The oldest written documents dealing with the life of the people of
Breage in the past are contained in William the Conqueror's Domesday
Book. The Domesday Book contains a general survey of all the land in
England, which William the Conqueror caused to be made after his
usurpation of the English throne in 1066. This book contains the
description of four manors in the Parish of Breage, Metela, Rentis, or,
as we call them, Methleigh and Rinsey, and the two smaller manors of
Tregew and Trescowe. The following is what we read concerning them. "The
Bishop has one manor which is called Metela[17] (Methleigh) which Bishop
Leofric held in the time of King Edward, and it rendered tribute for one
hide, but yet there is a hide and a half. Fifteen teams can plough this.
Thereof the Bishop has half a hide and one plough in demesne, and the
villeins one hide and eight ploughs. There the Bishop has fifteen
villeins and four bordars and three serfs and three cows and twenty
sheep and sixty acres of underwood and forty acres of pasture. Of this
manor the Count of Mortain has a yearly market, which Bishop Leofric
held in the time of King Edward." "Ulward holds of the Count one manor,
which is called Rentis, and therein is one hide of land. Twelve teams
can plough this. Ulward and his villeins have there one plough, one cow
and thirty sheep, and eight coliberts and four serfs and of pasture half
a league in length and the same in breadth." Attached to the manor of
Rentis or Rinsey the Count of Mortain had in demesne a quarter of a hide
of land; this portion was probably tilled by the Count's steward or
agent. "The Count has a manor which is called Trescowe, which Alnod held
in the time of King Edward and still holds of the Count, and it paid
tribute for the 1/16 of a hide. Three teams can plough this. Thereof
Alnod has 1/48 part of a hide in demesne, and the villeins the remaining
land and one plough. There Alnod has three bordars and one serf and
three acres of wood and 100 acres of pasture." "The Count has one manor
which is called Tregew, which Brismar held in the time of King Edward.
There is one quarter of a hide of land and it paid tribute for 1/16 of a
hide. Three teams can plough this. Heldric holds this of the Earl, and
has in demesne 1/32 of a hide and one plough, and the villeins have the
remaining land and one plough. There Heldric has six bordars and two
serfs and forty sheep and forty acres of pasture."
The manors were grants of land made by the king to noblemen, or as they
were then called thanes. As a return for this gift of land the thane had
to go to the wars with the king and fight for him when the king desired
his services, and also he had to give assistance in the building of the
king's castles and strongholds. The land on a Saxon manor was dealt with
in two ways; part of it was held and cultivated by the thane himself,
this was called demesne land, and the other portion of it was cultivated
by the thane's tenants, who were called villeins. The villein would
usually hold a strip of land called a virgate, possibly equal to about
thirty acres. The thane provided him with two oxen and one cow and seed
sufficient for seven acres of land for each of the thirty acres or
virgates that he held. The villein or tenant was not a free man and
could not leave the manor without the consent of his lord, and in
transfers of manors the villeins passed with the land. They paid tribute
to their lord both in money and in the produce of the land they
cultivated; also on certain days in each week, according to the season,
they had to give their labour free on the land cultivated by the lord or
thane. Below these larger villein holders came a class called coliberts,
cottars or bordars, who held about five acres of land each. These
inferior tenants had to work for their lord without wage on each Monday
throughout the year and three days each week during the period of
harvest. Below these again were the serfs who worked on their lord's
demesne; they were slaves bought and sold in the market and often
exported from English ports across the sea as part of the commercial
produce of the country. Most of us are familiar with the story of Pope
Gregory the Great, who, walking in the Roman slave-market, saw a number
of fair-haired Saxon slave boys exposed for sale, and who, seeing these
children, vowed to do his best for the conversion of their country to
Christianity. On the Breage manors it is more than probable that the
slaves would not be Saxons but Celts. Many of the manor slaves were
slaves from birth, but it also seems not to have been an uncommon
practice for free men to sell themselves into slavery under the pressure
of want.
