Cornhill

“ The Cornhills were a family of farmers-general of the revenues of the counties south of London, and between 1164 and 1215, Gervase, Henry, Ralph, and Reginald de Cornhill, appear as sheriffs of Surrey and Sussex then combined. In this year, 1213, also one hundred deer, "damos et damas," were given from Guildford to the Archbishop of Canterbury to replenish his park. In 1214, 24th August, 53s. was allowed for the entertainment of the Papal legate, then on his way to revoke the Interdict. Rochester and Guildford Castles are mentioned together in this year as undergoing some repairs. ”

“ Early in the following year Adelaide Kemble married Edward John Sartoris. Though her career as a professional was now closed, Mrs. Sartoris was frequently heard in society, singing sometimes a Scotch ballad ‘as if inspired’ (cf. Bunsen, Memoirs, ii. 82) , and finding a new outlet for her genius in the writing of stories. The humour and freshness of ‘A Week in a French Country House’ was keenly relished when first published in ‘Cornhill,’ and in book form in 1867 ”

“ Mrs. Pratchett allotted him the room, and took his bag to it. He then went back before the fire, and fell a biting his nails.
“Waiter!” biting between the words, “give me,” bite, “pen and paper; and in five minutes,” bite, “let me have, if you please,” bite, “a”, bite, “Messenger.”
Unmindful of his waning soup, he wrote and sent off six notes before he touched his dinner. Three were City; three West-End. The City letters were to Cornhill, Ludgate-hill, and Farringdon Street. The West-End letters were to Great Marlborough Street, New Burlington Street, and Piccadilly. ”

“ The unfortunate fellow never recovered from the shock, but died in a lunatic asylum.” “A middle-aged Camborne man was subject to violent fits until two years ago, when some one told him to kill a toad, put one of its legs in a bag, and wear it suspended by a string around his neck. He did so, and has never had a fit since.”—Cornishman, December, 1881.
“In Cornwall a black cock is buried on the spot where the person is first attacked by epilepsy” (to avert a similar attack) .—Comparative Folk-Lore, Cornhill, 1876.
For other charms see Addenda, A Bundle of Charms, by the Rev. ”

“ The town thus began about the year 1100, was incorporated about 1130 perhaps, and was made a free borough (as we shall instantly see) before 1140.
In the reign of King Stephen, who came to the throne in 1135, and in the fifth year of it, or 1140, Lucy resigned up the possessions of the earldom; as then, “Reginald Fitzroy, who was one of the illegitimate sons of King Henry the First, was created Earl of Cornwall.” [8] Reginald was, therefore, invested with all that Lucy had possessed. ”

“ It is no uncommon thing for a Cornishman to build his own house, make his own shoes, be both fisherman and miner, and, possibly, small shop-keeper besides; and wherever the Cornish miner emigrates, he is pretty sure to take the lead in enterprise and danger.
Wilkie Collins says: "As a body of men they are industrious, intelligent, sober, and orderly, neither soured by hard work, nor depressed by harsher privations"; and the old poet Taylor, in 1649, writes: "Cornwall is the compleate and repleate Home of Abundance, for high, churlish hills and affable, courteous people. ”

“ In Cornwall everything is alive—the mine, the moor, the sea, the deep pools, the brooks, the groves, the sands, the caves; everything has its moan and harmony and inspiration. And the land under the sea, which is called Lyonesse by the poets, was a fairy zone, and some say it sank in the night, and some say other things harder to believe.
Cornwall under the sea has been there a long time. Some people, who like to be accurate above all things, say it disappeared in the year 1089, and contained 140 parish churches, and God wot how many chapels, and baptistries, and holy wells, and places. ”

“ Here in out-of-the-way places are relics of forgotten creeds and peoples, earthworks, amphitheatres, castles, the caves of smugglers, and the subterranean hiding-places of neolithic man. There is so much to interest, so much to see—almost too much it would seem, certainly too much for any one holiday; but Cornwall is a place to go to again and again, to go to till it seems as your own land, and its people have forgiven you for being a "foreigner."
This Cornish folk, clannish but kindly, has of late years been decreasing. ”

