Long after 1549, in King James’ time, when the Great Bible, despised by the Cornish, despised and rejected as an alien thing, had as a translation lost its hold upon the scholars of England, and its successor in public esteem, the Geneva Bible, was in turn to yield place to what we now call the Authorised Version, the celebrated John Norden, with Royal recommendations in his pocket, was making his journeys and constructing his _Speculum_, his topographical description of this kingdom. He never completed it; indeed, it was not printed till long after his time. But it is a vivid and for the most part trustworthy survey of the country generally, and the county of Cornwall is minutely described. Nowhere can a better view be had of the condition of the Western part of the Diocese in the distribution of language. Here are his words; the spelling is Norden’s: “Of late the Cornishmen have muche conformed themselves to the use of the English tongue, and their English is equal to the beste, especially in the Eastern partes; even from Truro eastwarde it is in menner wholy Englische. In the West parte of the Countrye, as in the hundreds of Penwith and Kirrier, the Cornish tongue is most in use amongste the inhabitantes, and yet (which is to be marveyled) though the husband and wife, parentes and children, master and servauntes do mutually communicate in their native language, yet there is none of them in manner but is able to convers with a straunger in the English tongue unless it be some obscure people that seldom confer with the better sorte. But it seemeth that in a few yeares the Cornish language will be by litle and litle abandoned.” That was how the case stood in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is no wonder that two generations earlier the leaders of the Cornish rising demanded that they should be allowed to have the services of the Church as they had been accustomed to have them, for that other new Book was to them a foreign thing. “We will not receive,” they said, “the new service, because it is but like a Christmas game.... And we, the Cornish, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse the new English.” Whitaker, himself a Cornish clergyman, though not a Cornishman, who published his _History of the Cathedral of Cornwall_ in 1804, and represents the most intelligent criticism of his time, says, in his vigorous way, as if the old blood still ran in his veins: “The English was not desired by the Cornish, but forced upon the Cornish by the tyranny of England, at a time when the English language was as yet unknown in Cornwall.” “This act of tyranny,” he continues, “was at once gross barbarity to the Cornish people, and a death blow to the Cornish language.” “To use the universal tongue,” says Freeman, “whether understood or not, was no grievance; to have English forced on them was.”