A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY
“THE Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks,
lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them
they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode
with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married
Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor
was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse,
on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was
no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into
the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be
a crowd of people assembled to
“See the young lady
Get up on her horse”
when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William
Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit,
alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons
and two daughters still survive. {168} A charming lady of great age, the
daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago.
Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called
him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful
brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know
something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being
acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another.
He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never
seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the
open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”
It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually
severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft
as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the
country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the
greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to
inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had
nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the
marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an
exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the
earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where
he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day
ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he
walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost
without interruption, till they returned.”
There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon
his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to
Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the
side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a
cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s
poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took
with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood
looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair.
One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for
him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at
dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed
during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by
the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and
catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused
his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of
the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he
expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.
Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow
stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic
Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen.
The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising
manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the
era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the
top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the
“court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to
a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of
rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a
garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.
This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert
Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The
Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had
married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the
property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this
eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient
granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the
house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many
generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and
Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of
Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he
got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of
science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle
from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled
up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr.
William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with
whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had
just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name
to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five
Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited
Woolston to see.
Mr. Pollard, in his ninetieth year, was a prisoner in a canopied bed, but
with a mind clear and logical, and full of memories and interests.
Scattered around him were newspapers and books, and one of the books a
contemporary of Borrow himself. “A very strange, wild person,” was his
introductory description of Borrow; “a very tall, upstanding man, wiry
and lithe, with a strong face and snow-white hair. He looked fit for
anything, and I believe he was—that he feared no man nor devil. I
remember the first evening he came here. We had tea in the parlour, and,
farmhouse fashion, we had some roast beef on the table, which my father
carved. After tea, somebody suggested that he should sing a song. He
did sing it, and a weird, wailing, outlandish song it was. No—not a
gypsy song. . . . Maybe it was the song of Swayne Vonved. He got up and
waved his arms as he sang of his hero’s adventures, he fought an
imaginary foe, and finally, as he worked himself into a fervour of
passionate song, he seized the carving-knife from the table and swished
it round his head. We all drew back, and some of us were glad when the
song was over and he dropped that carving-knife and sat down. His voice
was tremendous—‘as big as Tregeagle’s,’ as we say in Cornwall.”
Not only the legendary lore and the ancient language of Cornwall
interested Borrow; he was equally attracted by the physical
characteristics of the peninsula, and impressed by the great wealth lying
dormant in the incalculable masses of granite on the moors. “If I were a
rich man,” he exclaimed, “I would buy up all this granite; it will be
wanted one day.” The demand for Cornish granite in various great public
works and the present activity of the quarries at the Cheesewring
illustrate his foresight.
The Woolston people were particularly struck by Borrow’s intense
enthusiasm for the legend and the poetry of the North. He himself
relates how, on a walking tour farther west, he faced eight dreary miles
on a rainy evening, solacing himself by singing:
“Look out, look out, Swayne Vonved!”
the Danish ballad he had translated more than thirty years before. At
Woolston he made the Vikings live again for them. “He gave us Odin and
Thor without ceasing.” There never could have been so much Norse
mythology in that part of Cornwall before. Some of the ladies seem to
have fallen in love with his hair, but could not summon up courage to beg
a lock; and one of them saved his combings and preserved them in
tissue-paper for years.
The keen, almost boyish, delight which Borrow took in everything he saw
and heard in the hills, and his complaisance towards the company he met,
are remarkable in the man whose odd misanthropic fancies and wretched,
paltry miseries we have been watching during many pages. The contrast is
vivid indeed. In Cornwall Borrow was both pleased and pleasing—with
occasional outbursts such as the display of spleen against “Uncle
Tomfools”—whether he were riding with “the gallant girl” over the snowy
country, listening to her superstitions about magpies—
“One for sorrow, two for mirth;
Three for a wedding, four for death” {174a}
—or visiting patriarchal villagers at Tremar to hear their stories of
pixies and foxes, {174b} or attending rural dinner parties, with all the
neighbourhood beaten up in his honour. Some of the pixy stories have
been given. The attitude of the countryside towards the fox in that day
was shockingly unorthodox. He was vermin to be destroyed whenever and
wherever discovered: did he not wreak incalculable damage in the farmyard
by various and subtle devices, such as taking his brush in his teeth and
whirling round like a teetotum under the poultry perches, till the
unhappy fowls, rendered dizzy by the unaccustomed spectacle, fell an easy
prey to his rapacious appetite? How a fox was shot and the murderer
brought his victim for admiration both of the brush and the deed, is
related without the turning of a hair. The crime was so common as to be
merely a habit; Mr. Baring-Gould, in his story of Parson Jack Russell,
has given a similar account of the ethics of certain districts in
Devonshire about the same period.
