Full text of "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"

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3lj

THE

Story of an Ancient Parish

BREAGE WITH GERMOE, ;•;•,:;%;

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

H. R. COULTHARD, M.A.

1913.

The CAMBORNE Printing and Stationery Company, Limited.
Camborne, Cornwall.

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

13/^ (£.90

/ dedicate this small volume to the friends
and neigldjou7's who in tJie first place suggested
the writing of it to me hy telling me stories of tlie
days of their fathers.

CONTENTS

CHAPTEli p^(,j,

I. THE CELTIC PERIOD 9

II. THE SAXONS 9^

III. PROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE

REFORMATION. 35

IV. THE REFORMATION TO THE END OF THE

COMMONWEALTH 59

V. RECENT TIMES .... S2

VL THE GODOLPHINS 100

VIL THE ARUNDELLS, DE PENGERSICKS, MILTONS AN
SPARNONS 115

VIII. WORTHIES AND UNWORTHIES 129

IX. PLACE NAMES AND SUPERSTITIONS 148

784240

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE,

Breage Church, Frontispiece

Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard

Frescos in Breage Church

St. Germoe's Chair

Godolphin House

100

A Godolphin Helmet iii Breage Church

103

Pengersick Castle

119

PREFACE.

npHE 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 anti-
quarian 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 i)arts 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.

Breaye,

All Saints' Day, 19 W.

Date of
Insti-

LIST OF THE VICARS OF BREAGE.

lution.

WTTJIAM, SON OF RICHARD ...

Died or resigned during the Interdict

1219

WILLIAM, Son of HUMPHREY ...

1264

MASTER ROBERT DE LA MORE ...

Resigned to become Canon of Ghisney,
ultimately parson of Yeovil.

1264

Master STEPHENUS de ARBOR

—

Sir PASCASlus

No date of Institution. Old, blind
and infirm in 1310.

1-^18

Sir DAVID de LYSPEIN

SIR JOHN YURL DE TREGESOU

No date of Institution.

1862

HENRY CRETTIER

—

Sir WILLIAM PELLOUR

No date of Institution.

1398

SIR JOHN GODE

Died at Breage.

1403

MASTER WILLIAM PENSANS ...

Died at Breage.

1489

SIR JOHN PATRY

Died at Breage.

1444

SIR JOHN PEYTO

Died at Breage.

1445

SIR WILLIAM LEHE ...

Died at Breage.

1466

SIR WILLIAM PERS ...

Resigned to become Canon of Glasney

1505

MASTER THOMAS GODOLPHIN ...

Resigned.

1510

MASTER JOHN JAKES,

Bachelor in Decrees

Died at Breage.

1536

JOHN BERY, M.A.

Died at Breage.

1558

Sir ALEXANDER DAWE

Died at Breage.

1595

FRANCIS HARVEY, M.A.

Vicar also of St. Erth, buried in
Breage Churchyard,

1607

WILLIAM COTTON, M.A.

Son of the Bishop of Exeter, resigned,
holder of many other benefices in
Devon and Cornwall.

1008

WILLIAM ORCHARD,

" Preacher of the Word of God."

Resigned.

JAMES INNES (ejected 1661)

Intruding Puritan Divine.

1661

JAMES TREWINNARD, M.A.

Resigned on becoming Vicar of Maw-
gan, at which place he lies Ixiried

1696

HENRY BUTHNANCE ...

Died at Breage. lies buried beyond
the East wall of the chancel.

1720

JAMES TREWINNARD, M.A.

Died at Breage, also Vicar of Mawgan.

1722

EDWARD COLLINS,

Died at Breage, also Vicar of St. Erth,

Bachelor of Laws

where he lies buried.

1755

HENRY USTICKE, B.A. ...

Died at Breage, lies buried beyond
the East wall of the chancel.

1769

EDWARD MARSHALL, M.A.

Died at Breage.

1803

RICHARD GERVEYS GRYLLS, M.A.

Resigned.

1809

RICHARD GERVEYS GRYLLS,

Died at Luxulian, which parish he

M.A., the younger

held in conjunction with Breage.

1853

EDWARD MORRIS PRIDMORE.

M.A.

Died at Breage.

1889

JOCELYN BARNES, M.A.

Died at Breage.

1904

HARRY JOHN VKl'i'Y ...

Resigned.

1907

HUGH ROBERT COULTHARD.

M.A.

THE CELTIC PERIOD.

CHAPTER I.

71 T the dawn of history, Cornwall, as in fact England
f@\ 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 sur-
vives in our midst.

The Ivernians must have been widely spread over Corn-
wall, 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
gmwth of grain was profitable, these flint chippings can still
be gathered in many places in the parish, especially on the
b:ire patches of land where the gorse has been burnt, before
the grass begins to spring. In the earlier stages of their his-
tory 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 w^ere much inferior in culture to the
Brythons ; they were the iirst 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 re-
morseless, 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 profess-
ing 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 cele-
brated the coming to life again of the God of vegetation,
whose name amongst the Celts was Gwydian.* 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 resur-
rection of the God of vegetation, so in autumn they mourned
over his death. f 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 liave'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. J 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

'See Professor Rhys "'Origin and growth of Celtic Religion" pp. 225, 236, 245.
tSee Frazer's " Attis, Adonis and Osiris.'
JSee Frazers " Attis, Adonis and Osiris."

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 over-
looking the sea the Druid Priests would have a splendid view
of the far horizon. We can picture them making their obser-
vations 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 sacraficed 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
centurj^ in a way which clearly points to human sacrifice as
the great central act of the rite.* 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

•'Account by Eevd. Alexander Hislop, Minister of Arbroath in "The Two Baby Ions."

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 sum-
mer 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 con-
genial climate, they may have encountered in the recesses of
primeval forests or in lonely fastnesses of the mountains rem-
nants of the slowly vanishing pigmy race of neo-lithic cave men,
and that they came to regard them with something of super-
stitousawe, and thatthe memory of these "little people" became
a race memory, in the course of generations becoming ethe-
realised 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 abounding-
ness 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, Ave have
a vestige of still more ancient rights, which carry us back to
the very dawn of human culture. We have Wendron goats,
MuUion gulls, Madron bulls, St. Agnes cuckoos, Mawgan

owls, St. Keverne buccasf and many others. The following
old rhyme perpetuates the fading memory of the custom,
" Cambourne men are bull dogs,
Breage men are bi-ags,
Germoe men can scat 'un all to rags."

An analogous custom to this Cornish system of nick-
names prevails amongst primitive people all the world over. J
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 Phoenicians from the earliest times.
Diodorus *Siculus gives a fragment from the writings of the
Greek traveller Poseidon ius 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 tlie
main land became dry land by the ebbing of the tide."

It has been suggested that Ictis was St. Michael's Mount

tBucca connected with Scottish "Bogle;" Bogle always in Scotland means a disem-
bodied 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.
JSee Andrew Lang " Secret of the Totem." Also W. Gregory "The Dead Heart of
Australia" pp. 188 to 195.

* " airOTv-n-ovVTei; S' tls aaTpaydKiov pvOfi-oii? KO^i^ovaiv ets vrja-ov TrpoKeiftei/rjV TVJS
BperraviKTjs, buofia^Ofievriv 6e "Iktiv. Kara yap afji.iru)TeL<; ava^rjpaivofxevov tgv ixsra^V
TOTTOU, rats a/uafais ets ravrrju KOfi-i^ovai, toi^ Kaaa-Crepov 5ai//iA.ipC"

Diodorus Si cuius.

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 main-
land, 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 tran-
shipped 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 ex-
cellent 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 Christi-
anity 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

IC)

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 neighbomiiood 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 lang-
uage 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 occupa-
tion 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 scatter-
ed 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 founda-
tions of St. Hilary Church, at the restoration, and now pre-
served 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, Ro-
man coins and Roman pottery have been from time to time
found all over the County. In L779 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 re-
mote 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,
TertuUian and Origen, si)eak 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 Aries and Rimini in the fourth century,
and were invited to the (Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, 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 manj other facts make it quite clear that
Christianity must have been received by the Celts of Corn-
wall long before the coming of the so-called Irish Mission-
aries 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, patting 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 admix-
ture 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 Corn-
wall were fully Christian, whilst the rest of Britain became
practically Pagan. The Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon
historiar monk of Jarrow, goes so far as to blame the Celts
of Cornwall and Wales for altogether neglecting the conver-
sions 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* and
the Welsh Bards, Taliesin, Anenrin and Llwarch-Hen. The
memorials of these writers date from the sixth century and
depict incidentally Christianity in a highly organised condi-
tion among the Celts of the West.

Leland the antiquarian, who visited Cornwall and con-
sequently 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 tvvo 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 forti-
fication 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 Tre-
goning are well chosen near an excellent water supply and
on the side of the hill sheltered from the blustering gales

*See Haddon and Stubbs.

coming np 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 undergrow^th.

The first definite tradition bearing upon the history of
the Parish is the arrival of St. Breaca with St. Germoe, some-
w^here 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 Cor-
nish. 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 pur-
pose of building a church upon it. It seems very much as
if these Irish men and women, with the true inipulsiveness,
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 Christi-
anity 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 con-
clusion 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"^ Priests. It was not till the year
804 that Monks and Clergy in Ireland were exempt
from bearing arms,* that is three hundred years after the
coming of these Saints to Cornwall. Women* 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 81G four hundred Monks
and Nuns"^' were slain in a pitched battle between two rival
Monasteries. In 700 the Irish Clergy" 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

*See Stokes' "Celtic Church' and Baring' Gould's "Lives of tlie Saints,"

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 : "
wonderful deed ! 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 L-ish 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 Bi'ittany
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
righting with Teudor or Theodore ; Cruennn, killed at Crowan ;
Wendron, who made his settlement at Wendron ; Moran, who
settled at ^ladron ; la, 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
Heni-y YIII, 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 Cum-
berland, 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."*

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

*See Borlase's "Age of the Saints."

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 some-
what vague and difficult.* He goes on to tell us that after
the straggle 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 ;t
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 overlook-
ing 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

*Lelan(l says "Campus Breacac in Hibernia in quo Brigida oratorium construxit et
posfea Monaster, in quo fuit et S. Breaca." It will be noticed tbat this statement
does not support the view of the Eevd. 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 i)Ossibly be a form of Bridget." In support of this
view he quotes Prof. Loth in LaRevue Celtique vol. 29, p. 237 on St. Briac "Ce Saint
est donn6 comme irlandaise ce que semblerait conflrmer la terminaison. U faut
supposer ime forme irlandaise 'Briacc.'"

tLeland : " Breaca aediflcavit ecclesiam in Trenewith et Talmeneth ut legitur in
vita St. Elwini."

24:

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 dnt}^ 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 ami-
cable relationships had been established with those dwell-
ing around, the first thing the Saint would attempt would be
the erection of a small Church, built of wattle work, mud
and stone. Tlie only relic of that ancient period that still
remains is the red sand stone Celtic Cross by the Church

The Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard.

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 cus-
tom, wherever possible, for the early founders of Christian
Churches to select ancient heathen sites.* 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 conse-
cration. t

*See "Byeways of British Archaeology" by W. Johnson.—Cambridge University Press.

t See Bade.

