With a member of the last-named family John Borlase seems to have had an altercation one day in church, the particulars of which are set forth in his victim's petition to Parliament as follows, viz.:
'Honoured Sirs,
'Life, the precious tenet of mankind, forceth me to inform your honours that Sunday, the 26th February, 1709, in full view of most of the congregation of Maddern, John Borlase, one of Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace, did wilfully break the peace by striking me almost to the ground with his staff, and if not timely prevented by one Paul Tonkin, he would have been striking me again. He did at the same time highly threaten me, with Chritr. Harris, Esq., Jane his wife, and John his son. Mr. Harris ordered his servant to beat me. Of the truth of the above information I am ready to give my corroboration. Humbly craving the Honble. Speaker and House of Commons not to skreene such daring offenders, but to give me leave to prosecute them as the law directs, is the humble prayer of, Hond. Sirs,
'Your in all humility and duty,
'Ffrances Godolphin.'
What this poor gentleman had done to deserve the 'Justice's justice' thus summarily inflicted on him, observes the writer in the Quarterly Review, from whom I quote this letter, there and then, in the midst as it seems of divine service, and by the occupant of the next pew, we are left to conjecture.
Pendeen[73] is a house of unusual interest in this part of Cornwall, where, indeed, primæval remains abound, but where are few examples—save small and (with one or two exceptions) not particularly interesting churches—of mediæval and later architecture. It is now occupied as a farmhouse, but was formerly a place of much more importance. Substantially built of native granite, the structure was evidently designed for the occupation of some prosperous man; and its ground-plot indicates that it was so traced as to be capable of some sort of defence against marauders. In one of the bedrooms—most probably that in which William Borlase first saw the light—are some curious figures on the wall, of which a sketch is preserved by the writer.
But it is not so much to the house itself as to its surroundings that we must look for what were probably the determining circumstances of Borlase's career. He was in the very heart of the cromlehs, the cliff-castles, the weird stone-circles, and the huge monoliths of a forgotten race; and, close to the house, there was a long and mysterious double cave—a vau or ogou—which, we can but believe, must have excited an inquiring child's awe-struck interest. We are indebted chiefly to himself for the little that we know of his early days; and this information is derived from a modest autobiographical sketch which he drew up in 1772, when seventy-seven years old, for his friend Huddesford, the Curator of the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, an institution to which Borlase contributed nearly the whole of his collections of natural history and antiquities.