There is much confusion in these traditions. The Jew, and the Saracen, and the Phœnician are regarded as terms applied to the same people. Whereas the Phœnicians, who are recorded to have traded with the Cornish Britons for tin, and the Jews, who were the great tin miners and merchants in the days of King John, are separated by wide periods of time; and the “Saracens,” who some suppose to have been miners who came from Spain when that country was under the dominion of the Moors, occupy a very undefined position. Tradition, however, tells us that the old Cornish miners shipped their tin at several remarkable islands round the coast. St Michael’s Mount has been especially noticed, but this arises from the circumstance that it still retains the peculiar character which it appears to have possessed when Diodorus wrote. But Looe Island, St Nicholas’s Island in Plymouth Sound, the island at St Ives, the Chapel Rock at Perran, and many other insular masses of rock, which are at but a short distance from the coast, are said to have been shipping-places.
Tradition informs us that the Christian churches upon Dartmoor, which are said to have been built about the reign of John, were reared by the Jews. Once, and once only, I heard the story told in more detail. They, the Jews, did not actually work in the tin streams and mines of the Moor, but they employed tinners, who were Christians; and the king imposed on the Jew merchants the condition that they should build churches for their miners.
That the Phœnicians came to Cornwall to buy tin has been so often told, that there is little to be added to the story. It was certainly new, however, to be informed by the miners in Gwennap—that there could be no shade of doubt but that St Paul himself came to Cornwall to buy tin, and that Creegbraws—a mine still in existence—supplied the saint largely with that valuable mineral. Gwennap is regarded by Gwennap men as the centre of Christianity. This feeling has been kept alive by the annual meeting of the Wesleyan body in Gwennap Pit—an old mine-working—on Whit-monday. This high estate and privilege is due, says tradition, to the fact that St Paul himself preached in the parish.[46]
I have also been told that St Paul preached to the tinners on Dartmoor, and a certain cross on the road from Plympton to Princes-Town has been indicated as the spot upon which the saint stood to enlighten the benighted miners of this wild region. Of St Piran or Perran we have already spoken as the patron saint of the tinners, and of the discovery of tin a story has been told, (p. 21;) and we have already intimated that another saint, whose name alone is preserved, St Picrous, has his feast-day amongst the tinners of eastern Cornwall, on the second Thursday before Christmas.
Amidst the giant stories we have the very remarkable Jack the Tinker, who is clearly indicated as introducing the knowledge of tin, or of the dressing of tin, to the Cornish. This is another version of Wayland Smith, the blacksmith of Berkshire. The blacksmith of the Berkshire legend reappears in a slightly altered character in Jack the Tinker. In Camden’s “Britannia” we read, relative to Ashdown, in Berkshire:—
“The burial-place of Baereg, the Danish chief, who was slain in this fight, (the fight between Alfred and the Danes,) is distinguished by a parcel of stones, less than a mile from the hill, set on edge, enclosing a piece of ground somewhat raised. On the east side of the southern extremity stand three squarish flat stones, of about four or five feet over either way, supporting a fourth, and now called by the vulgar, Wayland Smith, from an idle tradition about an invisible smith replacing lost horseshoes there.”—Gough’s Camden.
See “Kenilworth,” by Sir Walter Scott, who has appropriated Wayland Smith with excellent effect.
“The Berkshire legend of Wayland Smith (‘Wayland Smith,’ by W. S. Singer) is probably but a prototype of Dædalus, Tubal Cain, &c.”—Wilson’s Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.
See also Mr Thomas Wright’s Essay on Wayland Smith.