The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
In the year 1291, the 20th of Edward the First, (if, at least, I am
right in taking this to be the church there called Capella de Lamana,)
it was valued at £1. 10_s._ being then appropriated to the Priory of
St. German’s.
Morval, a vicarage, stands in the King’s Book at £6. 14_s._ 9_d._
The name of this parish signifies the Sea Valley, it being written
anciently Morevale; not that I would from thence insinuate that the
sea came up formerly to this place, though the same be not impossible.
But as Morval may be interpreted the Mory or Fenny Valley, I rather
take that to be the right.
THE EDITOR.
It is with much diffidence that I venture to approach the subject of
etymologies, but it seems at least to be clear that Mr. Tonkin is
mistaken. Val or Vale is not Cornish for a valley, but an inclosure.
More, in its original signification is great, large, vast, whence
figuratively it has acquired the substantive meaning of a widely
extended tract of land; as the Sea is in English, called the Deep. I
conjecture, therefore, that Morval may be The Enclosed Sea, in
reference to the Loch, which gives names to the towns of East and West
Looe; or, if the substantive and adjective are inverted, and More
resumes its primitive sense, it may be The Large Inclosure.
Mr. Bond states, in his History of Looe, and of the neighbourhood,
that the principal seat in this parish, and a place of the same name
in Cumberland, belonged to Sir Hugh de Morville, “a foul disgrace to
knighthood’s fair degree,” one of those villains who murdered Becket
at the altar in Canterbury Cathedral; but the honour of Cornwall is
not stained by the assassin’s birth. The manor of Morval passed in
early times to the family of Glynn.
Mr. Bond has also preserved a very curious memorial of the lawless and
unsettled state of Cornwall, and probably of all England, during the
contests for plunder, glossed over by the fiction of adverse rights
between two branches of the Plantagenets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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