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At a meeting of the Penzance Natural History and Anti quarian society on Friday evening, Mr. J. B. CORNISH read a most valuable and interesting paper on this subject, which he modestly called ** A note on the history of Cornish min ing.” He said the few facts which have collected in the short paper are no original discoveries. I take them from familiar sources and presume that they are all known to those who have made a study of the history of Cornish min ing. But I cannot find in any of the several summaries of that history, which have been written from time to time, that these facts have ever yet been put together in such a way as to show the conclusion to which they point. As they are facts they must carry weight and hope to be able to show you that,, taken together, they constitute a chapter which has been apparently overlooked. The first unquestionable historical record which we have of Cornish mining is the precept sent by Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was mana ging the kingdom during the absence of Richard I in Palestine in 1197, to the Sheriff of Devon. This pre cept appointed one William de Wrotham, as custos or warden of the Stannaries, for the purpose of enquiring into the weights in use and the duties which were paid to the King. William de Wrotham duly reported to head quarters, having made enquiry on the oaths of 26 jurymen at Exeter and of 18 at Launceston. Note of this that the precept was sent to the Sheriff of Devon, that the Devon Stannaries customs were explained by 26 witnesses while 18 were sufficient for Cornwall, and the examination of those 18 was conducted in the very east of the county. William de Wrotham further reported that in Devon the King received 30 pence on every thousand weight of tin and in Cornwall twice that amount, and yet Dr. Borlase tells us that at this time the tin farm of Cornwall amounted to only 100 marks or £ 66 13s. 4d., while in Devon it returned £ 100 per annum ; and Lysons, quoting Madox says that in 12135 the duty from Cornwall was 200 marks and from Devon £ 200. These are the same proportion That is the tin from Devon at half the duty produced more than that of Cornwall. In other words, Devon produced three times as much tin as Cornwall. In 1201 John granted to the tinners of Devon and Cornwall their first charter. By 1305 the tin trade, as measured by the King’s duty, had increased to about three times the amount of the century before and, from the fact that by the charter of Edward I. of that year the tinners of Cornwall were recognised as a separate body from those of Devon, I am led to conclude that the great bulk of the increase had occurred west of the Tamar. By that Charter Lostwithiel, Bodmin, Liskeard, Truro, and Helston were appointed the Coinage towns for Cornwall, and three of them as in the east of the county. More than 350 years passed away before the mining in West Penwith was of sufficient importance to enable Penzance to obtain a coinage charter. Either as part of the charter of Edward I, or soon after Cornwall was divided into the 4 stannary districts of Faymoor, Blackmoor, Tywarnhail and Penwith. These divisions were never accurately defined, but apparently Faymoor included the district be tween Launceston and Bodmin; Blackmoor, the country around St. Austell; Tywarnhail, St. Agnes and Truro, and Penwith, the whole of the western country. At this time Blackmoor seems to have been the most important of the four districts. We hear of the Lords of Blackmoor obtaining a charter from Edmund the son of Richard I, and at the convocation of tinhers, 2 James II, the stanna tors affirmed the ancient right and custom of the tithing men of Blackmoor to summon persons in the court without any writ of summons. Whatever this privilege was, it was apparently not enjoyed by the tithing men of the other divisions ; and the figures, which I will presently quote, show that Lostwithiel, the coinage town of Blackmoor, was at that time the chief centre of the industry. The dedica tion of Carew's survey tells us that Sir Walter Raleigh, a resident Devonshire man, was the Lord Warden of the stannaries in the reign of Elizabeth, and the records of Devon quarter sessions show us how jealously he guarded the privileges of the stannaries. The geographical distri bution of the mining was then apparently very different from what it has since become, and the figures published by Sir J. Maclean in the Journal K.I.C. (vol IV. p 190) lead to the same conclusion that from the commencement of the historical period the development of tin mining has pro ceeded from the East towards the West. Comparing the stannary roll of the year 1395 with those of each decade from 1577 to 1607, inclusive, he shows the following results :—In the year 1305 the total of tin coined at Bodmin and Lost withiel (Liskeard returning none) was 275 tons 6 cwt. ; of which 201 tons 1 cwt. were coined at