The Arundells of Lanherne were one of the foremost families in Cornwall for about 300 years, from the mid-fourteenth century until well into the seventeenth; and their considerable wealth included estates in most parts of the county, as well as elsewhere, notably in Devon and Dorset. We are fortunate that an extensive archive of their estate survives from that period, and has recently come fully into the public domain as a result of its acquisition by Cornwall County Record Office, Truro. The present volume contains rentals and surveys of the Arundells’ Cornish lands from the period of their greatest wealth and influence; the documents show the extent of their properties in the county, and thus can serve as a guide to the archive as a whole. Other parts of the archive, such as deeds and leases, manorial court rolls and account rolls, and more miscellaneous documents, are potentially richer than the rentals and surveys in terms of social and economic history; but the user of those documents requires the overall view provided by the surveys in order for their details to be fitted into the larger picture. Part of the purpose of publishing these documents, therefore, is to render the other riches of the archive, yet unpublished, more accessible and comprehensible for the student of local history in medieval Cornwall.

The surname Arundell (or Arundel) is known from various parts of England from the Norman Conquest onwards. The ramifications of the surname have not been fully worked out, and it is unclear whether all bearers of it were ultimately related. The surname may even have more than one derivation, from the Old English place-name Arundel (Sussex) in some cases, and from Old French arondelle ‘a swallow’ in others. The latter derivation was used in our family's coat-of-arms, and by other bearers of the name, but such allusion of course proves nothing about the actual derivation of the surname. Our family first appears, holding a single manor (Treloy, near Newquay) in the early thirteenth century. The possible relationship of the Cornish Arundells with other, up-country, bearers of the surname is unknown, for lack of records. Nearly a century earlier, in 1130, a Robert Arundell is mentioned in a Cornish context; but he appears in a similar capacity in several other counties, and may belong rather in Dorset.