Morval, a vicarage, stands in the King’s Book at £6. 14s. 9d.
The name of this parish signifies the Sea Valley, it being written anciently Morevale; not that I would from thence insinuate that the sea came up formerly to this place, though the same be not impossible. But as Morval may be interpreted the Mory or Fenny Valley, I rather take that to be the right.
THE EDITOR.
It is with much diffidence that I venture to approach the subject of etymologies, but it seems at least to be clear that Mr. Tonkin is mistaken. Val or Vale is not Cornish for a valley, but an inclosure. More, in its original signification is great, large, vast, whence figuratively it has acquired the substantive meaning of a widely extended tract of land; as the Sea is in English, called the Deep. I conjecture, therefore, that Morval may be The Enclosed Sea, in reference to the Loch, which gives names to the towns of East and West Looe; or, if the substantive and adjective are inverted, and More resumes its primitive sense, it may be The Large Inclosure.
Mr. Bond states, in his History of Looe, and of the neighbourhood, that the principal seat in this parish, and a place of the same name in Cumberland, belonged to Sir Hugh de Morville, “a foul disgrace to knighthood’s fair degree,” one of those villains who murdered Becket at the altar in Canterbury Cathedral; but the honour of Cornwall is not stained by the assassin’s birth. The manor of Morval passed in early times to the family of Glynn.
Mr. Bond has also preserved a very curious memorial of the lawless and unsettled state of Cornwall, and probably of all England, during the contests for plunder, glossed over by the fiction of adverse rights between two branches of the Plantagenets.
In the year 1471, John Glynn, esq. was barbarously murdered at Higher Wringworthy, in this parish, by several ruffians, employed by Thomas Clements, whom he had superseded in the office of Under-steward of the Duchy. In the preceding year he had been assaulted and grievously wounded in the face by the retainers of Clements as he was holding the King’s Court at Leskeard, and thrown into Leskeard prison, where he signed a compulsory obligation
not to prosecute. Some months preceding the murder, the retainers of Clements went to Morval, and plundered the house and premises of goods and chattels to the value of two hundred pounds and upwards, as then estimated. All this appears from the petition of Jane Glynn, the widow, to Parliament, which sets forth, that she could have no redress for these terrible outrages in the county of Cornwall, by reason of the general dread of the malice of Clements and his lawless gang; she prayed, therefore, that her appeal might be tried in London by a Cornish jury; and that, in default of Clements appearing to take his trial, he might be dealt with as convicted and attainted. Her petition was granted.
The words of Jane Glynn’s petition to Parliament are: