The Story of an Ancient Parish - Breage with Germoe

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Title: The Story of an Ancient Parish - Breage with Germoe
Author: Coulthard, H. R.
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible. Some changes of spelling and punctuation have been made.
They are listed at the end of the text.

Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.

[Illustration:

J. C. BURROW, F.R.P.S. BREAGE CHURCH. Camborne.]

THE
Story of an Ancient Parish

BREAGE WITH GERMOE,

With some account of its
Armigers, Worthies and
Unworthies, Smugglers
and Wreckers, Its
Traditions and Superstitions

H. R. COULTHARD, M.A.

1913.

THE CAMBORNE PRINTING AND STATIONERY COMPANY, LIMITED.
CAMBORNE, CORNWALL.

MR. J. A. D. BRIDGER, 112a and 112b, Market Jew Street. Penzance.

_I dedicate this small volume to the friends and neighbours who in the
first place suggested the writing of it to me by telling me stories of
the days of their fathers._

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE CELTIC PERIOD 9

II. THE SAXONS 28

III. FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE REFORMATION 35

IV. THE REFORMATION TO THE END OF THE COMMONWEALTH 59

V. RECENT TIMES 82

VI. THE GODOLPHINS 100

VII. THE ARUNDELLS, DE PENGERSICKS, MILTONS AND SPARNONS 115

VIII. WORTHIES AND UNWORTHIES 129

IX. PLACE NAMES AND SUPERSTITIONS 148

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

Breage Church, Frontispiece 2

Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard 24

Frescos in Breage Church 51

St. Germoe's Chair 55

Godolphin House 100

A Godolphin Helmet in Breage Church 103

Pengersick Castle 119

PREFACE.

The facts and thoughts which comprise this little book were many of
them, in the first instance, arranged for use in sermons on the Sundays
preceding our local Feast Day, as some attempt to interest Parishioners
in the story of our Church and parish.

I have to acknowledge with gratitude much information given me most
ungrudgingly, from his great store of antiquarian learning, by the
Reverend T. Taylor, Vicar of St. Just; likewise my thanks are due to Mr.
H. Jenner for kindly help and information upon the etymology of local
place names. I must also acknowledge the free use I have made of facts
bearing upon the history of Breage and Germoe taken from Mr.
Baring-Gould's "Historic Characters and Events in Cornwall," and at the
same time I have to express my thanks to the Reverend H. J. Warner,
Vicar of Yealmpton, the Reverend H. G. Burden, Vicar of Leominster, and
Mr. A. E. Spender for valuable information and assistance. I have been
greatly helped in my examination of the Parish Registers by the
excellent transcription of large parts of them made by Mrs. Jocelyn
Barnes. Finally I have to thank a great number of kind friends at
Breage, who have imparted to me the fast fading traditions of other
times, to whom I venture to dedicate this brief record of days that are
no more.

_Breage,
All Saints' Day, 1912._

THE CELTIC PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.

At the dawn of history, Cornwall, as in fact England generally, was
inhabited by a race of small, dark people, who, for the want of a better
name, have come to be called Ivernians. The blood of this ancient dark
race chiefly survives to-day in South Wales and Cornwall, especially in
our own western Cornwall along the coast line. In Breage, there are
continually to be met with faces and forms which suggest this small dark
race, and which show to what a large extent the ancient Ivernian blood
still survives in our midst.

The Ivernians must have been widely spread over Cornwall, judging by the
numerous chippings from the manufacture of their flint implements
scattered all over the County, which still may be collected in large
quantities. In spite of the continuous mining operations carried on all
over the Parish of Breage for endless generations, and the many
ploughings of the land which must have taken place in periods when the
growth of grain was profitable, these flint chippings can still be
gathered in many places in the parish, especially on the bare patches of
land where the gorse has been burnt, before the grass begins to spring.
In the earlier stages of their history the Ivernians used sharpened
fragments of flint rudely fashioned to the purpose, as knives, axes and
scrapers. In fact, for a long period of their history they were a people
living in and under the conditions of the Stone Age.

Long before the time of written records another race, called Celts,
found their way to Cornwall. This race was divided into two distinct
branches, the Goidels and the Brythons. The Goidels were much inferior
in culture to the Brythons; they were the first to enter Britain, and
upon the arrival of the Brythons they were slaughtered and driven before
them to the remote fastnesses of the West and North, just as in a later
age the Brythons themselves were driven before the Saxons. Under the
circumstances it might have been reasonable to conclude that the people
of Cornwall, in so far as they were not Ivernians, were mainly of
Goidelic blood. This conclusion is, however, not borne out by the
Cornish language which has come down to us in the form of a few miracle
plays and other fragments, which is undoubtedly Brythonic in character.
Of course, it may have been that, when the Brythons were driven into
Cornwall and Wales and across the Channel into Brittany in hordes by the
remorseless, exterminating Saxons, their tongue in these regions
gradually supplanted the more barbarous Goidelic speech.

The Celts, as they advanced westward, whether Goidel or Brython, would
exterminate or make slaves of the Ivernians, driving them before them as
they advanced into the extreme western parts of the County. We have all
heard a number of foolish stories of the Cornish folk in the fishing
villages being largely descended from Spanish soldiers and sailors who
were saved from wrecked battleships of the great Armada. These fisher
folk are dark and swarthy, not because they are descended from Spaniards
but because they are descended from the ancient Ivernians who took
refuge in the caves and rugged places along the coast, leaving the good
land to the conquering Celts.

The Celts, we imagine, would find the Ivernians professing a rude system
of natural religion much akin to their own, but perhaps not so highly
developed; indeed, a very large proportion of the human race at this far
distant time seems to have practised a religion of nature worship alike
in its main features. Here in Cornwall, as elsewhere, for instance,
they kept a great festival in the spring-time, when they celebrated the
coming to life again of the God of vegetation, whose name amongst the
Celts was Gwydian.[1] He was supposed to come to life again with the
coming of the green grass, the leaves and the flowers, and the singing
of the birds, having died in the previous autumn with the withering of
the leaves and the in-gathering of the harvest. Helston Flora Day is the
festival of his resurrection continued right down through the ages. As
in spring they rejoiced over the resurrection of the God of vegetation,
so in autumn they mourned over his death.[2] Most of us have heard the
old Cornish rhyme sung by the reapers at the cutting of the last sheaf,
which is a survival of this ancient custom of bewailing the death of
Gwydian.

"I'll have un, I'll have un, I'll have un,
What have'e, What have'e, What have'e,
What will'e, What will'e, What will'e,
Onec, Onec, Onec, O'hurro, O'hurro, O'hurro."

As this rhyme was repeated, all the harvesters stood round the farmer in
a circle, whilst he waved a sheaf in the air. This custom of mourning
the dead God of vegetation was very widely spread over the world.[3] No
one who has heard the mournful strain in which this chant of our ancient
harvest fields was sung can doubt that in its original use it was a song
of mourning.

The Celtic Priests or Druids knew a good deal of rude astronomy. They
used the stone circles, so many of which still survive, for purposes of
astronomical observations. By watching the alignment of the sun at
rising or setting, and also of certain stars, with the centre stone and
some stone on the circumference of the circle, they were able to
calculate the seasons of the year and the dates of their festivals.
Until a generation ago one of these ancient circles stood on Trewarvas
Head; it was pulled down by some foolish and ignorant people who thought
they might find hidden treasure under the great stones. From the top of
the high cliff overlooking the sea the Druid Priests would have a
splendid view of the far horizon. We can picture them making their
observations through the silent hours of some still star-lit night, with
the ceaseless slumbrous swell of the sea on the rocks far beneath them.

On Midsummer Eve the Druids lit a great fire on the summit of Tregoning
Hill. We know this, because the custom of lighting the fire survived
until very recent times. An old woman deplored its discontinuance to the
writer as a sign of the prevailing irreligion of the times. It seems
more than probable that at this Midsummer Festival human victims were
sometimes sacrificed in honour of the sun.

In the remote Highlands and Islands of Scotland this festival was
observed down to the early part of the eighteenth century, in a way
which clearly points to human sacrifice as the great central act of the
rite.[4] Numbers of men were in the habit of gathering on Midsummer Eve
in these remote parts of the kingdom round the ancient stone circles
midst the hills. A fire was lighted in the centre of the circle; pieces
of cake or bannock were then placed in some cavity where previously a
blackened and burnt fragment of the cake had been placed. Each person,
having first been blindfolded, then drew from the cavity a piece of the
broken cake; the man unfortunate enough to draw the blackened fragment
had to leap through the fire and pay a forfeit or fine. In the dim past
the drawer of the blackened fragment doubtless became the victim
offered to the God to ward off his anger from the community. This
ancient rite must have been practised in our Parish more than a thousand
years before the coming of Christ.

At the very dawn of human history we find all over the world, in Europe,
India, China and America, the ancient peoples keeping four great
festivals as a rule, at the summer and winter solstices and the two
equinoxes; in fact their religious culture in cardinal points was one
and the same.

One part of the faith of these ancient Ivernians and Celts that has
lingered on to our own times is the deeply cherished belief in Fairies.
How this belief came to be so widely spread and deeply cherished amongst
ancient peoples it is impossible to say. It has been suggested that, in
their wanderings over the world in search of pasturage and congenial
climate, they may have encountered in the recesses of primeval forests
or in lonely fastnesses of the mountains remnants of the slowly
vanishing pigmy race of neo-lithic cave men, and that they came to
regard them with something of superstitious awe, and that the memory of
these "little people" became a race memory, in the course of generations
becoming etherealised and woven into the woof of their religious
beliefs. On the other hand we have the possible view that our nomadic
forefathers may have had fitful glimpses, as some of their descendants
aver they have, of orders of beings beyond the ken of normal human
vision, of beings existing upon another plane. Taking into consideration
the exceeding aboundingness of human life within the radius of our poor
faculties, I confess that this view seems to present no inherent
difficulty.

Possibly in the way in which the people of each Cornish Parish possessed
in former generations a nickname, we have a vestige of still more
ancient rights, which carry us back to the very dawn of human culture.
We have Wendron goats, Mullion gulls, Madron bulls, St. Agnes cuckoos,
Mawgan owls, St. Keverne buccas[5] and many others. The following old
rhyme perpetuates the fading memory of the custom,

"Cambourne men are bull dogs,
Breage men are brags,
Germoe men can scat 'un all to rags."

An analogous custom to this Cornish system of nicknames prevails amongst
primitive people all the world over.[6] Each tribe or section of the
tribe has its Totem, an animal, bird or plant, with which it is supposed
to be in close and intimate relationship, and from which the tribe or
section of a tribe receives its name. Possibly Totemism may have had its
origin in crude attempts of primitive men to prevent too close
intermarriage, as men and women possessing the same Totem were not
allowed to marry, whilst on the other hand it has been suggested that
the custom was bound up with the view of primitive men with regard to
sacrifice and inter-communion with their Gods.

The Tin Mines of Cornwall had been known to the Greeks and possibly the
Phœnicians from the earliest times. Diodorus [7]Siculus gives a fragment
from the writings of the Greek traveller Poseidonius who visited
Cornwall possibly in the 3rd century B.C., which may be translated as
follows: "and stamping the tin into shapes of cubes or dice, they carry
it in great quantities in waggons into an island called Ictis lying off
Britain, when the parts between the Island and the main land became dry
land by the ebbing of the tide."

It has been suggested that Ictis was St. Michael's Mount and also the
Isle of Wight. It is impossible to accept the latter contention, unless
we take the view which has been put forward that great changes have
taken place in the depths of the channel separating the Isle of Wight
from the mainland, for which we have no evidence in history or
tradition. Also the Isle of Wight is not less than one hundred and fifty
miles from the tin mines of Cornwall, and at the period to which we are
referring the only roads that existed between the two were mere tracks,
for much of the distance no doubt impassable to waggons. If it had been
necessary to send Cornish tin to the Isle of Wight for transport abroad,
it would naturally have been taken to one or other of the many harbours
along the Cornish southern coast and transhipped by sea in the summer
time. The contention in favour of St. Michael's Mount is almost equally
difficult to accept. It is difficult to see what advantage could have
been gained by carting the tin from the mainland to that Island, when
the contiguous coast possessed several excellent natural harbours. The
most probable solution to the writer seems to be that the Island of
Ictis was the entire Penwith Peninsula. A walk from Marazion Station to
St. Erth along the low-lying belt of marsh land makes it clear that the
ocean at no very distant date must at high tide have encircled the
Penwith Peninsula.

In a later age it is possible that the first seeds of Christianity may
have come to Britain by way of Cornwall along the trade route created by
the exportation of the products of the Cornish Tin Mines to Marseilles.
Foreign merchants would visit Cornwall for the purpose of purchasing
tin, and numbers of foreign sailors would come to these shores in the
galleys that conveyed the tin to the coast of Gaul. Under the
circumstances it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the first
seeds of Christianity were in this way brought into Britain through
Cornwall.

It seems in every way possible that a fair proportion of the tin
exported from the Island of Ictis to Greece, Italy and the East came
from what is now the Parish of Breage. We have been told by those
competent to speak on such matters that there are tin workings in the
neighbourhood of Wheal Vor which evince a very great antiquity. The name
of Wheal Vor itself means in the Celtic tongue "great work," but we
cannot build much as to the antiquity of the mine merely upon its Celtic
name, as the Cornish or Celtic language continued to be spoken in this
part of Cornwall even until the reign of Queen Anne or later.

At what date the Romans penetrated into Cornwall it is impossible to
say. It has been usual to regard their occupation of Cornwall as of a
somewhat shadowy and uncertain character, but this is not altogether
borne out by facts. Their camps, possibly of a not very permanent
character, are scattered all over our most western part of the County,
amongst other places there is one at St. Erth and another in the parish
of Constantine. The Roman Mile-stone, found in the foundations of St.
Hilary Church, at the restoration, and now preserved there, attests the
fact that a Roman road to the extreme West passed near St. Hilary
Church, probably following the same lines that the main road between
Penzance and Helston follows to-day. Along this road it is probable
would come the first real light and culture to Breage with the steady
tramp of the marching legionaries. It may well have been that
Christianity first travelled this way in their train. Roman coins and
Roman pottery have been from time to time found all over the County. In
1779 an urn containing copper coins weighing eight pounds was found on
Godolphin Farm by a ploughman who sold them to a Jew, and so all trace
of them was lost.

In whatever way Christianity was first brought to the remote Parish of
Breage, it was certainly not brought by St. Breaca, St. Germoe and the
rest of their companions, who only made their appearance at the end of
the fifth or beginning of the sixth century.

As early as the third century two great Christian writers, Tertullian
and Origen, speak of the Britons as having been won over to the religion
of Christ, and St. Chrysostom in the next century makes a similar
statement. St. Jerome also speaks of the British Pilgrims he had seen in
the Holy Land in the fourth century; British Bishops were present at the
Councils of Arles and Rimini in the fourth century, and were invited to
the Œcumenical Council of Nicæa, but could not go on account of their
poverty. Pieces of Roman pottery with the sacred monogram burnt upon it
were found at Padstow. Pelagius a Welshman, in the fourth century, set
the whole world in a blaze with his teachings about original sin. These
and many other facts make it quite clear that Christianity must have
been received by the Celts of Cornwall long before the coming of the
so-called Irish Missionaries to Cornwall, to two of whom the districts
of Breage and Germoe owe their names.

The Pagan Saxons landed on the east coast of England in the fifth
century and drove the Christian Brythons before them, putting all to the
sword who fell into their hands. Those who escaped took refuge either in
Cornwall, Wales or Brittany. It is from the Celts, therefore, with a
strong admixture of Ivernian blood, that the present inhabitants, at any
rate of Western Cornwall, are descended. As a result of the Saxon
invasion of Britain it came about that Wales and Cornwall were fully
Christian, whilst the rest of Britain became practically Pagan. The
Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon historian monk of Jarrow, goes so far as
to blame the Celts of Cornwall and Wales for altogether neglecting the
conversions of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Considering the nature
of the case, this was a most unreasonable complaint to make, as the
Saxons at once killed or enslaved any Celts unlucky enough to fall into
their hands. If further proof were needed that Wales and Cornwall were
Christian at this time, we have only to turn to the writings of
Gildas[8] and the Welsh Bards, Taliesin, Aneurin and Llwarch-Hen. The
memorials of these writers date from the sixth century and depict
incidentally Christianity in a highly organised condition among the
Celts of the West.

Leland the antiquarian, who visited Cornwall and consequently Breage in
the reign of Henry VIII, amongst other things of interest in the
Parishes of Breage and Germoe which he noticed, speaks of the ruins of
the ancient Castle or Stone Fort on the summit of Tregoning Hill. He
says: "The Castle of Conan stood on the hill of Pencair, there yet
appeareth two ditches, some say that Conan had a son called Tristrame."
The life of the chieftain Conan and all that he did have long since
faded into oblivion; all that survives of him are the mounds of stones
that mark the site of his rude stronghold, and his name which has
escaped oblivion in the name of the hill on which he lived and
ruled--Tregoning, "Tre Conan" the abode or settlement of Conan. Pencair,
the name which Leland gives to Tregoning Hill, merely means the Hill of
the Castle or Camp.

The two round camps on the eastern face of Tregoning Hill, formed by the
casting up of high banks of earth with a deep ditch on the outer side,
are the work of Brythons, or at any rate of people who had adopted their
method of fortification and defence; the Goidels made the breastwork of
their camps of stone. In those lawless days all communities had to
fortify themselves against the sudden attacks of enemies, just as, on
the north-western frontier of India, all the villages at the present day
are fortified against attack by high walls of mud. The two camps or
settlements on Tregoning are well chosen near an excellent water supply
and on the side of the hill sheltered from the blustering gales coming
up from the sea. Possibly at the time when these two camps were the
haunts of two populous communities the whole of the low lying land of
Breage and Germoe was covered with swamp, tangled scrub and undergrowth.

The first definite tradition bearing upon the history of the Parish is
the arrival of St. Breaca with St. Germoe, somewhere about 500. It is
said that they landed at the mouth of the Hayle River in company with
between seven and eight hundred Irish Saints, both men and women, who
are supposed to have come from the Province of Munster. From the legends
that have come down to us with regard to them we gather that they were
not altogether wanted by the Cornish. However, this was a minor
consideration to such a large band of enthusiastic Irish men and women;
they made a forcible landing and drove back the Cornish Chief Teudor and
his men who opposed their landing. The legends describe Teudor as a
cruel heathen, in which surely there must be some mistake, as Teudor is
a Christian name, being only Cornish for Theodore. The legends go on to
tell us that one of this great company of Saints, a woman called Cruenna
was killed at Crowan in trying to take forcible possession of the land
of one who was already a Christian, for the purpose of building a church
upon it. It seems very much as if these Irish men and women, with the
true impulsiveness, of their race, set out to Cornwall to convert the
inhabitants, without first taking the trouble to find out whether or no
they were Christians. We see instances of the same spirit at work
to-day, Methodist Missionaries in Rome to convert Roman Catholics, and
Roman Catholic Missionaries in England to convert Christians who are not
Roman Catholics.

It may be helpful, in considering this matter, to take a glance at the
condition of the people of the country whence these Missionaries came at
the time with which we are dealing. St. Patrick, who owed his knowledge
of Christianity to St. Ninian, a Briton, first brought Christianity to
Ireland not more than a hundred years before the arrival of the seven
hundred and seventy seven Saints in the Hayle River, whilst, as we have
seen, Cornwall had been under Christian influences for several
centuries. A candid view of Christianity in Ireland at this time can
only lead to the conclusion that it was more than half Pagan. The
tonsure of the Priests, or mode of cutting their hair, was exactly the
same as that of the Druid[9] Priests. It was not till the year 804 that
Monks and Clergy in Ireland were exempt from bearing arms,[9] that is
three hundred years after the coming of these Saints to Cornwall.
Women[9] were not exempt from fighting in the ranks till 500. In 672 a
battle was fought between the rival Monasteries of Clonmacnois and
Durrow. In 816 four hundred Monks and Nuns[9] were slain in a pitched
battle between two rival Monasteries. In 700 the Irish Clergy[9]
attended their Synods sword in hand, and fought with those who differed
from them on doctrinal points, leaving the ground strewn with
corpses. The Irish, no doubt with the wild unreasoning enthusiasm so
characteristic of the race, flung themselves into the new movement, and
the Monasteries were soon filled with Monks and Nuns with but a vague
realisation of what Christianity was; many no doubt would quickly weary
of the new life of rule, and yearn for one of greater variety; hence
possibly the swarming off to other lands in search of spiritual
adventures.

The theory has been suggested that our army of Irish Saints were
fugitives, worsted in battle, escaping from their enemies, as Ireland at
this period was devastated with petty tribal wars. This theory, to say
the least, seems most plausible.

Vague traditions have come down to us of incidents in the lives of the
Saints of this period which reveal something of the moral atmosphere in
which they lived and moved and had their being. At the end of Germoe
Lane there used to be a cairn of great stones, which an ignorant local
administration has long since cleared away. The legend of these stones
was that St. Keverne possessed a beautiful eucharistic chalice and
paten. St. Just the holy visited his friend and stole these sacred
vessels. St. Keverne discovered the loss and pelted the flying St. Just
with the great stones that fell at the end of Germoe Lane. The same
story appears in the life of St. Patrick where the annalist reveals his
bias in the words: "O wonderful deed! O the theft of a treasure of holy
things, the plunder of the most holy places of the world!" Straws show
the way in which the wind blows, and this fable and the comments of the
Irish annalist reveal the view of his age on the question of theft.

Of course, we fully admit that the Irish Monasteries did become for a
time the home of the learning of the age such as it was. We do not
forget their great foundations in Germany and Northern Italy, and their
exquisite skill in the work of illumination as in the books of Durrow
and Kells; what we contend is that the Irish Saints in coming to
Cornwall were coming to a land which possessed a Christianity older and
purer than their own. That the Irish Saints were sincere according to
their lights we do not doubt, and being true to the light they possessed
they are worthy of being held in honour.

It has been suggested as a solution for the reason of the Invasion of
the Irish Saints, that at the close of the fifth and the beginning of
the sixth century Cornwall was only partially christianized, that Pagans
and Christians were living side by side in amity, and that the Irish
Saints came to devote themselves to the conversion of the Pagans.
Whether this solution of the difficulty be true or no, at any rate it is
opposed to all that we can gather from the testimony of ancient writers
and hagiographers, and, if we accept it, we must reject their testimony
as utterly false and worthless.

Of course, a distinction must be made between the Hibernian Saints and
the many Saints who came over from Brittany and settled in Cornwall. The
people of Brittany were one in language and character with the Cornish
to a far greater extent than the Irish; and, like the Cornish, the
people of Brittany had been under Christian influences several centuries
before the Irish had.

Amongst the Saints who came from Ireland with Breaca and Germoe was
Gwithian, said to have been killed in the fighting with Teudor or
Theodore: Cruenna, killed at Crowan; Wendron, who made his settlement at
Wendron; Moran, who settled at Madron; Ia, who settled at St. Ives; St.
Levan, said to have been Breaca's brother, settled at St. Levan; the
names of others also have come down to us whom we need not mention.
Germoe is supposed to have been of royal descent, which means that he
was related to the petty king or chief of his sept or tribe. Breaca is
said in the vague traditions that have come down to us, originally to
have pursued the calling of a midwife; Leland, the great antiquary of
the reign of Henry VIII. when he visited Cornwall, saw many legendary
lives of the Cornish Saints, from which he made extracts. Most of these
lives were destroyed with much else that was beautiful and valuable at
the time of the Reformation.

The last book of the lives of our local Saints was in the library of Sir
William Howard of Naworth Castle in Cumberland, in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth. It was carried thither by a Cornish Roman Priest, who took
refuge with him and acted as his Chaplain. This valuable volume has been
long lost sight of.[10]

Amongst other things Leland tells us that when he visited Germoe, St.
Germoe's grave was pointed out to him; of the site of the grave even
tradition is now altogether silent; he also mentions having seen St.
Germoe's well "a little without the churchyard."

At Breage Leland made some extracts from a life of St. Breaca that was
shown to him doubtless by the then Vicar of Breage; the life in those
days would be a very precious possession of our Church. From Leland we
gather that Breaca had begun her religious life in a Monastery founded
by the famous St. Bridget, Abbess of Kildare; as to the exact site of
this Monastery the statement made by Leland is somewhat vague and
difficult.[11] He goes on to tell us that after the struggle of the
Saints with Teudor and his defeat, Breaca first took up her abode at
Pencair, that is Tregoning Hill, and built a Church somewhere near
Chynoweth and Tolmena on the south eastern slopes of the hill. Of course
it is now quite impossible to locate the site of this ancient
Church;[12] at the best it would be small and poor and the materials of
its construction of no durable character. From this spot Leland tells us
that Breaca migrated to the site on which our present Church stands, a
spot which has been hallowed to the service of God by fifteen hundred
years of worship. Generation after generation through the whole course
of English history have there lifted up their hearts to God, and
generation after generation have been laid to rest under the shadow of
its sacred walls on the edge of the hill overlooking the sea. That
Breaca settled at Chynoweth is strangely borne out by facts. The two
fortified camps previously referred to are contiguous to the spot, and
the surrounding fields on the slopes of Tregoning hill, bear abundant
evidences of having been the site of a considerable settlement in Celtic
times; huge stones that once no doubt did duty in stone avenues and
circles have been piled by farmers of a latter age into boundary walls
of cyclopean character, whilst the curious may still find ancient querns
and stones fashioned to the rude uses of a forgotten age.

In ancient deeds the Church of Breage bears the name of Eglos Pembroc
_i.e._ the Church on the Hill of Breaca. The name still lives on in the
name Pembro Farm, standing on the same hill.

[Illustration: The Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard.]

When Breaca and those who followed her settled on the edge of the hill
on which our Church stands and when amicable relationships had been
established with those dwelling around, the first thing the Saint would
attempt would be the erection of a small Church, built of wattle work,
mud and stone. The only relic of that ancient period that still remains
is the red sand stone Celtic Cross by the Church door, unearthed a few
years ago in our churchyard; this ancient cross must have been brought
from a distance, as there is no red sand stone at all near. It is
interesting to speculate why it was brought to Breage from some distant
place; perhaps it was brought from Ireland, and to Breaca was fraught
with memories of a greater and older foundation.

The site which Breaca selected for the building of her Church had been
probably the site of ancient heathen worship through many centuries. It
seems to have been the custom, wherever possible, for the early founders
of Christian Churches to select ancient heathen sites.[13] Their
building on these ancient sites was at once symbolical of the victory of
the Cross over heathendom, and evidence that the Demons which were
supposed to haunt their ancient sanctuaries were powerless against the
Saints either to harm or to hinder. The tower of Breage Church from its
position is visible far out to sea, and for miles over the surrounding
country from every point of the compass but the West. The hill on which
it stands, therefore, dominating alike land and sea, is just the spot
that the Priests of "a creed outworn" would have selected, at once
excellent for astronomical observations and for rivetting the distant
gaze of the votaries of their faith.

When this site had been finally selected, a little hut would be erected
on the spot, in which Breaca would take up her abode and continue all
alone in fasting and prayer for a period of forty days; during the whole
of this time she would eat nothing from sunrise to sunset, except on
Sundays, when possibly she might partake of an egg, a morsel of bread
with a little milk mixed with water. When the forty days were
accomplished all had been done in the way of consecration.[14]

The Churches thus built were naturally called after their founders, but
as Professor Rhys points out, it remained for a subsequent generation to
give them the informal title of Saint. It is well for us to realise that
these Cornish Saints were never formally canonized.

We must bear in mind also that in Celtic times there were no Parishes
and no Dioceses. The little colonies of the Saints were independent
communities; they kept their own Bishops, who held quite a subordinate
position; at Kildare, St. Bridget had a number of Bishops under her
orders, so had Ninnock in Brittany and Columba in Iona. Our conception
of a diocese was altogether foreign to the Celtic mind.[15] Bishops were
kept as a species of ecclesiastical Queen Bee. The Saintship or headship
of the community was hereditary, descending from father to son. The
manner of life of the Saints was rude and barbarous in the extreme. They
wore a thick outer garment of wool or of skin, with an inner garment of
lighter texture; on their feet they wore sandals, they slept on hides
with a pillow of straw.[16]

With the foundation of Churches at Breage and Germoe by Breaca and
Germoe, thick mist closes in again over the history of the Parish for
several hundred years. The communities these two Saints founded would
continue to live peacefully in all probability under the rule of their
successors until the coming of the time of the Saxon settlement. No
doubt at some time during this period of darkness the Church life and
administration would come to be organised more and more on the plan with
which we are familiar.

As a line of Cornish Bishops in communion with Canterbury and the rest
of the Church gradually asserted their authority, the old rule of the
Saints over separate and distinct Christian communities would gradually
pass away, and thus the separate atoms would coalesce and become united
under one single authority--the Bishop of the Diocese in which their
community was settled.

In 813 Egbert, the Saxon King, invaded Cornwall, and marched from one
end to the other, spreading fire and sword in his path. In 926
Athelstan, the Saxon King, defeated the Cornish at the battle of
Hingeston Down near Calstock. The complete subjugation of Cornwall
quickly followed, and with this conquest the soil of our parish would
soon pass under the hands of Saxon lords, and the Saxon system of
government would quickly supplant altogether the old systems of Celtic
times.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Professor Rhys "Origin and growth of Celtic Religion" pp. 225,
236, 245.

[2] See Frazer's "Attis, Adonis and Osiris."

[3] See Frazer's "Attis, Adonis and Osiris."

[4] Account by Revd. Alexander Hislop, Minister of Arbroath in "The Two
Babylons."

[5] Bucca connected with Scottish "Bogle." Bogle always in Scotland
means a disembodied spirit. Bucca with Bogle said to be akin to
Sclavonic "Bog" _i.e._ God. We incline to think Cornish "bucca" and
Scottish "bogle" may be taken as equivalent in meaning. See Wentz "Fairy
Faith of Celtic Countries" pp. 164 and 165.

[6] See Andrew Lang "Secret of the Totem." Also W. Gregory "The Dead
Heart of Australia" pp. 188 to 195.

