Folklore of Cornwall E-Book

Tony Deane

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Standing alone at the bottom tip of England and despite the enormous influx of tourists it receives each year, Cornwall boasts many unique traditions. This volume touches on the wide variety of legends, songs and stories and their relationship with the rugged landscape: from standing stones and tales of sea-monsters and mermaids to ghosts, fairies and giants. The book looks at pagan ceremonies and old traditions, and the very Cornish love of singing. It further discusses the Cornish tongue, and the old language of Cornwall. And, of course, no study of Cornwall would be complete without some consideration of King Arthur and his legacy upon the folklore of the county.

Leseprobe

For Robert Husband and in memory of Charlie Bate, Mervyn Vincent, Tommy Morrissey, Charlie Pitman, Tony Rose and, especially, Mike Hutchison.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the many correspondents who passed information to us, following our letters to the Cornish press: the most helpful came from R. Buckeridge, Mrs M.G. Daniel, the Reverend T.M.W Darlington, Mrs A.M Honey, Mrs G. Knight, Mrs E. Knowles, Mrs Libby, Mrs E.H. Pengilly, Mrs M. Saunders and Mrs C.C. Stidwell.

Personal friends and acquaintances in and outside Cornwall also helped us a great deal, with recollections of customs and beliefs: these include John Affleck, the late Violet Alford, Dave Andrews, Jim Bassett, the late Charlie Bate, Bill Benton, Iris Bishop, Tom and Barbara Brown, John Buckingham, Jane Coley, the late Lester Curgenven, Sheila De Burlet, Fran and Geoff Doel, Morel Duboil, Tony Foxworthy, Tony Franklin, Dick Goddard, John Hills, Peter Hunt, Robert and Ros Husband, the late Mike Hutchison, the late Mrs Gladys Jennings, Sally Jennings, Mike Kessell, Richard Larque, Larry McLaughlin, Venetia Newall, Graham O’Callaghan, Mike O’Connor, Jo Pearce, Tony Rogers, ‘Doc’ Rowe, Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels, Ken Stubbs, Rex Trenouth, the late Mervyn Vincent, Kath Wallace, David Watts, Dr James Whetter, Nick White, Michael and Sonia Williams and Peter Wood. We apologise to any that we have overlooked.

Refreshment over many years was provided by, amongst others, Dave Adams, ‘Woody’ Allen, the late Charlie Cracknell, the late Richard Dearsley, the late Fran and Reg Digby, Jean Douglas, the late Ron Douglas, the late Graham Kendall, Pru Kendall, the late Clive and Sheila Lean, Gary Marshall, Mike and Pauline Meredith, Ray and Sally Mills, the Rickard Family, Andy Thompson and the late Doris and Roy Wilson. Thanks also to the many unpaid chauffeurs, especially Alan Gardiner, and to Jim Dann for his technical expertise.

The staffs of reference libraries were invariably helpful, particularly those at Falmouth, Penzance and Truro, and at Bromley, Kennington and the British Library; the Folklore Society Library, in University College, and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, at Cecil Sharp House, both in London, also proved very useful.

Much gratitude is due to our parents for instilling in us a love of Cornwall when we were children and to our own families for persevering with the ‘kiddies’ guide to word processing’: especially Ian and Kerensa and, most especially, Juliet and Philip. Thanks, too, to our wives, Audrey Deane and Sally Shaw, for suffering the foul language. Any errors in the text are entirely ours.

The dedicatory poem Padstow May Day: The Ghosts was written by Tony Deane and first appeared in Cornish Life magazine.

Tony Deane, Reigate

Tony Shaw, Penelewey

March 2008

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Poem

Introduction

one

The Life Cycle

two

The Tinners

three

The Sea

four

Fairies and Giants

five

Ghosts and Demons

six

Witchcraft and Herbal Lore

seven

Animal, Vegetable and Mineral

eight

The Balladeers

nine

Arthur and his Court

ten

Saints and Holy Wells

eleven

The Year’s Round

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

The town erupts with ribbon.

Red and blue the bunting flies

From every rooftop, the eyes

Of girls alive with promise flash

Toward their drinking men.

Behind each child there is a shadow:

Some dead reveller in his cups

Carouses still.

The throbbing rhythm – drum,

Man’s voice, accordion –

Confines the dancing mass

Within insistent walls.

In harmony the loud and silent sea calls.

The Celtic deadmen

Follow close their sons’ descendants

And watch their own lives begin again.

There is a vast affinity,

A pagan warmth: man to man

To child to ghost to man.

Past is present and the dead

Live on in memory.

Like fallen winter

When summer is a-come unto day.

