Living things in Cornwall
Herbs: Cornwall has a vast amount of Seaholm and Sampire. Seaholm is candied or made into a syrup. It’s a restorative. Rofa folis? Also has Hyssop, sage, pelamountayne, marjorum, and rosemary.
Few Cornish people farm, comparatively: food is imported from Devon and Somerset. Wild fruits include “whurts, strawberries, and raspies.” Orchards provide pears, plums, peareplummes, cherries, mulberries, chestnuts and walnuts. Carew is surprised by the lack of grapes given the limestone around the place.
The main fuel is furze (which seems to be a sort of broom). There are few woods, and they are coppiced. THey dry turfs and use them as fuel, and bring in sea coal from Wales. Timber is too valuable for mine stays and shipbuilding for wood to be used in charcoal.
There are snakes in Cornwall, and the stories Carew gives appeared in Hunt, so they need not be listed here. He does mention a man who caught a snake and broke out its fangs, so that he could use it to scare ladies. He would kiss it as a joke. Eventually it bit his toungue, either with a regrown tooth or a shard he had failed to remove, and he almost died of a swollen tongue.
Cornwall has a lot of rats: they are its main vermin. It also has martens, squirrels, foxes, badgers, otters, hares, coneys, and deer. Its domestic animals include pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, oxen, horses, dogs. Cattle aren’t much raised here: (beef, whitsull, leather, tallow are not particularly expensive, though). Oddly mules are not used as much as horses.
Carew notes doves, geese, ducks, peacocks, sinney ducks, china geese, and barbary hens. Wild birds include quails, rails, partiridges, pheasants, plovers, snyte (?), wood doe, wood cocks, merlins, sparhawks, hobbies and lannards. Her notes Cornish people are really interested in hawking and are happy to spend more to keep a hawk than it brings in as a hunter, showing he’s never had a hobby in his life. Singing birds are lynnets, goldfinches, ruddocks, canaries (?), blackbirds, thrushes. He says there are no owls, which sounds suspicious to me. He then gives the story, recorded in Hunt, of swallows hanging out in the bottom of quarries and rivers during the winter.
Seafood
Shellfish include winkles,limpets, cockles, mussels, shrimps, sheaths (razorfish), sea hedge hogs (urchins), crabs, lobsters, oysters. Carew believes crabs breed in the shells of cockles, and lobsters in the shells of winkles.
Fish include the sdab, plaice, flake, sole, thornback, brit, sprat, whiting scad, chad, shark, cuttle, eel, porpoise, whale. salmon, shoat, trout. Most important is the pilchard.
The fish are caught by line, spiller (a long line with lots of hooks), spear, and netting estuaries, making a sort of fishtrap with nets and poles, and drag netting. Oysters are pulled at high tide or with a weighted dragnet. Oysters have a “milk” in them in May and June which engenders younger oysters (not in Mythic Europe?) and they don’t taste as good at that time.
There are dark nuts found on the shore which are good for women in childbirth.
He also notes orewood, which is an edible seaweed.
Carew says that seals are kind of like aquatic pigs, but they delight in music and will come toward it.
Starfish are poisonous. He also mentions a “blobber” saying not to eat it because it is basically living sea muck, and that barnacle geese are geese.
Games From Folktales 