Dolly Pentreath - Life

Life

Baptised 16 May 1692, Pentreath was probably the second of the six children of Nicholas Pentreath, a fisherman, by his second wife, Jone Pentreath. She later claimed that she could not speak a word of English until the age of twenty. Whether or not this is correct, Cornish was her first language. In old age, she remembered that as a child she had sold fish at Penzance in the Cornish language, which most local inhabitants (even the gentry) then understood. She lived in the parish of Paul, next to Mousehole.

Perhaps due to poverty, Pentreath never married, but in 1729 she gave birth to a son, John Pentreath, who lived until 1778.

In 1768, Daines Barrington searched Cornwall for speakers of the language and at Mousehole found Pentreath, then a fish seller said to be aged about 82, who "could speak Cornish very fluently". In 1775, he published an account of her in the Society of Antiquaries' journal Archaeologia, entitled On the Expiration of the Cornish Language. Barrington reported that "the hut in which she lived was in a narrow lane", and that in two rather better cottages just opposite it he had found two other women, some ten or twelve years younger than Pentreath, who could not speak Cornish readily, but who understood it. Five years later, Pentreath was said to be in her 87th year and was "poor and maintained mostly by the parish, and partly by fortune telling and gabbling Cornish".

In the last years of her life, Pentreath became a local celebrity for her knowledge of Cornish. About 1777, she was painted by the youthful John Opie (1761–1807), and in 1781 an engraving of her after Robert Scaddan was published.

In 1797 a Mousehole fisherman told Richard Polwhele (1760–1838) that William Bodinar "used to talk with her for hours together in Cornish; that their conversation was understood by scarcely any one of the place; that both Dolly and himself could talk in English"'

Pentreath has passed into legend for cursing at people in a long stream of fierce Cornish whenever she became angry. Her death is seen as marking the death of Cornish as a community language. According to legend, her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!") but it is more likely that this was her customary response to being addressed in English.

There are many tales about her. She was said often to curse people, including calling them "kronnekyn hager du", an "ugly black toad", and was even said to have been a witch. Numerous other stories have been attached to her, their accuracy unknown. She was at one time thought to have been identical with a Dorothy Jeffrey or Jeffery whose burial is recorded in the Paul parish register but this has been doubted (however the Oxford DNB (2004) does accept the identification).