407
ST. EVALL.
HALS.
Is situate in the hundred of Pider, and has upon the north St. George's Channel, or the Irish Sea; west, Mawgan; south and east, St. Ervyn and St. Colomb Major. In the Domesday Tax it was rated by the name of Avalde. In the Inquisition of the Bishops of Lincoln and Winchester (1294,) Ecclesia de Avello, in Decanatu de Polton, was valued to first fruits vil. xiiis. iiiid. Vicar ejusdem xxs. In Wolsey's Inquisition, (1521,) rated at the same value; the patronage in the Bishop of Exon, who endowed it; the incumbent Bagwell: the rectory, or sheaf, in Hawkins; the parish rated to the 4s. per pound Land Tax, (1696,) 82l. 15s. 6d. The sheaf, or rectory, pays an annuity of 20l. per annum as an augmentation yearly to the vicar incumbent for ever, by virtue of an act of parliament. Probably the tutelar guardian and patron of this church is St. Ewalld or St. Evalld, from whence it obtained the appellation of St. Evall, or Avalld; who, as Malmesbury, in his Chronicle, and Herbert, in his Festivity of the Saints, tell us, was the son of Ethelbert the Second, martyred by the Danes, anno Dom. 749, brother to St. Edmnnd, king of the Saxon East Angles, who also was martyred by those people, and had his country wasted by them, till reduced by the West Saxon king, Edward the Elder; and though, after the death of St. Edmund, his brother Ewalld had right and title to the crown, and was requested by the people to take it upon him, yet he told them in answer that he preferred a religious and solitary life before all the kingdoms in the world, and therefore retired to Dorchester, in Oxfordshire, to a monastery called Cornehouse, where in great piety and holiness he lived, and died anno Dom. 850, and was interred, and held in great veneration for many supernatural facts done there after his death, whereby he obtained the reputation of a saint.
