VIII. A general stupidity may be observed to be in the whole county. As to other matters monumental, there is little mention made of our antient stately fabrics amongst us, now ruinated; as to the founders of them, castles, battles fought, and other things: and as to churches (though we have abundance of fair ones for so small a county, where there is no city nor any great town in it) excellent foundations, but who the builders were we have no intelligence, only a great many false tutelaries of them we hear of. Little of the monasteries hath been said by those that have written copiously of others elsewhere. Scarcely anything of the ancient bishops here, or of the bishop’s see; only we know it to be said antiently, that it
was removed from Bodmyn to St. German’s,[36] and that it was about anno 1000, Danorum turbine, from a country more open, to a place more woodland. The cathedral indeed might have been better memorized by Godwin in his Catalogue of Bishops, and enumeration of all the bishopricks; yet little is said of it or the four several chapels in several distinct places of the parish thereto belonging; and as for the monastery nothing at all. It is strange too that Mr. Camden should say, “Germani viculum nihil aliud est hodie, quam piscatorum casulæ:” whereas, there are no such things belonging to such a trade there seen, but instead thereof a cathedral, maintained at the great cost of the inhabitants, (though a great part, by an accident, about one hundred years since fell down,) a good monastical house yet undemolished, and hospitably inhabited, to the relief of poor people. The bishop’s seat and house are yet eminently extant in a Cornish name. The borough of St. German’s enjoys still the privilege of sending burgesses to Parliament by prescription. Pity it is that St. German, who came hither to suppress the Pelagian heresy, should have so bad a going off; for an old fable remains yet in report, that St. German being ill used fled away, leaving a sad curse behind him, to the cliffs at Rame near the head; where bewailing his misfortunes, the compassionating rocks in the cliffs shed tears with him, at a place ever since called St. German’s Well. True it is, such a spring there is, but the occasion of it cannot be more truly affirmed than the other part of the story that follows, viz. That he should be carried thence into remote countries by angels in a fiery chariot, the tract of whose wheels were said to be seen in those cliffs, but they are invisible. Thus much for the site of the place. As to the person of St. German, who perhaps never saw the place, I need not turn over old fabulous legends, nor a better sort who have written his life heretofore, but I may have liberty to relate what I have from the better hands of learned persons.[37] That besides his disputation and confutation of Pelagius at Verulam, and thereby freeing the church and nation from those heresies by a public edict from the Emperor Valentinian, whereby they were no more troubled with them afterwards, he the
said St. German did other great works for this land, viz. 1st. the institution of schools of learning among the Britons; Dubritius and Iltutus being both of them his disciples. Dubritius was made Archbishop of Carlehon; Iltutus sent to Lan Iltut, a church bearing his name to this day; and one Daniell, made Bishop of Bangor; from these famous men the monastery of Bangor, and other monasteries in this land, were so well furnished with learned men, at the coming in of St. Austin from the Pope, they stood upon discreet and honourable terms.
2. The introduction of the Gallican Liturgy into use in the churches of Britany, which was ever different from the Romans, and thereby a happy means to have kept this nation from so much acquaintance with the Pope, as they had with him afterwards, to their great trouble. It is also said that St. Patrick, who carried over into Ireland the education monastic, and good principles therewith, and is held to be the Apostle of Ireland, spent many years under the discipline of St. German, when he came hither; who, after he had been employed in the embassy to the Emperor at Ravenna, died there one year before the Saxons’ arrival.
All this time we are left in the dark concerning the fabric of the Monastery of St. German’s, which could not be built till two or three hundred years perhaps after the Saxons got a perfect dominion here over the land, but we may believe that that and the cathedral might be dedicated to his memory afterwards, in respect of the many good works he had done elsewhere.
