The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 4 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 4 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
This church is a vicarage, valued in the King’s Book, £19; the
patronage in the Dean and Chapter of Exeter; the incumbent Mr.
Fincher; the sheaf in Mr. Richard Kempe of Tregony, by lease [from Mr.
Weston, who had a lease transmitted, I believe, from his father,
Bishop Weston]; who resigning in 1734, was succeeded by Mr. Question.
But the antient name of this parish was Elerky, and so it is still
called in the King’s Book, as it is too in Taxatio Benefic. 20 Edw. I.
“Ecclesia de Elerky 10 lib. vicar’ ejusdem, xl. solid.” from the great
MANOR OF ELERKY.
In Domesday Book it is called Elerchi, which signifies the swan’s
house or swannery; for Elerk in Cornish is a swan, and there are the
remains of a large pool under the house, which seems to have been
designed to that end.
It is in the said book inserted among the manors given by William the
Conqueror, to his half-brother Robert Earl of Morton and Cornwall.
Francis Tregian, esq. among the rest of his estates, forfeited his
half of this manor.
WHITAKER.
The original name of this parish was the same with the name of the
manor Elerchi, or Elerky; that the appellation of the manor in
Domesday Book, this in the present time, and both derived from the
manerial house. This house stood upon a rising ground, nearly opposite
to the church, and on the west of it, which is now covered with
several houses of a mean condition, and yet marked as something
considerable to the eye, by a grove of tall trees upon it. The great
house, which the ancestors of these trees shaded, has been long down,
I suppose; and the mean houses on the ground have been constructed of
the poorest remains of it. It was bounded on the south by the lane
leading down to its own mills, still called Elerky Mills, and
distinctively noted as higher and lower; and on the east and north by
its lively brook, without a name, that divides the glebe from the
manor, then environs the house, and finally runs to the two mills
below. The manor is accordingly noticed so late as the 5th of Charles
the First, to have two mills within it. These mills even now proclaim
their original relation to each other, by the restrictions which the
higher is under to the lower, in not being able to keep up the water
from the other, beyond a certain space of time. And the house thus
environed by the brook could not have been very small, as it was the
mansion of a district, which in the 12th of Edward the First was
reckoned at forty-two acres, when so many are valued in much less, and
when so few are valued in more; but whence is the original name of
this house derived? Mr. Tonkin derives it from Elerk (C.) a swan, and
makes Elerky to signify the swannery, adding, that “there are the
remains of a large pool under the house, which seems to have been
designed to that end.” In all that part of antiquarian researches
where the eye is to be assisted by the imagination, and the past to be
collected from the broken appearances of the present; every active and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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