the Britaines . . . 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.”

In 1632, Dr. John Davies, the well-known Welsh lexicographer, published a Welsh translation of the Booke of Christian Exercise of Robert Parsons the Jesuit, under the title of Llyfr y Resolusion.  In it he gives a Cornish version of the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the earliest extant, and evidently translated from Latin, not from English.

In the same year appeared a play called The Northern Lass, by Richard Brome.  In this occurs an opprobrious sentence of Cornish, put into the mouth of a Cornishman bearing the absurd name of “Nonsence,” and addressed to a Spaniard who had no English, on the argument that Cornwall being the nearest point of Britain to Spain, Cornish might possibly approach nearer to Spanish than English did.

The next mention of Cornish we find in a diary of the Civil War, written by Richard Symonds, one of the Royalist army in Cornwall in 1644 (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 17,052).  He gives a short vocabulary of common words, together with four short sentences.  To these he appends the following note:—

“The language is spoken altogether at Goonhilly, and about Pendennis and the Land’s End they speak no English.  All beyond Truro they speak the Cornish language.”

Much about the same time William Jackman, the vicar of St. Feock, near Falmouth, chaplain of Pendennis Castle during its siege by the rebel troops, was in the habit of using Cornish for the words of administration of Holy Communion, because the old people did not understand English.  The Cornish words asserted to have been used by him were printed in Hals’s History of Cornwall in 1750, though they do not occur in all copies of that scarce book.

In 1662 and 1667 John Ray, in his Itinerary, mentions one Dickon Gwyn (his real name was Dick Angwin), of St. Just, as the only man who could write Cornish.  Ray adds that few of the children could speak it, “so that the language is like in a short time to be quite lost.”

This is probably the “Sieur Angwin” mentioned in a valuable little treatise on the Cornish language by John Boson of Newlyn, of which more later.  This little tract, entitled Nebbaz Gerriau dro tho Carnoack (or “A few words about Cornish”), is only known from a copy which formerly belonged to the late Mr. W. C. Borlase.  It was written about the year 1700, and according to it the Cornish-speaking district was then “from the Land’s End to the Mount and towards St. Ives and Redruth, and again from the Lizard to Helston and towards Falmouth,” but the language had decreased very much within the writer’s memory.

It is recorded by Dr. Borlase that Cheston Marchant, who died at Gwithian in 1676 aged 164 (!), could speak nothing but Cornish.

Writing in the latter part of the reign of Charles II., William Scawen, a Cornish antiquary, gives a long

account of the state of the language in his time, in a treatise in which he laments the decline thereof, accounting for it by no less than sixteen elaborate reasons.  This treatise, Antiquities Cornu-Britannick, was abridged by Thomas Tonkin, the Cornish historian, and the abridgment was printed in 1777, and again by Davies Gilbert at the end of his history.  A copy of the full form of it in Tonkin’s beautiful handwriting, a much more elaborate work, is in Add. MS. 33,420 in the British Museum.  According to this, the inhabitants of the western promontories of Meneage and Penwith were in the habit of speaking the language, so much so that the parson of Landewednack, Mr. Francis Robinson, used to preach in Cornish down to the year 1678, that being the only tongue well understood by his parishioners.  Scawen mentions the MSS. of the aforesaid “Anguin,” as he spells him, and laments their destruction.  He also speaks of a “Matins” (possibly a Primer, or Hours of our Lady) in Cornish, which had belonged to “Mr. Maynard.” [17]

In Bishop Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia, published in 1695, there is a short account of the Cornish Language, and the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the same versions as those given by Scawen, are given as specimens.  According to Gibson the language was confined to two or three western parishes, and was likely to last a very little longer.  He mentions the Poem of the Passion, the Ordinalia, and the Creation as the only books existing in the language.

The next authority is that excellent Celtic scholar, Dr. Edward Lhuyd, who published his Archæologia Britannica in the year 1707.  He gives the following list of the parishes in which the language was spoken:—St. Just, Paul, Buryan, Sennen, St. Levan, Morva, Sancreed,

Madron, Zennor, Towednack, St. Ives, Lelant, Ludgvan, and Gulval, and along the coast from the Land’s End to St. Keverne (this would also include St. Hillary, Perran Uthno, Breage, Germoe, Mullion, Gunwalloe, Ruan Major and Minor, Landewednack, Grade, and St. Keverne), adding that many of the inhabitants of these parishes, especially the gentry, do not understand it, “there being no need, as every Cornishman speaks English.”  There is a letter of Lhuyd’s to Henry Rowlands, author of Mono Antiqua Restaurata (1723), printed at the end of that work, in which similar information, dated 1701, is given.  Lhuyd in this letter relates his adventures in Brittany, and remarks on the closeness of Cornish to Breton.

Then the language quickly receded, until, in 1735, there were left only a few people at Mousehole, Paul, Newlyn, St. Just, and other parishes along the coast between Penzance and the Land’s End who understood it.  It was about this time that Gwavas and Tonkin finished their collections on the subject, and the language they found seemed to them a most irregular jargon—a peculiarity of which was a striking uncertainty of the speakers as to where one word left off and another began.

In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a little coterie of antiquaries at Penzance and the neighbourhood, who had busied themselves much with the remains of the old language.  The patriarch of these was old John Keigwin of Mousehole, the translator of the Poem of the Passion and the play of The Creation.  He was born in 1641, and died in 1710, and, according to Lhuyd and Borlase, his knowledge of Cornish was “profound and complete.”  However, that did not prevent him from making some extraordinary mistakes in his translations, which should perhaps be set down to the archaic form of the language with which he had

to deal.  He seems to have been a considerable if rather pedantic linguist, being accredited with an acquaintance with Latin, Greek, French, and even Hebrew, and in a translation into Cornish of the letter of King Charles to the people of Cornwall, he made use of his Hebrew knowledge when he failed to remember the exact Cornish word, writing “milcamath” for “war.”  Among the other members of this little party may be mentioned William Gwavas, John Boson and his brother Thomas, Thomas Tonkin the historian, Oliver Pender, and last (as probably the youngest) Dr. William Borlase, the author of the well-known History of Cornwall.  It does not seem that any of these, except Keigwin, troubled themselves much about Cornish literature, but