From a paper presented to Pheonix Pagan Conference March 9^th 2024

Inspired a by Robert Morton Nance’s description of Pen Glas, the horse skull hobby horse,[1] the newly formed Cornish dance group Cam Kernewek created their own beast to take to the Pan Celtic Festival in Killarney in 1979.[2] Accompanied by firebrands and torches late at night in the midst of wider celebrations of Celtic identity it was a very appropriate reincarnation for our Cornish beast. Cam Kernewek were guided by Trev Lawrence, West Penwith folk singer, droll teller and historian and regular visitor to the festival. Trev recalled stories of more than one Pen Glaze and outings at various times of the year rather than just the Christmas Guize Dancing suggested by Nance.

 

 

In the words of Polwhele in 1812 Cornish Guize Dance was “a kind of carnival or Bal masque which answers to the Mummers of Devon, and the Morrice dancers of Oxfordshire.  In Celtic Cornish ges, means mockery, a jest.”^[3]  Guize seems to be a conflation of the Cornish “Ges” meaning mockery / jest, the Cornish “Gis” meaning fashion / guise and the English “Guise”. It is pronounced “Geeze”, it is spelt in various ways but for the purposes of this article I have spelt with a “z” to remind of the pronunciation.

Cam Kernewek called their beast “Pen Gwyn”, (white head) partly for the obvious pun but also to leave space for any possible revival of the tradition in Penzance. Pen Gwyn was featured at Lowender Peran in October 1979 and became a regular part of the festival. Brenda Wootton, the popular Cornish singer, made Pen Gwyn her own and created a rabble-rousing story around the beast.[4] A story accompanied by a procession of drums, candles, and firebrands against a background of total darkness and all the things health and safety will now only allow us to look back on nostalgically.

Pen Gwyn hosted several exchanges with the Welsh horse skull hobby horse, Mari Lwyd at Lowender Peran as well as “Girt Oss” who arrived with the Tamar Troyl band from Calstock and “Bolingey Oss” courtesy of dancers who took their name after the village.

In June 1991 Cam Kernewek were privileged with an invitation to bring Pen Gwyn to the newly formed Golowan festival in Penzance and St John’s Hall witnessed their first perambulation of a horse skull hobby horse since the nineteenth century. Pen Glas was reinstated the following year at Golowan and has gone from strength to strength ever since with a number of different “osses” now coming out at Montol, the midwinter festival, and elsewhere much as described by Trev Lawrence.

Robert Morton Nance was a pioneer of the Celtic Revival in Cornwall. His parents came from Padstow but moved to South Wales to run their coal shipping company. It was here that Nance encountered Mari Lwyd as a child, and it was inevitable that he would make an immediate connection on discovering Pen Glas when he moved back to West Cornwall in the early 20^th century. In his enthusiasm he overlooked a wider story around Pen Glaze and Guize Dance beasts in Cornwall.

There is some question as to whether Pen Glas was a character in the Guise Dance or the creature itself. According to William Sandys in 1833 “another essential character is old Penglaze, who has a blackened face, and a staff in his hand, and a person is girded round with a horse’s hide, or what is supposed to be such, to serve as his horse”[5] Richard Edmonds’ History of Penzance published in 1862 provides a footnote “Pen Glas, a pole-mounted ‘oss used for Christmas mumming c. 1812”.[6]  Neither give us any provenance or eyewitness accounts and the chances are that the name of the character who led the oss and the creature itself became confused at different times and with different players.

What is interesting is an earlier talk by Richard Edmonds recorded in the Royal Cornwall Gazette in 1846.

