St. Mewan Parish Council

                           PARISH HISTORY

Loveday Hambly – A Quaker Saint of Cornwall

This extract is from the book, written in 1927 by L.V.Hodgkin (Mrs John Holdsworth). The publishers were Longmans Green. This book is in the St Austell library’s reference section. Loveday was born in 1604, the fifth daughter of Richard and Elizabeth Billing of Hengar Manor on the borders of St Breward and St Tudy parishes. Her mother was a Connock of Treworgie, St Cleer. Hengar Manor was destroyed by fire in 1900 and then re-built. The Billings had eight children, six daughters and two sons. When Loveday was 35 she married William Hambly of Tregongeeves, which is just outside St Mewan Parish although the farm is opposite the present St Mewan Primary School and the church. Tregongeeves means ‘The House of Sheep’ and was leased from the Mount Edgcumbe Estate.

She was married for 12 years, when her husband died in 1651, without any children. Her unmarried sister, Grace and her nephew, Thomas Lower came to Tregongeeves to live with her. The Lowers were already Quakers and Loveday was converted into the banned sect by Thomas Curtis.

George Fox, a prominent business man of the time and also a Quaker, was imprisoned in Launceston Gaol for heresy. Loveday and her sister, Grace travelled to the gaol to visit Fox in July 1656 and the book gives a vivid account of their treatment. ‘A fierce prosecutor and drunken bad man named Phillipp Pearse, searched Loveday and her sister on the pretext that they were smuggling letters into the prison’. ‘Their clothes and headgear were stripped off’. ‘He searcheth a woman’s head for letters with his own hands, taking her fowl clothes out of her Hat and searching them also’. Within the prison the gaoler ‘abused them with terrible nick-names, calling them doggs and whores and threatening to break their leggs and necks’. When the visitors and prisoner prayed together the gaoler thought they were crossing one another and threatened them with penalties ordered for Roman Catholics.

In spite of this terrible treatment, George Fox had in Loveday Hambly a staunch supporter and Tregongeeves became the stopping place for Fox’s visitors from the west of Cornwall on their way to Launceston. The slow weeks of the summer of 1656 dragged by. The Quaker prisoners were offered their liberty if they paid the fees demanded of them. ‘Major General Desbrough was sent doune, pretending to set us at liberty and he proferd us if we would go home and preach no more’. Finally, a Colonel Bennett released them after eight months in gaol. Bennett was persuaded by Humphry Lower of Tremeere, who had married Margery, one of Loveday’s older sisters. So the prisoners went first to Tremeere where ‘under his own roof he and his wife lavished upon their guests those necessities which had long been pitifully lacking in Launceston Gaol’. They then went on to Tregongeeves and rested ‘for two or three days, rejoicing in the harmony of the household and the noble universal spirit of its mistress’.

The house of Tregongeeves (spelt Tregangeeves in the book) was, according to this book, published in 1927, ‘pulled down and re-built about fifty years ago’ which makes it about 1877. The present house is therefore late Victorian but some of the farm buildings are probably original.

Loveday’s tribulations were not over, however. A year after Fox and his fellow prisoners were released from gaol, Loveday was summoned to appear at Westminster at the suite of George Upcott, the son of William Upcott, priest of Austell Parish. because she refused ‘to sett forth her tyths and brought her to trial at assizes and obtained judgement for treble damages’. She, as a Quaker, had refused to pay the insignificant sum demanded as tithe on her farm. The now elderly woman travelled to London only to be told that the matter had been referred back to Cornwall. So that her long journey of ‘two hundred and twenty miles each way had been taken in vain’. Her journey was made on horseback and would have taken many days. On her return to Tregongeeves she found that cattle to the value of forty pounds had been taken, although the original demand was for only five pounds. In the same year, ‘William Upcott, priest of Austell, caused Loveday Hambly to be summoned to appear in the exchequer to answer his demand there made against her for detaining tyth piggs, tyth eggs, tyth geese and other small tyths all which came to 13s and 4d’. She refused to obey and Priest Upcott caused her to be arrested. ‘His own son being the bailiff, namely John Upcott, carried her to Bodmyn prison where she remained a prisoner under a cruel keeper for several nights. Afterwards by reason of the cruelty of the keeper & his evil carriage to those that came to visit her, having beaten some & abused others...she was, by favour of the Sherrif put into the custody of a more friendly keeper & continued a prisoner until she was freed by the committy of parliament’. They took ‘three pewter dishes worth 12s. for refusing to pay 9s.’.

