174 CHUECH OF ST. JUST-IN- PENWITH. 



and only failed because they undertook more tlian they could 

 accomplish, and Sir John Maclean who really did show us how 

 the work could be done almost to perfection, I know no Cornish 

 history which you can quote as an authority for anything. Davies 

 Grilbert copied everything and copied it incorrectly. 0. S. Gilbert 

 thought that the history of the squire and his sisters, and his 

 cousins, and his aunts, was the history of the parish, while 

 Lake's, which is after all the best of this bad lot, written by a 

 surveyor and others employed, is nothing but a confused collec- 

 tion of extracts from previous writers, put together chiefly by a 

 man who did not understand them himself,* and who leaves you 

 to find out for yourself where he borrowed them from. To take a 

 mild instance of the way a wrong statement is perpetuated. Lake's 

 History says that the Church of St. Cury was dedicated by Bishop 

 Bronescombe on the 1st of September, 1261. Whoever first 

 started this mistake did it through carelessness, for the Register 

 states that on that day the Bishop was in Devonshire, and that 

 the church which he dedicated was not S. Cury at all, but Cory ton. 

 As a matter of fact Cury was not at that time a church, but merely 

 a chapel. This mistake is repeated by Cummings in his history 

 of that parish, and is now quoted on his authority by Students' 

 Associations and newspapers who naturally suppose that a man 

 who set to work to write the history of his own parish would at 

 any rate have taken the trouble to refer to some respectable 

 authority for his information. 



But it is time that I get to my own subject, and, having 

 found fault with other people, proceed to give you all the oppor- 

 tunity of finding fault with me. 



First, who was St. Just ? I am sure I do not know. Many 

 tell us that he was Justus, one of the companions of that trouble- 

 some fellow Augustine in 596, and who was appointed to the See 

 of Rochester by King Ethelbert, and, in 616, succeeded to the 

 Archbishopric of Canterbury. But there seems to be no ground 

 whatever for treating the two men as identical. The late Mr. 

 Borlase, in his "Age of the Saints," suggested Jestyn ap Geraint, 

 to whom two churches in Anglesey are dedicated. This identifi- 

 cation has the approval of no less an authority than Mr. Baring- 

 Gould. Mr. Borlase, in another of his writings, put forward St. 



*Lake is the name of the publisher, not the author. 



