Cornish saints and sinners
This old book has introduced me to some new Cornish legends. It's essentially a travelogue of 3 friends touring the county in the early twentieth century when there was already an awareness of an older world passing. The tone is archaically humorous and gets annoying after a while but I was surprised how much I learnt. And some of it is genuinely funny. Like the legend of St Ia, who sailed across from Ireland on a cabbage leaf. King Tewdrig was fed up with so many saints entering Cornwall and putting a strain on the local economy. He passed a law that "foreigners without luggage, or visible means of subsistence are not allowed into the kingdom." St Ia pointed to the cabbage and claimed it was luggage and also a form of subsistence but King Tewdrig's customs officers pointed out it was pickled so a manufactured article. St Ia committed herself to the waves once more and was carried on to St Ives where she planted her cabbage leaf an grew a miraculous crop of pickle...