Wyllow

Wyllow, whose name is also found in the forms Willow and Wylloc, is an early medieval Cornish hermit and martyr known almost exclusively from a local cult at Lanteglos-by-Fowey and from a short notice compiled by the antiquary William Worcester during a journey through Cornwall in 1478. Worcester recorded the tradition then current at the parish: that Wyllow had been born in Ireland, had lived as a hermit at Lanteglos, and had been beheaded by a group called Melyn ys kynrede, that is, Melyn's kindred. No contemporary vita, charter, or martyrology entry confirms these details, and neither a year of birth nor a year of death can be established. Later antiquarian and hagiographical writers have customarily assigned him to the sixth century, the era in which many of the founding saints of Cornwall are placed, but that dating is conventional rather than documentary.

The same fifteenth-century notice presents Wyllow as a cephalophore. After his decapitation he is said to have taken up his own head and to have carried it to a bridge, where a spring of water appeared, and to have been buried at the spot on which the parish church was afterwards founded. Stories of saints who walk with their severed heads are widespread in the Celtic and Frankish worlds and serve to mark the site of a church or well as the place chosen by the martyr. Nothing further is related of Wyllow's parentage, training, or companions. He is not associated with any of the later religious orders; the sources describe him only as a hermit. Tradition does not give him a wife or children, and his eremitical life implies celibacy. He held no episcopal or patriarchal office.

The cult is tied to the parish of Lanteglos-by-Fowey, on the east side of the Fowey estuary in south-east Cornwall, a parish that also includes the village of Polruan. The surviving Church of St Wyllow is a substantial medieval building, largely of the fourteenth century, with later work and a tower set apart from the nave, standing in a wooded valley above a tidal creek. The Cornish name Lanteglos, formed from lann (a sacred enclosure) and eglos (church), points to an early Christian site of the kind often linked with a hermit's cell, even though the place-name does not itself contain the saint's personal name. The church remains the principal, and essentially the only, focus of Wyllow's honour; he is regarded as patron of the parish and of its church.

Wyllow was not the subject of a papal canonization or beatification of the later medieval type. Like other Cornish and Breton local saints, he belongs to the era of popular and diocesan cults that preceded the centralized procedures of the Roman see. No feast day is securely fixed in the major martyrologies, and modern calendars that assign him a date do so without early authority. Comparison with neighbouring figures such as Saint Cuby, Saint Wenna, or the cephalophore Saint Decuman shows how typical his legend is of south-western British hagiography: an Irish or Welsh holy man, a riverside hermitage, a violent death at the hands of a local kindred, and a miraculous sign that locates the church. Historians therefore treat William Worcester's paragraph as important evidence for late medieval Cornish memory rather than as a recoverable sixth-century biography. Beyond the dedication at Lanteglos-by-Fowey and that brief traditional narrative, the life of Wyllow cannot be reconstructed.