At the beginning of the Norman period the people of Breage were living under the ordinary Manorial and King's Courts, but very soon all this was changed by the Norman Earls in their policy of mine development, and the rule of the Stannary Courts was added. By the Charter of 1201, Stannary Courts were set up which held civil and criminal jurisdiction over the Miners or Tinners, as they were called. A Stannary Parliament, consisting of twenty-four Senators, met at Hingston Down, near Calstock, and chose a Speaker of its own; subsequently this Parliament for the government of the Miners and the regulation of mining affairs seems to have met at Truro. The Stannaries were divided into five districts, of which Penwith and Kerrier formed one. The Cornish Miners thus came to be formed into a little State by themselves; they paid no taxes to the King but to the Stannaries, and these they paid not as Englishmen but as Miners, Their Parliament was the mine Parliament, their Courts were the mine Courts. The influence of this state of things was in the main bad; it gave opportunity for the oppression and consequent debasement of the Miners, and tended to make the people lawless and impatient of all restraint. Long after this ancient system had passed away its evil fruits remained in a certain lawlessness of disposition. Carew, writing in the days of Queen Elizabeth, remarks that it was a matter of notoriety in his day that the mining districts of Cornwall were farthest behind the general level of culture. The reason of this we take to be due, to a large extent, to the lawlessness, abuses and evils engendered by the Stannary Courts, which at one and the same time placed the mining population above the law and beyond the arm of its protection. The following letter of King Henry III., written in 1219 to Simon de Apulia, an Italian Bishop of Exeter, referring to the living of Breage, which is given in the Patent Rolls, is of interest. The two Vicars of Breage mentioned in this document are the earliest of whom we have any record.