INTRODUCTION

A dilapidated wooden bench once stood on the harbour of each Cornish coastal town. Here the old men would sit, chew tobacco and discuss the affairs of the day. It was known as ‘The Parliament’ or ‘The Long Lugger’ and in this book, our long lugger, we will investigate the affairs of earlier days, some of which have survived into our own more prosaic age.

Despite the huge influx of visitors to Cornwall each summer, it remains in essence isolated. An air of detachment surrounds both the land itself and its people and, indeed, probably explains its appeal as a holiday centre. This same introverted character provides a natural catalyst for the wealth of superstition and lore that exists in the area and a real concern is that this character may be gradually diminishing. As hundreds of people from ‘up-country’ move into Cornwall to set up businesses or to retire, similar numbers of young Cornishmen move out to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere. For the moment, though, the overall sense of remoteness remains.

Geographically, Cornwall is ideally suited as an outpost of pre-Roman culture. If the map of Britain resembles a man astride a pig, Cornwall is the pig’s foreleg, an Italy in miniature. Surrounded on three sides by the sea, the eastern border with Devonshire is now formed almost entirely by the River Tamar. Until the early 1840s the boundary passed slightly to the west of Plymouth, splitting the twin villages of Kingsand (Devon) and Cawsand (Cornwall): a marker on a wall in Garrett Street denotes the old line. The Tamar, though, is the natural boundary, rising only four miles from the Atlantic cliffs by Morwenstow and flowing southwards to the English Channel at Plymouth. Thus, today, four miles prevent Cornwall from being an island in fact as well as in spirit. The landscape itself is quite distinctive west of the Tamar and only in the far north-east corner, around Bude, do the two sides merge imperceptibly. The scent, too, is unique: a bad chef might describe it as ‘surf and turf’.

The Cornish people regard themselves as a race apart and even the Devonians next door are sometimes referred to slightingly as ‘foreigners’. This seemingly arrogant attitude may not be unreasonable for the Cornish, like their racial cousins in Wales and Brittany, could be the descendants of true Britons. The name Cornwall means ‘Promontory of Strangers’, perhaps an insult as these ‘strangers’ probably inhabited Britain long before the English arrived. The Cornish seem to be a combination of two races: a nomadic people from the Mediterranean shores who settled in the area about 4,000 years ago and the mysterious Brythonic Celts who came, possibly from a district south of the Alps, a few centuries before the birth of Christ.

The early settlers sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to north-west France and south-west Britain where they found environments suitable for their natural inclination towards fishing and husbandry. Cornwall is blessed with more monuments from prehistory than any of the English counties and it may be that the old Mediterranean people were responsible for them. Dolmens, or ‘quoits’, like those at Lanyon, in Madron parish, and at Trethevy, near St Cleer, are the remnants of burial-chambers, or ‘barrows’. These structures, table-shaped and built of granite, were originally covered with earth which over the centuries has been eroded by wind, rain and unknowing farmers, leaving the gaunt stone chambers bare, eerie in their remoteness and natural receptacles for superstition. Standing-stones, too, from about the same period, are rife in Cornwall and probably had considerable religious significance, although popular connections with the druids can be discounted. The Nine Maidens, near St Columb Major, is an alignment of stones: while the name probably means ‘moorland stones’, legend insists that the granite pillars were once young ladies, petrified for dancing on the Sabbath.

When the Celts first arrived in Britain they occupied most of the country but, over the years, retreated into the remoter areas. They were a more warlike race than their predecessors and built great hilltop fortresses, some of which still survive: Chun Castle, in West Penwith, and Castle-an-Dinas, near St Columb Major, for example. They recognised a new potential in Cornwall’s network of streams and rivulets by discovering tin, the basis for Britain’s oldest industry. It was probably the Celts’ skill in tin-production that saved them from total subjugation by the Romans, who were nothing if not practical.

Although the Romans apparently made no effort to subdue the Cornish, they did set up trading-posts, presumably to support their interest in tin, and built two camps, at Tregear, near Bodmin, and at St Erth. These, four milestones and the remains of a villa at Illogan, are scant evidence indeed of any major Roman activity. However, if the Romans did not attempt conquest, the Saxons finally succeeded when they routed the Cornish armies by the banks of the Tamar, at Hingston Down, in AD 650. They failed to progress much further west, though, and the culture in Cornwall remained a conjunction of Celtic and pre-Celtic influences. Perhaps the most important survival was the Cornish language.

