Tag Archives: Cornish language

Cornwall’s Prayerbook Rebellion

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It’s 1549, we’re in Cornwall, and (I’m taking a gamble here) none of us speak the language, because it isn’t English, it’s Cornish. Enough people speak English that we can probably buy a loaf of bread and a pint of beer (we’ll want to stay away from the water), but it’s embarrassing to depend on other people being better at languages than we are.

 

The inevitable background

What else do we need to know? Edward the Kid is on the English throne. That makes him sound more like a wild west gunslinger than a monarch, though, so let’s be conventional enough to call him Edward VI. He won’t last long–he becomes king at 9 and dies of TB at 15–but right now he’s sitting in the fancy chair, and he’s seriously, Protestantly Protestant, and more to the point, so are the people around him who, since he really is a kid, are powerful forces. 

This is when (and why) crucifixes and saints’ images are stripped out of the churches. Stained glass is destroyed. Masses for the dead are banned, and so are rosaries and church processions. The clergy’s gotten permission to marry.

But in Cornwall it’s gone further than that. Churches can’t ring bells for the dead. Church ales–fundraising banquets that are one of the important ways local churches raise money–have been banned. Priests’ vestments have to meet strict guidelines, and parishioners have to pay for that. 

Irrelevant photo: A magnolia blossom. For some reasons, it decided to bloom a second time this summer

These West Country rules come from William Body, who (I’m quoting David Horspool’s The English Rebel here) “got his hands on the archdeaconry of Cornwall against local opposition,” and then managed to line his pockets once he did.

In Penryn two years ago (that was 1547), there was a demonstration against him and the changes he’d introduced. It came off peacefully, and so did the government’s response. 

But the next year, the foundations that sang masses for the dead were suppressed, and in Helston Body was attacked and murdered by a mob led by a priest. 

Do I need to point out that this wasn’t peaceful? The priest and eleven other people were executed. This wasn’t a peaceful response.

Aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you these things?

Still, Edward, his advisors, or a combination thereof, didn’t think the opposition meant much. It happened in Cornwall, for fuck’s sake–the outer edges of beyond. They were convinced that people were thirsty for their reforms, but even if they’d believed the opposite, they might have acted the same way. Because they were right. It said so in their holy book, or it did once someone put the correct interpretation on it. So they moved ahead and introduced a major change in church services: they’d now be in English instead of Latin, and they’d follow the Book of Common Prayer. 

The Latin mass was now an endangered species, and if you insisted on saying it you’d be endangered yourself.

And since we’ve caught up with our timeline, we’ll shift back to the present tense. It almost makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.

Conducting church services in a language people understand is a very Protestant move, and the English church has been edging in this direction for a while, first including snippets of English, then tolerating–maybe even encouraging–English-only masses in a few churches. Now, though, every last church has to use the Book of Common Prayer, and nope, they’re not negotiating this.

This sets off a massive flap. Catholics cling to Latin, and they’re horrified. But people who are further along the Protestant spectrum are equally offended because the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t break as sharply as they’d like with Catholicism. 

And–we’re finally getting to the point here–it offends the Cornish, because say what you like about how a service in the language people actually speak brings religion closer to the people, English isn’t their damn language and their priests can’t say services in Cornish because that’s not how it’s being done this week.

I’m not sure anyone wanted to say the service in Cornish, mind you. I’m just pointing out that the compromise wasn’t on the table. The Act of Uniformity bans every language except English from church services.

 

Cue the rebellion, please 

We’ll start in Bodmin, which is more or less the geographical center of Cornwall. It’s the first day the new services are scheduled to be heard. So people gather. People protest. They convince a local member of the gentry, Humphrey Arundell, to lead them.

Yes, I do notice the strangeness of people having to convince someone to lead them. It speaks, I think, to how deeply ingrained the hierarchy is. Without a gentleman to lead them, how could they possibly know what to do, even if they had to set him up there and tell him to do it?

Instead of going home at the end of the event, the protesters set up camp.

