the extreme parts of the town. When the church was originally built I know not, but it was then dedicated to St. Pancras, I apprehend, though it is now to St. Mary, as the street leading down to one corner of the large area at it, which is popularly denominated Pider-street at present, is still denominated St. Pancras-street by Mr. Tonkin; but the present church of St. Mary is of that light and elegant sort of Gothic architecture which took place among us in the reign of Henry VII. and which perhaps might be wished to have still continued among us, as being a happy union of the solemn solidity of the Gothic and of the luminous lightness of the Roman. At this period the church must have been built, the architecture of London by degrees reaching out its influence into Cornwall; and accordingly in the southern window, which is the third from the east, is a date of 1518. But let me be more particular concerning the antiquity of Truro. The castle is not mentioned in Domesday Book;[6] it was therefore later than the Conquest. It was built by some of the Norman Earls of Cornwall, and was one of the rural palaces, as it were, which they had in the county subordinate to their grand capitals at Launceston, Tremarton, and Restormel. The town must be still later than the castle; yet it is noticed within a century after the Conquest, so nearly coeval was it with its cause, the castle. It is noticed above to have been in the possession of Richard de Lucy. It was incorporated, says the Visitation above, “as appeareth by record, by Richard Lucy, alias Lacam.” “Truro, Truru, or Trevereu,” adds that best investigator of our constitutional antiquities, because the most grounded on the evidence of records, Dr. Brady, “was some time in the possession of Richard de Lucy, a person of great note in the reigns of King Stephen and Henry II. in the eighth of whose [Henry’s] reign,” or, an. Dom. 1162, “he was made Justice of England.”[7] This Richard had got possession of this part of the old estates of the earldom, either by one of those half-alienations, which were only sub-infeodations in reality, or (as we shall soon see) by being Earl of Cornwall himself. He actually resided in the castle, as he is styled in an instrument of Henry the Second’s, “Ricardi de Lucy de Trivereu;” and he encouraged the little town of the Earls, by incorporating it, and so giving it a legal dignity in granting it an internal jurisdiction. He even proceeded to allow it that last and highest privilege of a borough, a freedom of exemption from toll; nor was this confined to the borough itself; it extended beyond it; it extended into all the country round; it was commensurate with the whole county; and Richard must, therefore, have acted with a power, not merely of the lord of the borough, but of the earl of the county, as no one less than an earl could have given such an ample sweep of exemption. The proof of all this lies in the original charter of the