Her body was laid at Burton-on-Trent, and was long an object of pilgrimage. But the fact that for a short while St. Modwenna instructed the sister of Alfrid, “son of the King of England,” has led some writers into strange mistakes. Capgrave supposes him to be Alfred the Great, son of Ethelwolf, and that the sister was Edith of Polesworth, who died in 954. And Dugdale followed Capgrave. Mr. Hawker, following Alban Butler, who accepted the account of Dugdale and Capgrave, made the blunder greater by fusing St. Morwenna of Cornwall, who, as has been shown, lived in the fifth century, with Modwenna, who lived at the end of the seventh century, and made her the instructress of St. Edith of Polesworth, who died in the tenth century, in the year 954. And Modwenna, as has been stated, was confounded by Concubran with Monynna of Newry, who died at the beginning of the sixth century.
On unravelling this tangle in 1874, I wrote to Mr. Hawker of Morwenstow, and told him that the east window of his church represented Morwenna of Cornwall teaching Edith of Polesworth, and that it was an anachronism and mistake altogether, as it was not Edith who was educated by the saintly Modwenna, and the abbess Modwenna was not the virgin Morwenna. I told him also that St. Modwenna was buried at Burton-on-Trent.
I received this answer:—
“What! Morwenna not lie in the holy place at Morwenstow! Of that you will never persuade me—no, never. I know that she lies there. I have seen her, and she has told me as much; and at her feet ere long I hope to lay my old bones.”
In the little glen of Morwenstow, 350 feet above the Atlantic, St. Morwenna had her cell, and gave origin to the church and parish of Morwenstow. As she lay a-dying, says a legend according to Hawker, her brother Nectan came to her from Hartland.
“Raise me in thy arms, brother,” she said, “that my eyes may rest on my native Wales.” And so she died on Morwenstow cliff, looking out across the Severn Sea to the faint blue line of the Welsh mountains. St. Nectan had a cell at Wellcombe, as also at Hartland, for both of these churches bear his name.
The coast from Tintagel to Hartland is almost unrivalled for grandeur. The restless Atlantic is ever thundering on this iron-walled coast. The roar can be heard ten miles inland; flakes of foam are picked up after a storm at Holsworthy. To me, when staying three miles inland, it has seemed the roar of a hungry caged beast, ravening at its bars for food.
The swell comes unbroken from Labrador, to hurl itself against this coast, and to be shivered into foam on its iron cuirass.
“Twice,” said a friend who dwelt near this coast, “twice in the sixteen years that I have spent here has the sea been calm enough to reflect a passing sail.”
This Atlantic has none of the tameness of the German Ocean, that plays on the low flat shores of Essex; none of the witchery of the green crystal that breaks over the white sands of Babbicombe and Torquay: it is emphatically “the cruel sea,” fierce, insatiate, hungering for human lives and stately vessels, that it may cast them up mumbled and mangled after having robbed them of life and treasure.