This book has been written with the expectation that it will be read by many people who are not related to the three Cornish families of Cotehele, Edgcumbe and Brendon, but who are interested in the families’ history and particularly the heiress Hillaria de Cotehele.

Can there be another wardship such as the wardship of Hillaria de Cotehele, which was seized by two Royal Princes – by Sir John de Eltham, the Earl of Cornwall, and by Edward the Black Prince, the Duke of Cornwall – then sold three times?

This history tells of the death of Ralph de Cotehele, brother of Hillaria, in 1349 when the Black Death entered the Brendon family house. Five subsequent court hearings over the dispute about the marriage of Hillaria de Cotehele resulted in the Black Prince granting the Cotehele Estate to John de Brendon.

The court ordered an inquisition into the Brendon family, and the resultant discoveries clearly point to the romantic suggestion that Hillaria de Cotehele was the daughter of John de Eltham, the Earl of Cornwall.

In 2013 it was discovered that the children of Thomas de Brendon of St Dominick were descended from the daughter of a great Norman landowner, the 6th Earl of Derby, whose family owned Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire for 500 years.

For ten years the author Tom Brendon has been working as a National Trust Volunteer at Baddesley Clinton. What a coincidence – it really is a small world!

ISBN 978 07223 4338–8

Paperback – 100 pages