[7] "ἀποτυποῦντες δ' εἰς ἀστραγάλων ῥυθμοὺς κομίζουσιν εἰς νῆσον
προκειμένην τῆς Βρεττανικῆς, ὀνομαζομένην δὲ Ἴκτιν. κατὰ γὰρ ἀμπώτεις
ἀναξηραινομένου τοῦ μεταξὺ τόπου, ταῖς ἁμάξαις εἰς ταύτην κομίζουσι τὸν
κασσίτερον δαψιλῆ."

_Diodorus Siculus._

[8] See Haddon and Stubbs.

[9] See Stokes' "Celtic Church" and Baring Gould's "Lives of the
Saints."

[10] See Borlase's "Age of the Saints."

[11] Leland says "Campus Breacae in Hibernia in quo Brigida oratorium
construxit et postea Monaster, in quo fuit et S. Breaca." It will be
noticed that this statement does not support the view of the Revd. S.
Baring Gould that Breaca is a latinised form of Bridget, in his Lives of
British Saints. Professor Gwynn of Dublin informs the writer: "Breaca
could not possibly be a form of Bridget." In support of this view he
quotes Prof. Loth in La Revue Celtique vol. 29, p. 287 on St. Briac "Ce
Saint est donné comme irlandaise ce que semblerait confirmer la
terminaison. Il faut supposer une forme irlandaise 'Briace.'"

[12] Leland: "Breaca aedificavit ecclesiam in Trenewith et Talmeneth ut
legitur in vita St. Elwini."

[13] See "Byeways of British Archæology" by W. Johnson.--_Cambridge
University Press._

[14] See Bede.

[15] Stokes' "Celtic Church."

[16] Constitutions of Columba.

THE SAXONS.

CHAPTER II.

The oldest written documents dealing with the life of the people of
Breage in the past are contained in William the Conqueror's Domesday
Book. The Domesday Book contains a general survey of all the land in
England, which William the Conqueror caused to be made after his
usurpation of the English throne in 1066. This book contains the
description of four manors in the Parish of Breage, Metela, Rentis, or,
as we call them, Methleigh and Rinsey, and the two smaller manors of
Tregew and Trescowe. The following is what we read concerning them. "The
Bishop has one manor which is called Metela[17] (Methleigh) which Bishop
Leofric held in the time of King Edward, and it rendered tribute for one
hide, but yet there is a hide and a half. Fifteen teams can plough this.
Thereof the Bishop has half a hide and one plough in demesne, and the
villeins one hide and eight ploughs. There the Bishop has fifteen
villeins and four bordars and three serfs and three cows and twenty
sheep and sixty acres of underwood and forty acres of pasture. Of this
manor the Count of Mortain has a yearly market, which Bishop Leofric
held in the time of King Edward." "Ulward holds of the Count one manor,
which is called Rentis, and therein is one hide of land. Twelve teams
can plough this. Ulward and his villeins have there one plough, one cow
and thirty sheep, and eight coliberts and four serfs and of pasture half
a league in length and the same in breadth." Attached to the manor of
Rentis or Rinsey the Count of Mortain had in demesne a quarter of a hide
of land; this portion was probably tilled by the Count's steward or
agent. "The Count has a manor which is called Trescowe, which Alnod held
in the time of King Edward and still holds of the Count, and it paid
tribute for the 1/16 of a hide. Three teams can plough this. Thereof
Alnod has 1/48 part of a hide in demesne, and the villeins the remaining
land and one plough. There Alnod has three bordars and one serf and
three acres of wood and 100 acres of pasture." "The Count has one manor
which is called Tregew, which Brismar held in the time of King Edward.
There is one quarter of a hide of land and it paid tribute for 1/16 of a
hide. Three teams can plough this. Heldric holds this of the Earl, and
has in demesne 1/32 of a hide and one plough, and the villeins have the
remaining land and one plough. There Heldric has six bordars and two
serfs and forty sheep and forty acres of pasture."

The manors were grants of land made by the king to noblemen, or as they
were then called thanes. As a return for this gift of land the thane had
to go to the wars with the king and fight for him when the king desired
his services, and also he had to give assistance in the building of the
king's castles and strongholds. The land on a Saxon manor was dealt with
in two ways; part of it was held and cultivated by the thane himself,
this was called demesne land, and the other portion of it was cultivated
by the thane's tenants, who were called villeins. The villein would
usually hold a strip of land called a virgate, possibly equal to about
thirty acres. The thane provided him with two oxen and one cow and seed
sufficient for seven acres of land for each of the thirty acres or
virgates that he held. The villein or tenant was not a free man and
could not leave the manor without the consent of his lord, and in
transfers of manors the villeins passed with the land. They paid tribute
to their lord both in money and in the produce of the land they
cultivated; also on certain days in each week, according to the season,
they had to give their labour free on the land cultivated by the lord or
thane. Below these larger villein holders came a class called coliberts,
cottars or bordars, who held about five acres of land each. These
inferior tenants had to work for their lord without wage on each Monday
throughout the year and three days each week during the period of
harvest. Below these again were the serfs who worked on their lord's
demesne; they were slaves bought and sold in the market and often
exported from English ports across the sea as part of the commercial
produce of the country. Most of us are familiar with the story of Pope
Gregory the Great, who, walking in the Roman slave-market, saw a number
of fair-haired Saxon slave boys exposed for sale, and who, seeing these
children, vowed to do his best for the conversion of their country to
Christianity. On the Breage manors it is more than probable that the
slaves would not be Saxons but Celts. Many of the manor slaves were
slaves from birth, but it also seems not to have been an uncommon
practice for free men to sell themselves into slavery under the pressure
of want.

The cultivated land round each ancient Saxon manor village was marked
off according to the custom of the time into three enormous unfenced
fields. Each householder in the village above the rank of slave had a
greater or less number of strips or shares in each of these three
fields. When the time for ploughing came round, as no villager possessed
a team of eight oxen--the number required to draw the primitive Saxon
plough--the team for the general ploughing was contributed jointly by
the villagers. The advantage of this system will therefore be obvious.
Custom decreed further that each year one of these great open fields
held in strips by the villagers should lie fallow; that another of them
should be sown with oats or rye; and a third should be sown down with
barley. Some of this last crop would be used for bread, but we fear
that a great deal of it would be devoted to drink, for the Saxons were
men who loved to drink themselves drunk, probably ascribing the ill
effects of the beer, enhanced no doubt by the relaxing climate, to
anything but the right cause. Not content with a large supply of beer,
the Saxons impressed the honey bee into the service of Bacchus, and
manufactured from honey great quantities of mead. It is probable that in
a seaboard parish like Breage, fish would be a staple article of diet;
from the smallness of the number of live stock on the manors, flesh can
only have been a rare article of diet, possibly enjoyed by the bounty of
the lord of the manor on the great festivals of the Church.[18]

The vast mass of the country at this period was wild, uncultivated and
uninhabited. Such would be the condition of the greater part of the
Parish of Breage in Saxon times. The valleys would be filled with a
thick undergrowth, their beds forming impassable swamps, whilst the
higher ground would be more or less covered with furze and scrub, in
which wolves would make their lairs, preying upon the flocks and from
time to time carrying off a child that had strayed too far from the
parental hut of clay.

The land measure called a hide made use of in the Domesday record is
supposed to have contained 120 acres;[19] a virgate was the term used
for a quarter of a hide or thirty acres. The virgate was again divided
into quarters, called ferlings, of 7-1/2 acres each. We must not
confound this word ferling with our present word "furlong," which
originally meant the longest furrow which it was deemed possible a team
of oxen could plough without stopping, viz., 220 yards.

Unfortunately Domesday is silent with regard to mining matters, and
consequently we can gather nothing as to the nature of the mining
carried on in our Parish in Saxon times. There can be no doubt that
mining of an elementary character was carried on, but of its extent and
the number of those engaged in it, it would be rash to theorise. Knowing
nothing therefore of the number of the population engaged in mining we
can form no approximate estimate of the local population, but at any
rate we may conclude that it cannot have been great. The bordars and
slaves mentioned on the four manors only come to twenty-eight; on the
largest of the manors, Metela or Methleigh, there were fifteen villeins;
the number of villeins on the other three manors is not stated--simply
the fact that there were villeins; but as Methleigh was about the size
of the other three manors put together we may conclude these manors also
possessed in all about fifteen villeins. This would give us a total of
sixty-one villeins, bordars and serfs enumerated; if we multiply this
number by five for the women and children of their respective families,
it gives us a total agricultural population for the parishes of Breage
and Germoe of three hundred and five, with eighteen teams of oxen, four
cows, and ninety sheep. It is interesting to notice that the live stock
were enumerated before the slaves, presumably because they were the more
valuable.

The houses or huts in which the Cornish villeins, bordars and serfs
lived on the Saxon manors would be composed of clay, with a hole in the
roof to let the smoke out; their inhabitants from constantly sitting in
the smoke suffered greatly from diseases of the eyes; of sanitation
there was none, and human life was exceedingly short. This condition of
things practically continued in Cornwall to the end of the Tudor period
as we gather from the picture of Cornish life given to us by Carew in
his "Survey of Cornwall" written in the reign of Elizabeth.

Compelled by law to live on the manor on which they were born and to
give a great part of their labour free to their lord, the lives of the
ancient inhabitants of Breage, judged at any rate by our standards,
must have been dull and hard indeed.

Each manor had its own court for the trial of cases which concerned only
persons living on the manor; this court was under the presidency of the
baron or thane, assisted by ten freemen. Where the freemen were not to
be found, as in our Breage manors, cases were tried by the Court of the
Hundred in which the manor was situated. The Court of the Hundred also
tried suits in the case of the larger manors which involved people
living in two or more different manors.[20]

From the legal view of things we naturally pass to matters
ecclesiastical. In approaching this view of the life of our parish in
Saxon times it is interesting in the first place to note that the Manor
of Rinsey formed part of the great Manor and Hundred of Wilmington,
which comprised a large portion of the Lizard district, including Cury
and Gunwalloe. We have here a hint as to the reason why Breage, Cury and
Gunwalloe have always been ecclesiastically one until recent times, as
roughly they formed a considerable part of the Hundred of Winnington.
It was natural that this large Manor should be regarded as an
ecclesiastical unit. We find this unity complete in the earliest extant
ecclesiastical document, dated 1219, given in the Patent Rolls, and it
seems natural to conclude that this unity dates from the foundation of
the Saxon Manor. Breage was an [21]"ecclesia," Cury and Gunwalloe were
"Capellæ" in the _Inquisitio Nonarum_ of 1346; in other words there was
only one parish with several chapelries. Most probably in the Saxon
period the collegiate system prevailed in our part of Cornwall, and
Breage may have performed for the western half of the Meneage Peninsula
what St. Keverne did for the eastern half. We find mention of the Canons
of St. Keverne, but there is no record of the Canons of Breage.

The Bishop Leofric referred to in the account of the Manor of Methleigh
became first Bishop of Cornwall and Crediton in 1046; in the same year
the title of the See was changed, and Leofric became the first Bishop of
Exeter. Possibly the Manor of Methleigh, which thus passed to the See of
Exeter, had originally been a portion of the settlement of Breaca which
had passed to the Bishops of Bodmin or St. Germans on the reorganization
of the Church in Saxon times on continental lines. There had been
Cornish Bishops in full communion with the See of Canterbury from 865,
governing their Sees from either Bodmin or St. Germans.

The Earl or Count mentioned in the extracts from Domesday was Robert,
Earl of Cornwall, and Count of Mortain in Normandy. He was the bastard
half-brother of William the Conqueror. The Earls of Cornwall to all
intents and purposes within the bounds of the earldom were reigning
princes. The earldom was not hereditary; a special creation took place
at the death of each Earl, or in case of the earldom having been
forfeited through rebellion. Earl Robert obtained enormous spoils from
his half-brother William on his conquest of England; some idea of the
plunder thus obtained may be gathered from the fact that in Domesday we
find him possessed of 797 manors in various counties.

After this brief record of our Parish and its Manors to be found in
Domesday, its history is again utterly lost in impenetrable obscurity
for 250 years, when documents, especially of an ecclesiastical nature,
became more frequent, and the main outline of its story becomes much
clearer.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] This ancient Manor of Methleigh was much bigger than the present
estate of Methleigh. It most probably comprised a large portion of the
present district of Kenneggie. This conclusion finds interesting support
from the names of two fields in Kenneggie, viz. the "Sentry" or
"Sanctuary Field" and "Church Field." It may be added that the Manor of
Methleigh passed from the Bishops of Exeter to the Dean and Chapter of
Exeter, and by them was alienated from the Church.

[18] For the conditions of life on Anglo-Saxon Manor see Seebohm's
"Village Communities."

[19] The exact size of the ancient Cornish acre is unknown.

[20] Inderwick's "The King's Peace."

It is fair to add that the Rev. T. Taylor informs me:--"An examination
of the Court Rolls given by Maitland makes it evident that where there
were few freemen, the villeins were suitors at the Court, and that it is
impossible to say that the absence of the former drove the villeins to
the Hundred Court."

[21] In the _Inquisitio Nonarum_ of 1346 the phrase "ecclesia Sanctae
Bryacae cum capellis Sanctorum Correnti Wynyantoni et Gyrmough" occurs.

From the Norman Conquest to the Reformation.

CHAPTER III.

In dealing with the Norman period, to make the story of Breage clear, it
is necessary in the first place again to refer briefly to the Earldom of
Cornwall. From the time of the Norman Conquest, when the earldom was
created, to the time of Edward the Black Prince, when it was exalted
into a duchy, the earldom was held by a series of twelve earls. Since
the time of the Black Prince the Duchy of Cornwall has always been held
by the eldest son of the reigning Sovereign.

Giraldus describes the ecclesiastical polity of the Normans in no
flattering terms. If his version be correct--and there seems little
reason in the main to doubt it--the Normans simply regarded the
endowments of the Church as a means of satisfying the rapacity of a
swarm of needy ecclesiastics from the other side of the Channel.

As the possession of the land was torn from the Saxon nobles and handed
over as largess to Norman Knights, so too the endowments of the Church
were regarded as fitting spoil for Norman Priests. According to
Giraldus, the method of the Norman Priest might be summed up in the
words "_pasci non pascere_." He also charges the Norman Clergy with
great ignorance and gross immorality, though many of the Saxon Clergy
were dispossessed by the Conqueror on the specious charge of immorality,
as the Prior and Canons of Plympton St. Mary, near Plymouth. Doubtless
the invectives of Giraldus are somewhat highly coloured, but after all
it seems but too clear that they contain more than a substratum of
truth.

It is evident from existing remains that Norman Churches were built
both at Breage and Germoe, possibly about the year 1100. The building of
these Churches was no doubt at the expense of the Earls of Cornwall, in
accordance with the prevailing custom. Whether Saxon Churches succeeded
the ancient Celtic Churches it is impossible to say. If the Saxons did
find the humble Celtic Churches inadequate and built new ones, at any
rate no vestige or record of them survives. The remains of the Norman
Church built on the site of the present Church at Breage consist only of
a couple of fragments, but yet these two fragments are sufficient to
make it clear that the present Church was preceded by a Norman Church. A
projecting stone of bluish grey colour, let into the northern wall by
the door of the present vestry, bears distinct marks of Norman
workmanship, and some twenty years ago more than a fragment of a Norman
font was found outside the north door of our Church. This interesting
relic was incorporated into the new font at present in use, which was
fashioned on the model of the ancient Norman font at Cury.

At Germoe, on the other hand, the remains of a Norman Church are
altogether more abundant. Here the foundations and lower portions of the
east and south walls are evidently of Norman workmanship, as also the
east and south walls of the south transept. During the restoration of
1891 the head of a Norman window was discovered built into the wall of
the south transept. This little window has been carefully restored by
the addition of two new jambs and a stone sill; on examination it will
be discovered that this Norman window arch is slightly chamfered. Other
discoveries made at the restoration were the Norman corbel heads, now
built into the outside face of the east wall of the north aisle, and the
bowl of a Norman stoup, which has been built into the south wall of the
nave, with a new arch placed over it. In the foundations of the Church
was also discovered the bowl of a mutilated Norman font, which now
stands on a new rough-hewn stem in the north transept. The date of this
font is placed by Mr. Sedding, in his "Norman Churches in Cornwall," at
about 1100. If we regard this date of 1100 as correct, it will serve as
some clue to the date of the building of the Norman Churches at Breage
and Germoe. Assuming this date to be approximately correct, the churches
were built by William Fitz Robert or William de Mortain, Earl of
Cornwall, son of Earl Robert de Mortain of Domesday Book. This
unfortunate nobleman joined his cousin Robert de Belesme in rebellion
against Henry I. with disastrous consequences. He was taken prisoner at
the battle of Tenchebrai and deprived of his estates and honours, and
his eyes were put out by the hands of the executioner. In his blindness
and misery he sought peace in the bosom of the Church, of which it seems
at least probable that he was a benefactor in the days of his
prosperity, and died a Cluniac Monk in the Monastery of Bermondsey.

The question of patronage is one of extreme difficulty; it seems more
than probable that the patronage went to the builders of the Churches;
in this case the patronage of Breage would naturally pass at the
building of the Norman Churches to the Earldom of Cornwall. At any rate
we find the patronage of the benefice attached to the Earldom at the
beginning of the thirteenth century.

Leland states that Germoe was originally a cell of St. Michael's Mount.
In this statement he is followed by Hals. It seems probable that on this
point Leland was misled by some statement made locally to him, as there
is no shred of existing evidence to support this view. Domesday and the
Monasticon are alike silent upon the subject and lend no countenance to
it. It is true Hals, apparently in support of this contention, evolved a
fictitious Inquisition of the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester from
the depths of his subliminal consciousness. In this precious Inquisition
"Sancto Gordon," as Germoe is styled "in the Deanery of Kerrier," is
valued at £8. More to the point is the fact that in 1246 Richard, Earl
of Cornwall, made over the living of Breage with the Chapels of Cury,
Gunwalloe and Germoe to the Abbey of Hayles.

In Lysons' Cornwall it is stated that the Chapel of St. Germoe was given
by William, Earl of Gloucester, to the Priory of St. James, Bristol. The
learned authors have here fallen into a mistake for which there is
reasonable excuse; they have confounded the church of St. Breoke[22] in
North Cornwall with St. Breage and a Church of Germot, possibly on the
Norman lands of the Earl of Gloucester, with Germoe. The Earl of
Gloucester never held any lands in this district. This statement of the
Lysons has also been freely used by subsequent writers of county
histories. It seems clear that at no period of its history was Germoe
ever ecclesiastically independent of Breage; it is probable that in
early times it was served like Cury and Gunwalloe by clergy living
together under the collegiate system at Breage. In the _Inquisitio
Nonarum_ of 1346 we read "ecclesia Sanctae Bryacae cum Capellis
Sanctorum Corenti, Wynyantoni et Gyrmough," which makes it quite clear
that at that date Germoe was included in the parish of Breage.

With the coming of the Normans the value of Cornwall's mineral wealth
seems to have been quickly grasped. The successive Earls were greedy
foreigners, who valued their Fief mainly for what it would produce; it
was not so much Cornwall they wanted as Cornwall's wealth. By the time
of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of the Romans, the mines of Cornwall
had become a source of immense wealth, 1224-72. Possibly the building of
Churches both at Breage and Germoe in Norman times may have been due to
the large influx of population owing to the opening up of local mines.

At the beginning of the Norman period the people of Breage were living
under the ordinary Manorial and King's Courts, but very soon all this
was changed by the Norman Earls in their policy of mine development, and
the rule of the Stannary Courts was added. By the Charter of 1201,
Stannary Courts were set up which held civil and criminal jurisdiction
over the Miners or Tinners, as they were called. A Stannary Parliament,
consisting of twenty-four Senators, met at Hingston Down, near Calstock,
and chose a Speaker of its own; subsequently this Parliament for the
government of the Miners and the regulation of mining affairs seems to
have met at Truro. The Stannaries were divided into five districts, of
which Penwith and Kerrier formed one. The Cornish Miners thus came to be
formed into a little State by themselves; they paid no taxes to the King
but to the Stannaries, and these they paid not as Englishmen but as
Miners, Their Parliament was the mine Parliament, their Courts were the
mine Courts. The influence of this state of things was in the main bad;
it gave opportunity for the oppression and consequent debasement of the
Miners, and tended to make the people lawless and impatient of all
restraint. Long after this ancient system had passed away its evil
fruits remained in a certain lawlessness of disposition. Carew, writing
in the days of Queen Elizabeth, remarks that it was a matter of
notoriety in his day that the mining districts of Cornwall were farthest
behind the general level of culture. The reason of this we take to be
due, to a large extent, to the lawlessness, abuses and evils engendered
by the Stannary Courts, which at one and the same time placed the mining
population above the law and beyond the arm of its protection.

The following letter of King Henry III., written in 1219 to Simon de
Apulia, an Italian Bishop of Exeter, referring to the living of Breage,
which is given in the Patent Rolls, is of interest. The two Vicars of
Breage mentioned in this document are the earliest of whom we have any
record.

"The King to Simon, Bishop of Exeter, greeting; be it known that on the
resignation of William the son of Richard, Parson of the Churches of
Eglospenbroc, Egloscure and Winiton now deceased, i.e. the Churches of
Breage, Cury and Gunwalloe, Our Lord King John conferred the said
Churches on our beloved Clerk, William, the son of Humphrey, the
aforesaid Churches being in his appointment. But since the same William
was prevented from following his claim on account of the disturbed state
of the time, we now send him to your fatherly care, asking you to admit
no one else to those Churches contrary to the gift already made by the
King our Father, but to kindly institute the said William, showing
yourself kindly disposed in this matter for love of us." This document
under the specious phrase "disturbed state of the times" evidently
refers to the period of the Interdict which had only come to a close
some five years previously--a period when by the insensate wickedness of
King and Pope the whole apparatus of the religious life of the country
was thrown out of gear and ceased to perform its functions, to the
infinite sorrow and misery of many thousands of the people.

In 1246 Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of the Romans, made over the
Church of Breage with the Chapelries of Cury, Gunwalloe and Germoe to
the Abbey of St. Mary, at Hayles in Worcestershire. The story of this
Prince reads more like a romance than a record of sober fact. He was the
second son of King John. Born in 1209, Richard was made a Knight and
Earl of Cornwall at the early age of sixteen. Before his seventeenth
birthday he had shewn himself to be a fearless soldier in the wars of
Gascony. Three years later he took the field again against the French
King, this time in the North of France. The campaign was barren of all
results, but memorable for the terrible slaughter of its battles and the
ruin and misery wrought upon the poor peasants of the country in which
it was waged, who knew less than nothing at all as to what it was all
about. In this terrible campaign Richard lost his friend Gilbert De
Clare, Earl of Gloucester. Richard consoled himself for the loss of his
friend by marrying his widow, whose beauty and golden tresses the old
chronicler delights to dwell upon.

This warlike brother of an unwarlike king bitterly inveighed against the
royal favourites who battened upon the wealth of the nation. "England
has become a vineyard without a wall, wherein all who pass by pluck off
her grapes," he exclaimed.

In 1241 we find Richard at Rome endeavouring to mediate between Pope
Gregory IX. and his mighty brother-in-law the Emperor Frederick II.,
"Stupor Mundi," the most gifted sovereign of his age, if not of any age.
The Pope was practically the Emperor's prisoner at Grotto Ferrata, and
during the terrible August heat, which was accompanied by pestilence,
Richard passed to and fro between Pope and Emperor. At length the
negotiations were put an end to by death claiming the aged Pontiff.

His beautiful wife Isabella de Clare died at an early age, and Richard
with a sad heart went off to the Crusades, where, by liberal largess,
wrung from the serfs of his fiefs no doubt, rather than by the sword, we
read he was able to open the gates of Jerusalem and raise the banner of
the Cross over Nazareth and Bethlehem.

Returning from the Holy Land, the ship in which he sailed was beset by a
terrible storm. In the hour of extreme danger Earl Richard made a vow to
the Virgin that, if by the mercy of God the ship was saved from the
storm, he would build a great abbey to her honour and richly endow it.

On his return, in obedience to his vow, he set about the founding of
Hayles Abbey in Worcestershire on a princely scale, to which we have
seen he made over the Church of Breage with its three Chapelries. The
Church of this Abbey was of the same dimensions as those of Gloucester
Cathedral; it was consecrated in 1251 amidst a scene of the greatest
splendour, the King and Queen with the majority of the Bishops and many
Barons being present. Now only a heap of grass-grown ruins marks the
site of this great foundation.

It was in the days of Earl Richard that the tin mines of Cornwall came
to be developed on a large scale, and they became to him a source of
immense wealth--in fact, a golden key by which he was able to unlock the
doors of attainment both in Palestine and Germany. We gather that this
Earl was most kindly disposed towards the Jewish race, which assertion
lends colour to the statement of Carew that the tin trade of Cornwall in
ancient times was largely in the hands of Jews, who grievously exploited
the Cornish Tinners.

In 1257 Richard was chosen King of the Romans after the payment of
immense bribes to a number of the electing Princes. He returned to
England after two years of fruitless war to maintain his shadowy
kingdom. He commanded a wing of the Royal Army at the battles of Lewes;
on the rout of the royal forces he hid himself in a windmill, from which
he was ignominiously dragged and sent a prisoner to the Tower of London.
He was released in 1265, and on his death in 1272 his body was laid in
the great Abbey which he had founded.

His son, Edmund, succeeded him as Earl of Cornwall; this Prince
presented to the Abbey of Hayles one of the most famous relics of the
Middle Ages, a reputed phial of the Blood of Christ. This revered relic
was kept in a shrine of great magnificence. A curious and interesting
report was made on the nature of this supposed relic by the King's
Commissioners at the time of the Reformation.[23]

We have a practically complete list of the Vicars of Breage from the
appointment of William, son of Humphrey in succession to William, son of
John, in 1219. In the deed already quoted, William, son of Richard, is
described as the Parson of Breage; this means he was the Rector of the
Parish in the full sense of the word. With the grant of the Church of
Breage with its three Chapelries to the Abbey of Hayles the day of the
Rectors of Breage was over.

The Abbey of Hayles now stood in the place of Rector, and the Abbot
appointed a Vicar or substitute in his room, who acted as the deputy of
the Abbot and Convent in the parish. The first of the Vicars was Master
Robert de la More, who, as well as his two next successors, was
appointed by the Bishop, _jure devoluto_; the Abbot of Hayles finding it
difficult no doubt to fill up such a distant and remote appointment.
Robert de la More seems to have been a person of note in his day.[24] He
was only Vicar of Breage for three months; he subsequently became a
Canon of Glasney, an ancient Collegiate foundation near Penryn. In 1276
he was Vicar of Yeovil, and of sufficient importance for the King to
address a letter to him with reference to the raising of a loan for the
carrying on of the Scottish Campaign. Of his successor, Master Stephanus
de Arbor, we are able to gather no particulars, though the figure of his
immediate successor, Sir Pascasius rises clear and distinct for a moment
out of the mists of the past. It may be well here to remark that the
prefix "Master" meant one who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at
either of the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge. "Sir," on the
contrary, was a title given to those who had studied at the Universities
but who had not taken their Master's degree; this we fancy would in the
main be due to poverty rather than laziness or lack of ability, as a
Master's degree in those days entailed a longer period of residence at
the Universities than now. We may conclude that Sir Pascasius was a
Cornishman and a member of the clan Pascoe. His name survives in the
archives of the Bishops of Exeter, embalmed in a document dated July
1310, which gives a lurid picture of the brutal methods of the age. The
Chapel of Buryan was the King's Peculiar, and, as such, was outside the
jurisdiction of the Bishop. It was held by Dean and Canons of its own. A
dispute had long been simmering between the Dean and the Bishop of
Exeter as to the appointment of one John de Beaupré as Canon of Buryan,
the Dean refusing to admit him. As a step in this long dispute it seems
that Bishop Walter de Stapleton must have issued a commission to certain
clergy, possibly for the purpose of instituting John de Beaupré to the
vacant canonry in the Chapel of Buryan. The commission was composed,
amongst others, of Sir Pascasius, the vicar of Breage, the vicars of St.
Keverne, Constantine, St. Erth, Sithney, Grade and Landewednack. Dean
Matthew, in seeking redress through the King's Court, complained that
when this posse of Clergy arrived at Buryan and found the doors of the
Church barred, they proceeded to heap abuse upon him of the most
untoward character, and then, having retired, they returned with a
battering ram and broke in the doors of the Church, proceeding most
unmercifully to beat the defenders of the door in the hour of victory,
and, in the case of one of the Dean's servants, to have danced upon his
prostrate body so that his life was despaired of. Having thus celebrated
their victory they proceeded to exercise jurisdiction[25] in the Chapel.
For this wild assertion, presumably of episcopal authority, they were
all heavily fined.

Shortly after this event Bishop Stapleton pronounced Pascasius to be
old, blind and infirm, and appointed Master Benedict de Arundelle,
Professor of Canon Law, his coadjutor. This coadjutor was a scion of the
ancient family of Arundell of Lanherne; he afterwards became Provost of
Glasney, which office he ultimately resigned whilst still remaining one
of the Canons of that Foundation till the time of his death. In addition
to his Canonry of Glasney, he also held the Rectory of Phillack, the
patronage of which was then vested in the Arundell family. Whilst
speaking of Glasney we may add that a third Vicar of Breage, Sir William
Pers, in 1466 became a Canon of that ancient house.

The first Vicar of Breage appointed by the Abbot and Convent of Hayles
was David de Lyspein in 1313. The name of this man makes it clear that
he was a foreigner, most probably a Gascon; possibly a more correct
rendering of his name would have been David de L'Espagne or David of
Spain. Froissart in his Chronicles has a good deal to say of a gallant
Gascon Knight, Roger d'Espaign, famous for his strength and valour, who
dwelt at the Court of the Count de Foix. Though these two names are
spelt somewhat differently they are practically one and the same, as in
the fourteenth century it was usual to find proper names continually
spelt in different ways. At this time Gascony was a fief of the English
Crown, and our Kings, Bishops and Nobles were continually passing
between the two lands on missions of government, diplomacy or war, and
numbers of Gascon Clergy found their way in their trains to our shores.
It may well have been that David de Lyspein was one of these.

