Part 4 (2/2)
The chief pastimes of the country people at this period, as far as can be ascertained, were wrestling, hurling and shooting with arrows. The game of hurling, in both its forms, seems to have been even more rough and dangerous than Cornish wrestling, and was attended, if Carew speak correctly, frequently with fatal results and serious injury to life and limb; yet he goes on to say ”was never Attorney or Coroner troubled for the matter.” It was in the larger game of ”Hurling the County” that most of the serious damage was done; this wild game was played over miles of country by men both on horseback and on foot. The goals were as a rule a couple of towns or villages three or four miles apart. The match seems to have been arranged, in the first place, between two country gentlemen, who on the occasion of some appointed holiday would gather as their respective supporters, as far as possible, the male inhabitants of two or three neighbouring parishes. Each squire headed the mob he had thus raised to the appointed rendezvous. When the two ma.s.ses of men, under their respective commanders, were brought face to face, at an appointed signal, a silver ball was thrown into the air. The object of the game was for each side to endeavour to capture the ball and carry it to their own goal some miles distant, in spite of the efforts of their opponents to hinder them in their purpose. The struggle would be waged over miles of country, to the right side or to the left, through rivers, ditches, woods and bogs, the ball being now pa.s.sed from one on foot to one on horseback, no effort being spared to drag the possessor of the ball to the earth by the opposing side. Little wonder that such a game often resulted in deaths and serious maimings.
A Cornish amus.e.m.e.nt of a milder character that came to an end with the seventeenth century was the performance of the ancient Miracle Plays. A vestige of the custom still survives in some places in the bands of children who at Christmas time go from house to house, dressed to impersonate a medley of characters, repeating garbled s.n.a.t.c.hes of doggerel, which are in reality fragments of the ancient plays in the last stage of evolution and disintegration. In their earliest form the Miracle Plays were performed by the Clergy in their Churches to ill.u.s.trate to an ignorant age, alike without literature and the faculty of using it, the truths of the Christian religion. These plays continued to be performed in Churches to a greater or less extent down to the time of the Reformation.[39] The Reformation endeavoured to draw an unreal line of demarcation between sacred and profane, and the drama thus came to be placed beyond the pale as worthless and sinful, with the natural disastrous result that it became quickly degraded and debased, like many other harmless, healthful and pleasure-giving inst.i.tutions and pastimes.
The Miracle Plays that have come down to us in the Cornish language[40]
are first the Ordinalia: this is a trilogy consisting of the Plays of the Beginning of the World, the Pa.s.sion and the Resurrection, with an interlude on the death of Pilate; this work is based on a French original of the fourteenth century. Secondly, we have the Play of the Life of St. Meriasek, of Breton parentage; and lastly, a work based on the Ordinalia, containing many more English words, written by William Jordan, of Helston, in 1611; the work deals with the Creation of the World and the Deluge. The Cornish language was spoken in the West of Cornwall until the beginning of the eighteenth century[41]; by the close of that century it had entirely disappeared. In Carew's time the Cornish Miracle Plays were performed in the open fields, and were resorted to by the country people with great delight; he tells us however, by his time they had become vulgarized and depraved to no small extent, possibly by the introduction of bucolic gag of a Rabelaisian character.
Judging from the pages of Carew, in the seventeenth century, with all its grossness and barbarism, there was much real friends.h.i.+p and happy intercourse amongst the people, possibly more than there is now. The Harvest Homes, the Church Ales and the Church Festivals of Dedication, with the Guary or Miracle Plays, all led to much friendly intercourse and hospitality. Carew says on these occasions, ”the neighbour parishes lovingly visit one another”; friends came from a distance, and were hospitably entertained with resultant kindliness and good fellows.h.i.+p.
The Church Ales seem to have been run on much the same lines as the present Harvest Teas, with the exception that instead of tea, beer and cider were drunk, and that the venue of the feasting was laid at the Public House, instead of the village School or Inst.i.tute.
Perhaps we shall obtain the most accurate glimpse of the character of the people, and the state of Western Cornwall generally at this period, from the State Papers. Here are a few gleanings culled at random from this source. In 1526 a Portuguese s.h.i.+p was wrecked at Gunwalloe and much cargo saved. It was seized by the servants of John Militon, of Pengersick, Thomas St. Aubyn and William G.o.dolphin, and when the owner appealed to the Justices he was told it was the custom of the country, and that no redress was possible. A commission of enquiry ensued, followed by Star Chamber proceedings, and the defence was the usual one, for which any number of witnesses could always be obtained, that the owner had sold his property on the sea sh.o.r.e!
In 1575 an information of fifteen Articles was laid against Sir William G.o.dolphin and the Killigrews, of Arwenack; thirteen of these concerned piracy.
In 1582 a Spanish s.h.i.+p put into Falmouth; she was boarded by a gang of men, who after removing the cargo as booty to Arwenack, took the s.h.i.+p to Ireland, throwing the crew overboard on the voyage. A Cornish Jury afterwards found there was no evidence to show by whom the deed was done. The Privy Council came to the conclusion very quickly that the plot originated with and was carried out by the orders of Lady Killigrew, of Arwenack.
In 1603 a Ma.r.s.eilles s.h.i.+p was plundered and the cargo carried to the Scilly Islands. The owner appealed to Sir Francis G.o.dolphin, who made an order to his son John, then Governor of those Islands, to restore the cargo. John G.o.dolphin expelled the unfortunate owner from the Islands and he could obtain no further redress.
