CHRONICLES OF CORNISH SAINTS. II. — S. PETROCK. 5 



that he should have undertaken this long journey in middle life, 

 on his withdrawal from Ireland, than in old age, after his thirty 

 years sojourn in Cornwall. In visiting those celebrated cities, 

 Petrock only followed the general custom of his generation. It 

 was the great aim of every Christian in those days to visit the 

 tombs of eminent saints and martyrs, and especially to gaze on the 

 scenes consecrated by the Saviour's life and death. Augustine 

 tells us * that the whole world flocked to Bethlehem to behold the 

 place of Christ's nativity ; and, from a remark which we find in 

 one of Jerome's Epistles,t it would seem that the British Christians 

 were specially addicted to this religious vagrancy long before 

 Petrock's time. " Heaven stands open," he says, with a touch of 

 irony, " in Britain as well as at Jerusalem " ; and in another place 

 he says, speaking of pilgrimages, that " the Britons, though 

 divided from the rest of the world, quit their western sun and go 

 in quest of a climate which they know nothing of, unless by re- 

 port and the history of the Bible." | 



From Jerusalem, we are told, Petrock proceeded further east- 

 ward until he reached India, and spent seven years there on a 

 solitary island; but the narrative of this remote journey is so 

 blended witli improbable and supernatural stories that nothing 

 historical can be deduced from it, besides the fact that he was ab- 

 sent a long time and travelled beyond Palestine. "All far 

 countries," says Fuller, in allusion to this narrative, " are East 

 Indies to ignorant people." On his return to Cornwall, Petrock 

 landed at a port called Loderic, or Laftenac, since from him framed 

 Petrockstowe, and, by contraction, Padstow. Great calamities had 

 befallen his native land during his long absence. Saxon armies 

 had well nigh quenched the independence of the British chiefs, 

 and had ravaged the country from the banks of the Tweed to the 

 borders of Dartmoor. King Arthur had, it is true, during 

 many years kept the pagan hosts at bay, and had in some degree 

 restored the supremacy of the British power ; but that hero was 

 now gone, and his successor, Constantine, had been obliged to wage 

 war with the two sons of Mordred, who claimed the throne, and 



* Vol. I, p. 561. 



f Epist : 13. Ad Paulinum. 



+ Epist: 17. 