On the same day and for the same reasons, a protest breaks out in Sampford Courtenay, in Devon, the next county up from Cornwall, and nine days later the two groups set up camp a few miles outside Exeter and prepare to lay siege to the city. Figure there are some 2,000 rebels out there. Or some 4,000. Let’s not bog down over the details. A lot of people. More than you’d want at your birthday party.

The rebels put together several versions of their demands, and most of what they want is about religion. The center of religious reformation is in London. In the West Country, they hold to the beliefs and traditions that have been part of daily life for centuries. Still, they don’t call for a full return to the Catholic Church but to a return to the way things were under Henry VIII. And like so many rebels in monarchical countries, they don’t see themselves as challenging the king but the bad counselors around him. 

Yes, everybody’s drunk the monarchical KoolAid. It won’t be until the Civil War that they turn to other drinks.

The siege of Exeter lasts five or six weeks, and Exeter is left to defend itself until John Russell, who just happens to be the Lord Privy Seal (and people take these titles entirely seriously, remember) arrives with soldiers and defeats the rebels.

Estimates of the number of rebel dead are roughly the same as the estimates of the rebels themselves: 3,000 to 4,000. 

Again, don’t try too hard to make the numbers work. The leaders are hauled to London to be ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. 

 

The aftermath

As a BBC historical article puts it, “The insurrection was eventually crushed with hideous slaughter – some three to four thousand West Country men were killed – and in its wake the ruling classes may well have come to associate the Cornish tongue with rebellion and sedition, as well as with poverty and ‘backwardness’. This in turn may help to explain why the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, as it was later to be translated into Welsh. What is certain is that the failure to provide a liturgy in the Cornish tongue did much to hasten the subsequent decline of the language.”

The decline is more or less geographical, with English leaking across the Devon border and pouring south and west. By 1640, Cornish has retreated into the toe of Cornwall’s sock, and as the language dies out, the process of assimilation into England gathers force. By 1700, only 5,000 people speak Cornish.

The last native speaker of Cornish is Dolly Pentreath, who’s born in 1685 and dies in 1777. 

But. The sense of separation stays strong and plays a role in Cornwall taking the royalist side in the Civil Wars–partly (or so the BBC article speculates) because they saw Charles as  British and the Parliamentarians as English. With his defeat, the Cornish identity took another hit.

The An Gof Rebellion, with an extra bit of Cornish history thrown in

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Welcome to Cornwall, 1497. Henry VII is on the English throne and Cornwall is part of England but also not part of England. The way that works is that the Cornish are a separate nation, which is about culture, but not a separate country, which is about law, power, and who’s in charge. So, like the Welsh, they’re a nation inside the country of England.

 

The culture

Most people’s mother tongue is Cornish, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh. And to a few other languages, but never mind that. I know a rabbit hole when I see one. The Cornish language is strongest in the west of the county and among ordinary people. Go east (which is actually northeast, but that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole) or spend time with the gentry and you’ll find English taking a stronger hold–probably alongside Cornish but in spite of what I said in the first paragraph we’re not actually there so we can’t walk down to the market and find out.

 

Irrelevant photo: what could be more Cornish than a Japanese anemone?

English is spoken among the gentry because not long after the Normans conquered England (and with it, Cornwall), the English king started handing Cornish lands to English (or Norman, or–rabbit hole, damn it) lords. That’s given English some upper-class cachet. Either for that reason or of necessity, a fair number of people speak it as a second language. 

But there’s another reason English is gaining a foothold. Cornwall’s surrounded by water, which means ships dock at its ports, bringing people in from other parts of the world, including from that closest of nations, England. People who live in ports tend to pick up at least bits of other languages.

Still, Cornish is the primary language, and the Cornish also have their own way of dressing, their own folklore, their own customs and games and ways of farming. The place is called–at least by the Cornish–Kernow, not Cornwall.

 

What outsiders say about the place

In 1538, the French ambassador to London, Gaspard de Coligny Chatillon, writes that the kingdom of England “contains Wales and Cornwall, natural enemies of the rest of England, and speaking a [different] language.” 

