CHAPTER 3

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Coastal Communities in Medieval Cornwall

Maryanne Kowaleski

This chapter explores how proximity to the sea shaped life in the hundreds of medieval settlements on the long coastline of Cornwall. Coastal inhabitants depended on the sea to make a living, whether as fishermen, as crews on trading vessels, as privateers or pirates, in naval service or in occupations such as shipwrights, ropers, sail-makers, coopers, net-makers or porters on the local quay. Whole communities, including women and children, could partake of the sea’s bounty in harvesting oysters and mussels from nearby estuaries, in mending nets or curing fish and in the more nefarious activities of smuggling and wrecking. The sea also left its mark on the landscape in the development of quays, piers, causeways and warehouses on the waterfront; capstans for hauling boats onto beaches; fishing cellars for storing and curing fish; sheds for sheltering boats and tackle; lighthouses, beacons and chapels to guide ships and provide spiritual comfort to those risking their life on dangerous seas; and coastal defences such as blockhouses and harbour chains to guard against enemy raids.

In addition to their sheer numbers – in 1478 William Worcestre marvelled at the 147 havens within a seventy-mile stretch from the Tamar around to Penzance – Cornish coastal settlements were distinguished from other British ports in several ways.¹ The earls and later dukes of Cornwall exercised control over a significant portion of the county’s maritime resources in not only the seventeen fishing ports, four major seigneurial ports and numerous coastal manors they controlled directly (see Map 3.1) but also in their rights to wreck, prisage and overseas customs duties, as well as their control over maritime courts, ferries and the fish trade throughout a large portion of the county.² They exercised this control via their ‘havener’, an official for which there is no parallel in medieval Britain. By the time that the Duchy was established in 1337 the havener had become a salaried manager who efficiently administered the duchy’s annual accounts and maritime prerogatives and properties. Jurisdictionally, Cornwall was also distinguished by the large swathes of the county under the authority of the stannary courts.³ Cornish production of tin attracted a good deal of shipping and foreign trade to Cornish ports, but refuse from tin works also choked navigation channels and made it increasingly difficult for ships to travel up river to some ports. Cornwall’s remoteness from the centre of government and power in London and its separate culture and language, still widely spoken in the Middle Ages, also gave the county a distinctive identity and, some would argue, rebellious nature.⁴ Its residents’ sense of independence may have been further augmented by the rule of the Duchy, the privileged jurisdiction awarded to stannary districts and the widespread jurisdiction of maritime law. These characteristics may have encouraged the lawlessness for which Cornish wreckers, smugglers and pirates became famous; far from the authority of central government, even the Cornish gentry were known to join enthusiastically in these illegal ventures.⁵

3.1 Map of the Chief Ports of the Earls and Dukes of Cornwall

Source: Maryanne Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall 1287–1356, Devon and Cornwall Record Society ns 44 (2001), p. xii. Reproduced with permission

Despite these commonalities it is important to remember the differences between Cornish coastal communities. Three main categories of coastal communities can be distinguished. The most important was the larger port towns that enjoyed borough status and markets and fairs, served as a regular port of call for overseas shipping and had their own fleet of trading vessels (Table 3.1, at the end of the chapter). Most were home to a cadre of merchants who provided capital for overseas trade and were often shipowners; these ports usually had developed waterfronts with quays, warehouses and a network of dockside workers who helped to load, carry and store cargoes. Their fleets were large and diverse enough to engage in both coastal and overseas trade, as well as naval service and pilgrim transport.

