legendary, not historical. It may be accepted, however, as evidence of the antiquity of the tribal name Gewissæ, which long survived in this kingdom. In A.D. 766 Cynewlf, King of Wessex, gave a charter to the monastery of Wells, and in it he styles himself ‘Cynewlphus Gewissorum rex.’[1] This is evidence of the survival of the name more than two centuries after the arrival of the Gewissas in Hampshire. The West Saxon Kings must have been proud of it to have retained it. Still later, in the year 825, Egbert used the same title ‘rex Gewissorum’[2] in a charter in which he gave land at Alton to the Monastery of SS. Peter and Paul at Winchester. Eadred also, in the year 946, in a grant of land to the thegn Ethelgeard, describes the situation of this land as being at Brightwell, in the district of the Gewissi—i.e., Brightwell, near Wallingford, in Berkshire, so described, probably, to distinguish it from another Brightwell in Oxfordshire.[3]
Even after the Norman Conquest, Ordericus Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, mentions the district round Winchester as the country of the Gewissæ. The name evidently had great vitality, and must have been a common one to have been used by a chronicler at so late a date. When we consider its probable origin, we have first to note the occurrence of the name Gewis in the genealogy of the West Saxon Kings,[4] and, secondly, its probable meaning. Gewis would naturally arise at the time when the Anglo-Saxon genealogies were drawn up, from the tribal name Gewissæ or Gewissas being in common use. This name of the mythological ancestor of the royal house is certainly more likely to have been derived from the name of the tribe than that the tribal name should have had its origin from a mythological one.
Its meaning has recently been discussed by Stevenson,[5]
14—2