How much should we trust that business about “natural enemies”? Hard to say. An equally authoritative Italian diplomat reports, “The Welshman is sturdy, poor, adapted to war and sociable,” while “the Cornishman is poor, rough and boorish; and the Englishman mercantile, rich, affable and generous.” So yes, a grain or six of salt might not be a bad idea here. These guys aren’t just outsiders, they make themselves into authorities no matter how little they know. 

Still, that idea of enmity might (emphasis on might) be useful background to the rebellion that I still haven’t told you about.

 

But before that, let’s talk about tin mining

Cornwall doesn’t have great agricultural land unless you have your heart set on farming slate, but it does have tin, and it’s been trading it with the world for centuries. Tin’s useful stuff. Mix it with lead and you get pewter. Mix it with copper and you get bronze. Mix it with trade and you get money.  

In 1201, Cornish tinners got their own legal framework, which exempted them from normal laws and taxes but replaced them with a whole different set. This framework divided the county into stannaries, complete with stannary courts. (Stannary? It comes from the word for tin.) The framework changed over the centuries, and starting in the fourteenth century, Cornwall was governed by a combination of the Duchy of Cornwall and a stannary parliament.

But Henry VII is still the king, remember, and his son, Arthur–the one who died and left the next Henry in charge–is the Duke of Cornwall. When he tries to make some changes in the stannary arrangements, the tinners don’t accept them. So what does Daddy do? He suspends the Stannary Parliament and the privileges that go with it. Talk about helicopter parenting.

Henry’s big on centralizing the government anyway, so this works for him.

You can–and at least one writer does–cast this as a conflict between self-rule and centralization, but how relevant the stannary parliament is to the average person I don’t know. It would’ve been run by a thin top layer of Cornish society. Did your average miner or peasant have more in common with them than with an English lord? Possibly, but not necessarily.

One writer also–sorry, by now I’ve lost track of whether it’s the same one or six other people–lists suppression of the Cornish language as a reason for the revolt that–I know, I know–we still haven’t gotten to. No one else mentions that, and he gives no specifics, so I’m inclined to put the language issue on the shelf for a later revolt, which I’ll write about soon.

Really, I will. 

What does matter to everyone is the new tax that goes along with this change in Cornish government. It’s to fund Henry’s war with Scotland. Without question, that affects everyone’s lives. Most people are somewhere between poor and very poor. They don’t have a lot of slack in their budgets.

 

Why a war with Scotland? 

We have to back up another step, avoiding another conveniently placed rabbit hole. It all has to do with Perkin Warbeck, who’s running around up north, claiming to be one of those famous princes in the tower: the ones who are lost to history and presumed to have been killed by Richard the Evil Uncle but miraculously making himself known just now to the world at large. 

But if Warbeck is one of the princes, that means he should be the king, not Henry. Which is awkward for both of them.

The Scots figure Warbeck’s a nice piece of sand to throw into the English governmental machinery and they back his claim. The Cornish, on the other hand, say, “What’s all that to us?” and (as one source puts it) refuse to pay the tax.

All of them say that? Probably not, but enough that a rebellion breaks out, led by the blacksmith Michael Joseph (he’s known as An Gof, which is Cornish for the blacksmith) from St Keverne, and the lawyer Thomas Flamank, from Bodmin, who’s the son of an estate owner. In several places, An Gof is described as powerful and a natural leader. Flamank is described as a plausible lawyer, which doesn’t quite sound like a compliment. 

If you’re not from Cornwall, the place names won’t mean much to you, but so little seems to be known about them that I’m tossing in the few scraps of information I do have. 

 

And at long last, the rebellion

The rebellion starts in the west, in an area called the Lizard (nope, you won’t find more lizards there than anywhere else in Cornwall) and the rebels head up through Bodmin and on toward London. When they leave Cornwall, they’re a force of 3,000 men. (I’m assuming they were all men, but I don’t really know that.) By the time they reach London they’re a guesstimated total of 15,000. 

