PERRAN UTHNO, or LITTLE PERRAN.

HALS.

The manuscript relating to this parish is lost.

TONKIN.

St. Piran Uthno, commonly called Little Perran, is in the hundred of Penwith, and is wholly surrounded to the north, west, and east, by St. Hilary, and to the south by the sea. In the Tax. Benefic. this is called Ecclesia de Udnow Parva, and in common speech Little Piran, from its smallness, not containing above 900 acres in all; but it was of greater extent formerly, the sea having much encroached upon it.

This is a rectory, valued in the King’s Book, £17. 11s. 3d.; the patronage in Sir John Trevillian, bart.; the incumbent Mr. John Davies. It hath its other adjunct of Uthno

[which appears from the Tax. Benef. above, to be the original name of the parish, and to have since had the name of the saint prefixed to it] from the manor of Uthno.

In the 3d of Henry IV. the heir of Mark de Walesbreu held two parts of a fee here, for Veno there is plainly a mistake for Uthno: since which time it has had the same lords as Whalesborough; the present lord of this manor being Sir John Trevelyan of Nettlecomb in Somersetshire, bart. as heir to that family.

THE EDITOR.

The church and the tower of this parish are small, but distinguished for their simple and neat appearance. They are situated with the church town in a valley opening to the sea. In the church is a plain memorial of Mr. Henry Davies, great-uncle to the editor, who died in 1737. Two of his relations, Mr. Davies father and son, were successive rectors of this parish, through the bounty of the Trevelyan family.

And it may be a matter of some curiosity to insert the oath administered a century ago to clergymen taking on themselves the office of Dean Rural, or Decanus Episcopus. The oath is now omitted, but the office itself has been uniformly preserved throughout the Diocese of Exeter, and this useful institution is revived in various parts of the kingdom.

The copy was found by the editor at Tredrea, his place in Cornwall, among other old papers.

TENOR JURAMENTI

Decani Episcopi, in Comitatu Cornubiæ et Diœcesi Exoniensi.

YOU GEORGE DAVIES shall swear, That you will well and truly execute the Office of DEAN RURAL,

within your Deanery, for the Year ensuing. You shall diligently, in the year, visit all Churches and Chapels within your Deanery; and also all Parsonage and Vicarage Houses. You shall make true Presentments of such Defaults, as you shall find therein; as also the defect of Books, Ornaments, Utensils, and other Furniture belonging to each Church. You shall observe the Manners and Conversation of your Brethren the Clergy; whom (if obnoxious) You shall admonish; and, if thereupon they shall not reform, You shall detect, and present them to The Ordinary; that they may be proceeded against according to Law. You shall, either by yourself or deputy, faithfully execute, or cause to be executed, all such processes and mandates, as shall be sent you from your Ordinary, and make true Returns of the same.

So help you God.

Sacramentum superscriptum præstabat Clericus prædictus
GEORGIUS DAVIES de Parochia Sancti Perrani
de Uthno in Diaconatu Penwith Rector.
Tertio die mensis Decembris, Anno 1730.
Coram me Ricardo W—[The name is defaced.]

Near the church used to flow a well, which, in addition to supplying ample quantities of excellent water, gave responses to the most interesting questions respecting life, deaths, marriages, &c. under the superintendence of a Pythian hierophant (since peeth, pythe, is Cornish for a well); but this oracle has ceased within the last twenty years, after a manner fairly appropriate to the county; the working of a mine having taken away all the water.

There are several good farm houses in the parish, formerly the residences of gentlemen; but, excepting the church town, only one place deserving the name of a village, which is Goldsithney, commonly pronounced Gulzinney, lying on the road from Redruth to Marazion. In this village was formerly a chapel dedicated to St.

James, as Doctor Borlase has ascertained from documents in the cathedral at Exeter. No memory remains of this chapel having ever been used for divine service; but within the editor’s recollection a small image might be seen over the door, said by the inhabitants to be St. Perran; but if the records consulted by Doctor Borlase are correct, more probably of St. James.

Mr. Lysons mentions the fair which is annually holden here on the fifth of August, St. James’s day, by the old style; and he also takes notice of a tale, which the editor has heard a thousand times, of the fair having been originally kept in the church town of Sithney, near Helston, by virtue of a glove, which was annually displayed there, till the men of Perran, by force or cunning, or by proposing to exchange new gloves for old ones, bore off the talisman, and have by its authority held the fair at Goldsithney ever since, paying one shilling every year as a poor compensation to the party bereaved.

