A Book of Cornwall - Baring-Gould Sabine

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opened to know where they were and which was their right direction. In gratitude for this deliverance, old John Fitz caused the stone memorial to be set over the spring for the advantage of all pixy-led wanderers. Alas! the convict establishment has enclosed the moor all round, and now this well, though intact, no longer stands, as I remember it, in wild moorland, but enclosed by a protecting wall in a field.

      In a certain large village of which I know something water was introduced by means of earthenware pipes for a considerable distance, and then conveyed to taps at convenient spots by iron and lead.

      Now there was one of these taps placed outside the Board school. The master said within himself, "If I go to the tap, I shall have to pay the water rate, which will be very heavy; if I never turn the tap, I surely cannot be required to pay. So I know what I will do. Go to! I will draw all my water from the well in the yard of the farm at the back of my premises."

      He did so, and lost his wife and child by diphtheria. Verily even modern Board school masters might learn something from these wild old pure water-loving Celtic saints.

      Note.-Book on Cornish Holy Wells: -

      Quiller-Couch (M. and L.), Ancient and Holy Wells of Cornwall. London: Clark, 1894.

      CHAPTER III

      CORNISH CROSSES

      Abundance of crosses-The menhîr-Crosses marked the limits of a Llan-Crosses marked places for public prayer-Instance of a Cornish Dissenter-Churches anciently few and far between-The cross erected where was no church-Which therefore precedes the village church-Crosses as waymarks-The Abbot's Way-Interlaced work-The plait a subject for study.

      There is no county in England where crosses abound as they do in Cornwall. Second to it comes Devonshire. Indeed, on Dartmoor and in the west of the latter county they are as numerous as in Cornwall.

      Their origin is various.

      In the first place, where the pagans worshipped a menhîr or standing stone, there it was Christianised by being turned into a cross. In the second place, crosses marked the bounds of a minihi or llan, the sanctuary of the saint.

      Then, again, the Celtic churches were very small, mere oratories, that could not possibly contain a moderate congregation. The saints took their station at a cross, and preached thence. With the Saxons there was a rooted dread of entering an enclosed place for anything like worship, fearing, as they did, the exercise of magical rites; and they were accustomed to hold all their meetings in the open air. S. Walpurga, the sister of S. Willibald, who wrote in 750, and was a Wessex woman, says: -

      "It is the custom of the Saxon race that on many estates of nobles and of good men they are wont to have not a church, but the standard of the holy cross dedicated to our Lord and reverenced with great honour, lifted up on high so as to be convenient for the frequency of daily prayer."

      In connection with this, I may mention a fact. In the parish of Altarnon was an old pious Wesleyan, and when the weather was too bad for him to go to chapel he was wont to go to one of the crosses of granite that stood near his cottage, kneel there, and say his prayers. He died not long ago.

      Bede, some twenty years before Walpurga, says that-

      "The religious habit was then held in great veneration, so that wheresoever a clerk or a monk happened to come he was joyfully received, … and if they chanced to meet him upon the way, they ran to him, and bowing, were glad to be signed with his hand and blessed with his mouth. On Sundays they flocked largely to the" (bishop's) "church or the monasteries to hear the word of God. And if any presbyter chanced to come into a village, the inhabitants flocked together to hear the word of life; for the presbyters and clerks went into the villages on no other account than to preach, baptise, visit the sick, and in short to take care of souls" (H.E., iii. 16).

      This shows that, in the first place, among the Anglo-Saxons there were no churches except the cathedral and the monastic church, and no parochial clergy. Bede does not actually say that there was a cross set up from which the itinerant clergy preached, and to which the faithful resorted for prayer, but this additional fact we have learned from Walpurga.

      So we come to this very interesting conclusion, that the village cross preceded the parish church. The crosses were, in fact, the religious centres of church life, and we ought accordingly to value and preserve them with the tenderest care. A great many of those that we have now on our village greens are comparatively modern, and date from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but there still remain a vast number, not in the midst of a village, but on moors and by highways of an extremely early description, and which most assuredly have been the scene of many a primitive "camp meeting" in the fifth and sixth centuries.

      On Sourton Down beside the road stands a cross of very coarse granite. On it is inscribed PRINCIPI FIL AVDEI, and above it an early and rude cross of Constantine. Some time in the Middle Ages the rudeness of the stone gave dissatisfaction, and its head was trimmed into a cross.

      A third occasion for the erection of crosses was as waymarks. Across Dartmoor such a succession of rude crosses exists where was what is called the Abbot's Way from Buckfast to Tavistock and to Plympton. But there are others not on these lines, and such may have served both as guiding marks and also as stations for prayer. That the monks of Buckland-and Buckland goes back to pre-Saxon times-did go out to the moor and there minister to the tin-streamers or squatters and shepherds, I cannot doubt, and accordingly look with much emotion at these grey monuments of early Christianity.

      The interlaced work which is found on some of the crosses is of the same character as the ornamentation in the early Irish MSS., and it was adopted from the Celtic clergy by their Anglian and Saxon converts.

      But whence came it?

      We know that the Britons delighted in plaited work with osiers, and it was with wattle that they built their houses, their kings' palaces, and defended their camps. By constant use of wattle through long ages they became extraordinarily skilful in devising plaits; and when they began to work on stone they copied thereon the delicate interlaced work they loved to exhibit in their domestic buildings.

      The various plaits have been worked out by Mr. A. G. Langdon in his admirable study of the Cornish crosses. At a meeting of the British Association he exhibited a hundred drawings of different crosses, etc., illustrative of a paper read by Mr. J. Romilly Allen on "The Early Christian Monuments of Cornwall." When some incredulity was expressed as to there being so many examples in that county, Mr. Langdon explained that not only did all these come from Cornwall, but that the examples brought before the Association represented only about one-third of the whole number known to exist. And since that date a good many more have been noticed. The variety in design of the crosses is very great indeed. Some affect the Greek cross, some the Latin; some are with a figure on them, some plain, others richly ornamented. But what is remarkable about them is, in the first place, they are nearly all in granite, a material in which nothing was done from the seventh century down to the fifteenth, as though the capability of working such a hard intractable stone had been lost. And, in the second place, the ornamentation is in the lost art of plaiting, of the beauty and difficulty of which we can hardly conceive till we attempt it. There is first the four-string plait, then that with six, and lastly that with eight. Then three strings are combined together in each plait, then split, forming the so-called Stafford knot; the knot and the plait are worked together; now a loop is dropped, forming a bold and pleasing interruption in the pattern. Then a ring is introduced and plaited into the pattern; then chain-work is introduced; in fact, an endless variety is formed, exercising the ingenuity of the artist to the uttermost. It would be an excellent amusement and occupation for a rainy day in an hotel for the tourist to set to work upon and unravel the mysteries of these Celtic knots.

      The old interlaced work, or the tradition of it, seems to have lingered on in the glazing of windows, and some very beautiful examples remain in England and in France. Mr. Romilly Allen points out: -

      "In Egyptian, Greek, and Roman decorative art the only kind of interlaced work is the plait, without any modification whatever; and the man who discovered how to devise new patterns from a simple plait, by making what I term breaks, laid the foundation of all the

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