The northern side of the churchyard is, according to ancient usage, devoid of graves.[24] This is the common result of an unconscious sense among the people of the doctrine of regions—a thought coeval with the inspiration of the Christian era. This is their division.[25] The east was held to be the realm of the oracles, the especial gate of the throne of God; the west was the domain of the people—the Galilee of all nations was there; the south, the land of the mid-day, was sacred to things heavenly and divine; but the north was the devoted region of Satan and his hosts, the lair of the demon and his haunt. In some of our ancient churches, and in the church of Welcombe,[26] a hamlet bordering on Morwenstow, over against the font, and in the northern wall, there is an entrance named the Devil’s door: it was thrown open at every baptism, at the Renunciation, for the escape of the fiend; while at every other time it was carefully closed. Hence, and because of the doctrinal suggestion of the ill-omened scenery of the northern grave-ground, came the old dislike[27] to sepulture on the north side, so strikingly visible around this church.
The events of the last twenty years have added fresh interest to God’s acre, for such is the exact measure of the grave ground of St. Morwenna. Along and beneath the southern trees, side by side, are the graves of between thirty and forty seamen, hurled by the sea, in shipwreck, on the neighbouring rocks, and gathered up and buried there by the present vicar and his people. The crews of three lost vessels, cast away upon the rocks of the glebe and elsewhere, are laid at rest in this safe and silent ground. A legend for one recording-stone thus commemorates a singular scene. The figurehead[28] of the brig Caledonia, of Arbroath, in Scotland, stands at the graves of her crew, in the churchyard of Morwenstow:—
“We laid them in their lowly rest,
The strangers of a distant shore;
We smoothed the green turf on their breast,
’Mid baffled ocean’s angry roar!
And there—the relique of the storm—
We fixed fair Scotland’s figured form.
She watches by her bold—her brave—
Her shield towards the fatal sea;
Their cherished lady of the wave
Is guardian of their memory!
Stern is her look, but calm, for there
No gale can rend, or billow bear.
Stand, silent image, stately stand!
Where sighs shall breathe and tears be shed;
And many a heart of Cornish land
Will soften for the stranger-dead.
They came in paths of storm—they found
This quiet home in Christian ground.”
Doorway at Stanbury, showing the initials of Kempthorne and Manning.
Halfway down the principal pathway of the churchyard is a granite altar-tomb. It was raised, in all likelihood, for the old “month’s mind,” or “year’s mind,” of the dead: and it records a sad parochial history of the former time. It was about the middle of the sixteenth century that John Manning, a large landowner of Morwenstow, wooed and won Christiana Kempthorne, the vicar’s daughter. Her father was also a wealthy landlord of the parish in that day. Their marriage united in their own hands a broad estate, and in the midst of it the bridegroom built for his bride the manor-house of Stanbury, and labelled the door-heads and the hearths with the blended initials[29] of the married pair. It was a great and a joyous day when they were wed, and the bride was led home amid all the solemn and festal observances of the time. There were liturgical benedictions of the mansion-house, the hearth, and the marriage-bed; for a large estate and a high place for their future lineage had been blended in the twain. Five months afterwards, on his homeward way from the hunting-field, John Manning was assailed by a mad bull, and gored to death not far from his home. His bride, maddened at the sight of her husband’s corpse, became prematurely a mother and died. They were laid, side by side, with their buried joys and blighted hopes, underneath this altar-tomb—whereon the simple legend records that there lie “John Manning and Christiana his wife, who died A.D. 1546, without living issue.”
THE MANNING TOMB IN MORWENSTOW CHURCHYARD (P. 24)