The Cornish Coast (South), and the Isles of Scilly

by Charles G. Harper

As "St. Michael's" Mount the island became early known. At some uncertain time the Archangel is said to have appeared here to some hermits, and the place was therefore already holy when St. Keyne came from Ireland in A.D. 490 and visited it. Edward the Confessor, in the eleventh century, granted St. Michael's Mount to the Benedictine Abbey of Mont St. Michel in Normandy, and until the reign of Henry the Fifth it remained the property of that Abbey, with a priory established on its summit. It was then transferred to the Abbey of Sion, in Middlesex.

The Abbey of Mont St. Michel and the Priory of St. Michael's Mount were fortresses, as well as religious establishments. The monks had fortified themselves for their own protection, and the strongholds seemed so useful to men of strife that we early find St. Michael's Mount seized and held by them when trouble was brewing. Thus, when Richard Lion-heart was a prisoner abroad, one Henry de Pomeroy got possession of the Mount on behalf of John. But when Richard, contrary from all reasonable expectation, returned, the position became untenable, the garrison yielded, and Pomeroy opened one of his veins and bled himself to death; a more excellent way than reserving himself for the picturesque and long-drawn agonies that in those times were the penalty of high treason.

A more desperate affair was that of 1471, when the Earl of Oxford, and a party of fugitives from the Yorkist crowning mercy at Barnet, fled from the vengeance of Edward the Fourth and took possession of the Mount. They came as pilgrims. You may quite easily picture them coming to the shore, pausing a moment at the Chapel Rock, then with a chapel on it; and thence walking the causeway to the Mount, kissing the relics at the foot of it, praying at the two wayside crosses up its steep sides and then admitted to the Priory itself, where, with drawn swords, produced from beneath their travel-stained pilgrims' garb, they soon made themselves masters of the place. Sir John Arundell, sheriff of Cornwall, was sent to dislodge them, and was after several attacks slain on the sands. According to the received account, Edward the Fourth pardoned the Earl of Oxford, on account of his so gallantly defending himself here; but we may well suppose that he "pardoned" him because he could not by other means dislodge this valorous rebel.

The Priory became a sanctuary for Lady Catherine Gordon, wife of Perkin Warbeck, in the time of Henry the Seventh, but sanctuaries were generally violated, and this was no exception. She was dragged out and sent to London.

During the west-country rebellion against the reformed religion in 1549, the Priory having by that time been dissolved and the property granted to the Arundells of Lanherne, Humphrey Arundell held it for the rebels. It was taken and retaken in the fights that followed, and Arundell at last was captured and put to death. The last warlike operations at St. Michael's Mount were the defence by the Royalist, Sir Francis Basset, and the capture by Colonel Hammond, on behalf of the Parliament. Since 1660 it has been the property of the St. Aubyn family.

ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT. [From the painting by Clarkson Stanfield.

The village at the foot of the Mount, with its little harbour, occupies a humble feudal situation beneath the castle of my Lord St. Levan. If you would seek revived mediævalism in a democratic age, then St. Michael's Mount is the place to find it, for Lord St. Levan maintains a body of gorgeously liveried boatmen to row him across, to and from his island hold; and nowadays, instead of being free to ramble about the craggy sides of the Mount, the stranger must resign himself to a guide. Whether wanton mischief on the part of holiday-makers, or the scattering of sandwich-papers, has aught to do with this changed condition of affairs, or whether it is merely due to the increased consideration the St. Aubyns cherish for themselves since the barony of St. Levan was conferred upon the family in 1887, I will not pretend to say.

The interior of the castellated residence is of somewhat varied interest. The chapel, although originally of Perpendicular architecture, was so altered in the "restoration" of 1826 that it is now merely a melancholy example of what was in those days considered to be Gothic. It is chill and bare and quite without any feature of note, with the exception of one thing that, being just a hole in the floor, can scarce be described as a "feature." This is an oubliette, discovered during the works of 1826.

Romantic novelists have been largely responsible for a general indifference to the very real mysteries and tragedies of ancient buildings, and the public, unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, have agreed to look upon everything out of the common as fiction. Yet here, the workmen of some eighty years ago, removing the old woodwork, discovered a walled-up door in the south wall, and, opening it, a narrow flight of stone steps was revealed, leading down into a grim stone cell, six feet square, without any window or other opening than the door by which they had entered. They were horrified by stumbling in the darkness of that dreadful place upon what proved to be the skeleton of a man of extraordinary height. Who that unfortunate wretch was, flung into this living tomb, to be conveniently "forgotten" and to die of starvation, has never been discovered. The appalling cynicism that constructed this particular example of an oubliette beneath the chapel floor is worthy of remark. While the doomed man lay there, above him the pious castellan and his fellow-villains were praising God.