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 ke}>t 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 lona. Our conception
of a diocese was altogether foreign to the Celtic mind.*
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 gar-
ment of lighter texture ; on their feet they wore sandals,
they slept on hides with a pillow of straw.f

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 com-
munities 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 Canter-
bury 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

- stokes' "Celtic Church."
t Constitutions of Cojumba,

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.

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 Con-
queror'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 con-
cerning them. " The Bishop has one manor which is called
Metela* (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

*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.

of Reiitis 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 iV of ^ hide. Three teams can plough this. Thereof
Alnod has /g 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 ^V <^f ^
hide. Three teams can plough this. Heldric holds this of
the Earl, and has in demesne ^V 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 culti-
vated 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 culti-
vated 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 num-
ber 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 primi-
tive 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 loTed 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 BaccLuis, 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.*

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 ;t
a virgate was the term used for a quarter of a hide or thirty
acres. The virgate was again divided into quarters, called
ferlings, of 7^ 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

*For the conditions of life on Anglo-Saxon Manor see Seebohm's "Village

Communities."

tThe exact size of the ancient Cornish acre is unknown.

times. There can be no doubt that mining of an elemen-
tary 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 respec-
tive 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 com-
posed 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 w^ere 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.*

From the legal view of things we naturally pass to mat-
ters 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 Winnington, 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 Hun-
dred 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 f^ecclesia," Cury and
Gunwalloe were " Capellae " in the Inquisitio Nonariim 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

"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 wliere there were tew 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."

tin the Inquisitio Nonarum of 1346 the phrase "ecclesia Sanctae Bryacae cum capellis
Sanctorum Correnti Wynyantoni et Gyrmough " occurs.

Breage may have performed for the western half of the
Menea^e 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 settle-
ment 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 Coi-nish
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 Domes-
day 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, especi-
ally of an ecclesiastical nature, became more frequent, and
the main outline of its story becomes much clearer.

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 Nor-
mans 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 u\) 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 chai-ge 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 sur-
vives. 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. Dm-ing the restoration of 1891 the
head of a Norman window v,^as 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 founda-
tions of the Church was also discovered the bowl of a muti-
lated 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, tlie churches were built by
William Fitz Robert or William de Mortain, Earl of Cornwall,
son of Earl Robert de Mortain of Domesday Book. This un-
fortunate 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 patronagt^ 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. Domesdaj^ 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 «tyled " 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 Cary, 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* in North
Cornwall with St. Breage and a Church of Germot, possibly
on the Norman lands of the Ear! 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
Nonarii7n 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

* ''Carta W. Com. Glouc testiflcante 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, eeelesiam
de Eglosvant, ecclesiam de Eglosocraven et capellam Sancti Germot " etc., etc. See
Pugdale's Monasticou. t

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 verj" 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 Kingston 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 English-
men but as Miners, Their Parliament was the mine Parlia-
ment, their Courts were the mine Courts. The influence of
this stiite 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 dis-
tricts 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, refer-

ring 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 him-
self 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 tlie
wealth of the nation. "England has become a vineyard with-
out 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 ^^ere 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 Cliapelries. 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 attain-
ment 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 com-
manded 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 1257, ami
on his death in 1265 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.*

*See Gasquet's " Henry VIII. and the Monasteries,"

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, /f«?-e devoluto ; the Abbot of Hayles finding it diffi-
cult no doubt to fill up such a distant and remote appoint-
ment. Robert de la More seems to have been a person of
note in his day.* 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 Cam-
bridge. '' 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

*See Mr. Thurstan Peter's '• Collegiate Church of Glasney."

degree in those days entailed a longer period of residence at
the Universities than now. We may conclude that Sir Pas-
casius 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 out-
side 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 appoint-
ment of one John de Beaupre 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 commis-
sion to certain clergy, possibly for the purpose of instituting
John de Beaupre 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 liandewednack.
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 unmerci-
fully 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 exer-
cise jurisdiction* in the Chapel. For this wild assertion, pre-
sumably 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

*See Prebendary Hingeston-Randolph's Registers of Bishop Stapleton. "'Et in ea
jurisdiccionem ordinariam e^ercere et alia diyersa in hac parte attemptare pre-
«Vinipserurit."

Benedict de Ariindelle, Professor of Canon Law, his coadju-
tor. This coadjutor was a scion of the ancitjnt family of
Arundell of Lanherne ; he afterwards became Provost of
Glasney, which office he ultimately resigned whilst still re-
maining 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, 1 466 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 prac-
tically 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 betwean
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 Pe7'sona 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 Gran-
disson 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,amanof 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 law-
lessness 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 foot-

steps of those who had gone before. The greater excommunica-
tion 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* grant-
ing 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 wei'e 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 tlie 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 Provengal 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 tradi-
tion 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 bear-
ing 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 Porth-

*Patent Rolls.

leven, 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.*

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 mediaeval 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 Gran-

*State Papers, 14 Edward HI.

disson ; 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 toucli with the life of the people.

Slowly but gradually the black shadow moved west-
wards 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 VM)2. It seems more than prob-
able 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 dissatis-
faction. 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 stipula-
tion 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 Gth 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 Reforma-
tion.

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 un-
worthy, and the present cruciform Church, with its tower sixty-
six feet in height, of beautiful workmanship and restful pro-
portions, 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 begin-
nings reaching back to the days when palaeolithic 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 be-
came ill 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

Frescos of St. Christopher and Our Lord in Breage Church.

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 medi-
aeval 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 van-
dalism 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 Commis-
sioners, who visited Breage 22nd April, 1549, to ascertain
that the injunctions of Edward VI. were dul}^ 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.*

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 vvere 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 restora-
tion, 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 be-
longed to victims of some fierce act of military discipline or
retaliation in the Parliamentary Wars.

The restoration of Germoe Church was taken in liand a
century earlier than that of Breage, for what reason it is
impossil)le to say. At this period the mining operations of
the Parish were mainly centred round Germoe, from Trewar-
vas 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

*It is possible that thiH vandalism may have been committed during the time of
Independent ascendancy.

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,* 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 anti-
quarian 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

*See Sedding's "Norman Architecture in Cornwall."

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 mediaeval 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 Clmrchyard ; sometimes this was of stone and of a per-
manent chaiacter like Germoe's Chair. Arrived at this erec-

St. Germoe's Chair.

tion 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.'"

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 tliemselves 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 i)ulses 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 l^attles and rebellions and
judicial murders that made up the history of England during
the times in which they lived. Rumours of these terrible
stirrings w^ould 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. Doubt-
less many of the Pilgrims would make Breage the last halting
place for the night, and move (m 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 media-
tion 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 shiines 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

*See Walcott's "Sacred Archaeology" pp. 421, 42B. Also Dr. Roch's "Church of our

Fathers." etc.

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 practi-
cally 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 Cornish men : Sir John Yuri bears
a name common enough amongst the Cornish Clergy at this
time. Sir William Pelloiir of course was one of the numerous
Cornish familj> 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 Lebe (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, un-
doubtedly 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 famil}-. 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.

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 dis-
missed the uncomfortable thought with the sixteenth century
equivalent of ^^ apres moi le deluged 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 man-
sions, and its Brethren scattered, never to be re-uiiited.

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 preach-
ing 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 examina-
tion 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 thou-
sand 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 hel<i 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.*

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 sti-eamer
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
through it may seem in the present age, satisfied the deep
emotional cravings of the Cornish character, whilst its teach-
ing was in unison with the needs of their hearts. As an
instance of the deep hold of the Church upon the pre-Refor-
mation life of the people, we have in Breage the curious
anomaly that the chief fete day of our Nonconformists is
St. Stephen's Day, which is the Feast of the Dedication of the

*Kalendar of State Papers. Domestic Series.

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 Refor-
mation 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 satis-
fied 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 Da we, 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 catas-

trophe 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 suffer-
ings. 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 thex-e 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, pesti-
lence 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
mLOre 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 nomin.alIy 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.* 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 Godol-
phin, 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,

MS. in the possession oi" Fleet-Surgeon Harvey.

to tlie exclusion of their own kith and kin. This evil system
had begun with the Conquest and had continued rigiit down
to the Reformation, accentuated and intensified ))y the fact
that a single person was capable of holding numerous bene-
fices, which in many cases he had never seen, to the exclusion
of others worthier and holier than himself. It was this con-
dition 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 incum-
bency 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 Mouse-
hole. 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.*

The Spanish force streamed up the hillf 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 Mouse-
hole fled in a terrified mob towards Penzance, the roar of

*Paul Church Burial Registers.
tCarew's Survey of Cornwall.

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 Tregon-
ing Hill the dense clouds of smoke hanging over Mousehole
and Paul, whilst the booming of the guns of the four war-
ships 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 com-
pany 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 Jiujusque parocMce Vicariiis cum jam quadrag em-
mum quartum annum cetatis vix attigesset. Secundo die
Marcii extremum diem clausit, et ut per totum temporis cur-
riculum transegit vitam minime non inhonestam sic obiit,
mortem non minus plane piam. Sepultusque fait 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. How-
ever 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 1G49 or
1650. Walker informs us that in his veins " flowed the blood
of crowned heads of England, Ssotland 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 Registei-s about the time of his in-
cumbency, 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, Vica^Hi
hijjus j)arochioe^ 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 ot" 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 enmii written upon it, looking wearily from the Godol-
phin aisle upon William Orchard, as band upon hour-glass be
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, tbe
tithes of Breage were sequestrated or confiscated by the
Government ; '^William Orchard with Antony Randall, curate
of Germoe, and Robert Smith, curate of Cury, were thus re-
duced 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 confis-
cated tithes of St. Keverne. Their prayer was answered, but
••iftei- four years of weary waiting, the tried clei-ics 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 i)rovoke8 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

'Reports of the Committee of Compoimding.

William Orchard at Breage was one James Innes. Doubtless
he was a man of extreme opinions both in politics aud religion,
but like William Orchard in the hour of darkness he was able
to play the true man, and rather than conform at the Res-
toration to tenets in which he did not believe, he vacated
his office even before Black Bartholomew's Day, 24th August,
16G2. 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 popula-
tion.* 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 in-
formed, were utterly corrupt and saturated with the spirit of
perjury and injustice.* 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* ; 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.

*Carew's Survey of Cornwall pp. 49, 59, 183, etc.

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 Yor 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 pro-
tector in the Church. With all her faults — and they were
many- until the Reformation the Church had been con-
sistently 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 Chui-ch 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 thenaaterial 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 w^as 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* 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 isola-
tion of the country for some measure of friendly and agree-
able 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.

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

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, bat that they made up for it by a plentiful indulgence
in curses, maledictions and the giving of spiteful nicknames.

The two chief practising physicians* 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 won-
derful 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 rougli 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

*Carew p. 172.

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 oppo-
nents 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 theii- 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. f The
Reformation endeavoured to draw an unreal line of demarca-
tion 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

tSee the Article "Drama" in '" Encylopaedia Britannica" by Mr. A.W. Ward.

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* are first the Ordinalia : this is a trilogy
consisting of the Plaj^s 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 centuryf ; 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 enter-
tained 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

*See the Article in " P^ncyclopsedia Britaiinica " by Mr. W. K.Sullivan.

tDr, Edward Lhuyd, "Arcliseologia Britannica" 1707, quoted by Mr. Jenner in his

"Handbook of the Cornish Language."