Quakerism was outlawed, as was the Roman Catholic faith, that of Judaism and in fact anything other than the then new ‘Church of England’. Not to worship the ‘right’ God and worst of all not to pay church tithes that supported the local priest was thought of as ‘heresy’. The Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth for a new life in America because of persecution.

Loveday Hambly died in 1682, aged 78. Her body was laid to rest in the Quaker Burial Ground bequeathed to Thomas Lower, now a doctor of medicine, by Richard, Earl of Mount Edgcumbe. According to the 1927 book, which carries a drawing of the outside and inside of the burial ground, ‘three times the level of the earth has been changed and when the road was cut, soil was thrown up on each side and the bodies of those buried in the seventeenth century were buried twenty feet below’. Of course, the road has been widened since then and all that remains of the original Quaker burial ground is the rear wall. Any remains that were found were re-buried near the Quaker meeting house in St Austell.

St Mewan was probably a monk from Britanny who had a young godson called Brother Austol. They died within a week of each other and their festivals are observed on the 21^st and 28^th June.

1,420 years ago, Saxon invaders pushed south and west and overwhelmed the British defenders at the battle of Deorham, west of Gloucester. A nobleman of that district was defeated and one of his sons, Aldate was slain and another son, Mewan managed to escape. He was a committed Christian and travelled across Cornwall on his way to Brittany with another priest, Samson and Mewan’s godson, Austol. They landed at Padstow and visited the monastery at St Kew, proceeding then to found a church at Golant. They then went to the road junction near the present St Mewan church where they erected a preaching cross and baptised new converts with water from a Holy Well a short way to the west. There was a structure above this well which, along with the cross, has long since disappeared. All that is left of the well is a swampy patch in the field. Mewan’s godson, Austol, founded the Holy Well at Menacuddle, which formed the parish of St Austell. Two small wooden churches were built, replaced by masonry structures in Norman times.

Mewan, Samson and Austol then went to Brittany and established the abbey-bishopric of Dol. In the present cathedral of Dol, today one can see, in the tracery in the east window, Samson and the other two monks in scenes from the life of St Samson, sailing across the channel in a boat under full sail with a spiteful looking demon flying above bending back the mast in a vain effort to stop them. St Mewan penetrated into the interior of Brittany and Normandy, preaching and converting the people and many places in that part of France were named after Saint Méen due to his reputation as a healer. Even three hundred years ago, thousands of poor and sick folk took a pilgrimage to St Méen’s well and visited his shrine. Children suffering from rickets and skin diseases were dipped in the waters. St Mewan died in 627 AD and for centuries, St Austol was only remembered as the disciple of the more celebrated saint. Today, the church of St Mewan is in an isolated position, having only a Rectory and church rooms and later the School but, unusually for Cornwall, no Churchtown.