Sir Pascasius, whatever else he may have been, was a Pascoe, and a
Cornishman. It was one thing to pay tithes to a Cornishman who was
moreover the actual _Persona_ of the parish, and another thing to pay
tithes to the Abbot and Convent of Hayles, of whom no Cornishman knew
anything, and whose representative or vicar was a foreigner, possibly
barely able to speak the English language, let alone the Cornish tongue,
and knowing nothing of the ways or habits of the people. England at
this period was overrun with French, Italian and Spanish Clergy, and the
whole of our Western diocese was in a state of ferment at having foreign
clergy thrust into the parishes. At Yealmpton, in S. Devon, the French
vicar thrust upon the people, on the day of his institution, had to fly
from the church with the Archdeacon and his retinue, in momentary danger
of being "detruncated." At Tavistock and Plymouth similar assaults were
perpetrated upon foreign clergy forced upon the people.

In 1339 a brief was issued by the King to Bishop Grandisson, who himself
was a Swiss noble, born on the Lake of Geneva, commanding him to certify
what dignities, prebends and other ecclesiastical benefices were held by
foreigners in the Diocese of Exeter.

Taking all these circumstances into consideration it would have been
surprising if David de Lyspein had had a good time amongst his Cornish
parishioners. The few documents that have come down to us all accentuate
the fact that they gave him a rather poor time. In the registers of
Bishop Grandisson we gather from a document bearing date 1335 that at
some time previous, he, together with Brother Thomas, a Monk of Hayle,
and Proctor of his Convent, had been grievously wounded by Henry de
Pengersick, a man of position. No doubt the affray had occurred in an
attempt to collect tithe or other dues. In proceeding to forcible
resistance Henry de Pengersick was but carrying into effect the popular
sentiment, so strong at this time practically throughout the whole of
England. It is interesting to note that this armed resistance came from
an owner of Pengersick. A tradition of the lawlessness and wild deeds of
the owners of Pengersick has been handed down to the present time
amongst the country people of the district, and like most traditions
seems based on truth. Judging from the fierce attack on David de
Lyspein, or David of Spain, and Brother Thomas, the Militons, who came
after, in their wild deeds were but following in the footsteps of those
who had gone before. The greater excommunication was placed upon Henry
de Pengersick, but as the wounds inflicted did not permanently prevent
the two clergy from performing the duties of their office, it was
removed on the payment of due damages. However, matters do not seem to
have mended much; in 1337 a decree was issued[26] granting protection to
the Abbot and Convent of Hayles, "who were grievously hindered in
receiving the fruits and profits of St. Breaca in Kerrier by persons who
threaten and assault their servants and carry away the goods of the
Abbey." The people were evidently of opinion that paying tithes to a
Worcestershire Convent and a foreigner Vicar was beyond all reason. We
see going on in this remote Cornish Parish that which was taking place
all over the country, alienating the Church from the hearts of the
people, and preparing the way for the great upheaval of the Reformation.
No doubt the heart of poor David de Lyspein in the gloom of the Cornish
mists and rain, as the Atlantic tempests howled round his rude tenement,
yearned for the forest-clad hills of the sunny South, the scent of the
pines and the view of the far-off ranges capped with eternal snow that
separated his land from Spain. Cornwall was then rude, barbarous and
remote, whilst Gascony was softened and humanized with Provençal culture
and light.

In 1340 an event occurred which showed that in spite of strained
relationships, clergy and people could at times make common cause in a
common enterprise. A tradition of the eighteenth century still lingers
at Germoe of a clergyman rushing from the pulpit demanding fair play to
participate in the spoil of the wreck which the sea was bearing in upon
Praa Sands. If this tale be not mythical, this clergyman had at any rate
fourteenth century precedent for his action. In 1340 an Irish ship came
ashore at Porthleven, when sixty-one persons, including several
"religious," i.e. persons in orders of religion, broke up the vessel
into pieces and carried away the cargo.[27]

It is not fair to judge the whole life of the community by cases coming
before the Courts, but still these cases are sufficiently frequent to
bring home to us the utter lawlessness and violence of the times. When
we compare the religious life of the fourteenth century as revealed in
the State Papers and the Episcopal and Chapter Records with the outlook
and condition of the Church to-day, in spite of dark streaks across the
horizon of the future, we cannot but be conscious of a wonderful
progress, and an exchanging of crude materialism and superstition for
high and noble ideals.

The greatest event in its consequences and at the same time the most
terrible in the story of the period between the Norman Conquest and the
Reformation is the visitation of the Plague or Black Death. The Plague
seems to have reached England in 1348; it spread from Dorsetshire to
London in the November of that year. In the Eastern Counties whole
districts were depopulated by this terrible scourge; and magnificent
Churches in remote and lonely parishes still attest the large
populations that dwelt around them and gathered in them for worship
before the coming of the Black Death.

In our own immediate neighbourhood, at Bodmin alone 1,500 persons died
in the terrible visitation. The Clergy seem to have been the greatest
sufferers of all, partly no doubt due to their office bringing them in
close contact with the dying, and partly no doubt due to the confusion
between dirt and holiness that subsisted in the mediæval mind. To
realise the awful mortality in the West amongst the Clergy at this
period it is only necessary to go over the endless lists of institutions
in the Registers of Bishop Grandisson; not seldom three institutions to
one parish occur in the course of a single year. As a country engaged in
a long and desperate war is glad almost to accept recruits of any kind
in its closing stages, so the Church, as this awful epidemic proceeded,
accepted recruits for the army of God she would have scorned in its
beginning. The result of this acceptation was altogether bad; her
influence began to wane, and she lost touch with the life of the people.

Slowly but gradually the black shadow moved westwards extending itself
over the County, leaving in its track half-peopled villages and the
survivors dwelling under the shadow of an awful and nameless dread. In
the extreme West of the County the ravages of the pestilence seem to
have been specially terrible in 1362. It seems more than probable that
Sir William Pellour, one of our Vicars of Breage, died of it in this
year. Bereft in many cases of the majority of those they loved, and with
a vision of death and mortality in its most horrible forms graven upon
their minds, the view of life of the mass of the people became utterly
changed, and this naturally reflected itself upon the whole religious
outlook of the time.

Another subtle and deep influence was beginning to stir at this period,
even in the remote wilds of Cornwall. On the Continent, in Italy
especially, the human mind in the previous century had begun to awake
from the torpor and lethargy of a thousand years. The thirteenth century
was a glorious springtime of the human soul, when art, philosophy and
the desire to know, came back to the human mind. This tide of new life
and light in the fourteenth century began to throb and move, even in the
remote backwaters of English life, filling the minds of the people with
vague yearnings after better things, and producing a condition of deep
spiritual dissatisfaction. This spirit found some expression in the
great number of Oratories in the leading private houses, that were
licensed, all over the Western Diocese. At this time here in Breage, we
read that on 2nd Dec. 1398, John Rynsy of Godolghan, and Elinora, his
wife, obtained a licence from Bishop Stafford, for Oratories both at
Rynsy and Godolghan, with the stipulation that on Sundays and other
Feasts they should resort to their Parish Church, whenever it was
conveniently possible for them to do so. Again on 6th September 1400,
John Pengersick and Joan, his wife, obtained from Bishop Stafford, a
licence for a third Oratory in the Parish at their mansion of
Pengersick.

Whilst the gentry were making provision for regular worship in their own
houses, new Parish Churches were being built in almost every parish.
Practically nine-tenths of the Parish Churches in Devon and Cornwall are
the product of this age. The people were seeking to express in stone the
new ideal that was moving in their minds, and which was destined to find
fuller and deeper expression in the Reformation.

Our Churches of Breage and Germoe we owe to this wonderful quickening of
religious life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The old Norman
Church at Breage was pulled down in the fifteenth century as inadequate
and unworthy, and the present cruciform Church, with its tower sixty-six
feet in height, of beautiful workmanship and restful proportions, reared
in its place. The Church outwardly to-day is very much as the fifteenth
century builders left it. The tiny transepts, which, like the beautiful
south porch, externally suggest small battlemented towers, were
evidently originally used as side chapels. The frescos with which the
whole of the interior walls were once covered, were doubtless painted
shortly after the building of the Church.

[Illustration: Frescos of St. Christopher and Our Lord in Breage
Church.]

Fresco painting is the oldest of the arts, its crude beginnings reaching
back to the days when palæolithic man sought to exercise it upon the
walls of the caverns of the Dordogne. In Egypt the ancient monuments
bear witness to its existence from the remotest antiquity. The Etruscans
seem to have brought the art with them from the East to Italy, which
became in future ages its true home, and where it attained to its
highest perfection and beauty. The Romans, probably owing to Greek
influences, carried the art much farther than the Etruscans had done.
Revived in Italy in the thirteenth, the art reached its highest
perfection in the fifteenth century. From Italy the fashion of mural
painting spread, and by the fifteenth century seems to have become
common even in Cornwall, judging by the records of the survival of
numerous fragments. Our frescos were probably painted very soon after
the building of the Church, in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
An important fact bearing upon fresco painting was the extreme rapidity
with which the work had to be accomplished, as the secret of its
permanency rested in the plaster upon which it was placed, being damp
and newly laid. It will strike the observer at Breage that the fresco of
St. Christopher and that of the Christ, though crude in execution, are
full of character and force, which the wooden and purely conventional
figures of the other frescos entirely lack. It seems evident therefore
that the former owe their origin to a different hand than the latter.

The fresco of St. Christopher arrests the eye immediately on entering
the Church through the south door. This was doubtless the intention of
the designer of the fresco, as to see St. Christopher on entering a
Church, according to mediæval superstition was a harbinger of good luck.
This may partly account for the superstition that still lingers, that to
enter the Church by the west door, which is never used, save for the
bearing out of the dead at funerals, foreshadows untimely death.

The windows of the Church, before the pillage and vandalism let loose
upon it by the Reformation, were all of stained glass, of which several
beautiful fragments have come down to us, as the head of St. Veronica in
the chapel at the end of the north aisle, and the heads of the two
angels in the south window of the chapel, on the south side of the
Church. The Reformation, like all great upheavals, beneficent in
themselves, led to the unchaining of the spirit of fanaticism and
rapine. The spirit of liberty was fanned into a flame in France before
the Revolution by the noblest and purest spirits in the country; yet who
could blame them for the frenzied orgies of the Terror? The few
fragments of fifteenth century glass were discovered with the bones and
skulls of two almost complete skeletons in the walled-up staircase
leading to the Rood Loft, in the north wall of the Church, at the time
of the restoration in 1891. The probable solution seems that the
Commissioners, who visited Breage 22nd April, 1549, to ascertain that
the injunctions of Edward VI. were duly fulfilled, ordered the
destruction of the windows, as containing figures of the Saints and
emblems of idolatry. Possibly also stone tombs were destroyed and
desecrated, partly in a spirit of iconoclasm, and partly from the spirit
of plunder. We can imagine at this juncture some one more pious or
superstitious than his fellows gathering the fragments of beautiful
glass, and bones torn from their tombs within the Church, and placing
them in the cavity of the broken stairway in process of being walled
up.[28]

The granite support of the Credence Table and the Piscina in the chancel
were exhumed from the foundations of the Church during the restoration
and placed in their original situation: also the rose Piscina and the
pedestal on which it at present stands were unearthed at this time. The
pedestal in question, it may be stated, has nothing whatever to do with
the Piscina, the date of which is most probably coeval with the Church,
but is evidently the base of a font of Jacobean origin. The granite bowl
masquerading as a stoup in the porch is not of ecclesiastical origin at
all; its original use was evidently for grinding corn in primitive
times. It may be interesting to mention the discovery during the
restoration, beneath the floor of the Church, near where the pulpit now
stands, of six skeletons lying uncoffined side by side, the skulls of
all of them being perforated with bullet wounds; the teeth in each skull
were almost perfect, suggestive of violent and untimely deaths. The
story of this tragedy has long since faded into oblivion; possibly these
skeletons belonged to victims of some fierce act of military discipline
or retaliation in the Parliamentary Wars.

The restoration of Germoe Church was taken in hand a century earlier
than that of Breage, for what reason it is impossible to say. At this
period the mining operations of the Parish were mainly centred round
Germoe, from Trewarvas Head to Laseve, and between the two hills of
Tregoning and Godolphin. It may well have been that the restoration of
Germoe Church was begun at an earlier date because it stood in the most
populous portion of the parish. Sometime in the fourteenth century a
north aisle was added to the small Norman cruciform Church, and then a
little later a further enlargement and embellishment was made by the
addition of the north transept, and the present chancel to some extent
reared upon Norman foundations; the south transept, as we have
previously stated, was of Norman origin. For some reason or other, the
work seems to have been arrested when half carried through; the builders
had gone as far as to replace the Norman arch in the south transept by a
twin archway,[29] the natural development of which would have been the
addition of a south arcade. Instead of this the present south doorway
was added to the Church, superseding an earlier entrance. The porch
built over this door was not added until the next century, possibly
about the time of the rebuilding of Breage Church. The grotesque
carvings of monkeys on the corbel stones supporting the ends of the
copings of the porch have evidently been taken from the older building.
A feature of the chancel at Germoe is the canopied arch over the present
sedilia and piscina. I take it that this beautiful arched aperture
originally contained a tomb, possibly of a de Pengersick, or it may have
been used as a sepulchre in connection with the Easter Festival; at
any-rate, its true significance has long been lost sight of under the
hand of the spoiler and the restorer.

[Illustration: St. Germoe's Chair.]

The most interesting feature for the ecclesiastical antiquarian is not
the Church itself, but the curious edifice in the Churchyard, known as
St. Germoe's Chair. Tradition says this was erected by a member of the
de Pengersick family. When Leland, the great antiquary, visited Cornwall
in the reign of Henry VIII., he mentions both St. Germoe's Tomb, St.
Germoe's Chair and St. Germoe's Well. The water still gurgles and
bubbles from the spring by the roadside, from whence the Saint slaked
his thirst and supplied his simple wants, but the very site of his tomb
is long forgotten, the crude and vulgar bigotry of an intervening age
having no place in its system for such memories. Germoe's Chair has been
the fruitful source of many curious speculations and ingenious theories
as to its origin. There can be but little doubt, however, that its
original use was in connection with the Palm Sunday celebrations of the
mediæval Church. It seems to have been customary on Palm Sundays for
some of the Clergy, bearing a cross which was covered or muffled at some
point in the service, to issue from the Church, followed by a portion of
the congregation in procession bearing palms or their substitutes in
their hands. A booth was erected in the Churchyard: sometimes this was
of stone and of a permanent character like Germoe's Chair. Arrived at
this erection the officiating Priest read the Gospel for the day; at
this point another procession issued from the Church, headed by a Priest
bearing the Host, and a number of children following a cross, decorated
with wreaths of green leaves and singing "Blessed is He that cometh in
the name of the Lord." The two groups then mingled together, the muffled
cross was removed, and a distribution of bread or alms was made from the
booth or pavilion, or, as in the case of Germoe, from what is now
called Germoe's Chair. The united processions then, following the
Priests, returned to the Church, where the service was continued to its
close.[30]

Cornwall from its position escaped the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses.
During this outwardly brutal and sordid period, whilst the Barons were
hacking themselves in pieces, and successive Kings were merely
"landlords" of England for the time being, the true heart of the nation
was beginning to throb slowly with the pulses of a new life. I doubt
much if Master William Pensans and his successors onward to Sir William
Pers, and their flocks at Breage and Germoe, troubled themselves very
much about the battles and rebellions and judicial murders that made up
the history of England during the times in which they lived. Rumours of
these terrible stirrings would be brought to them from time to time by
wandering Friars or the Pilgrims passing through the Parish on their way
to St. Michael's Mount, which was then one of the most popular places of
pilgrimage in England. Doubtless many of the Pilgrims would make Breage
the last halting place for the night, and move on to St. Michael's Mount
on the following morning. These Pilgrims would be a motley crew of every
class and grade, some seeking no doubt for the forgiveness of heinous
deeds and crimes through the mediation of St. Michael, others seeking
health and often finding it, not by the help of the Saint but through
change of air and scene. Childless parents of great possessions often
made pilgrimages to distant shrines in search of an heir, and still
others were pilgrims because they loved change and to live close to
Nature, though perhaps they never knew it.

In 1471 after the Battle of Barnet a strange band of Pilgrims visited
St. Michael's Mount. John, Earl of Oxford, who had escaped from the
slaughter of that terrible battle, came by sea to the Mount with a band
of followers disguised as Pilgrims. They landed, simulating deep
devotion, and obtaining admittance to the Castle, drew arms from beneath
their Pilgrims' cloaks and rushed upon and overpowered the small
garrison. Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, who was sent to retake the
Castle, was slain in the attempt on the sands between the Mount and the
shore--in his death, it is said, fulfilling a curse of former years.
After a siege of six months the Earl of Oxford and his men surrendered
upon terms, the Earl being allowed to retire to France, from whence he
returned with Henry of Richmond, to share in the victory of Bosworth
Field.

Pilgrims, wandering, preaching Friars and merchants, who came to the
West for the purchase of tin, would practically at this time be the sole
sources of news and connecting links with the outer world. Men then led
isolated lives, less dependent upon their fellows for daily needs and
wants. The phrase "we are all members one of another" has a fuller and
deeper meaning for us than it had for them.

We cannot conclude the account of this period without a brief allusion
to the names of the incumbents from the time of David de Lyspein
onwards. The particulars of their lives have long since faded into
oblivion; whether good or bad, wise or foolish, their memories have
utterly faded. The fact of the nationality, however, of many of them
survives in their names. Henry Cretier (1362) from his name we take to
have been one of the swarm of French Priests that at this time were
spread over the country. The great majority of the others seem to have
been Cornishmen: Sir John Yurl bears a name common enough amongst the
Cornish Clergy at this time. Sir William Pellour of course was one of
the numerous Cornish family of Pellar and Sir William Pers would now be
known as William Pearce. Sir John Gode or Ude bears also a name common
in the Cornish Priesthood of the period. Sir William Lehe (1445) was, we
fancy, from the Penwith Peninsula, from the similarity of his name to
the name of a manor in that district. Master William of Penzance (1403)
and Master Thomas Godolphin (1505) were, of course, undoubtedly
Cornishmen, the latter, we are led to conclude, being a son of Sir John
Godolphin, Sheriff of Cornwall in 1504, the founder of the fortunes of
his family. Of the lives of these men, alas! we can know nothing, beyond
the fact that in varying degrees they testified to the unseen and
spiritual, and, in spite of imperfections and weaknesses, held up the
torch of a Divine light for the illumination of a dark and degraded age.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[22] "Carta W. Com. Glouc. testificante quod R. Com. pater suus dederat
Richardo Clerico suo omnes ecclesias terrae suae de Cornubia cum
capellis et pertinentis suis viz: ecclesiam de Eglosbrec, ecclesiam
Commart, ecclesiam de Egloshiel, ecclesiam de Eglosvant, ecclesiam de
Egloscraven et capellam Sancti Germot" etc., etc. See Dugdale's
Monasticon.

[23] See Gasquet's "Henry VIII. and the Monasteries."

[24] See Mr. Thurstan Peter's "Collegiate Church of Glasney."

[25] See Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph's Registers of Bishop Stapleton.
"Et in ea jurisdiccionem ordinariam exercere et alia diversa in hac
parte attemptare presumpserunt."

[26] Patent Rolls.

[27] State Papers, 14 Edward III.

[28] It is possible that this vandalism may have been committed during
the time of Independent ascendancy.

[29] See Sedding's "Norman Architecture in Cornwall."

[30] See Walcott's "Sacred Archæology" pp. 421, 423. Also Dr. Roch's
"Church of our Fathers," etc.

The Reformation to the end of the Commonwealth.

CHAPTER IV.

Master John Jakes, bachelor in decrees, of whom we know nothing beyond
the fact that he died and was buried in Breage churchyard, became Vicar
in 1510, when no cloud loomed upon the ecclesiastical horizon. He who at
that date had foretold the ultimate consequences of the marriage of
Henry VIII. to a Spanish Princess would have been put down as a fool and
a dreamer. It would have seemed obvious to the ecclesiastical
politicians of that day that if the marriage affected at all the
fortunes of the Church it would be in the direction of drawing closer
the bonds with Rome. Possibly, here and there, there may have been those
who saw the signs of the coming of the storm in what seemed to them a
more or less distant future; and probably they dismissed the
uncomfortable thought with the sixteenth century equivalent of "_après
moi le déluge_." Yet within thirty years the deluge had been unloosed
and swept all before it. Within three years of the demise of John Jakes
the great Abbey of Hayles, with its broad acres and vast patronage, was
dissolved; its stately buildings and magnificent Church were falling
into ruins, turned into stone quarries for new mansions, and its
Brethren scattered, never to be re-united.

John Jakes was succeeded in 1536 by John Bery, M.A., the last Vicar to
be appointed by the Abbot and Convent of Hayles. Breage escaped the
terrible ecclesiastical tempest that in places less remote was sweeping
all before it. Though Hayles Abbey was in ruins and the Brethren
scattered, things continued in this little far-away appanage of the
great House much in the same way as heretofore, until the terrible year
1549. The Cornish, like the people of Wales, were bitterly opposed to
the Reformation in all its works and ways, and would have none of it. As
an instance of West Country methods in dealing with the new innovations,
we may quote the case of the parishioners of Sampford Courtenay, on the
northern skirts of the great waste of Dartmoor. On Sunday, 9th June,
1549, the new service in English was used for the first time in place of
the Mass, in compliance with the royal injunctions. The people would
have none of it, and on the following day compelled the Parish Priest,
under threats of what they would do to him, to resume his vestments and
say Mass as usual. In the April of this same year the storm had broken
in all its violence in our own part of Cornwall. Commissioners had been
sent throughout the County to examine the Churches and have all images
found in them removed and destroyed, and also, in plain language, to
plunder the Churches of their valuable plate, jewels and vestments, in
the specious name of religion. The Commissioners were required to
inquire into the doctrinal character of the preaching in the various
Churches, and to ascertain that the services were no longer held in
Latin but in the English tongue. A Commissioner named Body was making
his official examination at Helston Church--bent, no doubt, like the
majority of his fellows, on spoil as well as iconoclasm--when he was
stabbed to death by an enraged Priest, who had attended the visitation
in the company of one Kiltor of St. Keverne. This spark set the county,
already smouldering with discontent, in a blaze of rebellion. The
people, under the influence of the Clergy, flocked together from various
parts of the County, committing many barbarous outrages. Humphrey
Arundell of St. Michael's Mount placed himself at the head of this
rapidly-growing rabble of peasantry, and with many of the Clergy the
march upon Exeter was begun.

Job Militon of Pengersick Castle was at the time Sheriff of the County,
but he was powerless in the face of a force that by the time Bodmin was
reached had grown to six thousand strong. It is curious to note that
this enthusiastic but undisciplined host, marching to its doom, under
the walls of Exeter, contained within itself a strong leaven of
socialism. It seems to have been generally agreed, at any rate amongst
the rank and file, that all land should in future be held in common, and
that all enclosing fences should be obliterated. A few years previously
Germany had been throbbing with the same spirit, and the German Peasants
had been moved to throw off the yoke of the oppressing nobles, their
minds full of dreams of a sixteenth century millennium. Both these
efforts, due to opposite trains of events, had their origin in the
spirit of the age striving vaguely after dim ideals, and both were
trampled on and extinguished with ruthless force and cruelty. Humphrey
Arundell perished on the scaffold, and thousands of his deluded
followers in the fields and bye-ways, cut down by a merciless soldiery.

John Bery seems to have preferred monotony and safety at Breage to a
life of adventure in the field; at any rate, he lived on as Vicar of
Breage till the day of his death in 1558. He doubtlessly conformed
outwardly, if not in his heart, to the new order of things, and in the
reign of Queen Mary conformed back again to the old order. Death
absolved him in 1558 from a further change of opinions on the accession
of Elizabeth in that year.

The terrible memories of 1549 would long linger in the minds of John
Bery and the people of Breage. Some, no doubt, from Breage, had joined
the ill-fated march to Exeter to return no more.

The reports of the Commissioners who visited Germoe on the 18th April,
and Breage on the 22nd April, 1549, are as follows: "Germoe, Minister,
Henry Nicol, a Cope of blue damask, one set of very coarse vestments, a
copper gilt cross, two chalices, one gilt the other parcel-gilt, two
small bells, a fair brass censer, a linen streamer with a cross upon it
of red silk." The inventory closes with the remark that nothing has
been sold for a year past.[31]

The list at Breage reveals vessels and vestments of a richer and more
valuable character. The list comprises three chalices of silver, of
which two were gilt, three linen towels upon the altar, one pair of
vestments of blue velvet, one purple, broidered with gold work, a pair
of vestments of white satin, a pair of tawny satin, another pair of
oldsay, a cope of Morys velvet, purple broidered in gold work, an old
cope of blue velvet, two candlesticks of latten on the altar, upon the
font a yard of linen cloth, an old rotten streamer of silk, and four
bells of large burden hanging in the tower. Such was the inventory of
spoils in this remote parish at the time of the Great Pillage.

The Church must have had a deep hold on the hearts of the Cornish people
at the time of the Reformation, or they would never have risen in her
defence in the way they did in 1549. The mutilation and desecration of
her shrines stirred the hearts of the people to the very depths. The
same spirit of devotion to the Church was manifest also in a marked
degree in Wales; indeed, until the Reformation the Welsh were of all the
inhabitants of the British Isles the most devoted to the cause of
the Church: where she was once strongest she is now weakest. In
pre-Reformation times the Feasts and Festivals of the Church in Cornwall
were bound up with the social life of the people, and its ritual,
paradoxical though it may seem in the present age, satisfied the deep
emotional cravings of the Cornish character, whilst its teaching was in
unison with the needs of their hearts. As an instance of the deep hold
of the Church upon the pre-Reformation life of the people, we have in
Breage the curious anomaly that the chief fête day of our Nonconformists
is St. Stephen's Day, which is the Feast of the Dedication of the
Parish Church, whilst at Germoe the Festival of the patron Saint is kept
by them as a day of teas and rejoicing.

Under the new order of things brought in by the Reformation there was no
room for the play of emotions, the services of the Church were cold and
bare, adapted for religious philosophers, but not for peasants; the
change came, too, in the guise of an exotic planted by men of high
station, whom the people regarded as their natural oppressors and the
destroyers of the Church of their fathers. What followed was that which
might have been expected--a gradual lapsing of the people into what was,
to all intents and purposes, a crude form of paganism, which lasted,
with the exception of some stirrings of the dry bones during the
Commonwealth, until the coming of John Wesley, who with the warm glow of
emotional fervour re-converted the Cornish peasantry in the main to
Christianity. If proof of this assertion were needed, it is only
necessary to compare the religious aspect of things in Cornwall and
Brittany at the present day. Both people belong to the same division of
the Celtic race, yet both now in the main stand at opposite poles in
politics and religion. The reason seems to lie in the fact that the
Cornish were deprived of a faith which they loved, and which satisfied
the emotional and materialistic cravings of their hearts, and that the
new Clergy, creatures and toadies of the great, utterly failed to appeal
to their sympathies and to win their affections.

In 1558 Sir Alexander Dawe, the last of the "Sirs," became Vicar of
Breage, and continued as such until the day of his death in 1595. The
record of his burial is still extant in the Parish Registers. He was
presented to the living of Breage by one Richard Hyde, who had become,
by purchase, patron of the Benefice for one turn only. The Abbot and
Convent of Hayles had followed the policy of the other religious houses
at the dissolution of the Monasteries, and saved what property they
could from the impending catastrophe by granting, where possible, long
leases of the Abbey lands and selling the next presentations to their
ecclesiastical patronage.

A dark and terrible shadow passed over the life of the parish during the
time of Alexander Dawe. Breage was visited in 1578 by a pestilence,
which we have little doubt was the terrible Black Death or Plague, which
at this time was claiming endless victims all over the land. We who live
in these days of practical security from such awful visitations can have
no idea of the horror and dismay which they inspired, and the misery and
desolation which they spread broadcast over the land. To realise the
horror of the Plague, let us imagine an epidemic as contagious and as
infectious as influenza was some few years ago spreading everywhere, the
great majority of its victims dying in the most terrible sufferings. The
epidemic of plague in question had first appeared in London in the
autumn of 1563; about a thousand persons dying each week during the
latter part of 1563 and the earlier part of 1564. In 1570 Newcastle and
in 1574 Edinburgh endured terrible visitations of this scourge. During
the last months of 1578 and the earlier months of 1579 the Breage burial
register contains the record of seventy-six burials in Breage
churchyard. No comment is made upon the nature of the disease, but there
can be but little doubt we have here the grim records of a visit of the
terrible Black Death, whose dark shadow at this time hung in awful
menace over the whole land. The words of the Litany, "from plague,
pestilence and famine, from battle and murder and from sudden death,
good Lord deliver us," had a fulness of meaning for our fathers which we
who live in a brighter, cleaner and more peaceful time can only dimly
realise.

With the death of Sir Alexander Dawe, the last link with the old
pre-Reformation life was severed; henceforward the stream of parochial
life was to run in channels more closely approximating to those of our
own age, and succeeding Vicars were men of different antecedents and
ways. The patronage of the Living, though nominally in the hands of the
Crown, came practically to be in the gift of the Godolphin family, which
had risen to a position of power and influence in the preceding hundred
years.

Francis Harvey, who succeeded Alexander Dawe, was the son of Sir
Anthony Harvey, Kt., and Lucy Lister of Swarland, near Felton, in
Northumberland. The family of Harvey was remotely connected with the
Godolphin family, through the Carews.[32] Francis Harvey was born 2nd
March, 1562. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but
migrated, after taking his B.A. degree, to Emmanuel College, which had
been recently founded by his relative, William Mildmay, as the home of a
mild and aristocratic form of Puritanism. It is interesting to note that
Sir William Godolphin, who died in 1613, was at Emmanuel College at the
same time as Francis Harvey. Perhaps it may not be too fanciful to
conclude that an intimacy between William Godolphin and Francis Harvey
ripened into close friendship in the quiet Cambridge home of Puritan
learning, and that thus the son of a Northumberland squire came to
settle in the remote West. Francis Harvey married Mary Yorke, a lady of
ancient family, in Phillack Church, in 1595; their descendants were long
settled at Maen in this County.