By far the most prominent port town in medieval Cornwall was Fowey, whose fleet was over three times as big as that of its closest competitor and which was visited by almost twice as many overseas ships as any other Cornish port (Table 3.2, at the end of the chapter). Fowey’s importance was due primarily to its ties to Lostwithiel, which was the administrative centre of the earldom (by the 1270s) and the Duchy, the main market for Cornwall’s tin and itself one of Cornwall’s busiest ports until tin workings so choked the Fowey river that few vessels in the later Middle Ages could sail up to Lostwithiel.⁶ Profits from Fowey’s maritime courts and local port customs actually belonged to Lostwithiel, which had long enjoyed jurisdiction over the lower reaches of the river. Fowey was also a busy fishing port and became a naval centre during the Hundred Years War because of its ties to the Black Prince and its fine, deep harbour. During the siege of Calais in 1347 Fowey provided more ships and mariners than any other Cornish port (Table 3.2). Fowey also benefited from its strategic location on a quick sea route to Gascony and Iberia, where trade with England was growing. The skill of its seamen and entrepreneurial spirit of its merchant-shipowners was evident in the reputation that Fowey enjoyed as a centre of privateering and piracy during the late Middle Ages.⁷ Other important port towns with significant fleets and borough status were Saltash (jurisdictionally superior but economically subservient to its neighbouring port of Plymouth), Looe (actually two ports facing each other across the mouth of a river), Polruan, Penzance, St Ives (which acquired borough status as late as 1487) and Padstow (Tables 3.1 and 3.2).

In a second tier of port towns that had overseas shipping and either borough or market-town status were the Fal estuary ports of Penryn and Truro, the Mount’s Bay ports of Marazion and Mousehole, and Boscastle on the far northern coast. The port of call and home port termed ‘Falmouth’ in the medieval records refers not to today’s Falmouth (which became a significant settlement only in the seventeenth century) but to the many ports and anchorages of the Fal estuary. Truro, which paid a lay subsidy almost three times that of Fowey in 1334, was the most important of these ports, thanks to its location near to valuable tin deposits and access to inland markets.⁸ It lay almost ten miles from the sea, however, so that while its mercantile capital was significant, far fewer of its residents were involved in fishing or sailing occupations. The high numbers of ships using ‘Falmouth’ as a port of call, moreover, reflects in part the good shelter that the harbour offered to vessels arriving straight from France or Iberia; many ship captains, for example, paid prisage on their wine cargoes there because it was where they first touched English territory, but the majority probably departed soon afterwards to unload their cargoes in larger ports with more populated hinterlands. The ships claiming ‘Falmouth’ as their home port in this period were probably from Penryn, with smaller numbers from St Mawes, Tregony, Truro and St Feock (Table 3.2).

The protected position of estuarine ports, such as those on the Tamar, the Fowey, Fal, Helford and Hayle rivers, helped to shield them from damage caused by sea storms, enemy attacks and raids by pirates. As Leland notes, these ports often hosted shipbuilding because of their relatively calm waters and access to timber.⁹ The three-masted ships carved onto the bench end of one of the church pews of St Winnow also attests to the impact of the sea in this tiny estuarine port, which may have been in part responsible for building the new crayers, scaffs and carvels sold and ‘exported’ from Fowey in 1462.¹⁰ In contrast, the exposed location of ports on the sea gave them more immediate access to the bounty of the sea, but also made them vulnerable to the full brunt of tempests and strong winds. Weather was especially cruel to the ports of western Cornwall; Portheras was often unable to pay its farm in the first decade of the fourteenth century because its boats were submerged in water, while blowing sand had so blocked the entrance to the harbours of Portheras and its neighbouring ports of Porthzennor and Porthgwarra (Land’s End) that they could not pay their Duchy farm in the late 1420s.¹¹ Leland also pointed to the erosion of the shore on the west side of Mount’s Bay and to the virtual inundation of a large part of St Ives by sand thrown up during storms.¹²

More serious problems came from enemy raids, especially during the Hundred Years War, when Fowey was attacked and partly burned by a Spanish fleet in 1378 and again in 1457 by a combined force of Bretons and Normans.¹³ Polruan and even Bodinnick, further up the Fowey, were also targeted by Spanish raiders and in 1405 Spanish and French ships approached Looe, where they sank nineteen fishing boats, drowned their crews and burned the town. In 1473, during the last stages of the Wars of the Roses, the earl of Oxford seized St Michael’s Mount and surrendered only after a siege of four and a half months, and around 1514 Marazion was attacked and burned by the French. To counteract these threats blockhouses and harbour defences were built. In response to the attack of 1457 Thomas Treffry fortified his house overlooking Fowey harbour and two blockhouses were erected on either side of the mouth of the Fowey with a chain stretched between them to guard the harbour entrance.¹⁴ Other coastal fortifications were prompted by the Act of 1512, but the biggest push came with the coastal defence scheme of Henry VIII in 1538, which fostered the construction of artillery forts at Pendennis and St Mawes on opposite sides of the entrance to the Fal, as well as batteries at Looe, Penryn and St Michael’s Mount.