Borrow revealed his curiosity and enthusiasm in many ways. On one
occasion a young lady named Every was of the party at Woolston. Part of
the conversation turned—as it inevitably would where Borrow was
concerned—on Cornish names and their derivations. The girl asked him if
he could tell her anything about her name. His mind flew at once to the
one Every or Avery whose career was familiar to him, that Captain John,
of Plymouth, the fierce pirate of the Eastern Seas, the mortal enemy of
John Company, who was reputed to have become a king in Madagascar—one of
the choicest villains in the history of the world. “I said that the most
celebrated person who ever bore it was a buccaneer, whereupon she
informed me that her grandmother had told her that she was descended from
a famous pirate.” And he adds the suggestive commentary, “Very pleasant
party!” {176}
One of the most interesting gatherings arranged for him, of course, was
the family dinner party at the old farmhouse of Tredinnick, where his
father was born. According to Berkeley, who was among the guests, nearly
all the Borrows of the district were present, and George was highly
excited, with his mind constantly running upon the father whom he had
worshipped. The circumstances of the feast and the memories it aroused
were too much for him; he ceased to be merry and talkative, and closed up
his store of song and story; instead of exerting himself to amuse his
friends, he sat with restless glance wandering around the rooms in which
old Captain Tom had spent his boyhood; his eyes were moist. Suddenly he
left the party and burst into the open air—meeting with an ugly tumble
over a low wall into the yard. “Well,” said he to Berkeley as they
parted for the night, “we have shared the old-fashioned hospitality of
old-fashioned people in an old-fashioned house.” He was overwrought to
an extraordinary extent, and the excitement, together with the shock of
his little accident, brought on an indisposition that kept him laid up
all next day.
Having been a little more than a fortnight at Penquite, he began his
walking tour through Cornwall to the extreme west. At Mousehole, not far
from the Land’s End, lived one Burney, an officer of the coastguard, who
was a distant connection of the family. Taylor had given Borrow a letter
of introduction to him. “You can only see Cornwall or know anything
about it by walking through it,” he wrote to his wife. The secrets of
Cornwall, the conditions of its detachment, the spell of its romance, can
only be penetrated by the man who “the known track . . . deserts, and has
a by-way of his own.” He must explore its hills and combes, and its
remoter villages for their archæological treasures—whether of the
prehistoric races who have left their mark upon its sad grey stones, or
of the saints and heroes of the early Christian time, or of the authors
and the actors of its Mystery Plays—and he must know the simple folk of
its ancient blood to probe the riches of their lore. Even Borrow hardly
turned far enough aside from the beaten paths to get more than a very
general impression of the country; but he was a man who observed readily
and absorbed eagerly.
Nicholas Borrow, his cousin, was his topographical mentor and guide on
many expeditions, and, now that he was leaving for the West, accompanied
him on horseback across country to set him in the main road. He saw
Tremewth, where his father’s comrade, Thomas Honey, lived on the top of
the hill, and the field near Redgate containing the grave of King Doniert
(or Dungerth), the lord of the Western Britons in the ninth century, with
its broken pillar and Latin inscription. Parting with his cousin, he
walked on to Lostwithiel, the end of his first day’s journey, took his
ease in the Talbot Inn, and feasted on roast fowl and bacon. The ancient
stannary town, with its shire hall dating from the thirteenth century,
and its memories of the Civil War—when Essex stabled his horses in the
church, and his troopers brought a horse to the font and with a mock
baptism sardonically gave it the name of Charles—produced mingled
emotions in Borrow’s mind, for, in spite of his militant Protestantism,
he was a staunch Tory and a Royalist. Turning aside to see the hoary
Castle of Restormel, which had been a ruin since the time of Edward the
Third, he recorded some vivid impressions of the neighbourhood as “the
most beautiful he ever saw.”
