February 1087 A.D. St. Michael’s Mount Priory, Cornwall—Founded by Benedictine Monks,
1087-1090; Church Consecrated 1135;
Dependent on Mont-St-Michel, Normandy;
Granted by Edward the Confessor to Mont-St.Michel Before 1050; Seized During Wars with French, 1362;
Dissolved 1414; Granted by King Henry IV to King’s College, Cambridge; Granted by King Edward VI to Syon Abbey; Used Alternatively as Fortress, Monastery and
Private Residence; 290 Miles from London
St Michael's Mount
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
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St Michael's Mount
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Cornish: Karrek
Loos yn Koos
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St Michael's Mount
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Area
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0.09 sq mi (0.23 km2)
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– London
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290 miles (467 km)
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St Michael's Mount
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MARAZION
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01736
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Website
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List of places
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St
Michael's Mount (Cornish: Karrek Loos yn Koos,[1] (Carrek Los yn Cos), meaning "hoar rock in
woodland",[2] also known colloquially by locals as simply the Mount is a small tidal island in Mount's Bay, Cornwall, United Kingdom. The island is a civil parish and is linked to the town of Marazion by a man-made causeway of granite setts, passable between mid-tide and low water. It is
managed by the National Trust, and the castle and chapel have been the home of
the St Aubyn family since approximately 1650. The earliest
buildings, on the summit, date to the 12th century, the harbour is 15th century
and the village and summit buildings were rebuilt from 1860 to 1900, to give
the island its current form.[3]
Its Cornish language name — literally, "the grey rock in a
wood" — may represent a folk memory of a time before Mount's Bay was
flooded, indicating a description of the Mount set in woodland. Remains of
trees have been seen at low tides following storms on the beach at Perranuthnoe, but radiocarbon
dating established the submerging of the hazel wood at about 1700 BC.[4]
Historically, St Michael's
Mount was a Cornish counterpart of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France (which shares the same tidal island characteristics
and the same conical shape), when it was given to the Benedictines, religious order of Mont Saint-Michel, by Edward the
Confessor in the 11th century.[5]
St Michael's Mount is one of
forty-three (unbridged) tidal islands which can be walked to from mainland Britain and part of the island is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1995 for its geology.[6][7]
Contents
Pre-history
There is evidence of people
living in the area during the Neolithic (from circa 4000 to 2500 BCE years) with the discovery of a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead, which was found in a shallow pit on the lower eastern slope and now within
the modern gardens. Other pieces of flint have been found, and at least two
could be Mesolithic (circa 8000 to 3500 BCE).[3] During the Mesolithic, Britain was still attached
to mainland Europe via Doggerland, and archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological
backwater" in European terms, still living as ahunter-gatherer society whilst most of southern Europe had already
taken up agriculture and sedentary living.[8] At this time the Mount would likely to have been an
area of dry ground surrounded by a marshy forest. Any Neolithic or Mesolithic
camps are likely to have been destroyed by the later extensive building
operations, but it is reasonable to expect the Mount to have supported either a
seasonal or short-term camp for Mesolithic people.[3]
None of the flints, so far
recovered, can be positively dated to the Bronze Age (circa 2500 to 800 BCE) although any summit cairns
would have most likely been destroyed when building the castle. A hoard of copper weapons, once thought to have been found on the
Mount, are now thought to have been found on nearby Marazion Marsh. Defensive stony banks on the north-eastern slopes
are likely to date to the early 1st millennium BC, and are considered to be a cliff castle.[3] The Mount may be the Mictis of Timaeus, mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis
Historia (IV:XVI.104), and the Ictis of Diodorus
Siculus.[citation needed] Both men had access to the now lost texts of the ancient Greek geographer Pytheas who, is said to have, visited the island in the fourth century BC. If this
is true, it is one of the earliest identified locations in the whole of western
Europe and particularly on the island of Britain, although the account of John of Worcester in the 11th century would point to this association
being very unlikely.
History
St Michael's Mount in 1900
It may have been the site of a
monastery in the 8th – early 11th centuries and Edward the
Confessor gave it to the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel.[9] It was a priory of that abbey until the dissolution of the alien houses by Henry V, when it was given to the abbess and Convent of
Syon at Isleworth, Middlesex. It was a resort of pilgrims, whose devotions were encouraged by an indulgence granted by Pope Gregory in the 11th century.
