The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
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Long before the estuary’s main shoreside settlements had appeared, monastic communities were measuring out their days here, with prayer and fishing and contemplation.
This then is how history begins on the shores of the Lower Fal, with groups of beehive huts and shaggy men half attached to the world, who immersed themselves up to the neck in the freezing water and pressed songs of devotion from their chattering lips. They were holy sea-wanderers, peregrini, who in the name of Christ took to the open water in the post-Roman centuries, trusting less to the rigours of seamanship than to divine providence. The sea was their desert, a blank alternative to the troubled world, and retreating to it an enactment of the reckless example of St Anthony. But the waters of north-western Europe are a harsher place by far than the wastes of Egypt. How many perished, drowned or starved in the great flat-horizoned emptiness, we shall never know. In the Fal, salvation was a labyrinth of wooded creeks, tidal waterways that pushed up far into the hinterland. They left their names in a series of creek-side churches. The one here is St Anthony’s – the dedication honouring not the father of Christian monasticism, but the Cornish royal martyr, Entenius.
I work the mooring-chain over the samson post and watch it splash into the water. The weight of the chain as it sinks tugs the mooring buoy away from the boat. It is always a moment of anxiety, the severing of attachment. At the same time, Liberty’s bows are caught by the wind and blown further from the retreating buoy, down towards the shore. I jump inboard, jab the engine into gear, and head out of the river.
It is a bright day. A brisk westerly is driving gun-puffs of cloud across a clear sky. The water is flecked white, with short wind-turned seas that set up a barrelling motion in the boat. I lean back against the tiller. I can feel it in the small of my back. I can correct the lurch of the bows with the slightest movement. The village looks different from the water; all these years here and I’m still surprised by that: how seeing the land from the sea transforms it so completely.
Beyond St Mawes Castle, the estuary opens out, running several miles inland. I can see distant woods and fields and a few dot-clusters of white houses. Between them stretches the wide basin of the Carrick Roads, agreed by all who have written about it for hundreds of years to be one of the finest natural harbours in the world. I bring Liberty in past the town of Falmouth. The early sun lights up the town’s terraces, each one following its own contour-line along the slopes, a stadium crowd of a thousand windows. Against the outer arm of the docks lies a rusting stone-barge named Charlie Rock. Towering over it is a Monrovia-registered tanker waiting for repairs. High up on the rail, a tiny figure raises its hand to wave down at me. As I pass in under the stern, the dock opens out. So close to the houses, the ships look out of scale.
Until as late as the seventeenth century, there was no town here. There was nothing – no docks, no quays. Where the wharves are were shingle beaches and mudflats. A sandbar enclosed a swampy lagoon where the National Maritime Museum Cornwall now stands. The slopes above the low cliff were open country, copsed and dotted with furze. The town centre itself was a bog. (It is still known as ‘the Moor’, a place where swampy land meets the tide.)
Yet within a century and a half, Falmouth was one of the great ports of the fast-expanding world – a global thoroughfare of war-news and innovation, whispered espionage and gold bullion, its quayside crowded with footsore explorers, high-worded gospellers bound for the New World. The view from the wharves was a pitch-pine, hempen jungle of yards and sheets, masts and ratlines. The decks were so numerous, it was said, that you could walk from one side of the harbour to the other on them.
The steep arc of Falmouth’s growth reflects that of the era of sail, those ship-driven centuries that followed the Middle Ages. From the periphery of Europe, England emerged as a maritime power with such suddenness that it surprised her own people as much as it did her enemies. In the far south-west of the British Isles, Falmouth sprang from its bog with the same brash assurance. The Reformation prompted technical, political and cosmological changes that revolutionised mobility and fostered the restless urge to seek far-off lands. Falmouth itself was like a colony, an empty shoreline without a past, where the rootless and the hopeful could settle as equals.
Until that time, the Fal estuary had three ports. Each lay at the top of a long, tidal reach. Any settlement further downstream attracted the marauders who peopled the open seas and liked to burn the places they visited. Of the three, the most exposed was Penryn, a couple of miles up river from the site of Falmouth, where a chain could be stretched across the creek to repel incomers.
It is approaching high water when, later that day, I round the last bend in the Penryn river and see the ancient coinage town spread out over two valleys. Weekend yachts, day trawlers, houseboats and punts bob at the fringes of the creek. Alongside them lie semi-submerged hulks and wrecks, and the project-hulls of would be ocean-crossers, part-completed or long abandoned. I leave Liberty at Exchequer Quay and in sea-boots go up to the main road, standing to wait for the beep-beep-beep of the pedestrian lights before crossing. I follow the Antre river through the lower town and with the sun low find myself standing in the middle of an empty municipal field. The grass has just been cut. The trimmings lie in stripes at my feet, matted by the morning’s rain.
In the thirteenth century the Bishop of Exeter was visited in a dream by Thomas à Becket. Come to this place, he was told, to the marsh known as Polthesow, Cornish for ‘arrow-pool’, so named because hunted beasts would flee into its waters and disappear. Build an altar there and in that place ‘marvellous things’ shall be seen. The bishop drained the swamp and raised Glasney church based on his cathedral at Exeter and a full two-thirds of its size. It helped that the land at Penryn, its woods and pastures, for some way inland and for miles south along the shore towards the open sea, belonged to the diocese of Exeter, as did all the money-spinning rights of the coast – the fundus, oysterage, shrim-page and right of wreck.
A college was established, and a constitution drawn up, a wise and prudent document that proposed a presiding council of ‘13 discreet persons of the more substantial sort’. Thereafter at night, and ‘testified by the neighbours’, a heavenly light was often seen at Glasney glowing high above the heads of the holy men of the college gathered to praise the name of God. Marvellous things indeed.
Glasney College was soon one of the largest ecclesiastical centres of Cornwall. As the English state pressed westwards, on the tide of its own language, the college became a great promoter of Cornish. Around it, the port of Penryn prospered. Tin and stone were loaded on its strand. Hogsheads of salted pilchard left for the Continent. The fortified walls of the college offered protection from the sea, as did the barrage of stakes and stone and chain put across the river.
Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as sea trade increased around the coast, and as the coastal peoples of Atlantic Europe became more restless, so Penryn grew into one of the busiest ports in Cornwall. It was a frequent point of refuge. In 1506 King Philip and Queen Juana of Castile sheltered there for several weeks: ‘We are in a very wild place,’ wrote the nervous Venetian ambassador with them, ‘in the midst of a most barbarous race.’ Yet even in the Middle Ages, the sea had produced a cosmopolitan settlement. In 1327, half of Penryn’s population was described as ‘foreign’, Breton for the most part. As a language, English was the third or fourth most used. The college and the port complemented each other perfectly – ships coming to the Fal for shelter were drawn to Glasney, while their victualling needs produced a thriving commercial centre.
Glasney College.
But in time something of the worldly success of Penryn appeared to seep into Glasney College’s inner rooms. By the sixteenth century its officials were being described as ‘men of great pleasures, more like temporal men than spiritual’. The provost had little time for his ministry, preferring to ‘drink and joust’. Henry VIII’s Star Chamber was told how he ‘doth slay and kill with his spaniels, some days two sheep, some days three and divers times five in a day’. The college’s shoreside position, which had helped it to grow, now counted against it: ‘By reason of the open standynge of the same on the sea,’ gloated the Crown Commissioners shortly after Henry VIII’s death, ‘by tempest of weather felle into suche decaye.’
Yet