98 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
house, like Marazion and "attall Saracen" being but a corruption 
of Cornish words. 1 
Until the twelfth or thirteenth century European tin, unless 
any came from the East, must have been very largely and almost 
solely derived from this country, but about this period tin mines 
were discovered in Bohemia and Saxony. They do not appear to 
have seriously competed with the English mines ; for between 
1332 and 1345 it is recorded, in the accounts of the commercial 
industry of Florence, that the Italian merchants imported tin 
from Cornwall, from whence it was regularly conveyed in Italian 
vessels. It was exported from Cornwall in large slabs of a long 
square form, weighing about 200 lbs. 
The streaming operations on Dartmoor must have been very 
active, and of an extensive character, from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth centuries. Indeed, so active were they that Parliament 
had to interfere; and an Act was passed in 1531, having for 
its object the preservation of the havens of Plymouth, Dartmouth, 
and Fowey. The streamers were compelled to erect suitable catch- 
pits, for the purpose of arresting the silt, but it is very 
questionable whether the law was stringently applied; for, a 
few years after, Leland says that the Torey Brook ran red 
with sand from the tin works, and this had accumulated to such 
an extent as to choke up the lower and first buildings of the 
court of the Priory of Plympton Mary. Keferring to Dartmouth 
he says, "The River of Darte by Tynne Workes carieth much 
1 In Appendix B to De La Beche's Geological Report of Devon and Cornwall 
and West Somerset, in the JRed Book letter written about 1205 from William 
de Wrotham and others to the Archbishop of Canterbury, there occurs, in the 
enumeration of persons liable for penalties inflicted for contravention of the 
king's rules and regulations for refining, weighing, and stamping tin, the 
following expression, " Also neither man nor woman, Christian nor Jew," &c. 
The special mention of the Jews may indicate that they dealt in the metal, 
but it does not follow that they raised it. The selling referred to by Matthew 
Paris means that he pawned to his brother the legitimate and illegitimate 
taxes that could be squeezed out of the Hebrews. In the account given by 
Paris, who was a contemporary historian, there does not occur a single word 
which indicates that the Jews were sent as slaves into Cornwall to work the 
tin mines; on the contrary, he says, the "Earl spared them." If Jews did 
work the Cornish tin mines, it is fair to assume they worked in Devon 
as well, and seeing that they are supposed by some writers to have left their 
impress on one county, in the designation of the smelting-houses, it is strange 
they have left no impression whatever as the result of their labours in the 
other. 
