“This church was founded and endowed by King Athelstan, about the year 930, after such time as he had conquered the Scilly Islands, as also the county of Devon, and made Cornwall tributary to his sceptre. To which church he gave lands and tithes of a considerable value for ever, himself becoming the first patron thereof, as his successors the kings of England have been ever since; for which reason it is still called the royal rectory, or regal rectory, and the royal or regal peculiar; signifying thereby that this is the church or chapel pertaining to the king, or immediately under the jurisdiction of him, as the supreme ordinary from whom there is no appeal; whereas other peculiars, though exempt from the visitation or jurisdiction of the diocesan bishop within whose see they stand, yet are always subject to the provincial Archbishops of Canterbury and York, or other persons.
“This church or college consisted of canons, Augustines or regular priests, and three prebendaries, who enjoyed the revenues thereof in common, but might not marry; and the lord chancellors of England of old visited this peculiar—which extended only over the parishes of Burian, Sennen, and St Levan—for the king.
“One of the Popes of Rome, about the time of Edward III., obtruded upon this church, the canons and prebends thereof, a dean to be an inspector and overseer over them,—whom he nominated to be the Bishop of Exon for the time being,—who for some time visited this church as its governor, as the lord chancellor did before; which encroachment of the Pope being observed by Edward III., as appears from the register of the writs, folio 40 and 41, 8 Edward III., rot. 97, this usurpation of the Pope was taken away.”
WOEFUL MOOR, AND BODRIGAN’S LEAP.
The Bodrigans, from a very early period, were connected with the borough of Looe. Otto, or Otho de Bodrigan, was lord of the manor of Pendrim and Looe in the reign of Edward II. Another Otho de Bodrigan was Sheriff of Cornwall in the 3d of Richard II., A.D. 1400.
Sir Henry Bodrigan was “attaynted for taking part with King Richard III. against Henry VII.; and, after flying into Ireland, Sir Richard Egecombe, father of Sir Pears Egecombe, had Bodrigan, and other parcels of Bodrigan’s lands; and Trevanion had part of Bodrigan’s lands, as Restronget and Newham, both in Falmouth Haven.”
On the Barton of Bodrigan there exists what are evidently the remains of ancient fortifications, and near them a piece of waste land known as the Woeful Moor.
Here Sir Henry Edgecombe and Trevanion defeated the great Bodrigan. He fled, and tradition preserves, on the side of the cliff, the spot known as Bodrigan’s leap, from which he leapt into the sea, and swam to a ship which kept near the shore. As he leapt the precipice, he bequeathed, with a curse, “his extravagance to the Trevanions, and his folly to the Edgecombes.”
These families divided between them an estate said to be worth, in those days, £10,000 per annum.
“At that period in our history when the law of the strongest was the rule, three families in Cornwall were engaged in a series of domestic wars; these were Bodrigan, Trevanion, and Edgecumbe. And when Richard the Third obtained sovereign power, on the division which then took place in the York faction, Bodrigan endeavoured to seize the property of Edgecumbe, with little respect, as it would seem, for the life of the possessor; but in the final struggle at Bosworth Field, where Henry Tudor put an entire end to this contest for power under the guise of property, by seizing the whole to himself, Trevanion and Edgecumbe had the good fortune to appear on the winning side, and subsequently availed themselves to the utmost of belligerent rights against Bodrigan, as he had attempted to do before against them. The last of that family was driven from his home, and seems to have perished in exile. His property was divided between the two families opposed to him, and, after the lapse of three hundred and fifty years, continues to form a large portion of their respective possessions.”—Gilbert, vol. iii., p. 204.