XIII. CORNISH ANTIQUITIES.37

It is impossible to spend even a few weeks in Cornwall without being impressed with the air of antiquity which pervades that county, and seems, like a morning mist, half to conceal and half to light up every one of its hills and valleys. It is impossible to look at any pile of stones, at any wall, or pillar, or gate-post, without asking one's self the question, Is this old, or is this new? Is it the work of Saxon, or of Roman, or of Celt? Nay, one feels sometimes tempted to ask, Is this the work of Nature or of man?

The late King of Prussia's remark about Oxford, that in it everything old seemed new, and everything new seemed old, applies with even greater truth to Cornwall. There is a continuity between the present and the past of that curious peninsula, such as we seldom find in any other place. A spring bubbling up in a natural granite basin, now a meeting-place for Baptists [pg 239] or Methodists, was but a few centuries ago a holy well, attended by busy friars, and visited by pilgrims, who came there “nearly lame,” and left the shrine “almost able to walk.” Still further back the same spring was a centre of attraction for the Celtic inhabitants, and the rocks piled up around it stand there as witnesses of a civilization and architecture certainly more primitive than the civilization and architecture of Roman, Saxon, or Norman settlers. We need not look beyond. How long that granite buttress of England has stood there, defying the fury of the Atlantic, the geologist alone, who is not awed by ages, would dare to tell us. But the historian is satisfied with antiquities of a more humble and homely character; and in bespeaking the interest, and, it may be, the active support of our readers, in favor of the few relics of the most ancient civilization of Britain, we promise to keep within strictly historical limits, if by historical we understand, with the late Sir G. C. Lewis, that only which can be authenticated by contemporaneous monuments.

But even thus, how wide a gulf seems to separate us from the first civilizers of the West of England, from the people who gave names to every headland, bay, and hill of Cornwall, and who first planned those lanes that now, like throbbing veins, run in every direction across that heath-covered peninsula! No doubt it is well known that the original inhabitants of Cornwall were Celts, and that Cornish is a Celtic language; and that, if we divide the Celtic languages into two classes, Welsh with Cornish and Breton forms one class, the Cymric; while the Irish with its varieties, as developed in Scotland and the Isle of Man, forms another class, which is called the Gaelic or Gadhelic. [pg 240] It may also be more or less generally known that Celtic, with all its dialects, is an Aryan or Indo-European language, closely allied to Latin, Greek, German, Slavonic, and Sanskrit, and that the Celts, therefore, were not mere barbarians, or people to be classed together with Finns and Lapps, but heralds of true civilization wherever they settled in their worldwide migrations, the equals of Saxons and Romans and Greeks, whether in physical beauty or in intellectual vigor. And yet there is a strange want of historical reality in the current conceptions about the Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles; and while the heroes and statesmen and poets of Greece and Rome, though belonging to a much earlier age, stand out in bold and sharp relief on the table of a boy's memory, his notions of the ancient Britons may generally be summed up “in houses made of wicker-work, Druids with long white beards, white linen robes, and golden sickles, and warriors painted blue.” Nay, strange to say, we can hardly blame a boy for banishing the ancient bards and Druids from the scene of real history, and assigning to them that dark and shadowy corner where the gods and heroes of Greece live peacefully together with the ghosts and fairies from the dreamland of our own Saxon forefathers. For even the little that is told in “Little Arthur's History of England” about the ancient Britons and the Druids is extremely doubtful. Druids are never mentioned before Cæsar. Few writers, if any, before him were able to distinguish between Celts and Germans, but spoke of the barbarians of Gaul and Germany as the Greeks spoke of Scythians, or as we ourselves speak of the negroes of Africa, without distinguishing between races so different from each other as Hottentots and Kaffirs. Cæsar was [pg 241] one of the first writers who knew of an ethnological distinction between Celtic and Teutonic barbarians, and we may therefore trust him when he says that the Celts had Druids, and the Germans had none. But his further statements about these Celtic priests and sages are hardly more trustworthy than the account which an ordinary Indian officer at the present day might give us of the Buddhist priests and the Buddhist religion of Ceylon. Cæsar's statement that the Druids worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, is of the same base metal as the statements of more modern writers that the Buddhists worship the Trinity, and that they take Buddha for the Son of God. Cæsar most likely never conversed with a Druid, nor was he able to control, if he was able to understand, the statements made to him about the ancient priesthood, the religion and literature of Gaul. Besides, Cæsar himself tells us very little about the priests of Gaul and Britain; and the thrilling accounts of the white robes and the golden sickles belong to Pliny's “Natural History,” by no means a safe authority in such matters.38

