This letter was obtained from the personal papers of Harry Cullis, son of John F. Cullis and Mattie Kemp. John F. descended from Henry W. Cullis (1831 - 1910) and Hannah Faraday (1835 - ?? ). More about them later..... fun story! For now, let's focus on the letter sent to my great Uncle Harry Cullis as the result of a syncronistic meeting during a change of planes in a Canadian airport in the 1950's! Life is strange.
-----------------------Here is the letter. (The original is handwritten.) --------------------------
-----------------------Here is the letter. (The original is handwritten.) --------------------------
private &
personal Brunswick Road
Gloucester
October 11th 1923
My Dear Sir,
My daughter, Professor Winifred Cullis, has requested me to write you something of what I know of the surname Cullis, by which our family, and presumably yours also, have been through at least some recent centuries known to the world. You also ask if I can indicate where you and we come together in the joint use of the name and I am here, with pleasure, sending you from memory some notes respecting our name and your and our relative claims to it, which I hope may interest you.
Notwithstanding a competative modern French origin of the same name, but otherwise applied, there need be no doubt whatever that for us our family name is obviously and historically a slight modification of “Coilus”, the Latinised form of “Coel”, this being the correct historic form of the name of three of the best known British Kings. Unhappily this genuinely ancient name has been made ridiculous in the silly rhyme of “Old King Cole”. Perhaps the stupidest of all the attempts ever made to turn priceless fragments of ancient story to serve the tune of childish amusement and the monumental ignorance of these later times. We have no record of any ancient King Cole, the three Kings Coel occurring in the course of the long period of some five hundred years, remain amongst the most real personages of the remote period to which they belong.
In this connection you may perhaps deem it not unworthy of record that in an ancient Sussex Folk Song, these three Royal Coels, though first chiefly connected with more western countries of England and never especially so recorded for Sussex, are not only this popularly celebrated in their correct number and due order, but personally honoured in a chorus which to the uninformed may seem to be without meaning and simply ridiculous. When explained however it is obvious that the song was emphasized by an ??? accompaniment most meant for use by the unconquered and unconquerable early iron workers of the Sussex Weald, however it is not a local but a genuinely British enthusiasm which they expressed in their really notable refrains, “Here’s to the young Coel! And to the old Coel!” And to become not only the old Coel of British tradition and the Sussex song, but also to be commonly recorded by the more polite Latinised form of his British name as “King Coilus”, thus introducing the original form of the family name which is now both yours and ours.
The still comparatively young Coilus no doubt had had a good time in Rome, since he was not only the son of Marcus and the grandson of Anviragus - British Kings tributary to Rome - but the grandson also of the young wife of Anrivagus, a Roman princess and daughter of Claudius, given to Anviragus by the Emperor himself on his seventeen day visit to Britian in the spring of the year 44 of our era. To complete and celebrate the success of his conquest of a considerable portion of this even then long coveted Britian, after coming to the kingship, Coilus is said to have regularly paid the tribute to Rome and to have reigned in great peace for the all too brief remaining twenty years of his life. It is also of course quite easy to understand that Coilus himself, with his Roman sympathies and dignity, should willingly use this Latinised form of his British name, first introduced in connection with him, but also used more than a century later by the last of the three Coels then reigning in the extreme east of England as the stubborn defender of Colchester against the Roman Constantuis Chlonis, then an aspirant and afterward attain?? of the imperial dignity. Presently, on making a peace with Colius, the latter, as a man of amity, gave his daugther Helena to the would-be Emperor in marriage and so she became the great Empress Helena, the refuted discoverer of the True Cross, the foundress of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem and by far the most famous woman known in the history of her time.
If like me you have daughters and granddaughters to boast of, it may amuse them to reflect that if this famous ancient lady had not been in her youth the daughter of a British King and therefore a princess, and if the common form of address known to us now had only then been in use, she would have been familiarly recognized as little other than the Miss Cullis which has come to them today.
I have ventured to suggest that if you could only be quite sure that representatives of your line were already at Penryn as early as the second century B.C., you might very well claim to represent the original stem of the whole family - while the rest of us can do no better that trace our attainment of it to some later period, we here in particular, not to our knowledge sharing your Cornish domisilo?- and not acquiring the name till at least 1213 years later than you might so have done, we get a first clue to the origin of our name only through an eatery in the famous Doomsday Book, the compilation of which was - by the way - ordered and to the old Coel of all. “Twank-i-dillo, Twank-i-dillo, Twank-i-dillo!” the genuineness of this scrap of ancient but doubtless modernised and thus still used Folk Lore may be regarded as at least suggested by the way in which it looks backward successively from the youngest to the oldest of the certainly three Coels and by its so tolerably indicating as it does in many a mystic gathering even now the music of the anvils and hammers of so very long ago.
