An extract from a longer post, "The Travails of Silvanus Trevail".
This is Luxulyan Church in Cornwall. On a trip back in April we went out of our way to visit the famous Treffry Viaduct and right next door is the small village of Luxulyan, and this was how we came to be there and why on driving through the village, we hit the brakes as we passed this fascinating small church. Hitting the brakes while driving along, when we spot something interesting is something we do a lot of. You can read my post on the Treffry Viaduct here. Strictly speaking the Treffry Viaduct is also an Aqueduct, as it had small wagons on rails crossing it and also a channel carrying water.
This arrangement of granite furniture was the cause of our emergency stop. I just had to have a closer look. It is difficult to age stone but we are talking about hundreds of years not decades, this is granite and it takes a lot of effort to wear down granite into these soft curves. What you can see are two stone benches for people to rest while they place a heavy coffin on the coffin rest in the middle. The original entrance would have been the gap on the right as here is the grid to prevent animals entering the churchyard. A gate probably closed across the gap on the left until there was a funeral. For some reason that is now reversed with the closed gate on the right. There may have been a wooden lych gate over the whole set up to keep people dry but there is no sign of that if it ever existed.
It is a thing of great age and beauty. The people who made it didn't think, it'll do, it'll see me out. The people who built this expected it to last hundreds of years, just like the church.
The parish church, originally Norman, was entirely rebuilt in granite in the 15th century. It is dedicated to St Ciricius and St Julitta. The tower is without buttresses or pinnacles and the south porch has battlements and a handsome tunnel-vault.
This is the second time I have come across St Ciricius and the other church I have written about dedicated to him was in Southpool in Devon.There his name is spelled St Cyriac. More on St Ciricius and his mother Julitta later.
Next to the entrance is this ancient Celtic cross. It was moved to this site in 1890 and is made from Luxullianite a local volcanic stone. The cross is Grade 2 listed by English Heritage.
Churchyard cross. Mediaeval or earlier origin. Granite, set on uncut metamorphic stone boulder. Cross about one metre high, wheelhead, with raised carved Maltese cross on each face. Ancient monument no. 347.
Luxullianite is a rare mineral and only found in the area around Luxulyan. It is a form of granite with large crystals of tourmaline embedded in it making it an attractive material for buildings and monuments. It was most famously used to construct The Duke of Wellington's tomb in St Paul's Cathedral.
The church itself is Grade 1 listed. The porch is late 15th century. Around the time this porch was being carved out of granite, Richard III was King of England. He died in The Battle of Bosworth Field, the last Plantagenet King, and his death marked the end of The Middle Ages and the end of The Wars of the Roses.
These famous wars were nothing to do with flower beds or gardening, they were dynastic bloody wars. The sort of wars that happen when there is a power vacuum and competing claims for that power.The roses were symbolic of the two warring families represented by the red and the white roses.
Following the war and the extinction of the last male line of the House of York in 1483, a politically arranged marriage united the Houses of Tudor and York, creating a new royal dynasty which inherited the Yorkist claim as well, thereby resolving the conflict. The result can still be seen in Royal Regalia today which features the double or Tudor Rose.
Bearing all that in mind it is no surprise that the buildings of the time had battlements on the roof and as seen here three small heraldic castle towers above the door. Two carved heads also stand guard at the entrance either side of the door. Either side of the arch are carved quatrefoil patterns.
This is the porch interior with its unusual decorative tunnel vaulting.
The porch door is only 19th century, almost brand new. One of the original screws has obviously fallen out of the handle, and been replaced, very unsympathetically. If I ever think I may be headed in this direction again, I am going to search our rusty old screw jar in the garage first, and try to find something dome headed and with a slot. This shiny zinc plated cross head monstrosity just will not do. Call me picky.
I have to confess the rusty old screw jar is curated by my other half not me, although I do have an old button box which was an antique when I got it, and which I have had for forty years, which sometimes comes in useful. For shirts obviously, not door handles.
If you are reading this, and you live in Luxulyan, and you also have a rusty old screw jar handy, and you get there before me, then please let me know in the comments.