“ A well-known character amongst them, about thirty years ago was the hobby-horse, represented by a man carrying a piece of wood carved into the form of a  horse’s head and neck, with some contrivance for opening and shutting the mouth with a loud snapping noise, the performer being so covered with a horse-cloth or hide of a horse as to resemble the animal, whose curvettings, biting and other motions he imitated. Some of these ‘guise-dancers’ occasionally masked themselves in the heads, horns and skins of bullocks, a practice not entirely yet discontinued.”[7]

One of the earliest accounts we have of Padstow’s Obby Oss, is also courtesy of Polwhele in 1803: “On May the first is a festival kept here, which is called the hobby-horse, from a man being dressed up in a stallion horse’s skin, led by crowds of men and women through the streets, and at every dirty pool dipping the head in the pool, and throwing out the water upon them”.[8] In 1902 the wooden snapper was scraped for painting and a date a date of 1802 was found “deeply carved in the oak which itself was black with age”.[9]  Whilst the evidence for wooden heads versus horse skulls is not conclusive either way it does place the Padstow Obby Oss and Pen Glas firmly in the same Guize Dance stable. Especially so when we find that, like Pen Glaze, faces at were blackened at one stage in Padstow’s story, to bring luck, or husbands in the case of girls caught under the Osses skirts. [10]

Throughout the 19^th century antiquarians and the local newspapers in particular followed Polwhele in describing these traditions as “Guise Dances”.[11] Morton Nance coined the term “Guise Dance Drolls” to describe the folk plays he collected and scripted. In the context of the Guize Dance we can add the dragons of the Hal An Tow[12] to our Cornish Bestiary together with more recent innovations including the Ivy Man and grotesque heads that appeared with the St Ives Guizers in the 80s;[13] the Beast of Bodmin which we will explore in detail later; and the proliferation of wonderful creatures we see at Montol.[14]

So, what do these Beasts and their rituals signify, what do they mean? “In Stations of the Sun” Ronald Hutton provides a cautionary about Padstow’s Obby Oss which might by applied across the board. In the 1920s folklorists descended upon Padstow with great enthusiasm. Mary Macleod Banks of the Folklore Society decided that the dance of the Obby Oss with the Teaser as man dressed as woman was “a relic of a pagan marriage between sun and sky” only to find her theory collapse a couple of years when she found him dressed as a harlequin. When she told the Mayers that they had got this all wrong (ouch!) the response was that there was no particular tradition to the dress.[15]

Other theories such as representing fertility sacrifices were dismissed by an increasingly academic folklore community who sought evidence and provenance.[17] Hutton summed this up in an interview for Sabrina Magliocco’s documentary “Oss Tales” when he says that origin theories arrived with the folklorists and were not a matter of great concern for the participants.[18]Maggliocco goes on the show that for the “Padstow Mayers” meanings and significance were much more about community, people and family memories than religious ritual. This was revisited recently during research by Barbara Santi with a video documenting Padstow May Day over several years and showing in detail the familial nature of the tradition.

Perhaps the largest barrier to connecting these customs to rituals from antiquity is the absence of written descriptions reaching back beyond the 1800s. We can go to 1750 with a description of Christmas Guize Dancing on the Scillies where much is made of cross dressing but no mention of beasts.[19] The paucity of written accounts might reflect the interests, and scope of the media of the time. It might simply be that the beasts were largely an artefact of the 19^th century, but a closer look brings us into the dark shadow of 1549.

Glasney and Crantock colleges were bastions of the Cornish Mystery Plays and a focal point for Cornish language, culture, and religion. In 1548 they were destroyed as part of the “Reformation” and Tudor consolidation of the English state. In “West Britons” Mark Stoyle shows how this caused widespread dissent in Cornwall and when, 1549, an incident at Sampford Courtenay indicated sympathies across the border a full-scale rebellion erupted. [20] The rebellion was brought to brutal end in August by Tudor forces. The insurgents were summarily executed together with large numbers of people as retribution continued across Cornwall. The loss of life and impact upon families in Cornwall would have been proportionally similar to that of the First World War. “Reformation” is probably not the way the bereaved families would have described these events and modern Cornish studies have made a case for the use of the term “genocide”.[21]

The negative impact of War fatalities upon traditional customs is noted by historians like A.L Rowse.[22] I was provided with an insight into the impact of the Second World War on folk traditions during an interview with William Barber looking at the St Ives Guize Dancing. The custom had been successfully revived by the Old Cornwall Societies in the late 1920s but faltered after the Second World War. William explained that there were so many faces now missing from the Guize Dancers that people’s hearts were simply not in it.[23]  It is not difficult to look back to the 16^th Century and understand how Cornish people would have lost heart in their culture and traditions post 1549.