Soon after obtaining the living of Breage, Francis Harvey was preferred
to the living of St. Erth, which he continued to hold jointly with
Breage until the day of his death. Whilst the Reformation had struck at
many evils, it had left one of the greatest of the abuses of the Church
practically untouched. One of the chief factors in preparing the popular
mind for the Reformation was the abuse of Church patronage; French and
Italian Priests, in many cases not speaking the English language, had
been foisted upon the English people, to the exclusion of their own
kith and kin. This evil system had begun with the Conquest and had
continued right down to the Reformation, accentuated and intensified by
the fact that a single person was capable of holding numerous benefices,
which in many cases he had never seen, to the exclusion of others
worthier and holier than himself. It was this condition of things that
alone rendered the Reformation possible. The storm of the Reformation
burst, but swept in vain round this crowning abuse. After the
Reformation the abuse of patronage presented itself even in more odious
forms, and the best life of the Church withered and died under its
poisonous shadow. Francis Harvey was not an excessive pluralist; he held
only two livings, though his cousin, William Cotton, who succeeded him,
enjoyed a good baker's dozen or more.

An event happened in the first few months of the incumbency of Francis
Harvey which would long linger in the minds of his flock, and which for
years to come would be spoken of by the cottage and farm house evening
firesides. The 23rd July, 1595 was a hot summer's day; a thick haze lay
over the sea, which gradually lifted, disclosing four Spanish ships of
war lying off the coast, over against Mousehole. Their hostile
intentions were soon evident; boatloads of armed men began to put off
from the ships. A force of over two hundred Spaniards was quickly landed
without opposition. The little town of Mousehole was soon in flames, and
a handful of brave men who scorned flight perished at their own
doors.[33]

The Spanish force streamed up the hill[34] their course marked by
blazing roof-trees. The old grey village Church of Paul on the ridge
soon became the special object of their fury, and its stones to this day
bear grim witness to the devouring flames that once enveloped them. The
inhabitants of Mousehole fled in a terrified mob towards Penzance, the
roar of the ships' guns adding speed to their flight. It seems Sir
Francis Godolphin had ridden forth earlier in the day from Godolphin
House, and saw either from Godolphin or Tregoning Hill the dense clouds
of smoke hanging over Mousehole and Paul, whilst the booming of the guns
of the four warships in the Bay would speedily make the whole situation
clear to the mind of this keen soldier trained in the Irish Wars under
Essex. Without delay he spurred his horse to the scene of action and
encountered the flying crowd a little westward of Penzance. He succeeded
for a time in infusing something of his own brave spirit into the minds
of the fugitives and the men of Penzance capable of bearing arms. A move
was made upon the Spanish position, and the Spaniards, seeing the
advancing force, retired to their ships, only again after a short period
to disembark at Newlyn, which they speedily set on fire, and began to
move on Penzance. In vain, sword in hand, the brave Sir Francis
endeavoured to rally the people to the defence of their town and homes;
he was speedily deserted by all save a few of his own servants. As the
Spaniards entered the town he had no alternative but to ride away,
surrounded by his little company of brave followers.

The Spaniards remained in Penzance Bay until the 25th July, when they
put out to sea in a north-west breeze, just in time to escape capture by
a force of British ships rounding the Lizard, which they must have seen
in the offing. The anxiety and dread of the people of Breage, standing
with straining eyes watching the course of events in the plain below
during those two fateful days, must have been great indeed. One wild
rumour after another of dire deeds transpiring beneath them, by the sea,
would pass through their midst. There would be little sleep in the
village during the two anxious nights the Spanish warships lay in
Penzance Bay. Many minds would turn to another night of anxiety and
dread a few years before, when the great Armada had passed the Lizard
early in the forenoon, and was making its way up Channel, followed by
the English Fleet.

"For swift to East and swift to West the ghastly war flame spread,
High on St. Michael's Mount it shone; it shone on Beachy Head."

Francis Harvey died whilst still practically a young man, 2nd March,
1607. We copy from our burial register the almost pathetic entry
recording his death and burial, so different is it by contrast to the
endless laconic entries of death that precede and follow it. Evidently
the entry was made by the hand of one who knew and loved him. It is
written in a clear and elegant hand, and the entry carries with it
something of truthfulness and sincerity that brings the image of Francis
Harvey up out of the mists of the past, as that of a true and good
man of a mild and gentle type of Puritan piety. The entry is as
follows:--"_Francisus Harvey, theologus hujusque parochiæ Vicarius cum
jam quadragesimum quartum annum ætatis vix attigesset. Secundo die
Marcii extremum diem clausit, et ut per totum temporis curriculum
transegit vitam minime non inhonestam sic obiit, mortem non minus plane
piam. Sepultusque fuit die quarto tunc proximum insequente. Anno Domini
1607._"

Francis Harvey was succeeded by his cousin, William Cotton, M.A.,
described in the Exeter Registers as "the beloved son of the Bishop." He
resigned the living of Breage after holding it but little over a year.
Walker, in his "Sufferings of the Clergy," includes William Cotton in
his list of suffering Clergy during the Commonwealth. However deeply the
sufferings of William Cotton may have touched the feelings of a former
age, they are not likely to move the sympathies of our own. As well as
being Vicar of Breage, he was also Precentor and a residentiary Canon of
Exeter Cathedral, and held the livings of Silverton, Whimple and Duloe,
and possibly others at one and the same time. His brother, Edward
Cotton, was equally well provided for by his father. It was outrageous
pluralism of this kind that alienated the people from the Church and
prepared the way for the wild outpourings of religious bigotry and
frenzy under the Commonwealth. William Cotton, with the failure of the
royal cause, was compelled to resign the mass of patronage which he
held. He died at his seat of Bottreux Castle in 1649 or 1650. Walker
informs us that in his veins "flowed the blood of crowned heads of
England, Scotland and Ireland, and other great personages of the highest
rank," and that "he was a person of a meek and humble spirit, of a grave
and sober conversation, of exemplary piety, charity and learning."

Edward Cotton was succeeded by William Orchard in 1608. In the record of
his institution in the Episcopal Registers he is described as "Preacher
of the Word of God"; this phrase will perhaps serve to disclose the bias
of his mind and the theological bent of the times. Unlike his
predecessors Harvey and Cotton, he had graduated at no University. Most
possibly in his own mind he regarded such institutions as unnecessary
for one who was led by the Spirit of God. It is possible that he owed
his appointment to the living of Breage to Sir William Godolphin, the
then Squire of Godolphin, and friend of the statesman Cecil, who, it
seems more than probable, acquired a Puritan bias when a student at
Emmanuel College, the Cambridge home of Puritanism.

I rather conclude from the frequent mention of the name of Orchard in
the Breage Registers about the time of his incumbency, that his family
had been settled in the parish at the time of his appointment. A George
Orchard married a Dorcas Coode of Methleigh, and an Edward Orchard
married a Jane Sparnon of Sparnon. The Coodes and Sparnons at this time,
with the exception of the Godolphins, were the chief families of the
parish, ranking considerably above the rank of yeoman. William Orchard
became a widower in 1619. The record in the Breage Register of the
death and burial of his wife is as follows: "_Anna Orchard uxor Wilhelmi
Orchard, Vicarii hujus parochiæ, filia Johis Yeo, gent, died 9th Feb.
and was buried 11th Feb. 1619._" His daughter Mary married John Coode of
Methleigh; their descendant owns the estate of Methleigh at the present
time.

Whilst Sir William Godolphin and Parson Orchard were both Puritans, they
were both loyalists. They would have shuddered with horror "at those
days which were coming upon the earth," and which to a great extent were
the logical outcome of the Puritanism which they and others professed
acting upon the popular mind; they were putting new wine into old
bottles, regardless of the inevitable result, as good men will do in
every age. Though Sir William Godolphin was not destined to see the day
that his king perished on the scaffold, it was the lot of William
Orchard to see it forty years later, and ultimately for conscience sake
to be ejected from his home and office. Rather than be untrue to the
light within him, like so many of his brethren, William Orchard elected
to go into the wilderness. It was his lot never to return to his
benefice, though his son at the Restoration petitioned Parliament on his
behalf for revenues from the living of Breage, of which he deemed his
father to have been defrauded.

It was during William Orchard's incumbency that Breage for the first and
last time was favoured with a royal visit in the person of Charles,
Prince of Wales, afterwards Charles II. When the royal cause was
irretrievably lost, Charles fled to Cornwall on his way to seek refuge
in the Scilly Islands. For some days he rested at Godolphin House, and
what remains of the suite of rooms he occupied is still shewn there. It
would be interesting to know how Charles spent the few days of his
sojourn in Breage, and how he wiled the time away, and whether, after
the good custom of those days, in spite of the danger of his position,
he joined in the Sunday worship at Breage Church. It is possible to
picture the swarthy youthful face, with the thick heavy red lips and
with _ennui_ written upon it, looking wearily from the Godolphin aisle
upon William Orchard, as hand upon hour-glass he unfolded Puritan truth
from a maze of conflicting facts.

But the evil days drew on apace; Prince and Parson had alike to go
before the storm. Soon after the swearing of the Solemn League and
Covenant by Parliament in 1644, the tithes of Breage were sequestrated
or confiscated by the Government; [35]William Orchard with Antony
Randall, curate of Germoe, and Robert Smith, curate of Cury, were thus
reduced to dire poverty. Their parishioners, touched by their trials,
and regarding them no doubt as honest and faithful men, on the 8th May,
1649, petitioned Parliament that a yearly grant might be made to them of
£40 each out of the confiscated tithes of St. Keverne. Their prayer was
answered, but after four years of weary waiting, the tried clerics
complained to Parliament that their grants had been withheld by the
County Committee, and humbly requested "that the rents may remain in the
Tenants' hands." On the 17th August, 1653, the County Committee made
answer to Parliament, that "by information of Colonel Rous, M.P., the
Vicarage of Breage is sufficiently endowed, and that the Ministers
thereof are malignant and scandalous, and that Antony Rous of Wotton,
John Bawden of Trelask, and three others are appointed trustees for
disposing of the grant made by Parliament to four such able and godly
ministers as they shall judge meet to place in their room." Whilst the
hypocritical cant of this declaration provokes a smile, at the same time
it arouses mournful reflections on the violence and bigotry that is ever
wont to dog the steps of human effort after political and religious
reformation.

"The able and godly minister" chosen to supplant William Orchard at
Breage was one James Innes. Doubtless he was a man of extreme opinions
both in politics and religion, but like William Orchard in the hour of
darkness he was able to play the true man, and rather than conform at
the Restoration to tenets in which he did not believe, he vacated his
office even before Black Bartholomew's Day, 24th August, 1662. He found
an asylum in Scotland in the household of the Earl of Lauderdale, where
he performed the office of chaplain in conformity with the Presbyterian
use.

The seeds of Puritanism sown by men like Orchard and Innes did not die,
but lay germinating in the hearts of the Cornish people, rendering
possible the great work of John Wesley a hundred years later. Such men
succeeded in a great measure in destroying the pre-Reformation
mechanical ideals of salvation in the hearts of the people, which
prepared the way for the stirring of the dry bones in future years.

Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602, gives a vivid
picture of the conditions of life in Cornwall prevailing during the
period we have been considering in this chapter. The condition of the
mining population, he tells us, was much worse than that of the
agricultural population.[36] We gather from his pages that the wages of
the miners were so inadequate that sooner or later indigence compelled
them to have recourse to their employers, who supplied them with food
and clothing in advance of their wages at usurious prices. The Stannary
Courts, we are informed, were utterly corrupt and saturated with the
spirit of perjury and injustice.[36] The houses of the working people,
we gather at this period, were made of clay, possessing neither windows
nor any attempt at ceiling or plastering[36]; a hole in the wall being
considered sufficient to do duty for a chimney. The miner and labouring
people generally, we gather, were alike destitute of shoes and
stockings, and we may add, of course, of any rudiments of education.

Leland, when he visited the parish, found large mining works along the
coast from Trewarvas Head to Praa Sands. Sir Francis Godolphin a
generation later developed the ancient mines of Great Work and Wheal Vor
upon scientific principles and a scale of vastness hitherto undreamt of.

The mines, it is evident, brought riches and prosperity to the owners of
the soil, but not to the people who dwelt upon it; to them, as Carew
makes clear, they meant too often degradation and oppression. The
harvest of this evil sowing is still being reaped at the present day. It
is but too true that with the Reformation the people lost a powerful
protector in the Church. With all her faults--and they were many--until
the Reformation the Church had been consistently the friend of the poor;
her clergy until that period, had been the members of a great
corporation, and as such stood in no dread of "the petty tyrant of the
fields." With the coming of the Reformation all was changed, and the
Parish Priest became too often the creature and parasite of the wealthy,
moved but too frequently by fear and policy to neglect the claims of his
flock, with for three centuries, disastrous results alike for Church and
people. The people at the Reformation were ready to rise and to die for
the Church, as we have seen in our own neighbourhood; three centuries
later they regarded her with utter suspicion and disfavour. Few with any
acquaintance with the facts of the case will deny that the material and
moral condition of the people, under much cruel injustice and
exploitation, grew worse for some generations after the Reformation,
because there were none to hold the balance of justice between class and
class and stay the hand of the oppressor, at any rate in the remote
places of the country.

In the western part of the County the mines tended to produce an utter
neglect of agriculture, the effects of which were bad in every way. They
also led to the reckless destruction of much valuable timber for the
purpose of making mine props. Western Cornwall, now so denuded and bare
of trees, in ancient days was thickly wooded; round Ashton now not a
tree is to be seen, yet the name perpetuates the memory of the time when
Ashton was the Down where the ash trees grew.

Carew tells us that there were few sheep in Cornwall in his days, and
that those there were had little bodies and fleeces so coarse that their
wool went by the name of Cornish hair. The horses, he says, were small
and hardy and "quick travellers over rough and hilly country," but he
goes on to say that by hard treatment and overwork they were soon worn
out and rendered unfit for service. Owing to the practical absence of
roads till long after Carew's time, vehicular traffic was practically
impossible; horses were therefore used as pack animals, and a regular
system of transit of goods prevailed through the County by means of pack
horses. The tracks that passed by the name of roads[37] for the six
rainy months of the year, were practically impassable quagmires of mud,
making intercourse, save of the most urgent character, practically
impossible. It was on account of the extreme difficulty of communication
through the long winter months that the gentry of the district
established for themselves town houses in Helston, in which they might
exchange the isolation of the country for some measure of friendly and
agreeable intercourse.

The land used for tillage seems to have been chiefly manured with sea
sand and sea weed; the little ploughing there was would, of course, be
done by oxen, a method which at any rate had the merit of producing a
strong and vigorous breed of cattle, which in size would perhaps more
than favourably compare with some of the animals to be seen at the
present time.

We gather from Carew "that some gentlemen allowed their cattle to go
wild in their woods and waste ground, where they were hunted and killed
with crossbows and pieces after the manner of deer." At this time the
Deer Park attached to Godolphin House took in a large part of the
present parish of Godolphin; the remains of the high walls of this
ancient park may still be seen on the south-western slopes of Godolphin
Hill.

In Carew's time the women and children of the West of Cornwall carried
on the industry of mat-making to a large extent. These mats were made of
coarse grass, and were exported to London in great numbers for the
purpose of floor and wall coverings.

Carew informs us that the Cornish had no oaths and never swore, but that
they made up for it by a plentiful indulgence in curses, maledictions
and the giving of spiteful nicknames.

The two chief practising physicians[38] in the County in Carew's time
were Rawe Clyes, a blacksmith, and a Mr. Atwell, parson of St. Tue; the
latter obtained the most wonderful results from recommending a diet of
apples and milk.

The chief pastimes of the country people at this period, as far as can
be ascertained, were wrestling, hurling and shooting with arrows. The
game of hurling, in both its forms, seems to have been even more rough
and dangerous than Cornish wrestling, and was attended, if Carew speak
correctly, frequently with fatal results and serious injury to life and
limb; yet he goes on to say "was never Attorney or Coroner troubled for
the matter." It was in the larger game of "Hurling the County" that most
of the serious damage was done; this wild game was played over miles of
country by men both on horseback and on foot. The goals were as a rule a
couple of towns or villages three or four miles apart. The match seems
to have been arranged, in the first place, between two country
gentlemen, who on the occasion of some appointed holiday would gather
as their respective supporters, as far as possible, the male inhabitants
of two or three neighbouring parishes. Each squire headed the mob he had
thus raised to the appointed rendezvous. When the two masses of men,
under their respective commanders, were brought face to face, at an
appointed signal, a silver ball was thrown into the air. The object of
the game was for each side to endeavour to capture the ball and carry it
to their own goal some miles distant, in spite of the efforts of their
opponents to hinder them in their purpose. The struggle would be waged
over miles of country, to the right side or to the left, through rivers,
ditches, woods and bogs, the ball being now passed from one on foot to
one on horseback, no effort being spared to drag the possessor of the
ball to the earth by the opposing side. Little wonder that such a game
often resulted in deaths and serious maimings.

A Cornish amusement of a milder character that came to an end with the
seventeenth century was the performance of the ancient Miracle Plays. A
vestige of the custom still survives in some places in the bands of
children who at Christmas time go from house to house, dressed to
impersonate a medley of characters, repeating garbled snatches of
doggerel, which are in reality fragments of the ancient plays in the
last stage of evolution and disintegration. In their earliest form the
Miracle Plays were performed by the Clergy in their Churches to
illustrate to an ignorant age, alike without literature and the faculty
of using it, the truths of the Christian religion. These plays continued
to be performed in Churches to a greater or less extent down to the time
of the Reformation.[39] The Reformation endeavoured to draw an unreal
line of demarcation between sacred and profane, and the drama thus came
to be placed beyond the pale as worthless and sinful, with the natural
disastrous result that it became quickly degraded and debased, like
many other harmless, healthful and pleasure-giving institutions and
pastimes.

The Miracle Plays that have come down to us in the Cornish language[40]
are first the Ordinalia: this is a trilogy consisting of the Plays of
the Beginning of the World, the Passion and the Resurrection, with an
interlude on the death of Pilate; this work is based on a French
original of the fourteenth century. Secondly, we have the Play of the
Life of St. Meriasek, of Breton parentage; and lastly, a work based on
the Ordinalia, containing many more English words, written by William
Jordan, of Helston, in 1611; the work deals with the Creation of the
World and the Deluge. The Cornish language was spoken in the West of
Cornwall until the beginning of the eighteenth century[41]; by the close
of that century it had entirely disappeared. In Carew's time the Cornish
Miracle Plays were performed in the open fields, and were resorted to by
the country people with great delight; he tells us however, by his time
they had become vulgarized and depraved to no small extent, possibly by
the introduction of bucolic gag of a Rabelaisian character.

Judging from the pages of Carew, in the seventeenth century, with all
its grossness and barbarism, there was much real friendship and happy
intercourse amongst the people, possibly more than there is now. The
Harvest Homes, the Church Ales and the Church Festivals of Dedication,
with the Guary or Miracle Plays, all led to much friendly intercourse
and hospitality. Carew says on these occasions, "the neighbour parishes
lovingly visit one another"; friends came from a distance, and were
hospitably entertained with resultant kindliness and good fellowship.
The Church Ales seem to have been run on much the same lines as the
present Harvest Teas, with the exception that instead of tea, beer and
cider were drunk, and that the venue of the feasting was laid at the
Public House, instead of the village School or Institute.

Perhaps we shall obtain the most accurate glimpse of the character of
the people, and the state of Western Cornwall generally at this period,
from the State Papers. Here are a few gleanings culled at random from
this source. In 1526 a Portuguese ship was wrecked at Gunwalloe and much
cargo saved. It was seized by the servants of John Militon, of
Pengersick, Thomas St. Aubyn and William Godolphin, and when the owner
appealed to the Justices he was told it was the custom of the country,
and that no redress was possible. A commission of enquiry ensued,
followed by Star Chamber proceedings, and the defence was the usual one,
for which any number of witnesses could always be obtained, that the
owner had sold his property on the sea shore!

In 1575 an information of fifteen Articles was laid against Sir William
Godolphin and the Killigrews, of Arwenack; thirteen of these concerned
piracy.

In 1582 a Spanish ship put into Falmouth; she was boarded by a gang of
men, who after removing the cargo as booty to Arwenack, took the ship to
Ireland, throwing the crew overboard on the voyage. A Cornish Jury
afterwards found there was no evidence to show by whom the deed was
done. The Privy Council came to the conclusion very quickly that the
plot originated with and was carried out by the orders of Lady
Killigrew, of Arwenack.

In 1603 a Marseilles ship was plundered and the cargo carried to the
Scilly Islands. The owner appealed to Sir Francis Godolphin, who made an
order to his son John, then Governor of those Islands, to restore the
cargo. John Godolphin expelled the unfortunate owner from the Islands
and he could obtain no further redress.

In 1626 a Flemish privateer, which had been hovering like a bird of prey
around the South-Western coast, was driven ashore and wrecked. The
country people must have enjoyed the wrecking of this hostile ship with
even more than their usual zest.

Dr. Borlase, writing in 1795, describes the methods of the mining
population near the coast in his day in dealing with vessels in
distress. His description would no doubt do equally well for the period
we are considering. He says "The wreckers were mostly Tinners, who as
soon as a ship was seen sailing near the coast left their work and
equipped themselves with axes, and followed the ship along the coast,
often to the number of two thousand men. They would cut a large trading
vessel to pieces in one tide. They strip half-dead men of their clothing
and cut down all who resist them."[42]

The following is a pleasing picture of the people of Germoe taken from a
letter of the year 1710. "The people of Germoe, called Tinners, are a
mad people, without fear of God or of the world. I cannot say a good
word for them." Here is another extract from a letter of the period
bearing date 30th October, 1671. "The Speedwell was cast away on the
rocks at Pengersick. The rude people plundered her of all that was
between decks, but the matter being noised about Sir William Godolphin,
Mr. Hugh Boscawen and Mr. John St. Aubyn came to the wreck, and by their
care preserved most of the goods from the violence of the country
people."

It may well have been said of the Miners of Cornwall, as far as wrecking
was concerned, "Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the vultures be
gathered together." Mr. Hunt, in his "Popular Romances of the West of
England," narrates a story of the mid-eighteenth century, which still
lingers in the popular mind, of a terrible fight that took place between
Miners from Breage and Wendron, over the spoils of a ship cast upon the
rocks near the Lizard. In old times, it seems, a gigantic ash tree used
to stand upon the Downs near Cury; from its great size and the
loneliness of its situation, it had in the course of time come to be a
popular landmark. In the case of the wreck in question, the Wendron
Tinners had the advantage over their Breage brethren in the matter of
distance, and thus were able more quickly to fall upon the spoil, break
up the unfortunate ship, and rifle the unhappy castaways of their
belongings. Like the true artists they were in the art of appropriating
the property of others, they worked quickly, and ere much time had
elapsed they had reached the great ash tree of Cury on their journey
home laden with spoil. Under this historic tree they encountered the
band of Tinners from Breage, who soon realised from the rich booty in
the hands of the men of Wendron that nothing more was to be done that
day in the way of wrecking on the Lizard rocks. Baffled of their prey,
and frantic with fury, the horde of men and women from Breage rushed
upon their Wendron compatriots, and the tide of brutal fight raged for
hours round the Cury ash tree. Mr. Hunt tells us that a Wendron man
named Gluyas having been disabled was borne out of the fight by his
friends, and placed upon the top of a hedge. A Breage woman named Prudy,
seeing this paladin lying disabled on the hedge, rushed upon him
exclaiming, "Ef thee artn't ded, I'll make thee," and smote him upon the
head with the iron upon her paton till he expired. Mr. Hunt concludes
this story by stating that the fiend Prudy, as far as judicial
investigation was concerned, was allowed to go untouched, because fights
at this period between parishes were matters of such common occurrence
as to excite but little comment, and fatal casualties so frequent as to
be regarded as matters of no moment. In this statement, as we have seen,
he is borne out by Carew writing in a previous generation. Down to fifty
years ago the brutal system of Parochial rivalry and violence
continued, at any rate in a mitigated form. A friend wrote to Mr. Hunt:
"So late as thirty years ago (circa 1850) it was unsafe to venture alone
through the streets of the lower part of Helston after nightfall on a
market day owing to the frays of the Breage, Wendron and Sithney men."
This statement was fully borne out by an aged friend of the writer, now
dead, who told him that in his youth even funeral processions of Miners
brought to Breage from other parishes were assailed with showers of
stones, and an attack which either ended in hasty retreat or a prolonged
free fight. It may be added, however, that Sunday was kept as a truce of
God, and on that day a dead Miner from outside the parish might be borne
to his rest without an assault being delivered on his friends as they
followed him to the grave. This aged friend also informed the writer
that to such an extent did this brutal system of savagery prevail that
no Miner could pass from his own parish to another without being
assailed and maltreated. Indeed, whenever Miners crossed the borders of
their own parishes, they did so in bodies for mutual protection. Well on
into the first half of the last century, fighting seems to have been one
of the chief topics of interest, if not the chief amusement of the
neighbourhood, and fights for wagers were of constant occurrence in
Breage parish, on Trew Green and elsewhere. To conclude this brief
summary of past conditions, one cannot help feeling that there was
something to be said for the old Roman view as to the results of the
occupation of mining on human character. It is a dismal picture, truly,
this of past conditions in the West of Cornwall, but when we contrast it
with the present it fills the mind with hopefulness, and reveals the
vast latent possibilities in human nature for improvement and progress.
If out of this dark and barbarous past we have so recently emerged, what
bright possibilities may not lie in the coming time seems but a
reasonable thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Kalendar of State Papers. Domestic Series.

[32] MS. in the possession of Fleet-Surgeon Harvey.

[33] Paul Church Burial Registers.

[34] Carew's Survey of Cornwall.

[35] Reports of the Committee of Compounding.

[36] Carew's Survey of Cornwall pp. 49, 59, 183, etc.

[37] Carew says "There are not any roads in the whole kingdom worse than
ours, hastily repaired only when some great man passes that way in his
coach."

[38] Carew p. 172.

[39] See the Article "Drama" in "Encyclopædia Britannica" by Mr. A. W.
Ward.

[40] See the Article in "Encyclopædia Britannica" by Mr. W. K. Sullivan.

[41] Dr. Edward Lhuyd, "Archæologia Britannica" 1707, quoted by Mr.
Jenner in his "Handbook of the Cornish Language."

[42] From the Gwavas MS. in the British Museum. A letter from John
Boson, of Newlyn, a Cornish-speaking Cornishman, written in the Cornish
language. A copy of this letter was given to the Author by Henry Jenner,
Esq.

RECENT TIMES.

CHAPTER V.

On the accession of Charles II. the intruding Puritan divine James Innes
was quickly ejected. He found refuge for the remainder of his life in
the household of the Earl of Lauderdale. It would seem that at the time
of the ejection of Innes, William Orcharde had become too old and infirm
to resume his office as vicar of Breage, and thus it came about that
James Trewinnard, a member of the ancient family long settled at
Trewinnard, in the Parish of St. Erth, succeeded to the benefice in
1661. He also held the living of Mawgan conjointly with that of Breage,
according to the lax custom of the times. On his death, which took place
at Mawgan, the parish in which he had chosen to reside, he was succeeded
at Breage by Henry Huthnance. Judging by his name Henry Huthnance was of
local origin, and at any rate was a connection of the family of
Robinson, of Nansloe; he lies buried in Breage churchyard at the east
end of the Chancel wall, between his predecessor, the learned and
saintly Francis Harvey, and one of his successors, William Eusticke, of
whom more anon. On the death of Henry Huthnance, in 1720, James
Trewinnard, son of the former incumbent of that name, became vicar; like
his father, he held jointly the two benefices of Breage and Mawgan. He
was a graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was succeeded in 1722
by Edward Collins, bachelor of laws. This incumbent, like several of his
predecessors, was also dowered with the living of St. Erth. Edward
Collins was the son of the Reverend John Collins, vicar of Redruth, and
was closely connected with many of the local county families. Indeed, it
may be said of practically all the incumbents onwards from the
Reformation to the middle of the last century that weighty local
connections were their chief passport to preferment. A mournful interest
attaches to his successor, Henry Eusticke. He came of the old Cornish
family of Eusticke, of Nancealvan, and had married Mary Borlase,
daughter of the then vicar of Madron. He was a man of undoubted learning
and literary attainments, and an acknowledged authority on the ancient
Cornish language, and did much during his not very long life in
collecting written fragments of the ancient tongue.[43] He also
published after the custom of the times[44] a collection of verses and
epigrams. Unfortunately for Henry Eusticke, he lived in different times
from those of his easy-going predecessors. The age had begun to grow
impatient of easy-going cultured clerical somnolence. John Wesley, like
other great men, seems to have been a symptom rather than the cause of
the deep spiritual ferment associated with his name. The stirrings were
already in the souls of the people; all that was needed was some passing
cause to set these forces in motion. If proof were needed it is only
necessary to realise how incapable John Wesley found himself of guiding
the movement into the rigid mould that he had designed for it. The
reaper can only gather in the harvest when it is ready to his sickle: he
cannot create the harvest.

I give John Wesley's experience at Breage in his own words from his
diary; they do not make pleasant reading because they present the
spectacle of two good men utterly incapable of understanding each
other's position. "I had given no notice of my preaching here, but
seeing the poor flock from every side, I could not send them away empty.
So I preached at a small distance from the house and besought them to
consider our Great High Priest, who is passed into the heavens, and none
opened his mouth, for the lions of Breage are now changed into lambs.
That they were so fierce ten years ago is no wonder, since the wretched
Minister told them from the pulpit, 'Seven years before I resigned my
fellowship John Wesley was expelled from the College for a base child
and had been quite mazed ever since,' that all the Methodists in their
private Societies put out the lights, etc., etc., with abundance more of
the same kind. But a year or two since it was observed he grew
thoughtful and melancholy, and about nine months ago went into his house
and hanged himself."

After reading this indictment of poor Mr. Eusticke, a Fellow of his
College and a learned man, one naturally asks oneself the question, who
were the informants of John Wesley as to this wild tirade from the
pulpit? The writer was once informed in all good faith by an old woman
that a clerical neighbour in a former parish, given to preaching on
Christian evidences, had stated from the pulpit his belief "That there
was no God at all, and that he would never get her to hold such a
belief." The writer is inclined to put these two statements in the same
category, whilst attributing them perhaps to a very different attitude
of mind. With all his saintly enthusiasm, John Wesley seems to have
been, like many other saintly men, of a somewhat credulous disposition;
and his attributing the death of Mr. Eusticke to the fact that he
opposed himself to him, to say the least, suggests a somewhat unbalanced
condition of mind.

