Thursday, November 16th.
Liskeard was visited in 1757 by John Wesley, who described it as "one of the largest and pleasantest towns in Cornwall," a description with which we agreed, but we were inclined to add the words, "and of no occupation," for there was no outward or visible sign of any staple industry. As in other similar places we had visited, the first question that suggested itself to us was, "How do the people live?" Their appearance, however, caused us no anxiety, as every one we saw looked both well and happy. They had made a clean sweep of their old castle, which was said to have been built in the thirteenth century by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and King of the Romans, the brother of Henry III; the site they had formed into a public park, in which stood the old grammar school where Dr. Wolcot was educated, who wrote a number of satirical odes, letters, and ballads, under the name of "Peter Pindar," in the time of George III, many of his satires being levelled at the king himself. Eventually he sold his works for an annuity of £250.
Liskeard was remarkable for the spring of water round which the town had been built, and which was described by Leland in his Itinerary as "a good conduit in the middle of the Town very plentiful of water to serve the Town." Four pipes originally conveyed the water to different points, and the street where the well existed was known as Pipewell Street.
The wells of Cornwall were famous, being named after the different saints who had settled beside them in ancient times, appreciating the value of the pure water they contained. We had often tested the water of the wells and springs we had come to in the course of our long walk, and the conviction had grown upon us that we owed much of our continued good health to drinking water. We naturally perspired a good deal, especially when we walked quickly, which of course created thirst; and the different strata of the various rock-formations we had crossed must have influenced the water and ourselves to some extent. We had come to the conclusion that people who went on holidays and attributed the benefit derived solely to "the change of air" might have equally benefited by the change of water!
In one part of Cheshire, formerly in possession of the Romans, there was a rather remarkable spring of water known as the "Roman Well," over which appeared the following Latin inscription, difficult to translate, but which had been interpreted thus:
Sanitate Sacrum: Sacred to Health!
Obstructum reserat, It removes obstruction.
Durum terit, It crushes the hard,
Humida siecat, It dries the moist,
Debile fortificat, It strengthens the weak,
Si tamen arte bibis. Provided thou drinkest with knowledge.
The water rises from some subterranean source in the sandstone rock and enters with considerable force into the receptacle prepared for it, which is about five feet deep. The water was always beautifully clear and cool, and visitors often amused themselves by throwing halfpennies into the bath and watching them apparently being transformed into shillings as they reached the bottom—a fact attributed to the presence of lime in the water.
In striking contrast to this was the water afterwards brought through the district from a watershed on the distant Welsh hills, which depended for its supply almost entirely on the downfall from the clouds. The difference between that and the water from the Roman well was very marked, for while the rainwater was very soft, the other that contained the lime was very hard, and therefore considered more conducive to the growth of the bones in children. Our personal experiences also with the water at Inverness, and in the neighbourhood of Buxton in the previous year, which affected us in a similar way, convinced us that water affected human beings very markedly; and then we had passed by Harrogate and Leamington, where people were supposed to go purposely to drink the waters. Even the water of the tin-mining district through which we were now passing might contain properties that were absent elsewhere, and the special virtues attributed to some of the Saints' Wells in Cornwall in olden times might not have been altogether mythical.
Besides the four Stannary towns in Devon there were originally four in Cornwall, including Liskeard, where all tin mined in their respective districts had to be weighed and stamped. Probably on that account Liskeard returned two members to Parliament, the first members being returned in 1294; amongst the M.P.'s who had represented the town were two famous men—Sir Edward Coke, elected in 1620, and Edward Gibbon, in 1774.
Sir Edward Coke was a great lawyer and author of the legal classic Coke upon Littleton. He became Speaker of the House of Commons, Attorney-General, and afterwards Chief Justice, and was the merciless prosecutor of Sir Walter Raleigh, and also of the persons concerned in the Gunpowder Plot; while his great speech against Buckingham towards the close of the career of that ill-fated royal favourite is famous.