We must be satisfied, indeed, to know very little [pg 242] about the mode of life, the forms of worship, the religious doctrines, or the mysterious wisdom of the Druids and their flocks. But for this very reason it is most essential that our minds should be impressed strongly with the historical reality that belongs to the Celtic inhabitants, and to the work which they performed in rendering these islands for the first time fit for the habitation of man. That historical lesson, and a very important lesson it is, is certainly learned more quickly, and yet more effectually, by a visit to Cornwall or Wales, than by any amount of reading. We may doubt many things that Celtic enthusiasts tell us; but where every village and field, every cottage and hill, bear names that are neither English, nor Norman, nor Latin, it is difficult not to feel that the Celtic element has been something real and permanent in the history of the British Isles. The Cornish language is no doubt extinct, if by extinct we mean that it is no longer spoken by the people. But in the names of towns, castles, rivers, mountains, fields, manors, and families, and in a few of the technical terms of mining, husbandry, and fishing, Cornish lives on, and probably will live on, for many ages to come. There is a well-known verse:—

But it will hardly be believed that a Cornish antiquarian, Dr. Bannister, who is collecting materials for a glossary of Cornish proper names, has amassed no less than 2,400 names with Tre, 500 with Fen, 400 with Ros, 300 with Lan, 200 with Pol, and 200 with Caer.

Yet in the reign of Elizabeth, when the liturgy was appointed by authority to take the place of the mass, the Cornish, it is said,41 desired that it should be in the English language. About the same time we are told [pg 244] that Dr. John Moreman42 taught his parishioners the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, in the English tongue. From the time of the Reformation onward, Cornish seems constantly to have lost ground against English, particularly in places near Devonshire. Thus Norden, whose description of Cornwall was probably written about 1584, though not published till 1728, gives a very full and interesting account of the struggle between the two languages:—

Carew, who wrote about the same time, goes so far as to say that most of the inhabitants “can no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the English, though they sometimes affect to be.” This may have been true with regard to the upper classes, particularly in the west of Cornwall, but it is nevertheless a fact that, as late as 1640, Mr. William Jackman, the vicar of Feock,43 was forced to administer the sacrament in Cornish, because the aged people did not understand English; nay, the rector of Landewednak [pg 245] preached his sermons in Cornish as late as 1678. Mr. Scawen, too, who wrote about that time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, “They were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own fault in not endeavoring after it.” About the beginning of the last century, Mr. Ed. Lhuyd (died 1709), the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was still able to collect from the mouths of the people a grammar of the Cornish language, which was published in 1707. He says that at this time Cornish was only retained in five or six villages towards the Land's End; and in his “Archæologia Britannica” he adds, that although it was spoken in most of the western districts from the Land's End to the Lizard, “a great many of the inhabitants, especially the gentry, do not understand it, there being no necessity thereof in regard there's no Cornish man but speaks good English.” It is generally supposed that the last person who spoke Cornish was Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, and to whose memory Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte has lately erected a monument in the churchyard at Paul. The inscription is:—

It seems hardly right to deprive the old lady of her fair name; but there are many people in Cornwall who maintain that when travellers and grandees came to see her, she would talk anything that came into her head, while those who listened to her were pleased to think that they had heard the dying echoes of a primeval tongue.44 There is a letter extant, written in Cornish by a poor fisherman of the name of William Bodener. It is dated July 3, 1776, that is, two years before the death of Dolly Pentreath; and the writer says of himself in Cornish:—

It would seem, therefore, that Cornish died with the [pg 247] last century, and no one now living can boast to have heard its sound when actually spoken for the sake of conversation. It seems to have been a melodious and yet by no means an effeminate language, and Scawen places it in this respect above most of the other Celtic dialects:—