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 152G 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."*

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, ai-e 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,

* From the Gwavas MS. in the BritiBh 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.

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, w^ho 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 art'nt 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 logo
untouched, because fights at this period between parishes
were inatters 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 night-
fall 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 progess. 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.

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 Ti-ewinnard, 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 connec-
tion 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.* He
also published after the custom of the timesf 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 fei-ment 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 read-
ing 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

* See Tenner's " Handbook of the Cornish Language."
t See House's " Collectanea."

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 w^as 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 disposi-
tion ; 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 patheti-
cally tells us how he proposed spending the last Sundaj^ 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 imme-
diately 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
Churjh, visible on cleir days far out to sea — but, alas ! as the
ship rounded the Lizard the whole coast lay embedded in
thick banks of cloud, and ;is 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 rendez-
vous 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 ordinarj^ 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 inhabi-
tants 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 w?s the custom to l)ury
drowned sailors in trenches ahmg the shore ; the |)lace 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 Riusey 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 niehe,
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,
" IJji Dieti 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 cf the Church
were discovered, hidden beneath successive layers of white-
wash that had accumulated upon them daring 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 preser-
vation, 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 neces-
sary 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 a])out 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 beneatli 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, tlieir 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 lai-gest 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 I "
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 belfiy floor on to
the flags at the base of the tower, nearly annihilating in the
l)rocess 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 mid-
night. 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 mediaeval 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 belfr3% 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, weigh-
ing 7 cwt., merely records the names of Edward Collins,
vicar, and Samuel Lemon and Simon Harry, Churchwardens ;
the second bell weighs 5 J cwt., and has engraved upon it
"Prosperity to this parish." The treble bell, weighing 4J
cwt., records the fact that "' Abraham Rudhall caste us all."
The Communion plate both at Breage and Germoe was the
gift of Dr. Godolj^hin, 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 11. 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 Polkj^nhorne," "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 1G96 ; 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 siiriianies. In
1713 we have the entry "Nicholas Coi'nisb, alias Cold Pye,"
in the following year he is mentioned as Nicholas Cornish

Coklpy, 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 forma-
tion 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 IGOO the marriage of Edmundus
Erasmus, and a little later on one William Delaregetto 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 Sol way 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 — w^ere 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 1531), 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 168G 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
higli 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 import-

ance, who had been out in the Forty Five, — possibly some
minoi' chief of the chin Macdonahl. 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 descen-
dants are still living in the parish.

Perhaps tlie 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, 1089, and he
died at the Bal and A\as buried at Breag, tlje KUh day of
December, in the yeare of Our Lord Christ, 1()89." Subse-
quent 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 applj^
it to the rocks.

I find in the registers the record of a great snowstorm
in December, 1G3(), 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 Rogei's, of Cniva, being ex-
communicate, 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
CuUompton 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 expeiience. 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, w^hen 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 import-
ance, 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 Os. Gd.

1772 — For the charge of prosecuting against the Kitows
for the murder of Henry Thomas, junior, as per bill of par-
ticulars, £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.

THE GODOLPHINS.

CHAPTER VI.

The family of Godolphin is by far the greatest and most
important that has issued from our parish. Their original
abode, according to the statement of Leland, was a fortified
stronghold or tower on Godolphin Hill, the remains of which
were in existence in his time. The origin of the family is
lost in obscurity, but the curious tenure under which the
Manor of Godolphin is still held from the owner of the
Manor of Lambourne makes it clear that they were not
tenants-in-chief from the Earls of Cornwall. A passing
allusion to the curious nature of this tenure may be pardoned.
Each Candlemas morning at six o'clock, beneath the twinkling
stars, or more probably in the black darkness of rain and
tempest, the Reeve of Lambourne still pays his yearly visit
to Godolphin House. Beating on the outer oaken doors of

Godolphin House-

101

the ancient mansion, he peremptorily demands admission. On
the doors being opened, without waiting for invitation he
enters the house and mounting upon the table of the hall he
exclaims " Yes ! Yes ! Yes ! I am the Reeve of Lam-
bourne in Perransand, come here to demand the old rent,
duties and customs due to the lords of the said manor from
the lands of Godolphin." In response to the summons of
the Reeve there is l)rought him 2s. Sd. in rent, a jack of strong
beer, a loaf of bread and a cheese. Out of the fact of this
ancient tenure the incorrigible Hals has woven one of his
innumerable romances, for which not one iota of evidence
worthy of consideration exists. Hals possessed the art of
evolving history of a libellous and defamatory character from
his own inner consciousness in a way that has been seldom
equalled.

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

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

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

The south-east corner of Breage Church, now called the

102

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

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

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

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

103

A Godolphin Helmet in Breage Church.

Sir John Godolphin was succeeded by his son, Sir William
Godolphin ; this Knight in his turn was repeatedly Sheriff of
Cornwall. We may gather from the State Papers* that his
character and principles, to say the least, were somewhat
robust. Ships cast upon the wild, rockbound coast of Breage,
it is complained, were snapped up as toothsome morsels by the
Sheriff, and their contents carried doubtless as loot to
Godolphin. His burial is recorded in the Breage register on
30th July, 1570. He was succeeded by his son, the heroic Sir

*State Papers, 1526.

104

William Godolphin, who covered himself with glory in the
short war waged by Henry VIII. against Francis I., which
terminated in the defeat of the French at the Battle of the
Spurs. Carew says of this brave Knight that "he added lustre
to his fame at the expense of his face." This statement has
reference to a charge made by Sir William and his brother
Thomas, at the head of the force under his command, which
resulted in the route of the French opposed to them and the
grievous shortening of Sir William's nose by a sword cut.
This warrior at home seems to have practised the robust
methods of his father. In 1575 we find the * Crown pre-
ferring fifteen charges against him, thirteen of which were for
piracy in conjunction with the Killigrews of Arvvennick. He
lies buried in Finchley Churchyard, and some faithful follower
who had wandered over the fields of Picardy with him in
search of military glory placed the following epitaph upon
his tomb :

"Godolphin his race to rest hath run,

Where grace affords felicity ;

His death is gone, his life hath wone

Eternal perpetuity.

Though William his corpse here doth lie

Barnes' faith in him shall never die."
His wife Dame Blanche Godolphin lies at Breage. As
Sir William left no son his estates devolved on his nephew, Sir
Francis, son of Thomas Godolphin, who had, as we have
already seen, distinguished himself in the war with France.
Of Sir Francis Godolphin, Carew says, "Zeal in religion,
uprightness in government and plentifulness in house-keeping
had given him a great reputation."

As well as having distinguished himself in the dreary wars
of Ireland, Sir Francis had applied his mind to the problems
of scientific mining on his estates, to his own great profit.

* state Papers.

105

In looking over the pages of the Church registers, I was per-
plexed to find the frequent recurrence of the name Erasmus.
There can be but little doubt that the first Erasmus whose
name appears in the registers was a Dutchman brought to
Breage by Sir Francis Godolphin in connection witli his great
projects of scientific mining. Sir Francis was Governor of
the Scilly Islands. As Governor he rebuilt the ruined fortress
of St. Mary, and made it so strong that it successfully resisted
all the assaults of the Parliamentary forces until the close of
the Civil War. The heroic attempt of Sir Francis Godolphin
to defend Penzance against the attacking Spaniards has
been dealt with in another place.

Sir Francis corresponded with Cecil Lord Burleigh, and
we thus get from the Hatfield MS. a faint, blurred picture
of the soul of this brave Cornish squire. In his last letter
to Cecil, dated Tavistock, 8th October, 1601, he speaks of his
" project as touching the wars in Ireland."* He married first
Margaret, daughter of John Killigrew, of Arwenack, and
secondly Alice, daughter of John Skerrit, and widow of
John Glanville, Judge of the Court of Comnjon Pleas. Of
one of these ladies the following quaint story still survives :
Sir Francis had taken into his confidence an attorney of
Ottery St. Mary, named John Cole, and ultimately employed
him as his agent. This person embarked in mining specu-
lations on his own account with disastrous results, which
soon hurried him into the paths of fraud. John Cole's
blocks of tin bore for purposes of identification the figure
of a cat stamped upon them, whilst those of his master bore
the impress of a dolphin. Emboldened by successful pecu-
lations, the sign of the cat appeared in ever-increasing
numbers where the sign of the c^olphin should have been
displayed. The suspicions of Lady Godolphin, more shrewd
in this respect than her husband, were aroused. Accom-

* See "The Life of Sidney Godolphin," by the Hon. Hugh Ehot.

106

paniedby a maid, she repaired to the Godolphin Blowing House
on foot, where she found numerous blocks of tin unlawfully
stamped with the sign of the cat. On her return to Godolphin
House, she found Sir Francis and a number of friends
wondering at her absence, prolonged long past the appointed
hour of dinner. She explained that during her absence she
"had been watching a cat eating a dolphin." The Breage
registers record the burial of Sir Francis Godolphin on 23rd
April, 1608.

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

It was during the lifetime of this Sir Francis that
Charles II., then Prince of Wales, took refuge at Godolphin
House, on his flight to the Scilly Islands on the complete
collapse of the Royal cause. Charles remembered the services
of his faithful Cornish squire, and at his accession made him
a Knight of the Bath, and entrusted to his charge the State

* See "The Life of Sidney Godolphin," by the Hon. Hugh Eliot.

107

prisoners, Sir Harry Yane and General Ireton ; at the same
time the foundation of the fortunes of his third son, Sidney,
was hiid by admission to the Royal household. Sir Francis
represented St. Ives and other constituencies in Parliament.
He and his wife. Dame Dorothy, daughter of Sir Henry
Berkeley, of Yarlington in Somerset, were both buried in
Breage Church. Sir Francis was succeeded by his eldest son,
Sir William, who died without issue, and is buried at Breage.
His fourth son, Henry Godolphin, D.D., was Provost of Eton
for thirty-five years, and ultimately became Dean of St.
Paul's. The silver-gilt Communion services still in use at
both the Churches of Breage and Germoe were the gift of
Henry Godolphin, whilst Dean of St Paul's. The record of
his baptism occurs in our registers on 15th, August, 1(348.

