XIII. The coming-in of strangers of all sorts upon us, artificers, traders, home-born and foreigners, whom our great commodities of tin (more profitable to others than ourselves) and fishing, have invited to us to converse with, and often to stay with us; these all, as they could not easily learn our tongue, for which they could not find any guide or direction, especially in these latter days, nor the same generally spoken or affected amongst ourselves, so they were more apt and ready to let loose their own tongues to be commixed with ours, and such, for the novelty sake thereof, people were more ready to receive than to communicate ours to any improvement to them. But ministers in particular have much decreased the speech; this country being far from academies, strangers from other parts of the kingdom have sought, as they still do, and have had their promotions here, where benefices are observed to be very good, and those have left their progenies, and thereby their names, remaining behind them, whereby the Cornish names have been diminished, as the tongue also: so that, as the reputed saints heretofore where they seated themselves, have robbed the places where their churches now stand for the most part of the Cornish names they had before, so the ministers since those times coming from other places, and other strangers, have filled up in many places the inhabitants and places here with their new names and titles brought amongst us, to the loss of many of the old. Here too we may add what wrong another sort of strangers have done to us, especially in the civil wars, and in particular by destroying of Mincamber, a famous monument, being a rock of infinite weight, which, as a burden, was laid upon other great stones, and yet so equally thereon poised up by nature only, as a little child could instantly move it, but no one man or many remove it. This natural monument all travellers that came that way desired to behold; but in the time of Oliver’s usurpation, when all monumental things became despicable, one Shrubsall, one of Oliver’s heroes, then governor of Pendennes, by labour and much ado caused to be undermined and thrown down, to the great grief of the country, but to his own great glory as he thought, doing it as he said, with a small cane in his hand. I myself have heard him to boast of this act, being a prisoner then under him. XIV. Another cause I shall mention as a great loss of the tongue, though it be a great and wonderful advantage to the people otherwise: the orders of the church and state, commanding all the people young to learn the Lord’s Prayer, Belief, &c. in the vulgar tongue, supposing that to be intended the English, if a mother, surely a stepmother to us. Younglings take in that most, and retain longest, wherewith they are seasoned and bred up in their education.