Among this second tier of ports were the smaller fishing ports, most of which did not have borough status or chartered markets and fairs. Leland singles out many of these; on the Tamar, for example, were St Germans, a ‘poor fishing town’, and Maker, a ‘simple fisher town’, but such ports could also be found along the Fowey river, Falmouth, Mount’s Bay, the Lizard and northern Cornwall (Table 3.1).¹⁵ Many of the coastal communities paying small annual farms to the Duchy also belong to this category. Even the larger and more privileged of these fishing ports, such as Tintagel, often had only minimal urban characteristics, as agriculture was an important mainstay of the economy.¹⁶ In the mid-fourteenth century only three to seven local boats regularly docked at Tintagel and, according to the annual dues they owed for the privilege of beaching there, they were clearly active for only part of the year.¹⁷ The Black Death hit Tintagel and other fishing communities hard. In 1348–50 only three boats were registered at Tintagel ‘because the fishers died in the pestilence’ and by the late fourteenth and into the fifteenth century no boats docked there.¹⁸ Indeed, many of the Duchy’s fishing ports had great difficulty paying their farms after the plague ‘because there were no men or boats’.¹⁹ The second pestilence in the early 1360s was also blamed for the inability of the smaller fishing ports, including Lamorna, to pay their annual Duchy farm, but in fact these difficulties continued well into the fifteenth century. Recovery occurred by the end of the fifteenth century, although some of the fishing ports paid a reduced farm (Table 3.1). It is highly likely that several of the smaller fishing ports, notably Porthgwarra, Porthplement, Portheras and Porthzennor in western Cornwall, were actually seasonal fishing settlements without any year-round residents.²⁰ As early as 1345, for instance, the men responsible for reporting on profits for a Duchy extent noted that ‘no ships had moored at Porthplement for a long time, nor were there any tenants to pay the farm’.²¹

The problems that these small fishing ports faced from shifting sands and dwindling populations in the later Middle Ages should not, however, obscure the lively economy and society that the fishing industry helped to generate. Some of the small or seasonal fishing settlements prospered and grew into port towns, such as Porthilly, nestled in a sheltered side of a tidal sea cove, which joined with the church settlement of Lanmorek slightly inland to become the port town of Mevagissey.²² By the 1270s seine fishing was producing a healthy profit in Portheast in Gorran Haven, which around the mid-fifteenth century agreed to pay a rent of ‘headfish’ (the best fish caught by each boat on certain days) to maintain the newly built pier.²³ In 1509 Golant was sufficiently organised to petition the bishop of Exeter to allow a cemetery and burial rights in their local chapel as residents found it so difficult to leave their boats and nets to travel to the more distant mother church in Tywardreath.²⁴ To compensate Tywardreath priory Golant inhabitants agreed to pay the priory every eighteenth fish they salted, every eighteenth barrel of herring landed and the eighteenth bushel of grain brought in ships to Golant; the port’s own ships plied both coastal and overseas routes in the fifteenth century (Table 3.2).

The allusion to salted fish and barrelled herring in Golant’s agreement points to the importance of the fish curing industry in Cornwall. By the early thirteenth century French merchants from Bayonne were paying large annual sums to salt and dry fish for export from Cornwall, an indication of the early development of this industry.²⁵ By the fourteenth century Cornish ports were regularly exporting fresh, salted and dried hake, herring and other fish to France and Spain and, by the late fifteenth century, at least one-third to two-thirds of all Cornish overseas shipping was involved in the fish trade, which accounted for 37 per cent of the value of all overseas trade at Penzance, 28 per cent at St Ives and 25 per cent at Marazion in the 1490s.²⁶ This trade involved not only the ‘export’ of salt to Ireland but the return of these same ships eight to twelve weeks later with cargoes of lightly cured fish. Much of this catch was subjected to further curing and then exported to Gascony and Iberia, or along the coast to Bristol, Exeter and Southampton. Cornish fishermen even went as far as Iceland for fish, bringing back dried cod or ‘stockfish’ as well as other cargoes of salted fish which could be subjected to further curing in Cornwall.²⁷