The monastic buildings were
built during the 12th century and in 1275 an earthquake destroyed the original
priory church, which was rebuilt in the late 14th century. It is still in use
today. The priory was seized by the Crown, when Henry V went to war in France and it became part of the endowment for the Brigittine Abbey of Syon at Twickenham in 1424. Thus ended the connection with Mont St Michel.[9][10]
Henry Pomeroy captured the
Mount, on behalf of Prince John, in the reign of Richard I. John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, seized and held it during a siege of twenty-three weeks against 6,000 of Edward IV's troops in 1473. Perkin Warbeck occupied the Mount in 1497. Humphrey Arundell, governor of St Michael's Mount, led the rebellion
of 1549. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it was given to Robert Cecil, Earl of
Salisbury, by whose son it was sold to Sir Francis Bassett. During the Civil War, Sir Arthur Bassett, brother of Sir Francis, held
the Mount against the parliament until July 1646.
In 1755 the Lisbon earthquake caused a tsunami to strike the Cornish coast over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away. The sea
rose six feet in ten minutes at St Michael's Mount, ebbed at the same rate, and
continued to rise and fall for five hours. The 19th-century French writer Arnold Boscowitz claimed that "great loss of life and property occurred upon the coasts
of Cornwall."[11]
In the late 19th century the
skeleton of an anchorite was discovered when a chamber was found beneath the castle's chapel.[citation needed] When the anchorite died of illness or natural causes, the chamber had been
sealed off to become his tomb.[citation needed] The Mount was sold in 1659 to Colonel John
St Aubyn. His descendant, Lord St
Levan, continues to be the "tenant" of the Mount but has ceased to be
resident there, his nephew, James St Aubyn, taking up residency and management
of the Mount in 2004.
Little is known about the
village before the beginning of 18th century, save that there were a few
fishermen's cottages and monastic cottages. After improvements to the harbour
in 1727, St Michael's Mount became a flourishing seaport, and by 1811 there
were fifty-three houses and four streets. The pier was extended in 1821[12] and the population peaked in the same year, when
the island had 221 people. There were three schools, a Wesleyan chapel, and three public houses, mostly used by visiting
sailors. The village went into decline following major improvements to nearby Penzance harbour and the extension of the railway to Penzance in 1852, and many of
the houses and buildings were demolished.
The Mount was fortified during
the Second World
War during the invasion crisis of 1940–41. Three pillboxes can be seen to this day.[13]
Sixty-five years after the
Second World War, it was suggested based on interviews with contemporaries that
the former Nazi foreign minister and one time ambassador to Britain, Joachim von
Ribbentrop, had wanted to live on the
Mount after the planned German conquest. Archived documents revealed that
during his time in Britain in the 1930s, in which he had initially proposed an
alliance with Nazi Germany, Ribbentrop frequently visited Cornwall.[14]
In 1954, the 3rd Baron St Levan
gave most of St Michael's Mount to the National Trust, together with a large endowment fund.[citation needed] The St Aubyn
family retained a 999-year lease to inhabit the castle and a licence to manage the
public viewing of its historic rooms. This is managed in conjunction with the
National Trust.
Priors & owners of St Michael's Mount[edit]
1275 Richard Percr, collated
by Bishop Bronescombe
1283 Waifrid de Gemon, ruled
33 years.
1316 Peter de Cara Villa, or
Carville ; Prior at Bishop Orandisson's visitation.
1342 Nicholas Isabel
1349 John Hardy, indicted at
Launceston
1362 John de Volant.
13xx Richard Harepath (date
dubious)
1412 William Lambert,
apparently the last prior ; after him there were Chaplains of the Mount
1537 Richard Arscott, Archpriest
of the Mount
1539 Dissolution of Sion
Monastery. Mount leased by the Crown
1611 Grant of Mount to Robert
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury
1640 Fee conveyed from Earl of
Salisbury to Bassets, who sold it to Saint Aubyns
The island today
The chapel is extra-diocesan, and the castle is the official residence of Lord St Levan. Many relics, chiefly armour and antique
furniture, are preserved in the castle. The chapel of St Michael, a fifteenth-century building, has an embattled
tower, in one angle of which is a small turret, which served for the guidance of ships. Chapel Rock, on the beach, marks
the site of a shrined edicated to the Virgin Mary, where pilgrims paused to worship before ascending
the Mount. A few houses are built on the hillside facing Marazion, and a spring
supplies them with water. There is a row of eight houses at the back of the
present village; they were built in 1885 and are known as Elizabeth Terrace. A
spring supplies them with water. Some of the houses are occupied by staff
working in the castle and elsewhere on the island. The island cemetery
(currently no public access) contains the graves of former residents of the
island and several drowned sailors. There are also buildings that were formerly
the steward's house, a changing-room for bathers, the stables, the laundry, a
barge house, a sail loft (now a restaurant), and two former inns. A former bowling green adjoins one of the buildings.
