Cornfield

“ We were so contented, and were making such progress in our sketch and distant view of Kynance over the now dry and smiling cornfield, that we had nigh forgotten the duties of civilisation, until some one brought the news that all the household was apparently dressing itself in its very best, to attend the rectory tea. We determined to do the same, though small were our possibilities of toilette.
"But what does it matter?" argued we. "Nobody knows us, and we know nobody." ”

“ The pale clear yellow of charlock, sharp and clear, promises the finches bushels of seed for their young. Under the scarlet of the poppies the larks run, and then for change of colour soar into the blue. Creamy honeysuckle on the hedge around the cornfield, buds of wild rose everywhere, but no sweet petal yet. Yonder, where the wheat can climb no higher up the slope, are the purple heath-bells, thyme and flitting stonechats.
The lone barn shut off by acres of barley is noisy with sparrows. It is their city, and there is a nest in every crevice, almost under every tile. ”

“ Orchards and cornfields ring with the hum of labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. ”

“ Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. ”

“ Cornwall liked the town. Its location on the river bank and the sloping foothills of Pine Mountain, the murmur of the river, and the quiet, practical lives of her neighbors, all fit into her idea of a place to live. The yard and garden of the place her son had purchased she found charming and in sweet concord with the river and the hills. She was not a critical woman, but all she could say in favor of the house was; "It is substantial and seemingly built to withstand the incursions of time." ”

“ The most important objects connected with the History of Cornwall, are its numerous Mines and Fisheries, and which for centuries past, have given employment to nearly one half of its inhabitants, and yielded a considerable revenue to government.
The Pilchard Fisheries, which are mostly confined to East and West Looe, Polparrow, Fowey, Charles Town, near St. Austell, Mevagissey, the Creeks of Falmouth Harbour, Mount’s Bay, on the southern coast, and St. Ives, on the northern coast, generally commence in July and end in November. ”

“ Agriculture.—About seven-tenths of the total area is under cultivation, but oats form the only important grain-crop. Turnips, swedes and mangolds make up the bulk of the green crops. The number of cattle (chiefly of the Devonshire breed) is large, and many sheep are kept; nearly 60,000 acres of hill pasture being recorded. As regards agricultural produce, however, Cornwall is chiefly famous for the market-gardening carried on in the neighbourhood of Penzance, where the climate is specially suitable for the growth of early potatoes, broccoli and asparagus. ”

“ Others again go to visit the Duchy and come away disappointed because they have not found exactly what they wanted or expected. They take small children to coast places of which they have only heard by name, and are dismayed to find there is no sand, no beach, no bathing—only hills steep as the blue slate-roofs; and a good deal in the "people's" part of the town, which is narrow, slatternly and disagreeable. But it is one of the traits of Cornwall that she embraces such wide variety and shows such startling contrasts close up against each other. ”

“ When we reach the top of the mountain we part company with the rivulet, thinking, with perhaps a sigh, what a vast advantage water has over people—it always goes down hill. Cornwall now begins to show its beauties. It seems to be a big village composed of splendid residences and elegant family hotels—or rather huge summer boarding-houses. Excellent roads run in all directions, up and down, turning now to the right and now to the left, until a stranger loses all idea of the points of the compass. ”

“ The sterile and rugged aspect of many parts of the county, (especially the road from Launceston to Truro, which presents, excepting the town of Bodmin, almost nothing but extensive and waste moors,) impresses the minds of travellers with a very unfavourable opinion of the county; but the admirers of the picturesque will always be delighted with the beauty of its numerous valleys and more cultivated parts. On the other hand, Cornwall, from its maritime situation, and the numerous mines with which it abounds, possesses many advantages. ”

“ The precept for electing members of parliament is thus directed: Majori et Burgensibus Burgi sui de Bodmin, &c.
This town, for number of inhabitants (as in Mr. Carew's time, 1602) far exceeds any other town in Cornwall; which is also privileged by its charter with keeping a weekly market on Saturdays, wherein is vended of all creatures both living and dead, corn, fish, and fowl, and all other things necessary for the life of man, in such great abundance, and at a moderate price, as the same equals if not exceeds the markets of Tavistock and Exeter, in Devon. ”

“ The south coast-line of Cornwall presents a great contrast to that of the north, except for the portion from the Land's End to Mounts Bay and the Lizard. We [42] have no more the wind-swept background of heights, barren and often tortured by miners, turned into a waste of heaps of rubble and studded with ruined engine-houses. We find instead a gentler sea-board, pierced by long estuaries, and with valleys of rich vegetation running down to the sea. We speedily leave the granite and the culm measures, and are among the rocks of the Devonian series, less stern and forbidding in colour. ”

“ Leaving the nut-tree, which is a real ornament to the town, we pass by a spring of water running into a large trough, in which many a country lad has been drenched for daring to enter the town on the 29th of May without the leaf or branch of oak in his hat.— (R. Hunt, F.R.S., Drolls, &c., Old Cornwall.)
The wrestlers of Cornwall and their wrestling-matches are still famous, and in the May of 1868 4,000 assembled one day on Marazion Green, and 3,000 the next, to see one. The wrestlers of this county have a peculiar grip, called by them “the Cornish-hug.” ”

“ Cornwall gives him diamonds! “In blackness and hardness they are far short of the Indian”—but there they are. He tops up a bumper basket down there with ambergris, garlic, pilchards, blue slate, and tin. Cornwall is easily his richest county, and next comes Cumberland, with pearls, blacklead and copper. Here are some poor ones: Dorset, “tenches,” pipe-clay, and hemp; Berks, “oakes, bark, trouts”; Bedfordshire, “barley, malt, fullers’-earth and larks”; slightly better are Bucks, with “beeves, sheep and tame pheasants”; Kent, “cherries, sainfoin, madder” ”

