Part 8

St. Petrock’s hundred had, of course, no connection with Rielton or Rillaton, subsequently known as the hundred of East. The confusion may have arisen from the fact that the bailiwick of Pydar was at Rialton, and that of East at Rillaton, formerly Rielton.

Footnote 68:

Patent Roll, 3 William and Mary.

Footnote 69:

See Monastery-Bishoprics, _supra_.

Footnote 70:

The Patent Roll of 7 Richard II (cf. also _Monasticon_, edited by Oliver, p. 4) should be compared with the Patent Roll of 9 Richard II. The former states that Cnut was the founder of the priory of St. German, while the latter states that Leofric was the founder. Inasmuch as the charter of Cnut required the land of Landrake to be given after Burhwold’s death to St. German for the good of the souls of Cnut and Burhwold (_Terram ... commendat ... Sancto Germano_) it follows that both statements were (and were probably understood to be) legal fictions. The earlier document, however, confirms, if confirmation were needed, the evidence as to the reconstruction of the monastery by Leofric as given in Domesday Book, though it is not necessarily conclusive as to the substitution of regular for secular canons. Preb. Hingeston Randolph (_Architec. Hist. of St. Germans_, p. 31) states that “there is no reason to suppose that Leofric took any steps to found a priory at St. Germans.” The statement is far too sweeping. On the other hand, Mr. Haddan (_Councils_, etc., I, 704) relies upon the _ipsissima verba_ of the Patent Roll for one of his main arguments for a single Cornish see in the days of Cnut. By itself the evidence supplied by an early patent roll relating to a transaction which took place nearly four centuries previously is not conclusive, especially when, as in this case, a legal title was needed in order to settle a dispute, and to place a bishop in undisputed possession of an advowson.

Footnote 71:

There is a temptation to identify Lanisley with the Lannaledensis of the _Missa S. Germani_ (Haddan and Stubbs, _Councils_, etc., I, 696). Alet, or Aleth, and Idles, in the parish of Kenwyn, are regarded as synonymous, if not identical, in several ancient charters. On the same principle Lanaleth would become Lanidles, a form sufficiently near that of Lanisle to convey the idea of identity. But Mr. Haddan is satisfied that Lanadleth is the British name of St. Germans, and the confusion introduced by the above supposition would be practically insurmountable.

Footnote 72:

Eglostudic (St. Tudy) and Polrode belonged to St. Petrock in the time of the Confessor, and Tinten may have been claimed for Exeter by virtue of the grant of 909.

Footnote 73:

At a much earlier date (670) St. Wilfrid claimed ecclesiastical endowments of the British for the Saxon Church in the neighbourhood of Ripon.

Footnote 74:

Loth, _Les Noms des Saints bretons_, p. 87.

Footnote 75:

Amaneth may be an English equivalent for Anmanach. Treveneage appears at Trevanek in 1284, and as Trevanaek in 1361.

Footnote 76:

Loth, _Les Noms des Saints bretons_, pp. 52, 53.

Footnote 77:

_Hist. of English Law_, i, 33.

Footnote 78:

The references are to Kilter’s rising in 1549, and to the prolonged defence of Little Dennis by Sir Richard Vyvyan in 1646.

Footnote 79:

The evidence is indirect. Trengwainton, to which the advowson was appendant, was itself a sub-manor of Roseworthy in Gwinear. Landithy is only a short distance from the church.

VII

CORNISH SAINTS

In the first chapter it has been attempted to show how the tyranny of resemblance and coincidence leads to false analogies and wrong inferences. Some further illustrations of this principle which have a direct bearing upon the main purpose of the present enquiry may be found instructive.

In this chapter we are not so much concerned with the Lives of the Cornish Saints, as they have come down to us, as with the question whether they had any actual existence as human beings at all. Of Ia, Uny, Dennis, Allen, Paul and Berrian it has been stated that “it is more than probable that there was no man in either case. Ia is the Island saint, Uny the Downs saint, Dennis the Hill saint, Paul or Pol the Pool saint,” Buryan or Berrian the saint of Berrie.

But why stop there? Domesday Book supplies us with Eglostudic, Sainguilant and Sainguinas. It is just as easy to imagine places bearing the names of Tudic, Guilant and Guinas as to imagine one bearing the name of Berrie, and quite as good etymology to derive them from Tutton a chair, Guilan a kingfisher and Guenan a blister.

Most will admit that a chair saint is suggestive of saintly pursuits—study and contemplation; many saints have been fishermen; some have suffered from pimples and perhaps have known how to cure them.

