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as Edward III.
This John, who 'took one dwelling, 32 acres of English land in Cornish furlongs', for which he
paid the duke's representative three shillings and ten pence a year, plus 22 pence for four acres
of wasteland, was named in the subsequent Assession Rolls of 1340 and 1347. But in 1356, the
first land assessment made after the Black Death that devastated England in 1348/9 (about a
third of the population died, ie, about 1.4 million people over two years). William Honeycombe
appears, taking possession of the very same house called Honeycombe and the same 32 acres.
Clearly he was John's heir, if not his son.
In France at this time, Edward the Black Prince, son of Edward III, added to his father's earlier
victories, like that at Crecy and the capture of Calais, by winning the battle of Poitiers and
capturing the French king, John.
Eight years later, in 1364, the house called Honeycombe passed from William Honeycombe to
a man called John Clerk. Although William and his
family continued to live in the neighbourhood, this William was the last Honeycombe to live at
Honeycombe itself.
His descendants and those of his relatives spread to neighbouring Cornish villages, and then
further afield. But most of them never lived far from Liskeard, the chief market town in eastern
Cornwall. Some returned to Calstock - like Matthew, the grandfather of William the emigrant.
Some never left. For over six hundred years, Honeycombes were born, lived and died in
Calstock, and were baptised, wed and buried in the parish church, where these events
eventually began to be recorded (after a decree by Queen Elizabeth I) and were noted in parish
registers - the earliest in Calstock dating from 1565.
Was William the stonemason, the emigrant to Australia, aware of his Cornish ancestry and of
Honeycombe House?
He must have known that generations of Honeycombes had lived in Cornwall, and that there
was some connection between the Honeycombes of St Cleer, where his grandfather, Matthew,
was born (in 1726) and those Honeycombes in Calstock who had recently died out (in 1750).
And then there was the house called Honeycombe. Although the fertile valley had been renamed
Danescombe by some antiquarian - on account of an ancient battle there between the Britons
and the Danes - the house had retained its original name and still stood at the head of the valley.
Much altered over the centuries by its various owners, it would be further altered over the next
200 years.
In 1798, in the year after William the stonemason was born in Calstock, the house and its now
30 acres were sold and bought by a Cornish landowner, John Pierson Foote, who installed a
George Marshall as his tenant therein. In 1806, the property was purchased by a mining
magnate, John Williams of Scorrier, and remained in the hands of his family for a hundred years.
Did young William, who was nine in 1806, ponder for a while when he heard about the new
owners of Honeycombe House, and ask his father, Robert, why the house had their name -
Honeycombe? Why did it not belong to them?
William's childhood was spent at a time when great forces, military, social and political, were on
the move: the face and frontiers of Europe were changing in the wake of the American and
French revolutions, and in Britain the agrarian and industrial revolutions that would transform the
nation, bringing it much wealth and woe, were gathering impetus. It was also the dawn of world
supremacy for Britain, of an age of imperial prosperity and greatness that would last for over a
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