The cultivated land round each ancient Saxon manor village was marked
off according to the custom of the time into three enormous unfenced
fields. Each householder in the village above the rank of slave had a
greater or less number of strips or shares in each of these three
fields. When the time for ploughing came round, as no villager possessed
a team of eight oxen--the number required to draw the primitive Saxon
plough--the team for the general ploughing was contributed jointly by
the villagers. The advantage of this system will therefore be obvious.
Custom decreed further that each year one of these great open fields
held in strips by the villagers should lie fallow; that another of them
should be sown with oats or rye; and a third should be sown down with
barley. Some of this last crop would be used for bread, but we fear
that a great deal of it would be devoted to drink, for the Saxons were
men who loved to drink themselves drunk, probably ascribing the ill
effects of the beer, enhanced no doubt by the relaxing climate, to
anything but the right cause. Not content with a large supply of beer,
the Saxons impressed the honey bee into the service of Bacchus, and
manufactured from honey great quantities of mead. It is probable that in
a seaboard parish like Breage, fish would be a staple article of diet;
from the smallness of the number of live stock on the manors, flesh can
only have been a rare article of diet, possibly enjoyed by the bounty of
the lord of the manor on the great festivals of the Church.[18]
The vast mass of the country at this period was wild, uncultivated and
uninhabited. Such would be the condition of the greater part of the
Parish of Breage in Saxon times. The valleys would be filled with a
thick undergrowth, their beds forming impassable swamps, whilst the
higher ground would be more or less covered with furze and scrub, in
which wolves would make their lairs, preying upon the flocks and from
time to time carrying off a child that had strayed too far from the
parental hut of clay.
The land measure called a hide made use of in the Domesday record is
supposed to have contained 120 acres;[19] a virgate was the term used
for a quarter of a hide or thirty acres. The virgate was again divided
into quarters, called ferlings, of 7-1/2 acres each. We must not
confound this word ferling with our present word "furlong," which
originally meant the longest furrow which it was deemed possible a team
of oxen could plough without stopping, viz., 220 yards.
Unfortunately Domesday is silent with regard to mining matters, and
consequently we can gather nothing as to the nature of the mining
carried on in our Parish in Saxon times. There can be no doubt that
mining of an elementary character was carried on, but of its extent and
the number of those engaged in it, it would be rash to theorise. Knowing
nothing therefore of the number of the population engaged in mining we
can form no approximate estimate of the local population, but at any
rate we may conclude that it cannot have been great. The bordars and
slaves mentioned on the four manors only come to twenty-eight; on the
largest of the manors, Metela or Methleigh, there were fifteen villeins;
the number of villeins on the other three manors is not stated--simply
the fact that there were villeins; but as Methleigh was about the size
of the other three manors put together we may conclude these manors also
possessed in all about fifteen villeins. This would give us a total of
sixty-one villeins, bordars and serfs enumerated; if we multiply this
number by five for the women and children of their respective families,
it gives us a total agricultural population for the parishes of Breage
and Germoe of three hundred and five, with eighteen teams of oxen, four
cows, and ninety sheep. It is interesting to notice that the live stock
were enumerated before the slaves, presumably because they were the more
valuable.
The houses or huts in which the Cornish villeins, bordars and serfs
lived on the Saxon manors would be composed of clay, with a hole in the
roof to let the smoke out; their inhabitants from constantly sitting in
the smoke suffered greatly from diseases of the eyes; of sanitation
there was none, and human life was exceedingly short. This condition of
things practically continued in Cornwall to the end of the Tudor period
as we gather from the picture of Cornish life given to us by Carew in
his "Survey of Cornwall" written in the reign of Elizabeth.
Compelled by law to live on the manor on which they were born and to
give a great part of their labour free to their lord, the lives of the
ancient inhabitants of Breage, judged at any rate by our standards,
must have been dull and hard indeed.
