[Car or Cair is a fort, and voza and voran are the plural of voz or vore, a ditch (see Pryce’s Vocabulary). Corvoza would therefore be the entrenched fort. Ed.]
THE EDITOR.
The church at Probus is large, but not remarkable for any thing beyond other churches in the neighbourhood. In it are some monuments, and especially one to Mr. Thomas Hawkins of Trewithon, sometime member for Grampound, who died in 1766. This gentleman not having passed the small-pox, and resolving on being inoculated, thought it was his duty to extend the same benefit to all his neighbours in the parish. Several scores had in consequence this dreadful disease communicated to them in its mitigated form, and all recovered except the benevolent individual himself, who thus extensively introduced inoculation, at that time a novelty in Cornwall among the great mass of the people. He is supposed to have carried too far the asthenic system for counteracting fever, and perhaps to have taken the contagion, in what is termed the natural way, previously to the artificial communication.
Although the church is not superior to others around it, the tower is on the whole more magnificent than any other
in the county. The tower at Weck St. Mary, near Stratton, is said to be somewhat more lofty; and several exceed that at Probus in elegance and lightness of proportions, but this combines massiveness, altitude, and elaborate decoration; moreover, it has been built since the Reformation, and according to tradition, by the voluntary contributions of the unmarried inhabitants of the parish; but the same is said of a lofty tower at Derby; and of the windows of St. Neot’s Church, one is given by the unmarried men, and another by the single women of that parish.
It is quite clear that this church was collegiate, having a dean and a certain number of prebendaries, founded in very early times before the Norman Conquest, and probably by St. Edward. The Deanery became attached with its share of the endowments to the Church of Exeter, but in a way which Mr. Whitaker himself has not succeeded in clearly making out. The prebendaries or some of them remained till the general dissolution, when the prebends were given or sold, and have passed through the Williams’s, by purchase to the Hawkins family, with some fairs. One fair, however, is the grant of King Charles the Second. Few gentlemen’s houses in the west of Cornwall were without the honour of receiving Prince Charles during his residence in Cornwall, about the middle part of the civil wars; and he is said to have remained for a time longer than usual with Mr. Williams, who, after the Restoration, waited on the King with congratulations from the parish; and on being complimented by him with the question whether he could do any thing for his friends, answered that the parish would esteem themselves highly honoured and distinguished by the grant of a fair, which was accordingly done for the 17th of September; this fair coming the last in succession after three others, has acquired for itself a curious appellation derived from the two patron saints, and from the peculiar pronunciation in that neighbourhood of the word last, somewhat like laest:—
Saint Probus and Grace,
Not the first but the last,
—and from this distinction it is usually called Probus and Grace fair.