veneration at wells could not be stamped out by the new Christian religion. Therefore, it was adapted to it. Pope Gregory, writing in a.d. 601, told the missionaries of the church not to destroy the pre-Christian sites of worship but to bless them and convert them from “the worship of devils to the service of the true God.” Therefore, throughout the Celtic lands, Holy Wells still survive that were once the sites of pagan veneration.

Welsh

The name given to the British Celts by the Anglo-Saxons, from welisc and wealh, meaning “foreigners.” Many names with the prefix Wal in England refer to places where the British Celts last held out against the encroaching Anglo-Saxon conquest. In London there is Walbrook (brook of the Welsh); in Yorkshire, the Walburn, which is similarly derived; in Kent there is Walmer (mere of the Welsh); Walcot in Berkshire (cottage of the Welsh); Saffron Walden in Essex (valley of the Welsh); Wallasey in Cheshire (island of the Welsh); and so on. Until the tenth century the evidence is that the British Celts continued to call themselves Britons. As they were slowly pushed back and separated into the western peninsulas, they called themselves “compatriots,” a sign of feeling under pressure from the invading Anglo-Saxons. The word in British was combrogos, from which Cymru and hence Cymric were derived. Cymru is the modern name for what the English now call Wales (land of foreigners) but which, in Welsh, means “land of compatriots.” The same term, Cymru (pronounced Cum-ree), was given to Cumbria, which was annexed to England in the late eleventh century and where the Celtic language died out in the fourteenth century. As Dumnonia vanished in the westward sweep of the English, the kingdom of Cornwall emerged. This was called Kernow in Cornish, but the English called it Kern—wealh—Cornwall.

Welsh Language

Cymraeg. At the time of the last census, only 18.9 percent of the population of Wales (503,549) spoke Welsh. However, the census does not extend to Welsh people living in England, and some Welsh-speaking communities actually straddle the border—the current border being arbitrarily fixed at the time of the acts annexing Wales. There is also a large Welsh-speaking immigrant population in England. Similarly, there is Y Wladfa, the Welsh-speaking colony set up in the 1860s in Patagonia, Argentina. Welsh-speaking communities can also be found in