I ought to pay the Duke of Cornwall five-and-twenty pennies every year; but in these prosaic times my agent sends a postal-order to the Duchy office instead, and usually sends 12_s._ 6_d._ to settle it for six years at once. I have to pay these pennies as owner of Hurston for certain privileges it has upon the moor; and the payment is called Venvill. One finds “fines villarum” in an Inquiry held at Lydford on 19 June 1382, and “certos annuales redditus vocatos _fyn de vile_” in an Inquiry held at Chagford on 23 September 1388: so Venvill must mean Fines from Vills. Fine only means a payment that has been definitely fixed, and does not mean a penalty here. Vill is the same word as village, but with a wider meaning, and will take in anything from a township down to what we call a farm. At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jurors said that these “fines villarum” were payable from time immemorial to the King and his progenitors by the tenants of divers vills near the forest of Dartmoor for profits that they had within the forest. And that looks as if Venvill were a survival from the times when Dartmoor was a royal forest, and had not yet been granted to Dukes or Earls of Cornwall. The Venvill tenements form a ring outside the commons that surround the moor. According to the ministers’ accounts for Dartmoor in 1505-6 there were forty-five such tenements, and the payments were 20_d._ for Hurston, 5_d._ for Willandhead which adjoins it on one side, 4½_d._ for Venn which adjoins it on the other, 8_d._ and 3_d._ for Jurston and Higher Jurston which are next beyond Venn, 4_d._ for Littaford which is next beyond Jurston, and so on. The total is 4_l._ 10_s._ 8_d._; and it was 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ in 1296-7, when these ministers’ accounts begin. The payments were primarily for pasturing cattle on the moor, and in 1296-7 the 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ is entered as “de finibus villarum pro pastura averiorum habenda.” The right of pasture was restricted to as many cattle as could be wintered on the Venvill tenements, but there were some other rights as well. At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jury said that the Venvill men could help themselves to “carbones, turbarias, fugeras, jampnos et lapides,” and at an Inquiry at Okehampton on 16 August 1608 the jury made it “turves, vagges, heath, stone, cole,” and “all thinges that maye doe them good, savinge vert and venson,” vert being the greenwood that gave covert to the deer. I take ‘jampnos’ and ‘fugeras’ to be gorse and bracken, not heath and vagges--at any rate ‘vagges’ now means turf--and I presume that ‘carbones’ or ‘cole’ means peat, as the moor does not produce what we call coal.