Part 7
A few words must be devoted to the new Cathedral at Truro erected from the designs of the late Mr J.L. Pearson in a French Gothic style of architecture. It consists of a choir of five bays, with retrochoir, transepts, nave with north and south aisles, baptistery and south-west porch, richly sculptured; a central and two western towers. Attached to the south side of the choir is the fine old parish church of St Mary, or a portion of it. There is an elaborately sculptured reredos over the altar. Notwithstanding its faults Truro Cathedral is a notable monument of the enthusiasm and self-denial of the Cornish people.
The Holy Wells of Cornwall are a distinct feature of the county. In all Celtic lands, previous to the introduction of Christianity, there was a great veneration for wells, and the early missionaries took advantage of this to turn them into baptisteries, or in other ways to consecrate them. Holy wells abound in Cornwall, but they have not always much architectural character. That of Dupath, by Liskeard, is the finest, but there is also another that is fine at St Cleer, and one most interesting and unique at St Clether, where, indeed, there are two, for the water from the first flows into a chapel and is carried under the old stone altar, to decant into another well outside the chapel. The Madron Holy Well was for long famous for cures.
=22. Architecture: (_b_) Military--Castles.=
Before the Norman Conquest there were no masonry built castles in Cornwall, only stockades of wood surmounting earthworks or piled up masses of stone uncemented. The usual Saxon _Burh_ was a mound, surmounted by a structure of timber, reached by a bridge or ladder from a base-court that was encompassed by moat and mound and stockade. The Norman system of building a castle was to erect a round or square keep, a massive structure of stone, on the mound that had formerly been surmounted by a wooden structure, and to surround the base-court with a stone wall. Within this were erected the necessary domestic buildings. Very generally the entrance to the court was strongly defended by a second tower. The style of castle was greatly altered in the reign of Edward I but of such Edwardian castles there are no examples in Cornwall, save the poor fragment of Tintagel. The Normans built a castle at Launceston, and there the circular keep standing on a lofty tump of rock, artificially shaped, is of their construction, but the ruined buildings below, with the gateways and walls of the base-court, are later.
The castle of Trematon also consists of a "motte" surmounted by a circular keep, and a base-court with square tower at the entrance, with an archway.
Tintagel Castle is reduced to a miserable ruin, part on the mainland, part on the islet, with the intervening portion blocked up by fallen rocks, forming a narrow isthmus. The deep chasm that formerly separated the two portions of the castle was anciently spanned by a drawbridge. The work appears to be of the thirteenth century. On the island are the remains of a chapel with its altar slab still in place. Tintagel became a residence of the Earls of Cornwall, and in 1245, Richard son of King John received in it his nephew David, Prince of Wales. It was subsequently used occasionally as a prison. In the reign of Elizabeth, that penurious queen, deeming the expense of keeping it up too onerous, allowed it to fall into ruin.
St Michael's Mount was crowned with a castle and a church. The oldest portion is the central tower, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century; other portions are later additions, and much very bad modern work has tended to its sad disfigurement. Edward the Confessor planted a monastery on the rock, and granted it to Mont S. Michel in Normandy; at the Conquest it was made over to Robert Earl of Mortain, but the Benedictines of Mont S. Michel continued to have a cell there with a prior. It was consequently at once a religious house and a military post.
Restormel, near Lostwithiel, consists of a keep crowning a hill, with a gatehouse on the west, a projecting tower on the E.N.E., and a chapel. It is not older than the reign of Henry III and was the stronghold of the Cardinhams and then of the Traceys, from whom it passed to the Earls of Cornwall. The circular keep is only 30 ft. high. The castle was already ruinous in the time of the Civil War, but it was put in repair and held by the Parliamentary forces till taken by Grenville.
St Mawes is a small but perfect castle, erected by Henry VIII.
Pendennis Castle was another erection of Henry VIII, on the site of earlier fortifications. The circular tower dates from his time, but it was added to considerably in the reign of Elizabeth. In 1644 Pendennis afforded shelter to Queen Henrietta Maria, when embarking for France, and hither came Prince Charles in 1646 on his way to Scilly.
