CHAPTER IX.
It has been said that the history of England is written in the names of her fields and enclosures. Certain it is that in almost every parish, if the names of the fields be gone over, some name of exceeding interest or curiousness will be discovered, embalming some long-forgotten fact or tradition. There are in the parish of Breage two fields called "The Sentry"; this name is of course obviously a corruption of the word "sanctuary." These two sanctuary fields are at opposite ends of the parish; one forms the site of the main shaft of Wheal Vor Mine, and the other is in the Kenneggie district. Their situation thus lends force to a suggestion that they may in remote times have been actually used as local sanctuaries.[61] The probability of this seems to be increased by the fact that a field contiguous to the Kenneggie sanctuary field, is called the Church Close. Possibly in ancient days in the Church Close there stood a sanctuary chapel, whose story has long since faded into the mists of oblivion. Originally every church and churchyard was a sanctuary for criminals. The sanctuary seats at Hexham Abbey and Beverley Minster and the sanctuary knocker in Durham Cathedral are still in existence. A person who had committed murder or other heinous crime was safe if he could reach a sanctuary before he was waylaid and arrested; once within the sanctuary, if in forty days he confessed his crime and took a solemn oath before the coroner to depart from the country and never return again, he was allowed to go unmolested into exile. Possibly our two local sanctuaries may have been thus used in Celtic times. Had they continued to be used as such in later times, it is probable that some record of this use would have survived.
Two fields in the parish possess the gruesome name of "Park Blood." Certain local antiquaries have drawn the conclusion that the numerous fields of Blood dotted over West Cornwall commemorate the sites of desperate tribal struggles. It seems much more probable and reasonable, however, that "Park Blood"[62] is merely the corruption of the ancient Cornish for "Field of Flowers." This derivation, it is fair to add, seems in keeping with a number of other local names of fields, as "Eye Bright Field," "Bramble Field," "Furzy Croft Field," etc.
Another field of somewhat gruesome name is "Venton Ghost." Mr. Jenner suggests that this name may be a corruption of "Well of Blood," a title which may well have been due to the red waters of a chalybeate spring.
From a field whose name naturally suggests at a first sight ghosts and hauntings, we pass naturally to a field which bears the portentous name of "Wizard's Plot"; alas! all memory of the wizard who once probably dwelt on this spot, and practised his spells and necromancy there, has long since faded into oblivion.
It would be interesting to know how a field on Methleigh Farm obtained the name of "The Martyr's Close." As to who these martyrs were tradition can give no light. It is possible that the name may commemorate one of the many acts of ferocity committed in the name of religion in the days of the "Saints," when slight religious differences were ample justification for any form of homicide, or it may have had, as seems more probable to the writer, some connection with the story of the unfortunate men whose skeletons, bearing upon them the unmistakable traces of violent death, were discovered lying in a shallow grave beneath the site of the pulpit in Breage Church. If this latter theory be accepted it seems probable that the field earned its present name through some act of military reprisal during the Parliamentary Wars.
In the Germoe district there is a field called "Bargest Croft." At first sight "Bargest" suggests a corruption of "Bargheist,"[63] the Teutonic and Scandinavian animal spectre, whose apparitions play such a large part in the folklore of the North of England. The resemblance in the words, however, is only superficial, "Bargest" evidently being a corruption of "Bargas," a kite, which is a more or less common form in compound local place names.
Turning from place names which have been culled in the main from the tithe map to the parish tithe itself. Probably our tithe with other Cornish tithe came first to be paid in Celtic times, not through any force of law, but gradually by custom, each owner of land making what was deemed a fitting payment for the maintenance of the bishop and clergy of the diocese and possibly to some extent for the relief of the poor. As in so many other instances long custom came gradually to obtain the force of legal enactment and the payment of tithe to become legally binding. When Churches were built at Breage and Germoe, our local tithe instead of going to the support of the clergy of the diocese generally, would pass to the special use of the clergy of Breage and Germoe; the right of appointing such clergy passing also by custom, it seems more than probable, to the builders of the Churches and their heirs.
When we deal with the fast fading superstitions of the district, it is interesting to note the extreme frequency in local folklore of superstitions exactly parallel to the Northern superstition of the Bargheist. At no very distant time, judging from the accounts of the aged, the majority of the lanes, roads and lonely places of the district were inhabited by spectral animals. The Board School master, however, has been allowing them no close time, and they soon will be as extinct as the mammoth, the cave bear, or the woolly haired rhinoceros. It is considered unlucky locally to behold these spectral animals, just as in the Northern superstitions the appearance of the Bargheist denotes disaster to the beholder. A flock of phantom sheep on the main road have not yet been quite exterminated, and their pitter-patter on wild, stormy nights may still be heard by the belated wayfarer, whilst a little further on, closely contiguous to the main road, it is said a phantom "passun" may still be seen; also certain houses have been pointed out to the writer as having been terribly troubled with "sperruts."
