All articles filed in Cornwall

Polwhele doesn’t give a lot of information here: the chapters are perhaps meant to be read in the context of equivalents from the previous era. This feels like a weak chapter. Time to drop this Polwhele guy and find something a bit more detailed. Agriculture A lot of “in kind” rent is paid: money rents…

Polwhele says that if a castle existed before the Normans, it’s in his previous book.  I’m not saying I now jovially hate him, but he is putting extra weight on the side of the scale that says I need to go back and read his first volume. Honestly I don’t want to, because it’s slightly…

In the earlier Cornwall posts, I’ve been looking at folklore, but to make a gazetteer I need to grapple with mundane matters like geography, politics and commerce.  For this I’m using the History of Cornwall by Polwhele which is ancient, but it’ll do while I’m waiting for something more modern to be delivered. Geographical extent…

Hunt just gives up and pours it all into a miscellaneous chapter here at the end.  Let’s fossick for plot hooks: The Bells of Forraburry Church There are no bells at Forrburry Church. They were made to rival the local church at Tintagel, and had a speedy voyage to Cornwall. The pilot gave thanks to…

This is a short chapter, but it contains something terribly valuable to me as a writer: it explains what’s going on with the Jews.  This matters a more deeply than may be superficially apparent. When we were writing Ars Magica, we kept looking for places where we could squeeze in black people, gay people, woman…

Hunt notes that he has never heard a person called a “wizard”. This note seems incongruous because he uses it himself for Merlin, but what he seems to be saying is that folk witchcraft is practiced by men and women, and that there is no separate title for the male and female types. He does…

Hunt, whose work we are following in this series of episodes, gathered his folklore in in the 19th Century. At this point, Cornish memories of Arthur were at low ebb. He found a few, which I’ll pass on in this post, but for stories set in 1220, a lot of supplementary material will need to…