This doctrine Pope Zacharias hastened to condemn as heretical.[1] Virgilius had to go to Rome to justify his opinion before ignorant Latin ecclesiastics—with what results we do not know.
Athelstan came to Exeter in 926, and drove out the British inhabitants. He built towers and repaired the old Roman walls; he it was who founded the monastery of SS. Mary and Peter, afterwards to become the Cathedral; and, we are told, he gave to it relics of S. Sidwell. This was a local saint, of whom very little is known, save that she was the sister of Paul, who became abbot and bishop of Léon, in Brittany. She had two sisters, Wulvella and Jutwara, called also Jutwell and Eadware. Though the names seem Saxon, they are corruptions of Celtic originals. Wulvella became an abbess at Gulval, near Penzance, where she entertained her brother as he was on his way to Armorica. Sidwell is supposed to have been a martyr, possibly to Saxon brutality, but this is very uncertain, as her story has not been preserved. She has as her symbols a scythe and a well—"canting" symbols framed from her name. Her brother Paul founded a church that still retains his name, in the British portion of Exeter.
The bishop's seat had been at Crediton: the Saxon
- ↑ In my Lives of the Saints, written in 1874, I accepted M. Barthelemy's view, that Virgilius held that there were underground folk, gnomes; but I do not hold this now, knowing more than I then did of the learning of the great Irish scholars, and of the voyages made by the Irish. The earliest gloss on the Senchus Mor says, "God formed the firmament around the earth; and the earth, in the form of a perfectly round ball, was fixed in the midst of the firmament."—I. p. 27.
