CHAPTER III.
CORNISH CROSSES
Abundance of crosses--The menhîr--Crosses marked the limits of a Llan--Crosses marked places for public prayer--Instance of a Cornish Dissenter--Churches anciently few and far between--The cross erected where was no church--Which therefore precedes the village church--Crosses as waymarks--The Abbot's Way--Interlaced work--The plait a subject for study.
There is no county in England where crosses abound as they do in Cornwall. Second to it comes Devonshire. Indeed, on Dartmoor and in the west of the latter county they are as numerous as in Cornwall.
Their origin is various.
In the first place, where the pagans worshipped a menhîr or standing stone, there it was Christianised by being turned into a cross. In the second place, crosses marked the bounds of a minihi or llan, the sanctuary of the saint.
CROSS, S. LEVAN
Then, again, the Celtic churches were very small, mere oratories, that could not possibly contain a moderate congregation. The saints took their station at a cross, and preached thence. With the Saxons there was a rooted dread of entering an enclosed place for anything like worship, fearing, as they did, the exercise of magical rites; and they were accustomed to hold all their meetings in the open air. S. Walpurga, the sister of S. Willibald, who wrote in 750, and was a Wessex woman, says:--
"It is the custom of the Saxon race that on many estates of nobles and of good men they are wont to have not a church, but the standard of the holy cross dedicated to our Lord and reverenced with great honour, lifted up on high so as to be convenient for the frequency of daily prayer."