No account of the house of Godolphin would be
complete without mention of the brave and debonair
Sidney Godolphin, poet, soldier and philosopher, brother of
the foregoing Sir Francis Godolphin, K.B. He was the
trusted fi-iend of the statesman Clarendon, Hobbes the
philosopher, and Waller the Cavalier poet. These three
friendships in themselves made clear the temper of his mind.
He sat in three Parliaments as member for Heist on. He
espoused in Parliament the cause of Strafford, and when
peace seemed hopeless, he withdrew to the King at Oxford.
The Earl of Clarendon in his history of the Great Rebellion
has left a vivid portrait of his character and personality. He
describes him as of small stature, but of sharp and keen wit,
Avith a mind tinged with melancholy and fitfulness. He tells
us that he would scarcely stir out of doors in windy or rainy
weather, and that at Court he mingled freely with the greatest
of the realm. He died fighting for his King at Chagford, in
Devonshire, in an obscure skirmish, and lies buried in
Okehampton Parish Church. It is evident that he had
inherited the nature of his mother, and was a Sidney both in
mind and in person rather than a Godolphin. Sidney

108

Godolphin was before his age, and his philosophic mind
revolted at the miserable tangle of religion and politics, and
the degrading spirit of religious intolerance and persecution
manifested by all parties. Of him it might have been well said :
" Qui n^as pas Vesprit de son age, de son age a, tout le mal-
Jieiir.''' On his tomb are inscribed the following pathetic lines
by his friend Hobbs :

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

The following entry in the Breage registers, which casts
a sidelight on the story of the Godolphin family, has a pathos
all its own : " Franciscus Berkeley, filius Caroli Berkeley
militis, sepultus fuit 27 Septembri, 1635." The mother
of the child whose death is thus recorded was Penelope,
daughter of Sir William Godolphin, and the sister of Sir
Francis and Sidney Godolphin. Penelope Godolphin had
been married to Sir Charles Berkeley in Breage Church,
September, 1G27. Possibly the rapid rise of the Godolphin
family was due to some extent to this marriage into the
powerful family of Berkeley. Sir Charles Berkeley after-
wards became Viscount Hardinge, and ultimately Earl of
Falmouth, and is said in the main to have been responsible
for the failure of the negotiations between Cromwell and
Ireton on the one hand, and Charles I. on the other, for the
restoration of Charles once more, to a peaceful, if a more
limited authority over his people.

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

The parish has produced only one great man of the first

109

rank, Sidney Godolphin, Earl of Godolphin, third son of the
Sir Francis honoured by Charles II. Our Church registers
record the baptism of Sidney Godolphin in the following
words : " Sidoni, the son of Francis Godolphin and Dorothy
his wife, was baptized 15th iVdj of June, 1614." Sidney
Godolphin almost immediately after the Restoration became a
page in the Royal household, and it was not long before the
King conceived a strong personal liking for the son of the
Cornish squire with whom he had found a refuge in the
darkest hour of his fortunes. Tlie regard of the merry Monarch
made smooth the path of rapid advancement for Sidney
Godolphin. Like his uncle of the same name, at an early
age he entered Parliament as member for Helston. It is
said that he very seldom spoke in the House of Commons,
but quickly earned a reputation as a man of keen financial
grasp and insight, and that his opinion on matters of finance
soon came to be regarded as of great weight. In 1679 he was
promoted with Viscount Hyde, afterwards Earl of Rochester,
and the Earl of Sunderland to the chief management of
affairs. In September, 16(S1, he was created Baron Godolphin
of Rialton, and succeeded the Earl of Rochester as First
Lord of the Treasury. James 11. extended to him the same
favour and confidence that King Charles had given to him.
He was one of tlie Council of Five to whom James left the
management of pffairs when lie left London to meet the
advancing forces of the Prince of Orange. On the utter
collapse of tlie cause of James II. he was one of the Com-
missioners appointed to n-egotiate with William Prince of
Orange. He continued in office under William HI., whilst
at the same time, like his friend the Duke of Marlborough, he
carried on a secret correspondence with James at St. Germans.
No doubt all his real sympathies were with the cause of the
exiled Monarch. In the reign of Anne he was largely instru-
mental in l)ringing about the Act of Union with Scotland ;
and by his great ability as a Minister of Finance he alone

rendered possible the victorious prosecution of the war with
France. He was created Earl of Godolphin in 1706. His
position as a Minister of Finance in a venal age gave him
unlimited opportunities for peculation, which others would
have unblushingly seized, but he remained incorruptible,
and at his death in 1712 was found to be worth only £12,000.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The life of Sidney Godolphin was early clouded by a
great sorrow. At the age of thirty he had married Margaret
Blague, daughter of Colonel Blague, of Horningsheath. Three
years after their marriage, in 1678, Margaret Godolphin's
saintly life came to an end. John Evelyn has rendered the
story of her short life in a sense the common heritage of all
English men and women. By her purity and simple
goodness of character she came to exercise an influence upon
an evil and licentious Court, and for posterity she stands out
as one of its brightest ornaments. I extract the following
fragment from Evelyn e's memoir of her : " She died in the
26 yeare of age, to the inexpressible affliction of her deare
husband. She was for beauty and good nature, wit, fidelity
and discretion the most incomparable person. Her husband,
struck with the unspeakable affliction, fell down as dead. The
King himself and all the Court expressed their sorrow. To
thepooreand miserable her loss was irreparable, for there was
no degree but had some obligation to her memorei. She
desired to be buried in the dormitorie of her husband's
family, neere 300 miles from all her other friends. So
afflicted was her husband at this severe loss that the entire
care of her funeral was committed to me. Having closed
her eyes, and dropped a teare upon the cheeke of my deare
departed friend, lovely even in death, I caused the cori)se to be
embalmed and wrapped in lead, with a plate of brass soldered
thereon, with an inscription and other circumstances due to
her worth, with as much diligence and care that my grieved
heart would permit me. She was accordingly carried to

Ill

Godolphin,in Cornwall, in a hearse with six horses, attended
by two coaches of as many, with al)out thirty of her
relations and servants. There accompanied the hearse her
husband's brother, Sir William, two more of his brothers
and his three sisteis ; her husband was so overcome with
grief that he was wholly unfit to travel so long a journey till
he was more composed. I went as far as H on n slow with a
sad heart, but was obliged to return on some indispensable
affairs. The corpse was ordered to be taken out of the hearse
ever}? night, and decently placed in ye house, with tapers
about it, and her servants attending to Cornwall ; and then
was honorably interr'd in the Parish Church of Godolphin.
This funeral cost not much less than £1000. With Mr.
Godolphin I looked over and sorted his lady's papers. We
found a diary of her solemn resolutions, all tending to
practical viitue. It astonish'd us to see what she had read
and written, her youth considered."

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

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

An interesting picture of these visits has come down to

112

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

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

* See Gilbert's History of Cornwall.
t Life of Sidney Godolphin by the Hon. Hugh Eliot.

113

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

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

In concluding the account of the family of Godolphin, it
is fitting to make some mention of Sir William Godolphin, of
Treveneag, in the parish of Mabe. He was the grandson of
that Sir Francis Godolphin who so gallantly attempted to
defend Penzance against the Spaniards, his father being John
Godolphin, Captain of the Scilly Isles. Sir William in tlie
days of the Commonwealth had eulogised the Protector in
fulsome verses still extant : when the Protector was dead,
and could no longer punish or reward, we find him on the other
hand assailing his memory with virulent abuse. It is only
just to add that whilst singing the praises of the Protector,
he was in full communication with the spies and agents of
Charles. Having so carefully prepared for the future, at the
Restoration his advance w^as rapid. In 1661 he became
member of Parliament for Camelford, and spoke vehemently
in favour of the sanctity of the Royal prerogative, not going
without substantial reward for his exuberant loyalty. Mr.
Pepys describes him as "a very pretty and able person; a
man of very fine parts." He afi'ected science as then under-
stood, and became a Fellow of the newly-formed Roj^al
Society, and on account of the sunshine of the Royal favour
in which he basked received the honorary 'degree of D.C.L.
from the University of Oxford. He ultimately became
Ambassador Extraordinary to tlie Court of Spain, but was
summoned home during the frenzy of the Popish Plot on a
charge of high treason. Sir William under the circumstances

114

thought it more prudent to disregard the command and
remain at Madrid as a private person, which he continued to
do until the day of his death in 1696. At his death he left
considerable property in Madrid, Rome, Venice and Amster-
dam, which continued for a number of years to be the source
of much litigation. A portion of the property was ultimately
employed, in accordance with the provisions of Sir William's
will, in founding the Godolphin School at Hammersmith.
The Godolphin School at Salisbury, it may be added, was
founded by his niece, Elizabeth Godolphin.

The Arundells, de Pengersicks, Militons
and Sparnons.

CHAPTER VII.

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

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

For the history of the Manor of Methleigh 1 am indebted to the Rev. T. Taylor,

of St. JUHt.

t See Vivian's "Visitations of Cornwall," Lyson's "CJornwall," etc., etc.

116

flowery paths of successful match-making ; they moved
forward rather to the music of wedding hells than to the
brazen blast of the trumpet sounding the charge. It was
to the former music that their broad lands in Breage came
to them.

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

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

The story of the coming of the Arundells of Tolverne
to their small manor of Truthual, in the parish of Sithney, is
full of the flavour of ancient romance. It was at the time
that the world was still dreaming of the land of El Dorado.
The spoils of Mexico and Peru brought home by the
Spaniards had profoundlj^ moved the imaginations of all
adventurous souls. Sir TliomuH Arundell, of Tolverne, had
listened to the tales of home-comingf adventurers of a

other powerful branches of the Arundell family were settled at Trerice,
Mandarva and Tremoderet, in the Parish of Duloe.

t See Lyson's "CornwaU."

117

marvellous island on the coast of America, called Old Brazil,
where untold wealth lay ready as spoil for the brave and
stout-hearted. He wasted his substance in vain search for
this island of beauty and wealth — the pearl of American seas.
Where he seaiched we do not know ; only that his search was
vain, and that he returned to his own land broken in fortune
and probably also in spirit and in health, and that he was
compelled to part with his ancestral acres of Tolverne and to
make his home on his smaller estate in Sithney and Brcage,
which still remained to him from the wreck of his fortunes.
He was succeeded by his son, John Arundell, who served as
a Colonel of Hoi'se in the army of the King during tlio Civil
War. This gallant soldier was buried in the north aisle of
Sitliney Church, and the tablet to his memory, which takes the
form of a stone shield, blazoned with swallows, is the only
memorial now remaining of this once powerful family. The
male line of this branch of the family became extinct on tlie
death of John Arundell, in India, in 1771). Their estate of
Methleigh was sold to the Coode family in the eighteenth
century, and still continues in their possession. The manor
of Treworlas which they had previously held in the parish
had passed in marriage to the Jago family in the seventeenth
century. The Arundells are still represented in our midst
in the female line in Messrs. John Arundell and William
Arundell Pry or, of Lower and Higher Pengwedna, through
Margaret Arundell, who married Eichard Pryor, of Sithney,
in 1704.

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

With regard to the manor of Methleigh, it may be
wortljy of mention that an ancient chapel seems to have
existed on this manor, close to Tremearne Farm. A carved
pillar of ecclesiastical design still survives, now used as a

118

gate-post, and from time to time carved stones have been
unearthed round the spot, one, I am told, containing a
realistic representation of the Crucifixion. Round the pre-
sumed site of this chapel human bones have from time to
time been laid bare. I have been unable to find any record
of this forgotten chapel. As the spot commands a wide
view of the sea, which beats upon the rocks below, its
erection may have been due to the vow of some voyager who
had escaped from the fury of the waves, and the bones rest-
ing round it may be those of drowned mariners ; or it may be
that we have here the site of the oratory of the ancient home
of the Nansladons or the diamonds ; at any rate, all record of
this ancient house of God and God's acre have long since
faded into oblivion.

