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The Romans were in Britain for nearly four hundred years, and while that may seem like a long time, Anglo-Saxon culture lasted for even longer, almost 500 years from the time when they entered British history until the downfall of the Saxon kingdom of Britain at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
When the Romans abandoned Britain, their towns and villas became ruins inhabited by ghosts and wild animals.It was the invading Saxons who laid the foundations for most of the communities which still exist in the Cotswolds, and in many cases the Saxon charters describing these ancient grants of land still exist. The Saxons founded the majority of the great monasteries which dominated the area until their dissolution several hundred years later. Most of the Cotswold churches are on Saxon sites, many have Saxon foundations, and a few are still substantially Saxon churches. There are inns, such as the Royalist in Stow which date back to Saxon times.
The most important Cotswold town in Saxon times was Winchcombe. Another site of great historical importance was Malmesbury, famous in Saxon times for its abbey, part of which still stands.
Medieval stuff is common enough to be genuinely surprising. A house you have walked past a dozen times turns out to have been built in the thirteenth century. The brass lectern in the local church was made before Christopher Columbus set sail for the Indies. A farmer's barn was built for a Norman abbot. The mausoleum in the local church is 700 years old and depicts a knight in full armour who might have shaken hands with Richard the Lionheart. It is surprising because you don't expect it outside of a museum. And it keeps happening.
Churches are the best place to start, because most of them (with no disrespect intended) are 1000 year-old community museums. All sorts of things end up in churches, like the Viking gravestone cemented into the wall of the (heavily Saxon) church at Bibury. You might find a very early example of a clock built by a village blacksmith, as you can in Castle Combe. The finest churches were adorned like grand ladies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, using money earned from the wool trade, and the best examples of these magnificent "wool churches" are at Chipping Campden, Northleach, and Cirencester. Don't just visit the better known churches - every village in the Cotswolds has a church, and you can find anything from gargoyles and grotesquery to scenes right out of Tolkein, and if you know where to go, an entire church glazed by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. And what about this Norman doorway in the church at Little Barrington, a place so far off the tourist trail that when the swallows return after a winter in North Africa, they have to fly around for days trying to find it. It isn't even the best Norman archway around - it's just the sort of thing you find when you aren't really looking.
If the abbeys had survived they would have been marvels. Much of the wealth of the Cotswolds went in to feeding the monks, adorning their magnificent buildings, and making them very, very comfortable.
Many of the abbey churches were as large as cathedrals, and although much of it has collapsed, the small part of Malmesbury Abbey which survives is still a very large building. Tewkesbury Abbey church is another lucky survivor. As for the rest, well, an abbey was just a vertical quarry with nicely shaped boulders and it was easier than digging stone out of the ground. One suspects that most of the large manor houses in the Cotswold are 10% quarried rock and 90% consecrated stone.