They will not appear exaggerated to those who have approached it as
Borrow did through the wonderful Glyn Valley, by the road which follows
the river brawling down from its moorland birthplace towards the sea at
Fowey. The second day he covered twenty-four miles to Truro. The sight
of a cairn on a hill top “brought the Spirit of Old upon my mind.”
_Antiquis debetur reverentia_ was always a potent principle with Borrow;
nevertheless, the modern Protestant within him sometimes got the better
of the antiquary. On the previous day he had seen a cross, and examined
it. This monument “seemed to have been raised by some Puseyite. The
base contained a nonsensical inscription to the effect that it had been
erected on a place which had been devoted to ‘Druidic Idolatry.’ The
Druids were no idolaters, though the Papists are.” {179} It was
darkening to evening when he passed through Grampound, one of the minute
derelict boroughs of Cornwall, whose disfranchisement in 1821 was the one
and only result of Lord John Russell’s first agitation against electoral
corruption. The appearance of The Dolphin Inn, looking snug with its
lighted windows and air of warmth and comfort, was a strong invitation to
a tired wayfarer who had more often than most men
“. . . by care oppressed
Found in an inn a place of rest.”
He looked wistfully at it, but withstood the temptation (with the
assistance of Swayne Vonved), and pushed on through the rainy night to
Truro, and to dinner and bed at the Royal Hotel.
In the morning he inspected the town, and visited the church—which no
longer exists save as a fragment built into the northern side of Benson’s
great cathedral—and then started again for the West. His walk extended
no farther than ten miles that day. On his arrival at Redruth, one of
the centres of the mining district, he was arrested by the great hill of
Carn Brea, to the north-west of the town. Its noble summit is one of the
most striking features of the landscape viewed from any part of West
Cornwall, and it is the haunt of many legends—mostly unauthentic and
nearly all ridiculous. The entertaining old Borlase, in his “Antiquities
of Cornwall,” invented a grotesque set of theories about the origin of
the curiously-shaped rocks that strew the long length of the hill’s
crest. Borlase saw Druids everywhere, and Druidical sculpture in every
freak Nature had played through countless centuries with the granite
which she found so pliable. It was inconceivable in his time that the
“basins” and channels in the rocks of Carn Brea could have been merely
the result of “weathering,” as the geologists inform us now they must
have been. “In yonder grave a Druid lies” was predicated by Borlase of
every mound he saw. One perceives that Borrow adopted all his theories
without modification. On Carn Brea he was not merely on a magnificent
precipitous hill, with a wide-stretching view away to the Atlantic on the
north; he was in the midst of a thousand memories of the past; the
“Spirit of Old” came upon him again; white-robed priests defiled along
the heather, and performed their sacrificial rites upon the granite
altars. The notes he made about Carn Brea were, says he, “written on the
top of the sacrificial rock. In the upper basin, the horrid place of
sacrifice, there are outlets for the blood to stream down. There seem to
be about eight basins in all.” William Borlase himself could have
accomplished nothing better than that.
On January 12th he set off from Redruth towards Penzance in torrents of
rain. Just above Rosewarne he came across a gypsy caravan, and of
necessity must go to find its inhabitants and talk with them. A dark
woman addressed him; he asked her her name in Romany. She pretended at
first not to understand, but finally answered him. Presently her
husband, “a remarkably knavish-looking personage,” put out his head and
began to discourse with him. He told him that their name was Bosvile.
It will be remembered that the “Flaming Tinman” of Mumper’s Dingle was
called Bosvile. The Bosviles, or Boswells, as they were called in later
days, were, in fact, a well-known tribe of gypsies in the West of
England. Another family, real Cornish in all their associations, formed
a branch of the ubiquitous Smiths. In 1866 they departed from England
almost in a body for America, where most of the Stanleys and the Coopers
had already gone.