Pilchards, that most Cornish of all fish, which were caught inshore with seining crews in small boats, appear as a Cornish coastal export in the 1340s, as an overseas export in the 1460s and become a regular Cornish export product by the 1490s, although their heyday was the late sixteenth century. Their rising popularity was due primarily to a new curing process, which produced a product that lasted longer (a particular asset when exporting to the Mediterranean) and was relatively inexpensive because it employed less salt and yielded a profitable by-product, train-oil. It is highly likely that this curing process was first developed in the mid-fifteenth century.²⁸ The rise of the curing industry in Cornwall also left its mark on the coastal landscape, in the form of areas for drying fish in Porthoustock; a salting operation in Porthallow; ‘loges’ (huts or sheds used to dry and store the catch) rented to non-local fishers in Mousehole and Penzance; and a ‘Fischouse’, a fishing ‘loge’ and a place leased ‘for drying fish in the autumn’ on Mount St Michael with new fish cellars constructed by 1481/2 to help process and store the increasingly large amount of fish coming into the Mount’s curing facilities.²⁹

Fishing was an occasional pastime of residents of coastal manors – villages or scattered hamlets with peasant tenants and no markets or fairs that represent the third category of maritime settlements in medieval Cornwall – but it played a secondary role to agriculture. The manor of Tewington, for example, had a small estuarine fishery that at one time attracted fish dealers who paid a toll called trantery, but the fishery decayed and no trantery seems to have been collected after the Black Death.³⁰ Its proximity to the sea also subjected some of the manor’s holdings to blowing sand. Yet in other instances the manor’s easy access to sand was a blessing to local agriculture. In Tywarnhaile in 1344/5 60 horses carried up about 288 horse-loads of sand. When local lords tried to raise charges for the use of these sand ways, as they did in Brannel, Tybesta, St Ewe, Moresk and Winnianton, the tenants complained vociferously about the harm done to their fields without this cheap and valuable addition to aerate their heavy soils.³¹ And although these coastal manors had no harbour or shipping, their maritime activities were sufficient in the south Cornish coastal manors of Moresk, Tybesta and Tewington to require a stipend for a bailiff or ‘warden of the sea-shore’.³²

One of the duties of these bailiffs was to ensure that the earl or duke received a fair share of shipwrecks and stranded ‘royal’ fish such as whales and porpoises within his jurisdiction. The distance of Cornwall from the centre of authority in London, combined with the frequency of wrecks off the rocky and dangerous Cornish coast and the lucrative supplement that plunder could add to local incomes, made wrecking a widespread activity in coastal communities. The central government understood the problem and ordered inquisitions into the concealment of wrecks in Cornwall, but their orders had little impact on what was locally recognised as a legitimate way to live from the sea.³³ Efforts were made to control the worst excesses by awarding finders salvage – a payment (usually one-half the value of the recovered goods) made by the merchants for aid in rescuing their cargo – but coastal residents realised that greater profits came their way if they kept and sold what they found. The salvage system was also strained when the Duchy’s havener or the county sheriff fraudulently confiscated salvage money for themselves, or when the locals were accused of killing sailors who made it ashore in order to remove rival claimants, or when local lords used their authority to stymie merchants’ efforts to recoup their lost cargo or ship.³⁴ The constant tension between royal or ducal interests and what residents felt were their natural rights to wrecks thrown up on their home shores points to the importance of wrecking in the maritime economy of coastal communities.

Smuggling and piracy were other illegal sources of income available to coastal residents. Smuggling is hard to track because its success lies in secrecy and evasion of customs duties, but it was certainly a problem in Cornwall, where long stretches of isolated coastline raised royal anxiety about the ease of smuggling.³⁵ Cornish seamen were also notorious pirates, particularly in the fifteenth century, when government instability, the expansion of the maritime economy in south-western England and the construction of faster ships such as the carvel helped to encourage lawlessness at sea.³⁶ Cornish pirates such as Mark and John Mixtowe of Fowey and Nicholas Frychowe of Falmouth attacked and plundered ships in their own harbours and elsewhere, including the seas from the Low Countries to Spain and Portugal. The substantial profits involved prompted many coastal residents to collude with the pirates – from merchants and artisans who purchased the stolen cargoes knowing full well their origin to local gentry and justices of the peace who stymied official inquests because they wanted to protect their own financial stake as shipowners or victuallers of pirate ships.