Folk traditions can be very resilient, and we do see some indirect evidence of their existence in the form of payment records in parish, church and country house accounts listing expenses such as “paid to the piper in the play- 4d”.[24] Based on these accounts, Joan Bakere makes a case for a continuity between the medieval Cornish drama and the travelling players and dancers of 17^th century.[25] These accounts are powerful as unwitting testimony to folk drama but none provide descriptions of the play or dances and, sadly, we see nothing of any beasts.

A closer look at Medieval Cornish drama provides resonance with 19^th Century Guize Dance.  There are four plays known to date in surviving manuscript collections: The Ordinalia, Gwreans an Bys (Creation of the world), Bewnans Meriasek (the life of St Meriasek) and the recently discovered Bewnans Ke (Life of St Kea).

The Ordinalia dates to the 14^th Century and is the most complete of the plays.  It takes the form of a cycle of three plays and draws upon the Bible and Apocrypha to follow the story of Adam through to the death and resurrection of Christ. We see Biblical Beasts like the Serpent and the dragon who provides the Jaws of Hell.

We meet Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Tulfryc, all of whom are provided with coarse language to emphasise their evil nature. Tulfryc’s language seems to have been so bad that the song he sung to accompany Pilate through the Jaws of Hell has been omitted from the text![26]

Gwreans an Bys is a later version of the first cycle of the Ordinalia with some differences. In one scene the disgraced Cain appears and is so misshapen as to be mistaken for a beast that is “blewake coynt ha hager” (Hairy strange and ugly) and like a “Bucca Nos” (Goblin of the night). The last lines of a transcription from 1611 are almost a portend of the future: “Mynstrells Grewgh theny peba, May Hallan warbarthe downssya, Del ew an vaner ha’n geys”. This is conventionally translated as “Minstrels pipe for us, That we may together dance, As is the manner and the custom” but “geys” is clearly the “ges” of Polwhele’s Guize Dancers.

It is the two saints’ plays and the stories of their travels between Wales, Cornwall and Britanny that connect us with the Celtic world. Bewnans Meriasek is a dramatic representation of the life of the Breton Saint following the legend as related in the Lectiones Propre de Vannes.[27]  Bewnans Ke is fragmentary and with Cornwall’s rich lore of Celtic Saints one can only imagine how many more plays and narratives we would have today were it not for the events of 1548-9.[28]

In relation to our “beasts” there are three pieces of action that interest us in Bewnans Meriasek. There is a reference to a hobby horse in a comical scene where the evil emperor Teudar berates his torturers for failing to capture Meriasek. “Me a pe dh’en hebyhors ha’ cowetha have that ye four lorels, hag arta perthugh coff guel penrellen dhe comondya” – I will pay to the hobby horse and their comrades to have you four scoundrels better remember what I command.[29]

Meriasek goes on to confront a giant wolf, which is tamed and duly sent off into the wilderness.[30] In a digression from the main story, the legend of Silvester and the Dragon makes an appearance. Silvester subdues a dragon that has been terrorising the countryside, banishes it and resurrects those killed by the beast.[31] Cornish historian and folklorists draws Tom Miners points out that scenes and characters in Bewnans Meriasek are echoed in West Cornwall folk plays.[32]

Bewnans Ke follows the Arthurian story of St Kea. There is a comic scene where the Goaler tells his boy to get a move on and calls him “Pen Tarow” – bull head.[33] It is interpreted as a proper name rather than bull’s skull on the basis that skull is more usually expressed as “grogan”.  In the light of Sandy’s and Edmonds’ descriptions of Pen Glas, the use of bullock hides and references to what appear to be familiar folk traditions in the other Mystery Plays there is an alternative interpretation. Was Pen Tarow a character, a fool, or a hobby horse in a story or folk play familiar to the audience?