Again we have two more ancient parishes one of which occurs in Domesday Book, viz. Eglosros (Philleigh) and Egloshayle, the church on the heath and the church on the estuary, yet no one has ever ventured to describe or to speak of them as the churches of St. Rose and St. Hayle, and for the obvious reason that Cornish saints have not been manufactured in the way that has been suggested.

In choosing Ia, Uny, Dennis, Allen, Paul and Berrian to demonstrate his theory, the critic could hardly have made a more unfortunate selection. With one exception they are all to be found in Brittany.

Ia is said to have been an Irish missionary who came with her brothers Uny and Erth and some others to complete the conversion of the Cornish in the golden age of Celtic Christianity. For our present purpose it is not material to accept the legend, but it is useful to know that Ia is commemorated at St. Ives in Cornwall and in Finistère in Brittany, Erth at St. Erth in Cornwall and at Chittlehampton in Devon, Uny at Lelant and Redruth in Cornwall and at Plevin in Côtes du Nord. St. Dennis (or Denys), his church being situated in the centre of a hill-fort, is the only one whose name seems, at first sight, to lend colour to the new criticism. But to quote Professor Loth, writing on a totally different subject,[80] “it is quite impossible for Dinas by itself to be a man’s name. It is one of the most widely distributed place-names in Cornwall. Dinas in Cornish, as in Welsh, signifies a fortified town.” Assuming that a personage derived his name from the place Dinas we should have Dinan as in Cardinan. St. Dennis or Denys appears to have been the name given to a chapelry of St. Stephen (Etienne) but there is no reason to suppose that it was ancient when it first appears along with that of Caerhayes in the _Inquisitio Nonarum_ (1340) as _Capella Sci. Dionisii_. St. Denys, supposed, but mistakenly, to be identical with Dionysius the Areopagite, was from the seventh century onwards venerated throughout Europe, and it is not remarkable to find him the patron of a chapel in Cornwall in the fourteenth century.

That the name of the site of the chapel may have suggested to its founder a name for its patron saint is quite possible. As late as the seventeenth century the heralds chose St. John Baptist’s head for the arms of Penzance (holy head). There are, in truth, no better grounds for regarding St. Dennis as mythical than St. Stephen to whom his chapel was appendant.

St. Allen, as the presiding saint of the _hail_ or moor, reminds one of some rather irreverent lines by the greatest of Irish poets:

Our preacher prays he may in’erit The hinspiration of the Spirit. Oh! grant him also, ’oly Lord, The haspiration of thy word.

St. Allen is found as St. Alun in the Episcopal Registers. The name occurs in the cartulary of Redon and in Coed-Alun near Carnarvon in Wales. St. Alan is among the disciples of Iltut and is the patron of Corlay (Côtes du Nord). In no instance is the name found with the aspirate, or hail without it.

Pol de Leon is a personage quite as historic as Napoleon. It must rest with the reader to say whether the church in Cornwall which bears his name got it from Gwavas Lake or from the well-known British saint, a disciple of Tutwal, who founded a Breton bishopric, who was a fellow-student of St. Sampson the patron of Golant and who is himself the patron of fifteen parishes, one of which curiously enough is in Cornouaille in Brittany.

Eglosberria remains and this, we are told, is compounded of Eglos and a Cornish place-word presumed to be Berrie. The fact that no such place is now to be found in the parish of St. Buryan does not, of course, prove that in the far remote past there may not have been one. Nor does it concern us much to know that in the parish berries of sorts are abundant, holly berries, elder berries, blackberries and gooseberries; still less to consider whether the last-named berry is indigenous or acclimatised. This is not a treatise on Botany.

Had our critic consulted his reference, Domesday Book, he would have read in the Exchequer redaction, “The Canons of St. Berriona hold Eglosberrie”; in the Exeter book—the original document—under the heading Inquisitio Geldi (1085), “St. Berriana holds a hide of land”; and under the heading Land of St. Berriona the Virgin, “the Canons of St. Berriona hold a manor which is called Eglosberria, which the same Virgin held in the time of King Edward freely” (i.e. free from the payment of dues). The first point to notice is that in every case the name of the saint is trisyllabic, Berrian or Berrion. Berria, the second half of the name of the manor, is probably only a contraction for Berriana made by the earlier scribe and copied by the later. This explanation is placed almost beyond dispute by earlier and later documents concerning the manor and the church. Again it is well known that the letters _b_ and _v_ are, in certain Cornish words, interchangeable as, for example, in Trebean and Trevean. Professor Loth had pointed out to the present writer that Berrian (Buryan) and Verrian (Veryan) were identical, but it was two years before a striking confirmation of his statement was disclosed. A charter dated 1450 was recently handed to me to decipher relating to this very manor of Eglosberrie.