In 1778 Dolly Pentreath, a fish-wife aged 102, died in the village of Paul, near Penzance. Folk memory regards her as the last person to have spoken Cornish as a first language and a monument in her honour, with inscriptions in both Cornish and English, stands on the edge of Paul churchyard. It was erected in 1860 by the philologist Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte but his enthusiasm was misplaced. Dolly’s contemporary, William Bodener of nearby Mousehole, himself a native speaker, knew others, some of whom must have outlived his death in 1776 by several years. Then, John Davey, who was born in 1770 at Boswednack and died in his mid-seventies at St Just-in-Penwith, spoke the language fluently, while his son (1812-1891) also knew a little. Variants of the Celtic language still survive, of course, in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Brittany, but Cornish apparently died in the nineteenth century. The main reason for its eventual failure to withstand pressure from English was an almost total lack of literature: only a handful of religious texts have been discovered in their entirety. Recently, though, concerted efforts have been made to restore and revive Cornish; it is now an official language, taught in schools, with over 3,500 speakers of varying ability.

One area in which the old tongue never died is in the etymology of the place and personal names of Cornwall. ‘By tre, pol and pen,’ it is accurately said, ‘you shall know the Cornishmen’, for these words – tre (a homestead), pol (a lake or inlet) and pen (a top or headland) – prefix dozens of Cornish names. They are not alone, of course: lan (a monastic enclosure), caer (a fortification) and many others abound all over Cornwall. The Saxon stow is rarely found west of the Tamar and the Roman caster is totally absent. While the lack of written Cornish is a hindrance to any survey of local folklore, the fact that a language barrier existed between Cornwall and the rest of the country is in itself a reason for the district’s fund of singular legend. Indeed, it combines well with Cornwall’s often weird landscape and chequered history to produce a real land ‘of strangers’.

Cornwall’s folklore involves virtually the whole spectrum of traditional activity. Stories of mermaids and sea-monsters rub shoulders with pagan ceremonies and, less romantically, a style of wrestling unknown elsewhere in Britain. Some say that King Arthur still lives in the form of a chough, Cornwall’s national bird, and will fly around his erstwhile home in Tintagel until he is needed to return and serve his country again; and, when the wind howls over Goss Moor, below Newquay, the old king’s hunting-horn can still be heard, as he chases a spectral deer. The lost land of Lyonesse once lay between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly and later we shall see how Cornwall so ably fits into the context of the great romance between Tristan and Iseult.

Cornwall’s foremost industries have always involved man in a struggle with his environment. The miner works in unnatural and dangerous seclusion, while fisherman and farmer compete with nature for their livelihoods. Although china-clay extraction is still a major business in the west, tin and copper-mining are now virtually extinct, following the introduction of cheap foreign competition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The last working-mine in Cornwall, at South Crofty, near Redruth, closed on 6 March 1998. Protesters against closure used the chorus of Roger Bryant’s wonderful song Cornish Lads as part of their poignant graffiti:

Cornish lads are fishermen and Cornish lads are miners too

But when the fish and tin are gone what are the Cornish lads to do?

The ceremony to mark the mine’s finale was described on the BBC News as ‘a silent vigil’, for no words could express the sense of loss. Now in 2008, there is hope that the mine may be reopened. A relic of tin-streaming does survive, however, at Blue Hills Mine in Trevellas Combe near St Agnes; the metal is ‘panned’ from the stream and made up into jewellery for the tourist trade. Also, tales of mysterious subterranean spirits, the ‘knockers’ are occasionally heard. It is said that ‘where there are mines you will find Cornishmen’ and, certainly, every mining community in the world has its share of them. Here, perhaps, is a throwback to the nomadic spirit of the earliest settlers in the far west.

Like mining, fishing in Cornwall is sorely depleted: tourists after the shark have replaced seamen after the pilchard. The old omens though are still feared and songs are sung to remind a dying breed of its heyday. In the mid-1950s Peter Kennedy, the folksong collector, discovered a whole range of songs and shanties in Cadgwith, a tiny village on the Lizard peninsula. One song The Robbers’ Retreat, known locally as The Cadgwith Anthem, has a haunting air supported by a set of fierce words:

Come fill up your glasses and let us be merry,

For to rob bags of plunder it is our intent.

This song, above all others, seemed to encapsulate the fishermen’s stubborn independence and, happily, those who sang it – or their descendants – are still in fine voice. The song has spread now to male-voice choirs and pubs throughout Cornwall.

Many other songs are sung regularly in Cornish inns. The Song of the Western Men, better known as Trelawney, was written by Robert Stephen Hawker in 1824 but contains elements of an earlier ballad and has long since entered the tradition. Bishop Jonathan Trelawney was committed to the Tower of London in 1688 for refusing to sign the Declaration of Indulgence, by which James II intended to offer more rights to Roman Catholics and other dissenters from the Church of England. In bars from Land’s End to Launceston, 20,000 Cornishmen still seek the reason why. Widespread folksongs such as Pleasant and Delightful and Spanish Ladies have Cornish variants, while, around Padstow, minstrel songs, including Joe Lund’s Cocktail Joe of 1858, have entered the traditional repertoire. The apparently-local Lamorna has its roots in Mancunian music-hall but the oddest relative newcomer is Little Eyes: originally called Little Lize, it provided the B-side of a 1950s record by the Deep River Boys; somehow it entered the Cornish consciousness, to join the ancient May carols of Padstow and Helston.