One of the candidates for a lost Mystery Play would be the legend of St Petroc, one of Cornwall’s patron saints. His travels across Wales, Cornwall, Brittany and as far as Rome parallel those of St Meriasek. In one branch of the story, he joins company with Saints Wethnoc and Samson to fight and defeat King Teudor’s giant serpent and in another he subdues a dragon that has been rampaging the countryside around Bodmin. In this instance St Petroc discovers a splinter in the dragon’s eye which he removes with the result that the beast is pacified and grateful to the saint. The legend of St Petroc continues to be remembered in the name of “The Dragon Centre” a sports facility built on the site of what was known as the “Dragon Pit” at Halgavor to the south of Bodmin.

We have to respect the information watershed of the 1800s. It is difficult to prove or disprove dramatic continuity between the Mystery Plays and the Guize Dance traditions of the 19^th century, but the resonance cannot be avoided. The Mystery Plays take us back to a world where ideas and “dramatic action” were copied between the popular religions and mythology of the time. There is every possibility that fertility rituals and marriages between sun and sky mutated and evolved through a thousand years of folk drama to become the customs we see today. What is equally fascinating is the meaning and significance that these traditions have for today’s bearers. The Beast of Bodmin provides an interesting case history here.

Following meticulous research by local historian, Pat Munn, the Bodmin Riding was revived in 1974. She traced the festival and various “sports” associated with it from parish accounts in 1469 through early histories, antiquarian studies, and 19^th century press reports to the recollections of townspeople in the early 20^th century.[34]

One of these sports was that of the “Halgavor Court” variously presided over by a mock mayor or judge and held at the Dragons Pit.  The forfeits meted out to the hapless victims included being sent out on the mire to find the dragon just as being sent to the “Heby Hors” was a penance meted out in the Mystery Plays. The inevitable outcome was of course to be thrown in said mire.

The mock court was adapted for the 1974 revival of the riding to re-enact acolourful part of Bodmin’s history. It became the civic banquet arranged for

the Kings provost, Sir Anthony Kingston, who arrived in the town following his successful defeat of the Cornish rebels in 1549. At the end of the banquet Kingston seized the mayor, Nicholas Boyer, and had him publicly executed for his support of the insurgents. The mayors banquet together with theatrical re-enactment of the hanging became a centre piece for the Riding celebrations. The hanging was controversial and dropped as the festival evolved over the next 30 years to become Bodmin Riding and Heritage Day.

In 2005 theatre director Will Coleman was commissioned to create a new focal point for the Riding.

He collaborated with Clive Little, local historian, and re-enactor to create Gwari Bosvena – The Bodmin Play. This was intended to be a mummers play fusion of the mock court dating from the 16^th century, the story of Cornwall and something that people identified with Bodmin today, the “Beast”. Reported sightings of a large cat on surrounding moorland had captured the public imagination and generated a modern myth to become the “Beast of Bodmin” and the perfect persona for a modern Halgavor Dragon in the play.

Clive Little takes up the story of the evolution of the Beast.

[35]He explains that almost by accident the Beast became the personification of Cornwall. It grew out of trying to capture various points of Cornish history in combination with a story that enabled a traditional “death and resurrection”. The mock court consists of the Ragadazio (forefathers) the town worthies who call for the notorious Justice Jan Tregeagle to try the Beast. The young people of Bodmin are then summoned to act as the Helliers (hunters), capture the Beast and bring it before Justice Jan. They spend the day chasing capturing and parading the beast and finally bringing it before Justice Jan at 15:49 pm – in commemoration of the Cornish Martyrs of 1549.

