H. R. Coulthard - The Story of an Ancient Parish: Breage with Germoe

H. R. Coulthard

With Some Account of Its Armigers, Worthies and Unworthies, Smugglers and Wreckers, Its Traditions and Superstitions

Published by Good Press, 2021

EAN 4064066205058

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The facts and thoughts which comprise this little book were many of them, in the first instance, arranged for use in sermons on the Sundays preceding our local Feast Day, as some attempt to interest Parishioners in the story of our Church and parish.

I have to acknowledge with gratitude much information given me most ungrudgingly, from his great store of antiquarian learning, by the Reverend T. Taylor, Vicar of St. Just; likewise my thanks are due to Mr. H. Jenner for kindly help and information upon the etymology of local place names. I must also acknowledge the free use I have made of facts bearing upon the history of Breage and Germoe taken from Mr. Baring-Gould's "Historic Characters and Events in Cornwall," and at the same time I have to express my thanks to the Reverend H. J. Warner, Vicar of Yealmpton, the Reverend H. G. Burden, Vicar of Leominster, and Mr. A. E. Spender for valuable information and assistance. I have been greatly helped in my examination of the Parish Registers by the excellent transcription of large parts of them made by Mrs. Jocelyn Barnes. Finally I have to thank a great number of kind friends at Breage, who have imparted to me the fast fading traditions of other times, to whom I venture to dedicate this brief record of days that are no more.

Breage,
All Saints' Day, 1912.

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t the dawn of history, Cornwall, as in fact England generally, was inhabited by a race of small, dark people, who, for the want of a better name, have come to be called Ivernians. The blood of this ancient dark race chiefly survives to-day in South Wales and Cornwall, especially in our own western Cornwall along the coast line. In Breage, there are continually to be met with faces and forms which suggest this small dark race, and which show to what a large extent the ancient Ivernian blood still survives in our midst.

The Ivernians must have been widely spread over Cornwall, judging by the numerous chippings from the manufacture of their flint implements scattered all over the County, which still may be collected in large quantities. In spite of the continuous mining operations carried on all over the Parish of Breage for endless generations, and the many ploughings of the land which must have taken place in periods when the growth of grain was profitable, these flint chippings can still be gathered in many places in the parish, especially on the bare patches of land where the gorse has been burnt, before the grass begins to spring. In the earlier stages of their history the Ivernians used sharpened fragments of flint rudely fashioned to the purpose, as knives, axes and scrapers. In fact, for a long period of their history they were a people living in and under the conditions of the Stone Age.

Long before the time of written records another race, called Celts, found their way to Cornwall. This race was divided into two distinct branches, the Goidels and the Brythons. The Goidels were much inferior in culture to the Brythons; they were the first to enter Britain, and upon the arrival of the Brythons they were slaughtered and driven before them to the remote fastnesses of the West and North, just as in a later age the Brythons themselves were driven before the Saxons. Under the circumstances it might have been reasonable to conclude that the people of Cornwall, in so far as they were not Ivernians, were mainly of Goidelic blood. This conclusion is, however, not borne out by the Cornish language which has come down to us in the form of a few miracle plays and other fragments, which is undoubtedly Brythonic in character. Of course, it may have been that, when the Brythons were driven into Cornwall and Wales and across the Channel into Brittany in hordes by the remorseless, exterminating Saxons, their tongue in these regions gradually supplanted the more barbarous Goidelic speech.