So blessed be the “Lyonnesse,” and long may she continue to reign supreme over that part of the Atlantic—perhaps until the time when we shall be flying across from Penzance, and looking back with horror on the days of sea-passages, even as we now look back to the days of the sailing-vessels.
[II]
HISTORICAL
A WELL-KNOWN writer has spoken of the Scilly Isles as “patches of rock, dignified by historical and political associations”; and one is surprised to find, considering their small size and their isolated situation, how very frequently they do figure in the pages of history.
They were included with the mainland when the Romans took possession of Britain, and possibly their conquerors introduced Christianity here as elsewhere after they themselves had been converted. This is only guesswork. Strangely enough the first Christians whom we actually know by historical records to have landed in Scilly were heretics, sent there into exile by the Emperor Maximus for their unorthodox opinions. These were Bishops Instantius and Tiberianus, who were convicted of the Priscilline heresy in a.d. 384 and sent to “insula Sylina, quæ ultra Britannias est,” as we learn from Sulpicius Severus, who wrote only twenty years after the event.
After the Romans had left Britain (a.d. 410) the islands probably remained, like West Cornwall, independent of the Saxons; and when four centuries later the Northmen came to harry the country, they were joined by Welsh and Cornish Celts, glad of the chance of a blow at their common foe the Saxon. Scilly was then used by the Northmen as a sort of “naval base,” from which expeditions were made against the mainland. King Athelstan sent a fleet to oust them in 927, and left a garrison on the largest island; afterwards, in fulfilment of a vow, he founded a collegiate church at St. Buryan in Cornwall to commemorate his conquest.
It is uncertain at what date the Benedictine monks first came to Scilly. Some say it was in 938.
According to the Saga of King Olaf Tryggwason there was on Tresco in his time “a famous abbot, the head of a great cloister.” The story goes that the young Viking, in about the year 993, came harrying the coasts of England with a fleet of ninety-three ships, and was driven by contrary winds to the Isles of Scilly. Here he heard of a wonderful Christian hermit, who lived in a cell among the granite rocks and was said to possess the power of prophecy.