The Story of an Ancient Parish: Breage with Germoe / With Some Account of Its Armigers, Worthies and Unworthies, Smugglers and Wreckers, Its Traditions and Superstitions

by H. R. Coulthard

Slowly but gradually the black shadow moved westwards extending itself over the County, leaving in its track half-peopled villages and the survivors dwelling under the shadow of an awful and nameless dread. In the extreme West of the County the ravages of the pestilence seem to have been specially terrible in 1362. It seems more than probable that Sir William Pellour, one of our Vicars of Breage, died of it in this year. Bereft in many cases of the majority of those they loved, and with a vision of death and mortality in its most horrible forms graven upon their minds, the view of life of the mass of the people became utterly changed, and this naturally reflected itself upon the whole religious outlook of the time.

Another subtle and deep influence was beginning to stir at this period, even in the remote wilds of Cornwall. On the Continent, in Italy especially, the human mind in the previous century had begun to awake from the torpor and lethargy of a thousand years. The thirteenth century was a glorious springtime of the human soul, when art, philosophy and the desire to know, came back to the human mind. This tide of new life and light in the fourteenth century began to throb and move, even in the remote backwaters of English life, filling the minds of the people with vague yearnings after better things, and producing a condition of deep spiritual dissatisfaction. This spirit found some expression in the great number of Oratories in the leading private houses, that were licensed, all over the Western Diocese. At this time here in Breage, we read that on 2nd Dec. 1398, John Rynsy of Godolghan, and Elinora, his wife, obtained a licence from Bishop Stafford, for Oratories both at Rynsy and Godolghan, with the stipulation that on Sundays and other Feasts they should resort to their Parish Church, whenever it was conveniently possible for them to do so. Again on 6th September 1400, John Pengersick and Joan, his wife, obtained from Bishop Stafford, a licence for a third Oratory in the Parish at their mansion of Pengersick.

Whilst the gentry were making provision for regular worship in their own houses, new Parish Churches were being built in almost every parish. Practically nine-tenths of the Parish Churches in Devon and Cornwall are the product of this age. The people were seeking to express in stone the new ideal that was moving in their minds, and which was destined to find fuller and deeper expression in the Reformation.

Our Churches of Breage and Germoe we owe to this wonderful quickening of religious life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The old Norman Church at Breage was pulled down in the fifteenth century as inadequate and unworthy, and the present cruciform Church, with its tower sixty-six feet in height, of beautiful workmanship and restful proportions, reared in its place. The Church outwardly to-day is very much as the fifteenth century builders left it. The tiny transepts, which, like the beautiful south porch, externally suggest small battlemented towers, were evidently originally used as side chapels. The frescos with which the whole of the interior walls were once covered, were doubtless painted shortly after the building of the Church.

Fresco painting is the oldest of the arts, its crude beginnings reaching back to the days when palæolithic man sought to exercise it upon the walls of the caverns of the Dordogne. In Egypt the ancient monuments bear witness to its existence from the remotest antiquity. The Etruscans seem to have brought the art with them from the East to Italy, which became in future ages its true home, and where it attained to its highest perfection and beauty. The Romans, probably owing to Greek influences, carried the art much farther than the Etruscans had done. Revived in Italy in the thirteenth, the art reached its highest perfection in the fifteenth century. From Italy the fashion of mural painting spread, and by the fifteenth century seems to have become common even in Cornwall, judging by the records of the survival of numerous fragments. Our frescos were probably painted very soon after the building of the Church, in the latter half of the fifteenth century. An important fact bearing upon fresco painting was the extreme rapidity with which the work had to be accomplished, as the secret of its permanency rested in the plaster upon which it was placed, being damp and newly laid. It will strike the observer at Breage that the fresco of St. Christopher and that of the Christ, though crude in execution, are full of character and force, which the wooden and purely conventional figures of the other frescos entirely lack. It seems evident therefore that the former owe their origin to a different hand than the latter.

The fresco of St. Christopher arrests the eye immediately on entering the Church through the south door. This was doubtless the intention of the designer of the fresco, as to see St. Christopher on entering a Church, according to mediæval superstition was a harbinger of good luck. This may partly account for the superstition that still lingers, that to enter the Church by the west door, which is never used, save for the bearing out of the dead at funerals, foreshadows untimely death.

The windows of the Church, before the pillage and vandalism let loose upon it by the Reformation, were all of stained glass, of which several beautiful fragments have come down to us, as the head of St. Veronica in the chapel at the end of the north aisle, and the heads of the two angels in the south window of the chapel, on the south side of the Church. The Reformation, like all great upheavals, beneficent in themselves, led to the unchaining of the spirit of fanaticism and rapine. The spirit of liberty was fanned into a flame in France before the Revolution by the noblest and purest spirits in the country; yet who could blame them for the frenzied orgies of the Terror? The few fragments of fifteenth century glass were discovered with the bones and skulls of two almost complete skeletons in the walled-up staircase leading to the Rood Loft, in the north wall of the Church, at the time of the restoration in 1891. The probable solution seems that the Commissioners, who visited Breage 22nd April, 1549, to ascertain that the injunctions of Edward VI. were duly fulfilled, ordered the destruction of the windows, as containing figures of the Saints and emblems of idolatry. Possibly also stone tombs were destroyed and desecrated, partly in a spirit of iconoclasm, and partly from the spirit of plunder. We can imagine at this juncture some one more pious or superstitious than his fellows gathering the fragments of beautiful glass, and bones torn from their tombs within the Church, and placing them in the cavity of the broken stairway in process of being walled up.[28]

The granite support of the Credence Table and the Piscina in the chancel were exhumed from the foundations of the Church during the restoration and placed in their original situation: also the rose Piscina and the pedestal on which it at present stands were unearthed at this time. The pedestal in question, it may be stated, has nothing whatever to do with the Piscina, the date of which is most probably coeval with the Church, but is evidently the base of a font of Jacobean origin. The granite bowl masquerading as a stoup in the porch is not of ecclesiastical origin at all; its original use was evidently for grinding corn in primitive times. It may be interesting to mention the discovery during the restoration, beneath the floor of the Church, near where the pulpit now stands, of six skeletons lying uncoffined side by side, the skulls of all of them being perforated with bullet wounds; the teeth in each skull were almost perfect, suggestive of violent and untimely deaths. The story of this tragedy has long since faded into oblivion; possibly these skeletons belonged to victims of some fierce act of military discipline or retaliation in the Parliamentary Wars.