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.

[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

BY
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.]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.]

[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.

t 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 rites, 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.

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.

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 μεταξὺτόπου, ταῖς ἁμάξαις εἰς ταυτὴν 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 7¹⁄₂ 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.

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.

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.

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 5¹⁄₂ cwt., and has engraved upon it "Prosperity to this parish." The treble bell, weighing 4¹⁄₂ 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.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[44] See Bouse's "Collectanea."