Cornwall

By the later Middle Ages three separate townships had grown up at Launceston: Launceston ‘St. Stephen’, Dunheved and Newport. Each of the three at various times adopted the name of ‘Launceston’, and confusion between them increased after 1529 when both Newport and Dunheved returned Members to Parliament, for Newport made returns as ‘Launceston’ and Dunheved (which until then had generally done the same) took to using its ancient name. However, in the 14th and early 15th centuries Newport was of minor importance, and the histories of the other two townships may be easily disentangled.

The town of Helston was the focal point of the manor of Helston-in-Kerrier, the most westerly of the assessionable manors of the duchy of Cornwall, and also the biggest. Before the Black Death approximately 5,000 areas were leased to the tenants of the manor, with perhaps an additional 2,500 acres held in free tenancies. But the manor contained large tracks of barren land suitable for use only as rough pasture, which would only be leased in response to an exceptional demand for foodstuffs and land, such as that created by extensive mining activity.

The town of Bodmin owed its existence to the priory built in the tenth century on the site where St. Petrock was buried. At the time of the Domesday survey, when the priory possessed 68 houses and a market there, Bodmin was the largest settlement in Cornwall. But although it retained its pre-eminence over the other Cornish towns with regard to size, its position under the lordship of the priory made it an unsuitable place for use as a centre for royal administration. Even so, there was clearly some anxiety in Launceston that Bodmin might usurp the place of county town.

Situated on a creek to the east of Falmouth Harbour, St. Mawes was a small fishing village notable only for its ancient chapel dedicated to St. Maudutus, and the royal castle built in the 1540s to protect the bay from French raiders. Although one indenture in 1625 referred to ‘St. Maudes’, the chapel was derelict by 1621, when Parliament was petitioned unsuccessfully for its restoration. Local government was limited to a manorial court leet, held before a portreeve chosen annually by the manor’s tenants.

The larger of the twin settlements at the mouth of the Looe, East Looe existed as a market town and port by the late thirteenth century, and was accounted sufficiently important in 1341 to send a representative, jointly with Fowey, to an assembly at Westminster. T. Bond, E. and W. Looe, 1-2, 6. In the early seventeenth century the local merchants traded with France, the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula, but they could no longer compete with their rivals at Fowey in terms of the volume of traffic.

Truro sprang up in the early twelfth century at the juncture of two major roads and a navigable tributary of Falmouth Haven, and began sending burgesses to Parliament in 1295. A key factor in the borough’s development was its close proximity to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Tywarnhaile. From around 1300 Truro was west Cornwall’s principal location for ‘coinage’, the obligatory pre-sale testing of the metal’s purity, and when tin production in this part of the county dramatically increased in the sixteenth century the town’s prosperity rose commensurately.

West Looe was known originally as Porthbyhan (‘little cove’ in Cornish), and a corrupted version of this name, Portpighan, still appeared on the borough’s election indentures in the early seventeenth century as part of its official title. A settlement existed on the west bank of the Looe by 1243, when it received its first charter. Along with the adjacent manor of Portlooe, the borough was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1540. T. Bond, E. and W. Looe, 50, 57; R. Pearse, Ports and Harbours of Cornw.

Tregony sprang up at the highest point of the River Fal navigable by medieval shipping. A manorial court leet was recorded there in the Domesday survey, and the town had achieved borough status by 1201, its government lying in the hands of a portreeve or mayor. The manor was granted by William I to the Pomeroy family, who obtained for the town the privileges of holding fairs and a weekly market, and who also constructed a castle and parish church. In the later Middle Ages, however, the river silted up, drowning the church and part of the town, and rendering Tregony an economic backwater.

Set on the west bank of the Tiddy, a few miles upstream from Plymouth Sound, St. Germans existed by 936, when its church became the cathedral of the Anglo-Saxon diocese of Cornwall. Although the bishops relocated to Devon in 1042, St. Germans Priory remained an important religious site during the Middle Ages, affording the town much of its prestige and prosperity. The decline which set in after the monastery’s dissolution in 1539 was noted at the end of the century by Richard Carew†: ‘the church town mustereth many inhabitants and sundry ruins, but little wealth’.

A settlement existed at Bossiney by the late eleventh century, when a small Norman castle was constructed there. The village was granted in the mid-thirteenth century to Richard, earl of Cornwall, who provided the borough with its first charter. Like many of the earl’s former estates, Bossiney was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337. At that time the borough was flourishing, but decline set in during the next century, and around 1540 Leland observed a substantial number of ruinous buildings.