“ One of the charms of Cornwall is that it gives one the sense of being such an old country, as if things had gone exactly as they do now, not merely since the days of King Arthur, but for ever so long before then. The Romans, the Phœnicians, nay, the heroes of pre-historic ages, such as Jack the Giantkiller and the giant Cormoran, seemed to be not impossible myths, as we gradually quitted civilisation in the shape of a village or two, and a few isolated farm-houses, and came out upon the wild district known as Goonhilly Down. ”

“ Buryan in pursuance of his vow, when he returned victorious from the Scilly Isles. We get brilliant peeps in the legends of King Arthur; in the mysterious beehive huts and stone circles of a people who have vanished; in the whimsical tales of the early saints who scattered themselves so freely over the land on their arrival from Ireland; and we find hieroglyphic messages we cannot read in structures we call cromlechs and in the cliff-castles.
Small wonder that Cornwall is a land of legend and story, and that tales of fabulous men and wonder-working men abound. ”

“ Very little time was lost, even in the old days, when there was anything to tell, and Cornwall was the eye, and ear, and tongue.
The Dodman, the highest headland in the county, is one of those places of solitude where depression will not stay. Hour after hour one [Pg 260] may pass upon the bluff headland without seeing a human soul or hearing a human voice, and yet feel one's spirits elated in the silence. With a mere half-turn of the head one can see the whole Cornish coast, from the Lizard to the Rame, and beyond, and all the ocean traffic passing up and down. ”

“ A sheep-track—for no other visible path will render guidance along the moor—leads on to Kilmarth Tor, from the brow of which lofty crag the eye can embrace the expanse of the two seas which are the boundaries of Cornwall on the right and left. There, too, looms in the distance rocky Carradon, with the valley of the Hurlers at its foot. These tall shapes of granite, grim and grotesque, were once, as local legends say, nine bold upstanding Cornish men who disdained the Sabbath-day ”

“ However, this town belonged, temp. Hen. III. to Richard Earl of Cornwall, King Richard’s nephew, upon the death of whose son Edmund, it became part of the King’s demesne, and anno 7 Edw. III. upon the creation of John Earl of Cornwall, the King’s brother, he had this borough, inter alia, granted him; which was afterwards assigned to Edward the King’s son, when he was made Duke of Cornwall, and became, upon his death, the jointure or dowry of Joan Princess of Wales, his wife; on whose decease, anno 9 Ric. II. the King granted it to Tho. ”

“ Then, in the pauses of the solemn tolling of the funeral bells, sweet voices came from fairy-land welcoming him there, from whence one day he will return and again be king of Cornwall. No luck follows a man who kills a Cornish chough (a red legged crow) , as, after his death, King Arthur was changed into one.
“In the parish of St. Mabyn, in East Cornwall, and on the high road from Bodmin to Camelford, is a group of houses (one of them yet a smith’s shop) , known by the name of Longstone. ”

“ On this subject I do not venture to speak of the Cornish people generally. There may be important differences. I have been told that in the more easterly parts, particularly in mining districts, the people are not of so lively, friendly and communicative a disposition as in West Cornwall; but I assume that here, in Bolerium, we get the least mixed, the truer, Cornishman. Here it seemed to me that not only with regard to the æsthetic faculties, but in various other ways too, in mind and disposition, they are like children of a larger growth. ”

“ Now, in the fashion of her stateliness and in the hue and texture of her garments, there was none among the maidens of old Cornwall like Alice of the Combe. Men sought her far and near, but she was to them all, like a form of graven stone, careless and cold. Her soul was set upon a Granville’s love, fair Sir Beville of Stowe—the flower of the Cornish chivalry—that noble gentleman! ”

“ Cornish said feebly: "Oh, well...."
Before she willed it, she was telling him:
"He didn't. He didn't leave me," she cried with passion. "He had another wife." Incredibly it was as if she were defending both him and herself.
"Lord sakes!" said Cornish.
She poured it out, in her passion to tell some one, to share her news of her state where there would be neither hardness nor censure.
"We were in Savannah, Georgia," she said. "We were going to leave for Oregon—going to go through California. We were in the hotel, and he was going out to get the tickets. He started to go. Then he came back. ”

