Albion Revisited
A series of articles on Ancient British Christianity
2nd November 2006
No.1. The
Tinners’ Legend
In this series of articles, we shall be looking at evidences
relating to the establishment of Christianity in Britain
in the first century. In due course, we plan to write a book with the title
“Albion Revisited”, but these preliminary surveys are intended to advertise the
results of our researches thus far, and it is hoped that some of our readers
may be able to respond, adding to our knowledge from some of their own
recollections.
The latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th
century were noted for the profusion of articles and books dealing with the
ancient folklore and legends of this our land of Britain, and in particular the
rise of Christianity in Somerset and Cornwall in the first century of the
Christian era. Two men in particular must be mentioned in this respect, both
having the name Lewis. Henry Ardern Lewis, (H.A.L.)
vicar of Talland Church, near Polperro in Cornwall, from 1933
to 1936, was well known for ferreting out local tales and remembrances of
legends that had lingered on through the centuries, and were held in great
respect by (mainly) elderly Cornish folk. Lionel Smithett
Lewis, (L.S.L.) vicar of St John the Baptist Church at Glastonbury from 1921 to
1950, was an indomitable researcher into all ancient historical material
relating to the work of apostles in Britain in the first century.
I am indebted to Mrs Jennifer Higham,
Assistant Librarian at the Lambeth Palace Library for obtaining biographical
information about these two ministers. In another article, I shall have
occasion to mention them again in greater detail. But for now, we shall be
limited by brief references to their writings.
H.A.L. wrote a series of booklets detailing the
results of his work. I have found it rather difficult to obtain copies of his
writings, but have been helped by Sarah Marsh, Librarian of Looe
Library, Cornwall, in finding and photocopying Ab
Antiquo, Terry Knight, principal librarian at
Redruth Library, in loaning a copy of The Child Christ at Lammana, and
Chris Pead, librarian of the Orange Street
Congregational Church in London, who kindly sent a PDF file of Christ in
Cornwall?
It was in the third of these booklets that H.A.L.
mentioned (on page 7) the story of the “Tinners’ Legend”, by which workers in
the tin trade used an invocation whenever working with the metal, saying “Joseph
was in the tin trade.” Apparently this invocation has been passed
down through the centuries, and persisted (mainly) in Cornwall whilst the
tin mines were still in operation. With the closure of South Justy Mine in recent years, there must surely be a gradual
loss of this saying amongst the mining fraternity. But as we shall see in a
moment, the invocation was quite widespread, even as far as London.
L.S.L. wrote a book entitled St. Joseph
of Arimathea at Glastonbury. The first edition came out in
1922. It was then just a small booklet of 28 pages. I was able to photocopy
Lewis’s own copy of this, thanks to David Orchard, in charge of the Local
Studies section of the Glastonbury Library. Due to the public response, his
booklet grew with new editions, until the last (7th) edition came
out in 1953, then a full-blown book of 211 pages. Lewis had added no less than
13 appendixes to this last edition, each of which contained most useful
information. In Appendix 7, page 167, he wrote about the letter that Henry Jenner sent to the Western Morning News, April 6th 1933, in which information was contained about the Tinners’ Legend.
Lewis had made enquiries himself about the legend, and closed the Appendix with
these words, “I am indebted to the indefatigable Rev. H.A.Lewis
for this further information about Mr Henry Jenner.”
Due to the importance of the information afforded
by Henry Jenner, it has been decided to quote the
correspondence in full. It was necessary to contact the Archives Department in
respect of vintage copies of the Western
Morning News, and once again I was put in touch with a most helpful
librarian, Nicola Holdgate, who came to my
assistance. She sent me photocopies of several of the letters I needed.
(The following letter appeared in “The Western
Morning News and Daily Gazette” on Lady Day, March 25th 1933)
CHRIST
IN CORNWALL?
Sir, - It has been stated that
Joseph of Arimathea, as a merchant, came to Britain, seeking tin from the Isles
of Scilly and the mainland of Cornwall, and that “Our Lord Himself came with
him as a boy.” There was a long period in the life of Christ of which the
Scriptures tell us very little – those 18 years which elapsed between His
discourse with the Jewish doctors in the temple and His entry into His public
ministry. It is said to be not improbable, therefore, after the death of Joseph,
the husband of Mary, that her wealthy uncle made it possible for Christ to
accompany him on his journey to Cornwall. In any case, it is an attractive legend.
Fowey,
March 23rd.
T.H.L.HONY
(The answering letter
appeared on Thursday April 6th 1933.)
WAS
CHRIST IN CORNWALL?
“JOSEPH WAS IN
THE TIN TRADE”
VOYAGE BY OWN SHIP TO ST. MICHAEL’S MOUNT
By HENRY JENNER of Hayle
Mr. T.H.L.HONY’S
letter, which appropriately appeared on Lady Day, suggested an interesting
story, and as I think, though I am not quite sure, that I am answerable for the
first publication in print of the curious legend, I may as well explain how I
got hold of it, and give my authority for it.
About
40 years ago I happened to be dining at the house of
one of the masters of Harrow School, the late Mr. George Hallam, when the following story was told of a
friend of his by our host, who had just heard it. Mr. James Baillie Hamilton, an amateur in organ-building, went to the workshop of one of
the principal firms of organ-builders in London to see the
process of making metal pipes. It seems that it is the practice, in order, I
suppose, to obtain a perfectly smooth and homogenous surface, to throw a
shovelful of molten metal along a table on which a linen cloth is stretched. It may well be understood that this is a delicate operation,
and requires considerable dexterity, for a slight slip might have serious
consequences. Each workman before he made his cast said in a low tone, “Joseph
was in the tin trade.” The foreman, who was taking the visitor
round, after some persuasion, explained this, saying in words to the following
effect:-
FOREMAN’S LEGEND
“We workers in metal
are a very old fraternity, and like other handicrafts, we have old traditions
among us. One of these, the memory of which is preserved in this invocation, is
that Joseph of Arimathea, the rich man of the Gospels, made his money in the
tin trade with Cornwall. We have also a story that he made voyages to Cornwall in his own
ships, and that on one occasion he brought with him
the Child Christ and His mother, and landed them at St. Michael’s Mount.”