On the other hand, to the latitudinarian and philosophic Henry Eusticke,
John Wesley would no doubt appear as a lawless and erratic High Church
Clergyman, who out of pure self-will, in defiance of the orders of his
Bishop, went about obtruding himself into parishes where he had no
jurisdiction, and generally turning the world upside down. It was
enthusiasm, however, and not cold moralities, coupled with a Dr. Panglos
attitude towards all constituted things, as making for the best of all
possible worlds, that was going to change the hearts of the people. The
pity of it all is that the mutual prejudices between John Wesley and his
brother clergy ended in one more cruel rent in the seamless garb of the
Church--in making the holiest aspirations of the human heart, which
should have been the chiefest strength of the Church, into a source of
discord and division.

In speaking of John Wesley one is naturally reminded of another saintly
character, the tenderest episodes in whose career are closely bound up
with the parish of Breage. John Wesley confined his labours to people of
his own race and language; Henry Martyn sought to become the Apostle of
India and Persia. The connection of Henry Martyn with Breage was due to
Lydia Grenfell, the lady to whom he was engaged, having made her home to
a large extent with her brother-in-law, a Mr. Wylliams, who for many
years acted as curate-in-charge of Breage, for a non-resident pluralist
incumbent. Henry Martyn thus came to pass many happy days in what is now
the old Vicarage at Breage, previous to his departure for India. In his
diary he pathetically tells us how he proposed spending the last Sunday
in England at St. Hilary with Lydia Grenfell, but early in the morning
of that day a messenger arrived from Falmouth with the news that the
troopship in which he was sailing was about to put to sea with all
possible speed. He immediately started from St. Hilary by road, passing
through Breage on his way. There is a touching pathos in the statement
in his diary that he anxiously waited on deck till the ship in which he
sailed passed the Lizard Point, that he might search the twilight coast
for the familiar landmarks linked with the tenderest associations of his
life--one of the most prominent of which would be the old grey tower of
Breage Church, visible on clear days far out to sea--but, alas! as the
ship rounded the Lizard the whole coast lay embedded in thick banks of
cloud, and as the darkness fell and the ship forged out to sea this
lonely pioneer of the faith descended to his cabin, and poured out his
soul in prayer, that in the distant East, to which he was voyaging, he
might win kingdoms for Christ. This first of the great modern English
Missionaries was never fated to see the home of his youth again; his lot
was not to win kingdoms for Christ, but to find a martyr's grave in
Persia. Lydia Grenfell rests at Breage under the shadow of the old grey
Church on the hill overlooking the sea.

With the death of the second Earl of Godolphin in the middle of the
eighteenth century, rank and fashion took leave of the parish of Breage,
and the chief events in its annals became in the future mining
speculations, with occasional wrecks and alarms of invasion.

During the summer months, in the time of Sidney Godolphin, Godolphin
House had been the constant rendezvous of the leading families of the
County, and a great centre of social life. The great Minister whilst in
residence at Godolphin had relays of messengers, who brought on his
despatches from Exeter--as far as that town they seem to have been
entrusted to the ordinary post; in those days, it may be added, no
regular post linked Cornwall with London, Exeter being the extreme
postal limit of the West. To Godolphin House, therefore, during the
short residences of the Lord High Treasurer of England, came men in
search of the crumbs of patronage that fell from the Minister's table,
or to hear news of the outer world, or of what transpired at Court and
who was likely to succeed on the Queen's demise, and how it fared with
Marlborough in the great war, many no doubt of the varied throng having
relatives serving under him.

During the Napoleonic wars a Signalling Station was established on
Tregoning Hill, and anxious watch kept over the seaward horizon for
French Fleets which never hove in sight, whilst tradition says rumours
of invasion from time to time stirred the public mind to fear.

But the real events in the sequestered life of the district, beyond the
mere fluctuations in the prosperity of the tin trade, which stirred the
pulses of public interest were the harvest of shipwrecks which the
winter storms yielded each year to the inhabitants. The merits and
values of the cargoes of the different wrecks were never-failing topics
of interest round the firesides, memories of which still linger in the
minds of the aged. The invention of steam told sadly against the value
of this annual winter harvest: now it is steam and steam trawlers that
ruin the local fishing industry, then it was steam striking a death blow
at the local industry of wrecking. Old men have told the writer a
legend, told to them by men of a still older generation, of one of the
first steamers to appear on the coast. The inhabitants concluded with
regard to it that it was a ship on fire, and consequently followed it in
ever increasing numbers along the coast, anxious to participate in the
good things in the hold of the ship when her crew beaten by the flames
drove her on shore. The establishment of the Wolf Lighthouse within
comparatively recent years, the fitful gleam of whose red eye is clearly
visible from our shores far out to sea, has practically brought to an
end the dismal tale of wrecks and drowned sailors that each year
produced. Until well on into the last century it was the custom to bury
drowned sailors in trenches along the shore; the place where a number of
these unfortunate mariners lie heaped together in one common burial,
without religious rites, is still marked by the broken conformation of
the ground. From the fact that drowned mariners and voyagers received
this unhonoured sepulture, our Church Burial Registers are of no avail
as a guide to the history of the innumerable wrecks on our six miles
strip of coast. Not till after 1850 do we find any record of the burial
of those cast up by the sea in the Churchyard.

The Church Registers for the year 1867 record one of those tragedies of
the sea, shrouded in mystery which can never be unravelled. In the
failing light of the evening of the 7th January of that year, in the
midst of a heavy gale, a large sailing ship was seen off the coast at
Rinsey by several people; the gathering darkness soon shrouded her from
the eyes of the few watchers. She was never seen again, next morning the
shore was strewn with wreckage and with dead, but no fragment bearing
the name of the ill-fated ship was ever found. She had evidently struck
on a reef of rocks a mile or so from the coast, only to slip off them
during the wild, tempestuous night and to disappear in the depths of the
sea. This ship was evidently a foreign one, as most of the drowned were
of dark and swarthy appearance.

After a valued incumbency of nearly forty years, the Reverend Maurice
Pridmore was succeeded in 1889 by the Reverend Jocelyn Barnes, who, with
self-denying generosity, set about the restoration of Breage and Germoe
Churches. The work was taken in hand almost immediately after Mr.
Barnes' arrival, and was carried to its completion by Mr. Barnes at
great personal cost to himself. In this labour of love he was greatly
assisted by the eighth Duke of Leeds, the heir of the ancient House of
Godolphin, and the Right Honourable W. H. Smith, through whose
instrumentality he had been appointed to the living, whilst the
Parishioners and Landowners assisted in the good work according to their
several abilities. Dilapidations in the fabrics of both Churches were
carefully renovated, and the beautifully-carved oak screen and reredos
placed in Breage Church. The reredos was the work of Belgian artists,
and like the screen is composed of oak, whilst the carved figures which
adorn it are of lime wood. The central group of figures represents the
adoration of the Magi; in this group appear the figures of St. Breaca,
St. Germoe and St. Corentine, the patron Saint of Cury, who is said to
have been the first Bishop of Cornwall; the carved figures on either
side of this main group represent St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Anselm and
St. John the Baptist, each with their appropriate emblem; beneath these
figures, each in its separate niche, are the beautifully carved figures
of the four Evangelists, two on either side. On the screen, amongst
numerous emblems of a religious character, occurs the Godolphin crest,
with the Cornish motto of the family, "_Frank ha leal ettoge_," linked
with the motto of the saintly Margaret Godolphin, "_Un Dieu un amy_."

The fragments of ancient glass, which, as previously stated, were found
in the walled-up staircase leading to the rood loft, were once more
placed in the windows after having been carefully pieced together. It
was also during the restoration that the frescos adorning the walls of
the Church were discovered, hidden beneath successive layers of
whitewash that had accumulated upon them during the course of centuries.
The figures represented in the frescos are St. Christopher, bearing the
infant Christ upon his shoulder, a large figure of our Lord with the
crown of thorns, whilst the drops of blood caused by it are falling upon
the instruments of daily village life and husbandry, thus symbolising
that the business and tasks of our daily lives are blessed and
sanctified by our Lord's sacrifice, and that no human work is too lowly
to be recognised by the Saviour of the world; the two foregoing figures
are in a wonderful state of preservation, whilst the other figures,
which practically cover the walls of the body of the Church, and are
in a more or less faded and obliterated condition, consist of
representations of St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, St. Corentine, St. Michael,
St. Giles, St. Germoe and St. Thomas of Canterbury.

At the time of the restoration, in making certain necessary excavations,
large numbers of human bones in extremely shallow graves were discovered
all over the interior of the Church. One large vault was found in the
nave, a little in front of the site of the present pulpit, quite empty
save for a handful of bones. This vault was about seven feet deep. All
the remains found beneath the flooring of the Church were carefully
buried under the superintendence of Mr. Barnes in this empty vault
beneath a large cross of flowers; the vault was then carefully covered
over with concrete. Amongst the bones deposited in this receptacle were
the six skeletons mentioned in a former chapter, which were found lying
side by side, their skulls perforated with bullet wounds.

In 1910 Mrs. Cornelia Carter, of Philadelphia, U.S.A., placed a clock in
the Church tower to the memory of her husband, Mr. William Thornton
Carter, who, leaving Breage as a comparatively poor lad, rose to a
position of great wealth in America. In his latter years his memory
often turned with affection to the far-off Cornish home of his youth,
and he used to speak fondly of the old village Church with its far
reaching view over the waters of the Atlantic, under the shadow of whose
grey tower he passed as a little lad each morning on his way to school.
At the same time were placed in the Church three windows to different
members of the Carter family.

The gifts of the Carter family to the Church stirred the parishioners to
the putting in order of the huge single bell, the largest in Cornwall,
which had long hung mute in the belfry. The quaint motto "_Complures
populo, suppetit una Deo_," runs round the base of the bell, with the
date of its casting in 1771. This motto may be roughly translated "The
people desire many bells, but one suffices God." This curious motto
supplies a hint at the cause of the casting of this bell; the event
happened during the incumbency of the Reverend Edward Marshall. It seems
that it was the custom of those days for the bell ringers of the
neighbouring village Churches to exchange visits of friendly rivalry. On
these occasions quantities of strong waters found their way into the
belfries, and their fumes into the brains of the ringers, with the
result that the bells

"In the startled ear of night,
Too much horrified to speak
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune:
Leaping, higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavour,
Now, now, to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells,
Of despair!
How they clang and clash and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!"

On one of these uproarious occasions the tenor bell broke away from its
fastenings, and instead of sitting by the pale-faced moon, it came
crashing through the belfry floor on to the flags at the base of the
tower, nearly annihilating in the process some of the exuberant ringers.
The nocturnal clash and roar seems, if tradition speaks true, to have
frequently lasted all through the night. On New Year's Eve especially it
was the custom to continue ringing the bells through the majority of the
hours of darkness that remained after midnight. There being no
regulations as to the hour of closing public houses in those days, on
these occasions of festivity they remained open until all hours of the
morning, and strong waters thus passed freely between the public house
and the belfry, the distance being so short between them. The endless
jangle of the midnight bells, it is said, got on the nerves of the
Reverend Edward Marshall; more possibly his sense of decency and fitness
was stirred by these wild doings. To remedy the evil he took the drastic
action of melting the four mediæval bells down into the present big one
on the fall of the tenor bell from its fastening in the tower, much
against the wishes of his parishioners, as the motto round the base of
the bell more than hints. The process of recasting took place in the
large field on the south side of the Church. This drastic operation only
seems to have made matters worse, as on the following New Year's Eve, a
lusty band of Tinners took possession of the belfry, and the awful
"boom," "boom" of the big bell, in ceaseless iteration, sounded out over
land and sea, banishing sleep through the livelong night from all within
easy distance of Breage Church Tower.

We may remark that Edward Marshall was a Fellow of Exeter College,
Oxford, and son of the Reverend William Marshall, of Ashprington,
Devonshire. His wife was a member of the Sandys family, of Lanarth, and
his grandson long represented Taunton in Parliament.

The Germoe bells were purchased by public subscription and placed in
Germoe Church in 1753. The tenor bell, weighing 7 cwt., merely records
the names of Edward Collins, vicar, and Samuel Lemon and Simon Harry,
Churchwardens; the second bell weighs 5-1/2 cwt., and has engraved upon
it "Prosperity to this parish." The treble bell, weighing 4-1/2 cwt.,
records the fact that "Abraham Rudhall caste us all." The Communion
plate both at Breage and Germoe was the gift of Dr. Godolphin, Dean of
St. Paul's; he was the brother of the great Sidney Godolphin. The plate
in all consists of three very large silver-gilt flagons, two cups, one
large silver paten and two small ones; these bear the date 1692. The
entry recording the gift which appears in the Church registers runs as
follows: "The gift of plate to our parish by Dr. Henry Godolphin and the
Communion table railed in, in the year of our Lord Christ, 1693, Richard
Carleen."

The registers date from 1559, but contain a number of breaks, the
largest of which naturally begins with the latter years of the
Protectorate, and for some unexplained reason continues well on into the
reign of Charles II. The registers make it clear that at the time of
their commencement there were still a number of people living in this
remote corner of the West without any surname at all; such entries as
"Wilhelmus servus Wilhelmi Polkynhorne," "Johes servus Stepeni
Treworlis," and "Margareta filia Thoms Robert," are all culled from the
first page of the burial register. Gradually at this period the
Christian names of the fathers were being adopted by the sons as
surnames. The surnames Richards, Edwards, James, Thomas, Johns,
Williams, Stephens were thus evolved; Richards or Williams being in the
first instance mere abbreviations of the possessive form, son of Richard
or son of William; quite ninety per cent. of the surnames in the parish
fall under this head.

The great majority of the surnames in the parish which have not been
formed in the foregoing way were in their original form local place
names. The entry "Johes servus Stepheni Treworlis," given in the
preceding paragraph, gives us an example of the method of their
adoption; the descendants of Stephen Treworlis in succeeding
generations, as the registers show, being grouped under the names of
Stephens or Treworlis, no doubt as chance or fancy had decided.

The following extracts from the registers recording either the marriage
or deaths of the persons mentioned bring out another curious factor in
the formation of local surnames, "Jo Brown, alias Uninformed," "Thomas
Sampson, alias Cunning Boy," "John Arthur, alias Plain Dealing"; these
entries all occur previous to 1696: at later dates we have "Jane the
daughter of Edmund the Tod-stoole," "Thomas, alias Punch of Germoe."
Scattered through the registers we also find the elegant aliases "Two
Suppers," "Stink," "Ginger," "Dissembler," "Onwise." A series of entries
dating from 1713 show us how these nicknames in the course of time
crystallized into actual surnames. In 1713 we have the entry "Nicholas
Cornish, alias Cold Pye," in the following year he is mentioned as
Nicholas Cornish Coldpy, whilst in later years he figures in the
registers simply as Nicholas Colpy. It is interesting to speculate upon
the attempts at derivation that an antiquary or genealogist not knowing
the true facts might devise as an explanation of the surname "Colpy."

A further curious instance of the method of the formation of local
surnames is vouchsafed in our rather common surname "Meagor." The
earliest form of this name in the registers is "Meneager," _e.g._ "Avis
filia Thoms Meneager, 1579," or in plain English, "Avis the daughter of
Thomas of the Meneage District."

The earlier Breage registers contain here and there surnames that are
not of local origin, and which savour of romance and adventure in lives
long since folded in utter oblivion. In 1511 I find the death of Hugh
Grymme de Godolphin recorded, in 1600 the marriage of Edmundus Erasmus,
and a little later on one William Dellaregetto is laid to rest at Breage,
whilst the name of Angus Macdonald appears in the Germoe registers after
the Forty Five.

The story of Hugh Grymme or Graeme is not difficult to piece together in
its main outlines without being too fanciful. The wanderings of this
northern Ulysses from the home of his clan on the shores of the Solway
would make an interesting Odyssey, could they be distilled from the
mists of the past. One sees the vague outline of it all fitfully. His
fellow Borderers at this time,--the Armstrongs, the Elliots, the Ridleys
and a hundred others--were sadly realizing that times had changed since
Flodden Field, that ceaseless Border strife was coming to an end, that
law was beginning to grow stronger in its grasp, and that raids and
forays and cattle-lifting expeditions were each year becoming
accompanied more and more with such unpleasant and undignified incidents
as hangings at Jedburgh and Carlisle. For such roystering blades it was
impossible to hang spear, sword, helmet and breastplate for ever to rust
upon the wall, and to sink down into the life of dull tillers of the
soil. There was nothing else for them to do than to troop off to the
Irish wars, where they could raid and harry and slaughter the Irish to
their hearts' content, all in the name of good Queen Bess, and not in
defiance of her Wardens of the Marches. Many of these riders of the
Borders founded families in Ireland, and came to own broad acres, and
many no doubt found nameless graves. Hugh Graeme, it would seem
probable, was one of these Border adventurers who found neither wealth
nor a grave in Ireland, but service with Sir William Godolphin, who had
spent his youth fighting under Essex in Ireland. No doubt Hugh Graeme
had ridden behind Sir William in his campaigns, often with death on his
saddle bow, and when fighting days were over came with his master to
Godolphin, where Death, who had passed him by in the wars, found him and
claimed him.

The name Erasmus twice occurs in the Breage registers, and in the next
generation makes its appearance in the guise of "Rasmus." In 1660 the
marriage of Edmundus Erasmus is recorded with Johanna Caraver. I cannot
think that in this case Erasmus is a mere second Christian name, because
shortly after we have the baptism entry "Thomas Erasmus," and in 1687 we
have the marriage entry "Joisea Rasmus." Nor do I think it probable that
the surname Erasmus, as it occurs in the Breage registers, grew out of a
Christian name given in the first instance on account of its popularity
with Reformers, because in this case the registers would have shewn some
trace of Erasmus used as a Christian name, which they do not.

The appearance of this name in the registers tallies with the great
activity of Sir Francis Godolphin in developing the tin mines upon his
estates. Under the circumstances it seems probable that Edmundus Erasmus
was one of the Continental experts whom we know that he employed in
improving the local methods of mining; this conclusion, however, in no
way elucidates the mystery that clings round the name. The great
humanist namesake of Edmundus, who died in 1536, was, like many of the
Cornish tinners, born without a surname, his father only possessing the
Christian name of Gerhard, of which Erasmus is meant to be the Greek
rendering. We may therefore very well conclude that no other surname of
Erasmus existed in the world, save that of the great humanist, and that
it must have begun and ended with him, because as a priest he could have
had no legitimate issue. On the other hand, I cannot think that anyone
would adopt Erasmus as a surname having absolutely no connection in
blood with the great Dutch scholar. Here we have one of those strange
and often fascinating mysteries with which the registers of our parishes
abound. Their yellow pages so often, like withered rose leaves, suggest
the joy, the youth, the sunlight and the tragedy of forgotten summers.

In 1686 we find the marriage entry of William Dellaregetto, and in 1730
the entry of the marriage of Zenobia Dellaregetto. The name Dellaregetto
certainly suggests the sunny skies of Italy, whilst Angus Macdonald
conjures up a vision of the Scottish Highlands. Possibly the first
Dellaregetto may have been some Italian sailor cast away upon our
shores. From a descendant of Angus Macdonald, still living in the
parish, I have been able to obtain a fleeting glimpse of the story of
this man. He arrived (I imagine on board some smuggling craft) about one
hundred and fifty years ago, and settled for a year or two at Rinsey and
went through the ceremony of marriage with a Breage woman, after having
been a resident at Rinsey for some little time. Tradition says that he
was a person with plenty of money, and a man of high station in his own
country, and that at the close of the wars a price was set upon his head
by the Government. If tradition speaks true it seems probable,
considering the date of his coming, that this Macdonald was a man of
some importance, who had been out in the Forty Five,--possibly some
minor chief of the clan Macdonald. He disappeared as suddenly as he
came, whether to his native land on having made his peace with the
Government, or, as is more probable, to join his exiled compatriots in
France or Spain, where life was less dull, who can say? At any rate, his
Cornish wife and children saw and heard of him no more. His descendants
are still living in the parish.

Perhaps the following curious entry from the registers may be of
interest to the reader: "Thomas Epsley, senior, of Chilchampton, parish
of Bath and Wells, Summersitsheers; he was the man who brought here the
rare invention of shooting the rocks, which came here in June, 1689, and
he died at the Bal and was buried at Breag, the 16th day of December, in
the yeare of Our Lord Christ, 1689." Subsequent entries in the burial
register make it clear that "the rare invention of shooting the rocks"
_i.e._ blasting, was anything but an unmixed blessing to those who had
to apply it to the rocks.

I find in the registers the record of a great snowstorm in December,
1630, in which four persons perished, and another at the end of January
and the beginning of February, 1692. To these great snowstorms may well
be added that of March, 1891, which not only isolated the parish from
the rest of the world, but the householders from each other, save in the
village and hamlets, for several days. This terrible storm also levied
from the parish its toll of human life.

The following grim entry from the burial register, bearing date 2nd
February, 1693, illustrates the methods and views of a former age, which
seem strangely out of touch with our own: "Samuel Rogers, of Crava,
being excommunicate, was laid in the earth in the Church at night."

I find in the registers the records of but few briefs. At Germoe in 1682
five shillings was collected for the "distressed Protestants of
France," and in the same year ten shillings for the sufferers in the
great fire at the town of Cullompton in Devonshire. At Breage I only
find records of briefs in the year 1712: they were for the restoration
of Battle Bridge, West Tilbury and St. Clement's Church, presumably of
this diocese.

It is to be regretted that the churchwardens' accounts have long since,
through damp and neglect, passed beyond the stage when it is possible to
examine them. The Parish Councils Act with all its benefits committed a
terrible mistake in consigning the ancient records of the Church
Vestries, in many cases going back for hundreds of years, to the custody
of simple, well-meaning but unlettered men, with no realisation of the
value of ancient documents. Too often they have been jumbled into an old
wooden box in a damp vestry room, and left to grow green with mould and
disintegrate into an evil-smelling paste; at least such is an instance
in the writer's experience. In another case, the fountain of village
wisdom informed a learned antiquary that he could not be allowed to
inspect their documents; whilst in a third case the clerk to a Parish
Council parted with an ancient document, that had come down through the
generations with the Church Vestry papers, to an old gentleman who was
in the habit of shewing it to his friends as a curiosity. On the death
of the old gentleman in question a friend of the writer, in the hope
that the document might prove of interest, and that he might be able to
return it to the vicar of the parish from whence it had been originally
taken, endeavoured to purchase it from the heir, when it transpired that
the document had been burnt as waste paper.

The following items from the Breage churchwardens' accounts I have been
able to cull from a note-book of the Reverend Jocelyn Barnes. Whilst of
no paramount importance, they serve as vivid illustrations of the
dead-and-gone life of the village.

1774--Mr. John Hood and Company for Oilcloth Umbrella for the
Parson at funerals, £1 0s. 6d.

1772--For the charge of prosecuting against the Kitows for the
murder of Henry Thomas, junior, as per bill of particulars, £18 4s.
2d.

1797--Feb. 2nd, to a new white sheet for William Fischer to do
penance, 6d.; ditto, to the expense of the occasion, one shilling.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[43] See Jenner's "Handbook of the Cornish Language."

[44] See Bouse's "Collectanea."

THE GODOLPHINS.

CHAPTER VI.

[Illustration: Godolphin House.]

The family of Godolphin is by far the greatest and most important that
has issued from our parish. Their original abode, according to the
statement of Leland, was a fortified stronghold or tower on Godolphin
Hill, the remains of which were in existence in his time. The origin of
the family is lost in obscurity, but the curious tenure under which the
Manor of Godolphin is still held from the owner of the Manor of
Lambourne makes it clear that they were not tenants-in-chief from the
Earls of Cornwall. A passing allusion to the curious nature of this
tenure may be pardoned. Each Candlemas morning at six o'clock, beneath
the twinkling stars, or more probably in the black darkness of rain and
tempest, the Reeve of Lambourne still pays his yearly visit to Godolphin
House. Beating on the outer oaken doors of the ancient mansion, he
peremptorily demands admission. On the doors being opened, without
waiting for invitation he enters the house and mounting upon the table
of the hall he exclaims "O Yes! O Yes! O Yes! I am the Reeve of
Lambourne in Perransand, come here to demand the old rent, duties and
customs due to the lords of the said manor from the lands of Godolphin."
In response to the summons of the Reeve there is brought him 2s. 8d. in
rent, a jack of strong beer, a loaf of bread and a cheese. Out of the
fact of this ancient tenure the incorrigible Hals has woven one of his
innumerable romances, for which not one iota of evidence worthy of
consideration exists. Hals possessed the art of evolving history of a
libellous and defamatory character from his own inner consciousness in a
way that has been seldom equalled.

After a number of generations the ancient race of Godolphin centred in
an heiress Elinor or Elianora, who married John Rinsey of Rinsey, thus
joining the estates of Rinsey and Godolphin. On 2nd December, 1398, John
Rinsey of Godolphin and Rinsey and Elianora his wife received a licence
from Bishop Stafford for oratories on their manors of Godolphin and
Rinsey. The arms of this worthy pair are still to be seen quartered on
the 15th century screen of Buryan Church.

Hals' story about the Godolphin estates passing by marriage to the
Arundells of Perransand, and being sold to one Stephens or Knava, on the
above-mentioned tenure, rests upon no proof save that the name of Knava
happened to be common in Breage in his time, and it finds no support
from the descent of the family given by Vivian.

John Godolphin of Godolphin, Sheriff of Cornwall in 1504, must be
regarded as the real John of Hapsbourg of his race. I am led to conclude
that the Master Thomas Godolphin who became vicar of Breage in 1505 was
the younger son of this founder of the family greatness.

The south-east corner of Breage Church, now called the Godolphin
Chapel, was the burying-place of this ancient family from the period of
its rise to greatness, though no monument of any kind preserves the
memory of those whose earthly remains rest there. It seems incredible
that no monuments to the memory of departed Godolphins ever marked the
site of their last resting-place. Sir Francis Godolphin, who lived in
the time of Elizabeth, was a man of vast wealth, as well as vast
influence. The age of Elizabeth was an age of ornate and magnificent
tombs; they still survive in great numbers in our country churches, of
elaborate character with rows of kneeling figures and inscriptions that
will suggest the lines:

"The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done upon the tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been."

The conclusion is forced upon us that at some period the tombs of the
Godolphins were removed and desecrated. As to the period there can be
little doubt; it can only be placed in the time of the Independent
ascendancy, during the Protectorate. The Godolphins had distinguished
themselves by their fearless loyalty to the exiled house, and had
rendered themselves a target for the animosity of the Government and
local fanatics and sectaries. Their elaborate tombs were thus perhaps
conveniently confused with the emblems of superstition, and their
recesses rifled in search of sacrilegious booty.

The helmets of three Godolphins still hang in the south-east corner of
the church, the silken banners that once hung with them having long
since mouldered into dust. At the restoration of the church in 1892 two
large marble slabs were removed from the floor of the church, which
marked the stairway leading to the Godolphin vault. John Evelyn, in his
account of the burial of Margaret Godolphin, speaks of this quiet corner
as the "dormitorie of her family."

[Illustration: A Godolphin Helmet in Breage Church.]

Sir John Godolphin was succeeded by his son, Sir William Godolphin: this
Knight in his turn was repeatedly Sheriff of Cornwall. We may gather
from the State Papers[45] that his character and principles, to say the
least, were somewhat robust. Ships cast upon the wild, rockbound coast
of Breage, it is complained, were snapped up as toothsome morsels by the
Sheriff, and their contents carried doubtless as loot to Godolphin. His
burial is recorded in the Breage register on 30th July, 1570. He was
succeeded by his son, the heroic Sir William Godolphin, who covered
himself with glory in the short war waged by Henry VIII. against Francis
I., which terminated in the defeat of the French at the Battle of the
Spurs. Carew says of this brave Knight that "he added lustre to his fame
at the expense of his face." This statement has reference to a charge
made by Sir William and his brother Thomas, at the head of the force
under his command, which resulted in the rout of the French opposed to
them and the grievous shortening of Sir William's nose by a sword cut.
This warrior at home seems to have practised the robust methods of his
father. In 1575 we find the [46]Crown preferring fifteen charges against
him, thirteen of which were for piracy in conjunction with the
Killigrews of Arwennick. He lies buried in Finchley Churchyard, and some
faithful follower who had wandered over the fields of Picardy with him
in search of military glory placed the following epitaph upon his tomb:

"Godolphin his race to rest hath run,
Where grace affords felicity;
His death is gone, his life hath wone
Eternal perpetuity.
Though William his corpse here doth lie
Barnes' faith in him shall never die."

His wife Dame Blanche Godolphin lies at Breage. As Sir William left no
son his estates devolved on his nephew, Sir Francis, son of Thomas
Godolphin, who had, as we have already seen, distinguished himself in
the war with France. Of Sir Francis Godolphin, Carew says, "Zeal in
religion, uprightness in government and plentifulness in house-keeping
had given him a great reputation."

As well as having distinguished himself in the dreary wars of Ireland,
Sir Francis had applied his mind to the problems of scientific mining on
his estates, to his own great profit. In looking over the pages of the
Church registers, I was perplexed to find the frequent recurrence of the
name Erasmus. There can be but little doubt that the first Erasmus whose
name appears in the registers was a Dutchman brought to Breage by Sir
Francis Godolphin in connection with his great projects of scientific
mining. Sir Francis was Governor of the Scilly Islands. As Governor he
rebuilt the ruined fortress of St. Mary, and made it so strong that it
successfully resisted all the assaults of the Parliamentary forces until
the close of the Civil War. The heroic attempt of Sir Francis Godolphin
to defend Penzance against the attacking Spaniards has been dealt with
in another place.

