The Treatment of Myth and Legend in the Windows of St. Neot's, Cornwall

Abstract

THE village of St. Neot's and its church lie in a cosy and secluded patch formed by a moorland stream as it meanders a little, leaving behind a few green meadows before bubbling off between the steep banks of a narrow wooded valley to join the River Fowey on its way to the sea. Coming from the south, even today, it is easy to miss the turn from the Bodmin-Liskeard road-even easier to miss the way if you come over the moor from Bodmin. It was here that, according to tradition, a hermit settled. His well, beside which a large oak once grew, is marked by a little stone building, erected in 1862. Children were brought there for healing until well on in the nineteenth century. The present church is of the fifteenth century. It was glazed towards the end of that century and during the first half of the sixteenth. There are fifteen windows with remains of ancient glass. Four of these are narrative windows. The oldest, the Creation window, is the only one with five lights. It has pictures in three rows. The Noah window is next to it with two rows of three pictures. The other two depict the legends of St. George and St. Neot in twelve scenes each. The remaining windows are of single figures under canopies. The basic research on St. Neot's is in two pamphlets, one by Canon Gilbert Doble on the life of the saint;' the other, a paper by McNeil Rushforth on the windows.2 The glass was extensively restored in 1825 by Hedgeland. Rushforth had access to two descriptions of the glass before the restoration, and it is on his informed conjectures that I have relied for the original siting of the window glass. The glazing was started just before the Perkin Warbeck rising; the rebel leader Michael Joseph, the Cornish blacksmith, was executed in 1497. The work was completed just before the Western (Prayer Book) Rebellion of 1549, most of it being carried out in the time of the Rev. Robert Tubbs whose incumbency was almost exactly contemporaneous with the reign of Henry VIII. Throughout this period there were seditious murmurings, if not open rebellion. Secure in their fertile little valley, the people of St. Neot's may well have been content not to be involved and rather proud of their peaceful isolation, even as they are today. News filtered through the country lanes, along the tinners' tracks, and through the farmers' network. Rumours of discontent were all around them, but in the valley they had a priest of local stock about whom nothing further is known. It is safe, therefore, to assume that he led a blameless life, and, since the whole parish co-operated in order to glaze the windows, that he was well liked. The services were no doubt conducted in the Latin to which they were accustomed. So, a comfortable parish without reason for religious discontent. They had been taught the bases of the faith; their devotion, a deep empathy with the passion of Our Lord and the sufferings of His Mother, was much as you find it in the works of Margery Kemp. A parish, then, of folk much like the Paston family, counting their days by the festivals of the saints, but unlike them in being, happily, too unimportant to be caught up in national affairs. Unlike the Pastons, they are west country people, not only preserving the tradition of a typical Celtic missionary saint, but almost slyly