Who was St Piran?

Degol S.Peran da tha whye oll.

You can find a brief account of the modern association of St Piran with Cornwall here and an introduction to the placenames associated with the saint here.

Let’s add a few more details from the Life of St Piran. Written in the 1200s, 700 years after he was supposed to have lived, this may not be the most reliable account imaginable. In fact, most of it was stolen from the Life of the Irish Saint Ciaran from Leinster, presumably on the basis of their similar names. Piran’s departure from Ireland to Cornwall was tacked on to the end of Ciaran’s life, but in order to do so he had to be made to live 200 years, inevitably without suffering any of the infirmities associated with old age. And all despite his habit of praying when standing or kneeling in water.

While in Ireland Piran conducted a whole range of miracles, raising various servants from the dead, feeding ten kings and their armies on just eight, or was it three, cows, turning cold water warm and water into wine, carrying fire in his bare hands without getting burnt and the like. Of less useful material benefit was his ability to make a stork sing, cause snow to fall or make any meat ‘seem diverse in taste’.

Having retired to Cornwall on sensing the long-delayed approach of death, Piran still survived long enough to build a mansion before his passing, when his ‘soul pierced the heavens with exceeding brightness’.

Before being overwhelmed by sand and moved inland in 1804, the minster church dedicated to him at Perranzabuloe was the centre of a very large parish which at first included neighbouring St Agnes. Before the Reformation in the sixteenth century, this would have been staffed by a group of canons, performing services (at least in theory) eight times a day from midnight to late afternoon.

During Rogation week in April and May the canons would lead a procession of parishioners to the boundaries of the parish, carrying a cross, banners including depictions of a dragon and any relics of Piran that they happened to possess. The copper bell listed as belonging to the church in 1281 would no doubt have been rung to accompany their perambulations. Nicholas Roscarrock, the compiler of the lives of Cornwall’s saints, remembered the last of these processions in the reign of Mary in the 1550s. At that time, the Perranzabuloe procession would meet up with similar processions from Newlyn East, Cubert and Crantock at a chapel in Newlyn East. Such processions ended with the Reformation.