An old saying suggests that there are ‘more saints in Cornwall than in Heaven’ and the briefest glance at a map will substantiate the point. These Cornish saints, though, rarely have a place in conventional hagiology: they were mostly Celtic missionaries, often from Ireland or Wales, who settled in Cornwall during the fourth and fifth centuries, bringing with them a roughshod Christianity. They usually set up oratories, or ‘praying-places’, and two of these still exist, in ruins, at Gwithian and Perranzabuloe. Also, wells were named in their honour and later, of course, churches. Many of these holy men – some less holy than others – attracted stories of miraculous powers. St Neot could charm the animals, St Keverne possessed herculean strength, while St Piran actually sailed to Cornwall on a millstone before ‘discovering tin’. Although these stories now seem quaint, once they were believed by the people and, even today, offerings are made at some of the holy wells on the saints’ feast-days.

Cornwall has been described as a land of giants and it certainly holds more legends about them than elsewhere in Britain. Possibly the stories started in a simple way: the Cornish as a race are relatively short in stature and the early English invaders would have appeared huge by comparison. From this seed could have sprung the tales of Giant Bolster and Jack the Giant Killer. However, a genuine Cornish giant was discovered in 1861, when a group of tin-miners unearthed a coffin at Tregony; the box was over eleven feet long and the corpse inside had a tooth measuring two-and-a-half inches. The little people, too, appear to have made their home in Cornwall and there are many folktales about piskeys and spriggans. In parts of Bodmin Moor the old beliefs still linger and a man who has lost his way is said to be ‘piskey-led’. Witches and ghosts add to Cornwall’s traditional lore and the wicked Tregeagle stalks the moors in every storm. Even flying-saucers are not unknown: in the mid-1970s UFOs were apparently seen above Falmouth, Perranwell and Newmill, near Penzance, where the viewers were struck with nausea.

The folklore umbrella should also cover human eccentricity and the wit and wisdom of the people, the folk. Robert Hawker, Trelawney’s writer, was the vicar of Morwenstow; he combined egotism with humanity to rule his flock with a rod of iron, yet offered comfort to shipwrecked sailors. He liked to sit on a rock by the sea dressed as a mermaid, to shock his parishioners: a habit that would surely interest modern psychologists. The bizarre behaviour of Frederick Densham, vicar of Warleggan on Bodmin Moor, alienated his congregation to such an extent that he eventually resorted to filling his pews with cardboard cutouts.

Historian James Whetter disputes the Cornish motto ‘One and All’, suggesting that local rivalries render it untenable. Mullion residents were known to outsiders as ‘gulls’ because they once threw a live seagull over a cliff for making too much noise, while the cuckoo was allegedly walled in at Poughill, St Agnes, Gorran, Towednack and Zennor. Mevagissey shares with Hartlepool the dubious distinction of hanging a monkey as a French spy, Mousehole men were ‘cut-throats’, Morwenstow men ‘wreckers’ and:

Camborne men are bulldogs,

Breage men are brags;

Three or four of Germoe men

Will scat (knock) ‘en all to rags.

Cornwall was recalled by Salome Hocking by ‘the smell of the salt sea mingled with the perfume of dog-roses and new-mown hay’ but, perhaps, it is the characters who really make the place. Here are two stories to conclude, one rather cruel, the other demonstrating thrift and independence. An aged farm-worker from Gorran awoke each morning to the crowing of his cockerel, then walked two miles to his workplace at Bodrugan. In the early hours of one morning local youngsters shone a torch into his chicken-house, the cock crew and the old boy rose and walked to work, undaunted by the darkness. A young labourer from Warleggan lost his right leg in an agricultural accident just before the outbreak of the First World War; during the war one of his friends lost his left leg in battle. They both survived until fairly recently and, each year, bought a new pair of boots.

ONE

THE LIFE CYCLE

Life in old Cornwall was hard. Poverty and hunger were never far away and a stroll around any Cornish churchyard will show how rare was longevity before the last century. The customs and beliefs which relieved the monotony sometimes suggest forgotten religions, sometimes fear, but many provided the working people’s only pleasures: moments when the reality of existence could be forgotten. We shall see in later chapters how certain beliefs survived in specialised areas and how the annual ‘calendar’ customs played their part in folk life, but here we are concerned with living and dying: from cradle to grave with numerous traditions in between. Some of the beliefs, of course, still continue but most have gone with an easier living standard. The people themselves must surely approve of this new comfort but, perhaps, they still regret their lost culture.

First we bought the porridge-crock

And then we bought the ladle

And then we bought a little cheeld

And had to buy a cradle.