Helsborough, near Michaelstow, was a fortress belonging to the Earls of Cornwall, but it shows no tokens of having ever been walled with masonry. The only structural remains to be seen are the ruins in the midst of a Perpendicular chapel.
On Carn Brea is a tower, another on Roche rock; and St Catherine's Castle, erected by order of Henry VIII, defended the entrance to the harbour of Fowey.
=23. Architecture: (_c_) Domestic and Monastic.=
In England generally castles belonged only to the Crown or to great nobles, and no gentleman was suffered to castellate or embattle his walls without a special licence from the Crown. In Cornwall all the castles pertained to the Crown or the Duke of Cornwall, and private persons had to content themselves with purely domestic mansions. Till the reign of Elizabeth the dining-hall reaching to the roof was the most conspicuous feature, and opening out of it was the ladies' bower, a small oak-panelled room. The inconvenience arising from a house being cut in half by the hall led in the reign of Elizabeth to an alteration, and the halls were ceiled over, so that the upper portion could be used for bedrooms and passage. Before her reign the usual form of a house was quadrangular, that is to say a court surrounded by buildings entered by a gate, with the hall and principal portions of the house opposite the entrance gate. But in the reign of Elizabeth it became the fashion to form the house in the shape of the letter E. In her father's reign it often had the shape of the letter H with the open ends closed by slight walls.
Cornwall possesses very few stately houses. At the close of the seventeenth century a schoolmaster at Trebartha filled a folio with sketches of the ancient manor-houses of the neighbourhood of the Tamar; picturesque old mansions of the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Nearly every one has disappeared. The squirearchy of Cornwall, flush of money, through tin, pulled down their old residences and built mansions in the Georgian period, totally devoid of interest. Of the old houses few remain except as farm houses. They were, however, never so magnificent as those in the counties where bricks and easily dressed stone existed. But still there remain Cothele, unaltered, the beautiful house of Lord Mount Edgcumbe on the Tamar; Basil, the manor-house of the Trevelyans, much mutilated by the barbarous hand of a modern architect; Trecarrel, near Launceston, an old Tudor mansion with a noble hall, never completed; Place, near Padstow, formerly Prideaux Castle, the Elizabethan residence of the Prideaux Brunes, very stately, and with a dining room rich in carved oak; Lanherne, built in 1580, a small manor-house of the Arundells and now a convent; Lanhydrock, built by the first Lord Roberts--they called themselves later Robartes; Place House, Fowey, with rich sculpture; Trerice, the old seat of the Arundells; Tregudick with its Elizabethan hall; Penheale, once the seat of the Speccots, in Egloskerry; Tonacombe, an unaltered house of the reign of Henry VII, in Morwenstow; Penfound in Poundstock, small but charming; and Lanreath, with a carved oak parlour, the ancient house of the Grylls family. There are others, now farmhouses, and only spared on that account, deserted when the squires moved elsewhere and did not pull down their ancestral residences.
A monastic building consisted of a church, with a cloister court adjoining, about which were the dormitories, a library, and a refectory or room in which all had their meals in common. There would be often two courts, one outer, the other with the cloister about it in which the monks mainly lived and in the centre of which was the monastic graveyard. The garden of pot herbs and herbs for medicinal purposes was an essential feature of all monastic settlements, as was also the stewpond or ponds for fish. The necessity under which the monks lay of being near water, both for their fish and for sanitary purposes and for drinking, led to all monastic establishments lying low down in valleys by running streams.
Of monastic remains there are few. At Launceston the foundations of St John's Priory have been laid bare. At Glasney in Penryn a few walls alone represent what was once a stately priory. Of the great house at Bodmin hardly a wall stands, but some remains of the sanatorium exist at Lavethan. At Lanivet are the remains of St Benet's Monastery, till 1859 the most picturesque and best preserved of the monastic buildings in Cornwall, except St Michael's Mount. An engraving of the remains was published by Lysons in 1814, which shows the house to have been beautifully situated, and as beautiful as its situation demanded. At the date mentioned it was mutilated and spoilt.