The harbour, widened in 1823
to allow vessels of 500 tons to enter, has a pier dating from the 15th century
which was subsequently enlarged and restored. Queen Victoria landed at the harbour from the royal yacht in 1846,
and a brass inlay of her footstep can be seen at the top of the landing stage.
King Edward VII's footstep is also visible near the bowling-green.
In 1967 the Queen Mother entered the harbour in a pinnace from the royal yacht Britannia.
One of the most noteworthy
points of interest on the island is the underground railway, which is still used to transport goods from the
harbour up to the castle. It was built by miners around 1900, replacing the
pack horses which had previously been used. Due to the steep gradient, it
cannot be used for passengers. The National Trust currently does not permit
public access or viewing of the railway.
Some studies indicate that any
rise in ocean waters as well as existing natural erosion would put some of the
Cornwall coast at risk, including St. Michael's Mount.[17]
Local government
St Michael's Mount
Until recent times both the
Mount and the town of Marazion formed part of the parish of St Hilary.[5] St Michael's Mount forms its own civil parish for local government purposes. Currently, this
takes the form of a parish meeting as opposed to a parish council (that is, a
yearly meeting of electors that does not elect councillors). The current
chairman of the St Michael's Mount parish meeting is James St Aubyn.
Geology
The rock exposures around St
Michael's Mount provide an opportunity to see many features of the geology of
Cornwall in a single locality.[18] The Mount is made of the uppermost part of a granite intrusion into metamorphosed Devonian mudstones or pelites. The granite is itself mineralised with a
well-developed sheeted greisen vein system. Due to its geology the southern coast of the island was
designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1995.[7]
Granites
There are two types of granite
visible on the Mount. Most of the intrusion is a tourmaline muscovite granite which is variablyporphyritic. This is separated from a biotite muscovite granite by pegmatites.
Devonian Pelites
Originally laid down as
mudstones these pelites were regionally metamorphosed and deformed (mainly folded here) by the Variscan orogeny. They were then affected by the intrusion of the granite, which caused further contact metamorphism, locally forming
a hornfels, and mineralisation.
Mineralisation
The best developed
mineralisation is found within the uppermost part of the granite itself in the
form of sheeted greisen veins. These steep W-E trending veins are thought to
have formed by hydraulic
fracturing when the fluid pressure at the top of the granite reached a critical level.
The granite was fractured and the fluids altered the granite by replacing feldspars with quartz and muscovite. The fluids were also rich in boron, tin and tungsten and tourmaline, wolframite and cassiterite are common in the greisen veins. As the area cooled
the veins became open to fluids from the surrounding country rock and these deposited sulphides e.g. chalcopyrite and stannite. Greisen veins are also locally developed within the pelites.
Folklore
In prehistoric times, St
Michael's Mount may have been a port for the tin trade, and Gavin de Beer made a case for it to be identified with the
"tin port" Ictis/Ictin mentioned by Posidonius.[4]
It is claimed that St Michael,
the Archangel appeared to local fishermen on the Mount in the 5th century AD,[19] which according to author Richard Freeman Johnson
is perhaps a nationalistic twist to a myth.[20]
The chronicler John of Worcester[21] relates under the year 1099 that St Michael's Mount
was located five or six miles (10 km) from the sea, enclosed in a thick
wood, but that on the third day of November the sea overflowed the land,
destroying many towns and drowning many people as well as innumerable oxen and
sheep; the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle records under the date 11 November 1099, "The sea-flood sprung up to
such a height, and did so much harm, as no man remembered that it ever did
before".[22] The Cornish legend of Lyonesse, an ancient kingdom said to have extended from Penwith toward the Isles of Scilly, also talks of land being inundated by the sea.
