Truro and Treguier

I warmly commended recently Sacrament an Alter, a fine recent edition of a catena of Patristic texts concerning the Most Holy Eucharist. D H Frost has been working on this teext for more than two decades; here we have the ripe fruits of his scholarship.

Parts of this work have, over those years, appeared, notably in Cornish Studies (e.g. 2003; 2007). I will refer today to one such episode; related by Frost in 2007 and repeated in his new publication. 

Fr Thomas Stephyn, Vicar of nearby St Newlyn, was involved in a most diverting fracas in the port of Truro in 1537. An agent of the Tudor regime, Alexander Carvanell, heard about a ship called the Maudelyn which, with Fr Stephyn and two other priests and a few dozen laity, was about to set sail for the Pardon** (patronal festival) in Treguier (Lantregar) Brittany, "faynyng a poope holly pilgrymage". The pious miscreants refused to allow the Tudor employees to board the ship; Carvanell and two assistants were at first thrown overboard. 

They persisted, and eventually the ship sailed off with the three government men as captives on board. Five miles out from Falmouth, the two lackies were put in a boat to row ashore, but Carvonell himself was carried all the way to Brittany. The pope holy pilgrims amused themselves by threatening to tow him behind the ship at the end of a rope. The fun continued in Treguier; the Cornishmen explained to their Breton cousins the status of Carvonell, and the more devout among those who had gathered for the Pardon duffed him up beautifully in the streets of Treguier, "shuldryng and buffeting him as though he had bene a turke or a Sarzin". But he survived to get home and to report to the Council.

Perhaps Fr Stephyn's subsequent disappearance from the records means that he went into the Catholic underground. Perhaps Sacrament an Alter went with him; in 1564 Fr Tregear, incidentally, was involved in passing on, presumably among those clergy whom he knew would make sympathetic use of them, books bequeathed by a traditionalist priest. Who knows; perhaps the volume of 'homilies' to which Sacrament had become attached spent some time, not very far away from St Allen and St Newlyn, in the Lanhearne residence of the Arundell family. They suffered in the aftermath of the 1549 rebellion; a house where the Blessed Sacrament never ceased to be reserved even during the darkest days - and where now the admirable Carmelites, formerly Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate, pray the Old Rites. 

There are little details in these narratives that make me want to know more ... surely, the episode demands more treatment in its own right. What, in 1537, did Tudor lackies expect or wish to find in a ship headed for for Treguier? Why might they wish to prevent sound Cornish Catholics from attending a Pardon there (the English Reformatin had hardly by then entered its ideologically Protestant phase). What did Cornishmen know about Turks and Saracens? Were the Corsairs still raiding Cornish villages to kidnap inhabitants for the Slave Trade?

**Pardon of S Yves, mid-May. Pam and I had a marvellous fortnight near Treguier a couple of decades ago. It is a remarkable little city with very good seafood and ravishing pastries and a charming cathedral and cloister.