The Cornish was, however, so well spoken in the parish of Feock by the old inhabitants till about the year 1640, "that Mr. William Jackman, the then vicar, and chaplain also of Pendennis Castle, at the siege thereof by the Parliament army, was forced for divers years to administer the sacrament to the communicants in the Cornish tongue, because the aged people did not well understand the English, as he himself often told me," says Hals.
So late as 1650 the Cornish language was currently spoken in the parishes of Paul and S. Just; the fisherwomen and market-women in the former, and the tinner in the latter, for the most part conversing in their old vernacular tongue; and Mr. Scawen says that in 1678 the Rev. F. Robinson, rector of Landewednack, "preached a sermon to his parishioners in the Cornish language only."
Had the Bible been translated, had even the English Prayer-book been rendered into Cornish, the language would have lived on. It is due to a large extent to this--the translation into Welsh--that in Wales their ancient language has maintained itself.
The editors of the _Bibliotheca Cornubiensis_ state that Dorothy Jeffery, daughter of Nicolas Pentreath, was baptized at Paul 17th May, 1714; and they conclude that she was the Dolly Pentreath who died in 1777, and that her age accordingly was sixty-three and not one hundred and two.
But this is a mistake. Dolly was a Jeffery by birth and married a Pentreath.
A story is told of Dolly in Mr. J. Henry Harris's _Cornish Saints and Sinners_, "as current in Mousehole, but whether true or well conceived it is not possible for me to say."
It is to this effect: that on one occasion a deserter from a man-of-war fled to her house for refuge, and as there was a cavity in her chimney large enough to contain a man, she thrust him into it, and threw a bundle of dry furze on the fire, and filled the crock with water. Into the middle of the kitchen she drew a "keeve," which she used for washing, and when the naval officer and his men in pursuit burst into her house, Dolly was sitting on a stool, her legs bare and her feet ready to be immersed in the keeve. She screamed out on their entry that she was about to wash her feet, and only waiting for the water to get hot enough. The officer persisted in searching, and she gave tongue in strong and forcible Cornish. She rushed to the door and screamed to the good people of Mousehole, that the lieutenant and his men had invaded her house without leave, and were impudent and audacious enough to ransack every other cottage in the place. The officer and his men withdrew without having seen and secured their man; and that night a fishing lugger stole out of Mousehole with the deserter on board and made for Guernsey, which in those days was a sort of dumping-ground for all kinds of rascals who were "wanted" at home.