A still more circumstantial account is given by Hals, as quoted by Gilbert in his “Parochial History of Cornwall.” Here we are told that King Henry III., by proclamation, let out all Jews in his dominions at a certain rent to such as would poll and rifle them, and amongst others to his brother Richard, King of the Romans, who, after he had plundered their estates, committed their bodies, as his slaves, to labor in the tin-mines of Cornwall; the memory of whose workings is still preserved in the names of several tin works, called Towle Sarasin, and corruptly Attall Saracen; i.e. the refuse or outcast of Saracens; that is to say, of those Jews descended from Sarah and Abraham. Other works were called Whele Etherson (alias Ethewon), the Jews' Works, or Unbelievers' Works, in Cornish.
Here we see how history is made; and if our inquiries led to no other result, they would still be useful as a warning against putting implicit faith in the statements of writers who are separated by several centuries from the events they are relating. Here we have men like Carew and Camden, both highly cultivated, learned, and conscientious, and yet neither of them hesitating, in a work of historical character, to assert as a fact, what, after making every allowance, can only be called a very bold guess. Have we any reason to suppose that Herodotus and Thucydides, when speaking of the original abodes of the various races of Greece, of their migrations, their wars and final settlements, had better evidence before them, or were more cautious in using their evidence, than Camden and Carew? And is it likely that modern scholars, however learned and however careful, can ever arrive at really satisfactory results by sifting and arranging and rearranging the ethnological statements of the ancients, as to the original abodes or the later migrations of Pelasgians, Tyrrhenians, Thracians, Macedonians, and Illyrians, or even of Dorians, Æolians, and Ionians? What is Carew's evidence in support of his statement that the Jews first worked the tin-mines of Cornwall? Simply the sayings of the people in Cornwall, who support their sayings by the name given to deserted mines, Attall Sarazin. Now admitting that Attall Sarazin or Attall Sazarin, meant the refuse of the Saracens, how is it possible, in cold blood, to identify the Saracens with Jews, and where is there a tittle of evidence to prove that the Jews were the first to work these mines,—mines, be it remembered, which, according to the same Carew, were certainly worked before the beginning of our era?
But leaving the Jews of the time of Nero, let us examine the more definite and more moderate statements of Hals and Gilbert. According to them, the deserted shafts are called by a Cornish name meaning the refuse of the Saracens, because, as late as the thirteenth century, the Jews were sent to work in these mines. It is difficult, no doubt, to prove a negative, and to show that no Jews ever worked in the mines of Cornwall. All that can be done, in a case like this, is to show that no one has produced an atom of evidence in support of Mr. Gilbert's opinion. The Jews were certainly ill treated, plundered, tortured, and exiled during the reign of the Plantagenet kings; but that they were sent to the Cornish mines, no contemporary writer has ever ventured to assert. The passage in Matthew Paris, to which Mr. Gilbert most likely alludes, says the very contrary of what he draws from it. Matthew Paris says that Henry III. extorted money from the Jews, and that when they petitioned for a safe conduct, in order to leave England altogether, he sold them to his brother Richard, “ut quos Rex excoriaverat, Comes evisceraret.”[79] But this selling of the Jews meant no more than that, in return for money advanced him by his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, the King pawned to him, for a number of years, the taxes, legitimate or illegitimate, which could be extorted from the Jews. That this was the real meaning of the bargain between the King and his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, can be proved by the document printed in Rymer's “Fœdera,” vol. i. p. 543, “De Judæis Comiti Cornubiæ assignatis, pro solutione pecuniæ sibi a Rege debitæ.”[80] Anyhow, there is not a single word about [pg 310] the Jews having been sent to Cornwall, or having had to work in the mines. On the contrary, Matthew Paris says, “Comes pepercit iis,” “the Earl spared them.”
After thus looking in vain for any truly historical evidence in support of Jewish settlements in Cornwall, I suppose they may in future be safely treated as a “verbal myth,” of which there are more indeed in different chapters of history, both ancient and modern, than is commonly supposed. As in Cornwall the name of a market has given rise to the fable of Jewish settlements, the name of another market in Finland led to the belief that there were Turks settled in that northern country. Abo, the ancient capital of Finland, was called Turku, which is the Swedish word torg, market. Adam of Bremen, enumerating the various tribes adjoining the Baltic, mentions Turci among the rest, and these Turci were by others mistaken for Turks.[81]
Even after such myths have been laid open to the very roots, there is a strong tendency not to drop them altogether. Thus Mr. H. Merivale is far too good an historian to admit the presence of Jews in Cornwall as far back as the destruction of Jerusalem.[82] He knows there is no evidence for it, and he would not repeat a mere fable, however plausible. Yet Marazion and the Jews' houses evidently linger in his memory, and he throws out a hint that they may find an historical explanation in the fact that under the Plantagenet kings the Jews commonly farmed or wrought the mines. Is there any contemporary evidence [pg 311] even for this? I do not think so. Dr. Borlase, indeed, in his “Natural History of Cornwall” (p. 190), says, “In the time of King John, I find the product of tin in this county very inconsiderable, the right of working for tin being as yet wholly in the King, the property of tinners precarious and unsettled, and what tin was raised was engrossed and managed by the Jews, to the great regret of the barons and their vassals.” It is a pity that Dr. Borlase should not have given his authority, but there is little doubt that he simply quoted from Carew. Carew tells us how the Cornish gentlemen borrowed money from the merchants of London, giving them tin as security (p. 14); and though he does not call the merchants Jews, yet he speaks of them as usurers, and reproves their “cut throate and abominable dealing.” He continues afterwards, speaking of the same usurers (p. 16), “After such time as the Jewes by their extreme dealing had worne themselves, first out of the love of the English inhabitants, and afterwards out of the land itselfe, and so left the mines unwrought, it hapned, that certaine gentlemen, being lords of seven tithings in Blackmoore, whose grounds were best stored with this minerall, grewe desirous to renew this benefit,” etc. To judge from several indications, this is really the passage which Dr. Borlase had before him when writing of the Jews as engrossing and managing the tin that was raised, and in that case neither is Carew a contemporary witness, nor would it follow from what he says that one single Jew ever set foot on Cornish soil, or that any Jews ever tasted the actual bitterness of working in the mines.
