AN ANCIENT PEOPLE.
There is no lack of literature about Cornwall. Hardly any other county in England finds so many to write about it. It is a favourite with novelists as a place in which to give their imaginary characters ‘a local habitation and a name;’ and Tre, Pol, and Pen abound in their pages. Every year there is a crop of articles about it in the newspapers and magazines for the benefit of those who choose it for the scene of their autumn rambles, or who wish to renew their recollection of its rocky headlands, washed by the deep-blue Atlantic waves, its sheltered coves, its glorious sunsets, and its wealth of ferns and rare birds and flowers. In nine cases out of ten, it is of the Land’s End and its neighbourhood that people thus write; indeed, in the minds of many at a distance, the Land’s End is Cornwall, much as the Fens are popularly supposed to be Lincolnshire. But there is much that is interesting about the county and its people which only those who live in Cornwall are likely to observe. It is not as other counties, and the Cornish are not as other folk who live ‘up the country’—the local name for all beyond the Tamar. They have peculiarities of custom and of speech, not to be accounted for merely by the fact that they are far away from the great centres of national life, and are, as it were, living in the day before yesterday. They are of a distinct race, the kindred of the Welsh, the Irish, and the Bretons, but a race whose language has perished, save in the names of places and people; and the tongue they speak is not the English of to-day, but, with a mixture of Celtic idiom, the English of two centuries ago, the English of our translation of the Bible. Cornwall is emphatically an ancient county, and there is an unmistakably old-world flavour about everything that belongs to it.
One thing which particularly strikes any one who converses much with the labouring classes is, that they speak much more grammatically than their compeers usually do. There are the peculiar idioms which we have just mentioned; but apart from these, the language is rather that of educated people than what one usually hears in other counties. This arises from the fact that English was scarcely introduced into Cornwall until the Elizabethan age, and that when it was introduced it was by the upper classes. The rest, who used Cornish for their intercourse with each other, learned English as a foreign tongue, and learned the refined form of it. That form it still retains; and hence, quaint and odd as it is when used in the Cornish way, from the lips of these western folk it is never vulgar. We are not well enough read in the mysteries of the ancient tongue to know the reason for the singular use of the personal pronouns, but certain it is that they seem to have a rooted antipathy to the objective case. ‘Tell it to she,’ ‘Bring he to I,’ and ‘This is for we,’ are the universal forms. Then the preposition ‘to’ is always used instead of ‘at,’ as, ‘I live to Bodmin.’ In Cornwall, too, people are never surprised, but ‘frightened’ or ‘hurried;’ never in a bad temper, but in a ‘poor’ one; and the very eggs and milk, if kept too long, go ‘poor.’ When they live beyond their means, they ‘go scat;’ and if they are not too particular as to honourable dealing, they ‘furneague.’
But in spite of these peculiarities, one hears the ring of good old English speech, such as nowadays we may look for vainly elsewhere, save in the pages of the Bible. Girls are spoken of as the maids or the maidens, and when they leave the house, they ‘go forth.’ ‘Come forth, my son,’ is an invitation one often hears, occasionally even when ‘my son’ turns out to be a horse or a dog. And if we wish to know the name of any little boy whom we may meet, the best chance of getting an intelligible answer is to put the question in the form of, ‘How are you called, my son?’
In things that meet the eye, too, we seem to have come into an older world in Cornwall. There are the old-fashioned earthen or ‘clomb’ pitchers, of exactly the pattern we see in the pictures of old Bibles in the hands of Rebekah or Zipporah; though we cannot say we ever saw one balanced upon the top of a woman’s head. Till very lately, oxen were still used to draw the plough; and to this day, in the country districts, kitchen stoves, and indeed coal-fires of any sort, are hardly known. The fuel is commonly dried furze, which is burned either in an earthen oven or on a wide open hearth. It is thrown on piece by piece with a pitchfork, till the iron plate on which the baking is to be done is considered hot enough; then the plate is swept clean, and the cakes—biscuits, as they are termed—or pasties having been ranged in order upon it, an iron vessel shaped somewhat like a flower-pot is turned over them, the furze is again piled on, and a large heap of glowing embers raked over all. No further attention is paid to the cooking; but when the embers are cold, the things are done. And those pasties, what wonderful productions they are to the uninitiated; there appears to be scarcely any article of food that does not find its way into them. Parsley pasties, turnip pasties (very good these are, too), ‘licky,’ that is, leek pasties, pasties of conger-eel, of potatoes and bacon, of all kinds of meat and of all kinds of fruit, the variety is endless.