Justice Jan makes a wager on the casket of St Petroc’s bones that the Beast will be found guilty thus invoking the Black Hunter to appear as council for the defence. The Black hunter is Tregeagle’s nemesis in local legend. Various characters from history are called to witness the Beast’s (i.e., Cornwall’s) story.  Cornwall is shown to have been allegorically hung, drawn, and quartered throughout history only for its spirit to survive and come back. This is expressed as a death and resurrection ritual for the beast.

The Beast is “Blewack Coynt ha Hager”, a hairy, strange, and ugly creature of sheep hide stretched over a wicker frame. The Ragadazio are Guize Dancers wearing grotesque leather masks in salute to the medieval leather industry on Bodmin.  The whole is framed as a mummers play with improvised local, topical, and sometimes questionable references under cover of the masks. Justice Jan also acts as prompt reading from the script in such a way as to limit the need for rehearsal and enable co-option of new players at short notice.

Clive Little describes how the Beast almost immediately took on additional meanings and significance of its own: “just as the young people / Helliers were seeking and finding the beast they were seeking and finding Cornish identity within themselves and themselves within it”. On a different level younger children quickly identified with the Beast and saw the Ragadasio as the baddies and a chant of “Free the Beast” soon developed.

Over two decades the Gwari Bosvena has continued to evolve with increasing emphasis on the Beast. Although the Riding Day itself is dormant at the time of writing the date, the first Saturday in July, is marked by a tour of the Beast and trial through the town. The Beast also takes excursions further afield and on Kalan Gwav (Winters Eve / Halloween) 2022 joined Pen Glas in an audience with Satan and Beelzebub courtesy of the recently staged Ordinalia. [36]

The Cornish Bestiary thus ranges from Cain’s “Bucca Nos” in the medieval mysteries through horse skull hobby horses and dragons to the creatures paraded by our modern Guize Dancers. Our beasts have hints of origin in the legends of 6th century saints together with still older motifs behind them. They were used to carry the message of religion in the Mystery Plays, exercised the imagination of the early folklorists, act as a vehicle for the celebration of community and identity today and touch the mysticism inside all of us.

The Beasts of Cornwall celebrate Kalan Gwav (Halloween) at Lowender 2022:

Merv Davey

Notes

[1] Robert Morton Nance, Folklore recorded in the Cornish Language, Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, St Ives 1925 p 1 : “The Cornish name, “Pen Glaze,” a representative in West Cornwall of the Welsh Mari Lwyd, a horse-skull hobby-horse, with its meaning” grey head “–pen glas, so like that of the Welsh name, shows that this feature of Christmas guise-dancing was Celtic also.”

[2] Dave Crewes, Remembering Pen Gwyn, Cornish National Music Archive, https://cornishnationalmusicarchive.co.uk/content/cam-kernewek-cornish-dance-display-group-and-ceili-band/

[3] Richard Polwhele, The History of Cornwall, Civil, Military, Religious, Architectural, Agricultural, Commercial, Biographical, and Miscellaneous. (London: Michel & Co., 1816) Vol 3 p58

[4] Lowender Peran Archive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmxLO0BIwl4

[5] William Sandys Christmas Carols, Ancient And Modern, (London: Richard Beckley, 1833).cxiii

[6] Richard Edmonds. The Land’s End District: Its Antiquities, Natural History, Natural Phenomena and Scenery. (London: J.R. Smith, 1862), p69

[7] Richard Edmonds, report on talk, Royal Cornwall Gazette 18^th Sept 1846.

[8] Polwhele, History of Cornwall, 1803, Vol. 1, Bk. 2, Chap. 2, P• 54·

[9] The Padstow Hobby Horse etc, Folklore, vol.16,No1, 1905, p.59

[10] Barbara C Spooner, The Padstow Obby Oss, Folklore, Vol. 69, No. 1. (Mar., 1958), p. 35

[11] See Tom and Tehmina Goskar, Guise Dancing Sources: Newspaper Archive, Cornish Trad website: https://www.cornishtrad.com/guisedancing/guise-dancing-newspapers/ , for examples of articles carrying stories of Cornish Guize Dancing between 1803 and 1950.