Those numbers speak to the Cornish rebellion striking a chord among the English, and the Cornish historian Brian Webb says it spoke to both yeomen and peasants. A river of grievance is flowing through the country. So even though I just spent a lot of time talking about Cornwall as a nation, nationalism can’t be the only force driving this. There’s an interesting essay to be written about the ways class and nationalism intertwine and then conflict with each other, but preferably by someone who isn’t me.

At Flamank’s urging, the march is peaceful. The rebels are armed (according to some sources) with bows and arrows and agricultural tools, which have doubled as weapons in many a war, but from what I’ve read they attack no one on the way to London.

What do they plan to do once they get there? I wish I knew. I’m reasonably sure it isn’t get rid of the king. If monarchy strikes you as a natural arrangement, the accepted way to get rid of one king is to pull an alternate out of the oven, then get rid of the one someone else baked. And it helps if yours has a marginally believable hereditary claim. 

These rebels weren’t in the business of baking or un-baking kings. So maybe we should think of the rebellion as a sort of armed demonstration. Cardboard and felt-tip pens haven’t been invented, so you’d pick up a weapon. It said, “Look how serious we are,” not to mention, “We’re not taking any shit, by the way.” But I’m speculating. Let’s not take me too seriously. What I’m reasonably sure of is that the decision to march on London speaks to how much they considered Cornwall a part of England. Contrast that with centuries of Irish rebels, who fight in Ireland to get the English out, and to hell with London.

So the An Gof rebels march to London, and they’re enough of a threat that Henry forgets the Scots and marches an army south to join the forces he’s already assembled, so that 25,000 men meet the rebels outside London, at Blackheath.

 

The defeat

The rebel army is defeated at the battle of (take your pick) Deptford Bridge or Blackheath–same place, two names. In some tellings, in addition to being lightly armed, the rebels aren’t well trained. In another, their weakness is simply that they don’t have horses or artillery, although their archers are good.

Either way, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 rebels die before the group surrenders, and another 1,500 are taken prisoner. An Gof and Flamank are tried and–yeah, they’re going to do that horrible thing to them–they’re sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. An Gof declares that they’ll have “a name perpetual and fame permanent and immortal.” 

In a moment of mercy (Henry’s apparently worried about getting the Cornish any more cranked up than they already are) they’re left to die by hanging before the rest of the theatrical stuff is carried out. A baron who joined them when they marched through Somerset is simply beheaded, because he’s an aristocrat, after all. 

All three heads are displayed on London Bridge. Forgive me, but the Tudors have some really unpleasant habits.

Nobody says what happens to the rank and file rebels who were captured. Nothing good, I’m sure. I also haven’t found anything about the rebels who weren’t captured. I imagine them filtering back home with tales to tell, some true and some good enough for neighbors to buy them a pint or three. And some, inevitably, unwilling to talk about what happened at all.

 

However

In 1508 Henry reinstateds and strengthens the stannary system in return for Cornwall’s payment of a £1,000 fine. The Stannary Parliament now has the power to ignore Westminster’s laws.

That £1,000 would be the equivalent of £666,000 in 2023, but a more useful comparison is to say it’s equal to 709 contemporary horses. Horses, remember, are a luxury, which is why the rebels didn’t have them. In other words, this is a hefty chunk of cash, and I have no idea how it’s raised. Probably from those least able to pay.

According to Historic UK Henry “never imposed such high taxes on the Cornish again.” 

 

Back to 2023

The Stannary Parliament last met in 1753 and the Stannary Court heard its last case in 1896, but the charter that created them has never been revoked, so the Duke of Cornwall still appoints a Lord Warden of the Stannaries. Who, I have to assume, does nothing more than show up here and there in a fancy costume, or at least with a huge metal necklace to show how important he or she is. 

It’s a British thing. If you live here long enough, it almost begins to make sense. 

Cornish history: the Prayerbook Rebellion

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The Prayerbook Rebellion started when Henry decided to divorce Katherine.

Yeah, that Henry. Isn’t it odd how we’re on first-name terms with people who wouldn’t have known us from the dirt under their feet?

By way of full disclosure, I set the start date a little early, just for context, so nothing happened for the first few years. Then in 1534 Henry founded the Church of England, with himself as its head. And–no one could’ve been more surprised than him–it decided to grant him his divorce, which the Catholic Church was being very crabby about.

