In England generally castles belonged only to the Crown or to great nobles, and no gentleman was suffered to castellate or embattle his walls without a special licence from the Crown. In Cornwall all the castles pertained to the Crown or the Duke of Cornwall, and private persons had to content themselves with purely domestic mansions. Till the reign of Elizabeth the dining-hall reaching to the roof was the most conspicuous feature, and opening out of it was the ladies' bower, a small oak-panelled room. The inconvenience arising from a house being cut in half by the hall led in the reign of Elizabeth to an alteration, and the halls were ceiled over, so that the upper portion could be used for bedrooms and passage. Before her reign the usual form of a house was quadrangular, that is to say a court surrounded by buildings entered by a gate, with the hall and principal portions of the house opposite the entrance gate. But in the reign of Elizabeth it became the fashion to form the house in the shape of the letter E. In her father's reign it often had the shape of the letter H with the open ends closed by slight walls.

Cornwall possesses very few stately houses. At the close of the seventeenth century a schoolmaster at Trebartha filled a folio with sketches of the ancient manor-houses of the neighbourhood of the Tamar; picturesque old mansions of the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Nearly every one has disappeared. The squirearchy of Cornwall, flush of money, through tin, pulled down their old residences and built mansions in the Georgian period, totally devoid of interest. Of the old houses few remain except as farm houses. They were, however, never so magnificent as those in the counties where bricks and easily dressed stone existed. But still there remain Cothele, unaltered, the beautiful house of Lord Mount Edgcumbe on the Tamar; Basil, the manor-house of the Trevelyans, much mutilated by the barbarous hand of a modern architect; Trecarrel, near Launceston, an old Tudor mansion with a noble hall, never completed; Place, near Padstow, formerly Prideaux Castle, the Elizabethan residence of the Prideaux Brunes, very stately, and with a dining room rich in carved oak; Lanherne, built in 1580, a small manor-house of the Arundells and now a convent; Lanhydrock, built by the first Lord Roberts—they called themselves later Robartes; Place House, Fowey, with rich sculpture; Trerice, the old seat of the Arundells; Tregudick with its Elizabethan hall; Penheale, once the seat of the Speccots, in Egloskerry; Tonacombe, an unaltered house of the reign of Henry VII, in Morwenstow; Penfound in Poundstock, small but charming; and Lanreath, with a carved oak parlour, the ancient house of the Grylls family. There are others, now farmhouses, and only spared on that account, deserted when the squires moved elsewhere and did not pull down their ancestral residences.

Cothele

Cothele

A monastic building consisted of a church, with a cloister court adjoining, about which were the dormitories, a library, and a refectory or room in which all had their meals in common. There would be often two courts, one outer, the other with the cloister about it in which the monks mainly lived and in the centre of which was the monastic graveyard. The garden of pot herbs and herbs for medicinal purposes was an essential feature of all monastic settlements, as was also the stewpond or ponds for fish. The necessity under which the monks lay of being near water, both for their fish and for sanitary purposes and for drinking, led to all monastic establishments lying low down in valleys by running streams.

Of monastic remains there are few. At Launceston the foundations of St John's Priory have been laid bare. At Glasney in Penryn a few walls alone represent what was once a stately priory. Of the great house at Bodmin hardly a wall stands, but some remains of the sanatorium exist at Lavethan. At Lanivet are the remains of St Benet's Monastery, till 1859 the most picturesque and best preserved of the monastic buildings in Cornwall, except St Michael's Mount. An engraving of the remains was published by Lysons in 1814, which shows the house to have been beautifully situated, and as beautiful as its situation demanded. At the date mentioned it was mutilated and spoilt.

Cornwall cannot boast picturesque cottages. Some few remain that possess some charm, as the old Post-office at Tintagel, some slate-hung dwellings in West Looe, the Lugger Inn, Fowey, and the almshouses at St Germans. There are as well some that call for an artist to use his pencil at Saltash. But, on the whole, the county is poor in the domestic architecture of farm and cottage, and house fronts in the towns, with rare exceptions, are not of any artistic character.

The Old Post Office, Tintagel

The Old Post Office, Tintagel