Lostwithiel, while the total coined at Helston and Truro was only 111 tons 2 cwt. ; and of this Helston shared only 6 tons 2 cwt. ; Lost withiel, or the stannary of Blackmoor alone, returning nearly twice the quantity of the whole of the western half of the county. During the next 300 years it would seem that the tide of empire set its way westward, for in the year 1577 the eastern districts (Liskeard taking the place of Bodmin) returned 92 tons 16 cwt, against 530 tons 19 cwt, coined at Truro and Helston, Truro returning 12 tons 10 cwt more than Helston and Helston nearly twice as much as Lostwithiel, and in 1607 Helston comes at the top of the list, giving nearly 15 tons more than Truro and more than six times as much as Lostwithiel (202 tons 17 cwt. against 31 tons 2 cwt.) The change from the earlier figures is most striking and Sir J. Maclean points out that the average production of the two eastern Stannaries during the 40 or 50 years embraced by the account of the reigns of Elizabeth and James, which he had gone through, was 60 tons 11 cwt., as compared with 360 tons 8 cwt, the production of stannary districts of Tywarn hail and Penwith, and he adds that the ‘‘disparity was largely increasing every year by rapid decrease in the eastern district as well as increase in the western,” and all the more recent figures show an excess of the western over the eastern returns and of Cornwall over Devon. Taking the year 1870 I find the number of mines in the two western stannaries was 160, employing about 22,000 persons ; in the eastern stannaries the mines were 84, employing 6000 persons, while in the whole of Devon there were only 39 mines and 2600 parsons employed, and from the government returns for 1892 I see that the output of tin from Cornwall was 9205 tons and from Devon only 96 tons: West Cornwall produc ing 7751 and East Cornwall 628; the remainder coming from unspecified stream works. A very marked change indeed from the days when Blackmoor produced more than half of the total, or when Cornish mining was not of sufficient importance to be recognised distinct from Devon. These facts and figures, taken from historical documents and official returns, seem to show that the mining industry spread from the east westwards, gradu ally opening up the greater wealth of East and West Pen with. They throw a curious light on the legend of Jack the Tinkard, as told by Bottrell. You may remember that Jack, who came from Towednack and showed Tom and the other natives the stores of tin which the giants had left and taught them how to work it, at a time before watermills were in vented, ‘‘ was bred in a country more than a month's journey to the east, and many days’ travel from the river which divided Cornwall from the rest of the land. He never knew his father and the first circumstance he well remembered was living on the moors amidst the hills with a company of men, some called them giants, who Streamed for tin in these cold regions.’ He was brought up in a city in those parts, but having heard that there were rich tin lands in the west he had travelled down to try his luck. Mr. Spence Bate, in a paper before the Plymouth Institution, made use of the legend in explaining a stone enclosure known as Gum pound on Hameldon Hill, Dartmoor, and suggests Jack the Tinkard came from that country. It is curious that in the legend his arrival should have been celebrated by a week of games and feasting. And in the light of the fact which I have quoted it is possible that the legend stands for the fact that the mineral wealth of this district was first opened up by pioneers from the East. I don't draw any further conclusion nor do I attempt to fit these considerations with the general history of the trade, but I do say that no such history is complete which does not take them into consideration. The CHAIRMAN said the paper was a most excellent and interesting one and opened up a new field of thought for them. Hear, hear, Mr. TREGELLES said he noticed that Mr. Cornish pointed out that, in 1197, the production of tin in Cornwall, as re turned to government, was very small; Devon having returned three times the quantity. Did Mr. Cornish fancy that some of the Cornish tin did not pay the duty? They had had the character of being a smuggling county, and tin might have been included as, in those early days, the duty might perhaps have been looked upon as an unfair tax. On the other hand it was quite possible that tin might have gone through a period of deadness and, at the time it was taken notice of by the government, it might have fallen from its high estate and might not have had the importance it had afterwards. Might not the Cassiterides have included Devon as well as the Cornish promontory ?
Newspaper Details
Cornwall Cornishman
Cornwall, South West England, GB
Thu, Oct 26, 1893
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Charlie H.
USA 04 Feb 2026
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