Irrelevant photo: Camellia blossoms. 

 

Henry the Much-Married starts the ball rolling downhill

The reconfiguration of the church took on a logic of its own, and starting in 1536 Henry closed religious centers–monasteries, hospitals, nunneries, abbeys. Some of them served a purpose in their communities–as schools and hospitals. The confiscated land and the buildings went to the crown and a lot of it was sold off to the wealthy. Who else had that kind of money? 

We’ll get to Cornwall any minute here. I promise.

In 1537, Henry banned the feasts on saints’ days. That included St. Piran’s Day, which is where I finally get Cornwall into the picture. St. Piran is Cornwall’s patron saint, and at this point we have a reaction on record: A fisherman from St. Keverne planned a protest and was arrested and probably executed. In Truro–Cornwall’s capital–a customs officer tried to stop a ship carrying people to Brittany to celebrate some unspecified saint’s day. He was pushed into the sea. The story seems to drop out of history there but let’s assume the ship got away and the people came back later and lived happily ever after.

The next year, pilgrimages were banned. 

You get a sense of how life was changing, right? Anne Bolyn, who Henry divorced Katherine for, had been dead by Henry’s executioner’s hand for two years by now. I mention that as a reminder of how far all this had wandered from where it started.

Along with the ban on pilgrimages came a directive that churches had to use an English-language translation of the bible. When I first heard about that–this was, oh, maybe a hundred years ago–I thought it meant people could understand the book they considered holy. The problem was, English wasn’t Cornwall’s language. Cornish was. 

It didn’t go down well. So let’s talk about the ways Cornwall was both a part of England and not English.

 

Cornwall as a country and a county

Cornwall was governed by England at this point, and it had been for a long time. Technically speaking, it was just another English county.  But it also had a distinctive culture: Not just its own language, but its own style of dress, folklore, naming customs, agricultural practices, and games and pastimes.”

High on the list of games and pastimes was pushing customs officers into the sea.

Cornwall also had two distinctive administrative institutions, the Stannary organisation, which oversaw tin mining, and  the Duchy of Cornwall. We won’t stop to make sense of those; we’ll just take it on faith they underlined its sense of separation.

Writers of the time–and well into the next century–wrote about the Cornish as a separate people, as distinct and recognizable as the Welsh, and about Cornwall as almost a separate country.

So that’s what we get to plunk onto the separate-country side of the scales. On the English-county side was an English gentry, which England had long since imposed on Cornwall, and the gradual inward seep of the English language. 

It might not have looked that way at the time, but from our point of view we can see the Cornish language in a slow retreat from the Devon border down toward the tip of Cornwall’s foot. 

Why’d that happen? The English gentry spoke English, although they may (or may not–I don’t know) have spoken Cornish as well. That made it useful to know enough English to do business with them, to work for them, to mix with them in whatever other ways the non-gentry mixed with the gentry. To people who cared about refinement, the fact that the gentry spoke English would’ve made English seem like the language of refinement. 

Cornwall’s ports would also have been full of the English language and the people who spoke it. This was a time when it was easier to get from, say, London by sea than by road.

 

All hell breaks (slowly) loose

In 1547, colleges, hospitals, chapels, and guilds were closed, and no provision was made for anyone else to fill the roles they’d played in caring for the sick and educating–well, some small number of kids, but still it mattered to the ones who might’ve been able to take advantage of it, leaving a very practical gap. The next year, an English official was stabbed when he tried to take down an image in a parish church. 

That makes it sound like a sudden thing. It wasn’t. The conflict had rocked back and forth for months, but we don’t do detail here at Notes. Twenty-eight Cornishmen were arrested and ten were executed for it. 

Then in 1549, Edward VI–or at least his government, since he’d have been somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven–introduced the Book of Common Prayer. Which was in English. And it insisted that church services follow it. That demand’s called the Act of Uniformity, in case that rings any bells from your long-buried memory of history classes.

Straw.

Camel.