While talking with Bosvile and his mort, Borrow heard the sound of
fiddles in an adjoining tent, and was invited to join the company, for
doubtless his perfect knowledge of the language and his unfailing
fascination over the gypsies had overcome all their first suspicions; but
he told them that he was “mokhado” (muddy and dirty), gave them a
four-penny piece, and departed. He went through Hayle, then, and now,
one of the Cornish homes of industry, which he contemptuously dismisses
as “a filthy place.” Reaching Penzance in the evening, he dined at the
Union Hotel, and held converse with a mining agent, whom he discovered to
be “a sensible man, full of Cornish patriotism.”
On the 13th he turned up Mr. Burney at Mousehole, one of the quaintest
fishing villages among the hundred peppered round the Cornish coast, and
found him excellent company. There is just a glimpse in his memoranda of
the kind of miscellany Borrow might have given to the world if he had
ever written his book on Cornwall—a mixture of travel and religion,
legend and dialogue, philology and adventure. A page or two would
certainly have been occupied by the story which Burney told him the first
day they met of his doings on the West Coast of Africa—many naval
officers of the mid-century could relate good stories of slave-chasing in
those regions—and especially of the triumphant expedition to the town of
a native king, who at first resisted their demands, his capital being
fortified and defended by thirty guns of sorts. The essence of the tale
was that while the palaver was in progress Burney’s gunner went round and
drenched the touch-holes of all the thirty defending pieces. Borrow
returned to Penzance that night: again, had the book been written, we
should doubtless have been in possession of the full narrative of the
experiences of that mining agent who had been in Greenland; but he is
only just dotted down, a bare, unclothed lay figure in the surviving
Notes. For the rest of his time in West Penwith, Borrow was the guest of
Mr. Burney, exploring the country of Dolly Pentreath, who in the
eighteenth century had spoken the Cornish language, and examining the
traces there remaining of the Spanish expedition against the Cornish
coasts in 1595. On the Sunday he went to church at Paul (where Dolly
Pentreath was buried), and in the evening “read the Bible and prayers to
the family” of Burney.
There was, of course, a trip to St. Michael’s Mount, the show-place of
those parts, that castle on an island in Mount’s Bay, which approaches in
singularity and beauty, if it does not quite reach the glory of, its
namesake Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy. Borrow went with
Burney by boat from Mousehole, and observed with curiosity the points of
greatest interest on the island and about the buildings—the bastion by
which the Parliamentarians were said to have entered when they attacked
the place during the Civil War, the chapel within the castle, and the
stone vault underneath it in which a skeleton was found. Full of his
scheme for the book on Cornwall, he made his memoranda as he went in
order that the impressions might be quite fresh. Just as he set down old
William Borlase’s superstitions “on the top of the sacrificial rock” at
Carn Brea, so he records that his notes on St. Michael’s Mount were
written in the vault.
Borrow returned from the Mount on foot to Mousehole, and two days later
started upon an expedition to the most impressive part of the Cornish
coast—the Logan Rock and Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the spot where Charles Wesley
is reputed to have written his famous hymn:
“Here on a narrow neck of land
’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.”
The traveller, however, says very little about the magnificent scenery,
and a great deal about the companion of his travels. In “The Romany
Rye,” when Lavengro has succeeded in divorcing his old friend Murtagh
from the disreputable trade of a thimble-engro, it will be remembered
that, in order to elevate the Irish boy’s spirits, he induces him to tell
a story.
“Cheer up, man,” said I, “and let’s have the story, and let it be
about Ma-Coul and the salmon and his thumb.”