The great enemy of "sperruts" and spectres of all kinds in his day was the Reverend Robert Jago,[64] Vicar of Wendron, at the end of the seventeenth century. The dim traditions of his doughty feats in warring with spectres still vaguely linger, in a condition varying towards evanescence, in the popular mind. A lane leading up from the village of Herland Cross to Pengilly Farm still bears the name of Jew's Lane. In this lane a Jew had hanged himself in rage or despair after some outrage or wrong committed upon him by the Squire Sparnon of that day. Not long after the Jew's suicide the lane was rendered impassable at night by horrible sounds and sights, and recourse was had to the Reverend Robert Jago, who received a fee of five guineas for the business of laying the troublesome ghost. The method of Mr. Jago seems to have been first to draw a circle with a long whiplash upon the ground, whilst repeating certain formulæ and prayers. Having placed himself within the circle, he was safe from the anger of malignant spirits, and was thus able to summon the troubled spirit and banish it from the neighbourhood without danger to himself.
Mr. Wentz, in his "Faery Faith of Celtic Countries," gives the following story, taken from the lips of an aged man—John Wilmet, of Constantine—having reference to Parson Jago and the traditions of ghost-laying that still linger round his name: "A farmer who once lived near the Gweek River called Parson Jago to his house to have him quiet the ghosts and spirits regularly haunting it, for Parson Jago could always put such things to rest. The parson went to the farmer's house, and with his whip formed a circle on the floor, and demanded the spirit, which made its appearance on the table, to come down into the circle. Whilst on the table the spirit was visible to all the family, but as soon as it got into the ring it disappeared and the house was never troubled afterwards."
John Wilmet had also much to tell Mr. Wentz about the piskies or pobol vean that he heard, but did not see, at Bosahn. It is round the piskies, indeed, that the great mass of Cornish folk beliefs cling. Sixty or seventy years ago this belief seems to have been all but universal amongst the country people, and though now fast dying, is by no means extinct. Indeed, a churchwarden of many years standing recently dated a certain event by the winter in which he had been piskie "led." It seems on this occasion when leaving the market town he had taken the wrong turning and walked on rapidly till in the end he found himself more than twelve miles from home. Another Cornishman informed the writer that one night, thinking something was disturbing some of his cattle, he went out into his field to see what was the matter; when he endeavoured to return to the house, owing to the piskies he could not find the gate again, and had to spend several weary hours wandering round and round the hedges in a vain and exasperating search in rain and darkness, at one time floundering in a nettle bed, at another in mud and water over the tops of his boots.
An aged woman, Mrs. Harriet Christoper, informed Mr. Wentz, that a woman who lived near Breage Church had a fine baby, and she thought the piskies came and took it and put a withered child in its place. The withered child lived to be twenty years old, and was no larger when it died than when the piskies brought it. The parents believed that the piskies often used to come and look over the wall by the house to see the child, and she had heard her grandmother say that the family once put the child out of doors at night to see if the piskies would take it back again. The piskies are said to be very small, and you could never see them by day. She used to hear her grandmother, who had been dead fifty years, say that the piskies used to hold a fair in the fields near Breage, and that the people saw them dancing. She also remembered her grandmother saying that it was customary to set out food for the piskies at night.
Mr. Hunt, in his popular "Romances of the West of England," tells us that Bal Lane in Germoe was a famous haunt of the fairies in old time, and that at certain seasons of the year they held a great fair there.
The fairy folk in local superstitions seem to have been divided into three species—the piskies, fairies of the moors, dells and surface of the earth generally; the knockers or knackers, fairies of the mines, whom the miners heard knocking in the depths of the earth, indicating by their knocks the presence of rich veins of ore, or if of a malignant disposition luring the miners by their knockings to vain efforts after non-existent mineral wealth. The third order of fairies was that of the Buccas, an amphibious species, to whom down to recent times offerings of fish were made.
It is pleasant to gather from the learned author of "The Faery Faith in Celtic Countries" that the superstitions of the Cornish are of a much brighter character than those of the other branches of the Celtic race; the superstitious beliefs of their near kinsmen, the Bretons, being of a specially gloomy character. The pobol vean, it seems, are much more cheery folk, in spite of all their pranks, than gloomy Ankou, king of the dead, and his attendant ghosts. Having said that the Cornish folklore is not of a gloomy character is to say perhaps all that can be said in praise of it.
I have alluded to the foregoing tales and beliefs because in the course of a generation or so they will have completely faded from the popular mind. Our people seem eager to have done with the past, and to reach forward to the future, fraught with new conditions and new thought. When we compare the present with the past, we can only be thankful for all that change has brought within recent generations in physical surroundings and moral outlook. Let us hope that her future gifts, which give promise of being prodigal, will be as beneficent as those of the recent past, for we still require much at her hands. The danger seems to lie in wandering into a materialistic desert, for it is but too true that "Man can not live by bread alone."
