Cornish Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography; Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
But both she and Sir John Percival had been already benefactors in
London. Sir John had founded a chantry in S. Mary Woolnoth, and in
1539 is found an entry in the churchwardens' accounts of that parish
recording that Dame Thomasine Percival had left money for the
maintenance of the "beme light" in the church, i.e. the lamp before
the rood. She had also left money to supply candles to burn about the
sepulchre in the church on Easter Day, and he had bequeathed moneys
for the repair of the ornaments of the church, for bell-ringing, for
singers "for keeping the anthem," at his and her obits, and last but
not least, "for a potation to the neighbours at the said obit."
Carew says: "And to show that virtue as well bare a part in the desert,
as fortune in the means of her preferment, she employed the whole
residue of her life and last widowhood to works no less bountiful than
charitable, namely, repairing of highways, building of bridges, endowing
of maidens, relieving of prisoners, feeding and apparelling the poor,
etc. Among the rest, at this S. Mary Wike she founded a chantry and
free-school, together with fair lodgings for the schoolmasters,
scholars, and officers, and added £20 of yearly revenue for supporting
the incident charges: wherein, as the bent of her desire was holy, so
God blessed the same with all wished success; for divers of the best
gentlemen's sons of Devon and Cornwall were there virtuously trained up,
in both kinds of divine and human learning, under one Cholwel, an honest
and religious teacher, which caused the neighbours so much the rather
and the more to rue, that a petty smack only of Popery opened the gap to
the oppression of the whole, by the statute made in Edward VI's reign,
touching the suppression of chantries."
This disaster befell it in 1550, when all colleges, chantries, free
chapels, fraternities, and guilds throughout the kingdom, with their
lands and endowments, were alienated to the King--not because there
was a "petty smack of Popery" in them, but because of the rapacity of
the courtiers who desired to gather the lands and benefactions into
their own soiled hands.
Mr. W. H. Tregellas says: "There are still to be seen in the remote
and quiet little village of Week S. Mary, some five or six miles south
of Bude, in the northern corner of Cornwall, the substantial remains
of the good Thomasine's college and chantry, which she founded for the
instruction of the youth of her native place.
"The buildings lie about a hundred yards east of the church (from the
summit of whose grotesquely ornamented tower six-and-twenty parish
churches may be discerned), and built into the modern wall of a
cottage which stands inside the battlemented enclosure is a large
carved granite stone (evidently one of two which once formed the
tympanum of a doorway), on which the letter T stands out in bold
relief. Probably it is the initial of the Christian name of our
Thomasine; at any rate, it is pleasant to think it may be such."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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