The font is Norman which means it is about a 1000 years old and predates most of the church that can be seen today. It is described as Bodmin type, Bodmin being about 6 miles away, look at the faces carved in granite. Today's history revisionists, again as the result of total ignorance, would have you believe that the European artists of the 20th century stole unique styles like this from Africa. They would call it cultural appropriation. There is no doubt that artists were influenced by artefacts arriving with returning travellers, but here we have a 1000 year old European work of art that massively predates any African artefacts arriving in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Maybe we should call this style Universal, rather than African.
These arches are granite, no surprise there. They are described by English Heritage as Pevsner A Type. If you are interested in old buildings, as I am, you will have seen the name Pevsner before.
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner is the perfect example of Hitler's loss being our gain. He was born in Leipzig in 1902 and was awarded a Doctorate in Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on The Baroque Architecture of Leipzig. He was a Lutheran and a big fan of German modernist architecture. He lectured in English art and architecture at the University of Göttingen where he eventually fell foul of Hitler's new race laws and was forced to resign in 1933.
This is a salutary tale especially today because why, you may ask, did he fall foul of the Nazi laws if he was a Lutheran? The answer is Anti-Semitism, for he was born to Jewish parents and this precisely explains that Anti-Semitism is about race and not about religion. People today still make this mistake in thinking about Anti-Semitism as an opposition to Judaism, or Zionism, when in fact it is racism pure and simple. The same ignorant people I have already mentioned, the useful idiots for their cause, who are experts in identity and victimhood are the new acceptable face of racism in the west.
Pevsner moved to Britain after he resigned, escaping just in time, the horror and disaster that historical revisionism always brings. After he moved to England, Nikolaus Pevsner found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and that the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. He conceived a project to write a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this. Work on the series began in 1945. Two part-time assistants, both German refugee art historians, prepared notes for Pevsner from published sources. Pevsner spent the academic holidays touring the country to make personal observations and to carry out local research, before writing up the finished volumes. The first volume was published in 1951.
Pevsner wrote thirty-two of the books himself and ten with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others. The guides offer both detailed coverage of the most notable buildings and notes on lesser-known and vernacular buildings; all building types are covered but there is a particular emphasis on churches and public buildings.
I digress now into the side issue of how to photograph ancient churches with small windows and no electric light, on dark rainy days. The answer is, if you have a choice don't. Because this is what you get. In this case I had no choice because it was done on the spur of the moment.
This is the same photo below, and I place both of these here to demonstrate why it is a good idea to set your camera to RAW if you have that facility. For you non-camera buffs, actually I am not a camera buff either I'm a photo buff, and there is a big difference, so for me it is more a matter of necessity, RAW is a type of file that is much bigger than the Jpeg that you may be familiar with. For example on my camera a Jpeg will be about 8Mb in size while the exact same shot in RAW will be 30Mb in size.
So what does all that mean? When a camera or your phone takes a Jpeg it deliberately takes a smaller file to save space, so it decides for you what data it will keep and what data it will throw away. In this instance, it throws away the fact that in the distance in the dark there is an altar and candlesticks and a timber framed roof, because the extremes in light and dark are all averaged out.
In a RAW file the camera says OK I give up, here's everything, you decide. So you get to fiddle with the image in an editing suite, I use Affinity, and there hidden away are details in the dark. This is more like the way you would see this church interior if you walked in. When you entered the church from outside you would be blinded by the dark, and then gradually your eyes would adjust and the details would appear from the shadows.
Consequently it was too dark to get many details, like the memorial tablets.
Those timber roofs are called wagon roofs and in this case are later 19th century.
This is the main window in the church, below, and is placed above the altar in the chancel, it was donated to the church in 1903 as a memorial window, more on this later. It features 8 main panels, each with a pair of saints. If you read them left to right and top to bottom, St Cyricus and St Julitta are in panel number 7. These are the two saints to whom the church is dedicated.
Their exact history is disputed due the the mists of time but the most common story is that they were put to death at Tarsus in AD 304. They had fled to Tarsus and were identified as Christians whereupon Julitta was tortured and Cyricus, only a child, while being held by the Governor of the city, scratched his face and was killed by being thrown down some stairs. Julitta rather than weep at the death of her son celebrated his martyrdom so the Governor ordered that she have unspeakable things done to her which left her extremely dead. But there's more.