Although Cornish must now be classed with the extinct languages, it has certainly shown a marvelous vitality. More than four hundred years of Roman occupation, more than six hundred years of Saxon and Danish sway, a Norman conquest, a Saxon Reformation, and civil wars, have all passed over the land; but, like a tree that may bend before a storm but is not to be rooted up, the language of the Celts of Cornwall has lived on in an unbroken continuity for at least two thousand years. What does this mean? It means that through the whole of English history to the accession of the House of Hanover, the inhabitants of Cornwall and the western portion of Devonshire, in spite of intermarriages with Romans, Saxons, and Normans, were Celts, and remained Celts. People speak indeed of blood, and intermingling of blood, as determining the nationality of a people; but what is meant by blood? It is one of those scientific idols, that crumble to dust as soon as we try to define or grasp them; it is a vague, hollow, treacherous term, which, for the present at least, ought to be banished from the dictionary of every true man of science. We can give a scientific definition of a Celtic language; but no one has [pg 248] yet given a definition of Celtic blood, or a Celtic skull. It is quite possible that hereafter chemical differences may be discovered in the blood of those who speak a Celtic, and of those who speak a Teutonic language. It is possible, also, that patient measurements, like those lately published by Professor Huxley, in the “Journal of Anatomy and Physiology,” may lead in time to a really scientific classification of skulls, and that physiologists may succeed in the end in carrying out a classification of the human race, according to tangible and unvarying physiological criteria. But their definitions and their classifications will hardly ever square with the definitions or classifications of the student of language, and the use of common terms can only be a source of constant misunderstandings. We know what we mean by a Celtic language, and in the grammar of each language we are able to produce a most perfect scientific definition of its real character. If, therefore, we transfer the term Celtic to people, we can, if we use our words accurately, mean nothing but people who speak a Celtic language, the true exponent, aye, the very life of Celtic nationality. Whatever people, whether Romans, or Saxons, or Normans, or, as some think, even Phœnicians and Jews, settled in Cornwall, if they ceased to speak their own language and exchanged it for Cornish, they are, before the tribunal of the science of language, Celts, and nothing but Celts; while, whenever Cornishmen, like Sir Humphrey Davy or Bishop Colenso, have ceased to speak Cornish, and speak nothing but English, they are no longer Celts, but true Teutons or Saxons, in the only scientifically legitimate sense of that word. Strange stories, indeed, would be revealed, if blood could cry out and tell of its repeated mixtures since [pg 249] the beginning of the world. If we think of the early migrations of mankind; of the battles fought before there were hieroglyphics to record them; of conquests, leadings into captivity, piracy, slavery, and colonization, all without a sacred poet to hand them down to posterity,—we shall hesitate, indeed, to speak of pure races, or unmixed blood, even at the very dawn of real history. Little as we know of the early history of Greece, we know enough to warn us against looking upon the Greeks of Asia or Europe as an unmixed race. Ægyptus, with his Arabian, Ethiopian, and Tyrian wives; Cadmus, the son of Libya; Phœnix, the father of Europa,—all point to an intercourse of Greece with foreign countries, whatever else their mythological meaning may be. As soon as we know anything of the history of the world, we know of wars and alliances between Greeks and Lydians and Persians, of Phœnician settlements all over the world, of Carthaginians trading in Spain and encamped in Italy, of Romans conquering and colonizing Gaul, Spain, Britain, the Danubian Principalities and Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa. Then again, at a later time, follow the great ethnic convulsions of Eastern Europe, and the devastation and re-population of the ancient seats of civilization by Goths, and Lombards, and Vandals, and Saxons; while at the same time, and for many centuries to come, the few strongholds of civilization in the East were again and again overwhelmed by the irresistible waves of Hunnish, Mongolic, and Tartaric invaders. And, with all this, people at the latter end of the nineteenth century venture to speak, for instance, of pure Norman blood as something definite or definable, forgetting how the ancient Norsemen carried their [pg 250] wives away from the coasts of Germany or Russia, from Sicily or from the very Piræus; while others married whatever wives they could find in the North of France, whether of Gallic, Roman, or German extraction, and then settled in England, where they again contracted marriages with Teutonic, Celtic, or Roman damsels. In our own days, if we see the daughter of an English officer and an Indian Ranee married to the son of a Russian nobleman, how are we to class the offspring of that marriage? The Indian Ranee may have had Mongol blood, so may the Russian nobleman; but there are other possible ingredients of pure Hindu and pure Slavonic, of Norman, German, and Roman blood,—and who is the chemist bold enough to disengage them all? There is, perhaps, no nation which has been exposed to more frequent admixture of foreign blood, during the Middle Ages, than the Greeks. Professor Fallmerayer maintained that the Hellenic population was entirely exterminated, and that the people who at the present day call themselves Greeks are really Slavonians. It would be difficult to refute him by arguments drawn either from the physical or the moral characteristics of the modern Greeks as compared with the many varieties of the Slavonic stock. But the following extract from “Felton's Lectures on Greece, Ancient and Modern,” contains the only answer that can be given to such charges, without point or purpose: “In one of the courses of lectures,” he says, “which I attended in the University of Athens, the Professor of History, a very eloquent man as well as a somewhat fiery Greek, took this subject up. His audience consisted of about two hundred young men from every part of Greece. His indignant comments on the learned [pg 251] German, that notorious Μισέλλην or Greek-hater, as he stigmatized him, were received by his hearers with a profound sensation. They sat with expanded nostrils and flashing eyes—a splendid illustration of the old Hellenic spirit, roused to fury by the charge of barbarian descent. ‘It is true,’ said the eloquent professor, ‘that the tide of barbaric invaders poured down like a deluge upon Hellas, filling with its surging floods our beautiful plains, our fertile valleys. The Greeks fled to their walled towns and mountain fastnesses. By and by the water subsided and the soil of Hellas reappeared. The former inhabitants descended from the mountains as the tide receded, resumed their ancient lands and rebuilt their ruined habitations, and, the reign of the barbarians over, Hellas was herself again.’ Three or four rounds of applause followed the close of the lectures of Professor Manouses, in which I heartily joined. I could not help thinking afterwards what a singular comment on the German anti-Hellenic theory was presented by this scene,—a Greek professor in a Greek university, lecturing to two hundred Greeks in the Greek language, to prove that the Greeks were Greeks, and not Slavonians.”46

