St. Ives derives its name from a fifth-century Irish missionary, St. Ia, whose shrine stood in the church there until the Reformation. The peninsula which protects St Ives’s harbour from the Bristol Channel attracted settlement from prehistoric times, but the town developed slowly, lacking its own market until the late fifteenth century, and achieving full parochial status only in 1576. Some 20 years later Carew described it as ‘of mean plight’, and in need of a new pier.
Camelford grew up where the main road traversing north Cornwall crosses the River Camel. Established as a borough by Richard, earl of Cornwall in 1259, in the following century it was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall, along with the manor of Helston in Trigg to which it had formerly belonged. Despite its strategic location and privileges, Camelford failed to prosper. At the end of the sixteenth century Richard Carew† described it as ‘a market and fair (but not fair) town’, which ‘steppeth little before the meanest sort of boroughs for store of inhabitants, or the inhabitants’ store’.
Helston grew up at a strategic crossroads some eight miles north of the Lizard in western Cornwall, receiving its first borough charter in 1201. Its importance as a trading centre derived largely from the town’s proximity to the tin-producing zone, or stannary, of Penwith and Kerrier. Privileged from 1305 as one of the county’s five ‘coinage’ centres, where tin was assayed before sale, Helston had already begun sending representatives to Parliament seven years earlier. In 1337 the local manor became a founding component of the duchy of Cornwall. H.S. Toy, Hist.
A settlement existed in the Penryn area before the Conquest, but the town itself allegedly owed its origins to the bishops of Exeter, lords of the local manor, who obtained a borough charter in 1236. J. Polsue, Complete Paroch. Hist. of Cornw. ii. 78; R.J. Roddis, Penryn, 13-15. Located at the head of a sheltered creek off the great natural harbour of Falmouth Haven, Penryn in the early seventeenth century traded with markets around the globe.
Bodmin traced its roots back to the sixth century, when St. Petroc founded a monastery which served as Cornwall’s first Anglo-Saxon cathedral. The town achieved borough status by 1190, and secured its earliest recorded charter of privileges in the mid-thirteenth century. The prestige of its medieval priory, combined with the town’s importance as a centre for the tin trade, made Bodmin a focal point for Cornish society, and the western rebellions of 1497 and 1549 both began there. C. Henderson et al., Cornish Church Guide, 59-60; J.
Callington was the last of the old Cornish boroughs to be enfranchised, and physically was one of the least impressive. Despite being a market town since 1267, and the customary meeting-place for official assemblies within Cornwall’s East hundred, the borough was never incorporated, and the chief officer, although known as the mayor, was in reality a manorial reeve. In ecclesiastical terms, Callington was merely a chapelry of the neighbouring parish of South Hill, with which it was also merged for taxation purposes.
East Looe was a small port in the south-east of the county, romantically situated on the east side of Looe Bay and connected to West Looe by a bridge over the River Looe. It was a centre of the pilchard fishing industry and had a small trade in coal, limestone, iron and timber. The streets were said in 1824 to be ‘narrow, irregular and in general dirty’, and many of the houses exhibited ‘marks of decay and age’. Nevertheless, the town was becoming increasingly popular as ‘a bathing place, or situation for invalids, or for parties of pleasure’.
There was a settlement at Liskeard by around AD 1000. The town received its first charter from Richard, earl of Cornwall in 1240, and like many of the earl’s possessions it was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337, along with Liskeard manor, castle and park. The borough was important enough to be enfranchised in 1295, and ten years later it was designated as one of Cornwall’s five coinage towns, where tin could be assayed.
Founded by a half-brother of William the Conqueror, Launceston grew up around Dunheved castle, which the Normans built to control the principal northern crossing of the Tamar, Cornwall’s eastern border. The town’s name referred originally to a neighbouring settlement whose population was encouraged to move to the new citadel, and even in the early seventeenth century the parliamentary borough’s official designation remained Dunheved alias Launceston. R. and O.B. Peter, Launceston and Dunheved, 68, 70; I.D. Spreadbury, Castles in Cornw. 17; C.
Lostwithiel was probably founded around the late twelfth century by the Cardinham family, lords of the nearby castle of Restormel, who provided the settlement with its earliest charter. Located on a then navigable stretch of the Fowey river, and near to the tin-producing region, or stannary, of Blackmoor, the town enjoyed early prosperity as a prime distribution-point for the tin trade.
