Her voice was heard; her entreaty was fulfilled. They came at the cost and impulse of Morwenna; they brought and they set up yonder font, with the carved cable coiled around it in stone, in memory of the vessel of the fishermen of the East anchored in the Galilæan Sea. They built there altar and arch, aisle and device in stone. They linked their earliest structure with Morwenna’s name, the tender and the true; and so it is that notwithstanding the lapse of ten whole centuries of English time, at this very day the bourn of many a pilgrim to the West is the Station of Morwenna, or, in simple and Saxon phrase, Morwenstow. So runs the quaint and simple legend of our Tamar-side; and so ascend into the undated era of the ninth or tenth age the early Norman arches, font, porch, and piscina of Morwenstow church.[8] The endowment, in abbreviated Latin, still exists in the registry of the diocese.[9] It records that the monks of St. John at Bridgewater, in whom the total tithes and glebe-lands of this parish were then vested, had agreed, at the request of Walter Brentingham, the Bishop of Exeter, to endow an altar-priest with certain lands, bounded on the one hand by the sea, and on the other by the Well of St. John of the Wilderness, near the church. They surrendered, also, for this endowment the garbæ of two bartons of vills, Tidnacomb[10] and Stanbury, the altarage, and the small tithes of the parish. But the striking point in this ancient document is that, whereas the date of the endowment is A.D. 1296, the church is therein referred to by name as an old and well-known structure. To such a remote era, therefore, we must assign the Norman relics of antiquity which still survive, and which, although enclosed within the walls and outline of an edifice enlarged and extended at two subsequent periods, have to this day undergone no material change. We proceed to enumerate and describe these features of the first foundation of St. Morwenna,[11] and to which I am not disposed to assign a later origin than from A.D. 875 to A.D. 1000. First among these is a fine Norman doorway at the southern entrance of the present church. The arch-head is semicircular, and it is sustained on either side by half-piers built in stone, with capitals adorned with different devices; and the curve is crowned with the zigzag and chevron mouldings. This moulding is surmounted by a range of grotesque faces--the mermaid and the dolphin, the whale, and other fellow-creatures of the deep; for the earliest imagery of the primeval hewers of stone was taken from the sea, in unison with the great sources of the Gospel,--the Sea of Galilee, the fishing men who were to haul the net, and the “catchers of men.” The crown of the arch is adorned with a richly carved, and even eloquent, device: two dragons are crouching in the presence of a lamb, and underneath his conquering feet lies their passive chain.