And yet we hear the same arguments used over and over again, not only with regard to the Greeks, but with regard to many other modern nations; and even men whose minds have been trained in the school of exact science, use the term “bloods,” in this vague and thoughtless manner. The adjective Greek may connote many things, but what it denotes is language. People who speak Greek as their mother [pg 252] tongue are Greeks, and if a Turkish-speaking inhabitant of Constantinople could trace his pedigree straight to Pericles, he would still be a Turk, whatever his name, his faith, his hair, features, and stature—whatever his blood might be. We can classify languages, and as languages presuppose people that speak them, we can so far classify mankind, according to their grammars and dictionaries; while all who possess scientific honesty must confess and will confess that, as yet, it has been impossible to devise any truly scientific classification of skulls, to say nothing of blood, or bones, or hair. The label on one of the skulls in the Munich Collection, “Etruscan-Tyrol, or Inca-Peruvian,” characterizes not too unfairly the present state of ethnological craniology. Let those who imagine that the great outlines, at least, of a classification of skulls have been firmly established, consult Mr. Brace's useful manual of “The Races of the World,” where he has collected the opinions of some of the best judges on the subject. We quote a few passages:47—

And even if a scientific classification of skulls were to be carried out, if, instead of merely being able to guess that this may be an Australian and this a Malay skull, we were able positively to place each individual skull under its own definite category, what should we gain in the classification of mankind? Where is the bridge from skull to man in the full sense of that word? Where is the connecting link between the cranial proportions and only one other of man's characteristic properties, such as language? And what applies to skulls applies to color and all the rest. Even a black skin and curly hair are mere outward accidents as compared with language. We do not classify parrots and magpies by the color of their plumage, still less by the cages in which they live; and what is the black skin or the white skin but the mere outward covering, not to say the mere cage, in [pg 254] which that being which we call man lives, moves, and has his being? A man like Bishop Crowther, though a negro in blood, is, in thought and speech, an Aryan. He speaks English, he thinks English, he acts English; and, unless we take English in a purely historical, and not in its truly scientific, i.e. linguistic sense, he is English. No doubt there are many influences at work—old proverbs, old songs and traditions, religious convictions, social institutions, political prejudices, besides the soil, the food, and the air of a country—that may keep up, even among people who have lost their national language, that kind of vague similarity which is spoken of as national character.48 This is a subject on which many volumes have been written, and yet the result has only been to supply newspapers with materials for international insults or international courtesies, as the case may be. Nothing sound or definite has been gained by such speculations, and in an age that prides itself on the careful observance of the rules of inductive reasoning, nothing is more surprising than the sweeping assertions with regard to national character, and the reckless way in which casual observations that may be true of one, two, three, or it may be ten or even a hundred individuals, are extended to millions. However, if there is one safe exponent of national character, it is language. Take away the language of a people, and you destroy at once that powerful chain [pg 255] of tradition in thought and sentiment which holds all the generations of the same race together, if we may use an unpleasant simile, like the chain of a gang of galley-slaves. These slaves, we are told, very soon fall into the same pace, without being aware that their movements depend altogether on the movements of those who walk before them. It is nearly the same with us. We imagine we are altogether free in our thoughts, original and independent, and we are not aware that our thoughts are manacled and fettered by language, and that, without knowing and without perceiving it, we have to keep pace with those who walked before us thousands and thousands of years ago. Language alone binds people together, and keeps them distinct from others who speak different tongues. In ancient times particularly, “languages and nations” meant the same thing; and even with us our real ancestors are those whose language we speak, the fathers of our thoughts, the mothers of our hopes and fears. Blood, bones, hair, and color, are mere accidents, utterly unfit to serve as principles of scientific classification for that great family of living beings, the essential characteristics of which are thought and speech, not fibrine, serum, coloring matter, or whatever else enters into the composition of blood.