Back.

For all that Cornish was in retreat, it was still Cornwall’s language, and for many people it was their only language. This wasn’t bringing the church’s language closer to them, it was moving it further away. 

Nationalism, meet outraged religious beliefs. You’ll find you have a lot to talk about.

Three thousand men gathered outside Bodmin–the geographical center of Cornwall, in case that’s of any relevance, which I suspect it isn’t–and drew up a set of complaints. They chose a leader, Humphrey Arundell, who was one of the richest and most powerful men in Cornwall and from an aristocratic English Catholic family. 

Was he Cornish or English? These days, the only way to figure out who’s Cornish and who isn’t is by how many generations of ancestors a person has buried in Cornish soil. I’ve been told four. I’ve also been told two. Either way, I’m too late. Whether either of those was the standard then, when Cornish identity was more sharply defined, I don’t know. I know Arundell was born in Cornwall and that he had family in England. He could as easily have been moved by religious belief as by nationalism. 

Either this set of complaints of a later one (sorry–the quotes have all gone adrift) said, “We will not receive the newe service because it is but lyke a Christmas game, and so we the Cornyshe men (wherof certen of us understande no Englysh) utterly refuse thys newe Englysh.” 

Half the church’s confiscated land was to be returned.

The complaints were sent to the government, which shrugged its shoulders and ignored them, convinced everyone would settle down as soon as it was time for Coronation Street to come on.

Then, in the random way that these things tend to happen, a rebellion broke out in Devon, the neighboring county: A congregation forced its priest to conduct the service in Latin, and in case that wasn’t enough, a supporter of the book of Common Prayer was killed. Somehow or other things escalated and the next thing anyone knew (okay: the next thing I knew) an army was marching on Exeter, Devon’s capital. 

You know how things can get out of hand, right? One day you’re killing someone over a prayer book and before you know you’ve got a whole damn army and you’re marching on the capital, thinking, How’d I get here? Do I really want to do this? Did someone think to bring sandwiches?

Arundell hadn’t wanted a fight, but the snowball was rolling downhill too fast. His army started off toward London. His plan was to talk to the government, with a few thousand soldiers at his back to serve as a megaphone, but on the way it took Trematon Castle, where some members of the gentry had holed up, and Plymouth. It also took St Michael’s Mount, which is in the wrong direction. This tells us that sat-navs (what Americans would soon learn to call GPSs) were no different then than they are now.  

Plymouth, by the way, isn’t in Cornwall, it’s in Devon, a change that’s marked by the River Tamar, which is wide enough at that point that you’d be hard put not to notice it. It’s also very wet, both there and along its entire length. But like I said, snowball; downhill; and melting gently in the Tamar’s waters. Who’s going to argue about county borders when all that’s going on?

 

Across the Tamar

At roughly this point, the Cornish and Devon armies joined together and laid siege to Exeter for five weeks, and they would have blown up the city walls but their gunpowder was too wet. That’s the English weather for you. 

The Cornish weather’s no better.

In London, the news that a Cornish army was marching on London caused a panic. Bridges were pulled down. Plays were banned–they might turn people against the government. France rubbed its hands and declared war.

The government sent soldiers to defend Exeter.

The leaders of the Cornish on Devonian armies wrote the government again, saying essentially the same thing: “We will have our old service of matins, mass, evensong and procession in Latin as it was before.”

This time the government wrote back. Three times, in fact, all of them saying no. In a long-winded, oddly spelled sort of way.

Several battles were fought, and I won’t drag you through them. The English army was bigger and the Cornish and Devonians lost. In one battle so many were captured that the English were afraid they’d lose control of them and slaughtered them instead. 

In the final battle, 1,400 were killed and the survivors fled. Arundell went into hiding and was captured (his servant turned out to have been working for the English). He was taken to London and with other leaders of the rebellion was hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Which kind of makes getting slaughtered en masse by the people who captured you look almost good. 

His lands were also confiscated and given to the leader of the English army that had defeated him. He was past doing anything with them by then, but it meant his family lost out. 

