Your answers
Who in the ballad was Trelawny and why, if he died,
would 20,000 Cornishmen know the reason why? When was it
written?
The question's reference is to the refrain from the poem "The
Song of the Western Men" by the poet and cleric Robert Stephen
Hawker, from his Cornish Ballads, and collected with other poems in
Footprints of Former Men in Cornwall, published in
1870.
Hawker was Vicar of Morwenstow on the cruel and rugged coast of
north Cornwall. He rescued (and buried) many shipwrecked sailors,
and revived the Harvest Festival service, among many good deeds in
that poor area of Cornwall.
Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bt, was successively Bishop of Bristol,
Exeter, and Winchester. In 1628, he was incarcerated in the Tower
of London with six other bishops for refusing to allow King James
II's "Declaration for Liberty of Conscience" (Declaration of
Indulgence) to be read in the churches, believing that "the King
did not possess this dispensing power." The seven were freed.
During the trial, the old Cornish "And shall Trelawny die" was
revived in Sir Jonathan's favour, and, later on, Hawker of
Morwenstow made it the refrain of his well-known "The Song of the
Western Men". He wrote the poem anonymously in 1825, while a
22-year-old student at the University of Oxford.
I have a special interest in R. S. Hawker: his young second
wife, Pauline Kuscinski, was my grandmother's aunt.
(Mrs) Olga Shipperbottom
Stockport, Cheshire
Mrs Shipperbottom refers us to Piers Brendon's biography
Hawker of Morwenstow: Portrait of a Victorian eccentric
(Jonathan Cape, 1975), which states (page 56) that "The Song of the
Western Men" is "based on a chorus . . . supposedly written about
the imprisonment of one of the Seven Bishops, Sir Jonathan
Trelawny, by James II in 1688, but more probably referring to the
incarceration in the Tower of the pro-Royalist Sir John Trelawny in
1628.
"The whole poem, when Hawker published it anonymously in 1825,
was taken by four competent judges, Davies Gilbert, Scott, Macaulay
and Dickens, to have been an original seventeenth-century popular
song."
Our thanks also go to the other readers who responded to this
question. We enjoyed Martin Henwood's 1066 And All
That-style answer, in which Trelawny was imprisoned by James
II for inventing the mass production of the Cornish pasty, and
"before his arrest . . . taught twenty thousand Cornishmen how to
mass-produce their pasty", but we suggest that such talent could be
more safely channelled through our caption competition.
Editor
Your questions
The Crockford "Deaconesses" list has shrunk to
a single page, and most are over 80. It appears that fewer than ten
are still "working". Why are deaconesses no longer made? Is it
because women were made deacons from 1987? If so, why have the
remaining deaconesses not been made deacons?
R. W. C.
Address for answers and more questions: Out of the Question,
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