The Hancocks Part 1: A Cornish Inheritance
Thomas & Grace Hancock (About 1620-1679)
This story is part 1 of my family line that lived in Cornwall until Samuel Hancock and Elizabeth (nee Menear) migrated to Australia in 1876. We begin in the 1600s with Thomas and Grace Hancock in St Austell, Cornwall.
Cornwall
I’m a tinner, I’m a tinner,I’m a tinner brave and true,And when I go down to Wheal FortuneI’ll bring up riches for you.But leave ‘ee the Knocker’s pasty,And whistle not underground,For they that do spite the little folkWill never more be found. 1
Cornwall lies at the far western tip of England, projecting into the Atlantic like a peninsula. For centuries, the River Tamar formed a natural boundary: until bridges were built in the late nineteenth century, it effectively separated Cornwall from the rest of England. The county’s rugged coastline, carved by wind and sea, discouraged invaders and shaped the lives of those who dwelt there.
Long before the arrival of Romans and Anglo-Saxons, the inhabitants, people of Iberian and Celtic stock, developed in isolation. Daphne Du Maurier described them as being molded by the harshness of their land, becoming as resilient and weathered as the granite cliffs and moors that surrounded them. Tales of smuggling and shipwrecks abound in Cornish folklore, often tied to the fishing communities that thrived along the coast. My own family, however, were engaged in farming and mining, and no evidence has emerged of smugglers in our lineage.
Cornwall’s mining heritage stretches back to the Bronze Age, around 1800 BC, when tin was first produced. Early miners, known as tin streamers, recovered grains of tin from riverbeds, where they had been deposited over millennia from exposed veins in the rock. They crushed the gravel in mortar stones, washed it to separate waste sand from the heavier tin, and smelted the ore until molten, pouring it into moulds while impurities floated to the surface. Later generations discovered copper and lead at the junctions of granite and slate, requiring increasingly sophisticated methods of extraction. This deep connection between land and livelihood shaped generations of Cornish families, including the Hancocks.
A Land of Stone and Hedge
While the Farrs wrestled with the flat, waterlogged fens of Lincolnshire2 , the Hancocks lived in a landscape carved from granite and shaped by wind. The Farrs knew water; drains, dikes, fens, floods and cottages. The Hancocks knew stone; granite outcrops on Hensbarrow Downs, the great Cornish hedge (which is not a hedge at all, but a wall of earth and stone topped with furze and blackthorn.) and the ancient longhouses where families and livestock shared a single roof.
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| 1814 John Cary’s Travellors Companion |
Thomas & Grace Hancock
“The moor is wide, the hearth is small,
Yet all is home beneath one wall.” 3
When Thomas Hancock, my eighth great-grandfather, was born around 1620, the Cornish moors stretched wide and wild—strewn with weathered outcrops and divided by towering hedgerows into a patchwork of small, irregular fields. Each acre had been won from the land through generations of toil. After rain, slate roofs gleamed against the grey sky, and the rhythm of rural life echoed across the valleys.
Though no records place a Thomas Hancock at Holy Trinity Church in St Austell during this period, it is likely he was born in a nearby parish. As a farming family, they would have remained close to home, and when Thomas later settled in St Austell with his wife Grace, it was probably within walking distance of the land his forebears had worked for centuries.
St Austell itself was still what travel writers called “a mean market town.” John Leland, writing in the 1540s, dismissed it with a single line: “At St. Austelles is nothing notable but the paroch chirch.” Yet for those who lived in its orbit, it was the center of everything—a place to trade, to gather, and to hear news from the wider world.
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| Reproduced courtesy of Mac Waters as featured on cornishmemory.com |
The Hancocks likely lived not in a clustered village street, but in a scattered farmstead: a ring of moorstone and cob buildings around a muddy yard, or a single longhouse where family and livestock shared one roof, separated only by a cross-passage. The cottage would have been low, lit by rushlights in the evenings. Shuttered windows braced against Atlantic gales. Smoke from the central hearth seeped through the thatch, blackening rafters where sides of bacon hung to cure. The floor was packed earth, strewn with rushes and replaced only when fouled by mud and scraps.
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| A renovated long house |
Outside, the Cornish hedge marked the edge of survival. To the north, Hensbarrow Downs stretched across the granite uplands—wild, heather-covered common land where families grazed sheep, cut turf for fuel, and gathered furze for baking ovens. To the south, the land fell into more sheltered valleys, where oats and barley could be coaxed from thin, acidic soil.
