There was an Elizabethan writer who lived in the parish, Nicholas Roscarrock. He loved the old religion and was imprisoned in the Tower and put on the rack and then imprisoned again. He wrote the life of his parish saint.“St. Endelient” he called her and said she lived only on the milk of a cow: “which cowe the lord of Trenteny kild as she strayed into his grounds; and as olde people speaking by tradition, doe report, she had a great man to her godfather, which they also say was King Arthure, whoe took the killing of the cowe in such sort, as he killed or caus’d the Man to be slaine, whom she miraculously revived.” Nicholas Roscarrock also wrote a hymn in her praise:
To emitate in part thy vertues rare
Thy Faith, Hope, Charitie, thy humble mynde,
Thy chasteness, meekness, and thy dyet spare
And that which in this Worlde is hard to finde
The love which thou to enemye didst showe
Reviving him who sought thy overthrowe.
When she was dying Endelient asked her friends to lay her dead body on a sledge and to bury her where certain young Scots bullocks or calves of a year old should of their own accord draw her. This they did and the Scots bullocks drew the body up to the windy hilltop where the church now stands.
The churchyard is a forest of upright Delabole slate headstones, a rich grey-blue stone, inscribed with epitaphs—the art of engraving lettering on slate continued in this district into the present century—names and rhymes set out on the stone spaciously, letters delicate and beautiful. From the outside it’s the usual Cornish church—a long low building of elvan stone, most of it built in Tudor times. But the tower is extra special. It is of huge blocks of granite brought, they say, from Lundy Island. The ground stage of the tower is strongly moulded but the builders seem to have grown tired and to have taken less trouble with the detail higher up, though the blocks of granite are still enormous.
I can remember Endellion before its present restoration. There’s a photograph of what it used to look like in the porch—pitchpine pews, pitchpine pulpit, swamping with their yellow shine the clustered granite columns of the aisles.Be careful as you open the door not to fall over. Three steps down and there it is, long and wide and light and simple with no pitchpine anywhere except a lectern. A nave and two aisles with barrel roofs carved with bosses, some of them old but most of them done twelve years ago by a local joiner, the village postman and the sculptress. The floor is slate. The walls are stone lightly plastered blueish-grey. There is no stained glass. Old oak and new oak benches, strong and firm and simple, fill, but do not crowd, the church. They do not hide the full length of these granite columns. The high altar is long and vast. At the end of the south aisle is the sculptured base of St. Endelienta’s shrine, in a blue-black slate called Cataclewse, a boxwood among stones. The church reveals itself at once. Though at first glance it is unmysterious, its mystery grows. It is the mystery of satisfying proportion—and no, not just that, nor yet the feeling of age, for the present church is almost wholly early Tudor, not very old as churches go, nor is the loving use of local materials all to do with it. Why does St. Endellion seem to go on praying when there is no one in it? The Blessed Sacrament is not reserved here, yet the building is alive.
There is something strange and exalting about this windy Cornish hill top looking over miles of distant cliffs, that cannot be put into words.
Down a path from the North door, bordered with fuchsias, is the Rectory. The Rector of St. Endellion is also a Prebendary. This church is run by a college of priests like St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. There are four prebends in the college, though their building is gone and they live elsewhere. They are the prebends of Marny, Trehaverock, Endellion and Bodmin. Each of the Prebendal stalls has a little income attached to it and is held by local priests. The money is given to Christian causes. For instance, the Parish of Port Isaac, formed out of St. Endellion in 1913, is financed with the income of the Bodmin Prebendary. How this heavenly medieval arrangement of a college of prebendary clergymen survived the Reformation and Commonwealth and Victorian interferers is another mystery of St. Endellion for which we must thank God. It was certainly saved from extinction by the late Athelstan Riley and Lord Clifden. Episcopal attacks have been made on it; but long live St. Endellion, Trehaverock, Marny and Bodmin! Hold fast. Sancta Endelienta, ora pro nobis!
The Rectors of St. Endellion have long been remarkable men. There was Parson Hocken, a blacksmith’s son from St. Teath, who grew roses, was a Tractarian of the Parson Hawker type and when jeered at for his lowly origin hung a blacksmith’s shoe over his pulpit and preached about it. There was Parson Josa, whom I just remember, who started as a choirboy in St. Peter’s, Rome, and then joined our own Church of England; there is the present Rector, Prebendary Murphy,