Cornwall cannot boast picturesque cottages. Some few remain that possess some charm, as the old Post-office at Tintagel, some slate-hung dwellings in West Looe, the Lugger Inn, Fowey, and the almshouses at St Germans. There are as well some that call for an artist to use his pencil at Saltash. But, on the whole, the county is poor in the domestic architecture of farm and cottage, and house fronts in the towns, with rare exceptions, are not of any artistic character.
=24. Communications--Roads, Railways.=
The great road from London to Falmouth ran through Launceston, Bodmin, and Truro, and was kept in good order, and over it raced the mail coaches that conveyed letters on to the packets at Falmouth. This was the main artery of communication for more than a century, till Falmouth was abandoned as a mail-packet station by the Government. From 18 to 20 fine vessels performed this service, carrying letters and papers to all parts of the world, until the extension of railways caused the service to be transferred to Southampton.
Whether there were systematically constructed Roman roads in Cornwall has been doubted. One curious ancient road--the Giant's Hedge--is found near Lanreath, and appears to have been a portion of a road raised on a bank that started from a ferry over the Tamar and was carried into the west of Cornwall. There was a road also that came from Exeter and crossed the Tamar at Polson Bridge and then turned north to Camelford. Another ran past Stratton to the estuary of the Camel opposite Padstow, where Romano-British remains have been found on Bray Hill. But it is possible enough that these roads were of British and not of Roman construction.
In the Middle Ages little or nothing was done to keep the roads in repair. Even in the eighteenth century all that was thought necessary was to throw down a load of boulders into the ruts, rake them in, and leave coach and cart wheels to grind them up. But the roads were taken in hand at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the turnpikes served to provide funds for keeping them in order, while Macadam's invention of breaking the stones before laying them on the roads assisted enormously in facilitating transit along them.
The roads in Cornwall are now for the most part excellent, metalled with elvan, and cyclists and motorists can have little to complain of on that score.
Two railway companies have penetrated the county; the G.W.R. in the south crosses the Tamar by the famous Saltash tubular bridge, and runs to Penzance, by Truro. There is a branch to Bodmin, another to Fowey, and another crosses the county to Newquay. After reaching Truro, the line deserts the south, but sends a branch down to Falmouth. It runs to Redruth and Camborne and reaches the sea at Hayle. It sends a short branch up to St Ives, but the main line turns south again to end in a terminus at Penzance. The L. & S.W.R., after sending out a branch to Bude, reaches Launceston, and then supplies the dreary country from Launceston to Camelford with communication. From Camelford it runs to Wadebridge; and down the estuary to Padstow, a branch to the south serving Bodmin.
In addition to the branches already mentioned are others to Looe and Helston.
Penzance is reached from Paddington in 8-1/2 hours and Newquay in half-an-hour less.
The L. & S.W.R. leaving Waterloo reaches Launceston in 5-1/2 hours, Bude in 6 hours, and Wadebridge in under 7 hours. From Wadebridge coaches run to Newquay.
A steamer maintains communication with the Scilly Isles from Penzance.
=25. Administration and Divisions, Ancient and Modern.=
Before the Conquest the divisions of the county were probably those afterwards forming the old deaneries, and followed the limits of the Celtic tribes under their several chiefs. Of these there were eight:--East and West, Kerrier, Penwith, Powder, Pyder, Trigg Major, and Trigg Minor, but at the Conquest a redistribution was made in hundreds. These were Conarton, Fawiton, Pawton, Riatton, Stratton, Tibesta or Tibesterna, and Winneton. There may have been an Anglo-Saxon redistribution. But it was a rearrangement that did not last, and never commended itself to the people, and it is not easy now to ascertain what the limits were. Conarton was Penwith. Perhaps Tibesta was Powder and Winneton Kerrier. East and West composed one district of Wyvelshire.
Cornwall was first an Earldom, and then accordingly a County, but when raised to be a Dukedom it became a Duchy. It had two chief officers, the Earl and the Sheriff, the latter appointed by the crown.
The county was divided up into hundreds for administrative purposes. Each hundred was supposed roughly to contain a hundred free families. Each hundred had its own court, and every township its assembly under the reeve. But the tinners were under their own laws and officers, and their court, called the Stannary Court, sat formerly at Lostwithiel. Every manor also had its court.