This was a landscape of solitude and dispersed settlement. Narrow lanes ran between high hedge-banks, creating the sensation of traveling through green tunnels. A family might live within sight of one or two neighbours, but often a good walk from the next house. On market days, the lanes filled with carts and livestock. Most days were quiet, the silence broken only by the call of curlews on the moor or the distant ring of hammer on stone.
Life revolved around making do with what the land allowed. The Hancocks likely held a few acres—some inherited, some rented from the manor—and combined subsistence farming with essential trades. A man might work as a mason or carpenter when called upon to raise a barn or repair a hedge. Women spun wool and tended kitchen gardens. Children minded sheep on the commons and collected dried cow dung for fuel when turf ran short. Everyone worked. Survival demanded it.
Thomas and Grace: Building a Family
Thomas married Grace, and together they had at least six children:
John Hancock (1654–1690)
Jane Hancock (1656–1679)
Robert Hancock (1661–1737), who married Prudence Clements (1668–1753)—my direct ancestor
Margaret Hancock (1667–?)
Six children meant more hands to work and greater productivity. From an early age, children could mind livestock, gather fuel, help with harvest, spin wool, and contribute to the household economy. But more mouths to feed also meant the margin between sufficiency and hunger grew thinner. A bad harvest, a sick cow, or a lingering winter could push a large family toward destitution.
November 1671: Thomas’s Death
Thomas Hancock died in November 1671, probably in his early fifties, leaving Grace a widow with grown and nearly-grown children. Thomsin would have been twenty-one, John seventeen, Jane fifteen, Robert ten, and Margaret only four.
In an era when a woman’s legal and economic identity was largely subsumed by her husband’s, widowhood brought both vulnerability and a measure of independence. Grace would have been responsible for managing whatever land and resources Thomas left, ensuring younger children were cared for, and maintaining the family’s place in the community.
It is not known if she remarried, but she lived only two more years, dying in 1673. Her youngest child Margaret was just six years old. She would have been raised by older siblings—likely Jane or Thomsin, as elder daughters expected to mother the youngest. This pattern of older siblings raising younger ones was common when parents died young, reinforcing the family bonds that sustained working people through generations.
Robert Hancock (1661–1737), Thomas and Grace’s third son and my seventh great-grandfather, was twelve when his mother died. Old enough to work, young enough to need guidance. The skills his parents, neighbours, and extended family taught him would carry him through seventy-six years of life, through his marriage to Prudence Clements, and through the raising of his own children who would continue the Hancock line into the eighteenth century.
Thomas and Grace never saw their grandchildren. They could not have imagined that their descendants would survive civil war, navigate religious upheaval, endure the Industrial Revolution, and eventually cross oceans to build new lives in Australia. Though their own lives were brief, they passed down knowledge, cultivated resilience, and held fast to the land and each other. In the shadow of moorstone walls and beneath the shelter of towering hedgerows, they laid the foundations of a family that would weather centuries.
The Fires of Summer and Winter
The Hancocks’ year was marked not just by the church calendar but also the older rhythms of festivals that blended Christian and pagan traditions. These festivals offered respite from daily grind and strengthened community bonds across the turning of the seasons.
On Midsummer Eve, the darkening sky filled with smoke from dozens of bonfires lit on every hill and headland. The Royal Cornwall Gazette described it vividly:
”No sooner had the tardy sun withdrawn himself from the horizon, then the young men began to assemble… drawing after them, trees and branches of wood and furze… Tar barrels were presently erected on tall poles… pretty female children tript up and down in their best frocks, decorated with garlands… The joyful moment arrives, the torches make their appearance, the heaped-up wood is on fire!”
The smell of burning tar and woodsmoke drifted for miles. Young men leapt through flames, testing their courage. Children danced in circles, their garlands wilting in the heat. From every high place, fires answered each other across the darkness—a network of light connecting farm to hamlet to town, a defiant assertion that despite poverty and hardship, this community was alive and unbroken.
