Page:The histories of Launceston and Dunheved, in the county of Cornwall.djvu/394

 356 ST. THOMAS CHURCH. two men who had attended a meeting in the chapel there. They are called " two men of the town of Launceston," and one of them was a fisherman named Robert Symon. By them blood was shed in the burial-ground. The act of drawing blood in a churchyard was at that time deemed a pollution of the place. It is said that, although a great pestilence was then reigning, all interments in the cemetery were suspended until the pollution had been expurgated. A solemn enquiry was therefore directed, and was after- wards held in the chapel of St. Thomas. The Court con- sisted of T. Uppton, Esq., who sat for John Stevyn, the Mayor of Dunheved ; Nicholas Tregodeck, William Stoterych, and others. Symon was found the chief offender, but we have no record of his punishment. It is difficult to give a picture of proceedings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which, in later times, became "vestry proceedings;" but, as the result of con- siderable pains, we are happily able to show means used by the parishioners of St. Thomas, before the imposition of church rates, to obtain funds for supporting the fabric of their chapel, and such accessories to worship as bells, bell- ropes, candles, bread, and wine. The lay inhabitants seem, from a very early period, to have formed themselves into guilds or fraternities, and to have annually elected two or more of themselves to collect money, and to keep the col- lected store, and to account for it. Some of the practices at St. Thomas were, so far as our observation has gone, peculiar and interesting. By permission of the Rev. W. S. Johns, the present incumbent of the parish, we have arranged in some order a number of tattered leaves and fragments of leaves of manuscript, written partly in bad Latin, partly in worse English, but veritable accounts of wardens of guilds and keepers of stores, eventually gliding into pure churchwardens 1 yearly accounts. The earliest of these