A West Country Pilgrimage Part 5

That Arthur was begotten at Tintagel we may please to believe; but that he died far from the land of his birth seems sure.

As for the existing ruin, it springs from that of the castle which saw the meeting of Arthur's parents, Uther Pendragon and the fair Igraine; but the original British building has long since vanished, and the present remains, dating from the Norman Conquest, did not rise until six hundred years later than the hero's death. An old Cornish tradition declares that Arthur's mighty spirit pa.s.sed into a Cornish chough, and in the guise of that beautiful crow with the scarlet beak, still haunts the ruins of his birthplace.

A CORNISH CROSS

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORNISH CROSS.]

Kerning corn waved to the walls of the little churchyard and spread a golden foreground for the squat grey ma.s.s of the church that rose behind it. The building stood out brightly, ringed with oak and sycamore, and the turrets of the tower barely surmounted the foliage wrapped about it.

Rayed in summer green the trees encircled church and burying-ground with shade so dense that the sun could scarce throw a gleam upon the graves.

They lay close and girdled the building with mounds of gra.s.s and slabs of slate and marble. The dripping of the trees had stained the stones and cushions of moss flourished upon them. Here was the life of the hamlet written in customary records of triumphant age, failures of youth, death of children--all huddled together with that implicit pathos of dates that every churchyard holds.

But more ancient than any recorded grave, more venerable than the church itself, a granite cross ascended among the tombs. Centuries had weathered the stone so that every angle of its rounded head and four-sided shaft was softened. Time had wrought on the granite ma.s.s, as well as man, and fingering the relic through the ages, had blurred every line of the form, set grey lichens on the little head of the Christ that hung there and splashed the shaft with living russet and silver and jade-green. The old cross rose nine feet high, its simple form clothed in a harmony of colours beautiful and delicate. The arms were filled with a carved figure of primitive type and a carmine vegetation washed the rough surfaces and outlined the human shape set in its small tunic stiffly there. Green moss covered the head of the cross and incised patterns decorated its sides to within a foot or two of the gra.s.s by a churchyard path from which it sprang.

The design was of great distinction and I stood before one of the finest monuments in Cornwall. On the north side ran a zigzag; while to the south a more elaborate key-pattern was struck into the stone--a design of triangles enfolding each other. The back held the outline of a square filled with a cross and a shut semicircle carved beneath; while upon the face, under the head which contained the figure, there occurred another square with a cross. The shaft upon this side was adorned with the outline of a tall jug, or ewer, from which sprang the conventional symbol for a lily flower.

There was another detail upon the southern side which seemed to lift this aged stone back into the mists of a past still more remote, for there, just above the ground, might be read the fragment of an inscription in debased Latin capitals. They were no longer decipherable save for the solitary word "FILIUS" which was easily to be distinguished, and this fragment of an obliterated inscription spoke concerning a period earlier by centuries than the carving and decoration. Indeed it indicated that the memorial was a palimpsest--a pre-Christian pillar-stone transformed at a later age to its present significance.

There are above three hundred old crosses still standing in Cornwall, and not a few of these, dating from time beyond the Roman period, originally marked the burying-places of the pagan dead. At a later period, long after their original erection, they were mutilated. But the greater number of these grand stones belong to Christianity, and by their varied decorations the age of them may approximately be learned.

Some bear the _Chi Rho_ monogram, which stands for the first two letters of the Greek "Christos," and these belong to the seventh century; but the more numerous appear to date from that later period when the sacred figure of the Christ began to be subst.i.tuted in religious architecture for the symbolic lamb that always preceded it. The Eastern Church authorised this innovation, after A.D. 683, and p.r.o.nounced that "The Lamb of Christ, our Lord, be set up in human shape on images henceforth, instead of the Lamb formerly used." The earliest type is not particularly human, however, and the little, archaic, shirted doll of Byzantine pattern, which ornaments so many of these Cornish crosses, has not much save archaeological interest to commend it. Until Gothic times this was the conventional pattern, and it is a.s.sumed that these early crucifixes dated from the eighth century and onward until a more naturalistic figure began to appear.

Scattered over the far-flung landscape of the West our Cornish crosses stand; by meadow and tilth and copse, among the little hamlets of the peninsula, in lonely heaths and waste places overrun by wild growing things, they shall be found. Sometimes the Atlantic is their background and sometimes the waters of the Channel. They were set on the roads that led to the churches, and served not only as places for prayer, but also as sign-posts on the church-ways. Now many of the more splendid specimens have been rescued, as in the case of this great cross, and stand in churchyards, or under the shadow of sanctified buildings. Their fragments are also scattered over the land, here set in walls, here at cross-roads, now as a gate-post, or a stepping-stone, or foot-bridge.

Sometimes they serve for boundary stones, and are yearly beaten; occasionally they support a sundial; not seldom the Ordnance Surveyors have outraged them with bench marks. Often only the stunted head and limbs of the wheel-crosses remain, their shafts vanished forever; still more frequently the cross-bases or pedestals alone have been chronicled and the stones that surmounted them exist no longer. None can say how numerous they were of old time; and it may happen, while many have been destroyed past recovery or restoration, that others still exist in obscure places, or sheltered by the saving earth, for a future race of antiquaries to discover and reclaim.