In it the lands were described as those of Eglosveryan. The Domesday record is not only in perfect agreement with, but confirms, the charter of Athelstan, which, in spite of some adverse criticism, probably arising from the fact that it has been copied and attested more than once, is acknowledged to be a trustworthy document, and as such was always regarded whenever the rights and privileges of the royal chapel of St. Buryan were called in question. Veryan and Buryan being identical, it follows that, on the assumption that they are derived from Berrie, a place-name, that place will be found in both parishes. It is found in neither. It is purely mythical.

It may be asked, why devote so much space to a matter of secondary importance? The reason is that here we have to meet an attempt to bring the Celtic saints within the province of comparative mythology, an attempt to show that they were eponymous in somewhat the same sense as Romulus, Cypris, Pallas Athene and Ceres (as representing Siculus) were the genii and afterwards the presiding deities over Rome, Cyprus, Athens and Sicily. It is useless to deny the assertion that “the Church history of Cornwall before the Norman Conquest is chiefly a matter of legendary lore” and that “the cult of the sun was that of Cornwall not a thousand years ago” unless we have something to say in support of our denial.

Let us therefore carry the argument a little further—let us suppose that the topological origin of the saints is the true one; let us suppose that there is indisputable evidence, gathered in Cornwall, in its favour; in other words, that the Cornish saints are local divinities; how will it fare with them when their votaries have crossed the seas? Will the Island which gives its name to St. Ives, will the Downs of Lelant, the Hail (deprived of its aspirate), the Dinas of Mid-Cornwall and Gwavas Lake win Armorican devotion? Or conversely, assuming the saints to have been of Armorican manufacture, will they appeal to the devotional instincts of the Cornish? Or must we assume that there was a sacred island at Plouyé, a sacred downs at Plevin, a sacred pool at Léon and a sacred Berrie at Berrien and Lan-verrien in Finistère? It is as difficult to imagine an affirmative answer being returned to any of these questions as St. Thomas Aquinas found it to believe that a religious could tell a lie, and therefore, according to his biographer, more difficult to believe than that an ox could fly. The Celtic saints were not eponymous, but men of like passions with us, who lived their lives, told their story, impressed their contemporaries and were gathered to their fathers, men honoured in their generation and the glory of their times.

This leads to a brief notice of their biographies. The subject is not free from difficulty. It requires a rearrangement of thoughts, a re-focussing of ideas. The Lives of the Saints do not conform to ordinary standards or respond to ordinary appeals.

They are not plain, unvarnished accounts of simple earnest men written by their contemporaries, but, in their present form, they are for the most part highly coloured stories addressed not to the intellect but to the imagination. They are not always free from anachronisms. The ideals of their writers are not ours to-day.

They abound in the miraculous. They are adorned after a common pattern peculiarly their own. They draw largely upon Holy Scripture. Incidents related of one saint are sometimes transferred to another. Similarities of expression are found in them, perhaps pointing to a common origin or authorship. In short, all the elements which provoke adverse criticism are found in them.

And yet, making due allowance for the mentality of those who wrote and those who read them, there is no sufficient reason for impugning the veracity of the writers, much less for despising them.[81] They were neither deceivers nor deceived. The hagiographer had probably as great a regard for truth as his modern critics, but he knew nothing of the canons of literary excellence. He had never heard of “nature unadorned”; but he knew, just as we know, how banal and commonplace are the lives of many of the best men and women who have lived and worked for others, and he strove to portray them in colours which might make them interesting to a generation whose intelligence, so far as religion was concerned, had been chiefly moulded by Holy Scripture. He recognised analogies and emphasised them. He was conversant with the main facts and knew how impressive had been the personality and the life of his hero, but he had not, like Boswell, followed him about with a note-book. He was himself an impressionist and by no means sparing of his paint, one whose work doubtless won the approval of the age in which he lived. He had no message for succeeding ages.

At the same time only ignorance or prejudice will place all hagiographers on the same level or refuse to take account of alleged facts, even when they are concealed underneath an intolerable deal of fanciful adornment.

