Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/30

Rh Registers, and in these and other fourteenth-century Exeter registers there are several allusions to the obligations of hearing confessions and propounding the Word of God in Cornish.

But until the time of Henry VIII. we have no trust-worthy information about the state or extent of the language. It is highly probable, from the number of places still retaining undoubtedly Celtic names, and retaining them in an undoubtedly Cornish form, that until at least the fifteenth century the Tamar was the general boundary of English and Cornish; though there is said to be some evidence that even as late as the reign of Elizabeth, Cornish was spoken in a few places to the east of the Tamar, notably in the South Hams. Polwhele, however, limits the South Hams use of Cornish to the time of Edward I., and we know from the English Chronicle that when Athelstan drove the "Welsh "out of Exeter in 936, he set the Tamar for their boundary. In the reign of Henry VIII. we have an account given by Andrew Borde in his Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, written in 1542. He says, "In Cornwall is two speches, the one is naughty Englysshe, and the other is Cornysshe speche. And there be many men and women the which cannot speake one worde of Englysshe, but all Cornyshe." He then gives the Cornish numerals and a few sentences of ordinary conversation. These are much mixed with English, and were, no doubt, such as might have been heard on the borders of Devon, for he probably did not penetrate very far, being doubtless deterred by the impossibility of obtaining drinkable beer—a circumstance which seems to have much exercised his mind in describing Cornwall. These numerals and sentences are, as far as is known, the earliest specimens of printed Cornish, earlier by a hundred and sixty-five years than Lhuyd's Grammar, though Dr. Jago,