Part 2

The chancel wall one day sounded hollow when struck; the mortar was removed, and underneath there appeared an arched aperture, which had been filled up with jumbled carved work and a crushed drain. It was cleared out, and so rebuilt as to occupy the exact site of its former existence. It is of the very earliest type of Christian architecture, and, for aught we know, it may be the oldest piscina in all the land. At all events, it can scarcely have seen less than a thousand years. It perpetuates the original form of this appanage of the chancel; for the horn of the Hebrew altar,[14] as is well known to architectural students, was in shape and in usage the primary type of the Christian piscina. These horns were four, one at each corner, and in outline like the crest of a dwarf pillar, with a cup-shaped mouth and a grooved throat, to receive and to carry down the superfluous blood and water of the sacrifices into a cistern or channel underneath. Hence was derived the ecclesiastical custom that, whenever the chalice or other vessel had been rinsed, the water was reverently poured into the piscina, which was usually built into a carved niche of the southward chancel wall. Such is the remarkable relic of former times which still exists in Morwenstow church, verifying, by the unique and remote antiquity of its pillared form, its own primeval origin.

But among the features of this sanctuary none exceed in singular and eloquent symbolism the bosses of the chancel roof. Every one of these is a doctrine or a discipline engraven in the wood by some Bezaleel or Aholiab of early Christian days. Among these the Norman rose and the _fleur-de-lis_ have frequent pre-eminence. The one, from the rose of Sharon downward, is the pictured type of our Lord; the other, whether as the lotus of the Nile or the lily of the vale, is the type of His Virgin Mother; and both of these floral decorations were employed as ecclesiastical emblems centuries before they were assumed into the shields of Normandy or England. Another is the double-necked eagle, the bird of the Holy Ghost in the patriarchal and Mosaic periods of revelation, just as the dove afterwards became in the days of the Gospel; and, mythic writers having asserted that when Elisha sought and obtained from his master “a double portion of Elijah’s spirit,” this miracle was portrayed and perpetuated in architectural symbolism by the two necks of the eagle of Elisha. Four faces cluster on another boss,--three with masculine features, and one with the softer impress of a female countenance, a typical assemblage of the Trinity and the Mother of God. Again we mark the tracery of that “piety of the birds,” as devout writers have named the fabled usage of the pelican.[15] She is shown baring and rending her own veins to nourish with her blood her thirsty offspring,--a group which so graphically interprets itself to the eye and mind of a Christian man that it needs no interpretation.

But very remarkable, in the mid-roof, is the boss of the pentacle[16] of Solomon. This was the five-angled figure which was engraven on an emerald, and wherewith he ruled the demons;[17] for they were the vassals of his mighty seal: the five angles in their original mythicism, embracing as they did the unutterable name, meant, it may be, the fingers of Omnipotence as the symbolic Hand subsequently came forth in shadows on Belshazzar’s wall. Be this as it may, it was the concurrent belief of the Eastern nations that the sigil of the Wise King was the source and instrument of his supernatural power. So Heber writes in his “Palestine”--

“To him were known, so Hagar’s offspring tell, The powerful sigil and the starry spell: Hence all his might, for who could these oppose? And Tadmor[18] thus and Syrian Balbec rose.”

Hence it is that we find this mythic figure, in decorated delineation, as the signal of the boundless might of Him whose Church bends over all, the pentacle of Omnipotence! Akin to this graphic imagery is the shield of David, the theme of another of our chancel-bosses. Here the outline is six-angled: Solomon’s device with one angle more, which, I would submit, was added in order to suggest another doctrine--the manhood taken into God, and so to become a typical prophecy of the Incarnation. The framework of these bosses is a cornice of vines. The root of the vines on each wall grows from the altar-side; the stem travels outward across the screen towards the nave. There tendrils cling and clusters bend, while angels sustain the entire tree.

