That a purer English is spoken on the islands than on the mainland has been explained by the fact that a Bedfordshire company of soldiers was left behind in garrison here during the Commonwealth, and in time was completely forgotten. The soldiers intermarried with the island women when they had given up all idea of being recalled. I do not think that any one who has ever heard the true Bedfordshire twang could credit this story as an explanation!
But there is little doubt that fresh blood has been introduced into the islands by such intermarriages. Duke Cosmo III. of Tuscany was driven by contrary winds to put into St. Mary’s Harbour in 1669, and he reports that “corn of late began to be scarce, in consequence of the increase of the population produced by marriages of the soldiers of the garrison with the islanders, but this has been remedied for some years past by forbidding them to marry!”
The isolation of the islanders led in past times to intermarriage between the same families again and again, but the results do not appear to have been as unfortunate as might have been expected.
There is this result, on the off-islands especially, that the same surname is repeated over and over again, so that nicknames have to be resorted to, to distinguish one man from another. On St. Agnes every man is a Hicks, unless he is a Legge. On Tresco, Bryher, and St. Martin’s, Jenkins, Pender, Ashford, and Ellis are the typical names.
It happened once on St. Agnes at the signing of the parish books that the names of the four signatories (the churchwarden, the two overseers, and the auditor from London) were all the same—Hicks!
There are traces of prehistoric man in nearly all the islands—kitchen-middens, with heaps of limpet-shells and other refuse, and great numbers of sepulchral barrows of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.
At the foot of Hellingy Downs on St. Mary’s the remains of a primitive village have been discovered, with the foundations of many circular huts, some of which have now been washed away by the sea. There was a kitchen-midden close by; and an ancient stone hand-mill, about four thousand years old, and some very crude pottery of the same period, were unearthed from among the foundations.
When digging near Garrison Hill, St. Mary’s, some of the islanders have come across layers of limpet-shells four feet in depth; and on the desolate island of Annet, now sacred to sea-birds, there has recently been found a midden with quantities of the peculiarly shaped and unmistakable pharyngeal bone of the wrasse, as well as the inevitable limpet-shells, showing that in this case prehistoric man had endeavoured to vary his diet. Dr. Borlase, the antiquarian, thus describes the barrows:—
“The outer ring is composed of large stones pitched on end, and the heap within consists of smaller stones, clay, and earth, mixed together. They have generally a cavity of stonework in the middle, covered with flat stones; but the barrows are of various dimensions, and the cavities, which, being low and covered with rubble, are scarce apparent in some, consist of such large materials in others that they make the principal figure in the monument.”