It is needless to add that this tale, as it is related, cannot be true; but the names Sithney and Goldsithney, with the payment to the churchwardens of the parish, seem to indicate some relation between the parish and this village. The displaying of a glove at fairs is an ancient and widely extended custom. Mr. Lysons says it is continued at Chester. The editor has seen a large ornamented glove displayed on a lofty pole over the Guild Hall at Exeter, during the fairs. Was the glove used to receive the tolls, as shillings are still collected in some courts of justice; or had it any reference to hand payments on delivery, as is usual in fairs; or has it a more noble origin in chivalry?

A cove is pointed out in Perran, where the ancestor of the Trevelyans is said to have been borne on shore by the strength of his horse, from the destruction of the Lionesse country, west of the Land’s End. The Trevelyan family are too old, too honourable, and now too much distinguished by science, for them to covet any addition of honour through the medium of fabulous history.

It is recorded in the Saxon Chronicle, that in the year

1099, on St. Martin’s day, there was so very high a tide, and the damage so great in consequence, that men remembered not the like to have ever happened before, and the same day was the first of the new moon.

Stow, who wrote his History of England about the year 1580, notices the great tide of 1099, when he says, The sea brake in over the banks of the Thames and other ryvers, drowning many towns, and much people, with innumerable numbers of oxen and sheepe; at which time the lands in Kent, that sometime belonged to Duke Godwyne, Earle of Kent, were covered with sandes and drowned, which are to this day called Godwyne Sandes. On the slender foundation of these alluvial catastrophies, Florence of Worcester either invented, or with more than monkish credulity, received the tale of a whole district being ingulphed; not at some remote geological period, but in what may be considered as the recent times of authentic history, after the existence of systematic registers and records; a district, covered as he states, by a city, and by a hundred and forty churches, with their accompanying villages, farms, &c. an event that must have shaken the whole of Europe: and, to increase the wonder, a gentleman accidentally on horseback, is carried by this animal to the neighbouring shore of Whitsend Bay, or twenty miles further off, to Perran, through a sea which had swallowed an entire country, and from which the largest of modern vessels could not by possibility have escaped. This idle tale, related by one writer after another, has almost reached our own times. The editor remembers a female relation of a former vicar of St. Erth, who, instructed by a dream, prepared decoctions of various herbs, and repairing to the Land’s End, poured them into the sea, with certain incantations, expecting to see the Lionesse country rise immediately out of the water, having all its inhabitants alive, notwithstanding their long submersion. But

Perchance some form was unobserved,

Perchance in prayer or faith she swerved;

—no country appeared, and, although the love of marvellous

events and of tales exciting the passions, seems not to have diminished in recent times, yet the editor is unaware of any subsequent attempt having been made to rescue those unfortunate people from their protracted state of suspended animation.

Perran Uthnow has to boast of but one modern addition to its residences. About the year 1775, the late Mr. John Shakspeare of Pendarves, built a house similar to the one previously erected by Mr. Stephens at Tregorne, and gave it the name of the family with which he was connected by his marriage.

About half a mile beyond this house, called Acton Castle, Cudden Point projects into the sea, entirely covered with rock, and affording, in many respects, the most pleasing view of any spot in the whole Bay. From St. Michael’s Mount itself, the feature transcendent above all others is lost; but from Cudden all the western objects are seen, without including the long flat land of the Lizard.

Children from all the neighbourhood are in the habit of going to Cudden Point at the low water of spring tides, with the hope of finding a silver table, although they know not why. It appears, however, that a Spanish vessel, having much bullion on board, was wrecked there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

The addition of Uthno made to this saint’s name, designates a manor within the parish; there is also a manor called Lan Uthno, in St. Erth, distinguished in former times as the parish of Lan Uthno; but the editor has never been able to form any conjecture respecting the meaning or the etymology of this word.

The parish feast is celebrated on the nearest Sunday to the fifth of March, St. Perran’s Day.

This parish measures 924 statute acres.

£.s.d.
Annual value of the Real Property, as returned to Parliament in 1815553000
Poor Rate in 183120000
Population,—
in 1801,
506		in 1811,
626		in 1821,
786		in 1831,
1033

giving an increase of somewhat more than 100 per cent. in 30 years.

This great increase of Population is owing to Perran having become a mining parish, and to the cultivation of an extensive piece of waste ground by individuals, constructing houses on portions of land not exceeding one or two acres, granted on leases for their lives. A spot on this formerly open ground, was called Chapel an Crouse, the chapel and cross; but no record nor trace remains of any such an establishment. Near the same place a bowling green existed about fifty years ago, which is said to have been frequented fifty years prior to that period, by all the gentlemen of the neighbourhood.

Present Rector, the Rev. W. M. Johnson, presented in 1815 by Sir J. Trevelyan.

THE GEOLOGY, BY DR. BOASE.

This parish is composed of rocks belonging to the porphyritic series, and which are similar to those of St. Hilary.