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

Mr. Robert Hunt, in his " Popular Romances of the
West of England," has preserved one of the wild Pengersick

119

legends, which I venture to record in an abbreviated form.
The first Pengersick, so the legend runs, was a proud man,
and desired to ally himself, if possible, with one of the great
families of the county. In pursuance of this purpose he

Pengersick Castle.

decided that his only son should wed a lady of high degree
who Avas by no means young, and who had made her inclina-
tions in the matter all too manifest. The heir of Pengersick,
however, had no desire to fall in with the plans of his father
and the wishes of the elderly spinster. The black witch of
Fraddam was therefore consulted — a terrible old beldam
versed in all manner of sorceries ; but even the strongest love

120

|)o Lions that she could brew were powerless to melt the
heart of young Pengersick. Love in the heart of the spinster,
subjected to constant rebuffs and coldness, began to change
to hate, and his father, finding that the heart of his son was
obdurate, and his nature most obstinate, made suit to the
spinster of high degree himself, and was smiled upon. Now
it happened that the witch of Fraddam had a niece called
Bitha, who had assisted her aunt in the brewing of her
unholy potions. Bitha too, like the elderly spinster — now
spinster no longer — had also fallen under the spell of the manly
beauty of young Pengersick, and in order to win his affections
determined to take service with his stepmother, now duly
ensconced in Pengersick Castle. It fell out in the course of
time as Bitha had hoped, and she won young Pengersick's
heart, but unfortunately their love was discovered by the
harridan stepmother ; this discovery served only to deepen
lier hatred for one whom previously she had so passionately
loved. She therefore determined once more without delay to
employ the services of the black witch of Fraddam, whom she
had previously discarded as an incapable physician. But here
IMtba stepped in. She had not served an apprenticeship to her
aunt, the witch of Fraddam, in vain ; she had kept her eyes
open all the while she had helped in filling the caldron on
Fraddam Down with horrible brews, and the knowledge
thus obtained enabled her now to foil all the spells of her
aunt upon the life of her beloved with more powerful
counter-spells. At last the wicked old beldam of Pengersick,
despairing once more of the weapons of sorcery, determined
to arm herself with the more powerful ones of calumny and
slander. She succeeded in persuading the foolish old lord,
her husband, that his son was now manifesting the deepest
affection towards her. This tale was altogether too much for
the dotard to bear, and it stung him to ungovernable
fury. He at once fell in with the carefully-prepared prompt-
ings of his wife, and had his unfortunate son seized by a

121

gang of ruffian sailors, who carried him off to a ship that lay
riding in the bay, in which he was taken to Morocco and
sold as a slave. After this we gather that the poor old lord
had little peace of mind ; both mistress and maid were at one
in desiring his dissolution. It was not long, till sad and weary
he lay a-dying, when Bitha came and stood by his bed, and
with pleasing candour divested herself of the mask of kindly
affection behind which she had hitherto hidden herself, and
in hard staccato tones told him of the vile machinations of
his wife, and that he was now dying from the effects of slow
poisons, which she herself had administered to him. There
was now nothing more left for the poor old lord of Penger-
sick to do than to wearily turn his face to the wall and die,
like many before and after him to whom knowledge had
come too late.

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

122

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

The beautiful lady of Pengersick rarely ventured from
the castle ; and in summer time, it was said, she would sit
for hours with her casement open to the sea, like a true
Eastern lady, singing to the accompaniment of her harp the
softest, sweetest songs. At times fits of unutterable gloom
would settle down on the soul of her lord, and as David
with his harp lifted the darkness from the soul of Saul, so
this fair lady would soothe to rest the weary spirit of her
lord. Years drifted on, bringing but little change, till one
day there came a swarthy stranger of gloomy and forbidding
mien to Marazion, where he took up his abode. The fisher-
men would see him sometimes as the night closed in sitting

123

on the rocks overhanging the sea round Pengersick ; or
cottars would see him in the twilight wandering over the
uplands. The lord of Pengersick went no more forth abroad,
and a nameless dread seemed to have settled down on him
and his lady. At last in the blackness of one awful night,
in the midst of a terrible tempest that had risen up out of
the Atlantic, a blaze of light shot up from the turrets of
Pengersick Castle ; and in the morning a blackened heap of
ruins alone marked the spot where it had stood, and the lord
of Pengersick and his lady, and their Eastern servants and
his beautiful steed, and the mysterious stranger of dark and
awful mien were never heard of more.

Of course, it is difficult to collect the sediment of truth at
the bottom of the foregoing legend. Perhaps we may con elude
that some lord of Pengersick, whose old age was not accom-
panied by the proverbial wisdom of that state, as not in-
frequently happens, had fallen under the spell of a mercenary
Delilah, and that in his infatuation he had allowed his son to
be kidnapped by a gang of sea ruffians and carried abroad like
Joseph of old, to be added to the hordes of Christian slaves that
in those days dragged out a dismal existence at Tunis or
Algiers. The spiriting away of the heir would thus leave the
field open for the cherished plans and hopes of Delilah.
History has a knack of repeating itself, and more slaves have
risen to power and influence in the land of their bondage than
the patriarch Joseph. Possibly the conscience of the heir of
Pengersick was more elastic than that of many of his
fellows, and he found it possible to recite the '^ fatelieW''
of Islam with reverence and empressement. In the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries there were many Christian renegades
holding high positions in the service of the Mohammedan
Powers of the Mediterranean — some of them Englishmen.
Perhaps this may have been the career of the heir of
Pengersick, ending in a return to his native land with riches,
a bride of the daughters of Islam, and an Arab steed.

124

We may well ascribe the skin disease of his wicked step-
mother to leprosy — then very common — rather than to the
fames of the witch's caldron. Adopting this rationalised
interpretation of the legend, it is but natural to conclude
that one who could thus readily exchange the creed for
the '''' fateheW had no deep inward convictions, and men
without deep convictions are ever prone to embark upon the
sea of speculation, and pursue such philosophic phantoms as
the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone ; hence perhaps
the strange instruments and the odours of the bottomless pit
with which his name in tradition is associated.

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

* Scenal Series, page 251,

125

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

The manor of Pengersick in the reign of Henry VIII.
passed by purchase to the family of Militon. The Militons
descended from a daughter of the Pengersicks" it is interest-
ing to note. According to Leland, Job Militon, the purchaser,
came from Devonshire. On his arrival at Pengersick he set
about building the present crumbling grey tower, which
though sadly shorn of its former splendours dominates the
valley. Hals, whose veracity is much open to doubt, states
that Militon had fled to this remote corner of the world to
hide his head and avoid avenging justice, having imbrued
his hands in the blood of a fellow-man. Whether this deed
was done by accident or with intent Hals does not say. It
is more than probable that it was never done at all. The
reason for the fortifying of the house of the Militons is not
far to seek : it stands close to the sea, and the sea in those
days was the open highway of all lawless spirits. Often from
the summit of the grey Keep of Pengersick, in the years
that followed its erection, might have been seen the sails of
Barbary corsairs on the bosom of the sea. The crew of the
merchantmen and the lonely fisherman in his little boat
were alike eagerly snapped up by these marauders to swell
the growing population of slaves in Tripoli and Algiers.

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

126

Under the shadow of night, when the sea was calm and the
landing good, these rovers of the sea would steal inshore in
open boats and surround some sleeping hamlet or farmhouse.
The strong men were carried off to labour as slaves under
the hot sun of Africa till death liberated them from their
misery, whilst the portion that fell to the fair daughter was
the listless ennui of the harem. The sea rovers were not the
only danger that would menace the dwellers in Pengersick
Castle in those days ; the constant wars in which this
country was embroiled would bring danger also from privateers,
the licensed robbers of the sea. Spanish, French and Dutch
men-of-war and privateers, each in turn would appear in the
bay as the centuries drifted on. From generation to genera-
tion, down to the first fifteen years of this century, Mount's
Bay echoed to the hoarse rumble of guns, and the cannon
smoke of ships engaged in deadly conflict drifted over its
waters ; whilst num])ers of lawless men, smugglers by repute
and pirates* when occasion served, dwelt upon its shores.
Well might the first Militon ensconce himself within the
fortified walls of his Keep of Pengersick, considering the
condition of the times in which he lived.

An extract from the State Papers for the year 152G
makes it clear that the ancient spirit of the wild Pengersicks
was by no means absent from the souls of the Militons. A
Portuguese ship had been wrecked at Gunwalloe and much
cargo saved. The cargo was seized by the servants of Job
Militon, second of the name at Pengersick, Thomas St.
Aubyn and William Godolphin ; when the unfortunate
owner applied to the justices for redress he was told that
such was the custom of the country, and that no redress of
any kind was possible. It may be here mentioned that Job
Militon was ultimately made Governor of St. Michael's
Mount after the ill-starred rebellion of Humphrey Arundell.

* state Papers.

127

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

*' The lame which lacketh for to go
Is borne upon the blinde's back,
So naturally between them twoo,

The one supplied the other's lack.
The blinde to laime doth lend his might.
The laime to blinde doth yield his sight."
Under another painting, which represented the constant
dripping of water upon a rock, the following lines are found :
" What thing is harder than a rock !
What softer than water clear !
Yet will the same with often drop

The hard rock pierce, as doth appear.
Even so nothing so hard to attayne.
But may be had with labour and payne."
Other inscriptions and paintings in this ancient stronghold
illustrated the blessedness of loyalty to the Sovereign and the
happiness of the kingdom that is served by faithful and
patriotic Ministers ; another the sacredness of the ties of
marriage ; and yet another, under the representation of an
ass laden with dainties and feeding upon thistles, the folly
of the miser, who denies himself the necessaries of life and
lays up store for others to wanton upon.

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

128

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

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

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

Worthies and Unworthies,

Harrij Garter, John Garter^ ^'' King of Prussia'' ; ^'Smuggling

W((ys and Days ; William Lc?non, Gaptain Tobias Jllartin,

Poet ; Joseph Boaden., Matliematician.

CHAPTER VIII.

Harry Carter, smuggler, privateer and revivalist, was
born on a small farm at Pengersick in 1749. His father, who
was a miner by trade, eked out a livelihood, with the
assistance of his sons and daughters, in farming a small plot
of ground. Harry Carter tells us in his memoirs* that he
was one of a family of eight sons and two daughters ; that
his eldest and youngest brothers received some scanty
education at Germoe School, but that he and the rest of his
familj^ received no education beyond some crude home
lessons in reading, given through the medium of the Bible.
The problem of daily bread in the household of his parents
was of much too pressing a nature to allow more than this
in the way of education. As soon as strength permitted, the
children had to go forth to work in the fields or the mines,
that each might bring his share of daily bread to the common
store. Though life was thus hard, the principles of religion
were not neglected in the home, the children being taught to
recite some prayers "after they were in bed " and to attend
when possible the services at Germoe Church. His youth
coincided with the strange stirrings in the religious life of
the people brought about by the not infrequent peregrina-
tions of John Wesley through the district. When Harry was
eight years of age the soul of his brother Francis was touched

* "The Autobiography of a Smuggler," published by Messrs. Pollard, of Truro, 1694,

130

at one of those wild scenes of religious revivalism, and as the
two brothers slept together, the little lad of eight became
strangelj^ impressed and awed by the change in the
demeanour of his brother. He tells us, however, that these
impressions of aw^e gradually faded out of his youthful
mind. At ten he was sent to work at the mines on the
surface, and he continued there for seven years, when he
went to join bis elder brothers in a more adventurous and
stirring life upon which they had entered at Porthleah,
soon to change its name to Prussia Cove.

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

to him for the rest of his life, but it has stuck ever since to
the little territory of Porthleah over which he ruled with an
iron hand.

