A number of small market-towns or large villages lie on the outskirts of the hills, but in the inner parts of the district villages are few. The “capital of the Cotteswolds” is Cirencester, in the east. In the north is Chipping Campden, its great Perpendicular church and the picturesque houses of its wide street commemorating the wealth of its wool-merchants between the 14th and 17th centuries. Near this town, in the parish of Weston-sub-Edge, Robert Dover, an attorney, founded the once famous Cotteswold games early in the 17th century. Horse-racing and coursing were included with every sort of athletic exercise from quoits and skittles to wrestling, cudgels and singlestick. The games were suppressed by act of parliament in 1851.
See Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalists’ Field Club, passim; W. H. Hutton, By Thames and Cotswold (London, 1903).
COTTET, CHARLES (1863- ), French painter, was born at Puy. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and under Puvis de Chavannes and Roll. He travelled and painted in Egypt, Italy, and on the Lake of Geneva, but he made his name with his sombre and gloomy, firmly designed, severe and impressive scenes of life on the Brittany coast. His signal success was achieved by his painting of the triptych, “Au pays de la mer,” now at the Luxembourg museum. The Lille gallery has his “Burial in Brittany.”
COTTII REGNUM, a district in the north of Liguria, including a considerable part of the important road which led over the pass (6119 ft.) of the Alpis Cottia (Mont Genèvre) into Gaul. Whether Hannibal crossed the Alps by this route is disputed, but it was certainly in use about 100 B.C. (see [Punic Wars]). In 58 B.C. Caesar met with some resistance on crossing it, but seems afterwards to have entered into friendly relations with Donnus, the king of the district; he must have used it frequently, and refers to it as the shortest route. Donnus’s son Cottius erected the triumphal arch at his capital Segusio, the modern Susa, in honour of Augustus. Under Nero, after the death of the last Cottius, it became a province under the title of “Alpes Cottiae,” being governed by a procurator Augusti, though it still kept its old name also.
COTTIN, MARIE [called Sophie] (1770-1807), French novelist, née Risteau (not Ristaud), was born in Paris in 1770. At seventeen she married a Bordeaux banker, who died three years after, when she retired to a house in the country at Champlan, where she spent the rest of her life. In 1799 she published anonymously her Claire d’Albe. Malvina (1801) was also anonymous; but the success of Amélie Mansfield (1803) induced her to reveal her identity. In 1805 appeared Mathilde, an extravagant crusading story, and in 1806 she produced her last tale, the famous Élisabeth, ou les exilés de Sibérie, the subject of which was treated later with an admirable simplicity by Xavier de Maistre. Sainte-Beuve asserted that she committed suicide on account of an unfortunate attachment. This story is, however, unauthenticated. She died at Champlan (Seine et Oise) on the 25th of April 1807.
A complete edition of her works, with a notice by A. Petitot, was published, in five volumes, in 1817.