There can scarcely be a doubt of this parish, Landewednack, and some chapels, being dedicated to one of the Missionaries from Ireland.
Towednack, like most of the districts situated on granite, exhibits a strange and almost unaccountable mixture of cultivated and of unreclaimed soils. On one side of a fence may be seen land producing abundance of grass and excellent for daisies, or bearing ample crops of barley, and of clover hay and on the other side, an inclosed waste, named throughout Cornwall a croft, producing nothing better than
the species or variety of furze, Ulex Nanus, and some of the most coarse grasses.
This parish has been productive of much tin near the surface; but a wide stripe of granite nearly resembling that of St. Stephen’s in Brannel, extends from the parish of Zennor through Towednack, and thence into Ludgvan, including Castle-an-Dinas, which Mr. Hals by mistake places in this parish. Its course is distinctly marked by the absence of all bolder rocks from the surface, and in some places it has been wrought for china clay, found quite equal in quality to that near St. Austell, but occurring in layers of but little breadth, and therefore expensive to pursue. This soft granite, called by the miners whetstone, permits the lodes to continue their courses through it from the hard and crystallized granite, but the tin in a great measure disappears at a trifling depth.
There is little connected with Towednack of any curiosity, that does not refer to the Editor and his family.
I am possessed of a manor still extending into five parishes, of which the vokeland, to use Mr. Hals’s term, was Amellibrea in this parish. It has descended to me from the Noyes, and particularly from my direct ancestor William Noye, the Attorney-General. I have the Court Rolls in complete succession for nearly three centuries. On these Rolls the names of Godolphin, Grylls, Mahun, Praed, St. Aubyn, Veal, occur with others as free tenants, and a great number of persons held by copy of Court Roll.
At Amellibrea are the remains of an extensive foundation said by tradition to have formerly supported a prison.
But the free tenants have been lost, and the copyholds converted into leases for life, as indeed has been the case generally over Cornwall, with the exception of ecclesiastical property; the copyholds not being renewable on the payment of a fine not exceeding two years’ value, as is the custom over most parts of England, but dependent wholly on the pleasure of the lord. The tenures were therefore in themselves much the same; and as I remember to have heard, the tenants preferred chattle property, as they termed
it, to copyhold, in consequence probably of the uniform rules of succession and the facility of disposing by will.
The last copyhold that appears on the Rolls was in the very beginning of the last century.