anguage, yet ther is none of them in
manner but is able to convers with a straunger in the Englishe
tounge, unless it be some obscure people, that seldome conferr
with the better sorte: But it seemeth that in few yeares the
Cornishe language will be by litle and litle abandoned."

Carew, who wrote about the same time, goes so far as to say that most of
the inhabitants "can no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the
English, though they sometimes affect to be." This may have been true with
regard to the upper classes, particularly in the west of Cornwall, but it
is nevertheless a fact that, as late as 1640, Mr. William Jackman, the
vicar of Feock,(43) was forced to administer the sacrament in Cornish,
because the aged people did not understand English; nay, the rector of
Landewednak preached his sermons in Cornish as late as 1678. Mr. Scawen,
too, who wrote about that time, speaks of some old folks who spoke Cornish
only, and would not understand a word of English; but he tells us at the
same time that Sir Francis North, the Lord Chief Justice, afterwards Lord
Keeper, when holding the assizes at Lanceston in 1678, expressed his
concern at the loss and decay of the Cornish language. The poor people, in
fact, could speak, or at least understand, Cornish, but he says, "They
were laughed at by the rich, who understood it not, which is their own
fault in not endeavoring after it." About the beginning of the last
century, Mr. Ed. Lhuyd (died 1709), the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum,
was still able to collect from the mouths of the people a grammar of the
Cornish language, which was published in 1707. He says that at this time
Cornish was only retained in five or six villages towards the Land's End;
and in his "Archaeologia Britannica" he adds, that although it was spoken
in most of the western districts from the Land's End to the Lizard, "a
great many of the inhabitants, especially the gentry, do not understand
it, there being no necessity thereof in regard there's no Cornish man but
speaks good English." It is generally supposed that the last person who
spoke Cornish was Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, and to whose memory
Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte has lately erected a monument in the
churchyard at Paul. The inscription is:--

"Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath, who died in 1778, said to
have been the last person who conversed in the ancient Cornish,
the peculiar language o