VIII. A general stupidity may be observed to be in the whole county. As to other matters monumental, there is little mention made of our antient stately fabrics amongst us, now ruinated; as to the founders of them, castles, battles fought, and other things: and as to churches (though we have abundance of fair ones for so small a county, where there is no city nor any great town in it) excellent foundations, but who the builders were we have no intelligence, only a great many false tutelaries of them we hear of. Little of the monasteries hath been said by those that have written copiously of others elsewhere. Scarcely anything of the ancient bishops here, or of the bishop’s see; only we know it to be said antiently, that it was removed from Bodmyn to St. German’s,[36] and that it was about anno 1000, Danorum turbine, from a country more open, to a place more woodland. The cathedral indeed might have been better memorized by Godwin in his Catalogue of Bishops, and enumeration of all the bishopricks; yet little is said of it or the four several chapels in several distinct places of the parish thereto belonging; and as for the monastery nothing at all. It is strange too that Mr. Camden should say, “Germani viculum nihil aliud est hodie, quam piscatorum casulæ:” whereas, there are no such things belonging to such a trade there seen, but instead thereof a cathedral, maintained at the great cost of the inhabitants, (though a great part, by an accident, about one hundred years since fell down,) a good monastical house yet undemolished, and hospitably inhabited, to the relief of poor people. The bishop’s seat and house are yet eminently extant in a Cornish name. The borough of St. German’s enjoys still the privilege of sending burgesses to Parliament by prescription. Pity it is that St. German, who came hither to suppress the Pelagian heresy, should have so bad a going off; for an old fable remains yet in report, that St. German being ill used fled away, leaving a sad curse behind him, to the cliffs at Rame near the head; where bewailing his misfortunes, the compassionating rocks in the cliffs shed tears with him, at a place ever since called St. German’s Well. True it is, such a spring there is, but the occasion of it cannot be more truly affirmed than the other part of the story that follows, viz. That he should be carried thence into remote countries by angels in a fiery chariot, the tract of whose wheels were said to be seen in those cliffs, but they are invisible. Thus much for the site of the place. As to the person of St. German, who perhaps never saw the place, I need not turn over old fabulous legends, nor a better sort who have written his life heretofore, but I may have liberty to relate what I have from the better hands of learned persons.[37] That besides his disputation and confutation of Pelagius at Verulam, and thereby freeing the church and nation from those heresies by a public