In some cases the Lives of the Saints, as presented by their authors, possess real historical value. Those of Sampson, Paul Aurelian, Winwaloe, Tutwal and Malo (Machutus) fall within this category.[82] The life of St. Sampson drawn up, according to Mgr. Duchesne, towards the end of the seventh century, of which the earliest and most valuable MS. is of the eleventh century, will repay diligent study.[83] It has a direct and important bearing upon monastery-bishoprics, and ought to possess a special interest for the people of Cornwall whose forefathers profited by St. Sampson’s ministry. The biography, as we should expect, contains its full share of miracles, but is, nevertheless, characterised by veracity in those statements which relate to the saint’s parentage, private life, travels and career. The picture is a true picture, however much we may dislike the method of treatment. The landing of the saint near Padstow, his sojourn at St. Kew, his destruction of the pagan idol in the hundred of Trigg and other details are all related and the topographical knowledge of the writer has been shown to be accurate.[84] It is doubtful, however, whether, at the present stage of historical research, it is possible for those, who are most competent to form a judgment of the value of the evidence afforded by the Lives of the Saints, to do so dispassionately and impartially owing to the antagonism which is provoked by the extraordinary play of fancy on the part of their writers.

That some of them possess historical value is proved by a Life the earliest MS. of which is comparatively recent. In the life of St. Petrock the text of which is not earlier than the fifteenth century it is stated that “Petrock, after visiting his compatriot St. Sampson, betook himself _ad cellam Wethnoci episcopi_. A little further on we read _unde etiam lingua gentis illius Landuuethmoch_ (for Lannwethnoc) _adhuc usque hodie dicitur_. Now Lannwethnoc presents itself in Domesday Book under the forms of Lanwehenoc (wrongly written Lanwenahoc) and Lan-guihenoc.”[85]

The remarkable thing is that a fifteenth-century writer should have recorded two facts which were as little known at the time when he wrote as they are to the generality of English readers to-day; the first, that in the days of St. Petrock a bishop might have been found occupying a cell, living as a monk or hermit, though not necessarily living alone; and the second, that there was in pre-Norman times a place bearing the name of Languihenoc, both of which are placed beyond dispute by the evidence given us in the chapter on Monastery-Bishoprics and by the testimony of Domesday Book. It surely requires an imagination of wider scope to believe that the writer was not transcribing or interpreting an authentic document than to accept the most fantastic legends of Celtic saints. The service rendered to research is twofold: it witnesses to the historicity of the Life even if it does not establish the reputation of its writer, and it adds one more to our list of Celtic bishops in the person of Guethnoc, who as Gwethnoc is honoured in Finistère and elsewhere in Brittany.

At this point it seems convenient to summarise the results of our survey. It has been maintained that coincidence and resemblance have been invested with an importance disproportionate to their real value, that where coincidence has been claimed for the purpose of discrediting traditional doctrine it has often proved as illusory as the rainbow, that resemblance unsupported by other evidence has proved to be imaginary or superficial, that in the case of the Cornish saints, whose names have been supposed to resemble place-names, there is nothing to warrant the suspicion that they are eponymous, that the Lives of the Saints as they have come down to us must be estimated in the light of the mentality of the writers and readers of them, that, however ornate or barbaric they may be considered to be, when they record ordinary events the statements are worthy of investigation and often of historical value, and that a comparatively modern life of a saint may afford evidence of the substantial accuracy of the facts which it records.

It may not unreasonably be asked what then is the attitude to be observed towards those students of comparative mythology who endeavour to find a common origin for all religions by studying religious phenomena? There is no reason why it should not be friendly or even helpful. But, whatever may be the final verdict of that study, its present value will be generally determined by psychology rather than by logic. The man who starts with a theory, whether in favour of a common origin of religious belief or with one opposed to a common origin, will probably find enough evidence to confirm his theory. Darwins are not born every day; yet there is no hope which is more widely shared or more secretly cherished by those who give themselves to mythological research than the hope that they are at least potential Darwins. The desire to be scientific, that is, to reduce to system an array of facts, vastly preponderates over the desire to ascertain the accuracy of certain alleged facts and their relation to other facts of a similar nature. It is possible to accept the statement that worship originated in sacrifice, in the attempt to propitiate an offended deity, and to deduce conclusions diametrically opposed to each other. To the Catholic Christian it will perhaps be a substantial aid to faith, to the Protestant an encouragement to discard the errors of paganism, to the unbeliever a confirmation of unbelief. The subject—only as yet in its infancy—can hardly be ignored. At the same time its ramifications cover so much ground that comparatively few can be expected to acquire sufficient knowledge to be in a position to judge of its conclusions. Archæology, philology, ethnology, ancient philosophy, theology and mythology are only some of the departments of a study which aims at determining the origins of religious belief. Who then is sufficient for these things? He has yet to be born.