Product Description
This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1871. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER III. LANSALLOS. It is a pleasant, though perhaps an unprofitable employment to speculate on what may have been the ancient condition of a place, concerning which, few or no memorials of any antiquity are found to exist. Yet he must have a very laggard fancy who has not found himself attempting to pierce the mists, however dark, which hang over the history of the spot on which his life has been passed; peopling the familiar hills and vales with the men of former times, and entering into their habits and usages as dimly shadowed forth by the fragments which time has left to him. I shall, however, here only deal with simple facts, although I may be permitted to think that the little fishing-town of Polperro, though it has no records of past, or pretensions to present importance, may have had an existence as an inhabited place at a time anterior to the date of many of those larger towns, whose magnificent ports give shelter to the ships, which are at once the glory and safeguard of Britain. Our British forefathers probably found these small, but commodious creeks, best adapted to their rude skiffs. But we have something more than conjecture to show that this place was a considerable village, in Saxon and Norman times. In those days the thane or lord resided in his castle or other house, having inherent sovereignty over his domain and its peasantry, whilst in the neighbourhood was the village where dwelt that portion of the community then known as ceorls or villains engaged in the necessary husbandry and other occupations, law-worthy, but in a condition which rendered them almost a portion of the soil they tilled. Now within a small circuit of Polperro we have the separate manors of Killigarth, Talland, and Trelawne on the one hand, and of Rafiel and Lansallo...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
