Right on the south-western tip of the British Isles, a finger of land points out into the Celtic Sea. This is Cornwall, the only place left nominally in England to be recognised as a stronghold of the Celtic race. Geographically, it's almost an island. Hemmed in by ocean on three sides and the River Tamar on the fourth, Cornish nationalists claim that England stops at the eastern bank of the river.
To the natives, this country is Kernow. To the English, the area is called Cornwall and it is widely perceived as just another county of England. No matter what views may be held regarding Cornish nationalism, it is not an English county.
Kernow: A Country Occupied for a Millennium
No treaty ever appended Kernow into wider England. Throughout the 5th and 6th centuries, the Wessex Saxons encroached westwards, taking the Dumnonii lands of Somerset and Devon. However, the wars raged on between the English and the Cornish, until King Aethelstan created a border between the two countries in the 10th century. This never left the statute books.
The affirmed River Tamar border did not stop first the Saxon, then the Norman nobility from establishing properties inside Cornwall. The country was not conquered, but taken over in a war of attrition lasting for centuries, as English landowners slowly replaced impoverished Cornish ones.
In the 14th century, Edward III created the Duchy of Cornwall, as a source of revenue for his eldest son. This is the position in which Kernow is held to this day.
How Stannary Laws Separate Cornwall and England
Cornwall occupies a unique legal and political status, which means that it can only ceremonially be called an English county. Ancient Stannary Laws, never repealed, state that any law passed in Westminster has to include special permission from the Cornish Stannary Parliament. But the English government will not recognise a Cornish Stannary Court, as they were rendered illegal under the Stannaries Court (Abolition) Act 1896.
In actuality, each law is signed off by the Prince of Wales, in his role as Duke of Cornwall.
(For an example, see the Tamar Bridge Act 1998, section 41.) In 1997, Andrew George MP challenged that practice, as the Stannary Laws state that the Duke of Cornwall cannot speak on behalf of the Cornish people. He was told that the House of Commons cannot debate Duchy issues.
In short, though the Cornish Stannary Laws are observed, they exist currently as little more than a paper exercise.
Celtic Cornwall: Foreigners in their own Country
The name Cornwall is a racial slur. Wælisc is an Old English word meaning 'foreigner'. It is still in common usage in the British Isles, though only slightly removed from its original meaning. It is pronounced 'Wales'. (The Welsh call themselves Cymru; their word for 'foreigner' is Saesneg, or Saxon.)
From the same source, we also get the 'wall' of Cornwall. The first part of the name refers, in part, to the Celtic tribe themselves. It could derive from Kernow, which is how the Cornish still refer to themselves. In Cornwall - A History (1996), Professor Phillip Payton made a strong case for these Celts being an off-shoot of the Cornovii of the Midlands. Either way, it's still a place name which remains disdainful of its inhabitants. It would be like looking towards the USA and calling them the Ameri-foreigners.
The Death of the Cornish Language
Wælisc was a word which the English tended to use against any people who spoke a Celtic language, probably because those were the foreigners that they largely encountered in battle. While this may once have applied to the Cornish, the majority have been monoglot English speakers since the end of the 18th century.
Academics at the time vied with each other for the kudos of finding the last Cornish speaker. In 1768, Daines Barrington, the son of a viscount, discovered Dolly Pentreath in Mousehole, near Penzance. He waited ten years until, shortly before her death, he presented her as the final person to fluently 'gabber Cornish'.
He also found another man, William Bodinar, who had learned the language as an adult, while fishing with old men. Mr Bodinar died in 1789; and all that remained were elderly people with a few words or a sentence or two in their native tongue. These people were viewed as objects of fun and derision. The sole fascination lay in watching the Cornish language die, with no-one rushing to record nor preserve it.
Did the Loss of their Language Turn the Cornish into English?
The loss of the Cornish language has been used by countless commentators and historians to discount Cornwall as a separate Celtic nation. The rationale being that once a people adopt the mother tongue of the invaders, then they have been effectively assimilated.
In 1904, Henry Jenner attended the Celtic Congress, in Caernarfon, Wales, where he made the case for his native Cornwall to be accepted as a Celtic nation. He had some difficulty, until he delivered a speech in Cornish and produced a telegram from a fellow countryman, also in the Cornish language. They had worked to recover it from old poems, literature and legal documents. The result was his Handbook of the Cornish Language, published in the same year. It was due to his efforts with the language that Cornwall was included in the Congress.
Unfortunately, Jenner's revival did not result in a mass resurgence of the Cornish language. In 1993, Irish writer Frank Delaney was dismissive of the Cornish, because of this loss. 'Regretfully the conclusion reaches through that the Cornish has utterly lost the struggle for survival. Already doomed, its fate was clinched when the railways brought the English to holiday on the Cornish Riviera, further Anglicizing the population.'
It seems that the Cornish battle on two fronts for recognition of their independence as a Celtic nation: a legal one with the English and a cultural one amongst the other Celts. But neither battle is over.
Sources:
- F Delaney, The Celts. (Harper Collins, 1993.)
- AK Hamilton, The Story of Cornwall. (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959.)
- R Morton Nance, Gerlyver Noweth Kernewek (A New Cornish Dictionary). (Dyllansow Truran, 1990.)
- M Tanner, The Last of the Celts. (Yale University Press, 2004.)
Jo Harrington - Jo has a BA (Hons) in History and Philosophy and a MA in History. She has a book published on the history of Wicca.
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