A Book of Cornwall

In the lives of some of the early Celtic saints we are told strange stories of their self-mortification, their rigorous fasts. This was due to a very curious cause.

According to the Celtic law of distress, the appellant took the matter into his own hands. There was no executive administration of law. Everyone who was aggrieved had to exact the penalty as best he might. If he were too weak to recover the penalty by force, then the legal proceeding for him was to fast against the debtor or aggressor. He sat down at his door and starved himself. The person fasted against almost always gave way, as the fact of the institution of the fast doubled the fine, and as he did not venture to allow the creditor to proceed to the last extremities lest he should entail on himself a blood feud.

When S. Patrick wanted to carry a point with King Lear (Laogaire) he adopted this method and succeeded, and the king gave way.

There is a very odd story-of course mere legend-of S. Germanus when he came to Britain to oppose the Pelagian heresy. He found one particular city mightily opposed to the orthodox doctrine, and as he could not convince the citizens by reasoning with them, he and his attendant clerks sat down at the gates and starved themselves to force the citizens into adopting the true faith.

The same law of distress is found in the code of Menu, and the British Government has had to forbid the dharma-i. e. the legal fasting against a creditor-from being put in practice in India.

Now, very naturally, and by an easy transition, the early Celtic saints carried their legal ideas into their religion, and just as when S. Patrick, wanting something from King Lear, fasted against him till he obtained it, so did the followers of Patrick, when they desired something of God for themselves or for others, proceed against Him by the legal method of levying a distress.

This is frankly admitted in an odd story in the Book of Lismore. Three clerks agreed together that they would each recite a certain number of psalms daily, and that should one die the other two would share his psalms between them. All went smoothly enough for a while. Then one died, whereupon the survivors divided his portion of the Psalter between them. But soon after a second died, whereat the third found himself saddled with the sets of psalms that appertained to both the others. He was very angry. He thought the Almighty had dealt unfairly by him in letting the other two off so lightly and overburdening him, and in a fit of spleen and resentment he fasted against Him.

But this view of asceticism was held only at the outset, and rapidly sounder ideas gained the mastery, and we find self-denial in the saints assume quite another complexion.

An instance in point is in the life of S. Columba. One day he saw a poor widow gathering stinging-nettles, and he asked her why she did it. "For the pot," said she; "I have no other food."

The good old man was troubled. He went back to the monastery and said to the cook, "I will eat nettles only now."

When this had gone on for some time, his disciple who cooked the nettles for him saw that he was falling away in flesh, so he took a hollow elder-stick, put butter into the tube, and by this means enriched the dish.

S. Columba said, "The nettles do not taste as before. They have a richer flavour. What have you done to them?"

"Master dear," answered his disciple, "I have put nothing into the pot but this stick, wherewith I stirred its contents."

Nor were they pedantic in observance of rule.

Travellers came to S. Cronan, and he had meat and ale set on the board, and he himself and his monks sat down to make merry with them.

"Humph!" said a formalist among them, "at this rate I do not see much prospect of matins being said."

"My friend," answered Cronan, "in receiving strangers we receive Christ; as to the matins, the angels will sing them in our room."

Finding that some travellers had wandered all night unable to find shelter, "This will never do," said he; "I shall move my quarters to the roadside."

Though rough in their treatment of themselves, they were tender-hearted and kind to bird and beast and man. It was through a frightened fawn flying for refuge to S. Petrock that Constantine was brought to repentance. S. Columba prayed with his arms extended till the birds perched on his hands. Another Columba, the founder, as I suspect, of Columb Major and Minor, was almost incommoded with their affection, fluttering about his face.

"How is it," asked one of his disciples, "that the birds avoid us and gather round you?"

"Is it not natural," answered the saint, "that birds should come to a bird?"

A play on his name, for Columba signifies a dove.

S. Cainnech saw a rich lady with a starved dog.

"Who feeds that poor brute?" he asked.

"I do," answered the lady.

"Feed it? Maltreat it. Go and eat what you cast to the poor hound, and in a week return and tell me how you relish such treatment."

One day an abbot saw a little bird with drooping wings.

"Why is the poor thing so wretched?" he asked.

"Do you not know," said a bystander, "that Molua is dead? He was full of pity to all animals. Never did he injure one. Do you marvel then that the little birds lament his decease?"

It was the same with regard to children.

One day King Eochaid sent his little son with a message to S. Maccarthen. The child's mother gave him an apple to eat on the way. The boy played with it, and it rolled from him and was lost. He hunted for his apple till the sun set, and then, tired, laid himself down in the middle of the road and fell asleep. Maccarthen was going along the road and found the sleeping child there. He at once wrapped his mantle round him, and sat by him all night. Many horsemen and cars passed before the child woke, but the old man made them get by as best they might, and he would neither suffer the child to be disturbed, nor let an accident befall him in the dark.

Great as were the powers conferred on the Celtic saints or arrogated to themselves, there can be no doubt but that they employed them mainly as a means of delivering the innocent, and in putting down barbarous customs.