But the tale of the finding of Finn-Ma-Coul in Veintry Bay, his servitude
of Dermod David Odeen, his cooking of the salmon, the blister on his
skin, his discovery of all witchcraft by the sucking of his thumb, and
all the rest of it, was not related to Lavengro in the ’twenties by
Murtagh at Horncastle Fair. It was told to him on the Cornish cliff
paths by one Cronan, the Irish guide who was conducting him to the Logan
Rock, as the Notebook shows, and inserted after Borrow got back to
Norfolk to lend the colour of romance to the end of “The Romany Rye.” Of
Cronan’s fairy stories, one is cited at length—the tale of the Clog
Vreach, or the parti-coloured stone, under the heading, “An Irish Fairy
Tale, told on a Wild Road by a Wild Native.” {185} It is a tale of a
drunken blackguard and tyrannical landlord, who vowed that he would shoot
all the fairies to be found on the moor where the Clog Vreach stood. He
went there and fired off all his ammunition, but when he returned his
body was bent, his tongue was hanging out, and his servants, seeing that
he was next door to dead, put him to bed, and four people poured raw
brandy down his throat all night. After that it is not surprising to
learn that in twenty-four hours his body had turned black and life had
left him. Cronan did not attribute his death to this remarkable
prescription, but rather to the vengeance of the supernatural powers.
“And,” says he, “a very fitting end it was for a person who was a tyrant
and interfered with the fairies.”
These things seem to have occupied Borrow on the journey to the exclusion
of all else. Before he left the district, however, he made some extracts
from the register of Paul Church, recording the death of a Keigwin killed
by the Spaniards in 1595, and the death of Dolly Pentreath (entered in
her married name of Dorothy Jeffery) in 1777. He had hunted up an old
man of eighty at Mousehole, who in his boyhood had seen and heard Dolly
Pentreath, and he had made a long list of Cornish words taken down from
the lips of aged persons in that village. No doubt the Cornish book was
intended to include a vocabulary of the old tongue.
I do not know of any evidence that Borrow had made a study of the Cornish
language in previous years, but his command of Welsh, and in a less
degree his knowledge of the three variants of Gaelic, made almost the
whole of the Cornish words surviving, in names of places and people, and
in peculiarities of local dialect, easily understood of him. There is a
general resemblance between Cornish and Welsh about which, I am told, all
writers agree, though they differ as to its exact extent. But the truth
is probably not far from the statement of Sir John Dodridge, who in 1630
said of the Cornish: “They have a particular language called Cornish
(although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh
and the language of the Britaines of France.” Mr. Henry Jenner, F.S.A.,
in his admirable “Handbook of the Cornish Language,” states that Welsh,
Cornish, and Breton “may be said to be as near together as three separate
languages can well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted
three dialects of the same language.”
The principal differences between Cornish and Welsh can be stated very
briefly. The following points show the main divergences between the
Cornish of the later literary remains and the Welsh of the books and
newspapers of the present day:—
(_a_) Certain grammatical differences, such as the occasional use of an
indefinite article, never employed in Welsh.
(_b_) A number of variations in vocabulary, in which Cornish will often
be found to have used a word current in contemporary Breton in place of
one current in contemporary Welsh. This is not surprising, even if it be
not assumed that the language was taken into Brittany from England, for
the relations between the shipping ports of Cornwall and Brittany were
exceedingly close, especially those relations of contraband traffic so
dear to the hearts of the writers of romance.
(_c_) Phonetic changes resembling corruptions, such as the substitution
of “j” or English “ch” for “d” or “t” in the bodies or the beginnings of
words, and of “s” or “z” for the same letters at the ends of words. {187}
It will be seen that Borrow could have found such differences as these no
stumbling-block to his philological excursions. He would readily
recognise _Tywardreath_ as the equivalent of the Welsh, Tywardraeth, the
house on the sands, and would be assisted thereto by the sight of the
wide stretches of white sand fringing St. Austell Bay in the angle where
Tywardreath stands on its hill side. He would identify _Hendra_ as
Hendre, the old stead; _Chyandour_ as Tyrdwr, the house of the water;
_Egloskerry_ as Eglwyscerrig, the stone church; and such forms as _nance_
for nant, a ravine, _pons_ for pont, a bridge, _plou_ for plwyf, a
parish, would offer no difficulty to one familiar with parallel changes
in other groups of languages.