12 - England’s Motley Breeds

Summary

John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, carried the sword of state in the grand procession to St Pauls that proclaimed the restoration of Henry VI before London's citizens. Eighteen months later, in April 1471, Oxford fled to Scotland after the battle of Barnet returned the Yorkist Edward IV to power. Oxford safely carried the Lancastrian cause into French exile. Great things awaited him after Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field, thanks not a little to the mettle of Oxford and his men. At best that would have been a dim prospect on the horizon when Oxford landed on rugged St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. He trusted ‘to the natural strength of the place, fortyf’d himself … and bravely defended it, tho’ with little success’ before his men answered the call of a full pardon for their crimes.

For William Camden, Oxford's story was just one interesting feature of St Michael's Mount. Oxford's soldiers would have seen the remains of the chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael, built by the earl of Cornwall after he had persuaded William the Conquer that a vision of Michael had been seen there. Camden remarked that others had ‘pretended’ the same vision, including Italian monks and the French at Mont St Michel. More believable for Camden were the artefacts found at the base of the mountain:

within the memory of our Fathers, as they were digging for tinn, they met with spearheads, axes, and swords, all wrap’d up in Linnen; of the same sort with those found long ago in Hircinia in Germany, and others lately found in Wales. For it is plain from the Monuments of Antiquity, that the Greeks, Cimbrians, and Britains, made use of brass-weapons, notwithstanding the … medicinal virtue in them, which Macrobius takes notice of from Aristotle.

Nested among the rocks below lived a red-billed crow ‘found by the Inhabitants to be an Incendiary, and very thieving’. Camden related without scepticism that ‘it often sets houses on fire privately, steals pieces of money, and then hides them’.

The settling of Cornwall set the stage for Camden's description of a mountainous county – ‘as if nature had design’d to arm it against the incursions of the sea’. Camden quickly turned to the Cornish people and the literary jousts between Henry III's court poet, Henry d’Avranches, and his Cornish student Michael Blaunpayn or Michael the Cornishman.