In 1626 a Flemish privateer, which had been hovering like a bird of prey around the South-Western coast, was driven ash.o.r.e and wrecked. The country people must have enjoyed the wrecking of this hostile s.h.i.+p with even more than their usual zest.
Dr. Borlase, writing in 1795, describes the methods of the mining population near the coast in his day in dealing with vessels in distress. His description would no doubt do equally well for the period we are considering. He says ”The wreckers were mostly Tinners, who as soon as a s.h.i.+p was seen sailing near the coast left their work and equipped themselves with axes, and followed the s.h.i.+p along the coast, often to the number of two thousand men. They would cut a large trading vessel to pieces in one tide. They strip half-dead men of their clothing and cut down all who resist them.”[42]
The following is a pleasing picture of the people of Germoe taken from a letter of the year 1710. ”The people of Germoe, called Tinners, are a mad people, without fear of G.o.d or of the world. I cannot say a good word for them.” Here is another extract from a letter of the period bearing date 30th October, 1671. ”The Speedwell was cast away on the rocks at Pengersick. The rude people plundered her of all that was between decks, but the matter being noised about Sir William G.o.dolphin, Mr. Hugh Boscawen and Mr. John St. Aubyn came to the wreck, and by their care preserved most of the goods from the violence of the country people.”
It may well have been said of the Miners of Cornwall, as far as wrecking was concerned, ”Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the vultures be gathered together.” Mr. Hunt, in his ”Popular Romances of the West of England,” narrates a story of the mid-eighteenth century, which still lingers in the popular mind, of a terrible fight that took place between Miners from Breage and Wendron, over the spoils of a s.h.i.+p cast upon the rocks near the Lizard. In old times, it seems, a gigantic ash tree used to stand upon the Downs near Cury; from its great size and the loneliness of its situation, it had in the course of time come to be a popular landmark. In the case of the wreck in question, the Wendron Tinners had the advantage over their Breage brethren in the matter of distance, and thus were able more quickly to fall upon the spoil, break up the unfortunate s.h.i.+p, and rifle the unhappy castaways of their belongings. Like the true artists they were in the art of appropriating the property of others, they worked quickly, and ere much time had elapsed they had reached the great ash tree of Cury on their journey home laden with spoil. Under this historic tree they encountered the band of Tinners from Breage, who soon realised from the rich booty in the hands of the men of Wendron that nothing more was to be done that day in the way of wrecking on the Lizard rocks. Baffled of their prey, and frantic with fury, the horde of men and women from Breage rushed upon their Wendron compatriots, and the tide of brutal fight raged for hours round the Cury ash tree. Mr. Hunt tells us that a Wendron man named Gluyas having been disabled was borne out of the fight by his friends, and placed upon the top of a hedge. A Breage woman named Prudy, seeing this paladin lying disabled on the hedge, rushed upon him exclaiming, ”Ef thee artn't ded, I'll make thee,” and smote him upon the head with the iron upon her paton till he expired. Mr. Hunt concludes this story by stating that the fiend Prudy, as far as judicial investigation was concerned, was allowed to go untouched, because fights at this period between parishes were matters of such common occurrence as to excite but little comment, and fatal casualties so frequent as to be regarded as matters of no moment. In this statement, as we have seen, he is borne out by Carew writing in a previous generation. Down to fifty years ago the brutal system of Parochial rivalry and violence continued, at any rate in a mitigated form. A friend wrote to Mr. Hunt: ”So late as thirty years ago (circa 1850) it was unsafe to venture alone through the streets of the lower part of Helston after nightfall on a market day owing to the frays of the Breage, Wendron and Sithney men.”
This statement was fully borne out by an aged friend of the writer, now dead, who told him that in his youth even funeral processions of Miners brought to Breage from other parishes were a.s.sailed with showers of stones, and an attack which either ended in hasty retreat or a prolonged free fight. It may be added, however, that Sunday was kept as a truce of G.o.d, and on that day a dead Miner from outside the parish might be borne to his rest without an a.s.sault being delivered on his friends as they followed him to the grave. This aged friend also informed the writer that to such an extent did this brutal system of savagery prevail that no Miner could pa.s.s from his own parish to another without being a.s.sailed and maltreated. Indeed, whenever Miners crossed the borders of their own parishes, they did so in bodies for mutual protection. Well on into the first half of the last century, fighting seems to have been one of the chief topics of interest, if not the chief amus.e.m.e.nt of the neighbourhood, and fights for wagers were of constant occurrence in Breage parish, on Trew Green and elsewhere. To conclude this brief summary of past conditions, one cannot help feeling that there was something to be said for the old Roman view as to the results of the occupation of mining on human character. It is a dismal picture, truly, this of past conditions in the West of Cornwall, but when we contrast it with the present it fills the mind with hopefulness, and reveals the vast latent possibilities in human nature for improvement and progress.
If out of this dark and barbarous past we have so recently emerged, what bright possibilities may not lie in the coming time seems but a reasonable thought.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Kalendar of State Papers. Domestic Series.
[32] MS. in the possession of Fleet-Surgeon Harvey.
[33] Paul Church Burial Registers.
[34] Carew's Survey of Cornwall.
[35] Reports of the Committee of Compounding.
[36] Carew's Survey of Cornwall pp. 49, 59, 183, etc.
[37] Carew says ”There are not any roads in the whole kingdom worse than ours, hastily repaired only when some great man pa.s.ses that way in his coach.”
[38] Carew p. 172.
[39] See the Article ”Drama” in ”Encyclopaedia Britannica” by Mr. A. W.
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