uries its bold proportions can be
traced by the most casual glance of the passer-by of the road that runs
past, now that the sheep clamber and feed in its deep fosses, and daisies
sprinkle the grass of its ramparts?

The Saxons seem to have come more or less peaceably to the Britons of
North Devon, who had taken little impress, probably, of the alien Roman
civilization, except Christianity, for many of the churches round still
carry the name of a Celtic saint, showing that the Saxons did not come
devastating villages and destroying the little churches (in which case,
of course, the churches would carry the name of a Saxon saint of their
later Christianity), but settled with the inhabitants, intermarried, and
probably adopted their worship. There is the church of St. Culbone, St.
Brendon--that tiny village of Brendon, near Lynton, which must have been
a village, with a rude little church of its own, before Hengist and Horsa
landed--of St. Dubricius at Porlock, of St. Brannock at Braunton, near
Barnstaple.

St. Brannock ought to have been an Irish saint; the legends of him have a
levity, and a fantastic and humorous twist, that we do not find in the
stories of the Teutonic saints. He was the son of the King of Calabria,
and came to North Devon somewhere about A.D. 300. He searched the hearts
of the inhabitants by various miracles, among them by having a cow
killed, cut in pieces, and boiled in a cauldron, and then, calling the
cow by name, out it walked, alive and whole, and never a penn'orth the
worse. The story of this is carved on one of the bench-ends of the pews
in the present fourteenth-century church of St. Brannock, and there is a
large carved boss of the roof representing a sow and her litter, because
St. Brannock is said to have been commanded in a dream to build a church
on the spot where he should first meet a sow. He pressed the deer into
the service of God, and yoked them, making them draw timber from the
woods to build the church. This is how the rhyme goes--a fairly modern
version of a much older doggerel:

"He had nor horse, nor ox, nor ass, but the deer so little
and limber;
They ran in the forest to please themselves, why shouldn't
they draw his timber?"

There is also another rhyme which seems to show that a bond of affection
sprang up between him and the cow which had had to serve his miracle:

"St. Brannock fed on venison when he sat down to table;
Behind him stood his f