Six months later, at the winter solstice on 21 December, fires blazed again, but now they marked not abundance but survival, not the height of summer but the return of light from deepest darkness. In homes across St Austell, families constructed the Cornish Bush. This was a three-dimensional wreath made from withy circles woven through each other. They weredecorated with holly, ivy, and mistletoe, with an apple hung at the center and a red candle secured above. On the night of the 20th, just before midnight, the candle would be lit and families would dance beneath the bush in circles, welcoming the God of Light, celebrating the rebirth of the sun that ancient peoples had honoured long before Christianity arrived in Cornwall.
The Yule log, or the “Mock” as it was called in Cornwall, was brought in with ceremony. A massive ash log, it would be laid on the hearth and set burning, meant to last through all twelve days of Christmas. In some households, farmers would burn the “ashen faggot”—bundles of ash branches tied together with withies (willow strips), each bundle representing good luck for the coming year. As the faggot burned, the withies would burst with loud cracks, and bets were placed on which would snap first, with proceeds going to charity. Any household that did not burn the ashen faggot risked years of bad luck; some believed it protected against evil spirits and the Devil himself.
On 23 December came Tom Bawcock’s Eve, celebrated particularly in the fishing villages but remembered throughout Cornwall. The legend told of Tom Bawcock, a brave fisherman from Mousehole who had sailed out into a terrible winter storm when his village faced starvation, returning with a massive catch of seven different fish that saved the people from famine. To commemorate his courage, families ate Stargazy Pie. This is a fish pie with the heads protruding through the crust, their eyes seeming to gaze at the stars. It was a festival of gratitude for those who risked their lives to feed others, a reminder that community survival depended on individual bravery.
At harvest’s end came another ritual: Crying the Neck. When the last handful of corn stood in the field, one of the reapers would lift it high and shout: “I ’ave ’un! I ’ave ’un! I ’ave ’un!” The rest would answer: “What ’ave ’ee?” “A neck! A neck! A neck!” “Hurrah for the neck!” Then came the feast of salted pork, barley pasties, ale and cider flowing, and dancing that lasted until dawn.
These festivals connected the Hancocks to rhythms older than Christianity, older than the Norman Conquest, older perhaps than written history itself. They were the threads that bound community together when law and economy seemed designed to tear it apart, the moments when even the poorest families could feast and dance and remember that they were part of something larger than individual struggle. When future generations of Hancocks left Cornwall, they carried these memories with them: the smell of tar-barrel smoke, the taste of Stargazy Pie, the sound of withies bursting in the Yule fire, and the shout of “A neck! A neck! A neck!” echoing across golden fields at harvest time.
Part 2 of a Cornish inheritance will look at the lives of Robert Hancock & Prudence Clements & Robert Hancock and Rebecca Mufford: Generations of Endurance
Notes:
1 The Tinner’s Rabbit” (Traditional, circa 1840s-1870s). ↩
2 To read the Farr’s Stories: Roots in Lincolnshire Pt 1. ↩
3 Original verse, describing the longhouse Thomas and his family likely lived in. ↩
Sources & Further Reading
My ancestry family tree for geneological sources: https://www.ancestry.com.au/invite-ui/accept?token=2NQi6YrG-SmftSXLJLZQV1w-gTbxWAqNrkWQa0xBCuM=
(I am in process of uploading the sources for this family line to this website, so use this link in the interim)
[2] working conditions in Cornish copper & tin mines https://victorianweb.org/technology/ir/samuel5.html
[3] Patterns of Agriculture in Seventeenth-Century England https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1746
[4] St Austell Facts for Kids https://kids.kiddle.co/St_Austell
[5] Nation on Film - Tin mining - Working conditions https://www.bbc.co.uk/nationonfilm/topics/tin-mining/background_conditions.shtml
[6] United Kingdom - 18th-century Britain, 1714–1815 https://www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/18th-century-Britain-1714-1815
[7] Full text of "A Cornish Parish: Being an Account of St. ... https://archive.org/stream/acornishparishb01hammgoog/acornishparishb01hammgoog_djvu.txt
[8] Work Life https://www.cornishmining.org.uk/about/mining-in-cornwall-and-west-devon/mining-characters-and-society/work-life
[9] Trewithen and its Cornish Context in the Early Eighteenth ... https://www.artandthecountryhouse.com/essays/essays-index/trewithen-and-its-cornish-context-in-the-early-eighteenth-century
[10] St Austell: the good old days – Cornish studies resources https://bernarddeacon.com/2022/10/11/st-austell-the-good-old-days/
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