believe.

CHAPTER II—THE LITERATURE AND OTHER REMAINS OF CORNISH

The following is a list, in order of date, of the known remains of Cornish from the earliest times to the end of the eighteenth century.  There may be others of very early date, which have been hitherto classified as old Welsh or Breton, such as the Lament for Geraint, King of Devon, generally attributed to Llywarch Hen, and certain glosses in Latin MSS.

1.  The Manumissions in the Bodmin Gospels (Add. MS. 9381, in the British Museum).  The MS. is of the tenth century, and belonged to St. Petrock’s Priory of Black Canons, originally Benedictine, at Bodmin.  At the beginning and end are manumissions of serfs from whose names about two hundred Cornish words may be gathered.  These have been printed in the Revue Celtique (vol. i. p. 332), with notes by Dr. Whitley Stokes.

2.  The Cottonian Vocabulary (Cott. MS. Vesp. A. xiv., in the British Museum).  This forms part of a MS. of the end of the twelfth century, and consists of about seven pages, preceded by a calendar containing many Celtic names, and followed by lives of Welsh and Cornish saints.  The words are classified under various headings such as heaven and earth, different parts of the human body, birds, beasts, fishes, trees, herbs, ecclesiastical and liturgical terms, and at the end occur a number of adjectives.  It has been printed by Zeuss in his Grammatica Celtica, by Dr. Norris with the Ordinalia, and has been incorporated into Canon Williams’s Cornish Lexicon. 

Many of the words in it were incorporated by Dr. John Davies in his Welsh Dictionary, as coming from what he calls the Liber Landavensis, and a quotation from the Life of St. Cadoc in the same MS. is spoken of in Camden’s Britannia as coming from the Book of Llandaff.  The MS. evidently bore that name for a time.  It is probable, from certain mistakes in it, that the vocabulary is a copy of an earlier one, in which the letters Ƿ and þ of the Saxon alphabet were used.

Of about the same date as this manuscript was a composition in Cornish, of which the original is lost, except a few words.  This was a Prophecy of Merlin, which only exists in a translation into Latin hexameters by John of Cornwall, who in his notes gives a few words of the original, which are certainly Cornish.  Like many of the so-called Merlin prophecies, this relates to the struggle between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, but it contains local Cornish allusions of great interest.  The only known MS. is one of the fourteenth century, in the Vatican.

3.  The single sentence, In Polsethow ywhylyr anetkow, in the Cartulary of Glasney College.  If the writer of the history of the foundation of the college is correct, this prophecy, “In Polsethow [the Pool of Arrows, the old name of Glasney] shall be seen habitations,” is older than the foundation in 1265.  It is therefore the oldest known complete sentence of Cornish, and is interesting as containing the inflected passive whylyr.  There is an abstract of the cartulary, by Mr. J. A. C. Vincent, in the 1879 volume of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and this sentence is given there, with an explanatory note by the late Mr. W. C. Borlase.  The original belongs to Mr. Jonathan Rashleigh of Menabilly.

4.  On the back of a charter in the British Museum (Add. Charter 19,491) the present writer discovered in 1877 a fragment of forty-one lines of Cornish verse. 

The writing was very faint, indeed the MS. had passed through other and by no means incompetent hands without this precious endorsement being noticed, and the finder might have missed it too had he not been deliberately looking for possible Cornish words on the backs of a number of charters relating to St. Stephen-in-Brannel, after he had finished the necessary revision of the cataloguing of these documents.  The date of the document is 1340, but the Cornish writing on the back is somewhat later, perhaps about 1400.  The language and spelling agree with those of the Poem of the Passion and the Ordinalia, and the exact metre is not found anywhere else.  The speaker (it may be a part in some play) offers a lady to some other person as a wife, praises her virtues, and then gives the lady some rather amusing advice as to her behaviour to her future husband, and how to acquire the position attributed in Cornish folklore to the influence of the Well of St. Keyne and St. Michael’s Chair.  A copy of these verses was printed in the Athenæum in 1877, but, as the writer admits, his readings were not at all good, for the writing was very faint.  Dr. Whitley Stokes, who had the advantage of working on a photograph, which brought out many letters which were invisible in the original, published an amended version in the Revue Celtique.

5.  The Poem of Mount Calvary, or The Passion.—There are five MSS. of this in existence.  One is in the British Museum (Harl. 1782), and is probably the original, said to have been found in the church of Sancreed.  It is a small quarto, on rough vellum, written very badly in a mid-fifteenth-century hand, and embellished with very rude pictures.  Of the other copies, two are in the Bodleian, an incomplete and much “amended” one in the Gwavas collection of Cornish writings in the British Museum, with an illiterate translation by William Hals, the Cornish historian, and one is in private hands. 

It has been twice printed, once with a translation by John Keigwin of Mousehole, edited by Davies Gilbert in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes for the Philological Society in 1862.  There is very little in this poem beyond a versified narrative of the events of the Passion, from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, taken directly from the four Gospels, with some legendary additions from the Gospel of Nicodemus and elsewhere, preceded by an account of our Lord’s fasting and temptation.  The metre consists of eight-lined stanzas (written as four lines) of seven-syllabled lines.  There are two hundred and fifty-nine of these stanzas.

6.  The Ordinalia.—These consist of three dramas collectively known under this title.  The first play, called Origo Mundi, begins with the Creation of the World, the Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, etc.; this being followed by the building of the Ark and the Flood, the story of the temptation of Abraham closing the first act.  The second act gives us the history of Moses, and the third represents the story of David and of the building of Solomon’s Temple, curiously ending with a description of the martyrdom of St. Maximilla as a Christian (!) by the bishop placed in charge of the temple by Solomon.  The second play, Passio Domini, represents the Temptation of Christ, and the events from the entry into Jerusalem to the Crucifixion; and this goes on without interruption into the third play, Resurrectio Domini, which gives an account of the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, with the Legend of St. Veronica and Tiberius, and the death of Pilate.  As in the Poem of the Passion, the pseudo-Gospel of Nicodemus and other legendary sources are drawn upon.

But running through the whole and interwoven with the Scriptural narrative comes the beautiful and curious Legend of the Cross.  The legend, most of which is in the dramas, is this.  When Adam found himself dying, he

sent his son Seth to the Gates of Paradise to beg of the angel that guarded them the oil of