Trewardreth is in the hundred of Powder; for the name, it signifies
the village or the house upon the sand. It is a vicarage, not valued
in the King’s Book, as having been but lately endowed; the late
incumbent was Mr. May, likewise Rector of St. Mewan, who died this
year (1732).
In the year 1291, 20th Edward I. the rectory of this church was valued
at £5. 6_s._ 8_d._ being appropriated to the priory here; and the
vicarage at 13_s._ 4_d._
In 3 Henry IV. William de Campo Arnulphi [or Champernoun] held here
one fee, from whom the prior held three acres and a half in the same.
There are what are still called the priory lands. But to go further
back, as Robert de Cardinam was the founder of this priory in the time
of Richard the First, according to Bishop Tanner in his Notitia
Monastica, this must be one of the seventy knight’s fees, which the
said Robert held in this county, 6th Richard I. who by consequence
must then have been lord of this manor. In Domesday Book it is, by the
name of Tiwardrai, numbered among the manors which William the
Conqueror gave to Robert Earl of Morton, when he made him Earl of
Cornwall.
Leland says of this place, Tywardreth, “A praty town, but no market,
lieth a quarter of a mile from the east side of the bay; there is a
parish church, and there was a priory of black monks, a cell sometime
to a house in Normandy. Some say Campernulphus was founder of this
priory; some say that Cardinham was founder. Arundell of Lanherne was
of late taken for the founder.
“I saw a tomb in the west part of the church of this priory, with this
inscription:
Hæc est Tumba
Roberti filii Wilhelmi.
“This Robert Fitz William was a man of fair lands, tempore Edwardi
tertii Regis Angliæ.”