4. Significancy of the Tongue. Adam gave names to the creatures, according to their natures; but the people of this land, having no better guide, have given names upon long experience had, and much observation made of the nature of things, and those do mostly appear now as to places and families. I shall adventure upon some instances:

Lanceston, alias Dunhevet. Camden would fain have it to be Fanum Stephani; indeed St. Stephen’s, which is a mile off, seems to be the mother church, Lanceston the daughter church. Others would have it to be Lancelot’s Town, one of the Champion Knights of King Arthur, but that is further from truth. The Chief Justice Foster, talking with me about it, would fain have Dunhevet to be the most ancient name, from Dune a town, and Hevet above it, which there is accordingly. I told his lordship we must fetch the derivation higher, from the Cornish original (and not from the Saxon), and that is Leostofen, which is a place of large extent, or a broad end, which is properly so according to the situation thereof, at the broad end of the county, from whence it grows towards the west still narrower, like to the point of a wedge. I read in a good author, that Radulphus, brother to Alfius, Duke of Cornwall, was founder of Lanceston. I think he means the castle there, not the town.

The names of places above, and from those places downwards, have suffered much violence along the river from Devon side, by reason of the mutations formerly spoken of; but from thence we shall take notice of some that have received their names antiently, passing down the river of Tamar (and on some of the branches thereof) where, by the way, I may say I am astonished at some of our late Geographers, who, in enumerating the famous bridges in all this have omitted altogether ours in Cornwall, of which, among