Having thus disposed of the Jews, we now turn to [pg 312] the Saracens in Cornwall. We shall not enter upon the curious and complicated history of that name. It is enough to refer to a short note in Gibbon,[83] in order to show that Saracen was a name known to Greeks and Romans, long before the rise of Islam, but never applied to the Jews by any writer of authority, not even by those who saw in the Saracens “the children of Sarah.”
What, then, it may be asked, is the origin of the expression Attal Sarazin in Cornwall? Attal, or Atal, is said to be a Cornish word, the Welsh Adhail, and means refuse, waste.[84] As to Sarazin, it is most likely another Cornish word, which by a metamorphic process, has been slightly changed in order to yield some sense intelligible to Saxon speakers. We find in Cornish tarad, meaning a piercer, a borer; and, in another form, tardar is distinctly used, together with axe and hammer, as the name of a mining implement. The Latin taratrum, Gr. τέρετρον, Fr. tarière, all come from the same source. If from tarad we form a plural, we get taradion. In modern Cornish we find that d sinks down to s, which would give us taras,[85] and plural tarasion. Next, the final l of atal may, like several final l's in the closely allied language of Brittany, have [pg 313] infected the initial t of tarasion, and changed it to th, which th, again, would, in modern Cornish, sink down to s.[86] Thus atal tharasion might have been intended for the refuse of the borings, possibly the refuse of the mines; but pronounced in Saxon fashion, it might readily have been mistaken for the Atal or refuse of the Sarasion or Saracens.
POSTSCRIPT.
The essay on the presence of Jews in Cornwall has given rise to much controversy; and as I republish it here without any important alterations, I feel it incumbent to say a few words in answer to the objections that have been brought forward against it. No one, I think, can read my essay without perceiving that what I question is not the presence of single Jews in Cornwall, but the migration of large numbers of Jews into the extreme West of Britain, whether at the time of the Phœnicians, or at the period of the destruction of Jerusalem, or under the Flavian princes, or even at a later time. The Rev. Dr. Bannister in a paper on “the Jews in Cornwall,” published in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 1867, does indeed represent me as having maintained “that one single Jew never set foot on Cornish soil!” But if my readers will refer to the passage thus quoted from my essay by Dr. Bannister, they will see that it was not meant in that sense. In the passage thus quoted with inverted commas,[87] I simply argued that from certain words used by Carew, on which great stress had been laid, it would not even follow “that one single Jew ever set foot on Cornish soil,” which surely is very different from saying that I maintained that no single Jew ever set foot on Cornish soil. It would indeed [pg 314] be the most extraordinary fact if Cornwall had never been visited by Jews. If it were so, Cornwall would stand alone, as far as such an immunity is concerned, among all the countries of Europe. But it is one thing for Jews to be scattered about in towns,[88] or even for one or two Jews to have actually worked in tin mines, and quite another to speak of towns receiving Hebrew names in Cornwall, and of deserted tin-mines being called the workings of the Jews. To explain such startling facts, if facts they be, a kind of Jewish exodus to Cornwall had to be admitted, and was admitted as long as such names as Marazion and Attal Sarazin were accepted in their traditional meaning. My own opinion was that these names had given rise to the assumed presence of Jews in Cornwall, and not that the presence of Jews in Cornwall had given rise to these names.
If, therefore, it could be proved that some Jewish families had been settled in Cornwall in very early times, or that a few Jewish slaves had been employed as miners, my theory would not at all be affected. But I must say that the attempts at proving even so much have been far from successful. Surely the occurrence of Old Testament names among the people of Cornwall, such as Abraham, Joseph, or Solomon (there is a Solomon, Duke of Cornwall), does not prove that their bearers were Jews. Again, if we read in the time of Edward II. that “John Peverel held Hametethy of Roger le Jeu,” we may be quite certain that le Jeu does not mean “the Jew,” and that in the time of Edward II. no John Peverel held land of a Jew. Again, if in the time of Edward III. we read of one “Abraham, the tinner, who employed 300 men in the stream-works of Brodhok,” it would require stronger proof than the mere name to make us believe that this Abraham was a Jew.