So said a rhyme current only a few years ago. Even then the ‘little cheeld’ was setting out on a life filled with tradition. If it was a boy born during a waning moon, the next child would be a girl and vice versa; if, though, the birth occurred while the moon was growing, the next child would be of the same sex. A baby born between the old and new moons would have a short life and the unfortunate child with a blue-veined nose would not reach twenty-one years. No baby’s hands were washed in its first year for its riches would be sluiced away, and cutting its nails during the same period produced a thief. Hair, too, was allowed to grow until the moon had waned, preventing baldness in old age. Children born in May were regarded as unfortunate and, similarly to ‘ne’er casting a clout’, to:

Tuck (short coat) babies in May,

You’ll tuck them away.

In some parts of Cornwall a ‘groaning-cake’ was made after a birth, presumably from the mother’s agonies in labour; it was expected that every caller and well-wisher should sample a slice and it was regarded as ill-mannered to refuse. The following custom was, perhaps, connected to this belief: when a christening-party was on its way to church an essential ingredient was a large currant cake, the ‘cheeld’s fuggan’ or ‘christening crib’. An offering cut from the cake, known as ‘kimbly’, was given to the first person met on the road. Sometimes, among the really poor, the kimbly was nothing more than a piece of bread but the belief was always that if the person to whom the morsel was offered accepted it, the child to be christened would avoid any supernatural influences in later life. The custom continued until at least the 1930s for, in 1932, a christening-party on its way to chapel in St Ives presented a total stranger with a biscuit. The kimbly had grown more sophisticated but still retained its power. Incidentally, a similar practice was observed in the Isle of Man.

As a child grew up in old Cornwall its life was enriched by various games and songs. A mother would use little jingles to interest her charge; one of these, sung while touching the appropriate parts of the body, is a mild variant of the bawdy folksong Gently, Johnny, My Jingalo, now better known as a rugby song:

Brow-bender,

Eye-winker,

Nose-dropper,

Mouth-eater,

Chin-chopper,

Tickle-tickle.

Another would be accompanied by the baby’s feet being tapped lightly together:

Tap-a-shoe, that would I do

If I had but a little more leather;

We’ll sit in the sun till the leather do come,

Then we’ll tap them both together.

A prayer current in different versions throughout Cornwall was probably more acceptable to children than to the clergy:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Pray bless the bed that I lie on;

Four corners to my bed,

Four angels there are spread,

Two to foot and two to head,

And six will carry me when I’m dead.

These rhymes were used to keep the children smiling for, if they frowned, the wind might change direction and their expressions remain unhappy forever.

Cornish nursery-rhymes often reflected the children’s environment in a lucid and, perhaps, typically-childlike way. This verse makes a quick transition from fantasy to reality:

I would that I were where I wish:

Out on the sea in a tombey (wooden) dish.

When the dish begins to fill,

I wish I was on Mousehole Hill;

When the hills begin to crack,

I wish I was on Daddy’s back;

When Daddy’s back begins to ache,

I wish that I was sitting down a-eating currant cake.

The child’s matter-of-fact outlook is expressed here, too:

Grandfa’ Grig had a pig

In a field of clover.

Piggy died, Grandfa’ cried

And all the fun was over.

Girls living near Dolcoath Mine many years ago would dry their washing in a local smithy. The smith’s name was ‘Bullum’ (Plum) Garn, so-called for his garden of plum-trees, and, for the young boys of the time, his place was where the girls should be:

Rain, rain, go away, come again another day,

For little Johnny wants to play.

Every drop as big as a hop,

Send the maidens to Bullum Garn’s shop.

In Stratton, near Bude, the little children sang this song until quite recently to the music of the village church bells:

Adam and Eve could never believe

That Peter the Miller was dead;

Locked up in a tower for stealing of flour

And never could get a reprieve.

They bored a hole in Oliver’s nose

And put therein a string

And drew him round about the town

For murdering Charles our king.

Lucy Broadwood suggests that the original third line was ‘And forced to lose his head’. The Cromwellian element in the second half of the rhyme was echoed in the Devon town of Tiverton where, each year on Restoration Day, 29 May, the local boys would parade through the streets, dragging with them a ‘fool’ called ‘Oliver’, who was pelted with refuse by the onlookers. The Devon custom died out in the mid-nineteenth century, while a very similar children’s verse was collected in the north of Scotland.

Once out of the nursery the Cornish children’s rhymes and songs were generally used in connection with games, although the late A.L. Rowse of St Austell recalls a jingle from his childhood which appears to have been simply for fun:

Murder in the shoe-box, fire in the spence (kitchen dresser),

I had a little donkey but I haven’t seen ‘n sence.

Give ‘n a little oats, give ‘n a little straw,

Gee up, donkey! and away she go.