All the hundreds of Cornwall, except Penwith, from time immemorial belonged to the Earls of Cornwall. The hundreds and Petty Sessional Divisions are now coextensive, and are as follows:--1. Hundred of East (Northern Division). 2. Hundred of East (Southern Division). 3. Hundred of Kerrier. 4. Hundred of Lesnewth. 5. Hundred of Penwith. 6. Hundred of Powder, East. 7. Hundred of Pyder, West. 8. Hundred of Pyder, East. 9. Hundred of Stratton. 10. Hundred of Trigg. 11. Hundred of West.
Cornwall formerly returned four county members in two divisions, but under the provisions of the "Redistribution of Seats Act, 1885," it now returns six members in six divisions. 1. The western or St Ives division. 2. The north-western or Camborne division. 3. The Truro division. 4. The Mid or St Austell division. 5. The south-eastern or Bodmin division. 6. The north-eastern or Launceston division. Under the provisions of the above-mentioned Act, the boroughs of Bodmin, Helston, Launceston, Liskeard, St Ives, and Truro were deprived of independent representation and merged in the county, and Penryn and Falmouth lost one member.
In 1877 the diocese of Truro, taken from that of Exeter, was formed, comprising the whole county of Cornwall, together with the parishes of Broadwood-Widger, Virginstow, Werrington, St Giles on the Heath, and North Petherwin, which are in the county of Devon. The Stannary Court is now at Truro, but its occupation is almost gone.
The Poor Law Unions are Bodmin, Camelford, Falmouth, Helston, Launceston, Liskeard, Penzance, St Austell, Redruth, St Columb, St Germans, Scilly Isles, Stratton, and Truro.
The County Council formed under the Local Government Act of 1888 consists of a chairman, aldermen, and councillors; but for the local government of the towns and parishes another Act was passed in 1894, and new names were given to the local bodies. In the large urban parishes the chief authorities are now entitled District Councils, while the smaller parishes have their Parish Councils or only Parish Meetings.
The county is in the western circuit; the assize and quarter sessions, which were formerly held at Launceston, a most inconvenient place for the purpose, being at the extreme limit of the county, are now held at Bodmin.
In Cornwall there are 223 civil parishes and the municipal boroughs are eleven, Bodmin, Falmouth, Helston, Launceston, Liskeard, Lostwithiel, Penryn, Penzance, Saltash, St Ives, and Truro.
The civil parishes and those that are ecclesiastical are not always conterminous. Of the latter there are 236. There are two Archdeaconries, Cornwall and Bodmin, and twelve deaneries, St Austell, Carnmarth, Kerrier, Penwith, Powder, and Pydar in the Archdeaconry of Cornwall, and Bodmin, East, Stratton, Trigg Major and Minor, and West in that of Bodmin. There is a Bishop at Truro and a suffragan who takes his title from St Germans.
=26. Roll of Honour.=
It would, perhaps, be invidious to say that Cornwall has produced men of more brilliant and varied achievements than any other county in England, but she can certainly show a very notable roll of honour. As might be expected from her geographical position, aided by good harbours, she has produced some great seamen who have done gallant service for England. At the head of these must come Sir Richard Grenville, hero of the _Revenge_, whose action off the Azores in 1591 has rendered him one of England's immortals. Trapped by the huge Spanish fleet off Flores, Sir Richard had many of his crew sick on shore, but declined to leave till they had been brought on board. The _Revenge_ engaged fifteen large Spanish men-of-war and stood at bay from three in the afternoon all through the night till the following morning, when the last barrel of powder was spent. Ralegh told of it, as did Gervase Markham in 1595, and Tennyson nearly 300 years later in the stirring lines:--
"Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came, Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame; Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame. For some were sunk and many were shattered, and so could fight us no more-- God of Battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?"
