The statement is based upon the assumption that the decrees of Pope Leo III were as inoperative in Cornwall as they were in Wales and Ireland. It should be needless to warn the reader against confounding Augustine of Canterbury with the bishop of Hippo. The latter is said to have sanctioned certain regulations for the religious life which subsequently became known as the rule of St. Augustine. In the beginning of the ninth century Pope Leo III made this rule obligatory upon all the clergy who had not embraced some other rule. Had the monks of St. Petrock been in outward communion with western Christendom they would probably have become canons, regular or secular, of St. Augustine and, in that case and in that sense only, Sir John Maclean’s statement might have been excusable. But in that sense the words had no meaning in the sixth century when St. Petrock founded the Cornish community. Augustine of Canterbury was a Benedictine monk and the canons regular introduced by Bishop Warelwast, known as Black Canons, belonged to one of the three great orders which sprang from the rule attributed to his great namesake the bishop of Hippo.
Dom Gougaud speaks of them as _Évêques déclassés et errants_ (_Chrétientés_, p. 219).
To this period Mr. Jenner would also assign the dwellings at Chysauster which may indeed, as he suggests, have been St. Gulval’s nunnery.
Stokes, _Ireland and the Celtic Church_, p. 347.
It is even possible that Coelling may be Callestock in Perranzabuloe. The canons of Exeter had lands in that parish in the twelfth century.
Donan, however, is a Celtic name (see Loth, _Rev. Celt._, XXIX, 277). For the purpose of the argument which is here put forward it would have been more convenient to have distinguished between them.
In the West of Cornwall there are indications in Domesday Book (1086) of the recent introduction of Saxon place-names, e.g. in Edward the Confessor’s time it can hardly be a coincidence that Aluuarton (_hodie_ Alverton) was the holding of Aluuar.
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EVOLUTION OF THE DIOCESAN-BISHOPRIC FROM THE MONASTERY-BISHOPRICS OF CORNWALL
The Roman and, consequently, the Saxon conception of episcopal government was territorial and diocesan; the Celtic conception was tribal and monastic. An ecclesiastical system based upon tribal and monastic principles, recognising no supreme central authority, can afford to dispense with clearly defined boundaries. At the same time a monastic, no less than a tribal organisation, requires a centre of its own, towards which its activities may converge, and from which its influences may radiate.