Cornish Worthies: Sketches of Some Eminent Cornish Men and Families, Volume 1 (of 2)Tregellas, Walter H. (Walter Hawken)
History
Cornish Worthies: Sketches of Some Eminent Cornish Men and Families, Volume 1 (of 2)
Tregellas, Walter H. (Walter Hawken)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography
She long survived even her third husband; and retiring, as it is
believed, to Week St. Mary, by her will, made in 1510, left goodly sums
of money to the home of her childhood. She directed that the 'chauntry
with cloisters' (to which reference has already been made) should be
built there; and that a school should be founded for the children of
the poor.[68]
If Mr. Hawker's testimony is to be accepted, she also left, by a
codicil to her will, and in memory of an early love affair, to the
priest of the church, where she knew her cousin John Dineham would
serve and sing, 'the silver chalice gilt, which good Master Maskelyne
had devised for her behoof, with a little blue flower which they do
call a "forget-me-not," wrought in Turkess at the bottom of the bowl.'
But Mr. Hawker's mind was always full of graceful fancies; and he has
in this case undoubtedly drawn upon his imagination for his facts.
Carew is a more reliable if less poetic authority. He says: 'And to
show that virtue as well bare a part in the desert, as fortune in the
means of her preferment, she employed the whole residue of her life
and last widowhood to works no less bountiful than charitable; namely,
repairing of highways, building of bridges, endowing of maidens,
relieving of prisoners, feeding and apparelling the poor, etc. Among
the rest, at this St. Mary Wike she founded a chantry and free-school,
together with fair lodgings for the schoolmasters, scholars, and
officers, and added £20 of yearly revenue for supporting the incident
charges: wherein, as the bent of her desire was holy, so God blessed
the same with all wished success; for divers of the best gentlemen's
sons of Devon and Cornwall were there virtuously trained up, in both
kinds of divine and human learning, under one Cholwel, an honest and
religious teacher, which caused the neighbours so much the rather, and
the more to rue, that a petty smack only of popery opened the gap to
the oppression of the whole, by the statute made in Edward VI.'s reign,
touching the suppression of chanteries.'
FOOTNOTES:
[67] According to Dr. Borlase, 'the sheep in Cornwall in ancient times
were remarkably small, and their fleeces so coarse that their wool
bare no better title than that of _Cornish hair_, and under that name
the cloth made of that wool was allowed to be exported without being
subject to the customary duty paid for woollen cloth. When cultivation
began to take place, and the cattle to improve in size and goodness,
the Cornish had the same privilege confirmed to them by grant from
Edward the Black Prince (first Duke of Cornwall after the Norman
Conquest), in consideration of their paying four shillings for every
hundredweight of white tin coined. The same privilege of exporting
cloth of Cornish manufacture, duty-free, was confirmed to them by the
twenty-first of Elizabeth.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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