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Cornish Legends

Introduction

  Our Cornish drolls are dead, each one;

       The fairies from their haunts are gone

     There’s scarce a witch in all the land;

        The world has grown so learn’d and grand.

 

Henry Quick of Zennor 1840  1

Around 5.000 years ago a group of people stood in a moorland landscape and surveyed the ring of stones that they had erected. They had no doubts that future generations would be pleased at what they had done and why they had done it. They could not have foreseen the mystery they were to leave behind for today we stand amongst the stones and wonder why.

I recently met an Australian Jim Quick who is of Cornish descent. We went into Zennor church to see the gravestone of one of his ancestors, John Quick of Wicca, who had died in the 1700's. As we looked around the place Jim saw a little card with what he thought was Welsh written on it. I explained that it was the Lords Prayer in the Cornish language which was now making a revival. John,  Jim's ancestor probably spoke it all the time. I informed Jim that his family were not English because  when  he crossed the River Tamar, which acts as a border across most of the land mass between Devon and Cornwall, he entered the land of a people who can trace their roots back to long before the English came. In the words of  the Rev. Canon Doble, "You have arrived amongst a people who are descendents of a different  kingdom. A people who differ fundamentally from the English in race, civilization, language, and in religion."2. The fact that nearly every parish in Cornwall is called after a saint reminds us of the difference in religion which once distinguished the people of Cornwall from the people of England.   

Cornwall's history was transmitted by oral means for thousands of years and much of it has been lost or was altered when it was finally transcribed into documentary form. As another of Jims ancestors, Henry Quick,  pointed out in his little rhyme, much of the verbal history, which had been passed down in the form of drolls (stories) from father to son and mother to daughter was, in 1840, fast disappearing. Thankfully, others had also spotted the danger and decided to set about recording as many of the folk tales as possible. One of these was Dr. Robert Hunt, who as a young boy, took to writing down the stories he heard from an old lady who lived amongst the sand dunes of Lelant, he later published a collection of folk-tales and stated the following in its introduction : 

"From early youth accidental circumstances have led to my acquiring a taste for collecting the waifs floating upon the sea of time, which tell us something of those ancient peoples who have not a written history. The rude traditions of a race who appear to have possessed much native intelligence, minds wildly poetical, and great fertility of imagination, united with a deep feeling for the mysteries by which life is girdled, especially interested me."3.

He became Secretary of  the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, based at Falmouth and his duties, as well as his inclination, took him often into the mining and. agricultural districts, and brought him into intimate relation with the "miners and the peasantry". He tells us that: 

"every district in which there was a mine, became familiar ground. away from the towns, at a period when the means of communications were few, and those few tedious. Primitive manners still lingered. Education was not then, as now, the fashion. Church­schools were few and far between; and Wesleyan Methodism - although it was infusing truth and goodness amongst the people had not yet become conscious of the importance of properly educating the young. Always delighting in popular tales, no opportunity of hearing them was ever lost. Seated on a three-legged stool, or in a “timberen settle,” near the blazing heath-fire on the hearth, have I elicited the old stories of which the people were beginning to be ashamed. Resting in a level, after the toil of climbing from the depths of a mine, in close companionship with the, homely miner, his superstitions, and the tales which he had heard from his grandfather, have been confided to me." 4.

William Bottrell  on the other hand grew up listening to the tales of his grandparents . He was born at Raftra Farm in the parish of St Leven in 1818 and tells us in the introduction to the first of his three volumes of Cornish folk lore, that

"Before the commencement of the present century (19th), the district of West Penwith, was, from its almost insular position, one of the most secluded and unknown parts of England. The estuary of Hayle by which it is bounded on the North-West and the Mount’s-bay to the South approaching to within three miles of each other, sever it in some measure from the rest of the county, with which, some three score years ago, from the badness of roads and scarcity of wheel-conveyances, it had but little communication, either commercially or other­wise. Then persons, living west of Penzance, were regarded as great travellers if they had “crossed over Hayle,” which, at that time, was a dangerous undertaking, on account of its shifting quick-sands; and people living further east were looked on as foreigners by the west-country folks." 5.

It is easy to see how the verbal history had survived in this insular part of Cornwall. A droll teller "could take three or four winter's evenings to get through with the droll, because he would enter into very minute details... taking care, at the same time, to give the spoken parts literally as he had heard them from his ancestors." 6. So history became legend and legend became stories of entertainment. But how many of the drolls are based on fact?

Plutrarch, a priest of the Delphic Oracle (circa  45 - 125 A.D.) wrote the following:

"It is so hard to find out the truth of anything by looking at the record of the past.  The process of time obscures the truth of former times, and even contemporaneous writers disguise and twist the truth out of malice or flattery." 7.

Platarch hit the nail on the head when he wrote those words, for even verbal history changes in its telling. A simple way to demonstrate this is to get a group of friends  to watch a Football match then ask them to record their memory of it the next day and see the different perspective put on it by supporters of the two different sides.

What you are about to read is an interpretation of some of the  verbal legends that were passed down through many generations of Cornish folk. Eventually someone wrote them down. You may disagree with some of my thinking but I would argue that it has as much right to be put forward as any other. Having read it it is then up to you how much of it you accept as part of the history of Cornwall's past.

George Pritchard. 

  1. "Henry Quick of Zennor" by P.A.S. Pool. 

  2.  "The Saints of Cornwall" Rev. Canon Doble

  3. "Popular Romances of the West of England" Robert Hunt.

  4. ibid.3

  5. Traditions & Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Series One. William Bottrell.

  6. ibid.5

  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Introduction" to Plutarch's Morals, edited by William W. Goodwin (London: Sampson, Low, 1870) p. xxi.

St Piran the Man of Tin

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Revised: September 07, 2006 .