1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/St Mawes

ST MAWES, a small seaport in the St Austell parliamentary division of Cornwall, England, beautifully situated on an arm of Falmouth Harbour. Pop. (1901), 1178. The inlet admits only small vessels to the little harbour, but there is a considerable fishing industry. A large circular castle, vis-à-vis with that, of Pendennis near Falmouth, and dating from the same period (Henry VIII.), guards the entrance. Near the shore of the inlet opposite St Mawes is the small church of St Anthony in Roseland, an excellent example of Early English work, retaining a good Norman doorway.

The history of St Mawes is simple. The saint of that name is said to have made the creek of the Fal a halting-place in the 5th century. The chapel of St Mawes, pulled down in 1812, was licensed by the bishop in 1381, and both chapel and village were' situated within the manor of Bogullos, which in the 16th century belonged to the family of Wydeslade. In the 16th century John Leland speaks of the castle as lately begun and describes St Mawes as “a quarter of a mile from the castle, a pretty village or fishertown with a pier called St Mawes and there is a chapel of the saint and his chair of stone and hard by his well.” The number of houses half a century later did not exceed twenty, and John Wydeslade, as lord of the manor of Bogullos, owned the village. For the part which he took in the rebellion of 1549 Wydeslade was hanged and his lands forfeited, and in 1562 the manor was granted by Queen Elizabeth to Sir Reginald Mohun of Hall. In the same year St Mawes was incorporated and invested with the right of returning two members to the House of Commons, a privilege which it enjoyed until 1832. In 1607 the portion of the manor of Bogullos which embraced St Mawes was sold by Sir Thomas Arundell, who had married a daughter of Sir William Mohun, to Thomas Walker, and by the latter it was resold to Sir George Parry, who represented the borough in parliament from 1640 to 1642, Sir George Parry sold St Mawes to John Tredenham, whose sons, Sir William and Sir Joseph, and Sir Joseph’s son, John Tredenham, became successively its parliamentary representatives. On the death of the last named St Mawes passed by sale to John Knight, whose widow married Robert Nugent, afterwards Earl Nugent, and until the Reform Act of 1832 the Nugents controlled the elections at St Mawes. The corporation, founded in 1562, which consisted of a mayor, or port reeve, and other officers elected by about twenty free tenants, was dissolved under the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835. Its silver mace now belongs to the corporation of Wolverhampton, to whom it passed after the great sale of the effects of the duke of Buckingham at Stowe in 1848, the duke having obtained it as the heir of the Earls Nugent.