Many of the pirates had also served at one time or another as privateers, licensed by the crown, who sought their maritime expertise to keep the coasts of England safe from enemy marauders. The line between piracy and privateering (sanctioned attacks on enemy shipping which allowed privateers to keep a hefty percentage of what they captured) was very thin indeed, particularly during the late Middle Ages, when heightened anxieties about enemy coastal raids during the Hundred Years War, the crown’s dependence on merchant ships for naval services and problems within central government encouraged a reliance on privateering.³⁷ Mark Mixtow of Fowey and William de Meer of Truro, for instance, captured over ten ships as privateers licensed by the crown, although on occasion they exceeded the limits of their license and became more pirate than privateer.³⁸ Several privateer/pirate shipmasters, including William Nansksek and William Rose of Falmouth and John Russell of Fowey, also participated in the transport of pilgrims to Spain, while almost all served on coastal or overseas trading ships and on occasion were also paid for legitimate naval service.³⁹ This easy slippage between maritime work on vessels employed in trade, pilgrim transport, piracy, privateering and naval service in medieval Cornwall points to the flexibility of mariners’ skills and their willingness to apply these skills to a variety of ventures.

The rise in privateering and piracy in late medieval Cornwall is just one aspect of the growing opportunities in the Cornish maritime economy during this period. This growth is evident in the striking commercial expansion of Cornish fishing not only off their own shores but also in Ireland, Iceland and in coastal waters as far east as Dorset and Sussex.⁴⁰ The value of overseas trade going through Cornish ports, although never large, also rose during the fifteenth century, particularly in the later fifteenth century as both the cloth industry in eastern Cornwall expanded and the tin industry underwent some recovery.⁴¹ But the expansion in the maritime sector is most evident in the rising profile of Cornish shipping, which appears to have increased in total tonnage as well as diversified across more ports in the fifteenth century. By the fifteenth century Cornish ships active in the coastal import trade at Exeter represented over 9 per cent of the ships at this busy port, compared to just 2 per cent in the fourteenth century (Table 3.2). In the fourteenth century ships from only eight different Cornish ports sailed into Exeter, but by the fifteenth century no fewer than twenty-four Cornish ports sent shipping to this Devon port. Although the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century shipping involved in overseas trade cannot be strictly compared in terms of numbers there was a similar rise in the range of Cornish ports providing vessels on the overseas trade routes, which climbed from fourteen home ports in the fourteenth century to twenty-two in the fifteenth.⁴² And Cornwall’s relative share of the British shipping at Bordeaux rose from just over 3 per cent in the early fourteenth century to over 20 per cent of the albeit reduced wine trade in the mid-fifteenth century.⁴³ A similar growth is apparent in Cornish contributions to naval service, which doubled between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from 7 to over 14 per cent of all British ships called to naval service.⁴⁴

The impact of this maritime expansion on the coastal communities of medieval Cornwall is evident in the relative prosperity of the coastal regions even during the ‘depression’ of the fifteenth century. The growing presence of Cornish shipping in both coastal and overseas trade, moreover, must have increased the demand for maritime labour for crews and for shore-side occupations such as victualling, porterage, cooperage and shipbuilding. Profits from the escalation of privateering and piracy carried on by the Cornish, who, with their fellows in Devon, were notorious throughout England, were probably spent in Cornwall’s own port towns and fishing villages; much may have been channelled into building the growing number of ships and constructing and enlarging quays, which we often first hear of during the fifteenth century. The rising profits from fishing and the fish trade must also have stimulated shipbuilding, net-making and investment in the curing of fish. What is harder to measure is how this maritime expansion, which helped transform Cornwall from a backwater, peripheral county in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries to one with a prominent role in the national maritime economy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, may have influenced the society, politics and culture of coastal communities. What was the impact, for example, of the appearance of hundreds of foreign ships from lands stretching from the Mediterranean to North Seas along their coast and in their harbours? As Cornish fishermen and mariners more regularly ventured further from home, what did they bring back with them? We do not have the sources to answer these questions, but the maritime skills and entrepreneurial spirit that underlay this expansion are assets that were developed and nurtured in the port towns, fishing villages and coastal manors of medieval Cornwall.