Riddles have always been popular in Cornwall and a few really old examples still exist in country schools. In Pendeen, just a few years ago, a ten-year-old girl described a grindstone as:

A thing behind the door,

The more you feed it, the more ‘twill roar;

while we heard this gruesome description of an orange from a Gorran boy:

I met a fellow clothed in yellow

Upon a cloudy day;

I picked him up and sucked his blood,

Then threw his skin away.

An almost identical rhyme appeared in a book written in 1890.

Blind Man’s Buff, or ‘Blind Buck-a-Davy’, was a popular Cornish game which began, typically, with this dialogue:

How many horses has your father got in his stables?

Three.

What colour are they?

Red, white and grey.

Then turn about and twist about and catch them when you may.

Children in Looe played a linked-hands game punctuated by a song:

How many miles from this to Babylon?

Three score and ten!

Can we get there by daylight?

Yes, if your legs are long and strong.

This one’s long and this one’s strong.

Open your gates as high as the sky

And let St George (or the King) pass by.

An interesting game was played with marbles, where a boy would take a handful of them from his pocket and ask his opponent, ‘Ship sail, sail fast – how many men on board?’ If the second boy guessed below the correct number, he would hand over sufficient marbles to correct his guess; if he guessed above, he would take the excess for himself. An accurate guess reversed the roles of the players. Today older patrons of many Cornish pubs play a variant of this game called ‘Riding the Pony’ (or just ‘Pony’) for money but the youngsters seem to have forsaken it in favour of the ubiquitous ‘spoof’.

Counting-out rhymes pose interesting problems, and an especially picturesque Cornish example is:

Hewery, hiery, hackery, heaven,

Hack a bone, crack a bone, ten or eleven;

Baked, stewed, fried in the sun,

Twiddlelem, twiddlelem, twenty-one.

Another, still current, rhyme recalls the more familiar ‘eeny-meeny-miny-mo’:

Ena, mena, more, mi,

Pisca, lara, bora, bi;

Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,

Stick, stack, stone, dead.

O-U-T spells out!

There could be an echo here of the old Cornish language.

From schooldays and rhymes of childhood it is a short step to early courtship:

Saturday night is courting night,

I wish the time was come,

For my house is swept and sanded,

So all my work is done.

Young women tried various charms, especially at Halloween, to divine the names of their future husbands. Men’s names were written on separate pieces of paper and the scraps were then screwed up tightly and pressed into little mud balls; these were immersed in a bowl of water and the first one to open revealed the true lover’s name. A wedding-ring was suspended from a line of cotton and held between a girl’s thumb and forefinger, accompanied by the command, ‘If my husband’s name is to be (name), let this ring swing!’ Obviously, the girl subconsciously made the ring move when her favourite’s name was mentioned. Even the future husbands’ occupations were foretold by their determined suitors: molten lead poured through the haft of a front-door key proved the profession or trade by the shapes it assumed. This rather odd tradition possibly embodied an indistinct recollection of the sexual connotations of the lock and key, common throughout British folklore and song.

Rhymes, too, were used by young girls anxious to be married. An apple-pip flicked into the air indicated the lover’s home, as long as this verse was used:

North, south, east, west,

Tell me where my love does rest.

While the moon was new a piece of herb yarrow placed under a girl’s pillow was a reliable prophet:

Good night, fair yarrow,

Thrice good night to thee;

I hope before tomorrow’s dawn

My true love I shall see.

If a marriage was due the girl saw her sweetheart on the following morning. On St Valentine’s Day, 14 February, the first man seen by a girl – or a man of the same name – would become her husband, but a delightfully practical couplet from Bodmin Moor puts this into perspective:

O proper maid, if you’ll be mine,

Send me back some binder-twine.

The men were exhorted to be good lovers but faithful husbands:

Come all you young men with your wicked ways,

Sow all your wild oats in your youthful days,

That we may live happy, that we may live happy,

That we may live happy when we grow old.

This honest advice provided a good basis for marriage.

The Cornishman’s insularity turned any attempt to choose a marriage partner from outside one’s own village into a crime. Many a man who sought a wife from a neighbouring community was ‘arrested’ by his own villagers and forced to ride in a dirty wheelbarrow. One story was told of an elderly woman from St Keverne who was found in tears and, when asked the reason, explained that her daughter intended to marry a foreigner. Questioned further, she added that he was far worse than a Frenchman or a German: he came from Cury, about eight miles away. To some extent this attitude still persists.

