Yew burn respectively. It is moreover felt by the Welsh-speaking people of the district that yw is the plural of ywen, 'a single yew,' and as there is only one yew at the source somebody had the brilliant idea of making the name right by calling it Ywen, and this has got into the maps as Ewyn, as though it were the Welsh word for foam. Who began it I cannot say, but Theophilus Jones has it in his History of the County of Brecknock, published in 1809. Nevertheless the name is still Yw, not Ywen or Ewyn, in the Welsh of the district, though Lewis gives it as Ywen in his article on Llanvihangel-Cwm-Du.