The occupation of the Carter brothers at Prussia Cove
was nominally that of peaceful fishermen, but in reality that
of .daring smugglers. From this quiet and secluded nook
in the coast Harry Carter began his career by making
several voyages as supercargo of contraband in Folkestone
and Irish luggers. Like so many men of his time and
country anxious to make their way in the world, Harry
Carter lost no opportunity of self-education, and rapidly
made himself proficient in a rude system of accounts. At
twenty-five he found himself in command of a small sloop
of sixteen or eighteen tons and a crew of two men, busily
engaged in the exciting trade of importer of contraband
goods. The sun shone upon his illegal efforts, and so great
was his success that he soon succeeded in making himself
master of a sloop of thirty-two tons ; but his vaulting
ambition aspired to still greater things, and the success that
fortune so often extends to new and inexperienced players
was still his. The sloop of thirty-two tons was quickly
exchanged for one of fifty tons and a crew of ten men ; and
this in its turn soon gave place to a heavily-armed cutter of
sixteen guns and a crew of thirty-two men. At this time
there seemed no cloud on his horizon, save gloomy religious
thoughts that came welling up in his heart. He was greatly
troubled about the sin of swearing and his lack of assurance
that he was a " saved man," but not a whit about the dishonest
and lawless nature of his calling. Having obtained from
Government a licence to sail as a privateer in the American
War, and with strict injunctions to his crew against all
swearing on board, he set sail in December, 1777, in search
of adventures and profit on a wider and more extensive
scale ; but his star was no longer in the ascendant, and the
favours of fickle fortune were to be denied him for many a

132

long year. Off the French coast bis bowsprit was carried
away, and he put into St. Malo for repairs, little recking
of tbe momentous transpirings since he bad sailed from
Penzance Bay ; for France had entered into alliance with the
revolted American colonies, and was now at war with
England. Carter thus sailed his heavily-armed cutter ipto
a trap, out of which there was no escape. He and his men
were made prisoners, and his ship and all that she contained
became a French prize of war. *' The King of Prussia," who
happened to be on " business " at this time in the Channel
Islands, hastened to his rescue, and attempted to explain
matters to his captors. The attempt was a foolish one, and
he soon found himself locked up with his brother Harry and
the crew of the cutter in a French prison. Tbeir captivity
proved a hard and tedious one, but like the men of resource and
purpose that they were, they at once set to work to make the
best of their situation by learning the French language,
whilst Harry, in addition, beguiled the ennui of his captivity
by the study of navigation, which in after years served him
in good stead. The two brothers did not obtain their liberty
until after a captivity of two years, when freedom came to
them in an exchange of prisoners.

Harry Carter on his return home refitted his old fifty-
ton cutter and made several successful smuggling runs. One
of these runs was attended with unpleasant consequences,
which nearly proved disastrous. He had sailed to deliver a
contraband cargo in South Wales ; on reaching the Welsh
coast he left his cutter lying off the Mumbles whilst he
landed to make final arrangements about running the cargo.
In his absence the cutter was mistaken by a cruiser for one
of the Dunkirk privateers, which at this time were haunting
the Welsh coast like birds of prey, snapping up vessels
engaged in the coasting trade. These privateers were for
the most part commanded and manned. Carter tells us, by
Irishmen. The crew of the cutter, seeing the cruiser bearing

133

down upon them, put out to sea to save their cargo of
contraband, and soon succeeded in eluding the cruiser by
superior speed. On giving up the chase the cruiser sent a
])oat on shore, and Carter was arrested as the captain of tlie
Irish pirate. The matter ended in his being detained on
suspicion for twelve weeks, and his ultimate liberation was
only brought about by the representations of his Cornish
friends to the Admiralty. With the exception of this slight
overclouding of his horizon, things still continued for some
time to prosper with him. On his return home he informs
us that '' he rode about the country getting freights and
collecting money for the 'company." Indeed, things
continued for some time to prosper so well with the
" company " that soon another large cutter of one hundred
and sixty tons, and carrying nineteen guns, was purchased by
them, whilst they gave orders for the building of a lugger
mounting twenty guns. These two vessels when fitted out
saileti, under the supreme command of Harry Carter, on
voyages of illicit merchandise. No wonder, under the
circumstances, Harry Carter began to fancj^ himself again,
as he tells us in his memoirs ; but there was, alas ! a ^j in the
ointment. In the pride of his prosperity and self-satisfaction
swear words began continually to slip out of his lips ; this
weighed at times heavily on his soul and plunged him in
deep spiritual gloom. It was evidently words and not deeds
that counted in this man's creed.

His relations with the collector of Customs and preven-
tive officers seym to have been of the most friendly character,
and herein lay most probably the secret of his success as a
smuggler ; indeed, the friendship of Carter with these officials
helps us to understand the cause of the extreme prosperity
of the smuggling industry along the Cornish coast at this
period. In December, 1780, Harry Carter was lying in
Newlyn Road aboard his cutter, with her consort the lugger
alongside, when a messenger came from his friend the

134

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

135

In 1786 Carter married Elizabeth Flindel, of Helford,
and in the following year was born his only child, Elizabeth
Carter. In January, 1788, happened the great disaster of his
life. In attempting to land a cargo of smuggled goods in
Cawsand Bay, he was surprised by boats sent off by a man-of-
war. He and his crew attempted to offer an armed resistance ;
the cutter was quickly boarded by the boat's crew, and
Carter himself received a severe cutlass wound upon the head
and was left lying upon the deck of his ship for dead. He
was able to retain consciousness all the time, and when
unobserved, with great difficulty, he managed to plunge into
the water. Luckily he was seen by sympathisers on the shoie,
who only succeeded with great difficulty, on account of his
wounded and exhausted condition, in bringing him safely to
land. This adventure was to cost Carter dear, and it proved
the culminating point in his career ; henceforth the sun of
good fortune only shone upon his path in fitful and watery
gleams. In spite of the serious wound from which he was
suffering, his friends managed in two days to bring him to
the house of his bi'other Charles at Kenneggie, in Breage ;
there he and his friends soon learnt the disquieting intelli-
gence that the Government had offered a reward of £300 for
his capture. It was now necessary for Carter, in order to
avoid arrest, to be removed by night to Marazion. Soon the
scent became too strong, and he again had to be removed in
the dead of night to Acton Castle, then only occupied in the
summer months by its owner, Mr. Stackhouse Pendarves.
The land attached to this house was farmed by the "King of
Prussia," who kept the keys of the house in the absence of
the family. In this deserted mansion the wounded man had
to lie in solitude for many weary months. It is said that the
doctor who attended him in this retreat was brought blind-
folded by night, and that on one occasion Carter only eluded
justice by hastily assuming the garb of a woman. In this
lonely refuge his disposition at once manifested its gloomy

136

morbidity and intense practicalness ; much time seems to
havo been profitably spent in the study of navigation, and
much wasted upon hypochondriacal maunderings upon the
condition of his soul, his occasional proclivity for swear
words and lack of assurance as to his state of salvation.
When his wounds healed he used to steal out of his lair at
night to Prussia Cove, returning ere the dawn. On one of
these occasions, as he returned he moralised on the singing
of the birds in the dawn "answering the end for which
they were sent into the world, so that I wished I had
been a toad or a serpent or anything, so that I had no
soul. Likewise there was a grey thrush which sang to
me night and morning, which have preached to me many
a sermon."

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

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

On the 24th October, 1788, he was able to obtain a
passage to Leghorn on board the George, a ship sailing from
Penzance. From Leghorn he succeeded in obtaining a
passage to New York, where he became reduced to a condition
of extreme poverty, having for a bare pittance to work side
by side in the fields with negro slaves. After many hard-
ships he determined to brave the terrors of the law and

137

venture back once more to England. He worked his way
back under the American flag, and narrowly escaped the
attentions of the Press Gang in the English Channel. On
his arrival in England he soon found that his native soil was
still too hot for his feet. Under the circumstances he crossed
over to Roscoff, on the French coast, the then capital of the
Channel smuggling trade, where he became the local agent
of his brothers. But events moved rapidly in France under
the Revolution. During the Terror, with many other English,
he was arrested and remained under detention for over two
years. With the fall of Robespierre he and his other English
fellow-prisoners were set at liberty. This smuggling Ulysses
))rought his wanderings to an end on the 22nd August, 1795.
He disembarked on that day at Falmouth, he tells us, "at
three o'clock in the afternoon, where I met my dear little
Bessie, then between eight and nine years old." The follow-
ing day happened to be Sunday, and he at an early hour set
out for his native place, reaching Breage a little before eleven
o'clock, and meeting his brother Frank on his way to church.

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

John Carter, known as " The King of Prussia," plays a
much larger part in local tradition' than his brother Harry,
though on Harry fell the more onerous and dangerous part of
facing the perils of the sea and of hostile shores in pursuit of
the smuggler's calling. In those days and for long
after the wild doings of Prussia Cove would be on
everyone's lips ; the doings on the lonely deep had no
chronicler to magnify them. Many are the legends that
cling round the name of " The King of Prussia " : some of
these Mr. Baring-Gould has placed on record in his book
" Cornish Characters and Strange Events." On one occasion
John Carter received a visit from the Revenue officers, who
demanded to make a search of his entire premises. One door

138

remained padlocked, and this they insisted on having opened ;
the key not being forthcoming they wrenched the locks off,
but the cellar thus closed proved to be quite innocent of^
contraband. On the following day Carter complained to the
Revenue authorities that his unlocked premises had been
rifled during the night, and demanded restitution for his
stolen goods, as the Revenue ofiicers by their violent action
had deprived him of the means of securing his doors. The
story runs that Carter himself had removed his property
during the night, and we are asked to believe the somewhat
difficult statement that the Revenue officers under the
circumstances paid him the value of the property he had
never lost.

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

His crowning exploit, however, was opening fire with a
battery of guns which he had erected at Prussia Cove, on the
boats of the Government cutter Faery. The Faery was in
hot pursuit of a smuggling craft, which in order to elude her
pursuer sailed through a narrow channel between the Enys
rocks and the shore. The Faery, baffled of her prey, lowered
her boats in pursuit, and as these drew into Prussia Cove,
Carter opened fire upon them and beat them ofi". This
seems to have been towards dusk. Next morning the Faery
opened fire from the sea on Carter's shore battery,
whilst mounted troops from Penzance took up their position
on the shore to the rear of his battery, and in turn opened
fire upon it. The smugglers thereupon withdrew to Bessie
Burrow's public-house and prepared for its defence, but re-

139

ceived no further attack or molestation. The whole incident
as narrated reveals a strange supineness on the part of the
Customs authorities, which almost suggests connivance with
Carter's delinquencies.

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

The grim side of the smuggler's calling and the terrible
crimes that sometimes accompanied it are well illustrated by
the gruesome find of another parishioner recently, close to
his farmhouse, under the shadow of Tregoniiig Hill. The
hind leg of one of the horses of this friend, whilst ploughing
in his field, suddenly sank deep into the ground, and it was
with difficulty that the animal was extricated. The spot from
which the horse's foot was withdrawn revealed a cavity in the

140

ground ; spades were brought and excavations made, which
ended in bringing to light a fair-sized subterranean cellar,
whose gruesome contents were a large knife of foreign make,
a skull, a few human bones, some disintegrated patches of
clothing and a small handful of silver and copper coins, one
of which, a shilling of the reign of George II., now lies on the
table of the writer.