“Hearken! there is in Old Morwenna’s shrine, A lonely sanctuary of the Saxon days, Reared by the Severn Sea for prayer and praise, Amid the carved work of the roof a vine. Its root is where the eastern sunbeams fall First in the chancel, then along the wall, Slowly it travels on--a leafy line With here and there a cluster; and anon More and more grapes, until the growth hath gone Through arch and aisle. Hearken! and heed the sign; See at the altar-side the steadfast root, Mark well the branches, count the summer fruit. So let a meek and faithful heart be thine, And gather from that tree a parable divine!”

A screen[19] divides the deep and narrow chancel from the nave. A scroll of rich device runs across it, wherein deer and oxen browse on the leaves of a budding vine. Both of these animals are the well-known emblems of the baptised, and the sacramental tree is the type of the Church grafted into God.

A strange and striking acoustic result is accomplished by this and by similar chancel-screens: they act as the tympanum of the structure, and increase and reverberate the volume of sound. The voice uttered at the altar-side smites the hollow work of the screen, and is carried onward, as by some echoing instrument, into the nave and aisles; so that the lattice-work of the chancel, which at first thought might appear to impede the transit of the voice, does in reality grasp and deliver into stronger echo the ministry of tone.

Just outside the screen, and at the step of the nave, is the grave of a priest. It is identified by the reversed position of the carved cross on the stone, which also indicates the self-same attitude in the corpse. The head is laid down toward the east, while in all secular interment the head is turned to the west. Until the era of the Reformation, or possibly to a later date, the head of the priest upon the bier for burial, and afterwards in the grave, was always placed “versus altare;” and, according to all ecclesiastical usage, the discipline was doctrinal also. The following is the reason as laid down by Durandus and other writers. Because the east, “the gate of the morning,” is the keblah of Christian hope, inasmuch as the Messiah, whose symbolic name was “The Orient,” thence arrived, and thence, also, will return on the chariots of cloud for the Judgment: we therefore place our departed ones with their heads westward, and their feet and faces towards the eastern sky,[20] that at the outshine of the Last Day, and the sound of the archangel, they may start from their dust, like soldiers from their sleep, and stand up before the Son of man suddenly! But the apostles were to sit on future thrones and to assist at the Judgment: the Master was to arrive for doom amid His ancients gloriously, and the saints were to judge the world. These prophecies were symbolised by the burial of the clergy, and thence, in contrast with other dead, their posture in the grave. It was to signify that it would be their office to arise and to “follow the Lord in the air,” when He shall arrive from the east and pass onward, gathering up His witnesses toward the west. Thus, in the posture of the departed multitudes, the sign is, “We look for the Son of Man: ad Orientem Judah.” And in the attitude of His appointed ministers, thus saith the legend on the tombs of His priests, “They arose and followed Him.”

The eastern window of the chancel,[21] as its legend records, is the pious and dutiful oblation of Rudolph, Baron Clinton, and Georgiana Elizabeth his wife. The central figure embodies the legend of St. Morwenna, who stands in the attitude of the teacher of the Princess Edith, daughter of Ethelwolf the Founder King; on the one side is shown St. Peter, and on the other St. Paul. The upper spandrels are filled with a Syrian lamb, a pelican with her brood, and the three first letters of the Saviour’s name. The window[22] itself is the recent offering of two noble minds; and while on this theme we may be pardoned for the natural boast that the patrons of this chancel have called by the name of Morwenna one of the fair and graceful daughters of their house. “Nomen, omen,” was the Roman saying,--“Nomen, numen,” be our proverb now! But before we proceed to descend the three steps of the chancel floor, so obviously typical of Faith, Hope, and Charity, let us look westward through the tower-arch; and as we look we discover that the builders, either by chance or design, have turned aside or set out of proportional place the western window of the tower. Is this really so, or does the wall of the chancel swerve? The deviation was intended, nor without an error could we render the crooked straight. And the reason is said to be this: when our Redeemer died, at the utterance of the word τετέλεσται, “It is done!” His head declined towards His right shoulder, and in that attitude He chose to die. Now it was to commemorate this drooping of the Saviour’s head, to record in stone this eloquent gesture of our Lord, that the “wise in heart,” who traced this church in the actual outline of a cross, departed from the precise rules of architect and carpenter.