One of the earliest references to the Mount (originally named 'Dynsol' or
'Dinsul'), was in the mid 11th century when it was 'Sanctus Michael beside the
sea'.[23][24]
In popular culture
The Mount has featured in a
number of films, including the 1979 film Dracula where it was prominently featured as the exterior
of Castle
Dracula.[25] It appeared in the 1983 James Bond film Never Say
Never Again, as two
guided missiles armed with nuclear warheads fly over the English countryside
and out to sea, passing directly over St Michael's Mount. In the 2003 filmJohnny English it was used as the exterior of the character Pascal Sauvage's French chateau and in 2012, it was a filming location for the fantasy adventure movie Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box.
"Mt Saint Michel Mix +
Saint Michaels Mount" is the title of an experimental electronic track by
musician Aphex Twin, who grew up in Cornwall and in Michael Moorcock's series of Fantasy novels about Prince Corum, a fictionalised version of St Michael's Mount
appears as Moidel's Mount.
It was one of the locations
used on BBC One
"Balloon" Idents which were used on the channel from 4 October 1997 to 29 March 2002.
Images
Sunset, St.
Michael's Mount.
The Castle.
The
causeway at low tide.
A map from
1946
Sunrise
over Mount's Bay
See also
References
1. Jump up^ Place-names in the Standard Written Form (SWF) : List of
place-names agreed by the MAGA Signage Panel.Cornish Language
Partnership.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Herring, Peter (2000). St Michael's Mount Archaeological Works, 1995-8. Truro:
Cornwall Archaeological Unit. ISBN 1-898166-49-8.
4. ^ Jump up to:a b Gavin de Beer (June 1960). "Iktin". The Geographical Journal 126 (2): 160–167. doi:10.2307/1793956. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
7. ^ Jump up to:a b "St Michael's Mount". Natural
England. 31 March 1995. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
8. Jump up^ Malone, Caroline (2001). Neolithic Britain and Ireland. Stroud:
Tempus. ISBN 0-7524-1442-9.
9. ^ Jump up to:a b Nikolaus Pevsner, Enid Radcliffe (1970). Cornwall. Yale University Press.
pp. 193–195. ISBN 9780140710014.
10. Jump up^ McCabe, Helen (1988). Houses and Gardens of Cornwall. Padstow: Tabb
House. ISBN 0907018580.
11. Jump up^ "Sources of Cornish History – The Lisbon
Earthquake". Cornwall Council. 12 September 2011. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
12. Jump up^ "St Michael's Mount". New Monthly Magazine. May 1821.
p. 259. Retrieved 27 December 2012.
14. Jump up^ Vanessa Thorpe (3 October 2010). "Nazi foreign minister planned to own
Cornwall as his retirement home". The Observer. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
15. Jump up^ A short history of St Michael's
Mount;Appendix B ; by the Rev. W. S. Lach-Szrma; 1878;https://archive.org/stream/ashorthistorype00lachgoog/ashorthistorype00lachgoog_djvu.txt
16. Jump up^ Plea Rolls of the Court of Common
Pleas; National Archives; CP 40/541; Year 1396; Richard II;http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT6/R2/CP40no541a/bCP40no541adorses/IMG_0693.htm; second to last
entry, as plaintiff
17. Jump up^ Steven Morris (13 October 2008). "South-west England's treasures in
danger". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
18. Jump up^ "Marazion to Porthleven (virtual
geological field excursion)". University of Exeter. Retrieved 16 September 2012.
20. Jump up^ Richard Freeman Johnson (2005). Saint Michael the Archangel in medieval English legend. Boydell Press.
p. 68.ISBN 1-84383-128-7.
21. Jump up^ Noted by de Beer 1960:162f as
"Florence of Worcester" in Thomas Forester's edition, London,
1854:206.
23. Jump up^ Padel, O J. "The Cornish background of the Tristan
Stories".Cambridge Medieval Studies 1: 53–81.
24. Jump up^ Padel, O J (1985). Cornish Place-name Elements. English
Place-names Society Volumes 56/57.
Further reading
- Foot, William (2006). Beaches, fields, streets, and hills ... the anti-invasion landscapes of England, 1940. Council for British Archaeology. ISBN 1-902771-53-2.
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