Page:The parochial history of Cornwall.djvu/257

Rh William Saplyn; andSaplyn, in the 1st and 2nd of Philip and Mary, sold it to John Glyn, Esq., John Ganergan, William Prye, John Manifield, Richard Carter, Henry Rouse, John Vivian, and Richard Hancanon, who were trustees for the parish of Sancta Colomba. After which conveyances the Lord of Resurrans refused to pay the said rent. Whereupon the parish distrained those lands, and the owner thereof replevined the goods so taken, which occasioned the parish bringing an action in replevin against the replevers thereof; and for plea, by way of avowry, did allege that those goods they ought to take, for that one John chaplain of Trinity chantry was seised of the said rent in fee, as his predecessors time out of mind had been before, in right of the said chantry, from which it passed to King Edward the Sixth, and the purchasers under him as aforesaid. Whereupon the issue passed for the plaintiff, or parish, against the Lord of Resurrans. (See St. Michael Penkivell, St. Mary Wike; also for Chantry, see St. Cuthbert for prayer for the dead.)

In the year 1676, the greatest part of this church of St. Colomb was casually blown up with gunpowder by three youths of the town, scholars therein, who, in the absence of their master and the rest of their companions, ignorantly set fire to a barrel of gunpowder, the parish stores, laid up in the stone stairs and walls of the rood-loft, which occasioned the destruction of it and themselves together; for the glass-window, roofs, timber, stones, and pillars, thereby made a direful concussion together, especially those shot from the walls of the moorstone stairs aforesaid, to the total defacing the church and many pews thereof.

In this tragical concussion several accidents were strange and unaccountable. As, first, that one Nicholas Jane, a hellyar, was on a ladder mending the healing, or stones on the roof of the church, when it happened, whereby he himself and the ladder under him