When
I heard this I said that the saying “Joseph was in the tin trade”
was known to me as current in Cornwall, though I had not thought enough about
it to consider to which of the three Scriptural Josephs it referred. I found
later that it was well known to other Cornish people. When I went to the British Museum the
next day I looked up St. Joseph of Arimathea in the “Acta
Sanctorum,” and though I found nothing about the tin
trade, and most of what I did find was the usual Gospel of Nicodemus, Glastonbury and
Grail legend, there was one life which made him accompany St. James the Great
to Galicia in Spain, which was the other tin-producing district of his time.
The
tradition that “Joseph was in the tin trade” may account for the
choice of St. Joseph as the legendary Apostle of Britain. When several of the Twelve are
not accounted for, and a romancer might have chosen one of those without much
fear of contradiction, it is curious that a character who is only mentioned
once in each of the Gospels, though, it is true, in connection with a very
important incident, should have been picked out, unless there was a tradition
that he really did come. The Glastonbury legend is not found before the 12th century, though that
does not prove that it is no earlier, and St. Joseph is
liturgically very much neglected in Western rites, even in the Sarum books, though more is made of him in Greek liturgies.
I
told the story soon after I heard it to my friend Mr. Ascott
Hope Moncrieff, the editor of Black’s “Guide to Cornwall” and he put it into his 1895 edition, which, as far as I know,
was its first appearance in print. I also told it to Mr. Baring-Gould, to whom it was quite new, and he worked it into one of his
novels, and rather spoilt it by a characteristically conjectural emendation
into “Joseph to the tinner’s aid.”
IN THE
HEBRIDES
Soon after that I was
staying on South Uist, in the Catholic part of the
Outer Hebrides, and found there a whole set of legends of the wanderings of the
Holy Mother and Son in those islands, with some very pretty folklore and moral
teaching associated with them. There was nothing about St. Joseph or the
tin trade in them, and some were connected with St. Bridget in her
anachronistic character of “Muime Chriosta”
(Foster-mother of Christ), as the Gaels call her. I wonder where Mr. Hony got his notion that St. Joseph was the
uncle of Our Lady. It is not at all improbable, but I do not remember any
mention of such a relationship even in the most fanciful of the Grail romances.
As Mr. Hony rightly says, “It is an attractive
legend.” It is not impossible that it is true, but, though one would like to
believe that Those Two really did come to Cornwall, I fear that one can only
ask with William Blake, who seems to have known some form of it,
“And did those Feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?”
and we shall probably never be able to get an answer to
those questions.
Further
correspondence about the Tinners’ Legend.
According to H.A.L., (in “The Child Christ at Lammana”, page 16) there appeared in the Western Morning News of
April 12th
1933, a reply to Henry Jenner’s
article of a week before. Nicola Holdgate has kindly
looked this up for me, but without any positive results. L.S.L. said that it
appeared on April 13th, rather than 12th, but once again
the search failed to show up any such correspondence. This remains a mystery as
yet unsolved. However, H.A.L. records snippets from this correspondence, so we
must assume that it did exist. What he had to say is as follows. First of all
he mentions Jenner’s article, then –
“This was followed by a
letter signed E.O.G., Plymouth, on April 12th in which the writer
records the songs and carols sung by children and remembered by a Cornishwoman,
beginning, ‘Joseph was a tin merchant, a tin merchant, a tin merchant’, [and
L.S.L adds that the song described his arriving by sea in a boat]; the
recollections of an old clergyman in Plymouth who ‘used to tell how many times
he had heard this strange persistent belief among country people’; and the
reply of an old Irish clergyman, when asked about it. ‘Indeed, and don’t I know
it? I have known about it all my life.’”
H.A.L. then said that
he had traced memories of the songs in Looe, during
his ministry as the vicar of Talland between 1933 and
1936.
Would it be too much to
ask, now that we have entered the 21st century, whether there still remains in Cornwall, amongst
the older folk, a memory of the Tinners’ Legend, and the songs that used to be
sung by the children? What about the Carol, “I saw three ships”?
Has anyone ever traced the origin of this strange song? It was certainly known
as early as 1660. The words, as they now read in its various versions, make
complete nonsense if taken as fact.
1. I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day,
I saw three ships come sailing in
On Christmas Day in the morning.
2. And what was in those ships all three?
3. Our Saviour Christ and his lady.
4. Pray, whither sailed those ships all three?
5. O, they sailed into Bethlehem. Etc.
No ships could
possibly land at Bethlehem, which is on a ridge 2,550 feet above sea level, 6 miles south of Jerusalem, and all
of 35 miles from the Mediterranean Sea!
There is the tradition
held strongly at Pilton Church, in Somerset, that Joseph of Arimathea came with the Child Christ to Cornwall and Somerset. A
beautifully embroidered banner showing the ship with Joseph and Jesus, graces their church, and panels affixed to the
pillars tell the story as believed by local folk.
Footnotes relating to the letter
quoted above
Henry Jenner
was born at St Columb in1848. His father was a curate
at St Columb Major church. He became a clerk in the Probate Division of the
High Court in London. Later he worked in the Department of Ancient
Manuscripts in the British Museum. He died in 1934.