A strange custom survived in Morvah until early in the last century. On their wedding-night unfortunate newly-weds were visited by friends and relatives who pulled them from bed and beat them with a sand-filled sack. Afterwards a furze bush was placed in the bed and the intruders left. While the crowd must have considered this great fun one wonders at the effect on the victims. Other west Cornwall practices survived until more recently. One involved the men of the village felling a young tree, trimming it of its branches and placing it at night against the wall of a house in which the bridal pair were staying; known as ‘propping the house’, this act was said to symbolise the need for strength in the marriage partnership. Another superstition demanded that the final part of the wedding feast should be a ‘dance around the candles’. Here, candles were placed on the floor in brass holders and the newly-wed couple pranced around them, finally jumping high over the flames, to ensure good luck and fidelity: the higher they jumped, the more certain their success.

If there was a discrepancy in the ages of newly-weds or they were suspected of some form of immorality, they might, until well into the last century, have been subjected to a ‘shallal’. This serenade of music, played on tin kettles and pans, lasted all night and often provided a convenient excuse for the settling of old scores. Known elsewhere as ‘rough music’ or ‘skimmington’, the practice once featured in the BBC television cult comedy series Big Jim and the Figaro Club and the expression ‘a regular shallal’ is still used in Cornwall to describe a loud noise. There were related, equally-obnoxious, customs current until quite recently. Around Padstow, the local vicar would organise a ‘shaming-party’ to humiliate an adulterer: again, pots and pans were used to create cacophonous music, while the offender’s home was whitewashed or tarred-and-feathered. Known as ‘cockle-riding’, it parodied the practice of collecting cockles at low-tide on the Doom Bar in the Camel Estuary: it was easy but dangerous, as the tide was quick to rise. In the ‘riding’, or ‘mock hunt’, two villagers impersonating unpopular newly-weds were driven through the streets and jeered at by baying crowds; direct reference to the victims was always avoided to evade the slander laws. In 1880 six residents of Stoke Climsland, near Callington, were charged with holding a mock hunt. Their defence counsel pleaded that the ceremony was ‘older by far in the counties of Devon and Cornwall than any Divorce Court’ and the six were discharged with a nominal fine.

Recalling the opening chapters of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, the long-defunct Turk’s Head in Truro was, in 1850, the scene of a ‘wife-sale’: the unfortunate woman was tied to railings, then sold for the highest bid of ‘half-a-crown (121/2p) and beer’. In 1967 we received two letters from a Camborne man, then aged seventy-nine, who described himself as an ‘ex rabbit-trapper and horse-breaker’. He told us that he had started work at twelve years old and was obviously proud of his writing, which was forthright and easily-legible. His stories, he said, came to him from his mother’s side of the family and he described them as ‘God’s truth’: one of the tales concerned wife-selling. A man from Redruth would sell his wife to the highest bidder at a local fair; she would then wait until her purchaser fell asleep, kill him and steal his money, before returning to her husband. No one knew how often the pair succeeded with their evil game but eventually the wife was killed by the daughter of one of her victims.

Our correspondent told us of an old tinker called Elizabeth Dunstan; her drunken husband, when in his cups, was prone to bouts of crockery smashing. One day, after a particularly violent night, he opened his lunchtime pasty to find it filled with broken china, ‘sherds’ in the Cornish dialect. Thereafter his drinking decreased and his wife became known as ‘Lizzie Sherdy’. The old man also wrote of a well in Sithney parish, near Helston, where the water induced infertility in women. They came from miles around to sample it until the local parson had the well filled in. It happened about ‘200 years ago’ and, over a period of five years, only three babies were born in Sithney.

His longest story was very gruesome. An old woman, presumably a witch, gave a newly-married couple from Wendron the key to a long life of happiness and prosperity. They should buy a young girl from the market, fatten her and then kill her, preferably by strangulation. The body should then be salted, placed in a barrel and a piece of it eaten each day for six months. Finally the remains should be buried in the couple’s garden and an elder tree planted on the grave. The newly-weds obeyed their instructions to the letter but a neighbour saw them burying the body. They were arrested and locked in the iron cage on Hangman’s Hill, near Troon, to starve to death, but the man killed his wife by cutting her throat with a sharp stone, then took his own life in the same way. Their bodies were covered with tar and burned at the crossroads on Hangman’s Hill. Our informant concluded, ‘I have seen where the iron cage was’.

Most of the traditional rhymes and customs suggest that marriage in old Cornwall was a generally acceptable state. If a couple wanted a large family, they had first to rock an empty cradle, for to:

Rock the cradle empty,

You’ll have babies plenty.

The wife’s traditional role is stressed by the following rhyme:

Rock the cradle, tend the table,

Blow the fire and spin;

Take your cup and drink it up,

Then call your neighbours in.