Their bodies were thrown on the heap of other bodies lying around outside the city, it sounds like a lovely place, and her two maids rescued their bodies and buried them nearby. Theodore of Mopsuestia sent a letter with the account to Pope Zosimus. If somebody did make all this up they had one hell of a vivid imagination.
Tarsus still exists as a city and is served by Adana Şakirpaşa Airport and is connected by Turkish State Railways to both Adana and Mersin. Hopefully it has changed a bit since then.
Zosimus, an unlikely name for a Pope, I admit, was Pope number 41 and ruled for 97 days. He fell out with Emperor Honorius and got himself exiled. To give some context the current Pope is number 266.
This is a detail from panel 5, below, and it piqued my curiosity. It is held by St Laurence. If you are thinking it looks like a fire grate or the bottom of a barbecue, you are not far from the truth.
If you thought the previous story was far fetched, wait until you hear this one. We turn back the calendar a little to Pope number 24, Sixtus II. Laurence and Sixtus met in Spain and travelled to Rome together, Sixtus was a famous teacher. After they travelled to Rome Wikipedia jumps to....."When Sixtus became Pope" with no preamble as to how this happened. Maybe they were just glad to see him.
As Pope he appointed his best mate Laurence as Archdeacon of Rome, putting him in charge of finances and all the wealth of the Catholic Church. Quite a promotion. It's a bit like being an ex politician one day, a Baron the next and Foreign Secretary the next, with no election. Highly improbable. I did warn you it was far fetched.
Then out of the blue, the Emperor Valerian just issued an edict that all bishops, priests and deacons should immediately be put to death, just like that. Sixtus, who thought he was Pope was quickly caught and separated from his head. Easy come easy go. He should have stayed in Spain.
Having removed Sixtus the prefect of Rome demanded Laurence turn over all the cash, and there was a lot, this was Rome. Laurence dilly dallied for several days because he had a plan. As well as being in charge of all the cash he was also in charge of giving cash to the poor and indigent. The indigent were the people who had had their cash taken off them already by the church. Laurence spent three days giving all the cash back until there was nothing left, a bit like lockdown grants in Covid, only in reverse. In Covid they gave us borrowed money and now they are taking it back.
On the third day, have you noticed that Biblical tales are always three days, the prefect said, OK, where's all the cash? Laurence had invited who Hillary Clinton would have called the deplorables round to meet the prefect, thousands of them. Laurence was what the media would call today Far Right as he roused the populace against the unelected elites. He presented the deplorables to the prefect and said,
"Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the Church's crown."
He was trying to point out that the wealth of the church was in fact it's people.
Now we get to the barbecue. The prefect was so angry that the deplorables got all his cash that he had a big barbecue set up with a gridiron over red hot coals. Laurence was placed on it and sizzled away in agony for a bit whereupon he "cheerfully declared" according to Wikipedia, "I'm well done on this side. Turn me over!".
This was how St Laurence became the patron saint of both chefs and comedians. I am not making this up, although an editor on Wikipedia might be. This got me to thinking about the concept of the comedy roast, is this where the term originates? The word roast originally meant to cook on a gridiron, it does seem like a big coincidence.
This is the other side of the cross we saw earlier and is it just me or can you now see how Christian symbols may have evolved from pagan fertility symbols?
This is a more modern cross based on the wheelhead type cross of old.
The tower is in three stages with embattlements on the top, and a pointed arched doorway below and it has a beautiful set of bells inside. Now about a hundred years ago, when you started reading this post it had a title, which by now you have completely forgotten about. The Travails of Silvanus Trevail. The bells in this tower were paid for by this man just over a hundred years ago, the man with the unlikely name. Before visiting this church I had never heard of this man and it's likely that you have never heard of him either.
In fact it wasn't until I started writing this post and editing these photos taken 7 months ago that I zoomed in on that beautiful stained glass window and read in the small print at the bottom that it was in fact donated as a memorial to Silvanus Trevail by his sister. The unusual name intrigued me so I wondered, who this man was. What a tale of both huge success and huge tragedy I stumbled upon.
Comments