Each manor had its own court for the trial of cases which concerned only
persons living on the manor; this court was under the presidency of the
baron or thane, assisted by ten freemen. Where the freemen were not to
be found, as in our Breage manors, cases were tried by the Court of the
Hundred in which the manor was situated. The Court of the Hundred also
tried suits in the case of the larger manors which involved people
living in two or more different manors.[20]
From the legal view of things we naturally pass to matters
ecclesiastical. In approaching this view of the life of our parish in
Saxon times it is interesting in the first place to note that the Manor
of Rinsey formed part of the great Manor and Hundred of Wilmington,
which comprised a large portion of the Lizard district, including Cury
and Gunwalloe. We have here a hint as to the reason why Breage, Cury and
Gunwalloe have always been ecclesiastically one until recent times, as
roughly they formed a considerable part of the Hundred of Winnington.
It was natural that this large Manor should be regarded as an
ecclesiastical unit. We find this unity complete in the earliest extant
ecclesiastical document, dated 1219, given in the Patent Rolls, and it
seems natural to conclude that this unity dates from the foundation of
the Saxon Manor. Breage was an [21]"ecclesia," Cury and Gunwalloe were
"Capellæ" in the _Inquisitio Nonarum_ of 1346; in other words there was
only one parish with several chapelries. Most probably in the Saxon
period the collegiate system prevailed in our part of Cornwall, and
Breage may have performed for the western half of the Meneage Peninsula
what St. Keverne did for the eastern half. We find mention of the Canons
of St. Keverne, but there is no record of the Canons of Breage.
The Bishop Leofric referred to in the account of the Manor of Methleigh
became first Bishop of Cornwall and Crediton in 1046; in the same year
the title of the See was changed, and Leofric became the first Bishop of
Exeter. Possibly the Manor of Methleigh, which thus passed to the See of
Exeter, had originally been a portion of the settlement of Breaca which
had passed to the Bishops of Bodmin or St. Germans on the reorganization
of the Church in Saxon times on continental lines. There had been
Cornish Bishops in full communion with the See of Canterbury from 865,
governing their Sees from either Bodmin or St. Germans.
The Earl or Count mentioned in the extracts from Domesday was Robert,
Earl of Cornwall, and Count of Mortain in Normandy. He was the bastard
half-brother of William the Conqueror. The Earls of Cornwall to all
intents and purposes within the bounds of the earldom were reigning
princes. The earldom was not hereditary; a special creation took place
at the death of each Earl, or in case of the earldom having been
forfeited through rebellion. Earl Robert obtained enormous spoils from
his half-brother William on his conquest of England; some idea of the
plunder thus obtained may be gathered from the fact that in Domesday we
find him possessed of 797 manors in various counties.
After this brief record of our Parish and its Manors to be found in
Domesday, its history is again utterly lost in impenetrable obscurity
for 250 years, when documents, especially of an ecclesiastical nature,
became more frequent, and the main outline of its story becomes much
clearer.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] This ancient Manor of Methleigh was much bigger than the present
estate of Methleigh. It most probably comprised a large portion of the
present district of Kenneggie. This conclusion finds interesting support
from the names of two fields in Kenneggie, viz. the "Sentry" or
"Sanctuary Field" and "Church Field." It may be added that the Manor of
Methleigh passed from the Bishops of Exeter to the Dean and Chapter of
Exeter, and by them was alienated from the Church.
[18] For the conditions of life on Anglo-Saxon Manor see Seebohm's
"Village Communities."
[19] The exact size of the ancient Cornish acre is unknown.
[20] Inderwick's "The King's Peace."
It is fair to add that the Rev. T. Taylor informs me:--"An examination
of the Court Rolls given by Maitland makes it evident that where there
were few freemen, the villeins were suitors at the Court, and that it is
impossible to say that the absence of the former drove the villeins to
the Hundred Court."
[21] In the _Inquisitio Nonarum_ of 1346 the phrase "ecclesia Sanctae
Bryacae cum capellis Sanctorum Correnti Wynyantoni et Gyrmough" occurs.
From the Norman Conquest to the Reformation.