Sir Francis corresponded with Cecil Lord Burleigh, and we thus get from
the Hatfield MS. a faint, blurred picture of the soul of this brave
Cornish squire. In his last letter to Cecil, dated Tavistock, 8th
October, 1601, he speaks of his "project as touching the wars in
Ireland."[47] He married first Margaret, daughter of John Killigrew, of
Arwenack, and secondly Alice, daughter of John Skerrit, and widow of
John Glanville, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Of one of these
ladies the following quaint story still survives: Sir Francis had taken
into his confidence an attorney of Ottery St. Mary, named John Cole, and
ultimately employed him as his agent. This person embarked in mining
speculations on his own account with disastrous results, which soon
hurried him into the paths of fraud. John Cole's blocks of tin bore for
purposes of identification the figure of a cat stamped upon them, whilst
those of his master bore the impress of a dolphin. Emboldened by
successful peculations, the sign of the cat appeared in ever-increasing
numbers where the sign of the dolphin should have been displayed. The
suspicions of Lady Godolphin, more shrewd in this respect than her
husband, were aroused. Accompanied by a maid, she repaired to the
Godolphin Blowing House on foot, where she found numerous blocks of tin
unlawfully stamped with the sign of the cat. On her return to Godolphin
House, she found Sir Francis and a number of friends wondering at her
absence, prolonged long past the appointed hour of dinner. She explained
that during her absence she "had been watching a cat eating a dolphin."
The Breage registers record the burial of Sir Francis Godolphin on 23rd
April, 1608.

Sir Francis was succeeded by his son, Sir William Godolphin, educated at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the home in those days of Puritan learning.
Sir William also had distinguished himself under Essex in Ireland ere he
succeeded his father; tradition says that he had been knighted for his
bravery on the field of battle. In 1606 he was employed by the
Government on a mission to Paris, the object of which is unknown. In an
extant letter to Cecil[48] he complains that his means were inadequate
to meet the expenses of the mission. He represented Cornwall once, if
not twice, in Parliament. He married Thomasina, the daughter of Thomas
Sidney, of Wrighton, in Norfolk. It was thus that the Christian name of
Sidney was introduced into the Godolphin family. The Breage registers
record his burial on 5th September, 1613. His eldest son William died
whilst still a youth, when on a visit to Bruton Abbey, in Somersetshire;
he was thus succeeded by his second son Francis, a boy of fourteen at
the time of his father's death.

It was during the lifetime of this Sir Francis that Charles II., then
Prince of Wales, took refuge at Godolphin House, on his flight to the
Scilly Islands on the complete collapse of the Royal cause. Charles
remembered the services of his faithful Cornish squire, and at his
accession made him a Knight of the Bath, and entrusted to his charge the
State prisoners, Sir Harry Vane and General Ireton; at the same time
the foundation of the fortunes of his third son, Sidney, was laid by
admission to the Royal household. Sir Francis represented St. Ives and
other constituencies in Parliament. He and his wife, Dame Dorothy,
daughter of Sir Henry Berkeley, of Yarlington in Somerset, were both
buried in Breage Church. Sir Francis was succeeded by his eldest son,
Sir William, who died without issue, and is buried at Breage. His fourth
son, Henry Godolphin, D.D., was Provost of Eton for thirty-five years,
and ultimately became Dean of St. Paul's. The silver-gilt Communion
services still in use at both the Churches of Breage and Germoe were the
gift of Henry Godolphin, whilst Dean of St Paul's. The record of his
baptism occurs in our registers on 15th August, 1648.

No account of the house of Godolphin would be complete without mention
of the brave and debonair Sidney Godolphin, poet, soldier and
philosopher, brother of the foregoing Sir Francis Godolphin, K.B. He was
the trusted friend of the statesman Clarendon, Hobbes the philosopher,
and Waller the Cavalier poet. These three friendships in themselves made
clear the temper of his mind. He sat in three Parliaments as member for
Helston. He espoused in Parliament the cause of Strafford, and when
peace seemed hopeless, he withdrew to the King at Oxford. The Earl of
Clarendon in his history of the Great Rebellion has left a vivid
portrait of his character and personality. He describes him as of small
stature, but of sharp and keen wit, with a mind tinged with melancholy
and fitfulness. He tells us that he would scarcely stir out of doors in
windy or rainy weather, and that at Court he mingled freely with the
greatest of the realm. He died fighting for his King at Chagford, in
Devonshire, in an obscure skirmish, and lies buried in Okehampton Parish
Church. It is evident that he had inherited the nature of his mother,
and was a Sidney both in mind and in person rather than a Godolphin.
Sidney Godolphin was before his age, and his philosophic mind revolted
at the miserable tangle of religion and politics, and the degrading
spirit of religious intolerance and persecution manifested by all
parties. Of him it might have been well said: "_Qui n'as pas l'esprit de
son âge, de son âge a tout le malheur._" On his tomb are inscribed the
following pathetic lines by his friend Hobbs:

"Thou art dead, Godolphin, who lov'dst reason true,
Justice and peace, soldier belov'd, adieu."

The following entry in the Breage registers, which casts a sidelight on
the story of the Godolphin family, has a pathos all its own: "Franciscus
Berkeley, filius Caroli Berkeley militis, sepultus fuit 27 Septembri,
1635." The mother of the child whose death is thus recorded was
Penelope, daughter of Sir William Godolphin, and the sister of Sir
Francis and Sidney Godolphin. Penelope Godolphin had been married to Sir
Charles Berkeley in Breage Church, September, 1627. Possibly the rapid
rise of the Godolphin family was due to some extent to this marriage
into the powerful family of Berkeley. Sir Charles Berkeley afterwards
became Viscount Hardinge, and ultimately Earl of Falmouth, and is said
in the main to have been responsible for the failure of the negotiations
between Cromwell and Ireton on the one hand, and Charles I. on the
other, for the restoration of Charles once more, to a peaceful, if a
more limited authority over his people.

The child whose death the entry records had doubtless come with his
parents to his mother's ancestral home. Penelope Berkeley no doubt
returned to the old home of her childhood full of dreams of the renewal
of the life of her girlhood, proud of her firstborn, heir to a great
name. It all ended, alas! in the laying of the body of her babe in the
old grey Church on the hill, overlooking the sea, 'midst the dust of his
maternal ancestors.

The parish has produced only one great man of the first rank, Sidney
Godolphin, Earl of Godolphin, third son of the Sir Francis honoured by
Charles II. Our Church registers record the baptism of Sidney Godolphin
in the following words: "Sidoni, the son of Francis Godolphin and
Dorothy his wife, was baptized 15th day of June, 1644." Sidney Godolphin
almost immediately after the Restoration became a page in the Royal
household, and it was not long before the King conceived a strong
personal liking for the son of the Cornish squire with whom he had found
a refuge in the darkest hour of his fortunes. The regard of the merry
Monarch made smooth the path of rapid advancement for Sidney Godolphin.
Like his uncle of the same name, at an early age he entered Parliament
as member for Helston. It is said that he very seldom spoke in the House
of Commons, but quickly earned a reputation as a man of keen financial
grasp and insight, and that his opinion on matters of finance soon came
to be regarded as of great weight. In 1679 he was promoted with Viscount
Hyde, afterwards Earl of Rochester, and the Earl of Sunderland to the
chief management of affairs. In September, 1684, he was created Baron
Godolphin of Rialton, and succeeded the Earl of Rochester as First Lord
of the Treasury. James II. extended to him the same favour and
confidence that King Charles had given to him. He was one of the Council
of Five to whom James left the management of affairs when he left London
to meet the advancing forces of the Prince of Orange. On the utter
collapse of the cause of James II. he was one of the Commissioners
appointed to negotiate with William Prince of Orange. He continued in
office under William III., whilst at the same time, like his friend the
Duke of Marlborough, he carried on a secret correspondence with James at
St. Germans. No doubt all his real sympathies were with the cause of the
exiled Monarch. In the reign of Anne he was largely instrumental in
bringing about the Act of Union with Scotland; and by his great ability
as a Minister of Finance he alone rendered possible the victorious
prosecution of the war with France. He was created Earl of Godolphin in
1706. His position as a Minister of Finance in a venal age gave him
unlimited opportunities for peculation, which others would have
unblushingly seized, but he remained incorruptible, and at his death in
1712 was found to be worth only £12,000. He was buried in Westminster
Abbey.

The life of Sidney Godolphin was early clouded by a great sorrow. At the
age of thirty he had married Margaret Blague, daughter of Colonel
Blague, of Horningsheath. Three years after their marriage, in 1678,
Margaret Godolphin's saintly life came to an end. John Evelyn has
rendered the story of her short life in a sense the common heritage of
all English men and women. By her purity and simple goodness of
character she came to exercise an influence upon an evil and licentious
Court, and for posterity she stands out as one of its brightest
ornaments. I extract the following fragment from Evelyn's memoir of her:
"She died in the 26 yeare of age, to the inexpressible affliction of her
deare husband. She was for beauty and good nature, wit, fidelity and
discretion the most incomparable person. Her husband, struck with the
unspeakable affliction, fell down as dead. The King himself and all the
Court expressed their sorrow. To the poore and miserable her loss was
irreparable, for there was no degree but had some obligation to her
memorie. She desired to be buried in the dormitorie of her husband's
family, neere 300 miles from all her other friends. So afflicted was her
husband at this severe loss that the entire care of her funeral was
committed to me. Having closed her eyes, and dropped a teare upon the
cheeke of my deare departed friend, lovely even in death, I caused the
corpse to be embalmed and wrapped in lead, with a plate of brass
soldered thereon, with an inscription and other circumstances due to her
worth, with as much diligence and care that my grieved heart would
permit me. She was accordingly carried to Godolphin, in Cornwall, in a
hearse with six horses, attended by two coaches of as many, with about
thirty of her relations and servants. There accompanied the hearse her
husband's brother, Sir William, two more of his brothers and his three
sisters; her husband was so overcome with grief that he was wholly unfit
to travel so long a journey till he was more composed. I went as far as
Hounslow with a sad heart, but was obliged to return on some
indispensable affairs. The corpse was ordered to be taken out of the
hearse every night, and decently placed in ye house, with tapers about
it, and her servants attending to Cornwall; and then was honorably
interr'd in the Parish Church of Godolphin. This funeral cost not much
less than £1000. With Mr. Godolphin I looked over and sorted his lady's
papers. We found a diary of her solemn resolutions, all tending to
practical virtue. It astonish'd us to see what she had read and written,
her youth considered."

A brass with the following inscription marks the spot in Breage Church,
in front of the altar in the south aisle, beneath which the earthly
remains of Margaret Godolphin lie: "Beneath this brass repose the mortal
remains of Margaret Godolphin, daughter of Colonel Blague, of
Horningsheath, Groom of the Bedchamber to King Charles I.; the wife of
Sidney Godolphin, afterwards Earl of Godolphin; and the friend of John
Evelyn, who has told the story of her noble life. She wished to rest at
Breage, the cradle of her husband's race. Born 2nd August, 1652. She
died in London 9th September, 1678. This brass was placed to her memory
by George Godolphin Osborne, 10th Duke of Leeds."

It seems to have been the custom of the Lord High Treasurer, at any rate
until his later years, from time to time to visit his old Cornish home,
which, it may be added, did not become his property until two years
before his death at the decease of his elder brother in 1710.

An interesting picture of these visits has come down to us from the
father of Dr. Borlase,[49] of antiquarian fame, who in his youth was
present on one of these occasions. He says that at this time no regular
post or means of transit, either for persons or things, were to be found
beyond Exeter, but when masses of letters had accumulated at Exeter they
were from time to time sent on to Cornwall, as occasion might serve, by
a system which was called the post. When the Lord High Treasurer,
however, visited Godolphin, he had a weekly messenger from Exeter
bringing letters, despatches and a newspaper; and on the fixed day of
the messenger's arrival all the gentlemen for many miles round assembled
at Godolphin House to hear the newspaper read in the great hall.

A number of letters addressed to Sidney Godolphin by his mother and
other members of his family still survive in the British Museum[50] also
letters of Sidney and his sisters to their mother. These letters give a
deeply interesting picture of the family life as lived at Godolphin.
Some of the letters of his sisters to their mother deal with the things
they saw and did on their visits to London. Money seems to have been not
too abundant at this period in the Godolphin family, and considerations
of ways and means constantly obtrude themselves in the letters. In one
letter the future Lord High Treasurer is commissioned by his mother to
purchase the wedding trousseau of one of his sisters; to this letter of
his mother the future Finance Minister replies that he has purchased the
dresses that a "Mrs. Stuart had had out of France just before the Court
went into mourning." This engagement between his sister Catherine and a
Mr. Dryden ultimately came to naught. Catherine remained unmarried, and
was the last of her line to be laid in the "dormitorie" of her race in
Breage Church. She died 7th October, 1678.

Godolphin House was fitfully inhabited by Francis, 2nd Earl of
Godolphin, the only son of the Lord High Treasurer, for a few summer
months. He seems to have somewhat enlarged the house and built the front
portico and colonnade of granite from Tregoning Hill. Since his death in
1766 this ancient house has never been inhabited by its owners, and of
it may be said in the words of Hafiz:

"The spider has woven her web in the palace and the owl hath sung her
watch song on the towers."

In concluding the account of the family of Godolphin, it is fitting to
make some mention of Sir William Godolphin, of Treveneag, in the parish
of Mabe. He was the grandson of that Sir Francis Godolphin who so
gallantly attempted to defend Penzance against the Spaniards, his father
being John Godolphin, Captain of the Scilly Isles. Sir William in the
days of the Commonwealth had eulogised the Protector in fulsome verses
still extant: when the Protector was dead, and could no longer punish or
reward, we find him on the other hand assailing his memory with virulent
abuse. It is only just to add that whilst singing the praises of the
Protector, he was in full communication with the spies and agents of
Charles. Having so carefully prepared for the future, at the Restoration
his advance was rapid. In 1661 he became member of Parliament for
Camelford, and spoke vehemently in favour of the sanctity of the Royal
prerogative, not going without substantial reward for his exuberant
loyalty. Mr. Pepys describes him as "a very pretty and able person; a
man of very fine parts." He affected science as then understood, and
became a Fellow of the newly-formed Royal Society, and on account of the
sunshine of the Royal favour in which he basked received the honorary
degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. He ultimately became
Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Spain, but was summoned home
during the frenzy of the Popish Plot on a charge of high treason. Sir
William under the circumstances thought it more prudent to disregard
the command and remain at Madrid as a private person, which he continued
to do until the day of his death in 1696. At his death he left
considerable property in Madrid, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam, which
continued for a number of years to be the source of much litigation. A
portion of the property was ultimately employed, in accordance with the
provisions of Sir William's will, in founding the Godolphin School at
Hammersmith. The Godolphin School at Salisbury, it may be added, was
founded by his niece, Elizabeth Godolphin.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[45] State Papers, 1526.

[46] State Papers.

[47] See "The Life of Sidney Godolphin," by the Hon. Hugh Eliot.

[48] See "The Life of Sidney Godolphin," by the Hon. Hugh Eliot.

[49] See Gilbert's History of Cornwall.

[50] Life of Sidney Godolphin by the Hon. Hugh Eliot.

The Arundells, de Pengersicks, Militons and Sparnons.

CHAPTER VII.

At the conclusion of the Norman Conquest all the land in the parish of
Breage was in the possession of the Earls of Cornwall, with the
exception of the manor of Methleigh, which still continued to be
attached to the See of Exeter. Methleigh passed from the Bishops of
Exeter[51] to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter about 1160. Soon afterwards
it was granted by the Dean and Chapter to the Nansladons, or Lansladons;
from this family it passed to the Chamonds, and from them to the
Arundells.

In the fifteenth century the Arundells owned the Breage manors of
Pengwedna, Methleigh and Treworlas; in fact a very large section of the
parish. The ancient home of this family was at Yewton, in Devonshire,
where they had been settled since the days of King Stephen. They are
said to have been of Norman origin, and that the first form of their
name was Hirondelle; at any rate, the swallow figures upon their
shields. It is possible, on the other hand, that this device of the
swallow may have been merely due to the vogue for canting heraldry, an
example of which we have in the Godolphin helmets hanging from the roof
in Breage Church, which take the form of sea monsters or dolphins
rearing their heads above the waves. A more prosaic but probable origin
of the Arundells would connect them with the ancient Sussex town of that
name. The pathway of the Arundells to greatness[52] lay not so much by
the way of the tented field as along the flowery paths of successful
match-making; they moved forward rather to the music of wedding bells
than to the brazen blast of the trumpet sounding the charge. It was to
the former music that their broad lands in Breage came to them.

In the thirteenth century Ralph Arundell had risen to influence and the
possession of the manors of Trembath and Treloy through marriage with
the heiress of the Trembaths; and in the following century his
descendant acquired the manor of Lanherne by marriage with the heiress
of the ancient house of Pincerna.

The manor of Pengwedna in Breage was held by the senior branch of the
family, the Arundells of Lanherne; whilst the manors of Treworlas and
Methleigh were held by the Arundells of Tolverne, one of the junior
branches[53] of the family. Tolverne had come to the house of Arundell
in the usual way in the reign of Richard II., Sir John Arundell of
Lanherne having married the heiress of the manor, the daughter of Ralph
le Sore. Sir John Arundell bequeathed this estate to his second son,
Thomas, whose descendants held it until the time of Charles I. It was at
Tolverne that Henry VIII. was entertained with great magnificence by his
kinsman the Sir John Arundell of that day.

The story of the coming of the Arundells of Tolverne to their small
manor of Truthual, in the parish of Sithney, is full of the flavour of
ancient romance. It was at the time that the world was still dreaming of
the land of El Dorado. The spoils of Mexico and Peru brought home by the
Spaniards had profoundly moved the imaginations of all adventurous
souls. Sir Thomas Arundell, of Tolverne, had listened to the tales of
home-coming[54] adventurers of a marvellous island on the coast of
America, called Old Brazil, where untold wealth lay ready as spoil for
the brave and stout-hearted. He wasted his substance in vain search for
this island of beauty and wealth--the pearl of American seas. Where he
searched we do not know; only that his search was vain, and that he
returned to his own land broken in fortune and probably also in spirit
and in health, and that he was compelled to part with his ancestral
acres of Tolverne and to make his home on his smaller estate in Sithney
and Breage, which still remained to him from the wreck of his fortunes.
He was succeeded by his son, John Arundell, who served as a Colonel of
Horse in the army of the King during the Civil War. This gallant soldier
was buried in the north aisle of Sithney Church, and the tablet to his
memory, which takes the form of a stone shield, blazoned with swallows,
is the only memorial now remaining of this once powerful family. The
male line of this branch of the family became extinct on the death of
John Arundell, in India, in 1776. Their estate of Methleigh was sold to
the Coode family in the eighteenth century, and still continues in their
possession. The manor of Treworlas which they had previously held in the
parish had passed in marriage to the Jago family in the seventeenth
century. The Arundells are still represented in our midst in the female
line in Messrs. John Arundell and William Arundell Pryor, of Lower and
Higher Pengwedna, through Margaret Arundell, who married Richard Pryor,
of Sithney, in 1704.

The manor of Pengwedna remained in the family of Arundell, of Lanherne,
until it was sold in the eighteenth century by Lord Arundell of Wardour,
who had inherited the estates of his Cornish kinsmen.

With regard to the manor of Methleigh, it may be worthy of mention that
an ancient chapel seems to have existed on this manor, close to
Tremearne Farm. A carved pillar of ecclesiastical design still survives,
now used as a gate-post, and from time to time carved stones have been
unearthed round the spot, one, I am told, containing a realistic
representation of the Crucifixion. Round the presumed site of this
chapel human bones have from time to time been laid bare. I have been
unable to find any record of this forgotten chapel. As the spot commands
a wide view of the sea, which beats upon the rocks below, its erection
may have been due to the vow of some voyager who had escaped from the
fury of the waves, and the bones resting round it may be those of
drowned mariners; or it may be that we have here the site of the oratory
of the ancient home of the Nansladons or the Chamonds; at any rate, all
record of this ancient house of God and God's acre have long since faded
into oblivion.

From the ancient family of Arundell we naturally pass to the owners of
the tradition-haunted manor of Pengersick. An ancient race bearing the
name of the manor long flourished there, their first coming being long
since lost in the mists of the past. The Pengersicks are credited still
in the minds of the people as having been remorseless wreckers, luring
ships to their doom on the Sands of Praa by false lights displayed on
the shore. In a persistent tradition of this kind there is as a rule a
substratum of fact; tradition has been proved time after time to rest
upon a solid basis of truth, preserving for future generations a blurred
vision of events from a long-forgotten past. That the Pengersicks were
men of wild deeds, the assault by a member of the race, Henry de
Pengersick, on David de Lyspein, Vicar of Breage, in 1335, whilst
collecting the ecclesiastical dues of the parish, lends more than a
suggestion; the assault, as we have seen in a former chapter, being of
such a grievous and heinous nature as to lead to Henry Pengersick being
placed under the ban of excommunication.

[Illustration: Pengersick Castle.]

Mr. Robert Hunt, in his "Popular Romances of the West of England," has
preserved one of the wild Pengersick legends, which I venture to record
in an abbreviated form. The first Pengersick, so the legend runs, was a
proud man, and desired to ally himself, if possible, with one of the
great families of the county. In pursuance of this purpose he decided
that his only son should wed a lady of high degree who was by no means
young, and who had made her inclinations in the matter all too manifest.
The heir of Pengersick, however, had no desire to fall in with the plans
of his father and the wishes of the elderly spinster. The black witch of
Fraddam was therefore consulted--a terrible old beldam versed in all
manner of sorceries; but even the strongest love potions that she could
brew were powerless to melt the heart of young Pengersick. Love in the
heart of the spinster, subjected to constant rebuffs and coldness, began
to change to hate, and his father, finding that the heart of his son was
obdurate, and his nature most obstinate, made suit to the spinster of
high degree himself, and was smiled upon. Now it happened that the witch
of Fraddam had a niece called Bitha, who had assisted her aunt in the
brewing of her unholy potions. Bitha too, like the elderly spinster--now
spinster no longer--had also fallen under the spell of the manly beauty
of young Pengersick, and in order to win his affections determined to
take service with his stepmother, now duly ensconced in Pengersick
Castle. It fell out in the course of time as Bitha had hoped, and she
won young Pengersick's heart, but unfortunately their love was
discovered by the harridan stepmother; this discovery served only to
deepen her hatred for one whom previously she had so passionately loved.
She therefore determined once more without delay to employ the services
of the black witch of Fraddam, whom she had previously discarded as an
incapable physician. But here Bitha stepped in. She had not served an
apprenticeship to her aunt, the witch of Fraddam, in vain; she had kept
her eyes open all the while she had helped in filling the caldron on
Fraddam Down with horrible brews, and the knowledge thus obtained
enabled her now to foil all the spells of her aunt upon the life of her
beloved with more powerful counter-spells. At last the wicked old beldam
of Pengersick, despairing once more of the weapons of sorcery,
determined to arm herself with the more powerful ones of calumny and
slander. She succeeded in persuading the foolish old lord, her husband,
that his son was now manifesting the deepest affection towards her. This
tale was altogether too much for the dotard to bear, and it stung him to
ungovernable fury. He at once fell in with the carefully-prepared
promptings of his wife, and had his unfortunate son seized by a gang of
ruffian sailors, who carried him off to a ship that lay riding in the
bay, in which he was taken to Morocco and sold as a slave. After this we
gather that the poor old lord had little peace of mind; both mistress
and maid were at one in desiring his dissolution. It was not long, till
sad and weary he lay a-dying, when Bitha came and stood by his bed, and
with pleasing candour divested herself of the mask of kindly affection
behind which she had hitherto hidden herself, and in hard staccato tones
told him of the vile machinations of his wife, and that he was now dying
from the effects of slow poisons, which she herself had administered to
him. There was now nothing more left for the poor old lord of Pengersick
to do than to wearily turn his face to the wall and die, like many
before and after him to whom knowledge had come too late.

After the lapse of long years, the heir of Pengersick suddenly returned
to his home, bringing with him a dusky Eastern bride, whose beauty was
like a dream. He and his bride were accompanied by two swarthy servants,
with whom they conversed in a strange language. The lord of Pengersick
used to ride forth from the castle mounted upon a coal-black charger; so
obedient and docile in all its ways was this steed to its master that it
soon came to be universally regarded as undoubtedly of satanic origin.
The new lord on his return found his wicked and foolish old stepmother
shut up in her chamber, with her skin covered with scales like a
serpent, from the effect of the fumes of the hell-broth that she had
been constantly brewing with the witch of Fraddam for his undoing and
the infatuation of the foolish old lord his father. In her pain and
misery she at last ridded him of her presence, and sought relief in
death by plunging into the waves of the sea. The fumes of the witch's
caldron, we gather, had also been too much for Bitha, and her once
beautiful face had taken on the hue of a toad. She lived on, an ugly and
miserable old crone, in a cot on St. Hilary Down.

The Eastern bride of the lord of Pengersick was kind and gentle to all
with whom she had to do, and the lord himself, it was said, was generous
and helpful to all around; but he made no friendships nor held
intercourse with those of his own degree. The returned lord was, in
fact, a lonely and solitary man, riding forth alone and spending long
hours poring over strange books. His chamber, it is said, was full of
strange instruments, liquids and retorts, and as he laboured with these
in solitude the castle would be filled with strange odours, which
suggested the bottomless pit. At times as the night wind howled round
the turrets of the castle his voice might be heard in the intervals of
the blast summoning spirits from the unseen world, and as they came in
clouds obedient to his bidding their voices were heard above the beating
of the waves on the rocks beneath and the howling of the blast in the
turrets. He was regarded by the people as a white witch, whilst the
witch of Fraddam was a black witch and his antithesis. His spells were
more powerful than hers, and he at last drove her to sea in a coffin
from Germoe Churchyard, in which, as in a canoe, she could be seen on
stormy nights riding over the waves round Pengersick Head, her wild,
shrill shrieks of unholy laughter being carried on the storm-wind.

The beautiful lady of Pengersick rarely ventured from the castle; and in
summer time, it was said, she would sit for hours with her casement open
to the sea, like a true Eastern lady, singing to the accompaniment of
her harp the softest, sweetest songs. At times fits of unutterable gloom
would settle down on the soul of her lord, and as David with his harp
lifted the darkness from the soul of Saul, so this fair lady would
soothe to rest the weary spirit of her lord. Years drifted on, bringing
but little change, till one day there came a swarthy stranger of gloomy
and forbidding mien to Marazion, where he took up his abode. The
fishermen would see him sometimes as the night closed in sitting on the
rocks overhanging the sea round Pengersick; or cottars would see him in
the twilight wandering over the uplands. The lord of Pengersick went no
more forth abroad, and a nameless dread seemed to have settled down on
him and his lady. At last in the blackness of one awful night, in the
midst of a terrible tempest that had risen up out of the Atlantic, a
blaze of light shot up from the turrets of Pengersick Castle; and in the
morning a blackened heap of ruins alone marked the spot where it had
stood, and the lord of Pengersick and his lady, and their Eastern
servants and his beautiful steed, and the mysterious stranger of dark
and awful mien were never heard of more.

Of course, it is difficult to collect the sediment of truth at the
bottom of the foregoing legend. Perhaps we may conclude that some lord
of Pengersick, whose old age was not accompanied by the proverbial
wisdom of that state, as not infrequently happens, had fallen under the
spell of a mercenary Delilah, and that in his infatuation he had allowed
his son to be kidnapped by a gang of sea ruffians and carried abroad
like Joseph of old, to be added to the hordes of Christian slaves that
in those days dragged out a dismal existence at Tunis or Algiers. The
spiriting away of the heir would thus leave the field open for the
cherished plans and hopes of Delilah. History has a knack of repeating
itself, and more slaves have risen to power and influence in the land of
their bondage than the patriarch Joseph. Possibly the conscience of the
heir of Pengersick was more elastic than that of many of his fellows,
and he found it possible to recite the "_fateheh_" of Islam with
reverence and _empressement_. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
there were many Christian renegades holding high positions in the
service of the Mohammedan Powers of the Mediterranean--some of them
Englishmen. Perhaps this may have been the career of the heir of
Pengersick, ending in a return to his native land with riches, a bride
of the daughters of Islam, and an Arab steed. We may well ascribe
the skin disease of his wicked stepmother to leprosy--then very
common--rather than to the fumes of the witch's caldron. Adopting this
rationalised interpretation of the legend, it is but natural to conclude
that one who could thus readily exchange the creed for the "_fateheh_"
had no deep inward convictions, and men without deep convictions are
ever prone to embark upon the sea of speculation, and pursue such
philosophic phantoms as the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone;
hence perhaps the strange instruments and the odours of the bottomless
pit with which his name in tradition is associated.

Mr. Botterell, in his "Traditions and Hearth Stories of the West of
Cornwall,"[55] gives a more copious account of this legend of Pengersick
than the one here followed. He states that he heard the legend from the
lips of an elderly man at Gwinear, who had often heard it related in the
days of his youth. The main features of this story are, however, the
same; we have the additional statement in Mr. Botterell's legend that
the old lord of Pengersick had himself in his youth been a soldier of
fortune, and that the wander lust from time immemorial had been
effervescent in the blood of the race. The legend runs that the old lord
in the beginning of his days, as there were no wars at home, had betaken
himself in search of loot and glory "to outlandish countries far away in
the East, to a land inhabited by a people little better than savages,
who instead of tilling the ground or digging for tin, passed the time in
roving from place to place as they had need of fresh pasturage for their
cattle, and that they lived in tents covered with the skins of their
flocks, and that their raiment was made of the same material, and yet
they had rich stores of jewels and gold, which they had obtained by the
plunder of their more settled and industrious neighbours."

It is said, most probably with truth, that St. Germoe's Chair was
erected by some member of the Pengersick family, possibly as a
peace-offering to Mother Church after some more than usually wild and
lawless deed. The recess in the south chancel wall of Germoe Church,
with its canopy of carved stone now meant to be used as sedilia, most
probably was the tomb of some member of this restless race. This brief
account of the Pengersick family may be closed with the prosaic
statement that one of them represented Helston in Parliament in 1397 and
again in 1406.

