“A region of extreme fertility, we are told, once linked the Scilly Islands with Western Cornwall. A people, known as the Silures, inhabited this tract, which has been called Lyonesse, or sometimes Lethowsow, who were remarkable for their industry and piety. No less than 140 churches stood over that region, which is now a waste of waters; and the rocks called the Seven Stones are said to mark the place of a large city. Even tradition is silent on the character of this great cataclysm.” – Hunt

Latin writers call this land, either entire or merely the largest island, Siluria. Strabo says that Silura is divided from the rest of Britian by a narrow channel with fierce currents. It is accompanied by nine smaller islands which his people seek for trade. He calls these the Tin Islands (“Casseriterides”). The Saxon Chronicle says that Lyonesse was inundated on the 11th of November 1099. The Cornish name is Lethowsow. The Cornish name for the places within the Seven Stones Reef is Tregva (“dwelling”) and was the site of the capital of Siluria.  The remnants of Silura are called the Scilly Isles.

 

Scilly

The capital of Scilly is called St Mary’s. What’s now called “Old town” was the capital in 1220. After 1220, in the real world, there was an inundation and the town was moved.

There are a series of charters giving all of Scilly to the abbots of Tavistock. That being said the king sends governors to the island, who are also constables of the castle at Ennor, and they have rights over the islands in addition to those of the Church. The yearly fee for the islands is six shillings and eight pence, or 300 puffins.  There is no record of this payment ever actually being made in seabirds. The governor also had to pay for twelve men at arms to keep the peace on the island.

There are two giant sites in the Scilly Isles: Giant’s Castle and Giant’s Punchbowl.  The Castle is a ruined clifftop fort with a mild magical Aura, close to St Mary’s. The punchbowl is a Logan stone.

Local resources

  • In the 17th century ore-weed (kelp) was harvested and burned in kilns, to make alkali for glass and soap. A covenant may begin this business early.
  • After the game period, Scilly was a famed exporter of cut flowers, particularly varieties of daffodil. The  is a white narcissus (called a “Scilly White”) which might be a vis source. A relative is found near St Michael Mount.
  • Aristotle’s great proof of spontaneous emergence of animals from inanimate matter was the glass eel. Glass eels lack genitals, and yet they regularly appear in vast swarms, going up rivers throughout Europe. He said they came from decaying earthworms. Pliny said that tiny fragments of eel that were scraped off in daily life and grew into complete eels.  In Mythic Europe leptocephaluses, glass eels, elvers, yellow eels, and silver eels are all separate species, appearing in swarms and likely containing vis. In the real world, they are the life-stages of a single species which develops genitals in the final form.

Boons and Hooks for the Scilly Isles

Distorted Covenfolk – Selkie and merrow blood are far more common on the islands than in most of Mythic Europe.

Faerie Aura: All versions of Lyonesse are dramatic stories, which stir faerie kind.

Faerie Landlord / Faerie Court: Selkies or merrow.

Magical Disaster – The Sinking. Regardless of which version of Lyonesse you use, the lost land is of great interest to magi based in Scilly.

Massacre site: In some folklore, Lyonesse fell just before the death of Arthur. Merlin submerged it to drown the army Mordered. Even if it was a freak of nature, thousands of people died in a single night.

Monster: Some people claim that the name “Lyonesse” refers to the roar of the water between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. That could be a water elemental.

Mystical Allies: Selkies, merrow, sea people.

Rights and Customs: The Scillions are a tiny, isolated community who have developed a separate series of local laws.

Ruined Covenant – Stellasper: Stellasper was a Criamon covenant founded in Scilly during 1025, and its members vanished in 1163. The name means “through the stars” or possibly “during the stars”. They were members of an astrological Clutch. The covenant’s duration bridges the loss of Lyonesse, and it’s not clear if they caused, or were affected by, it. Stellasper’s loss, a mere 57 years before the standard ssaga start date, may explain the lack of a covenant in Cornwall.

Tribunal Boundary: Islands in the English Channel are in the Normandy Tribunal, but Scilly has historically been in Stonehenge. Regardless of which tribunal the covenant is in, the Domus Magnus of House Tytalus is one of its closest neighbours.

Vast Aura: In versions of Lyonesse that define it as a faerie kingdom, its aura covers an area the size of a county.

Unknown Regio: Lyonesse may be in a regio that the player characters do not know how to enter.

Warping to a Pattern: The more often people tell the mermaid and selkie stories about Lyonesse, and the more often people use charms taught to lineages like the family of the Charmer of Cury, the more likely it becomes that locals will being to warp to a pattern.

Four possible Lyonesses

Troupes tell a variety of stories, and should mix the plot hooks for the main themes freely.

Plot hook: The Forgetting

Why aren’t people more worried about the loss of Lyonesse? 140 parishes isn’t a small country: it’s about a quarter the population of Kent, the richest county in England in 1220. The loss of a city, and therefore a bishop, seems to have slipped the mind of Mythic Europeans in a most distressing way. Is this tidying up by the Order after they sank the whole place during the Schism? Is this God, or the faeries?  Does this forgetting make it difficult to research, or even remember, the folklore of Lyonesse?