From the Carters we turn to a man of a very different
type, who made his way to wealth by sterling integrity and
honesty of purpose. William Lemon was born at Germoe in
1696, and baptized in Breage Church on the 15th November
of the same year. He received his education at the village
school, and being a lad of quick intelligence, he became in the
first instance a clerk to a Mr. Coster, connected with the
local mining industry. He distinguished himself when a
mere boy on the occasion of a ship being driven on Praa
Sands in the midst of a terrific gale. He and a party of brave
men, who arrived on the scene of the disaster as the ship was
quickly breaking to pieces, formed themselves with great
gallantrj' into a living chain, extending from the shore into
the raging, angry surf, and so were able to grasp and save
the shipwrecked sailors as they were carried On the waves to
the shore. But for these heroic men thus grasping them they
would have been sucked back into the sea and drowned in
the receding waters. Young William Lemon was a lad of
thoughtful and studious disposition, and availed himself of
every opportunity to learn what there was to be learnt of
assaying and mine engineering in the district. Presumably'
men of education and practical ability were very scarce in the
neighbourhood at this time ; at any rate, whilst little more than
a boy he was appointed the manager of considerable tin
smelting works in the neighbourhood of Penzance. At
the age of twenty-eight he married a Miss Isabella Vibart, of
Tolver, in Gulval, a lady of some property. William Lenion
was endowed with breadth of mind and grasp of detail in a

141

marked degree, and the means which his wife brought him
enabled him to bring these faculties into play with the most
successful results. He embarked on prudent and far-sighted
mining speculations, which quickly made him a man of great
wealth. He conceived the idea of working the tin mines on
a large scale, and not as hitherto by small bands or companies
of "adventurers," as had been the custom for some generations.
Though great wealth came to him comparatively early,
his character continued unchanged and unspoilt, and in the
midst of his successes he continued to utilize his leisure in the
study of Latin, and in his middle-age he had attained to no
mean knowledge of that tongue. In the present age the
successful developer of mines and floater of mining companies,
spending his leisure in the study of the classics, would be in-
deed regarded as strange, but " autres tem^fs, autres mmu^'S.''''

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

William Lemon served as High Sheriff of the county, a-nd
might have represented it in Parliament had he so chosen.*
He ultimately bought the estate of Carclew, to which place he

*See 3Ii'. liaiing-Gould'H •' (Jornish Cliaracters and Stranj^'e Kvents" for many of the
factors as given above.

142

went to reside in 1749. His son was created a baronet, and
for some years represented Cornwall in Parliament. This
baronetcy became extinct in the succeeding generation.

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

" Truro,

28th September, 1748.
*' Dear Brother,

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

Your affectionate brother,

William Lemon."
'' Bottles— 4 Tent
„ 4 Canary

„ 12 Mountain
2S Port

48 Bottles.'

143

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

The life of Tobias Martin practically followed the course
of that of his father. After working for a number of years as
an ordinary miner, his superior education and gifts came to
be recognised by a Mr. Sandys, of Helston, interested in the
local mines, and his advancement quickly followed. Tobias
Martin died, aged 81, on 9th April, 1828, and was laid to rest

144

in Breiage Churchyard. The later years of his life were
clouded by false accusations and unjust claims, which led for
a time to his confinement in the Sheriff's Ward at Bodmin.
His character was ultimately completely vindicated by the
efforts of Mr. Richard Tyacke, of Godolphin. Hard upon this
trouble followed the brutal murder of his eldest son in
America, which darkened the few remaining years of the old
man's life.

: The poems of Tobias Martin were first published in
Helston in 1831 ; a second edition followed in 3856, and a
third in 1885. The poems suggest the mental attitude of an
eighteenth century Cornish Piers Ploughman ; running
through them there is a vein of deep resentment at the
tyranny and oppression of the ruling classes, and the lethargy,
pride, hard-heartedn ess and laxity of the clergy is touched
upon with no light hand. His verses as poetry are utterly
valueless, but as garish pictures of a day that is passed they
will always be interesting, if somewhat painful reading.
Martin by his contemporaries was called an atheist. Judging
by his poems, I imagine that he had thought perhaps a little
more than his accusers, who most probably had never thought
at all on the deeper things of life ; his soul no donbt was
in revolt against the dead shibboleths and formalism of the
age, with which men were attempting to compound for
the brutality and coarseness of their lives. One looks in
vain through Martin's poems for one thought of poetic beauty
or discernment.

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

Captain Toby was having his pint of ale at a tavern,

* "Cornish Characters and strange Events."

145

when in comes a miner who was wont "to be called "Old
Blowhard," and was not esteemed trusty or diligent as a
workman.

" How are 'ee, Capp'n ? "

" Clever, how art thee ? "

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

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

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

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

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

" How many ? Why ten."

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

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

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

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

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

146

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be unjust not to make mention in concluding
this chapter of Joseph Boaden, who lived his whole life as a
small cultivator in the parish of Breage, and who was laid to
rest in Breage Churchyard in December, 1858. Self-taught,
through his life he pursued the study of higher mathematics
and astronomy, and was regarded as a valued correspondent
by Professors Airy and Adams, of Cambridge. Under modern
conditions education has become more diffused, but we look

147

in vain for men of the type of those whom we have been
considering. With its superficial diffusion knowledge has in
a measure lost its prestige and fascination, and education has
been in a sense debased and vulgarised in the popular mind
into a mere instrument of livelihood. The successful passer
of competitive examinations, under the system of cram, with
no true love of knowledge for knowledge's sake in his heart,
and who divests himself of his crapula of potted knowledge
the moment a livelihood with a pension at the end has been
attained, has already gone far to cast learning, so far as the
popular mind is concerned, into the quagmire of contempt.

Local Place Names and Superstitions.

CHAPTER IX.

It has been said that the history of England is written in tlie
names of her fields and enclosures. Certain it is that in almost
every parish, if the names of the fields l3e gone over, some
name of exceeding interest or curiousness will be discovered,
embalming some long-forgotten fact or tradition. There are
in the parish of Breage two fields called " The Sentry " ; this
name is of course obviously a corruption of the word
"sanctuary." These two sanctuary fields are at opposite ends
of the parish ; one forms the site of the main shaft of Wheal
Vor Mine, and the other is in the Kenneggie district. Their
situation thus lends force to a suggestion that they may in
remote times have been actually used as local sanctuaries.*
The probability of this seems to be increased by the fact that
a field contiguous to the Kenneggie sanctuary field, is called
the Church Close. Possibly in ancient days in the Church
Close there stood a sanctuary chapel, whose story has long
since faded into the mists of oblivion. Originally every
church and churchyard was a sanctuary for criminals. The
sanctuary seats at Hexham Abbey and Beverley Minster and
the sanctuary knocker in Durham Cathedral are still in
existence. A person who had committed murder or other
heinous crime was safe if he could reach a sanctuary before
he was waylaid and arrested ; once within the sanctuary, if
in forty days he confessed his crime and took a solemn oath
before the coroner to depart from the country and never

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

149

return again, he was allowed to go unmolested into exile.
Possibly onr two local sanctuaries may have been tbns used
in Celtic times. Had they continued to be used as such in
later times, it is probable that some record of this use would
have survived.

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

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

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

It would be interesting to know how a field on Methleigh
Farm obtained the name of " The Martyr's Close." As to who
these martyrs were tradition can give no light. It is jyossible
that the name may commemorate one of the many acts of
ferocity committed in the name of religion in the days of
the "Saints," when slight religious differences were ample

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

Mr. H. .Tenner

150

justification for any form of homicide, or it may have had, as
seems more probable to the writer, some connection with the
story of the unfortunate men whose skeletons, bearing upon
them the unmistakable traces of violent death, were discovered
lying in a shallow grave beneath the site of the pulpit in Breage
Church. If this latter theory be accepted it seems probable
that the field earned its present name through some act of
military reprisal during the Parliamentary Wars.

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

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

When we deal with the fast fading superstitions of the

*Mr. H. Jenner.

151

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

The great enemy of *' sperruts " and spectres of all kinds
in his day was the Reverend Robert Jago,* Vicar of Wendron,
at the end of the seventeenth century. The dim traditions of
his doughty feats in warring with spectres still vaguely
linger, in a condition varying towards evanescence, in the
popular mind. A lane leading up from the village of Herland
Cross to Pengilly Farm still bears the name of Jew's Lane.
In this lane a Jew had hanged himself in rage or despair
after some outrage or wrong committed upon him by the
Squire Sparnon of that day. Not long after the Jew's suicide
the lane was rendered impassable at night by horrible sounds
and sights, and recourse was had to the Reverend Robert
Jago, who received a fee of five guineas for the business of
laying the troublesome ghost. The method of Mr. Jago
seems to have been first to draw a circle with a long wliip-

* See Daniell's "History of Cornwall."

152

lash upon the ground, whilst repeating certain formulae and
prayers. Having placed himself within the circle, he was safe
from the anger of malignant spirits, and was thus able to
summon the troubled spirit and banish it from the neigbour-
hood without danger to himself.

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

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

153

several weary hours wandering round and round the hedges in
a vain and exasperating search in rain and darkness, at one
time floundering in a nettle bed, at another in mud and
water over the tops of his boots.

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

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

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

It is pleasant to gather from the learned author of " The

154

Faery Faith in Celtic Countries " that the superstitions of
the Cornish are of a much brighter character than those of
the other branches of the Celtic race ; the superstitious
beliefs of their near kinsmen, the Bretons, being of a
specially gloomy character. The pobol vean, it seems, are
much more cheery folk, in spite of all their pranks, than
gloomy Ankou, king of the dead, and his attendant ghosts.
Having said that the Cornish folklore is not of a gloomy
character is to say perhaps all that can be said in praise of it.
I have alluded to the foregoing tales and beliefs because
in the course of a generation or so they will have completely
faded from the popular mind. Our people seem eager to
have done with the past, and to reach forward to the future,
fraught with new conditions and new thought. When we
compare the present with the past, we can only be thankful
for all that change has brought within recent generations in
physical surroundings and moral outlook. Let us hope that
her future gifts, which give promise of being prodigal, will
be as beneficent as those of the recent past, for we still require
much at her hands. The danger seems to lie in wandering
into a materialistic desert, for it is but too true that " Man
can not live bv bread alone."

INDEX.

Ancient Glass in Breage Church, 5"2.

Aneurin, 18.

Ankou, King of the dead, 154.

Armada, The, 67

Arundell, Benedict de, 45.

Arundell, Humphrey, 60, 126.

Arundell, Sir John of Lanhern, 67, HC

Arundell, John, Colonel of Horse, 117.

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

Arundell, Ralph, 116.

Arundell, Sir Thomas of Tolverne, 1 16.

Ash ton, 74.

Athelstan, Saxon King, 27.

Atwell. Parson anri Physician, 75.

Bal Lane, 153.

Barbary Cotsaiis, 125.

Bargest Croft, 150.

Bargheist, The, 151.

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

Bartholomew, Black, 72.

Bells, Breage, 90, 91.

Bells, Germoe, 92.

Bede, The Venerable, 17.

Berkeley, Sir Charles, 108.

Berkeley, Dorothy, 107.