S. Erc-in Cornwall Erth-made use of his influence to prevent the king of Connaught from baptising his new lance, after pagan custom, in the blood of an infant; S. Euny his in rescuing a boy from being tossed on the spears of some soldiers. Again, finding after a battle that it was the custom to cut off the heads of all who had fallen, and stack them at the king's door to be counted, he with difficulty induced the victors to take turves instead of the heads.

I do not think we at all adequately appreciate the service the saints rendered to the Celtic nations in raising the tone of appreciation of woman.

Next to founding their own monastic establishments, they were careful to induce their mothers or sisters to establish communities for the education of the daughters of the chiefs and of all such maidens as would be entrusted to them.

The estimation in which woman had been held was very low. In the gloss to the law of Adamnán is a description of her position in the house. A trench three feet deep was dug between the door and the hearth, and in this, in a condition almost of nudity, the women spent the day cooking, and making candles out of mutton suet. In the evening they were required to hold these candles whilst the men caroused and feasted, and then were sent to sleep in kennels, like dogs, outside the house as guardians, lest a hostile attack should be made during the darkness.

The current coin seems to have been, in Ireland, a serving-maid, for all fines were calculated by cumals-that is, maidservants-and the value of one woman was the same as that of three cows.

A brother of one of the saints came to him to say that he was bankrupt; he owed a debt of seven maidservants to his creditor, and could not rake so many together. The saint paid the fine in cows.

Bridget's mother was sold as a slave by the father of Bridget to a Druid, and the father afterwards tried to sell his daughter; but as the idea had got about that she was wasteful in the kitchen, he could not find a purchaser.

But this condition of affairs was rapidly altered, and it was so through the influence of the saints and the foundation of the great schools for girls by Bridget, Itha, Brig, and Buriana.

Till the times of Adamnán women were called out to fight as well as the men, and dared not refuse the summons. Their exemption was due to this abbot. He came on a field of battle and saw one woman who had driven a reaping-hook into the bosom of another, and was dragging her away thereby. Horror-struck, he went about among the kings of Ireland and insisted on the convocation of an assembly in which he carried a law that women were thenceforth exempted from this odious obligation.

I have but touched the fringe of a great subject, which is one that has been unduly neglected. The early history of Cornwall is inextricably mixed up with that of the saints who settled there, or who sprang from the native royal family. We have unhappily no annals, hardly a Cornish record, of those early times. Irish, Welsh, Bretons, have been wiser, and have preserved theirs; and it is to them we are forced to appeal to know anything of the early history of our peninsula. As to the saintly lives, it is true that they contain much fable; but we know that they were originally written by contemporaries, or by writers very near the time. S. Columba of Tir-da-Glas, whom I take to have been the founder of the two Columbs in Cornwall and Culbone in Somersetshire, caught one of his disciples acting as his Boswell, noting down what he said and did, and he was so angry that he took the MS. and threw it in the fire, and insisted on none of his pupils attempting to write his life.

S. Erc was wont to retire in Lent to jot down his reminiscences of S. Patrick. The writer of the Life of S. Abban says, "I who have composed this am the grandson of him whom S. Abban baptised." But about the eleventh century a fashion set in for rewriting these histories and elaborating the simple narratives into marvellous tales of miracle, just as in James I.'s reign the grand simple old ballads of the English nation were recomposed in stilted style that robbed them of all their poetry and most of their value.

Now it is almost always possible to disengage the plain threads of history from the flourish and frippery that was woven in at this late period. The eye of the superficial reader is at once caught by all the foolery of grotesque miracle, and turns in disgust from the narrative; but if these histories be critically examined, it will almost always be found that the substratum is historical.

Surely it affords an interest, and gives a zest to an excursion into Cornwall, when we know something of the founders of the churches, and they stand out before us as living, energetic characters, with some faults, but many virtues, and are to us no longer nuda nomina.

CHAPTER II

THE HOLY WELLS

S. Patrick in Ireland-A pagan holy well-S. Samson-Celtic saints very particular about the water they drank-S. Piran and S. Germoe-S. Erth and the goose-eggs-S. Sithney and the polluted well-Dropping of pins into wells-Hanging rags about-Well-chapel of S. Clether-Venton Ia-Jordan wells-Gwennap ceremony-Fice's well-Modern stupidity about contaminated water.

The system adopted by S. Patrick in Ireland was that of making as little alteration as he could in the customs of the people, except only when such customs were flatly opposed to the precepts of the gospel. He did not overthrow their lechs or pillar-stones; he simply cut crosses on them. When he found that the pagans had a holy well, he contented himself with converting the well into a baptistery. It is a question of judgment whether to wean people gently and by slow degrees from their old customs, or whether wholly to forbid these usages. S. Patrick must have known perfectly what the episcopal system was in Gaul, yet when he came into a land where the Roman territorial organisation had never prevailed, he accommodated Christian Church government to the conditions of Celtic tribal organisation.

He found that the Irish, like all other Celtic peoples, held wells in great veneration. He did not preach against this, denounce it as idolatrous, or pass canons condemning it. He quietly appropriated these wells to the service of the Church, and made of them baptisteries.