PREBENDARY HINGESTON-RANPOLPH's REGISTERS. 



307 



Kin"- Henry VI. The Duke of Gloucester is Graudisson 

 redivivus. 



But there are greater services still which the Prebendary has 

 rendered to the better understanding of those times. The scene 

 in the Church of St. Buryan, on a July day, 1336, when with a 

 great retinue Grandisson brought back to" obedience," the long- 

 estranged parishioners, is, for the variety of its interest, legal, 

 theological, ethnological and personal, unique even in these 

 records. We know from this account the very text of the 

 Bishop's sermon, the language in which it was preached, the 

 name of the Vicar of St. Just who interpreted the Bishop's 

 sermon to his Cornish hsteners in their own tongue. AVith what 

 interest the whole is invested ! Nothing is altered in the scenery. 

 Still there is the same blood in the people's veins. Still there 

 are Penroses, and Vyvyans, and Boscawens in the West 

 Country. But it requires an effort of the imagination to picture 

 a great Medieval Bishop with a splendid retinue, pausing in his 

 progress, to look across in the light of July sunshine upon the 

 beautiful range of coast line that forms the eastern side of 

 Mount's Bay and stretches from St. Michael's Mount to the 

 Lizard. 



There are, I believe, four waves of emotion which pass over 

 the Cornish mind to which these volumes bear witness, and they 

 overpass in iinpressiveness all the abuses and shameful things 

 which disfigured the Church life of the centuries of which these 

 volumes are an outline. Waves of emotion, I call them, but 

 this emotion runs out into acts and deeds. The first is that 

 borne witness to by the Register of Bishop Walter Bronescombe 

 (p. xii). It touched the parish and made the Church the focus 

 of its life. " Between September, 1259, and the end of 12C8, the 

 Bishop dedicated eighty-eight churches. Of these dedications 

 forty occurred in a single year." Listen to a few of them, and 

 realise that it was six centuries and a half ago : 



A.D. 1259. 



On the 24th of Sej^tember, 1259, the Lord Bishop dedicated 



the Church of St. Breoke. 

 On the 26th of September . . the Church of St. Newlyn. 