Tending table is never easy when money is scarce but the Cornish housewives used their meagre resources to good effect. Pasties, of course, formed the staple diet. It was said that when the Devil crossed a bridge over the Tamar he looked through three cottage windows, where he saw three housewives preparing pasties, each of them using different ingredients. He asked the third lady what actually went into a pasty. ‘You next, my ’an’some’, she replied and he fled back to Devon, never to enter Cornwall again. Chaucer mentioned pasties in The Cook’s Tale, and they are found wherever Cornishmen are found. In South Australia, for instance, the ‘Copper Triangle’ in the Yorke Peninsula is formed by the mining towns of Moonta, Kadina and Woolaroo: there, every other shop seems to be a pasty-bakery.

The Devil was invoked again in Cadgwith, where the local fishermen would break off both ends of their pasties, allowing the wind to blow through and Old Nick to escape. Elsewhere, pasties should never be taken on board ship; even to speak of one is ‘cold iron’, meaning that the offender must touch cold iron (rather than wood) to ward off evil spirits: a survival of the belief in the power of iron. Ashore, though, pasties are the perennial favourite:

Father like mate (meat) and tatie (potato) best,

Mother like turmut (turnip or swede) and mate,

Boy Jack want all mate,

Boy Tom like lickey (leek) best,

An’ the maidens edden partic’lar ‘tall.

Nineteenth-century children were threatened with ‘mousey-pasties’ if they wet their beds:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Ate a pasty five feet long.

Bite ’n once an’ bite ’n twice–

O my Gor, he’s full o’ mice!

Once, St George’s Island, off Looe, was infested with rats; the inhabitants made rat pasties and the plague was vanquished. For the less squeamish it was said that marriages were more likely to survive if the bride-to-be gave more attention to pre-marital pasty-crimping than to pre-marital sex.

In 1999 William Grimes, food-critic of The New York Times, wrote that Cornwall ‘probably suffers more bad food per square mile than anywhere else in the civilised world’, adding that most pasties would be better employed as doorstops. The subsequent furore in Cornwall spawned many newspaper column inches and angry words from good pasty-makers like Ann Muller of Lizard Town. So the Cornish remain true to their staple and support the old rhyme:

Good luck to all the Cornish boys

That never yet was beaten;

A pasty may they never want

Nor stomachs for to ait ’n.

Drink a cup of sweet tea an hour after the pasty is eaten and there will be no danger of indigestion.

Apart from pasties, though, Cornwall was remarkable for the variety of its pies. A cottage in St Merryn, near Padstow, was held for many years on the rent of a pie filled with limpets, figs and sweet herbs, an apparently-delectable concoction. Compared with fish, meat was a rarity in Cornish pies until fairly recent years, but ‘nothing was too big or too small, too tough or too greasy’ to provide the ingredients. Pilchards were used, mackerel, conger and bream; strictly vegetable pies contained potatoes and leeks. The less common meat fillings, usually of lamb or pork and offal, satisfied many a hungry miner; giblets were used regularly, together with ‘nattlin’ (the entrails of sheep or calves) and ‘muggety’ (pigs), usually seasoned with parsley, pepper and salt. ‘Taddago’ pies were made from prematurely-born sucking-pigs, or ‘veers’, and ‘lammy’ pies from stillborn lambs. One of the strangest pies, however, contained the ubiquitous pilchard: it was wasteful to cover the inedible fish-heads with pastry and, as the rich oil would be lost if the heads were cut off, it was better to cook the fish whole, thus enabling the oil to drain back into the flesh. So the pie was cooked with the fish-heads poking through the pastry, hence the name ‘starrygazy’. This somewhat grotesque dish is still cooked in Cornwall, notably at Mousehole on Tom Bawcock’s Eve, as we shall see later; it is usually served with a sauce of sour cream. When pilchards are pressed in bulk, incidentally, a squeaky noise is made by the air-bladders bursting: this is said to result from the fish ‘crying for more’ and another full net will be the outcome.

Desserts, when included, were as practical as the main courses. Saffron cake, which should only be eaten indoors, remains a Cornish speciality and was, it is said, introduced by the Phoenicians in exchange for tin. Here is a typical recipe:

41/2lbs flour

1/2lb sugar

6oz mixed peel

1/2 nutmeg

2lbs currants

2oz yeast

11/2lbs butter and lard

milk

1/2oz saffron

salt

Well mix dry ingredients, put in yeast, leave till light and bake for 11/2 hours.

‘Figgy obbin’, a currant pudding, was another popular food, nicely described in this rhyme:

Roly-poly in the bag, pudden’ in the basin,

If you’d a’been where I have been you’d surely look to taste ‘n.

Possibly the most widespread Cornish sweet, though, was ‘fuggan’, or ‘heavy cake’, a rich confection made with two cups of flour, 2oz of fat, a handful of currants and a pinch of salt; these ingredients were then mixed with sour milk and rolled into an inch-thick oval shape. The cake was always scored with a knife, criss-cross, and baked for half-an-hour before serving, often accompanied by sloe gin or parsnip wine.