CORNISH CROSSES
Abundance of crosses--The menhîr--Crosses marked the limits of
a Llan--Crosses marked places for public prayer--Instance
of a Cornish Dissenter--Churches anciently few and far
between--The cross erected where was no church--Which
therefore precedes the village church--Crosses as
waymarks--The Abbot’s Way--Interlaced work--The plat a
subject for study.
There is no county in England where crosses abound as they do in
Cornwall. Second to it comes Devonshire. Indeed, on Dartmoor and in the
west of the latter county they are as numerous as in Cornwall.
Their origin is various.
In the first place, where the pagans worshipped a menhîr or standing
stone, there it was Christianised by being turned into a cross. In the
second place, crosses marked the bounds of a _minihi_ or _llan_, the
sanctuary of the saint.
[Illustration: CROSS, S. LEVAN]
Then, again, the Celtic churches were very small, mere oratories,
that could not possibly contain a moderate congregation. The saints
took their station at a cross, and preached thence. With the Saxons
there was a rooted dread of entering an enclosed place for anything
like worship, fearing, as they did, the exercise of magical rites; and
they were accustomed to hold all their meetings in the open air.
S. Walpurga, the sister of S. Willibald, who wrote in 750, and was a
Wessex woman, says:--
“It is the custom of the Saxon race that on many estates of
nobles and of good men they are wont to have not a church,
but the standard of the holy cross dedicated to our Lord
and reverenced with great honour, lifted up on high so as
to be convenient for the frequency of daily prayer.”
In connection with this, I may mention a fact. In the parish of
Altarnon was an old pious Wesleyan, and when the weather was too bad
for him to go to chapel he was wont to go to one of the crosses of
granite that stood near his cottage, kneel there, and say his prayers.
He died not long ago.
Bede, some twenty years before Walpurga, says that--
“The religious habit was then held in great veneration,
so that wheresoever a clerk or a monk happened to come he
was joyfully received, ... and if they chanced to meet him
upon the way, they ran to him, and bowing, were glad to be
signed with his hand and blessed with his mouth. On Sundays
they flocked largely to the” (bishop’s) “church or the
monasteries to hear the word of God. And if any presbyter
chanced to come into a village, the inhabitants flocked
together to hear the word of life; for the presbyters and
clerks went into the villages on no other account than to
preach, baptise, visit the sick, and in short to take care
of souls” (_H.E._, iii. 16).
This shows that, in the first place, among the Anglo-Saxons there
were no churches except the cathedral and the monastic church, and no
parochial clergy. Bede does not actually say that there was a cross
set up from which the itinerant clergy preached, and to which the
faithful resorted for prayer, but this additional fact we have learned
from Walpurga.
So we come to this very interesting conclusion, that the _village
cross preceded the parish church_. The crosses were, in fact, the
religious centres of church life, and we ought accordingly to value
and preserve them with the tenderest care. A great many of those that
we have now on our village greens are comparatively modern, and date
from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but there still remain a vast
number, not in the midst of a village, but on moors and by highways
of an extremely early description, and which most assuredly have been
the scene of many a primitive “camp meeting” in the fifth and sixth
centuries.
On Sourton Down beside the road stands a cross of very coarse granite.
On it is inscribed PRINCIPI FIL AVDEI, and above it an early and rude
cross of Constantine. Some time in the Middle Ages the rudeness of the
stone gave dissatisfaction, and its head was trimmed into a cross.
A third occasion for the erection of crosses was as waymarks. Across
Dartmoor such a succession of rude crosses exists where was what is
called the Abbot’s Way from Buckfast to Tavistock and to Plympton. But
there are others not on these lines, and such may have served both
as guiding marks and also as stations for prayer. That the monks of
Buckland--and Buckland goes back to pre-Saxon times--did go out to
the moor and there minister to the tin-streamers or squatters and
shepherds, I cannot doubt, and accordingly look with much emotion at
these grey monuments of early Christianity.
The interlaced work which is found on some of the crosses is of the
same character as the ornamentation in the early Irish MSS., and it was
adopted from the Celtic clergy by their Anglian and Saxon converts.
But whence came it?
We know that the Britons delighted in plaited work with osiers, and it
was with wattle that they built their houses, their kings’ palaces, and
defended their camps. By constant use of wattle through long ages they
became extraordinarily skilful in devising plaits; and when they began
to work on stone they copied thereon the delicate interlaced work they
loved to exhibit in their domestic buildings.
The various plaits have been worked out by Mr. A. G. Langdon in his
admirable study of the Cornish crosses. At a meeting of the British
Association he exhibited a hundred drawings of different crosses,
etc., illustrative of a paper read by Mr. J. Romilly Allen on “The
Early Christian Monuments of Cornwall.” When some incredulity was
expressed as to there being so many examples in that county, Mr.
Langdon explained that not only did all these come from Cornwall, but
that the examples brought before the Association represented only about
one-third of the whole number known to exist. And since that date a
good many more have been noticed. The variety in design of the crosses
is very great indeed. Some affect the Greek cross, some the Latin;
some are with a figure on them, some plain, others richly ornamented.
But what is remarkable about them is, in the first place, they are
nearly all in granite, a material in which nothing was done from the
seventh century down to the fifteenth, as though the capability of
working such a hard intractable stone had been lost. And, in the second
place, the ornamentation is in the lost art of plaiting, of the beauty
and difficulty of which we can hardly conceive till we attempt it.
There is first the four-string plait, then that with six, and lastly
that with eight. Then three strings are combined together in each
plait, then split, forming the so-called Stafford knot; the knot and
the plait are worked together; now a loop is dropped, forming a bold
and pleasing interruption in the pattern. Then a ring is introduced and
plaited into the pattern; then chain-work is introduced; in fact, an
endless variety is formed, exercising the ingenuity of the artist to
the uttermost. It would be an excellent amusement and occupation for a
rainy day in an hotel for the tourist to set to work upon and unravel
the mysteries of these Celtic knots.
The old interlaced work, or the tradition of it, seems to have lingered
on in the glazing of windows, and some very beautiful examples remain
in England and in France. Mr. Romilly Allen points out:--
“In Egyptian, Greek, and Roman decorative art the only kind
of interlaced work is the plait, without any modification
whatever; and the man who discovered how to devise new
patterns from a simple plait, by making what I term
_breaks_, laid the foundation of all the wonderfully
complicated and truly bewildering forms of interlaced
ornament found on such a masterpiece of the art of
illumination as the _Book of Kells_. Although we do not
know _who_ made the discovery of how to make breaks in a
plait, we know pretty nearly _when_ it was made.”[4]
He goes on to show that the transition from plaitwork to knotwork
took place _in Italy_ between 563 and 774. But is that not a proof of
introduction into Italy, and not of its discovery there? I am rather
disposed to think that partly through the adoption of the osier wattle
in domestic architecture, partly through the employment of the tartan,
the plait in all its intricacy was a much earlier product of the genius
of the Celtic race.
There is a pretty story in the life of an early Irish saint. He had
been put at school, but could not learn. At last, sick of books, he ran
away. He found a man at work with willow rods, weaving them to form the
walls of a house he was building. He dipped them in water, and laced
them in and out with wonderful neatness, patience, and dexterity. And
the boy, looking on, marvelled at it all, took it to heart, and said
to himself, “These osiers flip out; but when there are patience and
skill combined, they can be made into the most exquisite patterns,
and plaited together into a most solid screen. Why may not I be thus
shaped, if I allow myself to be bent, and am docile in my master’s
hands?” So he went back to school.