St. Allen is situate in the hundred of Pow-dre-ham, id est, the hundred of the old ancient county or province town (viz. Lestwithell), for so it is called in the first Duke of Cornwall’s charter 1336――now contracted and corrupted to Powder Cantred. At the time of the Norman Conquest this district of St. Allen was taxed under the jurisdiction of Laner or Lanher, i. e. templer; so called, for that long before that time was extant upon that place a chapel or temple dedicated to God in the name of St. Martin of Tours, the memory of which is still preserved in the names of St. Martin’s fields and woods, heretofore perhaps the indowments of that chapel or temple; this Laner is still the voke lands or capital messuage of the Bishop of Exeter’s manor of Cargoll, whereunto it was annexed; in which place of Lanher (formerly a wood or forest of trees) the Bishops of Cornwall, and afterwards the Bishops of Exon, had one of their mansion or dwelling-houses for many ages,[8] till Bishop Voysey, tempore Henry VIII. leased those manors to Clement Throckmorton, Esq. cup-bearer to Queen Katherine Parr, from whom it passed by sale to Williams, and so from Williams to Borlase, by whom this mansion or barton of Laner was left to run to utter ruin and dilapidation, having now nothing extant of houses but old walls, stones, and rubbish. Out of this manor of Lanher the Bishop of Exon endowed the church of St. Allen with the glebe lands thereof now in being, and the sheaf of two tenements, viz. Laner and Tretheris,[9] so that the said church is a vicarage endowed, and was valued by Oliver Sutton, Bishop of Lincoln, and John de Pontefexia, Bishop of Winchester, to the Pope’s taxation of benefices, in order to take his first-fruits, 20 Edward I. 1294, Ecclesiam de Sancto Alune, in Decanatu de Powdre;――vi _s._ & viii _d._ The patronage of this church is still in the Bishop of Exon for the time being, the incumbent Richards. The rectory or sheaf formerly in Cook, now Boscawen [Viscount Falmouth]; and the parish as aforesaid rated to 4_s._ per pound Land Tax, in 1696, 157_l._ 14_s._ 10_d._