The origin and meaning of Ely’s name have always been regarded as obscure by place-name scholars, and are still disputed. The earliest record of the name is in the Latin text of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, where Bede wrote Elge. This is apparently not a Latin name, and subsequent Latin texts nearly all used the forms Elia, Eli, or Heli with inorganic H-. In Old English charters, and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the spelling is usually Elig. Skeat derived the name Ely from what he called “O[ld] Northumbrian” , meaning “district of eels”. This uses a hypothetical word , which is not recorded in isolation but thought by some to be related to the modern German word Gau, meaning “district”. The theory is that the name then developed a vowel to become l, and was afterwards re-interpreted to mean “eel island”. This essentially is the explanation accepted by Reaney Ekwall, Mills and Watts. But difficulties remain. Bailey, in his discussion of names, has pointed out that Ely would be anomalous if really from “eel district”, being remote from the areas where possible examples of names occur, and moreover, there is no parallel for the use of a fish-name in compounds with. More seriously, the usual English spelling remains Elig, even in the dative case used after many prepositions, where Elige would be expected if the second element were “island”. This is in conflict with all the other island names which surround Ely.