Notes and References

1 William Worcestre, Itineraries, ed. by John H. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 33.

2 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Introduction’, in Maryanne Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall 1287–1356 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society ns 44, 2001), pp. 1–64.

3 John Hatcher, English Tin Production and Trade before 1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); George Randall Lewis, The Stannaries: A Study of the English Tin Miner (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).

4 For medieval commentaries on the separateness of Cornwall, see F.C. Hingeston-Randolph (ed.), The Register of John de Grandisson (A.D. 1327–1369), 3 vols (London and Exeter: G. Bell & Sons, 1894–97), I, pp. 95, 97–98; II, pp. 957–58; III, pp. xix–xx, xlv. For an extended argument that the Cornish were a distinct ‘people’ with their own cultural identity, see Mark Stoyle, ‘The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall’, Journal of British Studies 38:4 (1999), pp. 323–44. For a contrary view, see John Chynoweth, Tudor Cornwall (Charleston, SC: Tempus, 2002), pp. 21–31.

5 C.J. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925; repr. 1962), pp. 78–106; James Whetter, The Bodrugans: The Study of a Cornish Knightly Family (St Austell: Lyfrow Trelyspen, 1995), pp. 117–76; A.L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (London: J. Cape, 1941; repr. 1969), p. 75.

6 For this and the following, see Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 38–39, 53–55, 68, 70–73; N.J.G. Pounds, ‘The Ports of Cornwall in the Middle Ages’, Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries 23 (1947), pp. 66–68.

7 Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, pp. 80–105, 200–3; John Keast, The Story of Fowey (Exeter: J. Townsend, 1950, repr. 1987), pp. 10–16, 20–34; Dorothy A. Gardiner (ed.), A Calendar of Early Chancery Proceedings relating to West Country Shipping 1388–1493 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society ns 21, 1976), nos 10, 21, 29, 33, 41, 53–54, 57, 64–65, 71, 75, 88. Leland also pointed out the crucial role of warfare in the rise of Fowey; Worcestre, Itineraries, pp. 203–4, 323.

8 Robin E. Glasscock (ed.), The Lay Subsidy of 1334 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 31–32; N.J.G. Pounds, ‘Ports and Shipping of the Fal’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall ns 1 (1946), pp. 42–60.

9 Worcestre, Itineraries, pp. 178, 189, 201, 205, 206, 208, 210. For the estuarine location of medieval shipyards, see Ian Friel, The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England 1200–1520 (London: British Museum, 1995), pp. 52–53. For the bench end at St Winnow, see ibid., p. 31.

10 The National Archives [hereafter TNA]: E122/114/1.

11 Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 89, n. 7, 97, 99; TNA: E122/180/4, 216/19, 180/5.

12 Worcestre, Itineraries, pp. 192, 320.

13 For this and the following, see M. Oppenheim, ‘Maritime History’, in William Page (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Cornwall, vol. I (London: A Constable, 1906), pp. 481–83; Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous [hereafter CIM], 8 vols (London: HMSO, 1916–2003), 1377–89, p. 77.

14 Worcestre, Itineraries, pp. 203–4; Peter Sheppard, The Historic Towns of Cornwall: An Archaeological Survey (Truro: Cornwall Committee for Rescue Archaeology, 1980), pp. 8, 18, 21, 35–36; Andrew Saunders, Fortress Britain: Artillery Fortifications in the British Isles and Ireland (Liphook: Beaufort, 1989), pp. 22, 27, 37, 39–40, 42, 234; Chynoweth, Tudor Cornwall, pp. 162–64.