The southern aisle, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, with its granite and dunstone pillars, is of the later Decorated order, and is remarkable for its singular variety of material in stone. Granite pillars are surmounted by arches of dunstone; and, _vice versa_, dunstone arches by pillared granite. This is again a striking example of doctrine proclaimed in structure, and is symbolic of the fact that the Spiritual Church gathered into one body every hue and kind of belief; whereas “Jew and Greek, Barbarian and Scythian, bond and free,” were to be all one in Christ Jesus: so the material building personified, in its various and visible embrace, one Church to grasp, and a single roof to bend over all. This, the last addition to the ancient sanctuary of St. Morwenna, bears on the capital of a pillar the date A.D. 1475,[23] and thus the total structure stands a graphic monument of the growth and stature of a scene of ancient worship, which had been embodied and completed before the invention of printing and other modern arts had worked their revolution upon Western Europe.

The worshipper must descend three steps of stone as he enters into this aisle of St. John; and this gradation is intended to recall the time and the place where the multitude went down into the river of Dan “at Bethabara, beyond Jordan, where John was baptising.”

The churchyard of Morwenstow is the scene of other features of a remote antiquity. The roof of the total church--chancel, nave, northern and southern aisles--is of wood. Shingles of rended oak occupy the place of the usual, but far more recent, tiles which cover other churches; and it is not a little illustrative of the antique usages of this remote and lonely sanctuary, that no change has been wrought, in the long lapse of ages, in this unique and costly, but fit and durable, roofing. It supplies a singular illustration of the Syriac version of the 90th Psalm, wherein, with prophetic reference to these commemorations of the death-bed of the Messias, it is written, “Lord, Thou hast been our roof from generation to generation.”

The northern side of the churchyard is, according to ancient usage, devoid of graves.[24] This is the common result of an unconscious sense among the people of the doctrine of regions--a thought coeval with the inspiration of the Christian era. This is their division.[25] The east was held to be the realm of the oracles, the especial gate of the throne of God; the west was the domain of the people--the Galilee of all nations was there; the south, the land of the mid-day, was sacred to things heavenly and divine; but the north was the devoted region of Satan and his hosts, the lair of the demon and his haunt. In some of our ancient churches, and in the church of Welcombe,[26] a hamlet bordering on Morwenstow, over against the font, and in the northern wall, there is an entrance named the Devil’s door: it was thrown open at every baptism, at the Renunciation, for the escape of the fiend; while at every other time it was carefully closed. Hence, and because of the doctrinal suggestion of the ill-omened scenery of the northern grave-ground, came the old dislike[27] to sepulture on the north side, so strikingly visible around this church.

The events of the last twenty years have added fresh interest to God’s acre, for such is the exact measure of the grave ground of St. Morwenna. Along and beneath the southern trees, side by side, are the graves of between thirty and forty seamen, hurled by the sea, in shipwreck, on the neighbouring rocks, and gathered up and buried there by the present vicar and his people. The crews of three lost vessels, cast away upon the rocks of the glebe and elsewhere, are laid at rest in this safe and silent ground. A legend for one recording-stone thus commemorates a singular scene. The figurehead[28] of the brig _Caledonia_, of Arbroath, in Scotland, stands at the graves of her crew, in the churchyard of Morwenstow:--

“We laid them in their lowly rest, The strangers of a distant shore; We smoothed the green turf on their breast, ’Mid baffled ocean’s angry roar! And there--the relique of the storm-- We fixed fair Scotland’s figured form.

She watches by her bold--her brave-- Her shield towards the fatal sea; Their cherished lady of the wave Is guardian of their memory! Stern is her look, but calm, for there No gale can rend, or billow bear.

Stand, silent image, stately stand! Where sighs shall breathe and tears be shed; And many a heart of Cornish land Will soften for the stranger-dead. They came in paths of storm--they found This quiet home in Christian ground.”