[12] The Hal An Tow takes place 7 times at various points in Helston on Flora Day, the action includes three saints defeating dragons see Andy Norfolk, Folklore of the Hal An Tow, Ed. Alex Langstone, Lien Gwerin – Journal of Cornsih Folklore no.7, Spirit of Albion Books, 2023, pp 4 -24.

[13] Dave Lobb, a Cornish exile living in London whose father had been a Guize dancer, lead a revival of the St Ives Guize Dance between 1978 and 1993 was creative with disguising and costume.

[14] Paul Betowski and Tom Goskar, Montol Festival, cornishculture.co.uk, youtube: https://youtu.be/HNwVX2yGaqU?si=LB_54ltTF-2baote

[15] Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun, (Oxford, Oxfoed University Press, 1996), p.81.

[16] Dates and people identified by Doc Rowe in special edition of Padstow Echo May 1982.

[17] Ronald Hutton, ibid referring to Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth, (Berkely, 19660 ch. 2.

[18] Sabrina Magliocco and John Bishop, Oss Tales. Media-Generation, 2007, [DVD / CD-Rom format].

[19] Robert Heath, A natural and historical account of the Islands of Scilly ….and a general account of Cornwall, (London, Manby and Cox, 1750) p.125.

[20] Mark Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State, (Exeter, UK, University of Exeter Press, 2002).

[21] Jon Mills, Genocidde and Ethnocide: The Suppression of the Cornish Language, John Partridge, Editor, Interfaces in Language, (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) pp189 – 206.

[22] A.L Rowse A Cornish Childhood, (London, Jonathon Cape.1942), p. 7.

[23] William Barber, interview with author, 30/10/09. Copy held by St Ives Museum.

[24] Camborne Churchwardens accounts 1550, also 1575 St Ives Borough accounts

Cornwall Record Office / Kresen Kernow, Redruth

[25] Joan Bakere, J. The CornishOrdinalia: A Critical Study,(Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1980), pp 19 -22 citing Camborne Churchwarden’s Accounts.  Pendarvis  Collection, D.D. PD322/1–3. Cornwall Records Office / Kresen Kernow.

[26] Henry Jenner, Cornish Drama 2, The Celtic Review, Vol. 4, No. 13 (Jul. 1907), p.54.

[27] Robert T. Meyer. The Middle-Cornish Play “Beunans Meriasek”, Comparative Drama, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 1969), pp. 54-64.

[28] Henry Jenner, The Cornish Drama 1, The Celtic Review, Vol. 3, No. 12 (Apr., 1907), p. 364

[29] Whitley Stokes, Beunans Meriasek: The Life Of Saint Meriasek, (London, Trubner and Co,1872) line 1061. See online version: https://archive.org/details/beunansmeriasek01hadtgoog/page/n14/mode/2up?view=theaterWhitley Stokes,

[30] Whitley Stokes, ibid lines 1103- 1127

[31] Whitley Stokes, ibid lines 4120 – 4144 .

[32] Tom Miners, The Mummers’ Play in West Cornwall, Old Cornwall Journal 1928, vol1, no.8, pp4 -16

[33]Michael Polkinghorn, Bewnans Ke: Revised Version, unpublished discussion paper, 2004,  verses 45 -49.

[34] Pat Munn, Bodmin Riding and other Celtic Customs, (Bodmin, Bodmin Books Ltd, 1975)

[35] Conversation with Author: Cornish National Music Archive – October 2023 – https://youtu.be/OD9YXbpkcEc?si=Qm965LE8WePqA6e2

[36] Kalan Gwav, Lowender Peran Celtic Festival, Redruth 2022. Ornish National Music Archive https://youtu.be/sFUEBDyc8TM