But the antient name of this parish was Elerky, and so it is still called in the King’s Book, as it is too in Taxatio Benefic. 20 Edw. I. “Ecclesia de Elerky 10 lib. vicar’ ejusdem, xl. solid.” from the great
MANOR OF ELERKY.
In Domesday Book it is called Elerchi, which signifies the swan’s house or swannery; for Elerk in Cornish is a swan, and there are the remains of a large pool under the house, which seems to have been designed to that end.
It is in the said book inserted among the manors given by William the Conqueror, to his half-brother Robert Earl of Morton and Cornwall.
Francis Tregian, esq. among the rest of his estates, forfeited his half of this manor.
WHITAKER.
The original name of this parish was the same with the name of the manor Elerchi, or Elerky; that the appellation of the manor in Domesday Book, this in the present time, and both derived from the manerial house. This house stood upon a rising ground, nearly opposite to the church, and on the west of it, which is now covered with several houses of a mean condition, and yet marked as something considerable to the eye, by a grove of tall trees upon it. The great house, which the ancestors of these trees shaded, has been long down, I suppose; and the mean houses on the ground have been constructed of the poorest remains of it. It was bounded on the south by the lane leading down
to its own mills, still called Elerky Mills, and distinctively noted as higher and lower; and on the east and north by its lively brook, without a name, that divides the glebe from the manor, then environs the house, and finally runs to the two mills below. The manor is accordingly noticed so late as the 5th of Charles the First, to have two mills within it. These mills even now proclaim their original relation to each other, by the restrictions which the higher is under to the lower, in not being able to keep up the water from the other, beyond a certain space of time. And the house thus environed by the brook could not have been very small, as it was the mansion of a district, which in the 12th of Edward the First was reckoned at forty-two acres, when so many are valued in much less, and when so few are valued in more; but whence is the original name of this house derived? Mr. Tonkin derives it from Elerk (C.) a swan, and makes Elerky to signify the swannery, adding, that “there are the remains of a large pool under the house, which seems to have been designed to that end.” In all that part of antiquarian researches where the eye is to be assisted by the imagination, and the past to be collected from the broken appearances of the present; every active and lively mind is apt to cry out against the creative fancies of the antiquarian poet, and to exclaim in the language of Shakspeare,
—— As imagination bodies forth
The form of things unseen, the Poet’s pen