From a Cornish Window / A New Edition - Arthur Quiller-Couch

Very pretty, no doubt! but, unlike the Wayside Cross, this kind of writing leads nowhere. We want Mr. Hawker's authority for what 'the forefathers said, in their simplicity'; without that, what the forefathers said resembles what the soldier said in being inadmissible as evidence. We want Mr. Hawker's authority for saying that these paths 'in truth, were trodden, and worn by religious men.' Nay we want his authority for saying that there were any paths at all! The hypotheses of symbolism are even worse; for these may lead to anything. Mr. Langdon was seriously told on one occasion that the four holes of a cross represented the four evangelists. "This," says he plaintively, "it will be admitted, is going a little too far, as nothing else but four holes could be the result of a ring and cross combined." At Phillack, in the west of Cornwall, there is part of a coped stone having a rude cable mounting along the top of the ridge. Two sapient young archaeologists counted the remaining notches of this cable, and, finding they came to thirty-two, decided at once that they represented our Lord's age! They were quite certain, having counted them twice. In fact, there seems to be nothing that symbolism will not prove. Do you meet with a pentacle? Its five points are the fingers of Omnipotence. With a six-pointed star? Then Omnipotence has taken an extra finger, to include the human nature of the Messiah: and so on. It reminds one of the Dilly Song:—

"I will sing you Five, O!"
"What is your Five, O?"
"Five it is the Dilly Bird that's never seen but heard, O!"
"I will sing you Six, O!…"

And six is 'The Cherubim Watchers,' or 'The Crucifix,' or 'The Cheerful Waiters,' or 'The Ploughboys under the Bowl,' or whatever local fancy may have hit on and made traditional.

The modern researcher is honest and sticks to facts; but there are next to no facts. And when he comes to a tentative conclusion, he must hedge it about with so many 'ifs,' that practically he leaves us in total indecision. Nothing, for instance, can exceed the patient industry displayed in the late Mr. William Copeland Borlase's Age of the Saints —a monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall: but, in a way, no more hopeless book was ever penned. The author confessed it, indeed, on his last page. "There seems to be little ground for hope that we shall be ever able to gain a perfectly true insight into the history of the epoch with which we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes of so tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put it, to be not unlike that of gathering up the broken pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the hope of fitting them together so as to make one large and perfect vase, but finding during the process that they belong to several vessels, not one of which is capable of restoration as a whole, though some faint notion of the pristine shape of each may be gained from the general pattern and contour of its shards. All that can be gained from the materials at hand is a reasonable probability that Cornwall, before it bent its neck to the See of Canterbury, had been invaded by three distinct streams of missionary effort—from Ireland, from Wales, and from Brittany. But even in what order they came no man can say for certain.

The young lady in my friend's story wished to hear the service of the Church of England in 'the fine old Cornish language.' Alas! if Edward VI. and his advisers had been as wise, the religious history of Cornwall, during two centuries at least, had been a happier one. It was liberal to give Englishmen a Liturgy in their own tongue; but it was neither liberal nor conspicuously intelligent to impose the same upon the Cornishmen, who neither knew nor cared about the English language. It may be easy to lay too much stress upon this grievance; since Cornishmen of this period had a knack of being 'agin the government, anyway,' and had contrived two considerable rebellions less than sixty years before, one because they did not see their way to subscribing £2,500 towards fighting King James IV. of Scotland for protecting Perkin Warbeck, and the other under Perkin's own leadership. But it was at least a serious grievance; and the trouble began in the first year of Edward VI.'s reign. The King began by issuing several Injunctions about religion; and among them, this one: That all images found in churches, for divine worship or otherwise, should be pulled down and cast forth out of those churches; and that all preachers should persuade the people from praying to saints, or for the dead, and from the use of beads, ashes, processions, masses, dirges, and praying to God publicly in an unknown tongue. A Mr. Body, one of the commissioners appointed to carry out this Injunction, was pulling down images in Helston church, near the Lizard, when a priest stabbed him with a knife: "of which wound he instantly fell dead in that place. And though the murderer was taken and sent up to London, tried, found guilty of murder in Westminster Hall, and executed in Smithfield, yet the Cornish people flocked together in a tumultuous and rebellious manner, by the instigation of their priests in divers parts of the shire or county, and committed many barbarities and outrages in the same." These disturbances ended in Arundel's rebellion, the purpose of which was to demand the restoration of the old Liturgy; and, in truth, the Seven Articles under which they formulated this demand must have seemed very moderate indeed to their conservative minds. The rebellion failed, of course, after a five weeks' siege of Exeter; and was bloodily revenged, with something of the savage humour displayed by Jeffreys in punishing a later Western rebellion. This part of the business was committed to Sir Anthony (alias William) Kingston, Knight, a Gloucestershire man, as Provost Marshal; and "it is memorable what sport he made, by virtue of his office, upon men in misery." Here are one or two of his merry conceits, which read strangely like the jests reported by Herodotus:—

(1) "One Boyer, Mayor of Bodmin in Cornwall, had been amongst the rebels, not willingly, but enforced: to him the Provost sent word he would come and dine with him: for whom the Mayor made great provision. A little before dinner, the Provost took the Mayor aside, and whispered him in the ear, that an execution must that day be done in the town, and therefore required to have a pair of gallows set up against dinner should be done. The Mayor failed not of the charge. Presently after dinner the Provost, taking the Mayor by the hand, intreated him to lead him where the gallows was, which, when he beheld, he asked the Mayor if he thought them to be strong enough. 'Yes' (said the Mayor),'doubtless they are.' 'Well, then'(said the Provost), 'get you up speedily, for they are provided for you.' 'I hope' (answered the Mayor), 'you mean not as you speak.' 'In faith' (said the Provost), 'there is no remedy, for you have been a busie rebel.' And so without respite or defence he was hanged to death; a most uncourteous part for a guest to offer his host." —Sir Rich. Baker, 1641.
(2) "Near the same place dwelt a Miller, who had been a busie actor in that rebellion; who, fearing the approach of the Marshal, told a sturdy fellow, his servant, that he had occasion to go from home, and therefore bid him, that if any man came to inquire after the miller, he should not speak of him, but say that himself was the miller, and had been so for three years before. So the Provost came and called for the miller, when out comes the servant and saith he was the man. The Provost demanded how long he had kept the mill? 'These three years' (answered the servant). Then the Provost commanded his men to lay hold on him and hang him on the next tree. At this the fellow cried out that he was not the miller, but the miller's man. 'Nay, sir' (said the Provost), 'I will take you at your word, and if thou beest the miller, thou art a busie knave; if thou beest not, thou art a false lying knave; and howsoever, thou canst never do thy master better service than to hang for him'; and so, without more ado, he was dispatched."—Ibid.

The story of one Mayow, whom Kingston hanged at a tavern signpost in the town of St. Columb, has a human touch. "Tradition saith that his crime was not capital; and therefore his wife was advised by her friends to hasten to the town after the Marshal and his men, who had him in custody, and beg his life. Which accordingly she prepared to do; and to render herself the more amiable petitioner before the Marshal's eyes, this dame spent so much time in attiring herself and putting on her French hood, then in fashion, that her husband was put to death before her arrival."

Such was the revenge wreaked on a population which the English of the day took so little pains to understand that (as I am informed) in an old geography book of the days of Elizabeth, Cornwall is described as 'a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain.'