The manor of Pengersick in the reign of Henry VIII. passed by purchase
to the family of Militon. The Militons descended from a daughter of the
Pengersicks[56] it is interesting to note. According to Leland, Job
Militon, the purchaser, came from Devonshire. On his arrival at
Pengersick he set about building the present crumbling grey tower, which
though sadly shorn of its former splendours dominates the valley. Hals,
whose veracity is much open to doubt, states that Militon had fled to
this remote corner of the world to hide his head and avoid avenging
justice, having imbrued his hands in the blood of a fellow-man. Whether
this deed was done by accident or with intent Hals does not say. It is
more than probable that it was never done at all. The reason for the
fortifying of the house of the Militons is not far to seek: it stands
close to the sea, and the sea in those days was the open highway of all
lawless spirits. Often from the summit of the grey Keep of Pengersick,
in the years that followed its erection, might have been seen the sails
of Barbary corsairs on the bosom of the sea. The crew of the merchantmen
and the lonely fisherman in his little boat were alike eagerly snapped
up by these marauders to swell the growing population of slaves in
Tripoli and Algiers. Under the shadow of night, when the sea was calm
and the landing good, these rovers of the sea would steal inshore in
open boats and surround some sleeping hamlet or farmhouse. The strong
men were carried off to labour as slaves under the hot sun of Africa
till death liberated them from their misery, whilst the portion that
fell to the fair daughter was the listless ennui of the harem. The sea
rovers were not the only danger that would menace the dwellers in
Pengersick Castle in those days; the constant wars in which this country
was embroiled would bring danger also from privateers, the licensed
robbers of the sea. Spanish, French and Dutch men-of-war and privateers,
each in turn would appear in the bay as the centuries drifted on. From
generation to generation, down to the first fifteen years of this
century, Mount's Bay echoed to the hoarse rumble of guns, and the cannon
smoke of ships engaged in deadly conflict drifted over its waters;
whilst numbers of lawless men, smugglers by repute and pirates[57] when
occasion served, dwelt upon its shores. Well might the first Militon
ensconce himself within the fortified walls of his Keep of Pengersick,
considering the condition of the times in which he lived.

An extract from the State Papers for the year 1526 makes it clear that
the ancient spirit of the wild Pengersicks was by no means absent from
the souls of the Militons. A Portuguese ship had been wrecked at
Gunwalloe and much cargo saved. The cargo was seized by the servants of
Job Militon, second of the name at Pengersick, Thomas St. Aubyn and
William Godolphin; when the unfortunate owner applied to the justices
for redress he was told that such was the custom of the country, and
that no redress of any kind was possible. It may be here mentioned that
Job Militon was ultimately made Governor of St. Michael's Mount after
the ill-starred rebellion of Humphrey Arundell.

A fragmentary account of the ancient tower, before cruel neglect and
decay had done their fatal work, may be of interest: "On the wainscot of
the upper storey, which is curiously carved and painted, there are
several quaint pieces of poetry, which are now nearly effaced. Beneath
the painting of a blind man carrying a lame man on his back occur the
lines:

"The lame which lacketh for to go
Is borne upon the blinde's back,
So naturally between them twoo,
The one supplied the other's lack.
The blinde to laime doth lend his might,
The laime to blinde doth yield his sight."

Under another painting, which represented the constant dripping of water
upon a rock, the following lines are found:

"What thing is harder than a rock!
What softer than water clear!
Yet will the same with often drop
The hard rock pierce, as doth appear.
Even so nothing so hard to attayne,
But may be had with labour and payne."

Other inscriptions and paintings in this ancient stronghold illustrated
the blessedness of loyalty to the Sovereign and the happiness of the
kingdom that is served by faithful and patriotic Ministers; another the
sacredness of the ties of marriage; and yet another, under the
representation of an ass laden with dainties and feeding upon thistles,
the folly of the miser, who denies himself the necessaries of life and
lays up store for others to wanton upon.

We can only deplore the spirit of neglect in generations that are gone
that allowed this heritage of a former age to crumble and waste away by
wind and rain and vandal hands. But for Dr. Borlase we should have never
known of the former existence of the ancient frescos and their message
of homely philosophy and truth.

A feature of Pengersick Tower is the numerous loopholes for the
discharge of arrows upon besiegers, and also the elaborate arrangement
for pouring boiling pitch or lead upon assailants attacking the doors.

The race of Militon did not long continue owners of Pengersick. Job
Militon, son of the purchaser, was succeeded by his son William Militon,
who died without issue, leaving his inheritance to be divided amongst
his six sisters; the estate thus ultimately passed through the female
line to the Godolphins and the Bullers.

Another ancient family owning considerable estates in the parish were
the Sparnons, of Sparnon and Pengelly. They seem to have held their
estates at any rate from the fifteenth century, if not earlier. We find
from the Church registers that at the meridian of their prosperity they
made alliances both with the Godolphins and the Arundells. The outlines
of the ancient home of the Sparnons at Sparnon, under the shadow of the
eastern end of Tregoning Hill, may still be traced. The Sparnons
ultimately built themselves a larger house on higher ground at Pengelly,
part of which still exists, serving as a farm house. In our Church and
churchyard several of the memorials of the Sparnons still survive. Their
estates were purchased in the eighteenth century by Mr. Justice Buller,
and are still held by his descendant, the present Lord Churston. The
Carter family settled in America, who in recent years have been such
generous benefactors to Breage Church, descend on the female side from
the Sparnons. It is pleasant to realise how frequently the offshoots of
old families renew themselves in new lands, sending forth vigorous
shoots to carry on old traditions and ideals of service and usefulness.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] For the history of the Manor of Methleigh I am indebted to the Rev.
T. Taylor, of St. Just.

[52] See Vivian's "Visitations of Cornwall," Lyson's "Cornwall," etc.,
etc.

[53] Other powerful branches of the Arundell family were settled at
Trerice, Mandarva and Tremoderet, in the Parish of Duloe.

[54] See Lyson's "Cornwall."

[55] Scenal Series, page 251.

[56] See a paper by the Rev. T. Taylor on "The Bevilles of Drennick and
Woolstan," No. LIV. Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.

[57] State Papers.

Worthies and Unworthies.

_Harry Carter_, _John Carter, "King of Prussia"_; _Smuggling Ways and
Days_; _William Lemon_, _Captain Tobias Martin, Poet_, _Joseph Boaden,
Mathematician_.

CHAPTER VIII.

Harry Carter, smuggler, privateer and revivalist, was born on a small
farm at Pengersick in 1749. His father, who was a miner by trade, eked
out a livelihood, with the assistance of his sons and daughters, in
farming a small plot of ground. Harry Carter tells us in his memoirs[58]
that he was one of a family of eight sons and two daughters; that his
eldest and youngest brothers received some scanty education at Germoe
School, but that he and the rest of his family received no education
beyond some crude home lessons in reading, given through the medium of
the Bible. The problem of daily bread in the household of his parents
was of much too pressing a nature to allow more than this in the way of
education. As soon as strength permitted, the children had to go forth
to work in the fields or the mines, that each might bring his share of
daily bread to the common store. Though life was thus hard, the
principles of religion were not neglected in the home, the children
being taught to recite some prayers "after they were in bed" and to
attend when possible the services at Germoe Church. His youth coincided
with the strange stirrings in the religious life of the people brought
about by the not infrequent peregrinations of John Wesley through the
district. When Harry was eight years of age the soul of his brother
Francis was touched at one of those wild scenes of religious
revivalism, and as the two brothers slept together, the little lad of
eight became strangely impressed and awed by the change in the demeanour
of his brother. He tells us, however, that these impressions of awe
gradually faded out of his youthful mind. At ten he was sent to work at
the mines on the surface, and he continued there for seven years, when
he went to join his elder brothers in a more adventurous and stirring
life upon which they had entered at Porthleah, soon to change its name
to Prussia Cove.

Before we proceed further with the story of Harry Carter, it may be well
to say something about Porthleah, so soon to become famous as a
smugglers' haunt. Between Cudden Point on the west and Enys Point on the
south lie three little coves. The one nearest to Cudden Point is called
Pixies' Cove. This cove is too rocky and exposed to be used as a
harbour, but its precipitous sides are riddled with caves suitable for
the smugglers' trade. Next to Pixies' Cove comes Bessie's Cove, called
after a wild character, Bessie Burrows, who there kept the Kiddlewink
Inn, a famous rendezvous of the smugglers plying their lawless trade
along the coast. Bessie's Cove is altogether hidden from view till the
edge of the cliffs are reached which form its precipitous sides. A
rugged road leads up the face of the cliff from Bessie's Cove, and at
certain points in the ascent caves open into the recesses of the rocks.
To the east of Bessie's Cove lies Porthleah, now known as Prussia Cove.
The name Prussia Cove came to be given to it from John Carter, the elder
brother of Harry, who soon came to be the acknowledged head of all the
smuggling fraternity along the coast. In his youth John Carter had been
the leader of his fellows in all boyish games, and stories of the great
Frederick, King of Prussia, having penetrated to the remote West of
Cornwall, had so fascinated the mind of this adventurous lad that he
dubbed himself King of Prussia. This name not only stuck to him for the
rest of his life, but it has stuck ever since to the little territory of
Porthleah over which he ruled with an iron hand.

The occupation of the Carter brothers at Prussia Cove was nominally that
of peaceful fishermen, but in reality that of daring smugglers. From
this quiet and secluded nook in the coast Harry Carter began his career
by making several voyages as supercargo of contraband in Folkestone and
Irish luggers. Like so many men of his time and country anxious to
make their way in the world, Harry Carter lost no opportunity of
self-education, and rapidly made himself proficient in a rude system of
accounts. At twenty-five he found himself in command of a small sloop of
sixteen or eighteen tons and a crew of two men, busily engaged in the
exciting trade of importer of contraband goods. The sun shone upon his
illegal efforts, and so great was his success that he soon succeeded in
making himself master of a sloop of thirty-two tons; but his vaulting
ambition aspired to still greater things, and the success that fortune
so often extends to new and inexperienced players was still his. The
sloop of thirty-two tons was quickly exchanged for one of fifty tons and
a crew of ten men; and this in its turn soon gave place to a
heavily-armed cutter of sixteen guns and a crew of thirty-two men. At
this time there seemed no cloud on his horizon, save gloomy religious
thoughts that came welling up in his heart. He was greatly troubled
about the sin of swearing and his lack of assurance that he was a "saved
man," but not a whit about the dishonest and lawless nature of his
calling. Having obtained from Government a licence to sail as a
privateer in the American War, and with strict injunctions to his crew
against all swearing on board, he set sail in December, 1777, in search
of adventures and profit on a wider and more extensive scale; but his
star was no longer in the ascendant, and the favours of fickle fortune
were to be denied him for many a long year. Off the French coast his
bowsprit was carried away, and he put into St. Malo for repairs, little
recking of the momentous transpirings since he had sailed from Penzance
Bay; for France had entered into alliance with the revolted American
colonies, and was now at war with England. Carter thus sailed his
heavily-armed cutter into a trap, out of which there was no escape. He
and his men were made prisoners, and his ship and all that she contained
became a French prize of war. "The King of Prussia," who happened to be
on "business" at this time in the Channel Islands, hastened to his
rescue, and attempted to explain matters to his captors. The attempt was
a foolish one, and he soon found himself locked up with his brother
Harry and the crew of the cutter in a French prison. Their captivity
proved a hard and tedious one, but like the men of resource and purpose
that they were, they at once set to work to make the best of their
situation by learning the French language, whilst Harry, in addition,
beguiled the ennui of his captivity by the study of navigation, which in
after years served him in good stead. The two brothers did not obtain
their liberty until after a captivity of two years, when freedom came to
them in an exchange of prisoners.

Harry Carter on his return home refitted his old fifty-ton cutter and
made several successful smuggling runs. One of these runs was attended
with unpleasant consequences, which nearly proved disastrous. He had
sailed to deliver a contraband cargo in South Wales; on reaching the
Welsh coast he left his cutter lying off the Mumbles whilst he landed to
make final arrangements about running the cargo. In his absence the
cutter was mistaken by a cruiser for one of the Dunkirk privateers,
which at this time were haunting the Welsh coast like birds of prey,
snapping up vessels engaged in the coasting trade. These privateers were
for the most part commanded and manned, Carter tells us, by Irishmen.
The crew of the cutter, seeing the cruiser bearing down upon them, put
out to sea to save their cargo of contraband, and soon succeeded in
eluding the cruiser by superior speed. On giving up the chase the
cruiser sent a boat on shore, and Carter was arrested as the captain of
the Irish pirate. The matter ended in his being detained on suspicion
for twelve weeks, and his ultimate liberation was only brought about by
the representations of his Cornish friends to the Admiralty. With the
exception of this slight overclouding of his horizon, things still
continued for some time to prosper with him. On his return home he
informs us that "he rode about the country getting freights and
collecting money for the 'company.'" Indeed, things continued for some
time to prosper so well with the "company" that soon another large
cutter of one hundred and sixty tons, and carrying nineteen guns, was
purchased by them, whilst they gave orders for the building of a lugger
mounting twenty guns. These two vessels when fitted out sailed, under
the supreme command of Harry Carter, on voyages of illicit merchandise.
No wonder, under the circumstances, Harry Carter began to fancy himself
again, as he tells us in his memoirs; but there was, alas! a fly in the
ointment. In the pride of his prosperity and self-satisfaction swear
words began continually to slip out of his lips; this weighed at times
heavily on his soul and plunged him in deep spiritual gloom. It was
evidently words and not deeds that counted in this man's creed.

His relations with the collector of Customs and preventive officers seem
to have been of the most friendly character, and herein lay most
probably the secret of his success as a smuggler; indeed, the friendship
of Carter with these officials helps us to understand the cause of the
extreme prosperity of the smuggling industry along the Cornish coast at
this period. In December, 1780, Harry Carter was lying in Newlyn Road
aboard his cutter, with her consort the lugger alongside, when a
messenger came from his friend the collector of Customs, saying that a
Dunkirk privateer, called the Black Prince, and bearing a terrible
reputation, was off St. Ives, committing many depredations upon the
local shipping. The collector concluded his message by asking him to
capture the privateer and so end the reign of terror along the coast.
This duty was not at all to Harry Carter's liking; but, considering his
business, it was a dangerous thing to displease the collector of
Customs, and so with not a few qualms he set out upon the dangerous
enterprise of actual warfare. He put round to St. Ives with his two
vessels, and anchored off that town. On Christmas Day, in the morning,
the redoubtable Black Prince hove in sight, and Carter sailed out of St.
Ives Bay with his two ships to engage her. The Black Prince immediately
put about and made for the open sea, a running fight ensuing between
pursuers and pursued. The lugger in the pursuit soon received a fatal
shot, which caused her to rapidly fill and sink with all hands on board.
In the meantime Carter, having had his jib carried away by a shot and
another planted in his hull, thought it high time to abandon the pursuit
of the Black Prince; he was thus able to bear up and rescue seventeen of
the lugger's crew of thirty-one, but the rest found a watery grave.
Carter tells us: "Before we came up with the privateer, in expecting to
come to an engagement, oh! what horror was on my mind for fear of death!
as I knew I must come to judgment sure and 'sartin.' I feared if I died
I should be lost for ever. Notwithstanding all this I made the greatest
outward show of bravery, and through pride and presumption exposed
myself to the greatest danger. I stood on the companion until the wad of
the enemy's shot flew in fire about me, and I suppose the wind of the
shot struck me down on the deck, as the shot took in the mainsail right
in a line with me. One of my officers helped me up and thought I was
wounded, and he would suffer me to go there no more."

In 1786 Carter married Elizabeth Flindel, of Helford, and in the
following year was born his only child, Elizabeth Carter. In January,
1788, happened the great disaster of his life. In attempting to land a
cargo of smuggled goods in Cawsand Bay, he was surprised by boats sent
off by a man-of-war. He and his crew attempted to offer an armed
resistance; the cutter was quickly boarded by the boat's crew, and
Carter himself received a severe cutlass wound upon the head and was
left lying upon the deck of his ship for dead. He was able to retain
consciousness all the time, and when unobserved, with great difficulty,
he managed to plunge into the water. Luckily he was seen by sympathisers
on the shore, who only succeeded with great difficulty, on account of
his wounded and exhausted condition, in bringing him safely to land.
This adventure was to cost Carter dear, and it proved the culminating
point in his career; henceforth the sun of good fortune only shone upon
his path in fitful and watery gleams. In spite of the serious wound from
which he was suffering, his friends managed in two days to bring him to
the house of his brother Charles at Kenneggie, in Breage; there he and
his friends soon learnt the disquieting intelligence that the Government
had offered a reward of £300 for his capture. It was now necessary for
Carter, in order to avoid arrest, to be removed by night to Marazion.
Soon the scent became too strong, and he again had to be removed in the
dead of night to Acton Castle, then only occupied in the summer months
by its owner, Mr. Stackhouse Pendarves. The land attached to this house
was farmed by the "King of Prussia," who kept the keys of the house in
the absence of the family. In this deserted mansion the wounded man had
to lie in solitude for many weary months. It is said that the doctor who
attended him in this retreat was brought blindfolded by night, and that
on one occasion Carter only eluded justice by hastily assuming the garb
of a woman. In this lonely refuge his disposition at once manifested its
gloomy morbidity and intense practicalness: much time seems to have
been profitably spent in the study of navigation, and much wasted upon
hypochondriacal maunderings upon the condition of his soul, his
occasional proclivity for swear words and lack of assurance as to his
state of salvation. When his wounds healed he used to steal out of his
lair at night to Prussia Cove, returning ere the dawn. On one of these
occasions, as he returned he moralised on the singing of the birds in
the dawn "answering the end for which they were sent into the world, so
that I wished I had been a toad or a serpent or anything, so that I had
no soul. Likewise there was a grey thrush which sang to me night and
morning, which have preached to me many a sermon."

The sermons of this bird, like many other sermons, seem to have produced
no practical effect upon Carter's life. His mind was utterly
untroubled so far as the lawlessness of his life was concerned, or the
questionableness of many of his deeds; indeed, he made careful
preparation for continuance in lawless courses by the study of
navigation.

In the autumn his wife was seized with rapid consumption, and he paid a
pathetic farewell visit to her under the shadow of night at Helford,
whither she had gone with her little girl to be with her parents. He
returned lonely and broken-hearted to his refuge at Acton Castle a
little before the dawn, overwhelmed with the thought that he would see
his wife no more and that he was a ruined and broken man.

On the 24th October, 1788, he was able to obtain a passage to Leghorn on
board the George, a ship sailing from Penzance. From Leghorn he
succeeded in obtaining a passage to New York, where he became reduced to
a condition of extreme poverty, having for a bare pittance to work side
by side in the fields with negro slaves. After many hardships he
determined to brave the terrors of the law and venture back once more
to England. He worked his way back under the American flag, and narrowly
escaped the attentions of the Press Gang in the English Channel. On his
arrival in England he soon found that his native soil was still too hot
for his feet. Under the circumstances he crossed over to Roscoff, on the
French coast, the then capital of the Channel smuggling trade, where he
became the local agent of his brothers. But events moved rapidly in
France under the Revolution. During the Terror, with many other English,
he was arrested and remained under detention for over two years. With
the fall of Robespierre he and his other English fellow-prisoners were
set at liberty. This smuggling Ulysses brought his wanderings to an end
on the 22nd August, 1795. He disembarked on that day at Falmouth, he
tells us, "at three o'clock in the afternoon, where I met my dear little
Bessie, then between eight and nine years old." The following day
happened to be Sunday, and he at an early hour set out for his native
place, reaching Breage a little before eleven o'clock, and meeting his
brother Frank on his way to church.

Harry Carter settled at Rinsey, became a farmer, and continued to reside
there until the day of his death in April, 1829.

John Carter, known as "The King of Prussia," plays a much larger part in
local tradition than his brother Harry, though on Harry fell the more
onerous and dangerous part of facing the perils of the sea and of
hostile shores in pursuit of the smuggler's calling. In those days and
for long after the wild doings of Prussia Cove would be on everyone's
lips; the doings on the lonely deep had no chronicler to magnify them.
Many are the legends that cling round the name of "The King of Prussia":
some of these Mr. Baring-Gould has placed on record in his book "Cornish
Characters and Strange Events." On one occasion John Carter received a
visit from the Revenue officers, who demanded to make a search of his
entire premises. One door remained padlocked, and this they insisted on
having opened; the key not being forthcoming they wrenched the locks
off, but the cellar thus closed proved to be quite innocent of
contraband. On the following day Carter complained to the Revenue
authorities that his unlocked premises had been rifled during the night,
and demanded restitution for his stolen goods, as the Revenue officers
by their violent action had deprived him of the means of securing his
doors. The story runs that Carter himself had removed his property
during the night, and we are asked to believe the somewhat difficult
statement that the Revenue officers under the circumstances paid him the
value of the property he had never lost.

On another occasion we are told that the Revenue authorities seized in
the cellars of Carter a valuable cargo of contraband spirits, which
Carter had already made arrangements to supply to his customers amongst
the surrounding gentry, and that on the following night Carter and his
gang broke into the Custom warehouses, seized the contraband of which
they had been deprived, and proceeded to deliver it to those for whom it
had been originally intended.

His crowning exploit, however, was opening fire with a battery of guns
which he had erected at Prussia Cove, on the boats of the Government
cutter Faery. The Faery was in hot pursuit of a smuggling craft, which
in order to elude her pursuer sailed through a narrow channel between
the Enys rocks and the shore. The Faery, baffled of her prey, lowered
her boats in pursuit, and as these drew into Prussia Cove, Carter opened
fire upon them and beat them off. This seems to have been towards dusk.
Next morning the Faery opened fire from the sea on Carter's shore
battery, whilst mounted troops from Penzance took up their position on
the shore to the rear of his battery, and in turn opened fire upon it.
The smugglers thereupon withdrew to Bessie Burrow's public-house
and prepared for its defence, but received no further attack or
molestation. The whole incident as narrated reveals a strange supineness
on the part of the Customs authorities, which almost suggests connivance
with Carter's delinquencies.

The action of the authorities in the above case is reminiscent of a
story told to the writer by a parishioner. His grandfather, who occupied
a farmhouse on the coast, was awakened in the dead of night by a band of
smugglers, who asked permission to stow a cargo of spirits, which they
had just landed, in his barn under the straw. He demurred on the ground
that if the cargo were discovered there by the authorities he would be
incriminated, but he expressed willingness for it to be hidden in the
hay ricks, contiguous to the barn. Some days afterwards his father, then
a mere youth, was asked to assist in the disposal of some of the kegs,
and, fearful of refusing, consented. Under cloak of night he set out
with the smuggler, each bearing a keg; the way led over fields and by
many devious paths till he found himself climbing the fence at the end
of the garden of a Preventive officer living in Helston. He remonstrated
with his guide at the madness of endeavouring to secrete contraband
spirits in the garden of an Exciseman. In reply he was told to have no
fear, but to do as he was told; the fence was crossed and the keg was
carried through the garden to the back door of the upholder of the law.
The smuggler without trepidation proceeded to knock, and on the door
being opened the kegs were placed inside without parley of any kind.

The grim side of the smuggler's calling and the terrible crimes that
sometimes accompanied it are well illustrated by the gruesome find of
another parishioner recently, close to his farmhouse, under the shadow
of Tregoning Hill. The hind leg of one of the horses of this friend,
whilst ploughing in his field, suddenly sank deep into the ground, and
it was with difficulty that the animal was extricated. The spot from
which the horse's foot was withdrawn revealed a cavity in the ground;
spades were brought and excavations made, which ended in bringing to
light a fair-sized subterranean cellar, whose gruesome contents were a
large knife of foreign make, a skull, a few human bones, some
disintegrated patches of clothing and a small handful of silver and
copper coins, one of which, a shilling of the reign of George II., now
lies on the table of the writer.

From the Carters we turn to a man of a very different type, who made his
way to wealth by sterling integrity and honesty of purpose. William
Lemon was born at Germoe in 1696, and baptized in Breage Church on the
15th November of the same year. He received his education at the village
school, and being a lad of quick intelligence, he became in the first
instance a clerk to a Mr. Coster, connected with the local mining
industry. He distinguished himself when a mere boy on the occasion of a
ship being driven on Praa Sands in the midst of a terrific gale. He and
a party of brave men, who arrived on the scene of the disaster as the
ship was quickly breaking to pieces, formed themselves with great
gallantry into a living chain, extending from the shore into the raging,
angry surf, and so were able to grasp and save the shipwrecked sailors
as they were carried on the waves to the shore. But for these heroic men
thus grasping them they would have been sucked back into the sea and
drowned in the receding waters. Young William Lemon was a lad of
thoughtful and studious disposition, and availed himself of every
opportunity to learn what there was to be learnt of assaying and mine
engineering in the district. Presumably men of education and practical
ability were very scarce in the neighbourhood at this time; at any rate,
whilst little more than a boy he was appointed the manager of
considerable tin smelting works in the neighbourhood of Penzance. At the
age of twenty-eight he married a Miss Isabella Vibart, of Tolver, in
Gulval, a lady of some property. William Lemon was endowed with breadth
of mind and grasp of detail in a marked degree, and the means which his
wife brought him enabled him to bring these faculties into play with the
most successful results. He embarked on prudent and far-sighted mining
speculations, which quickly made him a man of great wealth. He conceived
the idea of working the tin mines on a large scale, and not as hitherto
by small bands or companies of "adventurers," as had been the custom for
some generations.

Though great wealth came to him comparatively early, his character
continued unchanged and unspoilt, and in the midst of his successes he
continued to utilize his leisure in the study of Latin, and in his
middle-age he had attained to no mean knowledge of that tongue. In the
present age the successful developer of mines and floater of mining
companies, spending his leisure in the study of the classics, would be
indeed regarded as strange, but "_autres temps, autres mœurs_."

When success came William Lemon settled in Truro. The kindliness of his
character is well illustrated by an incident at this period of his life.
He had trained a pet Cornish chough so well, and so fond had the bird
become of him, that at his call it would leave its fellows and come and
settle on his hand or his head as he walked along. A lad of the Truro
Grammar School, named John Thomas, who afterwards became Warden of the
Stannaries, accidentally killed this tame bird so dear to the heart of
its owner. In fear and trembling he went to the house of Mr. Lemon, and
confessed his crime. The lad's straightforwardness disarmed all
resentment in the heart of this kindly man, who dismissed him with
friendly words, after praising his openness and manliness of character
in confessing his delinquency.

William Lemon served as High Sheriff of the county, and might have
represented it in Parliament had he so chosen.[59] He ultimately bought
the estate of Carclew, to which place he went to reside in 1749. His
son was created a baronet, and for some years represented Cornwall in
Parliament. This baronetcy became extinct in the succeeding generation.

A friend has shewn the writer some letters of William Lemon, which
reveal him as an affectionate and dutiful son to his aged mother, and
kindly and solicitous for the welfare of all the members of his family.
I venture to transcribe one of these letters, written to his brother at
Germoe, who had been ailing for some time. It reveals a touching faith
in the efficacy of alcohol as a restorer of the vigour of the human
system, which the world has now lost, and also gives a quaint picture of
a bygone age and generation.

The letter is as follows:--

"Truro, 28th September, 1748.

"Dear Brother,

I was much concerned to hear of the illness of you and your family,
and consequently had great satisfaction in hearing of your being
recovered. To comfort and recruit you, I have ordered to be brought
you by this bearer four dozen bottles of wine, of different sorts,
as mentioned on the other side, which I hope you will make use of
with moderation. I cannot omit again pressing you to have
particular attention to the education of your children. It will be
surprising should you neglect this, seeing I have offered to
contribute so much towards it. My good wishes attend you and your
whole family, and I am

Your affectionate brother,
William Lemon."

"Bottles--4 Tent
" 4 Canary
" 12 Mountain
" 28 Port
------------
48 Bottles."
============

It would not be right in a chapter dealing with the worthies and
unworthies of Breage, who have stamped their memories beyond their
fellows upon the local annals, to omit the name of "Captain" Tobias
Martin. Although he was not actually a native of the parish of Breage, a
great portion of his life was passed in the parish as captain of Wheal
Vor Mine. He was born in the parish of Wendron on 5th January, 1747. His
childish years, on account of the poverty of his father, a working
miner, seem to have been practically destitute of all school education.
Indeed, when we examine beneath the surface we find that a century ago
in Western Cornwall school education of any kind seems to have stopped
short with the children of the more well-to-do farmers. Young Tobias
Martin, however, had inherited from his father an active and vigorous
mind, which quickly set itself to grapple with the adverse circumstances
of his surroundings. From a very early age he began to utilise all his
spare time for the purpose of self-education, and in spite of long hours
spent as a working miner, managed amongst other things to acquire a fair
knowledge of Latin and written French. His father, in spite of the hard
circumstances of his life, had possessed a genuine thirst for knowledge
and information of all kinds, and tenderly preserved a few tattered and
meagre volumes as a fountain of light and inspiration. He also possessed
the faculty inherited by his son of stringing jingling rhymes together,
which he regarded as endowed with the fire of genius. In his later years
the father of Tobias Martin, on account of his integrity and superior
education, was promoted by his employers to the post of mine captain.

The life of Tobias Martin practically followed the course of that of his
father. After working for a number of years as an ordinary miner, his
superior education and gifts came to be recognised by a Mr. Sandys, of
Helston, interested in the local mines, and his advancement quickly
followed. Tobias Martin died, aged 81, on 9th April, 1828, and was laid
to rest in Breage Churchyard. The later years of his life were clouded
by false accusations and unjust claims, which led for a time to his
confinement in the Sheriff's Ward at Bodmin. His character was
ultimately completely vindicated by the efforts of Mr. Richard Tyacke,
of Godolphin. Hard upon this trouble followed the brutal murder of his
eldest son in America, which darkened the few remaining years of the old
man's life.

The poems of Tobias Martin were first published in Helston in 1831; a
second edition followed in 1856, and a third in 1885. The poems suggest
the mental attitude of an eighteenth century Cornish Piers Ploughman;
running through them there is a vein of deep resentment at the tyranny
and oppression of the ruling classes, and the lethargy, pride,
hard-heartedness and laxity of the clergy is touched upon with no light
hand. His verses as poetry are utterly valueless, but as garish pictures
of a day that is passed they will always be interesting, if somewhat
painful reading. Martin by his contemporaries was called an atheist.
Judging by his poems, I imagine that he had thought perhaps a little
more than his accusers, who most probably had never thought at all on
the deeper things of life; his soul no doubt was in revolt against the
dead shibboleths and formalism of the age, with which men were
attempting to compound for the brutality and coarseness of their lives.
One looks in vain through Martin's poems for one thought of poetic
beauty or discernment.