15 Worcestre, Itineraries, pp. 210–11, 324–25.

16 For the tendency for fishers to engage in agricultural pursuits, see Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Working at Sea: Maritime Recruitment and Remuneration in Medieval England’, in S. Cavciocchi (ed.), Ricchezza del mare, ricchezza dal mare. Secoli XIII–XVIII (Florence: Le Monnier, 2006), pp. 915–16. A low level of urbanization is indicated by the scarcity of occupational surnames, the tiny profits from the market and fair, and the 122 acres used by borough residents for their sheep, as recorded in P.L. Hull (ed.), The Caption of Seisin of the Duchy of Cornwall (1337) (Devon and Cornwall Record Society ns 17, 1971), pp. 32–34. Leland said that Bosinney (the port of Tintagel; see Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 55, 311) was an important fishing town with great privileges, but there is no evidence that the locals owned anything but a few fishing boats (Table 3.2, below).

17 TNA: SC6/816/11, m. 11; 816/12, m. 6d; 817/1, m. 12; 817/3, m. 13; 817/4, m. 9; Duchy of Cornwall Office [hereafter DCO], Ministers’ Account Roll 2, m. 5d; Roll 3, m. 5; Roll 4,m. 8, Roll 5, m. 8.

18 DCO Ministers’ Account Roll 4, m. 8; Roll 5, m. 8. The later accounts are in TNA: SC6/818/2, m. 6 (1369/70); 822/1, m. 4 (1462/3); 822/2, m. 8 (1475/6); 822/3, m. 8 (1476/7); SC6/Henry VII/1079, m. 7 (1485/6); DCO Ministers’ Account Roll 60, m. 16d (1467/8);

19 Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 203, 210, 222, 230, 244, 256–57, 268. For the following, see TNA: SC6/818/2, m. 12; 819/13, m. 12; 819/15, m. 14; TNA: E122/40/13, 40/19.

20 For such seasonal settlements elsewhere, see Harold Fox, The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon Coast, 1086–1550 (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2001).

21 Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 311–12 and n. The absence of these ports from medieval tithing lists also imply they were temporary settlements; for example, they do not appear in P.A.S. Pool, ‘The Tithings of Cornwall’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, ns 8:4 (1981), pp. 275–337, nor in Cornwall Record Office, A List of Cornish Manors (Truro: Cornwall County and Diocesan Office, 1990).

22 Joy Wilson and Andrew Lakeman, ‘Mevagissey Harbour and Quays – History and Constitution’, Journal of the Cornwall Association of Local Historians 37 (1999), pp. 13–19; O.J. Padel, A Popular Dictionary of Cornish Place-Names (Penzance: Alison Hodge, 1988), p. 120.

23 James Whetter, The History of Gorran Haven, Part I (St Austell: Lyfrow Trelyspen, 1990), pp. 4–5, 9, 12–23.

24 For this and the following, see Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, p. 146; Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 15, 23–24.

25 T.D. Hardy (ed.), Rotuli chartarum in turri Londinensi asservati, 1199–1216 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1837), p. 191; T.D. Hardy (ed.), Rotuli de oblatis et finibus in turri Londinensi asservati, 1200–1205 (London: Record Commission, 1835), p. 194; Publications of the Pipe Roll Society, 92 vols (London: Pipe Roll Society, 1884–2005), vol. 66, p. 16, vol. 68, p. 68, vol. 89, p. 128.

26 For this and the following, see Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Expansion of the South-Western Fisheries in Late Medieval England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 53 (2000), pp. 429–54; and idem, ‘The Commercialization of the Sea Fisheries in Medieval England and Wales’, International Journal of Maritime History 15:2 (2003), pp. 204–17.

27 Diplomatarium islandicum, 16 vols (Reykjavik: Icelandic Society of Literature, 1952–72), vol. XVI, pp. 20–22, 105, 107, 327–29, 331–35, 337–38, 359–63; Wendy R. Childs, ‘Commercial Shipping of South Western England in the Later Fifteenth Century’, Mariner’s Mirror 83 (1997), p. 285.

28 John Scantlebury, ‘The Development of the Export Trade in Pilchards from Cornwall during the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall 10 (1989), pp. 330–59. For the argument that the curing process first developed in the fifteenth century, see Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Western Fisheries’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N. Ashcroft (eds), England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London: Chatham Publishing, 2000), p. 26. To the references there should be added another early Cornish export of pilchards: to Southampton in 1341–42, where they were then re-exported; see TNA: E122/137/11, 137/12.