His grandson, Sir Bevil Grenville, "the Mirror of Chivalry," was a scarcely less notable warrior on land and fell in the Royalist victory of Lansdowne near Bath in 1643. Admiral Edward Boscawen, "Old Dreadnought," third son of Viscount Falmouth, distinguished himself at the taking of Cartagena and in the Cape Breton expedition, but his most memorable deed was the defeat of the French Toulon fleet in Lagos Bay in 1759. Captain Bligh, noteworthy as the captain of the _Bounty_, of which the mutiny is one of the most familiar tragedies of the sea, was perhaps in great measure the author of his own misfortunes, for he was a man of very overbearing temper, but his journey of 3618 miles in an open boat after having been set adrift with others by the mutineers was a remarkable feat. The Pellew family has added at least two names to the roll of distinguished sailors. Edward Pellew, when in command of the _Nymphe_, manned by Cornish miners, captured the French man-of-war _Cléopâtre_ under peculiarly gallant circumstances, the first of a series of brilliant exploits which led to his being created Baron Exmouth. Later, in 1816, he bombarded Algiers, reduced the Dey to submission, and put an end to the Barbary corsairs. His brother, Admiral Sir Isaac Pellew, commanded the _Conqueror_ at the battle of Trafalgar.
Cornwall being a land of mines has developed machinery and furthered invention in this direction. The most notable of the inventors she has produced is Richard Trevithick, who first made the high-pressure engine, and is still more remarkable as the early pioneer of motor traffic, putting his road locomotive on the Camborne highway on Christmas Day, 1801, and obtaining a speed with it of 12 miles per hour. In 1812 he laid before the Navy Board his invention for a screw propeller for ships, only to meet with a refusal. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, born in 1793, also ran steam-motors on the roads until they were forbidden by Act of Parliament, and the work of a lifetime and his fortune of £30,000 vanished into thin air. The oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and the steam-jet were invented by him. The wreck of H.M.S. _Anson_ on Looe bar with the loss of over 100 lives in 1807 had a great effect on one of the spectators, Henry Trengrouse, a Helston cabinet-maker, who thereupon invented the rocket life-saving apparatus and spent £3000--all his means--in experiments and in vain endeavours to induce Government to adopt the system. Another great benefactor to mankind was Sir Humphry Davy, the son of a poor gilder near Penzance. His safety-lamp he nobly refused to patent lest the sphere of its usefulness should be restricted, and he is fittingly honoured with a statue in his native town.
More than one distinguished traveller finds place among Cornish worthies. Richard Lander, the son of a Truro innkeeper (1805-34), stands at the head of them. He went with Clapperton to Sokoto and on his death took up his work, tracing the mouth of the Niger on a second expedition, and dying on a third at Fernando Po. Peter Mundy, born about 1596 at "Penrin, a pretty towne in Corne Wall," as he describes it, was one of the most remarkable travellers that the West of England has produced, whether in virtue of his long trading voyages to the Far East, or of his continental wanderings, of which he kept a not less careful record. James Silk Buckingham, who died in 1855, wrote eighteen books of travel, but was mainly noteworthy for his endeavours to do away with the monopoly of the East India Company.
Among statesmen must be noticed Sir John Eliot, born at Port Eliot in 1592, and at one time friend of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with whom he later broke, and taking up a strong line in the Parliament of 1628 against arbitrary taxation helped to force the Petition of Right from Charles. He was ultimately committed to the Tower, where he died three years later in 1632. To give an adequate sketch of the life of Sidney Godolphin would be to give the history of the times of Charles II, James II, William of Orange and Anne, with each and all of whom he was closely implicated. An extraordinarily able financier, his character was such as to permit him to serve either party indifferently. "Sidney Godolphin," said Charles, "is never in the way and never out of the way." Lord High Treasurer under Queen Anne, he was made Earl of Godolphin, only to be disgraced in 1710 and die shortly after.
Samuel Drew, the "Cornish Metaphysician," who was born at St Austell, had been a smuggler and a shoemaker in his earlier days, but developed into a Wesleyan preacher and became the author of an essay on the Immortality of the Soul. Of more normal mould was Humphrey Prideaux, born at Padstow in 1648, who wrote a _Life of Mahomet_, and _The Old and New Testament Connected_, which reached its 27th edition only a few years ago. He became Dean of Norwich and died in 1724.