Is situate in the hundred of Powdre, and hath upon the north, St
Columb; east, Roach; south, St. Stephen’s, in Brannell; west, St.
Enedor. As for the name, it is derived from the tutelar guardian and
patron of this Church, St. Denis or Dionysius the Areopagite,
President of Athens, in Greece, whose name Dionisius in Latin, hath a
Greek original, viz. from διονυσος Dionusos, Bucchus, Vini Inventor;
quod excitet mentem.
This place I take to be that Landines, or Landineri, taxed in Domesday
Roll 20 William I. 1087, that is to say, Denis’s church, temple, or
chapel; though, indeed, I meet not with the name thereof in any other
authentic record till Wolsey’s Inquisition into the value of benefices
in Cornwall 1521; at which time it was wholly appropriated, or
impropriated, together with St. Stephen’s, to the Rector of Carhayes,
and consolidated into it; and this parish rated to the 4_s._ per pound
Land Tax, 1696, 62_l._ 4_s._ The patronage in (Tanner[39]) Pitt. The
incumbent (Tanner[39]) Sutton.
St. Denis was born in the city of Athens in Greece at the time of
Tiberius’s reign over the empire; a place renowned for wisdom,
learning, arts and sciences. He was descended of a rich and honourable
family, morally just, courteous, and loving to strangers. From his
youth he was bred up and addicted to learning, and became so eminent
therein, that he had a chief place amongst the magistrates and rulers
of the academy and city of Athens. He was most elegant in the Attic
tongue, as being the dialect of his native country, and consequently a
good rhetorician. But that which made him more eminent was his skill
in the doctrine of the Stoics, Epicureans, and other philosophers.
Mr. Hals continues through several pages the history of St. Denis, but
as the facts want altogether the support of historical authority, and
do not include the most interesting of all, that of his walking from
Montmartre, where the sentence of decapitation was executed, to the
place since denominated from him, with his head under his arm, I shall
omit the whole; as also an account of blood having fallen in this
remote and sequestered churchyard, as the best and most authentic mode
of apprising the whole nation that their fleet would be defeated by
the Dutch, and that a plague would break out in London; notwithstanding
that some of the stones, having blood upon them, were seen by the
author himself.