IX. As we have had an ill registry of monumental matters, so for five or six centuries past (before the two last), I doubt we had but few learned men here, which induces me to put that to the ninth cause of the decay of the Cornish tongue. After the suppression of the Druids, and that Christianity was received, yet learning decayed some while amongst the people, the best of them being carried abroad by the Romans and never returned; and then the supposed Saints coming in after them, made no reparation thereof, but by their supposed miracles, with which they entertained the people. So they had very few learned men amongst them, places of breeding and obtaining learning being remote, scarcely approachable, and the nation in continual troubles and dangers; and for latter times such learned men as came to us, seeing our own neglect of our tongue, have thought it not fit to take the
pains to inquire into it, as a thing obscure and not fit to be studied by them, and so suffered to decay insensibly by them and the inhabitants.
X. The Cornish tongue hath mostly resided for some ages past in the names of the people, the gentry chiefly, and in the names of places, observed to be significant mostly as to the site, &c. or for some things eminent about them. Concerning both these, I must take liberty to shew how the speech has been invaded, and eaten up by intrusion, much of which hath been about churches and their sites, as well as by neglectful inobservation; for those Saxon saints have hungrily eaten up the antient names, which, when they could not well digest for hardness of the words, many catched up others from those whom they fieigned to be the tutelaries of those places, churches, and fountains, and supposed miracles wrought thereabouts, as St. Kaine, St. Gurrion, St. Tudy, St. Ive, St. Endellion, St. Kue, Landulph, St. Ust, St. Just, St. Marthren, &c. Of St. Mardren’s Well,[38] (which is a parish west to the Mount) a fresh true story of two persons, both of them lame and decrepit, thus recovered from their infirmity. These two persons, after they had applied themselves to divers physicians and chirurgeons for cure, and finding no success by them, they resorted to St. Mardren’s Well, and according to the ancient custom, which they had heard of, the same which was once in a year, to wit, on Corpus Christi evening, to lay some small offering on the altar there, and to lie on the ground all night, drink of the water there, and in the morning after, to take a good draught more, and to take and carry away some of the water, each of them in a bottle, at their departure. This course these two men followed, and within three weeks they found the effect of it, and by degrees their strength increasing, were able to move themselves on crutches. The year following they take the same course again, after which they were able to go with the help of a stick; and at length one of them, John Thomas, being a fisherman, was, and is able at this day, to follow his fishing craft. The other, whose name was William Cork, was a soldier
under the command of my kinsman, Colonel William Godolphin, (as he has often told me) was able to perform his duty, and died in the service of his majesty King Charles I. But herewith take also this: one Mr. Hutchens, a person well known in those parts, and now lately dead, being parson of Ludgvan, a near neighbouring parish to St. Mardren’s Well, he observing that many of his parishioners often frequented this well superstitiously, for which he reproved them privately, and sometimes publicly in his sermons; but afterwards, he the said Mr. Hutchens, meeting with a woman coming from the well with a bottle in her hand, desired her earnestly that he might drink thereof, being then troubled with cholical pains, which accordingly he did, and was eased of his infirmity. The latter story is a full confutation of the former, for if the taking the water accidentally thus prevailed upon the party to his cure, as it is likely it did, then the miracle which was intended to be by the ceremony of lying on the ground and offering, is wholly fled, and it leaves the virtue of the water to be the true cause of the cure. And we have here, as in many places of the land, great variety of salutary springs, which have diversity of operations, which by natural reason have been found to be productive of good effects, and not by miracle, as the vain fancies of monks and friars have been exercised in heretofore.
Howbeit, there are some old names yet remaining of places of prayers or oratories, and the ruins shewing them to be such, as V. Gr. Paderda, which is prayers good, (of which many places are so named); Eglarose, the church in the vale, supposed antienter than the names of their churches. Their sites are eminent and ancient, standing towards the east, though no mention made how they came to be in decay, but supposed to be after the Saxon churches came to be erected, and miracles supposed to be wrought by those whose names they bear. Churches’ sites took new names, whereas the old Cornish names remain in all other places of the parishes generally; yet the names of the four old castles remain, and of manors also for the most part, and some other things in the Cornish, and do so continue the better, by reason of men’s particular interest in them: and so are the eminent hills likewise, especially towards the sea, and the hundred or hamlet names of the country remain so chiefly in the western parts; those on the eastern, standing towards the borders, have their