Dolly Pentreath - Monument

Monument

Pentreath was buried at Paul, where in 1860 a monument in her honour was set into the churchyard wall of the church of St Paul Aurelian by Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon, and by the Vicar of Paul of the time. It read:

Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath who died in 1778, said to have been the last person who conversed in the ancient Cornish, the peculiar language of this country from the earliest records till it expired in the eighteenth century, in this Parish of Saint Paul. This stone is erected by the Prince Louis Bonaparte in Union with the Revd John Garret Vicar of St Paul, June 1860. Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Exod. xx. 12. Gwra pethi de taz ha de mam: mal de Dythiow bethenz hyr war an tyr neb an arleth de dew ryes dees. Exod. xx. 12.

Contradicting the monument, in 1882 Dr Frederick Jago of Plymouth received a letter from Bernard Victor, of Mousehole, who wrote "She died Decr. 26, 1777, at the age of 102. At her funeral the undertaker was George Badcock. He being my grandfather, that is the reason I am so well informed ; and there were eight chosen fishermen bearers to take her to her last resting place. There was not anything erected on the old lady's grave as a tablet to her memory. I know quite well the grave where her remains are deposited." In a later letter he went on to say that it was no surprise that Bonaparte and Garret had mistaken both the date and the place of the grave. "Dolly's actual resting place is 47 feet south-east, a point easterly from Prince L. L. Bonaparte's monument to her. It is not to be said that the monument is in its right place, because it was put there by the order of Prince L. L. Bonaparte, or by the Rev. John Garrett – the one a Frenchman and the other an Irishman!" However, the erroneous idea that Pentreath had lived to be 102 is believed to originate in a Cornish language epitaph which had been written by December 1789 and published in 1806 by a man named Tomson.

No burial of Dorothy Pentreath is recorded, but it has been argued that this appears in the parish register under the name of Dolly Jeffery, which is suggested to be the surname of her son's father. This theory is accepted by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

In 1887, the monument was moved to the site of her unmarked grave, and a skeleton was disinterred which was believed to be hers.

Pêr-Jakez Helias, the Breton writer, has dedicated a poem to Dolly Pentreath.