The French or Norman Cullis, a refined product of the cooks’ art, as also the better known port-cullis, the strong grating or gate which by sliding down into grooves - still to be seen on either side of many an ancient castle gate-way - denied admission in times of war, come from a Latin route signifying to flors or to glide, as my perhaps also the present day Coulisse, the well known name give to the ourside body of Parisian financial brokers, though perhaps scarcely the surnames of Jean Calas, the unfortunate 18th Century Protestant martyr of Toulouse and that of Count Caylus, the somewhat late emminent French Antiguary. But these may from our point of view be regarded as having only an accidental similarity and being altogether too recent to be concerned in the origin of our certainly more ancient name.
You tell us that your original English home was at Penwyn. This is a small Cornish town a little to the east of Falmouth, with its name aptly descriptive of its one straight street sloping steeply form the “pen” or hill behind, down to the water-side where the one industry of the place, the shaping of blocks of Cornish granite, is still actively maintained near to the wharves where they are transferred to small sailing vessels for transport to and insertion in the massive dock-walls, bridges and the like, in many of the great works of the Civil Engineer all round the long coast-line of this old England.
You will doubtless have noted how brief are nearly all the true remains of ancient story whether carved in stone, impressed on metal, still preserved in documented histories, or strangely kept alive amongst the myths and fables of Folk Lore. So it is that if you could only make sure that your people have not been more recent Cornish immigrants, but were already located there in the second century B.C. you might claim this as at any rate suggesting that you may represent the senior original and central stem of all us ancient Cullis’s, and this owing to the fact that whilst the first of the Coels, “the old Coel of all” is universally spoken of as King Coel, one at least of the Chronicles somewhat inappropriately describes him as having been originally a “Duke of Cornwall”. Thence he is said to have penetrated in the year 128 B.C. into this part of the country, his conquests here including much of the Severn Vale and extending well up onto the Cotters wolde Hills. Here there is a considerable parish, now and anciently Coels’ Brook, and therefore Cole’s boundry towards the east. The ruler on the farther side of the stream would presumable then have been King Ceriu or Conu, whose name at any rate is preserved to us in the later name of the Roman Corinuim and in its modern form as Cinencester. It was also in these earlier Roman times in the earlier part of the second century of our era that on the death of King Marcus, his son Coel, having as the Chronicles say “spent all his young age in Italy”, was summoned home to succeed his father as King of the region hereabouts by King William the Conqueror, who usually kept his Christmas at Gloucester, at a Parliament held here at that season in the year 1085.
Notwithstanding this our possible family inferiority to you I have taken the liberty of noting the fact that your special service to this our late age of the world must make you an authority in the details of the business of literary publication, as they obtain on your side or the water.
Since becoming practically blind, I have spent some of my leisure time in abstracting from a local story, of the origin of our British Caes Glowe, which I wrote and my friends of the chief local newspaper here, bargained for first production in serial form some few years ago in their Journal. My present effort is an attempt to put forward, still in the same story form a less local and more general account of the first occupation by man of this western part of England, regarding it as both separate from, subsequent to and by a different people from the earlier and easier crossing from the continent to Kent, and so to the south eastern, eastern, central and generally more upland part of the country. My principal object in this later production has been to offer in a sufficiently interesting and easily readable story and outline of the facts of the coming hereabouts of late prehistoric man and I have often wished that I might make the acquaintance of some sufficiently influential American Journalist with the hope of getting this later and less local story accepted for serial production in a succession of American newspapers if this sort of thing is acceptable amongst you.
Whilst I have the more serious purpose of popularsing the realisation - by the multitude - of the antiquity of man, I should of course regard this as a business matter and the pleasant accident of your communication.... whether in may fall within your vocation personally to represent me on your side in this matter doing the best you could for me and of course retaining for yourself such renumeration as you wojuld be properly and by usage entitled to claim.
I will not trouble you with details in this present letter but if you will be good enough to say whether and generally on what terms you would entertain this suggestion and also let me know what success one might anticipate in such an effort. I shall be pleased in a future communication to send you such further information as you may require as to the story, its division into chapters, the number of words in each of these and the combination with it or not of an introduction and appendix intended to be easily but more definitely instructive, related to but not part of the story itself.
I hope that what I have thus written will not fail to be of some interest to you and peradventure to many generations of those yet to follow you in the long course of your branch - or original Cornish stem?- of our clan, and who may all the better realize the reality of ancient times and people because of this their association with the antiquities and dignities some record of which I have thus had the honor and pleasure of sending to you so far away over and beyond what I myself found long ago to be the stormy Western Sea.
If in this I have not quite succeeded in making you a present of the coveted distinction of a “Royal Pedigree” for you and “Your heirs for ever”, I think you willl admit that I have succeeded in showing you that our name has an origin not only most truly royal, but as amongst other family names, of an almost unparalleled antiquity.
With my sincere compliments and congratulations and all manner of good wishes to you and yours.
I remain,
Yours Very Truly,
Frederick John Cullis
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