Halfway down the principal pathway of the churchyard is a granite altar-tomb. It was raised, in all likelihood, for the old “month’s mind,” or “year’s mind,” of the dead: and it records a sad parochial history of the former time. It was about the middle of the sixteenth century that John Manning, a large landowner of Morwenstow, wooed and won Christiana Kempthorne, the vicar’s daughter. Her father was also a wealthy landlord of the parish in that day. Their marriage united in their own hands a broad estate, and in the midst of it the bridegroom built for his bride the manor-house of Stanbury, and labelled the door-heads and the hearths with the blended initials[29] of the married pair. It was a great and a joyous day when they were wed, and the bride was led home amid all the solemn and festal observances of the time. There were liturgical benedictions of the mansion-house, the hearth, and the marriage-bed; for a large estate and a high place for their future lineage had been blended in the twain. Five months afterwards, on his homeward way from the hunting-field, John Manning was assailed by a mad bull, and gored to death not far from his home. His bride, maddened at the sight of her husband’s corpse, became prematurely a mother and died. They were laid, side by side, with their buried joys and blighted hopes, underneath this altar-tomb--whereon the simple legend records that there lie “John Manning and Christiana his wife, who died A.D. 1546, without living issue.”

When the vicar of the parish arrived, in the year 1836, he brought with him, among other carved oak furniture, a bedstead of Spanish chestnut, inlaid and adorned with ancient veneer: and it was set up, unwittingly, in a room of the vicarage which looked out upon the tombs. In the right-hand panel of the framework, at the head, was grooved in the name of John Manning; and in the place of the wife, the left hand, Christiana Manning, with their marriage date between. Nor was it discovered until afterwards that this was the very couch of wedded benediction, a relic of the great Stanbury marriage, which had been brought back and set up within sight of the unconscious grave; and thus that the sole surviving records of the bridegroom and the bride stood side by side, the bedstead and the tomb, the first and the last scene of their early hope and their final rest.

Another and a lowlier grave bears on its recording-stone a broken snatch of antique rhythm, interwoven with modern verse. A young man[30] of this rural people, when he lay a-dying, found solace in his intervals of pain in the remembered echo of, it may be, some long-forgotten dirge; and he desired that the words which so haunted his memory might somehow or other be engraved on his stone. He died, and his parish priest fulfilled his desire by causing the following death-verse to be set up where he lies. We shall close our legends of Morwenstow with these simple lines.[31] The fragment which clung to the dying man’s memory was the first only of these lines:--

“‘Sing! from the chamber to the grave!’ Thus did the dead man say,-- ‘A sound of melody I crave Upon my burial-day.

‘Bring forth some tuneful instrument, And let your voices rise: My spirit listened as it went To music of the skies!

‘Sing sweetly while you travel on, And keep the funeral slow: The angels sing where I am gone; And you should sing below!

‘Sing from the threshold to the porch, Until you hear the bell; And sing you loudly in the church The Psalms I love so well.

‘Then bear me gently to my grave: And as you pass along, Remember, ’twas my wish to have A pleasant funeral-song!

‘So earth to earth--and dust to dust-- And though my bones decay, My soul shall sing among the just, Until the Judgment-day?’”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The foundations of this article first appeared in Mr. Blight’s “Ancient Cornish Crosses,” Penzance, 1850; in an article entitled “A Cornish Churchyard,” in _Chambers’s Journal_, 1852; also, as the “Legend of Morwenstow,” in _Willis’s Current Notes_, 1856; and in its present extended form, in “Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall,” 1870, embodying the author’s latest corrections and impressions.

[2] Woolley Moor.

[3]

“Ah! native Cornwall, throned upon the hills, Thy moorland pathways worn by Angel feet.”

_Quest of the Sangraal._

[4]

“If, traveller, thy happy spirit know That awful Fount whence living waters flow, Then hither come to draw: thy feet have found Amidst these rocks a place of holy ground.”

