TONKIN.
How these names of Glant or Golant prevailed over that of St. Sampson I am not able to determine, unless perhaps it was the primitive name thereof before the parish church was erected, consecrated, and endowed to God under the name of St. Sampson. For in Cardinal Wolsey’s Inquisition, and in Carew’s Survey, it is called St. Sampson.
The name Golant is obviously compounded of Gol, holy, and of lan, a church. (Mr. Whitaker remarks that Y-Gol, by the Holy One, is still an oath in Cornwall.)
THE EDITOR.
Mr. Hals has given a very long and uninteresting account of St. Sampson, the patron saint of Golant, involving a dissertation on the antiquity of archbishops.
He is reported to have commenced his ecclesiastical career by the practice of ascetic observances, in due time he became the chief of a monastic institution, from whence he was taken to be Archbishop of York; but the north of England being at that time ravaged by the northern pirates, he was driven from thence, and going over into Brittany he founded a monastery at Dal, and became the first Bishop of that place, where a see was created at his request by Pope Pelegius the First, who honoured him moreover personally with the pallium or pale. He was present at the Second Council of Paris, held in 557, and died about the year 564. His remains were enshrined at Dal, but when the Normans began in the tenth century to invade and pillage Neustria, these barbarians, equally hostile
to the saint alive or dead, obliged his brethren to remove the relics to Paris, where they are supposed to have been preserved up to the period of the great revolution.
Penquite was acquired by purchase about the beginning or towards the middle of last century from the Prestwoods, by Mr. Rashleigh, of Menwhilly, by whom a perpetual lease was soon after granted in favour of a relation, which has since passed through various hands.
Mr. Lysons says that the manor of Lentyon in this parish, belonged to the Montacutes Earls of Salisbury.
It appears from Dugdale’s Baronage that this property was seized by king Henry VIII., on his judicial murder of the last Plantagenet, Margaret Countess of Salisbury. It now belongs to Mr. William Rashleigh, who is impropriator of the great and small tithes, and appoints the perpetual curate, in right of the monastery of Tywardreth.