Norden, who says that the tongue was chiefly confined to Penwith and Kirrier, and yet "though the husband and wife, parents and children, master and servants, do naturally communicate in their native language, yet there is none of them in a manner but is able to converse with a stranger in the English tongue, unless it be some obscure people who seldom confer with the better sort."
The Cornish was so well spoken in the parish of Feock till about the year 1640 "that Mr. William Jackman, the then vicar, . . . was forced for divers years to administer the Sacrament to the communicants in the Cornish tongue, because the aged people did not well understand the English, as he himself often told me" (Hals).
So late as 1650 the Cornish language was currently spoken in the parishes of Paul and S. Just; and in 1678 the rector of Landewednack "preached a sermon to his parishioners in the Cornish language only."
It may seem paradoxical, but I contend that for intellectual culture it is a great loss to the Cornish to have abandoned their native tongue. To be bi-lingual is educative to the intellect in a very marked degree. In their determination not to abandon their tongue, the Welsh show great prudence. I have no hesitation in saying that a Welsh peasant is much ahead, intellectually, of the English peasant of the same social position, and I attribute this mainly to the fact of the greater agility given to his brain in having to think and speak in two languages. When he gives up one of these
