and Stationery Co., Camborne, Cornwall. 3s. 6d. net.)—The parish which
Mr. Coulthard describes takes its name from two Irish missionaries who are said to have effected a forcible landing at the mouth of the Hayle river about 500 A.D. In due time the mud-and-wattle churches of Breaca and her com- panion gave way to Norman buildings, traces of which still, survive in the existing fifteenth-century structures, and no relic of their time now survives except an old Celtic cross of red sand- stone. Since the days of the saints Breage with Germoe has not produced many famous men, though the Godolphin family lived there, at a house which still bears their name, till 1766. It was there that Charles II., then Prince of Wales, found refuge with Sir Francis Godolphin on his flight to the Scilly Isles. There was born little Sidney, the Lord High Treasurer, and there lies buried Margaret, his young wife, that "most incom- parable person" of whom John Evelyn has left so touching a description. For the rest the inhabitants of the parish seem to have been a wild folk—"a mad people, without fear of God or the world," a letter-writer of 1671 calls them. No doubt the proximity of the tin-mines had much to do with this, and something must also be attributed to the dangerous nature of the coast. For centuries the people almost lived on wreckage, and the disposition of the booty led to the most brutal and sanguinary feuds between neighbouring parishes. Even as late as 1850 we are told that the frays of the Breage, Wendons and Sithney men made the streets of Helston unsafe after dark on market days. With the advent of the steamship and the decay of tin-mining, times have changed, but many relics of the early rudeness still survive. Quaint nicknames such as "Jo Brown, alias Uninformed," "Thomas Sampson, alias Cunning Boy," "Jane, the daughter of Edmund the Tod- stoole," and even " Stink " and " Ginger " appear in the Register; and there are grim tales of smugglers, one of whom, Harry Carter, left an autobiography which has been published locally and should be excellent reading, if one can judge from the sketch given by Mr. Coulthard. But smugglers are as extinct now as the piskies, the knockers, the Buccas, and the Pobol Veen, who once upon a time regularly held their great fairy festival at Bal Lane in Germoe.
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