Faerie or Magical Kingdom

Is this where the selkies or merryfolk come from? Are they a faerie race or a group of  transformed humans?  Might it be possible to live among them? Could a whole kingdom still be there, cordoned off in a regio or ritual effect?

Reflections in the Water

Many of the creatures known on the land are reflected in the depths, either as a natural property of creation, or by faeries who take the shapes that humans expect. In the City of Lions, the most dangerous of these are the sea lions. Mundane sea lions, animals related to seals, are not found in these waters. Aquatic sea lions are halflings, with feline heads, claws, and piscean tails. Some faeries in this area take the form of knights, in scaly armor, and ride hippocampuses. These creatures are similarly divided, with the forepart of a horse and the tail of a fish. If your troupe has based their Lyonesse on Selkie lore, the rear parts of these animals might be seal- or dolphin-like.

Sleepers

Hunt notes that a sister of a vicar received a vision in which she was told to prepare a potion and pour it into the waters, so that the land would rise, and its people be reanimated from an unaging, magical sleep. Her technique or faith failed her, and the land did not rise. Maybe the magi might arrange the ritual better?

Curtana: a key for Lyonesse

Curtana, the sword of Tristram, Prince of Lyonesse, was in the English royal treasury until 1215 when it was lost, along with most of the portable wealth of King John, as his baggage train tried to cross a marshy area, called the Wash, during a storm. The sword, the treasury, and the king’s hope of victory, were taken by the waters, and he died, it is said, of disappointment.

This was one of the swords made by Wayland Smith, a faerie god or Sandinavian magus trained by dwarfs. Its more famous brothers are Joyeuse, which was wielded by Charlemagne, and Durendal, which was carried by Roland. In the Roland cycle is is carried by Ogier the Dane, and called Cortain. It had an inscription stating it was made at the same time, of the same metal, as the other two.

It’s hard to understand how Durendal, which had the power of splitting boulders, and Curtana, which left part of its tip in a man’s skull, could be of the same metal, but this missing chip is one of Curtana’s defining characteristics. Curtana is named from the Latin “curtus”, which means “short”. A copy of it, under the same name, is still used in the regalia when crowning a monarch of the United Kingdom: it’s the Sword of Mercy, with the tip squared off. In 1220 it did not represent mercy. In the time of Henry V (1400s) it was called the Sword of Justice.

An interesting idea which came up in the St Mary’s series is that the treasure was not lost, it was stolen by John himself, to allow him to pay his mercenaries without being seen to give away his grandmother Matilda’s Imperial regalia. The author, Jodi Taylor, doesn’t cite her sources, but even the most cursory research indicates that John’s son, Henry III, used a sword he claimed was Curtana when he married, and then crowned, Eleanor of Provence in 1236. How could he have a sword his father claimed was lost n the Wash? Henry might have just had a second one made. Possibly, though, Taylor’s story has the right or it: John stole his own crown jewels.

Can a sword be a key, allowing the rightful prince to return to the sunken realm? How do you steal or borrow it from the king?

Ruins

There may not be a hidden kingdom off the islands: it could just be a huge, sunken graveyard filled with the treasures of the dead

Plot hooks:

  • There’s a myth that is encoded in the coat of arms of the Trevilian family of Cornwall. It’s “gules a horse argent, from a less wavy argent, and azure, issuing out of a sea proper”. Their ancestor fled the encroaching floodwaters on his horse, landing on the Cornish coast.  That makes the family one point of inquiry into the nature of the disaster
  • Near Tregva, Cornish fishermen often catch artefacts in their nets. The oddest mentioned in Hunt are windows. He is unclear, but if he means glass windows, then that argues for supernatural manufacture: flat glass windows are not known in period. Flag this as a contested vis source, at least.
  • Hunt works through a digression in this chapter on the Padstow hobby horse, which locals “ride” into the sea each year. He suggests it is linked to the Padstow mermaid, or the horse that bought someone safely from Lyonesse. The riding of the horse into the sea may be a way of stopping more land being taken by a faerie power.
  • Many Verditius use bronze to construct their devices. Why has none set up a workshop in Cornwall, where both copper and tin are mined? Could one build a submersible and use it to explore, or loot, the ruins?

 

 

Notes for monster eel:

A final point about eels is that their blood is poisonous. This was only demonstrated scientifically in the 20th Century by proving you can provoke anaphylaxis by injecting it into laboratory animals. I’d suggest it’s well-known on a folk level regardless, because places which eat food raw, like the salmon in the west and the tuna in Japan, always cook eels. Cooking breaks down the irritant in the blood. That being noted, it makes corrosive blood a lovely choice for a vast eel that lingers in the depths of the channel, picking over the bones of fallen Lyonesse.

Plot hook: The tunnel

Hunt says that there’s a cave tunnel which connects Piper’s Hole, on St Mary’s in the Scilly Islands, with a similar cave near Tresco. People who try to take the tunnel often disappear. Dogs lost from one place sometimes turn up at the other with most of their hair missing, and locals seem to insist on having sex in the caves, for reasons Hunt does not seem to fathom, and might be mystical in Mythic Europe.