All told, some three thousand to four thousand Westcountry men were killed, including some priests and mayors hanged after the rebellion was over. According to one source, hundreds may have been killed for taking part–including many who may not have had anything to do with the uprising. 

 

The aftermath

The Cornish language went into a sharper decline after this, and although the Book of Common Prayer was translated into Welsh, it was never translated into Cornish.

Mind you, I’m not sure how welcome the translation was in Wales.

Stained glass windows were broken out of Cornish churches and images with any scent of Catholicism were destroyed, as they were elsewhere in England. 

Maps stopped showing Cornwall as a separate nation, and by 1700 you don’t find anyone writing about it as almost a separate country.

Ironically, the defeat of the rebellion, which was against the king’s new religion, set Cornwall up to support the king during the Civil War. The king was seen as British and the Parliamentary Army was seen as English. I suspect you had to be there at the time for that to make sense. The Parliamentary Army was also far more Protestantly Protestant than the king’s. I don’t know how heavily that weighed on the scales, but I assume it mattered.

When the king was defeated, it was another whack on the head for Cornwall’s status as an almost-country of its own.

The Cornish diaspora

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Cornwall–that nobbly foot sticking its toes into the waters of southwestern Britain–lost about a third of its population in the nineteenth century. 

 

The background stuff

To come up with that number, we have to use a flexible definition of the nineteenth century, then we have to admit that no one actually counted heads. Yes, you can document the number of people who left Britain, which ports they left from, and where their ships were bound, but no one asked where they were from. Or if they did, they didn’t write it down. 

You can guess more or less reasonably that most people leaving from Cornish ports were Cornish, since Cornwall (being foot-shaped and sticking into the ocean) isn’t on the way from anywhere except Cornwall, but not everyone would’ve left Cornwall from Cornish ports. Plymouth, which is in Devon, is temptingly close. 

Never mind. A third is close enough, so let’s call that calculated.

Irrelevant photo: A wild primrose. Although it’s in Cornwall, so let’s call it semi-relevant.

Are we ready to start yet?

Nope. To understand the story, you need to know although England swallowed Cornwall centuries ago, it never managed to digest it completely. 

Cornwall was once its own country, with its own language, and even today it holds onto its identity. The last native speaker of the Cornish language, Dolly Portreath, died in 1777, not all that long before the period we’re talking about, and I’m reasonably sure that “native speaker” here means that Cornish was her only language, not that she was the last person who spoke it fluently, because the language survived in isolated communities into the nineteenth century.

If we’ve got the pieces in place now, we’ll go on.

 

Early emigration

In 1815, the Napoleonic Wars ended, and instead of joy and relief, peace brought a depression. For farm workers, that meant low wages and unemployment. For farmers, it meant being squeezed between high rents and high taxes. 

In Britain, remember farmers were likely to rent their land, not own it. 

For Cornwall, it meant the start of wholesale emigration, with families headed to the U.S. and Canada. 

The West Briton (that’s a newspaper) wrote in 1843, “The spirit of emigration continues active in the neighbourhood of Stratton. High rents, heavy rates, and obnoxious and impoverishing taxes are driving some of the best of our agriculturalists to climes where these demons of robbery and ruin are unknown.”

Agriculturalists? That translates to farmers. And Stratton’s in North Cornwall, not all that far from where I live.

But if poverty and depression were the primary forces driving people out, they weren’t the only ones. Cornwall was a stronghold of Methodism, and even though they no longer belonged to the Church of England, they still owed it a tithe, which was basically a tax the church levied. You could quit the church if you liked, but your money couldn’t. If you left England, though, you could shuck off that history and those obligations and be free in your religion. 

Still, if leaving England gave people a whiff of freedom and the promise of a decent living, or at least a full meal, it also meant leaving their families, their homes, and their culture. It’s the story of immigrants everywhere, and as always, hope mingled with grief.

Between 1815 and 1830, Latin American countries were winning their independence, and some of them drew Cornish emigrants. Copper, gold, and silver were being mined in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, and Cornwall was hard-rock mining country, from prehistory onwards. Cornish miners had the experience mine owners were looking for. The saying is that you can go anywhere in the world and if you look into a hole in the ground you’ll find a Cornishman at the bottom, digging. 