_The Well of St. Morwenna._

[5] Breachan figures as a saint on a window in St. Neot’s church, called “The Young Women’s Window,” erected in 1529 at the cost of the maidens of the village. Mr. Baring-Gould says that “Brychan” lived in the fifth century, and that Morwenna was probably his grand-daughter.

[6] According to Mr. Baring-Gould, this story is full of anachronisms, arising from the confusion of three different saints, Morwenna of Cornwall, Modwenna of Burton-on-Trent, and Monynna of Newry.

[7] Compare Hawker’s poem “A Croon on Hennacliff.”

[8] This prose description of Morwenstow church has its metrical counterpart in “Morwennæ Statio.” The poetry in stone has never been more beautifully expressed than by those strong and simple lines.

[9] See Appendix A.

[10] A mistake for “Tunnacomb.” See Appendix A.

[11] See Appendix A_a_.

[12] The water for baptisms at Morwenstow is always drawn from this well, which Hawker won for the glebe by a law-suit soon after his appointment to the living.

[13] See Appendix A.

[14] In Blight’s book on “Ancient Cornish Crosses,” etc., there is an engraving of the Morwenstow Piscina and a Hebrew altar, with a note by Hawker.

[15] Among some unpublished MSS. of Hawker’s is the following verse, dated 1840:--

“Thus said the pious Pelican unto her thirsty Young, ‘Drink, drink! my desert children: be beautiful and strong. What tho’ it be the lifeblood from my veins ye drain away; Ye will grow and glide in glory, and for me, O let me die.’”

[16] Hawker had a seal engraved with this pentacle. Compare the lines in his poem “Baal-Zephon.”

“Oh for the Sigil! or the chanted spell! The pentacle that Demons know and dread.”

In a letter to Miss Louisa Twining, Hawker writes: “The pentacle of Solomon, or five-pointed figure, was derived from his seal wherewith he ruled the genii. It was a sapphire, and it contained a hand _alive_ which grasped a small serpent, also alive. Through the bright gem both were visible, the hand and the ‘worm’ as of old they called it. When invoked by the king, the fingers moved and the serpent writhed and miracles were wrought by spirits which were vassals of the gem.... Because of this mystic Hand the pentacle or five-pointed (fingered) figure became the Sigil of Signomancy in the early ages.”

[17] For an instance of its use in exorcism, see the “Botathen Ghost” story, p. 158.

[18] “And Solomon built ... Baalath, and Tadmor in the Wilderness” (1 Kings ix. 17-18).

[19] This screen was constructed by Mr. Hawker from the rescued remnants of an older screen, pieced together with ironwork. It has since been taken down, and the old carving placed in other parts of the church.

[20] See Appendix A_b_.

[21] The chancel has been restored by Lord Clinton. The old altar ornaments used by Mr. Hawker are preserved in the vestry.

[22] See note on p. 6. Two new lancet windows have since been placed in the chancel, one by Mrs. Waddon Martyn, of Tonacombe, in memory of her husband, the other by friends of the Rev. J. Tagert, to commemorate the restoration of the church during his vicariate. A larger memorial window has also been placed by the Martyn family at the east end of the north aisle.

[23] This appears to be an error, as the date on the pillar (in Roman figures) is 1564. (See Appendix A.)

[24] See Appendix A_b_.

[25] Compare the apportionment of the regions among the four great knights, Lancelot, Perceval, Tristan, and Galahad, in “The Quest of the Sangraal.”

“Let us arise And cleave the earth like rivers; like the streams That win from Paradise their immortal name: To the four winds of God, casting the lot....”

The mystic attributes of the four regions are told in lines of incomparable grandeur.

[26] More about this village is to be found in the article “Holacombe.”

[27] This dislike is disappearing. When I was at Welcombe recently a grave was being dug on the northern side of the church. The grave-digger said he had been christened and married by Mr. Hawker: “one of the best passons,” he added, “us ever had.”--ED.

[28] See p. 62.

[29] These initials are still to be seen at Stanbury, now a farmhouse. The scene of Mr. Baring-Gould’s novel “The Gaverocks” is partly laid there.