Celia Fiennes

Celia Fiennes passed through St Austell and St Mewan in the reign of William and Mary. She rode sidesaddle on a horse, and on stopping at St Austell, she gave this account:-

‘Thence from Parr, I went over the heath to St Austin’s which is a little market town where I lay, but their houses are like Barnes up to the top of the house. Here was a pretty good Dining room and Chamber within it and very neat Country women. My landlady brought me one of the West Country tarts; this was the first I met with, though I had asked for them in many places in Somerset and Devonshire. Its an apple pye with a custard all over the top. Its the most acceptable entertainment that Could be made me. They scald their Creame and Milk in most part of those Countrys, and so its a sort of Clouted Creame as we Call it, with a Little sugar and so put on the top of the apple Pye. I was much pleased with my supper, though not with the Custome of the Country, which is a universal smoaking , both men, women and children have all their pipes of tobacco in their mouths and do sit round the fire smoaking, which was not delightful to me when I went down to talke with my landlady for information of any matter and customs amongst them. I must say that they are as comely sort of women as I have seen anywhere tho’ in ordinary dress – good black Eyes and Crafty enough and very neat’.

On leaving the town she passed through ‘dirty stony lanes’ and had nearly reached Truro before she ‘came into a broad coach road which I have not seen since I left Exeter’.

Before the Education Act of 1870, education was voluntary and many children could hardly read or write. Dame’s schools in the villages were held in private houses with meagre equipment and little in the way of qualifications. The Dames charged a few pence a week and taught the three Rs, reading, riting and rithmatic plus Bible Study which was carried on in the many chapels’ Sunday Schools. St Mewan Board School was built in 1874, one of thirty-five such buildings designed by Cornish architect Sylvanus Trevail who also designed the ‘red’ bank and the Public Rooms (later to become the St Austell Furnishing Co, then Courts and now Sports World). The schools were built to the formula of ‘cubic feet per child‘ which meant that they were very high with little floor space. The first toilets at St Mewan school were simply a deep pit with a plank of wood over it. These conditions prevailed until after the 1914 – 18 war. Heating was with a Tortoise stove – slow but sure- and these emitted more smoke than heat in the morning and were red hot in the afternoon when the pupils were leaving. In each classroom was a blackboard and easel and the children sat, eight in a row at long desks.

The house next to the school was at the time of the school’s building adapted for the headmaster and his family but it pre-dates the school by many years. There was a Publick House there in Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1577 kept by Olyvar Vyan and this ‘kiddley-wink’ as it would have been known, half way between Trewoon and Polgooth and on the main turnpike road was a busy inn serving refreshment to thirsty miners, quarrymen and farm workers who drank beer or cider. The Quakers and Wesleyans would not enter this establishment, of course. There were two other inns in the Parish, the Polgooth Inn which was reputedly once a counthouse for the mine and the Hewas Inn in the village of Sticker. Trewoon did not have a public house until the early sixties when Ken Foster and his wife got a licence to convert their house on the west end of the village to The White Pyramid.

Although just out of St Mewan Parish, many children would have attended this school as it was nearer than St Mewan, It was opened in 1878 and called High Street Board School. It had 72 pupils and one teacher! In 1892 it was extended at a cost of £185 and two more teachers were taken on. Thomas Rundle was the head at this time. He was Chairman of St Stephen Parish Council from 1899 – 1901. The Lanjeth School closed in 1963 on 19^th December and was sold for conversion into a dwelling house for £2400.

This school is just outside the Parish boundary, but again would have served the southern part of the Parish, Sticker and Hewas Water. It too was built in the eighteen-seventies and also closed in the nineteen-sixties. It was used by the Borough Council to house a family who had been moved out of Melbur in the western clay area when its small school and hamlet was destroyed due to the expansion of the clay works. The school was then used by the County to house canoes and other out-door equipment before being converted to a dwelling house for a local doctor.

In 1821 a ‘Bethel’ was built near where the railway arch is now. With the building of the first bridge, a ‘new’ chapel was needed. In 1871, a Mr John Gaved pioneered the project and a Mrs Hennah of Hembal Manor gave a plot of land where the Chapel now stands. Wesley had reputedly preached where The Green is now situated and so the new Chapel was ‘Wesleyan’ Methodist. The new building held 200 worshippers when the total population of Trewoon was only 280! It opened on Boxing Day 1871 and cost ‘no more than £400’.

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