In the old days, the Cornish were great smugglers. Indeed, the natural features of the coast are such, that they would have been almost more than human if they were not. Even when it did not pay very well, the love of adventure enlisted the whole population in its favour. The farmers who did not themselves help to run a cargo on a moonless night, would, when the riders—the coastguard—were out of the way, lend their horses to those who did, so that long before daylight the kegs were all carried off far inland, or stowed away in the hiding-holes which nearly every house possessed. A darker page of Cornish history is that of the days of wrecking. Terrible sights have some of those pitiless beaches witnessed, when the doomed vessel was lured on by false lights to be the prey of men more pitiless still. At St Eval, between Padstow and Newquay, a lame horse used to be led on stormy nights along the cliffs with a lantern fixed on its head; and many a craft, supposing it to be the light of a ship riding at anchor, was then steered by her luckless crew straight into the very jaws of death. Wrecks were looked upon as a legitimate harvest of the sea, even as things to be prayed for, like a shoal of pilchards or a lode of tin. The remains of that feeling are not extinct even yet. A few years ago, a vessel laden with Manchester goods was wrecked on the north coast. Her name was the Good Samaritan. Of course such of her cargo as was saved was supposed to be handed over to the coastguard, according to law; but a good deal of flotsam and jetsam was quietly appropriated notwithstanding, the fortunate finders never dreaming that there could be anything morally wrong in such acquisitions, though they might not be strictly legal. Some months afterwards, a lady of the neighbourhood was visiting the cottagers and asking them how they had got through the hard winter that was just over; and she was told by one of the simple folk that times had been bad indeed, that work had been slack and wages low, and that it had been a severe struggle to keep a home together. ‘And indeed I don’t know what we should have done, if the Lord hadn’t sent us the Good Samaritan!’
It is reported of a worthy old parson on the west coast at the end of the last century, when wrecks were considered as godsends, and it was an article of faith that the owners of a ship lost all title to their property the moment her keel touched ground, that in the long extempore prayer which, in defiance of the rubrics, was then generally indulged in before the sermon, he was accustomed, as the winter drew on, to introduce a reference to this grim ocean harvest, in some such style as this: ‘Lord, we do not pray for wrecks; but since there must be some, grant, we beseech Thee, that they may be on our beach.’ Perhaps this was the divine who was in the middle of his sermon when the news reached the church that a vessel had just struck and was going to pieces in the bay, and who instantly concluded with the benediction, and left his surplice in the pulpit, so that he and his congregation might start fair upon the shore. Yet eager as was the rivalry for what could be snatched from the sea, there was no pilfering from any man’s heap. To this day, you have but to put a stone upon anything you find upon the beach, in token that it has been ‘saved,’ and you may leave it in perfect safety, for no Cornishman will take it then. If, on your return, you find it gone, you may be sure that some less scrupulous ‘up-country people’ have been by that way.
As to the ferns, every botanist knows the green treasures of this western land. Indeed, we wish he did not know quite so well; for though men of science may be trusted to pursue their researches without wanton destruction of the beauties of nature, it is too often far otherwise with the tourist. It is not only ’Arry who is to blame in this matter; those from whom one might expect more consideration for the feelings and the rights of others are not seldom the greatest sinners of all. Only last summer, a young man actually stripped two large hamperfuls of the beautiful sea-fern (Asplenium marinum) from the roof of a cave, utterly ruining its beauty for several years to come. There were plenty of specimens to be had elsewhere upon the cliffs for the climbing; but he must needs get a ladder and take fifty times as many as he could possibly want, just where it most grieved the inhabitants of the neighbourhood to lose them. But we fear our righteous indignation at the iniquities of the tourist will run away with us—how he ruthlessly exterminates rare ferns; how he comes into churches where service is going on, and walks about and stares around him; how he strews scenes of natural loveliness with his sandwich papers and his broken bottles; how he thinks to add interest to the rocks and cliffs by inscribing his name and the date of his visit upon their face. It is his mission, we suppose, to ‘vulgarise creation.’ But Cornwall will take a great deal of spoiling yet, and so will its people and its language, menaced as this last is by the penny paper and the Board School. And those who like a peep into a world which, in spite of railways and telegraphs and newspapers and nineteenth-century ideas, is still an old world, and full of old and quaint and beautiful things, will find enough in Cornwall to occupy them, as a Cornishman would say, for a ‘brave little bit of time.’