Abstract
In 1916, Thomas Taylor, vicar of St Breward and Honorary Canon of Truro Cathedral, published a series of ‘sketches and studies’ entitled The Celtic Christianity of Cornwall. These examined the ‘druidical’ religion that preceded the arrival of the Christian faith in the south-western peninsula of the British Isles and identified the late seventh and early eighth centuries as a ‘golden age’ of indigenous missionary saints whose cults had left a lasting imprint on the landscape in the form of standing crosses, holy wells and stone chapels. Later chapters explored the monastic character of Cornish ecclesiastical organization, its ancient religious houses and hermits, its tradition of miracle plays (or ‘gwaries’) and the history of its most famous pilgrimage shrine, St Michael’s Mount. Taylor stressed the kinship between Christianity in Cornwall and its Celtic neighbours of Wales, Ireland and Brittany, and underlined their mutual independence from Rome and spirited resistance to Saxon subjugation prior to ad 1000. Although born in Derbyshire, Taylor enthusiastically embraced the heritage of his adopted county and was made a bard at the inaugural Gorseth Kernow in 1928, where he took the name ‘Gwas Ust’ (‘Servant of St Just’).2
Iam grateful to Julia Crick, Jo Esra, Richard Maber, Matthew Spriggs and those who attended seminars in Cambridge, Exeter and London for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Notes
Thomas Taylor, The Celtic Christianity of Cornwall: Divers Sketches and Studies (London, 1916).
Henry Jenner, A Handbook of the Cornish Language Chiefly in Its Latest Stages. With Some Accounts of Its History and Literature (London, 1904); Jenner, ‘Cornwall a Celtic Nation’, Celtic Review 1 (1904–5).
See esp. John Rhys, Celtic Britain (London, 1879); Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London, 1888).
See Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Visionary Celt: The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 11 (1986); Terrence Brown (ed.), Celticism (Amsterdam, 1996);
Ian Bradley, Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (Edinburgh, 1999), ch. 4;
Donald E. Meek, The Quest for Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh, 2000), ch. 3.
Esther de Waal, A World Made Whole: The Rediscovery of the Celtic Tradition (London, 1991);
Ian Bradley, The Celtic Way (London, 1993);
Philip Sheldrake, Living between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality (London, 1995);
Timothy Joyce, Celtic Christianity: A Sacred Tradition, a Vision of Hope (New York, 1998);
Andy Philips, Lan Kernow: A Theology of Place for Cornwall (Portreath, 2006).
Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Celtomania and Celtoscepticism’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 36 (1998); Kathleen Hughes, ‘The Celtic Church: Is This a Valid Concept?’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981); Wendy Davies, ‘The Myth of the Celtic Church’, in Nancy Edwards and Alan Lane (eds), The Early Church in Wales and the West: Recent Work in Early Christian Archaeology, History and Place-Names (Oxford, 1992).
See, among others, James P. Mackey (ed.), An Introduction to Celtic Christianity (Edinburgh, 1995);
Oliver Davies, Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales: The Origins of the Welsh Spiritual Tradition (Cardiff, 1996);
Mark Atherton (ed.), Celts and Christians: New Approaches to the Religious Traditions of Britain and Ireland (Cardiff, 2002).
Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1999).
Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter, 2002), Introduction, esp. p. 6, and p. 182;
A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London, 1941).
Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Beyond Empire II: Christianities of the Celtic Peoples’, in Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity: Early Medieval Christianities c. 600–c.1100 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 92, 106; and
Charles Edwards, Wales and the Britons (Oxford, 2012). For an earlier overview, with different emphases, see
Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain (London, 1986).
John Blair, ‘A Saint for Every Minster? Local Cults in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Alan Thacker and Richard Sharpe (eds), Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford, 2002), p. 486;
Sam Turner, Making a Christian Landscape: The Countryside in Early Medieval Cornwall, Devon and Wessex (Exeter, 2006), esp. ch. 8.
O. J. Padel, ‘Local Saints and Place Names in Cornwall’, in Thacker and Sharpe (eds), Local Saints; see also Padel, ‘Asser’s Parochia of Exeter’, in Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell (eds), Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles Edwards (Woodbridge, 2011).
See O. J. Padel, ‘Oral and Literary Culture in Medieval Cornwall’, in Helen Fulton (ed.), Medieval Celtic Literature and Society (Dublin, 2005), esp. pp. 97–8. See also
P. Berresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and Its Literature (London, 1974), ch. 2. For the late medieval efflorescence of saint’s cults, see
Joanna Mattingly, ‘Pre-Reformation Saints’ Cults in Cornwall, with Particular Reference to the St Neot’s Windows’, in Jane Cartwright (ed), Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults (Cardiff, 2003). Suggestions that this revival included a medieval Cornish translation of the Bible, however, have been convincingly rejected: Malte Tschirschky, ‘The Medieval “Cornish Bible”’, Cornish Studies 11 (2003); Matthew Spriggs, ‘Additional Thoughts on the Medieval “Cornish Bible”’, Cornish Studies 14 (2006).
See Nicholas Orme, Cornwall and the Cross: Christianity 500–1560 (London, 2007), ch. 6 and passim.
Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989).
Nicholas Orme, ‘Popular Religion and the Reformation in England: A View from Cornwall’, in James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Cambridge, 2004), emphasizes the resilience of traditional religion long after the advent of Protestantism.
Albert Peel (ed.), The Seconde Parte of a Register Being a Calendar of Manuscripts under that Title Intended for Publication by the Puritans about 1593, and now in Dr Williams’ Library, London, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915), pp. 89, 98–110.
Anne Duffin, Faction and Faith: Politics and Religion of the Cornish Gentry before the Civil War (Exeter, 1996), ch. 2.
