Why is Frenchman’s Creek Called Frenchman’s Creek?
Whilst staying in the Landmark Trust’s cottage in Frenchman’s Creek on the Lizard this weekend I enjoyed reading through the history file they create for each of their properties. In this case there was a particularly interesting section on the reasons why Frenchman’s Creek was so named.
You will all know the name of course from Daphne du Maurier’s book — about a well to do London Lady who, for the first time in years, visits her family’s Cornish cottage in a creek up the Helford River to discover a French pirate using it as a lair and they fall in love.
I think that for many of us, Du Maurier’s story is so intricately bound up in the place name that they are somehow one and the same, but of course they are not — history is always a little more complicated.
My thoughts, however, were that Du Maurier was not that far off the mark. A French pirate lurking in Cornwall is by no means implausible to target the wealthy shipping entering or leaving the English Channel or Falmouth in particular. Given the well-established history of smuggling in the South West in the eighteenth century, however, with the government raising taxes on all sorts of luxury goods from tobacco to lace, it is perhaps more likely that the offending Frenchman was a smuggler.
The Landmark Trust’s history file, however, offers an interesting couple of lines of thought.
The first is that the word ‘Frenchman’ might actually refer to a French ship — and that there is evidence for the word Frenchman specifically meaning a ship, from the fifteenth century.
Another convincing line of thought suggests the name actually comes from the land on the river bank. On the Tithe Map of 1841 the creek is actually called Treveder Creek after the farm (Trevidor) on its western bank, but a field half way up, on the same bank, is called Frenchman’s Close, and perhaps this refers to a former tenant, just as on the opposite bank there is a small field called Noddy’s garden. One wonders if Noddy and the Frenchman knew each other and liked each other or just glowered at each other across the creek.
