The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden

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      Glasney College.

      But in time something of the worldly success of Penryn appeared to seep into Glasney College’s inner rooms. By the sixteenth century its officials were being described as ‘men of great pleasures, more like temporal men than spiritual’. The provost had little time for his ministry, preferring to ‘drink and joust’. Henry VIII’s Star Chamber was told how he ‘doth slay and kill with his spaniels, some days two sheep, some days three and divers times five in a day’. The college’s shoreside position, which had helped it to grow, now counted against it: ‘By reason of the open standynge of the same on the sea,’ gloated the Crown Commissioners shortly after Henry VIII’s death, ‘by tempest of weather felle into suche decaye.’

      Yet it was Henry and not the weather that was to blame. Glasney College survived the dissolution of the monasteries, but was prey a few years later to the same covetous forces. Lead was peeled from its vaulted roofs and shipped to the Isles of Scilly to use in fortifications. Piece by piece the buildings were broken up. The bells were sold off. The stone was removed. For generations, vestments and treasures had been bequeathed to the college by wealthy men hoping for prayers in perpetuity. Now copes of green and crimson velvet were bundled up and taken off, as were bolts of cloth-of-gold, albs and chasubles, six altar-cloths of black, gold, green, blue and red velvet, and one of ivory satin, embroidered with images of roses and Our Lady, a bell with a handle of gold and red silk, breviaries, tabernacles and missals, and a piece of paper painted with the five wounds of the Saviour.

      Standing alone in that playing field, I look around for traces of the college buildings. A panel-board shows the points at which archaeologists have recently conducted a series of digs. The dotted lines of their trenches are set against a plan of the church, and I am struck by its great size. Glancing away from the board, I picture the nave and aisles peopled by tiny figures, raising their heads and whispering – the grateful storm-survivors, passengers and merchants from the Low Countries, from France and Spain and Portugal.

      Glasney was a part of that network of ports and havens and anchorages which for thousands of years had been not so much on the land-fringes of European countries, as on the edge of a loose nation linked by the sea. As they grew, sovereign states superseded many of those maritime links. Of centuries of ship-voyages, little evidence remains. Glasney’s archaeological digs turned up floors and tiles and fragments of worked stone. But the digs themselves have now been covered up, the portable finds removed, and there is nothing on this late summer day, not a bump or hollow or mound, to break the green of the empty acre.

      Afternoon is sliding into evening. I return to Liberty and head out into the river. The tide has turned, and with it the moored boats have swung round to face the ebb. Somewhere here – between the wharves and warehouses to starboard, the woods to port – stretched the barrier that had protected Penryn and Glasney. It was the chain, and the narrow approach to Penryn, that enabled its rise during the Middle Ages, but it was the chain too, the closing out of the sea, that helped shut Penryn off from the bold and expansive age that was coming.

      CHAPTER 3

      One day a few weeks later, I row out to Liberty, fold up the cover and pump the bilges. The summer yachts have thinned out, laid up in the sheltered corners of the creeks. The shoreside oaks are still green, but something tired now shows in their foliage. A few hundred yards to the south, the Victorian facade of Place Manor rises from its sweep of lawn and gravelled drive. Almost completely hidden behind it is the much older church of St Anthony’s, its tower just clearing the manor’s roof like the mast of a sunken ship.

      I drop the mooring and head out towards St Mawes Castle. From the far headland rises Pendennis Castle, and the two stand guard over the estuary’s approaches. When the religious community around St Anthony’s church was dissolved during the Reformation, the buildings were pulled down and the stone barged across the harbour to build St Mawes Castle. With a neat circularity, the castle had been commissioned to oppose the threat of papal retribution that followed the Reformation and the Dissolution.

      In Falmouth, I moor up at the pontoon and walk through the town, over the railway, through a just-ploughed field to the hilltop church of St Budock. According to the boast on the service board, the church was founded in AD 473–1,000 years before the first buildings of Falmouth appeared above the strand. Budoc himself was one of the greatest of the sea-soaked saints of the Celtic Church. Venerated in Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, his story was carried between them, embellished by a thousand tellings. On Brittany’s hazardous shoreline, he has been called ‘le patron de ces côtes’ and in the miracles of his life, you can sense the particular licence of maritime myth: an adventure from the start, beginning in the middle of the English Channel, where Budoc was born in a bobbing barrel. Shaped by the winds, his earthly mission left him here for several years, above the Fal estuary, with his small group of monks, before he again took to the Channel, floating to Brittany in a stone coffin.

      The church interior is damp and dark. Morning light falls through the high altar window, flashing on and off as clouds slide across the sun. A harvest tableau stands in a niche – bread rolls and a vase of poppies and cornflowers. Kneeling in front of the altar rail, I take the edge of the runner and roll it back beneath the chancel, revealing a grid of terracotta tiles. In the centre, set into stone, glints the panel I am looking for:

      HERE LYETH IOHN KILLIGREW ESQVIER, OF ARWENACK …

       AND ELIZABETH TREWINNARD HIS WIFE … GOD TOOK

       HIM TO HIS MERCY THE YEARE OF OUR LORD 1567 …

      Above the inscription, mottled with age, lie the couple’s brass images. I bend to examine them more closely. No trace of human softness crosses their faces, none of the flamboyance of the later Elizabethans. They are standing in prayer. Framed by a wimple, Elizabeth Killigrew’s expression is stern and manly. John Killigrew’s hair and beard are cropped short and he is dressed in armour СКАЧАТЬ