“ Tre-wer-gy, id est, the village or farm-town, the same, I suppose, in Domesday Roll, taxed by the name of Treworgan, being still the voke lands of an ancient barton and manor, which claims the royalty or liberty of fishing over the river and haven of Loo, by virtue of the grant thereof from the ancient Earls and Dukes of Cornwall in right of their honour, manor, borough, and castle of Liskeard, situate upon the same river, which place was the mansion of the ancient, worshipful, and gentle family of the Kendalls for many ages ”

“ The seeds of Puritanism sown by men like Orchard and Innes did not die, but lay germinating in the hearts of the Cornish people, rendering possible the great work of John Wesley a hundred years later. Such men succeeded in a great measure in destroying the pre-Reformation mechanical ideals of salvation in the hearts of the people, which prepared the way for the stirring of the dry bones in future years.
Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602, gives a vivid picture of the conditions of life in Cornwall prevailing during the period we have been considering in this chapter. ”

“ They held for a little space, and then out broke another mass that constitutes the Bodmin moors. It heaved to the surface again north of S. Austell, then was held back as far as Redruth and Camborne. A few more hooks remained firm, and then the garment gave way for the Land’s End district, and, finally, out of the sea it shows again in Scilly.
Or take it in another way. Cornwall is something like a leg. Let it be a leg vested in a grey stocking. That stocking has so many “potatoes” in it, and each “potato” is eruptive granite. ”

“ A good many of the Cornish boroughs had been so constituted in the reign of Edward VI by the Protector Somerset, that he might get his own creatures into Parliament. Such were Camelford, Mitchell, Newport, Saltash, West Looe, Bossiney, Grampound, and Penryn. Queen Mary raised S. Ives into a borough in 1550, and Elizabeth created six more to serve her own political purposes, S. Germans, S. Mawes, Tregony, East Looe, Fowey, and Callington.
Mitchell is a mere hamlet, and in 1660 the franchise was solemnly transferred from the inhabitants at large to nominees of the lord of the manor. ”

“ But though this aspect is the keynote of almost every advertisement, or at any rate every winter advertisement, it is by no means the most prominent or characteristic one of Cornwall, which appeals far more to the hardy than the weak. When I think of Cornwall the vision that comes before me is not that of sheltered sun-bathed balconies, but rather of a high wind making the breakers frill around the jagged bases of the cliffs, while above, amid the towans or sandhills covered with bent grass, the golf-balls fly. ”

“ Its situation, projecting as it does into the sea, by which it is washed on all sides but one, has naturally [4] caused the natives to take to the water, and has made Cornwall to be the mother of a hardy breed of fishermen and sailors. But the county being also rich in mineral wealth has from an early age caused a large portion of the manhood of the land to seek their livelihood in mines; and the peculiar conditions of Cornwall have thus determined the professions of a large proportion of its males to be either on the water or under ground. ”

“ The Bookworm said Cornwall was a bigger place than it looked, or than could be gripped between the arms of the Atlantic, because of the tributaries it sent all over the world, every man taking with him a bit of Cornish earth and love, and setting up a new colony beyond the seas, just as the old Greeks carried with them some of the fire from the ancient hearths. ”

“ To this Richard succeeded Edmund Earl of Cornwall, his son, who in the 3d year of the reign of Edward I. granted this whole burgh, with the rent of the same, &c. and toll of the market and fairs, and all fines, mulcts, and perquisites thereof belonging to him and his heirs, in fee farm, at the rent of £18 sterling; upon which conditions the said borough being leased to the townsmen, has remained in their hands ever since, and the corporation at present enjoy the profits of the fairs and markets, &c. which yield them about £200 per annum. ”

“ There is no virtue in the dead hand of a near relation. A curious old troth plight was formerly practised in Cornwall: The couple broke a wedding ring taken from the finger of a corpse, and each kept one half. The editor of a local paper (Cornishman) once obtained a piece of rope, with which a man was hanged, for a poor woman who had walked fourteen miles to Bodmin in the hopes of getting it, that she might effect the cure of her sore eyes. [154]
The Rev. S. Rundle writes that “a Cornish surgeon recommended a charmer as being more efficacious than himself in curing shingles. ”