29 S.F. Hockey (ed.), The Cartulary of Beaulieu Abbey (Southampton Records Series 17, 1974), p. 217; S.F. Hockey (ed.), The Account Book of Beaulieu Abbey (Camden Society, 4th ser. 16, 1975), pp. 103–4, 309; P.A.S. Pool, The History of the Town and Borough of Penzance (Penzance: Corporation of Penzance, 1974), pp. 18, 210; PRO, SC6/822/5, 1307/29, m. 5; Cornwall Record Office, AU1. See also N.J.G. Pounds, ‘Cornish Fish Cellars’, Antiquity 18 (1944), pp. 36–41.

30 For this and the following, see the relevant entries (as specified in the indices) of L. Margaret Midgley (ed.), Ministers’ Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall 1296–1297, 2 vols (Camden Society, 3rd ser. 67, 1945); Hull (ed.), The Caption of Seisin; Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts; John Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duchy of Cornwall, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

31 Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 59–60.

32 Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 6, 12, and passim in text.

33 Calendar of Close Rolls Henry III to Henry VII [hereafter CCR], 62 vols (London: HMSO, 1892–1975), 1389–92, p. 103.

34 TNA: C260/76/31; Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 15, 24–27; TNA: JUST1/118, m. 68d. For the following, see Kowaleski (ed.), The Havener’s Accounts, pp. 90–91, 93, 95–96, 100, 120–21; A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the Public Record Office, 6 vols (London: HMSO, 1890–1915), V, p. 49.

35 Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1337–47 (London: HMSO, 1915), p. 414. For some instances of smuggling, see TNA: E159/175, Michaelmas recorda, mm. 13d, 21d; Hilary recorda, m. 5; E159/167, Trinity recorda, m. 29.

36 Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, pp. 78–106, 179–203, and n. 7, above, for this and the following.

37 There is no history of privateering in medieval England, but see Stephen P. Pistono, ‘Henry IV and the Privateers’, English Historical Review 90 (1975), pp. 322–30; C.J. Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400–1403’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 29 (1979), pp. 63–77.

38 For example, Calendar of Patent Rolls 1401–5 (London: HMSO, 1905), pp. 133, 276; CCR 1399–1402, p. 545; Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’, p. 72.

39 Constance Mary Storrs and Robert Brian Tate, Jacobean Pilgrims from England to St James of Compostella (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, Consellería de Cultura, 1994), pp. 174, 175, 177 and above, n. 38.

40 Kowaleski, ‘The Expansion of the South-Western Fisheries’; idem, ‘The Western Fisheries’.

41 John Hatcher, ‘A Diversified Economy? Later Medieval Cornwall’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 22 (1969), pp. 224–27; Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Port Towns in England and Wales 1300–1540’, in David Palliser (ed.), The Urban History of Britain, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 477, 481; Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, pp. 70–71.

42 The fourteenth-century figures rely heavily on the prisage accounts of wine ships and less on the overseas customs accounts (TNA: E122) which only began recording denizen trade in 1347. Note too that the seeming decline of ships from the Fal estuary in the fifteenth century is partly if not wholly a function of the tendency to lump all ships from these ports under the rubric ‘Falmouth’. For the expansion of overseas shipping in late medieval Cornwall, see also Childs, ‘Commercial Shipping’.

43 Cornish ships represented 3.4 per cent of 1204 British ships in the Bordeaux wine accounts of 1303–8 (TNA: E101/158/10; 160/3; 161/3; 162/1), 9.5 per cent of 591 ships in 1372–86 (TNA: E101/179/10; 180/2; 182/5; 182/6; 182/11; 183/11), 21.2 per cent in 1442–45 (TNA: E101/194/3; 195/19; BL Add. MS 15,524), and 20 per cent in one account of 1482–83 (‘Registre de la Comptablie de Bordeaux, 1482–1483’, in M.G. Ducaunnes-Duval (ed.), Archives historiques de département de la Gironde, 50 (1915), pp. 78–141). See also Childs, ‘Commercial Shipping’.

44 Kowaleski, ‘Port Towns in England and Wales’, p. 488. If this sample included naval service from the earlier period, the rising presence of Cornish shipping would be even more noticeable since Cornwall contributed very little to naval shipping before the late fourteenth century.