Berkeley, Francis, 108.

Berkeley, Sir Henry, 107

Bery John, Vicar of Breage, 59, 61.

Black Death, The, 48, 64.

Boaden, Jos., 146, 147.

Bodmin, 48.

Boidars, 30.

Boscawen, Hugh, 79.

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

Breton Saints, 22.

Briefs, 97, 98.

Brother Thomas of Hayles, 46.

Brythons, The, 10, 17, 18.

Bucca, The, 153.
Buller, Mr. Justice, 128.
Burials by Night, 97.
Buryan, Chapel of, 44.
Burying-place of Godolphins, 102,

Canons of St. Keverne, 34.

Carter, Mrs. Cornelia, 90.

Carter, Harry, 129 to 137.

Carter, John, "King of Prussia," 137 to im

Carter, Family of, 128.

Carter, William Thornton, 90.

Cattle, Cornish, in 17th Century. 75.

Cecil, Lord Burleigh, 105, 106.

Celtic Bishops, 26.

Celtic Churches at Breage and Gerinoe, 24 to 20, "^n.

Celtic Cross in Breage Churchyard, 24.

Celtic Metliod of Consecrating Churolio'-, 25, 96.

Charles II. at Breage, 70, 71, 106, 100.

Chanimonds, Family of, 115.

Christianity in Ireland at the End of Ihv. otli Century, 19, 20;

Church Ales, 77.

Church Registers, 92 to 99.

Churchwardens, 98, 99.

Churches, Built on Sites of He.ithen Temples, 25.

Churston, Lord, 128.

Chynoweth, 23.

Cla'rendon, Earl of, 107.

Clergy, The Chief Sufferers from Pin one, 48.

Clyes, Rawe, Blacksmith and Physician, 75.

Cole, John, 105.

Collegiate System in Saxon Times, 33.

Coliberts, 33.

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

Colonies of the Saints, 26.

Commissioners of Edward VI., Their Report on the Clnirches of Bieiitre
and Germoe, 61, 62.

Communion Plate, Breage and Germoe, 92.

Conan, The Castle of, 18.

Coode, Dorcas, of Methleigh, 69.

Coode, Family of, 69.

Coode, John, of Methleigh, 70.

Cornish Bishops, 26.

Cornish Language, 10.

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

Council of Aries, 17.

Council ot Nica-a, 17.

Crettier, Henr}-, Vioar of Bieage, 57.

Crowan, 19.

Cury, 33, 38.

Dawe, Sir Alexander, Vicar of IJreage, 63, 64.
Dean, Matthew, of Hiuyan, 44.
Dellaregetto. Wm., 96.
Diodonis, Siculus, 14.
Domesday Book, 28, 31.
Durrow, Book of, 21.

Earldom of Cornwall, 35.

Earls of Cornwall, 34.

Edmund, Earl of Cornwidl, 42,

Egbert, Saxon King, 27.

Eglos Penbroc (Breage), 24.

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 65, 106.

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

Erasmus, Edmund us, 95, 96, 105.

Essex, Eurl of, 106.

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

Fairies, 13, 152 to 154.

Fiiiht Between Wreckers from Breage and Wendron, 80.

Flint Implements, 9.

Fraddam, Witch of, 120 to 122.

Frederick II. *'Stu|.or Mundi," 48.

Frescos in Breage Church. 50 to 52. 89.

Frescos in Pengersick Castle, 127.

Cermoe Churclj, 26, 50, 53, 54.

Germoe, People of, 79-

Gilbert de Clare, Earl of (jiloucester, 41.

Gildas, 18.

(^iraldus, 35.

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

Glasney, Collegiate Churcli of, 45.

(il.iss, Mediaeval in Bre.ige Chuich, 52, 89.

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

Goidels, The, 10, 18.

Godolphin, Dame Alice, 105.

Qodolphin, Dame Blanche, 104.

Godolphin, Catherine, 112.

Godolphin, Dame Dorothy, 107.

Godolphin, Elinora, 101.

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

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

(Godolphin, Francis, Second Eail of, 113.

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

Godolphin, Sir John, 58, 101, 103.

Godolphin, John, 78.

Godolphin, Margaret, 110, 111.

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

Godolphin, Sidney, Cavalier, 107, 108.

Godolphin, Penelope, 108.

Godolphin, Sir William I., 103, 104, 1'26.

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

Godolphin, Sir William III., 106.

Godolphin, Sir William IV., 107, 108.

Godolphin, Sir William of Treveneag, 113.

Godolphin, Master Thomas, 58.

Graeme, Hugh, 94, 95.

Grandisson, Bishop, 46.

Great Work Mine, 73.

Greeks, The Ancient, 14.

Gregory, the Great, 30.

Gregory IX., Pope, 41.

Grenfell, Lydia, 85, 86.

Grotto, Ferrata, 42.

Guary, Plays, 77.

Gunwalloe, 33, 38.

Gwydian, Celtic God of Vegetation, 11.

Hals, County Historian, 37, 101, 125.

Hartest Customs, 11.

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

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

Hayle River, 19.

Helmets in Breage Church, 102.

Helston, 74.

Helston Flora, 11.

Helston Old Church, Commissioner Body Murdered in, 60.

Hingston Down, 27, 39.

Hobbs, The Philosopher, 107. 108.

Hoi'ses, Cornish, in 17th Century, 74.

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

Hurling, Game of, 75.

Hathnance, Henry, Vicar of Breage, 82.

Ictis, Island of, 14.

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

Interdict, The, 40.

Ire ton, General, 107.

Irish Saints, The, 17, 19, 22.

Isabella de Clare, 41 .

Ivernians, The, 9, 17.

J-

Jago, Robert, Vicar of Wendioii, 151.

Jago, Family of, 117.

Jakes, Master John, Vicar of Breage, 59.

Jews in Cornwall, 42.

Jew's Lane, Haunting of, 151.

John de Beaupre, 44.

John, Earl of Oxford, 56.

Jordan, William, 77.

m:.

Kells, Book of, 21.
Killigrews of Arwennick, 78.
Killigrew, John, 105.
Killigrew, Dame Margaret, 105.
Kiltor of St. Keverne, 60.

Lauderdale, Earl of, 72.

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

Leeds, Dukes of, 88.

Lemon, William, 140 to 142.

Leofric, Bishop, 28, 34.

Lewes, Battle of, 42.

Llwarch-Hen, 18.

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

MacDonald, Angus, 96

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

Martin, Tobias, 143 to 146

Martyn, Henry, 85, 86

Martyr's Close, 149, 150

Mat Making in Cornwall, 17th Century, 75

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

Midsummer Eve Customs, 12

Militon, Job, 125, 126

Militon, John, 78

Militon, William, 128

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

Miracle Plays, Cornish, 76, 77

Nansladons, Family of, 115

Nicknames, 75

Nicol, Henry, Minister of Germoe, 61

Norman Churches at Breage and Germoe, 36, 37

Norman Fonts at Breage and Germoe, 36

Oratoiies at Rinsy and Godolplun, 50
Oichfird, William, Vicar of Breage, 69 to 72, 82
Oidinalia, The, 77
Origen, 17

Palm Sunday Rites in Mediaeval Church, oG

Pascasius, Vicar of Breage, 43, 44, 45

Patronage of Breage and Germoe, 37

Pelagius, 17

Pellour, Sir William, 49, 57

Pencair, Hill of, 18, 23

Pengersick Castle, 50

Pengersick, Henry de, 46

Pengersick, John, 50

PenwiLh Peninsida, 15

Peuibro Farm, 24

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

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

Phoenicians, 14

Pilgrims to St. Michael's Mount, 56

Population of Breage and Germoe in Saxon Times, 32

Porthleveii, Shipwreck at, 47

Poseidonius, 14

Prior and Canons of Plympton, 35

Reformation, Effects of, 73, 76

Religion of Celts, 10, 14

Restoration of Breage and Gcrnioe Churches in 1891, 88

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

Rinsey, John, 50, 101

Rinsey, Manor of, 28, 29

Roads, Cornish, in 17th Century, 74

Robert de Belesme, 37

Robert de la More, Vicar of Breage, 43

Robert, Earl of Cornwall, 34, 37

Romans in Cornwall, 16

Rood Stairway in Breage Church, 52

St. Aubyn, Thomas, 78, 126

St. Aubyn, John, 79

St. Bridget, 23

St. Breaoa, 16, 19, 22, 24

St. Breoke, 38

St. Christopher, 52

St. Cruenna, 19, 22

St. Chry SOS Lorn, 17

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

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

St. Geimoe's Well, 54

KSt. Gwithian, 22

St. Hilary Gil inch, 16

St. la, 22

St. Just, 21

St, Levan, 22

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

St. Momn,22

St. Niniun, 19

St. Patrick, 19

St. Wendion, 22

Sanctuary Fields, 148

Snxons, 17

Saxon Churches at Breage and Getmoe, 85

Saxon Land Tenure, 29, 30, 31

Saxon Manor Courts, 33

Scilly Islands, 106

Screen in Breaj^e Church, 89 .

Sheep, Cornish, in 17Lh Century, 74

Sheep, Phantom, 151

SUerrit, Alice, 105

Skerrit, John, 105

Sidney, Thomas, 106

Simon de Apulia, Bishop of Exetci-, 39

Smith, Robert. Curate of Gernioe, 71

Smith, Right Honourable W. H., 88

Smuggling Ways, 139, 140

Snow stonns. Great, 97

Spanish Armada, 10

Si)arnon, Family of, 69, 128

Stafford, Bishop of Exeter, 50

Stannary Courts, 39

Stone Ciicles, 11

Surnames, Local, 93, 94

Taliesin, 18

Thanes, Saxon, 20

Tenure of the Manor of Godolphin, 100, 101

Tertullian, 17

Teudor, Cornish Chief, 19, 23

Thirteenth Century, Spirit of, 49

Tillage in Cornwall in 17th Century, 74

Tin Mines, 14, 42, 73

Tinneis, Their Love of Fighting, 81

Tithes of Breage, 71, 150

Tolmena, 23

Totemism, 13, 14

f ensure, Irish, 20

Tower of Breage Church, 25

Tregew, Manor of, 28

Tregoning Hill, 18 ,23, 24, 86

Tremearne Farm, Ancient Chapel at, 116

Trescowe, Manor of, 28, 29

Trewarvas Head, 12, 73

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

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

Treworlas, Manor of, 115 to 117

Vane, Sir Harry, 107
"Venton Ghost" Field, 149
Villeins, 29 ' •

mr.

Waller, Cavalier Poet, 107

Walter de Stapleton, Bishop of Exetei , 44

Welsh at Reformation devoted to the Cluiich, 62

Welsh Bards, 18

Wesley, John, 63, 72, 83 to 85

Western Cornwall, Once Thickly Wooded, 74

Wheal Vor Mine. 16, 73

William de Mortain, Earl of Cornwall, 37

William Fitz Robert, Earl of Cornwall, 37

William, Earl of Gloucester, 38

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

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

William the Conqueror, 28

Wilmet, Jolm, 152

Winnington, Hundred of, 33 ''

Wizard's Plot, 149

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

Wrestling, 75

"5r.

Yealmpton, 46

Yorke, Mary, 65

Yuri, Sir John, Vicar of Breage, 57

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