Cornwall

Newport sprang up in the shadow of Launceston Priory, and seems to have taken its name from one of the monastery’s gateways. In existence by 1274, little more is known about it until 1529, when it was enfranchised. In terms of geography and administration, Newport was the least impressive of the seventeenth-century Cornish parliamentary boroughs. Effectively just a suburb of Launceston, separated from its larger neighbour by only a minor tributary of the Tamar, the village lacked the most basic structures of self-government.

The mouth of the River Fowey forms the best natural harbour on the English coast between Plymouth and Falmouth. This fact, combined with Fowey’s close proximity to the duchy of Cornwall’s tin coining centre at Lostwithiel, explains the town’s rise in the later middle ages as a base for trade, piracy and, on occasion, military expeditions.

Grampound’s name derived from the bridge, or grand pont, built to carry the main road from St. Austell to Truro across the River Fal. Possibly founded by the earls of Cornwall, who granted it a market and fairs in 1332, Grampound was absorbed into the duchy of Cornwall in 1337 by Edward III, who provided the borough with its first charter, and made its privileges conditional on payment to the duchy of a yearly fee-farm rent.

The town of Mitchell dates from at least the early thirteenth century, when a weekly market was first held. Its location on the main road from Launceston to St. Ives failed to guarantee prosperity, and the town had declined to little more than a village by the time it was enfranchised in 1547, probably at the request of the lord of the manor, Sir John Arundell† of Lanherne. C.G. Henderson, Essays in Cornish Hist. ed. A.L. Rowse and M.I. Henderson, 54-5; HP Commons, 1509-58, i.

Launceston, a market town with ‘somewhat narrow and irregular’ streets, was situated on the side of a hill near the River Tamar, on the London to Land’s End road in the east of the county. Its trade was ‘not of a particular or important character’ and the manufacture of serge cloth for the East India Company, which had ‘employed about 300 hands’ early in the nineteenth century, was ‘passing into nothingness’ by the 1830s.

Grampound, an insignificant village situated on the River Fal in the south of the county, 40 miles north-east of Penzance, was governed by a corporation, consisting of a mayor and eight aldermen, which, as the municipal corporations commissioners noted in 1833, ‘existed but for the purpose of enabling the freemen to derive a revenue from their votes’. The freemen, whose numbers were unlimited, were nominated by a jury of existing freemen empanelled by the corporation. D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia (1814), iii. 71;Oldfield, Rep. Hist. (1816), iii.

West Looe, otherwise known by its older Cornish names of Portighan, Portpigham and Portuan, lay on the west side of the mouth of the River Looe in the south-east of the county. It was linked to East Looe by a narrow stone bridge, and of the two settlements (‘the twins’, in Cornish borough parlance), it was the less significant in terms of population and trade. The only industry was a pilchard fishery and the market had long been discontinued, although inland transport links were improved by the opening of a new road and canal to Liskeard in 1829. Pigot’s Commercial Dir.

Liskeard, a stannary and market town irregularly situated on ‘two rocky hills’ and in the valley dividing them in the south-east of the county, ranked ‘among the first towns’ in Cornwall. Its ‘principal business’ was connected with the tin, lead and copper mines in the neighbourhood, but serges and blankets were still manufactured ‘to a small extent’, there were ‘several tanneries and rope walks’ and the wool trade was ‘an improving branch’.

Fowey, a port and market town situated on the western bank of the river of that name, on the southern coast of the county midway between Plymouth and Falmouth, consisted essentially of ‘one street ... narrow and irregular’, which extended for ‘nearly a mile’ alongside the harbour. The mainstay of its economy had traditionally been the pilchard fishery, which was ‘still carried on to a considerable extent’ but was prone to fluctuations; in some seasons it ‘failed nearly altogether’.

Helston, a ‘thriving’ market and stannary town in the south-west of the county, on the London to Land’s End road, consisted chiefly of four ‘wide and well paved’ streets, which crossed ‘at right angles’. It was the focus for an extensive and fertile agricultural region to the south and east and a highly productive tin and copper mining district to the north and west, and its market was ‘justly ranked among the principal ones of Cornwall’.