“ It is a clean, granite-built place, with a well-defined aristocratic air, and down the gutters of its principal streets, which are chiefly paved with granite setts and would thus be very noisy if there were more traffic, run clear streams of water. As an old county centre, the chief place of meeting for the landed and leisured families of Cornwall in the old days before railways, when Truro had a "season," and the society of Cornwall came hither to their "town houses" to indulge in its gaieties, the aristocratic air it keeps is by no means accidental. ”

“ There is no part of our native country of England so little known, no region so seldom trodden by the feet of the tourist or the traveller, as the middle moorland of old Cornwall. A stretch of wild heath and stunted gorse, dotted with swelling hills, and interspersed with rugged rocks, either of native granite or rough-hewn pillar, the rude memorial of ancient art, spreads from the Severn Sea on the west to the tall ridge of Carradon on the east, and from Warbstow Barrow on the north to the southern civilisation of Bodmin and Liskeard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Strikingly like Brittany in physical aspects, Southern and Western Cornwall is a land of the sea, of rolling plains and moorlands rather than of high hills and mountains, a land of golden-yellow furze-bloom, where noisy crowds of black crows and white sea-gulls mingle together over the freshly-turned or new-sown fields, and where in the spring-time the call of the cuckoo is heard with the song of the skylark. Like the Isle of Man, from the earliest ages Cornwall has been a meeting-place and a battle-ground for contending races. ”

“ Hals has adverted to the fertility of this parish, and noticed the production of twenty Cornish bushels, equaling sixty Winchester bushels, of barley on one acre. The parish certainly is very fertile, being situated on granite peculiarly abounding in felspar; but the Cornish acre, derived from the Saxon pole of eighteen feet, exceeds the Norman acre in the proportion of six to five, therefore the produce is reduced to fifty bushels.
It is much to be lamented that a variety of measures should remain in different parts of the United Kingdom. ”

“ In the year 1225 Henry III gave the whole county of Cornwall, in fee, to his brother Richard, who was created Earl of Cornwall by charter dated August 12th, 1231, and from that time Restormel became the property of the Earls of Cornwall. Afterwards, in 1338, when the Earldom was raised to a Dukedom, the charter of creation settled on the Duchy, with other manors, the castle and manor of Restormel, with the park and other appurtenances in the county of Cornwall, together with the town of Lostwithiel: and it was on record that the park then contained 300 deer. ”

“ Like those who have stolen and applied the green ointment, she [125] loses the sight of it by a blow from an angry pisky’s fist. She meets and recognizes the father at a fair where, as usual, he is pilfering, and foolishly asks after the welfare of mother and child. But all these stories in West Cornwall would be told of the “small people,” as well as the well-known “Colman Grey” (of course the name varies) , which relates how a farmer one day found a poor, half-starved looking bantling, sitting alone in the middle of a field, whom he took home and fed until he grew quite strong and lively. ”

“ This church, according to its bigness, is the finest, best-kept, pewed, or seated, that I know of in Cornwall; the rood-loft, (yet standing, though without a rood on it,) a most curious and costly piece of workmanship, carved and painted with gold, silver, vermillion and bice, is the masterpiece of art in those parts of that kind. The pews or seats are uniform, all made of blackt oak; and to prove their antiquity, there is yet extant an inscription on one of them, containing these words: 231 “These seats were built by the poor’s stock in the year 1525.” ”

“ The same author makes the statement that Truro fair, on November 19th, belongs to the proprietors of Truro Manor, as high lords of the town, and that a glove is hung out at this fair as at Chester; he also says that these same lords claim a tax called smoke-money from most of the houses in the borough.
In Cornwall the last sheaf of corn cut at harvest-time is “the neck.” This in the West is always cut by the oldest reaper, who shouts out, “I hav’et! I hav’et! I hav’et!” ”

“ As regards the soil, on the high grounds it is frequently very shallow and barren; but in the valleys it is very productive, and here and there is well wooded, more particularly on the southern coast. On the northern coast, in the vicinity of the sea, it is very sandy, owing to the light testaceous sand of the shore being carried inland by high winds; in this manner no inconsiderable tracts of fertile land have been devastated.
Let us now turn our attention to the internal or geological structure of Cornwall. ”

“ It seems as if all the foliage which ought to have grown on the Cornish moorlands, had been mischievously crammed into this place, within the narrow limits of one Cornish valley. Weeds, ferns, brambles, bushes, and young trees, are flourishing together here, thickly intertwined in every possible position, in triumphant security from any invasion of bill-hook or [Pg 238] axe. You win every step of your way through this miniature forest of vegetation, by the labour of your arms and the weight of your body. ”

“ The manuscript relating to this parish is lost.
TONKIN.
Lestwithiel is in the hundred of Powder, and is surrounded to the west, north, and south, by Lanlivery; to the east it has Fowy river between it and St. Winnow. As for the name, I take it to be a corruption of Les-uchel, i. e. the lofty place, as having been from all antiquity the chief seat of the Dukes, &c. of Cornwall. Mr. Camden in Cornwall saith, “the Uzella of Ptolemy is seated, and has not yet quite lost its name, being called at this day Lestuthiell, from its situation. Now uchel, in British, signifies the same as high and lofty.” ”