If this be true, the inhabitants of Cornwall, whatever the number of Roman, Saxon, Danish, or Norman settlers within the boundaries of that county may have been, continued to be Celts as long as they spoke Cornish. They ceased to be Celts when they ceased to speak the language of their forefathers. Those who can appreciate the charms of genuine antiquity will not, therefore, find fault with the enthusiasm of Daines [pg 256] Barrington or Sir Joseph Banks in listening to the strange utterances of Dolly Pentreath; for her language, if genuine, carried them back and brought them, as it were, into immediate contact with people who, long before the Christian era, acted an important part on the stage of history, supplying the world with two of the most precious metals, more precious then than gold or silver, with copper and tin, the very materials, it may be, of the finest works of art in Greece, aye, of the armor wrought for the heroes of the Trojan War, as described so minutely by the poets of the “Iliad.” There is a continuity in language which nothing equals, and there is an historical genuineness in ancient words, if but rightly interpreted, which cannot be rivaled by manuscripts, or coins, or monumental inscriptions.

But though it is right to be enthusiastic about what is really ancient in Cornwall,—and there is nothing so ancient as language,—it is equally right to be discriminating. The fresh breezes of antiquity have intoxicated many an antiquarian. Words, purely Latin or English, though somewhat changed after being admitted into the Cornish dictionary, have been quoted as the originals from which the Roman or English were in turn derived. The Latin liber, book, was supposed to be derived from the Welsh llyvyr; litera, letter, from Welsh llythyr; persona, person, from Welsh person, and many more of the same kind. Walls built within the memory of men have been admitted as relics of British architecture; nay, Latin inscriptions of the simplest character have but lately been interpreted by means of Cornish, as containing strains of a mysterious wisdom. Here, too, a study of the language gives some useful hints as to the proper method of disentangling the truly ancient from the more modern [pg 257] elements. Whatever in the Cornish dictionary cannot be traced back to any other source, whether Latin, Saxon, Norman, or German, may safely be considered as Cornish, and therefore as ancient Celtic. Whatever in the antiquities of Cornwall cannot be claimed by Romans, Saxons, Danes, or Normans, may fairly be considered as genuine remains of the earliest civilization of this island, as the work of the Celtic discoverers of Britain.

The Cornish language is by no means a pure or unmixed language,—at least we do not know it in its pure state. It is, in fact, a mere accident that any literary remains have been preserved, and three or four small volumes would contain all that is left to us of Cornish literature. “There is a poem,” to quote Mr. Norris, “which we may by courtesy call epic, entitled ‘Mount Calvary.’ ” It contains 259 stanzas of eight lines each, in heptasyllabic metre, with alternate rhyme. It is ascribed to the fifteenth century, and was published for the first time by Mr. Davies Gilbert in 1826.49 There is, besides, a series of dramas, or mystery-plays, first published by Mr. Norris for the University Press of Oxford, in 1858. The first is called “The Beginning of the World,” the second “The Passion of our Lord,” the third “The Resurrection.” The last is interrupted by another play, “The Death of Pilate.” The oldest MS. in the Bodleian Library belongs to the fifteenth century, and Mr. Norris is not inclined to refer the composition of these plays to a much earlier date. Another MS., likewise in the Bodleian Library, contains both the text and a [pg 258] translation by Keigwyn (1695). Lastly, there is another sacred drama, called “The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood.” It is in many places copied from the dramas, and, according to the MS., it was written by William Jordan in 1611. The oldest MS. belongs again to the Bodleian Library, which likewise possesses a MS. of the translation by Keigwyn in 1691.50

These mystery-plays, as we may learn from a passage in Carew's “Survey of Cornwall” (p. 71), were still performed in Cornish in his time, i.e. at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He says:—

Scawen, at the end of the seventeenth century, speaks of these miracle-plays, and considers the suppression of the Guirrimears,52 or Great Plays or Speeches,53 as one of the chief causes of the decay of the Cornish language.