Perhaps the following story of Martin, given by Mr. Baring Gould,[60]
will suggest a picture of the man and his communications. It is fair to
add that whilst the following story reveals him as a merry fellow, many
of his poems reveal in him a strain of plaintive melancholy.

Captain Toby was having his pint of ale at a tavern, when in comes a
miner who was wont to be called "Old Blowhard," and was not esteemed
trusty or diligent as a workman.

"How are 'ee, Capp'n?"

"Clever, how art thee?"

"Purty well for health," says Bill, "but I want a job. Can 'ee give us
waun ovver to yur new bal?"

"No, we're full," replied Captain Toby.

"How many men have 'ee goat ovver theere?" asked old Bill Blowhard.

"How many? Why we've two sinking a air-shaft through the flockan, and
two to taackle, and that's fower; and theere's two men in the oddit, and
a booay to car tools and that, and that makes three moore, and that
altogether es seben."

"And how many cappuns have 'ee goat?" said Bill.

"How many? Why ten."

"What! Ten cappuns to watch ovver seben men? I doant b'lieve you can
maake that out, for the venturers wouldn't stand it."

"Tes zackly so then, and I'll make it out to 'ee in a moment. Waun
cappun es 'nough we oal knaw, but at the last mittin the 'venturers
purposed to have waun of the 'venturers sons maade a cappun, and to
larn, they said; and so a draaper's son called Sems, was put weth me
from school, at six pounds a month and a shaare of what we had in the
'count-house."

"Well, but how can 'ee maake ten of you and he?"

"Why I'll tell'ee how, and you mind nother time Bill, for theere's
somethin' of scholarin' in ut. Now see this. I myself am waun, baent I?"

"Iss sure," said Bill.

"Well, and theest aught ta knaw that young Sems is nawthin'; well when
theest ben to school so long as I have, theest knaw that waun with a
nought attached to un do maake ten, and so 'tes zackly like that."

I venture to give one specimen of Tobias Martin's poetry.

"Awake, my soul! the night is past,
The day begins to dawn,
With eager footsteps let me haste
To meet the rising sun.

"But first to heaven's exalted throne
A tribute let me pay,
To Him who hath His mercies shewn,
And sent another day.

"To honest labour then inclined
I'll hasten to the spot,
With cheerful and contented mind,
Where heaven hath cast my lot.

"And there let me my daily task
With busy hands pursue,
And God's assistance humbly ask
In all I have to do.

"Though some despise my mean estate,
I would not have it said
I spend my time in sloth and hate,
Nor earn my daily bread.

"While idle wretches pine and starve,
And nothing good will do,
I'll labour on and try to serve
God and my neighbour to."

It would be unjust not to make mention in concluding this chapter of
Joseph Boaden, who lived his whole life as a small cultivator in the
parish of Breage, and who was laid to rest in Breage Churchyard in
December, 1858. Self-taught, through his life he pursued the study of
higher mathematics and astronomy, and was regarded as a valued
correspondent by Professors Airy and Adams, of Cambridge. Under modern
conditions education has become more diffused, but we look in vain for
men of the type of those whom we have been considering. With its
superficial diffusion knowledge has in a measure lost its prestige and
fascination, and education has been in a sense debased and vulgarised in
the popular mind into a mere instrument of livelihood. The successful
passer of competitive examinations, under the system of cram, with no
true love of knowledge for knowledge's sake in his heart, and who
divests himself of his crapula of potted knowledge the moment a
livelihood with a pension at the end has been attained, has already gone
far to cast learning, so far as the popular mind is concerned, into the
quagmire of contempt.

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[58] "The Autobiography of a Smuggler," published by Messrs. Pollard, of
Truro, 1894.

[59] See Mr. Baring-Gould's "Cornish Characters and Strange Events" for
many of the factors as given above.

[60] "Cornish Characters and Strange Events."

Local Place Names and Superstitions.

CHAPTER IX.

It has been said that the history of England is written in the names of
her fields and enclosures. Certain it is that in almost every parish, if
the names of the fields be gone over, some name of exceeding interest or
curiousness will be discovered, embalming some long-forgotten fact or
tradition. There are in the parish of Breage two fields called "The
Sentry"; this name is of course obviously a corruption of the word
"sanctuary." These two sanctuary fields are at opposite ends of the
parish; one forms the site of the main shaft of Wheal Vor Mine, and the
other is in the Kenneggie district. Their situation thus lends force to
a suggestion that they may in remote times have been actually used as
local sanctuaries.[61] The probability of this seems to be increased by
the fact that a field contiguous to the Kenneggie sanctuary field, is
called the Church Close. Possibly in ancient days in the Church Close
there stood a sanctuary chapel, whose story has long since faded into
the mists of oblivion. Originally every church and churchyard was a
sanctuary for criminals. The sanctuary seats at Hexham Abbey and
Beverley Minster and the sanctuary knocker in Durham Cathedral are still
in existence. A person who had committed murder or other heinous crime
was safe if he could reach a sanctuary before he was waylaid and
arrested; once within the sanctuary, if in forty days he confessed his
crime and took a solemn oath before the coroner to depart from the
country and never return again, he was allowed to go unmolested into
exile. Possibly our two local sanctuaries may have been thus used in
Celtic times. Had they continued to be used as such in later times, it
is probable that some record of this use would have survived.

Two fields in the parish possess the gruesome name of "Park Blood."
Certain local antiquaries have drawn the conclusion that the numerous
fields of Blood dotted over West Cornwall commemorate the sites of
desperate tribal struggles. It seems much more probable and reasonable,
however, that "Park Blood"[62] is merely the corruption of the ancient
Cornish for "Field of Flowers." This derivation, it is fair to add,
seems in keeping with a number of other local names of fields, as "Eye
Bright Field," "Bramble Field," "Furzy Croft Field," etc.

Another field of somewhat gruesome name is "Venton Ghost." Mr. Jenner
suggests that this name may be a corruption of "Well of Blood," a title
which may well have been due to the red waters of a chalybeate spring.

From a field whose name naturally suggests at a first sight ghosts and
hauntings, we pass naturally to a field which bears the portentous name
of "Wizard's Plot"; alas! all memory of the wizard who once probably
dwelt on this spot, and practised his spells and necromancy there, has
long since faded into oblivion.

It would be interesting to know how a field on Methleigh Farm obtained
the name of "The Martyr's Close." As to who these martyrs were tradition
can give no light. It is possible that the name may commemorate one of
the many acts of ferocity committed in the name of religion in the days
of the "Saints," when slight religious differences were ample
justification for any form of homicide, or it may have had, as seems
more probable to the writer, some connection with the story of the
unfortunate men whose skeletons, bearing upon them the unmistakable
traces of violent death, were discovered lying in a shallow grave
beneath the site of the pulpit in Breage Church. If this latter theory
be accepted it seems probable that the field earned its present name
through some act of military reprisal during the Parliamentary Wars.

In the Germoe district there is a field called "Bargest Croft." At first
sight "Bargest" suggests a corruption of "Bargheist,"[63] the Teutonic
and Scandinavian animal spectre, whose apparitions play such a large
part in the folklore of the North of England. The resemblance in the
words, however, is only superficial, "Bargest" evidently being a
corruption of "Bargas," a kite, which is a more or less common form in
compound local place names.

Turning from place names which have been culled in the main from the
tithe map to the parish tithe itself. Probably our tithe with other
Cornish tithe came first to be paid in Celtic times, not through any
force of law, but gradually by custom, each owner of land making what
was deemed a fitting payment for the maintenance of the bishop and
clergy of the diocese and possibly to some extent for the relief of the
poor. As in so many other instances long custom came gradually to obtain
the force of legal enactment and the payment of tithe to become legally
binding. When Churches were built at Breage and Germoe, our local tithe
instead of going to the support of the clergy of the diocese generally,
would pass to the special use of the clergy of Breage and Germoe; the
right of appointing such clergy passing also by custom, it seems more
than probable, to the builders of the Churches and their heirs.

When we deal with the fast fading superstitions of the district, it is
interesting to note the extreme frequency in local folklore of
superstitions exactly parallel to the Northern superstition of the
Bargheist. At no very distant time, judging from the accounts of the
aged, the majority of the lanes, roads and lonely places of the district
were inhabited by spectral animals. The Board School master, however,
has been allowing them no close time, and they soon will be as extinct
as the mammoth, the cave bear, or the woolly haired rhinoceros. It is
considered unlucky locally to behold these spectral animals, just as in
the Northern superstitions the appearance of the Bargheist denotes
disaster to the beholder. A flock of phantom sheep on the main road have
not yet been quite exterminated, and their pitter-patter on wild, stormy
nights may still be heard by the belated wayfarer, whilst a little
further on, closely contiguous to the main road, it is said a phantom
"passun" may still be seen; also certain houses have been pointed out to
the writer as having been terribly troubled with "sperruts."

The great enemy of "sperruts" and spectres of all kinds in his day was
the Reverend Robert Jago,[64] Vicar of Wendron, at the end of the
seventeenth century. The dim traditions of his doughty feats in warring
with spectres still vaguely linger, in a condition varying towards
evanescence, in the popular mind. A lane leading up from the village of
Herland Cross to Pengilly Farm still bears the name of Jew's Lane. In
this lane a Jew had hanged himself in rage or despair after some outrage
or wrong committed upon him by the Squire Sparnon of that day. Not long
after the Jew's suicide the lane was rendered impassable at night by
horrible sounds and sights, and recourse was had to the Reverend Robert
Jago, who received a fee of five guineas for the business of laying the
troublesome ghost. The method of Mr. Jago seems to have been first to
draw a circle with a long whiplash upon the ground, whilst repeating
certain formulæ and prayers. Having placed himself within the circle, he
was safe from the anger of malignant spirits, and was thus able to
summon the troubled spirit and banish it from the neighbourhood without
danger to himself.

Mr. Wentz, in his "Faery Faith of Celtic Countries," gives the
following story, taken from the lips of an aged man--John Wilmet, of
Constantine--having reference to Parson Jago and the traditions of
ghost-laying that still linger round his name: "A farmer who once lived
near the Gweek River called Parson Jago to his house to have him quiet
the ghosts and spirits regularly haunting it, for Parson Jago could
always put such things to rest. The parson went to the farmer's house,
and with his whip formed a circle on the floor, and demanded the spirit,
which made its appearance on the table, to come down into the circle.
Whilst on the table the spirit was visible to all the family, but as
soon as it got into the ring it disappeared and the house was never
troubled afterwards."

John Wilmet had also much to tell Mr. Wentz about the piskies or pobol
vean that he heard, but did not see, at Bosahn. It is round the piskies,
indeed, that the great mass of Cornish folk beliefs cling. Sixty or
seventy years ago this belief seems to have been all but universal
amongst the country people, and though now fast dying, is by no means
extinct. Indeed, a churchwarden of many years standing recently dated a
certain event by the winter in which he had been piskie "led." It seems
on this occasion when leaving the market town he had taken the wrong
turning and walked on rapidly till in the end he found himself more than
twelve miles from home. Another Cornishman informed the writer that one
night, thinking something was disturbing some of his cattle, he went out
into his field to see what was the matter; when he endeavoured to return
to the house, owing to the piskies he could not find the gate again, and
had to spend several weary hours wandering round and round the hedges
in a vain and exasperating search in rain and darkness, at one time
floundering in a nettle bed, at another in mud and water over the tops
of his boots.

An aged woman, Mrs. Harriet Christoper, informed Mr. Wentz, that a woman
who lived near Breage Church had a fine baby, and she thought the
piskies came and took it and put a withered child in its place. The
withered child lived to be twenty years old, and was no larger when it
died than when the piskies brought it. The parents believed that the
piskies often used to come and look over the wall by the house to see
the child, and she had heard her grandmother say that the family once
put the child out of doors at night to see if the piskies would take it
back again. The piskies are said to be very small, and you could never
see them by day. She used to hear her grandmother, who had been dead
fifty years, say that the piskies used to hold a fair in the fields near
Breage, and that the people saw them dancing. She also remembered her
grandmother saying that it was customary to set out food for the piskies
at night.

Mr. Hunt, in his popular "Romances of the West of England," tells us
that Bal Lane in Germoe was a famous haunt of the fairies in old time,
and that at certain seasons of the year they held a great fair there.

The fairy folk in local superstitions seem to have been divided into
three species--the piskies, fairies of the moors, dells and surface of
the earth generally; the knockers or knackers, fairies of the mines,
whom the miners heard knocking in the depths of the earth, indicating by
their knocks the presence of rich veins of ore, or if of a malignant
disposition luring the miners by their knockings to vain efforts after
non-existent mineral wealth. The third order of fairies was that of the
Buccas, an amphibious species, to whom down to recent times offerings of
fish were made.

It is pleasant to gather from the learned author of "The Faery Faith in
Celtic Countries" that the superstitions of the Cornish are of a much
brighter character than those of the other branches of the Celtic race;
the superstitious beliefs of their near kinsmen, the Bretons, being of a
specially gloomy character. The pobol vean, it seems, are much more
cheery folk, in spite of all their pranks, than gloomy Ankou, king of
the dead, and his attendant ghosts. Having said that the Cornish
folklore is not of a gloomy character is to say perhaps all that can be
said in praise of it.

I have alluded to the foregoing tales and beliefs because in the course
of a generation or so they will have completely faded from the popular
mind. Our people seem eager to have done with the past, and to reach
forward to the future, fraught with new conditions and new thought. When
we compare the present with the past, we can only be thankful for all
that change has brought within recent generations in physical
surroundings and moral outlook. Let us hope that her future gifts, which
give promise of being prodigal, will be as beneficent as those of the
recent past, for we still require much at her hands. The danger seems to
lie in wandering into a materialistic desert, for it is but too true
that "Man can not live by bread alone."

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[61] I am aware that the term Sanctuary came to be applied very loosely,
and came to mean sometimes little more than Churchland or even a Tithe
Barn. The Rev. Thomas Taylor, of St. Just, suggests with regard to the
Kenneggie "Church Close" and "Sanctuary" that these fields may have been
fragments of the ancient Manor of Methleigh, which passed from the See
of Exeter to the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, who alienated it from the
Church.

[62] "Park Blood" might be "Park Blod," the field of flowers. "Blodon"
in the 12th century vocabulary is "Flos," and "Blot" is the same as
"farina." In Welsh "blawd" is "flour" and "blodon" "flower." In later
Cornish "blez" is "flour" and "bledzahn" is "flower." There still
survives a dialect word "blouth."

_Mr. H. Jenner_

[63] Mr. H. Jenner.

[64] See Daniell's "History of Cornwall."

INDEX.

Ancient Glass in Breage Church, 52.

Aneurin, 18.

Ankou, King of the dead, 154.

Armada, The, 67.

Arundell, Benedict de, 45.

Arundell, Humphrey, 60, 126.

Arundell, Sir John of Lanherne, 57, 116.

Arundell, John, Colonel of Horse, 117.

Arundell, John, Last of the Arundells of Truthal, 117.

Arundell, Ralph, 116.

Arundell, Sir Thomas of Tolverne, 116.

Ashton, 74.

Athelstan, Saxon King, 27.

Atwell, Parson and Physician, 75.

Bal Lane, 153.

Barbary Corsairs, 125.

Bargest Croft, 150.

Bargheist, The, 151.

Barnes, Revd. Jocelyn, Vicar of Breage, 88.

Bartholomew, Black, 72.

Bells, Breage, 90, 91.

Bells, Germoe, 92.

Bede, The Venerable, 17.

Berkeley, Sir Charles, 108.

Berkeley, Dorothy, 107.

Berkeley, Francis, 108.

Berkeley, Sir Henry, 107

Bery, John, Vicar of Breage, 59, 61.

Black Death, The, 48, 64.

Boaden, Jos., 146, 147.

Bodmin, 48.

Bordars, 30.

Boscawen, Hugh, 79.

Breage Church, 24, 50, 51, 52, 53.

Breton Saints, 22.

Briefs, 97, 98.

Brother Thomas of Hayles, 46.

Brythons, The, 10, 17, 18.

Bucca, The, 153.

Buller, Mr. Justice, 128.

Burials by Night, 97.

Buryan, Chapel of, 44.

Burying-place of Godolphins, 102.

Canons of St. Keverne, 34.

Carter, Mrs. Cornelia, 90.

Carter, Harry, 129 to 137.

Carter, John, "King of Prussia," 137 to 139.

Carter, Family of, 128.

Carter, William Thornton, 90.

Cattle, Cornish, in 17th Century, 75.

Cecil, Lord Burleigh, 105, 106.

Celtic Bishops, 26.

Celtic Churches at Breage and Germoe, 24 to 26, 35.

Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard, 24.

Celtic Method of Consecrating Churches, 23, 26.

Charles II. at Breage, 70, 71, 106, 109.

Chammonds, Family of, 115.

Christianity in Ireland at the End of the 5th Century, 19, 20.

Church Ales, 77.

Church Registers, 92 to 99.

Churchwardens, 98, 99.

Churches, Built on Sites of Heathen Temples, 25.

Churston, Lord, 128.

Chynoweth, 23.

Clarendon, Earl of, 107.

Clergy, The Chief Sufferers from Plague, 48.

Clyes, Rawe, Blacksmith and Physician, 75.

Cole, John, 105.

Collegiate System in Saxon Times, 33.

Coliberts, 33.

Collins, Revd. E., Vicar of Breage, 82, 92.

Colonies of the Saints, 26.

Commissioners of Edward VI., Their Report on the Churches of Breage
and Germoe, 61, 62.

Communion Plate, Breage and Germoe, 92.

Conan, The Castle of, 18.

Coode, Dorcas, of Methleigh, 69.

Coode, Family of, 69.

Coode, John, of Methleigh, 70.

Cornish Bishops, 26.

Cornish Language, 10.

Cotton, William, Vicar of Breage, 66, 68, 69.

Council of Arles, 17.

Council of Nicæa, 17.

Crettier, Henry, Vicar of Breage, 57.

Crowan, 19.

Cury, 33, 38.

Dawe, Sir Alexander, Vicar of Breage, 63, 64.

Dean, Matthew, of Buryan, 44.

Dellaregetto, Wm., 96.

Diodorus, Siculus, 14.

Domesday Book, 28, 31.

Durrow, Book of, 21.

Earldom of Cornwall, 35.

Earls of Cornwall, 34.

Edmund, Earl of Cornwall, 42.

Egbert, Saxon King, 27.

Eglos Penbroe (Breage), 24.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 65, 106.

Epsley, Thomas, "The Inventor of Shooting the Rocks," 97.

Erasmus, Edmundus, 95, 96, 105.

Essex, Earl of, 106.

Eusticke, William, Vicar of Breage, 82 to 84.

Fairies, 13, 152 to 154.

Fight Between Wreckers from Breage and Wendron, 80.

Flint Implements, 9.

Fraddam, Witch of, 120 to 122.

Frederick II. "Stupor Mundi," 48.

Frescos in Breage Church, 50 to 52, 89.

Frescos in Pengersick Castle, 127.

Germoe Church, 26, 50, 53, 54.

Germoe, People of, 79.

Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, 41.

Gildas, 18.

Giraldus, 35.

Glanville, John, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, 105.

Glasney, Collegiate Church of, 45.

Glass, Mediæval in Breage Church, 52, 89.

Gode, Sir John, Vicar of Breage, 58, 101, 103.

Goidels, The, 10, 18.

Godolphin, Dame Alice, 105.

Godolphin, Dame Blanche, 104.

Godolphin, Catherine, 112.

Godolphin, Dame Dorothy, 107.

Godolphin, Elinora, 101.

Godolphin, Sir Francis I., 67, 73, 95, 104 to 106.

Godolphin, Sir Francis II., 106, 107, 108.

Godolphin, Francis, Second Earl of, 113.

Godolphin, Dr. Henry, Dean of St. Paul's, 93, 107.

Godolphin, Sir John, 58, 101, 103.

Godolphin, John, 78.

Godolphin, Margaret, 110, 111.

Godolphin, Sidney, First Earl of, 86, 109 to 112.

Godolphin, Sidney, Cavalier, 107, 108.

Godolphin, Penelope, 108.

Godolphin, Sir William I., 103, 104, 126.

Godolphin, Sir William II., 65, 69, 70, 78, 79, 95, 106.

Godolphin, Sir William III., 106.

Godolphin, Sir William IV., 107, 108.

Godolphin, Sir William of Treveneag, 113.

Godolphin, Master Thomas, 58.

Graeme, Hugh, 94, 95.

Grandisson, Bishop, 46.

Great Work Mine, 73.

Greeks, The Ancient, 14.

Gregory, the Great, 30.

Gregory IX., Pope, 41.

Grenfell, Lydia, 85, 86.

Grotto, Ferrata, 42.

Guary, Plays, 77.

Gunwalloe, 33, 38.

Gwydian, Celtic God of Vegetation, 11.

Hals, County Historian, 37, 101, 125.

Harvest Customs, 11.

Harvey, Francis, Vicar of Breage, 65, 66, 68, 82.

Hayles Abbey, 38, 41, 42, 43, 47, 59, 63.

Hayle River, 19.

Helmets in Breage Church, 102.

Helston, 74.

Helston Flora, 11.

Helston Old Church, Commissioner Body Murdered in, 60.

Hingston Down, 27, 39.

Hobbs, The Philosopher, 107, 108.

Horses, Cornish, in 17th Century, 74.

Human Remains: A Forgotten Tragedy, 53, 89, 90.

Hurling, Game of, 75.

Huthnance, Henry, Vicar of Breage, 82.

Ictis, Island of, 14.

Innes, James, Intruding Puritan Minister at Breage, 72, 82.

Interdict, The, 40.

Ireton, General, 107.

Irish Saints, The, 17, 19, 22.

Isabella de Clare, 41.

Ivernians, The, 9, 17.

Jago, Robert, Vicar of Wendron, 151.

Jago, Family of, 117.

Jakes, Master John, Vicar of Breage, 59.

Jews in Cornwall, 42.

Jew's Lane, Haunting of, 151.

John de Beaupré, 44.

John, Earl of Oxford, 56.

Jordan, William, 77.

Kells, Book of, 21.

Killigrews of Arwennick, 78.

Killigrew, John, 105.

Killigrew, Dame Margaret, 105.

Kiltor of St. Keverne, 60.

Landerdale, Earl of, 72.

Leland, The Antiquary, 18, 22, 23, 37, 73.

Leeds, Dukes of, 88.

Lemon, William, 140 to 142.

Leofric, Bishop, 28, 34.

Lewes, Battle of, 42.

Llwarch-Hen, 18.

Lyspein, David de, Vicar of Breage, 45, 46, 57.

MacDonald, Angus, 96.

Marshall, Revd. Edward, Vicar of Breage, 91, 92.

Martin, Tobias, 143 to 146.

Martyn, Henry, 85, 86.

Martyr's Close, 149, 150.

Mat Making in Cornwall, 17th Century, 75.

Methleigh, Manor of, 28, 34, 114, 117.

Midsummer Eve Customs, 12.

Militon, Job, 125, 126.

Militon, John, 78.

Militon, William, 128.

Miners, Cornish, Condition of, 17th Century, 72.

Miracle Plays, Cornish, 76, 77.

Nansladons, Family of, 115.

Nicknames, 75.

Nicol, Henry, Minister of Germoe, 61.

Norman Churches at Breage and Germoe, 36, 37.

Norman Fonts at Breage and Germoe, 36.

Oratories at Rinsey and Godolphin, 50.

Orchard, William, Vicar of Breage, 69 to 72, 82.

Ordinalia, The, 77.

Origen, 17.

Palm Sunday Rites in Mediæval Church, 56.

Pascasius, Vicar of Breage, 43, 44, 45.

Patronage of Breage and Germoe, 37.

Pelagius, 17.

Pellour, Sir William, 49, 57.

Pencair, Hill of, 18, 23.

Pengersick Castle, 50.

Pengersick, Henry de, 46.

Pengersick, John, 50.

Penwith Peninsula, 15.

Pembro Farm, 24.

Pers, Sir William, Vicar of Breage, 45 to 57.

Phial Reputed to Contain Blood of Christ, at Hayles Abbey, 42.

Phœnicians, 14.

Pilgrims to St. Michael's Mount, 56.

Population of Breage and Germoe in Saxon Times, 32.

Porthleven, Shipwreck at, 47.

Poseidonius, 14.

Prior and Canons of Plympton, 35.

Reformation, Effects of, 73, 76.

Religion of Celts, 10, 14.

Restoration of Breage and Germoe Churches in 1891, 88.

Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of the Romans, 40, 41, 42, 88.

Rinsey, John, 50, 101.

Rinsey, Manor of, 28, 29.

Roads, Cornish, in 17th Century, 74.

Robert de Belesme, 37.

Robert de la More, Vicar of Breage, 43.

Robert, Earl of Cornwall, 34, 37.

Romans in Cornwall, 16.

Rood Stairway in Breage Church, 52.

St. Aubyn, Thomas, 78, 126.

St. Aubyn, John, 79.

St. Bridget, 23.

St. Breaca, 16, 19, 22, 24.

St. Breoke, 38.

St. Christopher, 52.

St. Cruenna, 19, 22.

St. Chrysostom, 17.

St. Germoe, 17, 19, 22, 23, 46.

St. Germoe's Chair, 54 to 56, 125.

St. Germoe's Well, 54.

St. Gwithian, 22.

St. Hilary Church, 16.

St. Ia, 22.

St. Just, 21.

St. Levan, 22.

St. Michael's Mount, 14, 15, 37.

St. Moran, 22.

St. Ninian, 19.

St. Patrick, 19.

St. Wendron, 22.

Sanctuary Fields, 148.

Saxons, 17.

Saxon Churches at Breage and Germoe, 35.

Saxon Land Tenure, 29, 30, 31.

Saxon Manor Courts, 33.

Scilly Islands, 106.

Screen in Breage Church, 89.

Sheep, Cornish, in 17th Century, 74.

Sheep, Phantom, 151.

Skerrit, Alice, 105.

Skerrit, John, 105.

Sidney, Thomas, 106.

Simon de Apulia, Bishop of Exeter, 39.

Smith, Robert, Curate of Germoe, 71.

Smith, Right Honourable W. H., 88.

Smuggling Ways, 139, 140.

Snow storms, Great, 97.

Spanish Armada, 10.

Sparnon, Family of, 69, 128.

Stafford, Bishop of Exeter, 50.

Stannary Courts, 39.

Stone Circles, 11.

Surnames, Local, 93, 94.

Taliesin, 18.

Thanes, Saxon, 20.

Tenure of the Manor of Godolphin, 100, 101.

Tertullian, 17.

Teudor, Cornish Chief, 19, 23.

Thirteenth Century, Spirit of, 49.

Tillage in Cornwall in 17th Century, 74.

Tin Mines, 14, 42, 73.

Tinners, Their Love of Fighting, 81.

Tithes of Breage, 71, 150.

Tolmena, 23.

Totemism, 13, 14.

Tonsure, Irish, 20.

Tower of Breage Church, 25.

Tregew, Manor of, 28.

Tregoning Hill, 18, 23, 24, 86.

Tremearne Farm, Ancient Chapel at, 116.

Trescowe, Manor of, 28, 29.

Trewarvas Head, 12, 73.

Trewinnard, James, the elder, Vicar of Breage, 82.

Trewinnard, James, the younger, Vicar of Breage, 82.

Treworlas, Manor of, 115 to 117.

Vane, Sir Harry, 107.

"Venton Ghost" Field, 149.

Villeins, 29.

Waller, Cavalier Poet, 107.

Walter de Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, 44.

Welsh at Reformation devoted to the Church, 62.

Welsh Bards, 18.

Wesley, John, 63, 72, 83 to 85.

Western Cornwall, Once Thickly Wooded, 74.

Wheal Vor Mine, 16, 73.

William de Mortain, Earl of Cornwall, 37.

William Fitz Robert, Earl of Cornwall, 37.

William, Earl of Gloucester, 38.

William, Son of Humphrey, Parson of Breage, 40, 43.

William, Son of Richard, Parson of Breage, 40, 43.

William the Conqueror, 28.

Wilmet, John, 152.

Wilmington, Hundred of, 33.

Wizard's Plot, 149.

Wrecking and Wreckers, 47, 48, 78 to 80, 87, 88, 118.

Wrestling, 75.

Yealmpton, 46.

Yorke, Mary, 65.

Yurl, Sir John, Vicar of Breage, 57.

[Illustration]

Transcriber's notes:

The following is a list of changes made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.

human victims were sometimes sacraficed in honour of the sun.
human victims were sometimes sacrificed in honour of the sun.

and that they came to regard them with something of superstitous
and that they came to regard them with something of superstitious

Wheal Vor itself means in the Celtic tongue "great work,'
Wheal Vor itself means in the Celtic tongue "great work,"

τόπου, ταῖς ἁμάξαις εἰς ταυτὴν κομίζουσι τὸν κασσίτερον δαψιλῆ.
τόπου, ταῖς ἁμάξαις εἰς ταύτην κομίζουσι τὸν κασσίτερον δαψιλῆ.

ecclesiam de Eglosccraven et capellam Sancti Germot"
ecclesiam de Egloscraven et capellam Sancti Germot"

through it may seem in the present age, satisfied the deep
though it may seem in the present age, satisfied the deep

thee art'nt ded, I'll make thee," and smote him upon the
thee artn't ded, I'll make thee," and smote him upon the

improvement and progess. If out of this dark and barbarous
improvement and progress. If out of this dark and barbarous

the name. The great humanist namesake of Edmundus.
the name. The great humanist namesake of Edmundus,

resulted in the route of the French opposed to them and the
resulted in the rout of the French opposed to them and the

fragment from Evelyne's memoir of her: "She died in the
fragment from Evelyn's memoir of her: "She died in the

no degree but had some obligation to her memorei. She
no degree but had some obligation to her memorie. She

was at Yewton, in Devonshire, where they had been settled
was at Yewton, in Devonshire, where they had been settled since

_John Carter, "King of Prussia"_; "_Smuggling_
_John Carter, "King of Prussia"_; _Smuggling_

collecting money for the 'company." Indeed, things
collecting money for the 'company.'" Indeed, things

upholder of the law, The smuggler without trepidation proceeded
upholder of the law. The smuggler without trepidation proceeded

summon the troubled spirit and banish it from the neigbourhood
summon the troubled spirit and banish it from the neighbourhood

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Story of an Ancient Parish - Breage with Germoe" ***

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