Andrew Boorde, The first boke of the introduction of knowledge (London, 1555 edn; first publ. 1542), sig. B2v. On the history of the language, see Jenner, Handbook, ch. 1; Ellis, Cornish Language; Philip Payton, ‘Cornish’, in Glanville Price (ed.), Languages in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2000).
See among others, Jenner, Handbook, p. 12; Ellis, Cornish Language, pp. 57, 66; Brian Murdoch, Cornish Literature (Cambridge, 1993), p. 15;
Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 66–7.
A copye of a letter containing certayne newes, and the articles or requestes of the Devonshyre and Cornyshe rebelles (London, 1549), sigs B6r–7r; Nicholas Pocock (ed.), Troubles Connected with the Prayer Book of 1549, Camden Society, New Series 37 (London, 1884), p. 171. See also Spriggs, ‘Medieval “Cornish Bible”’, pp. 49–50.
Scawen’s treatise on ‘The Causes of the Cornish Speech’s Decay’ is in the Cornwall Record Office, Truro, MS F2/39. It is transcribed in BL, MS Add. 33, 420, quotation at fos 123v–124r. It is printed, with minor variations, in Davies Gilbert, The Parochial History of Cornwall, Founded on the Manuscript Histories of Mr Hals and Mr Tonkin, 4 vols (London, 1838), 4, pp. 215–17. See also Edmund Gibson, Camden’s Britannia (London, 1695), p. 18.
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 1. For the similar but different case of the decline of Gaelic, see
Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Loss and Gain: Attitudes towards the English Language in Early Modern Ireland’, in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Reshaping Ireland 1550–1700: Colonization and Its Consequences (Dublin, 2011).
Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis (eds), Calvinism in Europe 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994).
Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010), esp. ch. 2.
O. J. Padel (ed.), The Cornish Writings of the Boson Family (Redruth, 1975), pp. 35–7; Gilbert, Parochial History, 4, p. 218. See Matthew Spriggs, ‘William Scawen (1600–1689): A Neglected Cornish Patriot and Father of the Cornish Language Revival’, Cornish Studies 13 (2005).
Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984); Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003), p. 194.
See Glanmor Williams, ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967); Richard Davies, ‘Address to the Welsh People’, prefacing the Welsh New Testament of 1567; Albert Owen Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff, 1925), Appendix III; Roger A. Mason, ‘Usable Pasts: History and Identity in Reformation Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review 76 (1997); and
Alan Ford, James Ussher: Theology, History and Politics in Early Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007), ch. 6. On Wales, see also
Jason Nice, Sacred History and National Identity: Comparisons between Early Modern Wales and Brittany (London, 2009), esp. ch. 4.
Serenus Cressy, The Church History of Brittany, from the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (Rouen, 1668); Richard Challoner, Britannia Sancta: Or, the lives of the most celebrated British, English, Scottish, and Irish Saints (London, 1745), sig. e3r. John Wilson’s English martyrologe conteyning a summary of the lives of the glorious and renowned saintes of the three kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (St Omer, 1608) is in the same vein. See Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2008), ch. 4. Jason Nice reaches somewhat similar conclusions in his Sacred History and National Identity, ch. 3.
Raymond Gillespie and Bernadette Cunningham, ‘“The Most Adaptable of Saints”: The Cult of St Patrick in the Seventeenth Century’, Archivium Hibernicum 49 (1995); Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting Sacred Space in Early Modern Wales’, in Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005).
Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England 1559–1642 (New York and London, 2004), ch. 6 passim, and p. 172.
This Oscott College MS is printed in John Morris (ed.), The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, First Series (London, 1872), p. 137. It seems once to have been in the possession of the antiquary Thomas Tonkin, whose forbear had married Tregian’s sister: p. 64.
See Sheldrake, Living between Worlds; Mary Low, Celtic Christianity and Nature: Early Irish and Hebridean Traditions (Belfast, 1996).
Joanna Mattingly, ‘A Well without Water? The Rise and Fall of the Holy Well at Chapel Porth, St Agnes’, Journal of the St Agnes Museum Trust 14 (1998), p. 8.
John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 5 vols (London, 1906–10), 1, pp. 175, 190, 208.
John Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica or A Miscellany of British Antiquities (Sherborne, Dorset, 1980), p. 846.
M. Quiller-Couch and L. Quiller-Couch, Ancient and Holy Wells of Cornwall (London, 1894), p. 2;
M. A. Courtenay, Cornish Feasts and Folk-lore (Penzance, 1890), p. 56.
Mattingly, ‘Well without Water’, p. 9; Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall (London, 1916 edn; first publ. 1865; rev. and expanded 1881), p. 275.
On hurling, see Sally L. Joyce and Evelyn S. Newlyn (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Cornwall (Toronto, 1999), pp. 564–71.
William Bottrell, Stories and Folklore of West Cornwall, 3rd series (Penzance, 1880), p. 116.
See the comments of William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Penzance, 1870), p. iv.
Quiller-Couch and Quiller-Couch, Ancient and Holy Wells; John Rhys, Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx, 2 vols (Oxford, 1901);
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Fairy Faith in Cornwall: Theories and Genuine Accounts of the Faery Folk by the Cornish People (Oxford, 1911), p. 163.
See, among others, Di Francis, Cornish Legends and Folklore (St Ives, 1977);
Kelvin I. Jones, Folklore and Witchcraft of Devon and Cornwall (Penzance, 1997);
Cheryl Straffon, Fentynyow Kernow: In Search of Cornwall’s Holy Wells (Penzance, 1998).
William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1989).
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Walsham, A. (2014). Antiquities Cornu-Brittanick: Language, Memory and Landscape in Early Modern Cornwall. In: hAnnracháin, T.Ó., Armstrong, R. (eds) Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137306357_6
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