St Germans
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Map sources for St Germans at grid reference SX3557
|
St Germans (Cornish: Lannales) is a village in east Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, at . It stands on the St Germans River or Lynher River, part of the Tamar Estuary. It takes its name from the St. German's Priory Church of St Germanus. This magnificent and ancient Norman church is adjacent to the Port Eliot estate of the present Earl of St Germans.
It was originally a busy fishing village in the 19th century. The St Germans Quay was busy in the last century with cargoes of timber, coal and limestone. Until the last war the trade in roadstone continued. Now St Germans Quay is home to the village sailing club; the Quay Sailing Club (QSC). The sailing club is now well established and plays a part in the life of the village.
The village was one of the rotten boroughs, electing two members to the unreformed House of Commons until the Reform Act 1832. As in many of the Cornish rotten boroughs, the franchise in St Germans was restricted to a tiny number of "freemen", rather than to all residents, but even they were not numerous - by the time of the reform bill, the male population of the borough was only 247. However, the previous census had shown that the whole parish (of which the borough made up only a fraction) had a population of 2,404, and the initial proposal was that St Germans should lose only one of its two MPs; but the Whig government subsequently decided that the availability of sufficient population in a surrounding parish should not save a borough from disfranchisement unless a substantial part of that population was already within the borough boundaries, amending the bill's schedules so as to extinguish both of the St Germans MPs. The Tory opposition attacked the decision as politically motivated (St Germans was a Tory borough), and the vote in the Commons was one of the narrowest in the entire reform bill debates.
St Germans was originally the seat of the Bishop of Cornwall before the see was combined with Exeter in 1261. Today the Bishop of Truro's deputy is known as the Bishop of St. Germans in acknowledgement of this, although he has no specific links with the village.
St Germans railway station was opened on 4 May 1859 at the west end of St Germans viaduct, 106 feet above the quay. It is notable for having the best preserved Cornwall Railway station buildings.
[edit] External links