In the 1840s, the same potato blight that devastated Ireland hit Cornwall. Potatoes had become a staple in the Cornish diet as well as a cash crop and pig food. With the blight, people faced starvation in Cornwall, although not in the same devastating numbers as in Ireland. But if you’re starving, you don’t stop to argue if somewhere else more people are even closer to the edge than you are. There were food riots.

At about the same time, the Australian government offered free passage to anyone who met their standards. They wanted people who were “healthy, sober, industrious and in the habit of working for wages.” To prove that they qualified, applicants needed two signatures from “respectable householders,” one from a physician or surgeon, and one from a clergyman. Presumably the clergyman was supposed to attest to the sober and industrious part.

Don’t get me started.

They wouldn’t have needed to say this, but they also wanted people who were white. 

 

And the later waves

In 1859, Australian mines started producing copper–lots of copper–and the price dropped worldwide. Cornish mines closed. Then in the 1870s, the price of tin collapsed. More jobs lost. More emigration. 

Reverend Hawker, from a North Cornwall parish, wrote in 1862,

“They come to me for advice. If they have a few pounds out of the wreck my advice always is ‘Emigrate!’ And accordingly nearly a hundred in the current year go across the seas. Our population in 1851 was 1,074 in 1861 it was 868.”

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Cornish began emigrating to South Africa to mine diamonds and gold. By then, steamships had made the trip faster, and miners were more likely to go abroad and return home rather than sink permanent roots in new countries. 

Wherever they went, though, and for however long, many emigrants sent money home. At the end of the nineteenth century, 7,000 miners in South Africa  sent £1 million a year to Cornwall. In 1898, the West Briton reported a rush to the banks after mail came from South Africa. 

By the time World War I ended, emigration had slowed down, but the population of Cornwall kept on shrinking until the late 1960s. By one estimate, between 1815 and 1920, 250,000 people left Cornwall for other countries and almost the same number left to find work–mostly in mining–in other parts of Britain and in Ireland. 

A different source estimates that between 1861 and 1900 44.8% of the Cornish male population who were between fifteen and twenty-four left to work overseas. So did 26.2% of the female population in the same age group. Another 30% of men and 35.5% of women left for other parts of Britain. 

By the time you add all that up, you have something like half a dozen people left at home to keep the fire going.

 

Cousin Jack

Outside of Cornwall, the non-Cornish considered the Cornish to be clannish. Somehow immigrants are always accused of being clannish. They cluster together to share their customs, their food, their memories, their language, their joys, and their grief. They lean into each other for familiarity and for help–material and emotional–in negotiating the transition. And they’re resented for it. It’s an old story, and it seems to play on a loop throughout–well, I can’t speak for all of human history but the parts of it that I know about.

This led to the belief that Cousin Jack, the common name for a Cornishman, especially a miner, came from Cornish miners always lobbying for some other Cornishman to be hired–his cousin Jack. 

The parallel name for a Cornishwoman is Cousin Jenny.

The story’s vivid enough to be convincing, although that doesn’t make it true. Especially since different sources trace the origin of the phrase to Australia, to the California gold fields, and to Devon, Cornwall’s neighboring county. 

The historian and archeologist Caitlin Green traces it to either Cornwall itself or to Devon and wonders if it didn’t start out as a name to mock Cornishmen, which was then stolen and repurposed by the community it was meant to mock. 

Cousin, she reminds us, didn’t just mean a family member at the time. It was a friendly way to address someone who was close but not family.

I’ll leave you with a link to a beautiful and heartbreaking song about Cornwall, mining, and emigration, “Cousin Jack.” It’s by the Fisherman’s Friends, a group of Cornish singers who are the subject of a movie made a few years ago. It’s got a joke embedded in it about Cornish and English nationalism, although maybe you have to have spent time in Cornwall to get it.

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My thanks to Pete Cooper for sending me a link about the origin of the phrase Cousin Jack, which got me going on this.