In the land of King Arthur

Soft power in Cornwall

Many years ago, I was writing a light-hearted news-in-brief story about something in Cornwall. I can’t even remember what it was about, only that when I spoke to a local journalist on the phone, I was struck by something he said; when I asked whether the incident was related to some similar event in the region, he replied ‘oh no, that was in another country’. We were talking about something just a few miles beyond the River Tamar, but the way he emphasised the word it was clear that it was not a slip for ‘county’.

Isn’t Cornwall in England, I didn’t ask? I guess a lot of Cornishmen feel the same. At a pub in Boscastle on the north coast last week, we watched a group of singers belt out a song about their home being ‘not a county but a duchy’. Another had the refrain ‘The English take our houses, the Spanish take our fish’, the latter at least partly explaining why the county, sorry duchy, voted Leave by 56.5%. This was despite Cornwall benefiting from EU structural funds, a reflection of the fact that it is one of the poorest areas in northern Europe.

Europe’s periphery regions tend to be poor, and Cornwall is so far away from the capital that one can fly there or, as Rishi Sunak did last week, take a sleeper train. I rather wish I’d done the same, as the drive back took so long that I actually felt jetlagged afterwards.

Kernow in the native language means horn, or headland, a reference to the peninsula that juts out like a miniature Italy. Novelist Daphne Du Maurier, a sort of naturalised Cornishwoman who set some of her most famous fiction there, in later years wrote a memoir, Vanishing Cornwall, in which she begins by making this comparison: ‘Cornwall projects from the body of England much as Italy falls from the land mass of central Europe. The two peninsulas, so dissimilar in size, are curiously alike in shape; both long, narrow, terminating in a pincer movement.’

Great Western Railway even used this geographic fact in an internet-famous advert from 1907, suggesting that travellers ‘See your own country first’ and that there is a great similarity between the peninsulas in ‘shape, climate and natural beauties’, the second part being a barefaced lie in my experience.

To the Anglo-Saxon invaders the people of this region were the West Welsh, to distinguish them from the Welsh (‘Romans’) to the north of the Bristol Channel. A decisive break between the two populations came in AD 577 when the West Saxons reached the Severn Estuary, cutting the native territory in two and making English domination of the island a certainty.

Wessex continued to push into the Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia, and Alfred the Great’s grandfather Egbert decisively made himself overlord of the Corn-Welsh, yet they maintained their distinctive nature for many centuries, and still  do today. DNA analysis of English people with four grandparents from their locality showed that the Cornish - and Devonians - are still genetically distinctive from the rest of the country.

The fifteenth century Italian chronicler Polydore Vergil observed of the island he visited that ‘The whole Countrie of Britaine... is divided into four partes; wherof the one is inhabited of Englishmen, the other of Scottes, the third of Wallshemen, and the fowerth of Cornishe people. Which all differ emonge them selves, either in tongue, either in manners, or ells in lawes and ordinaunces.’

Yet by the Elizabethan period it was increasingly rare to hear mees navidua cowzs sawzneck (‘I speak no English’), and the last Cornish speaker died in 1777 in Mousehole. Today the old language is seen on street signs and there have been attempts at revival, but this ‘Christian Celtic land’ - as one of the other songs referred to - is thoroughly Saxonised.

The St Piran’s flag is ubiquitous – indeed across Britain and on the continent it must be the most common bumper sticker on British cars - although, like almost all nationalist symbols in Europe, it is probably that old historical chestnut, a Victorian invention.

Saints’ names are everywhere, in fact. Just as Graham Robb noted that the least Germanised areas of France still have far more saints’ names, so Cornwall has far more parishes commemorating its various holy men than anywhere else in England. Among the various saints associated with the region are Petroc, who lived in great austerity near Padstow before he travelled east ‘where it was said that he existed for seven years on a single fish’ (it must have been a very big fish). There was also Gennys, a martyr who carried his own head around after his execution.

Cornish surnames are also distinctive, often recognisable by the prefix ‘Tre’, which means settlement and is also found in Brittany. Unusually among British people, Cornish names often end in vowels, among them Cada, Broda and Trewortha.

If the Home Counties are core England, wealthy, flat, Saxon, traditionally Anglican and Tory-voting, Cornwall represents Angleterre périphérique, and only Northumberland rivals it in terms of distinctive local identity. Indeed, as Dan Jackson has noted, there are similarities between the two parts of the country:

‘Where Northumbria had the quasi-independent Prince Bishops of Durham and aristocratic warlords of Northumberland who held the frontier with Scotland as Lord Wardens of the Marches, Cornwall was governed as a royal duchy, under whom a “Lord Warden of the Stannaries” (from the Latin, stannaria meaning tin-mine) governed the mining districts of the county. 

‘The Cornish Stannary Parliament (officially, “the Convocation of the Tinners of Cornwall”) was the representative body of the Cornish tin industry, whose ancient privileges exempted the tinners from any jurisdiction other than the Stannary courts. This mirrored the system of courts that the Prince Bishop oversaw in the County Palatine of Durham and had further parallels with the powerful “Newcastle Parliament” — the Opec of its day — that cartel of Northumbrian mine-owners who emerged in the 18th century to control the lucrative coal trade with London.’

Like other outlying regions, Cornwall has historically provided soldiers for London’s military schemes, just as the Welsh played a huge part in the later medieval English army, and Scots and Irish within the British imperial forces. Jackson wrote that ‘one account of the Cornish rebellion of 1497 notes Cornish grievances about crippling taxes, and that they had provided “more than their fair share of soldiers and sailors” for Henry VII’s campaign in Northumberland against the pretender Perkin Warbeck and his Scottish allies. Warbeck then landed near Land’s End to capitalise on Cornish resentment, and was proclaimed King Richard IV on Bodmin Moor before leading a Cornish army to besiege Exeter. Warbeck was soon captured, and later executed.’

The rebellion of 1497 was not the last. The people of Cornwall rose up again in 1549, against the installation of a prayer book in an English that wasn’t their own language. During the Civil War, like most of Angleterre périphérique, it sided with the king rather than a south-east dominated Parliamentary regime. The famous St Michael’s Mount was a stronghold of Royalist Sir Arthur Bassett who surrendered it in 1646 and, impoverished, sold it to Parliamentarian John St Aubyn - whose family still own it.

Cornwall resisted the new established church, although in the 18^th century Methodism became hugely influential and it formed part of the Nonconformist Celtic fringe that supported the Liberal Party in its battle with the Tories of Core England. But whatever their religion, Cornishmen tended to side with their own. One Bishop Trelawny was imprisoned for protesting James II’s Declaration of Indulgence, which led to anger among people who didn’t necessarily care about his views but just saw him as a compatriot. Although historian dispute the exact origins, this may have inspired the patriotic ‘The Song of the Western Men’, with its stanza:

‘And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!’

The bishop didn’t – his career went from strength to strength after the subsequent regime change – and neither did Cornish nationalism die. Jackson writes how: ‘Even Lord Salisbury conceded in 1889 that if Ireland were granted a Parliament, “the claims of Cornwall could not be overlooked to a separate and independent Government”. This was a view shared by Cornish nationalists. Their party Mebyon Kernow was founded in 1951, and has had some success in local government elections, leading to the launch on St Piran’s Day in 2000 of a “Declaration for a Cornish Assembly”, which was supported by more than 50,000 people.’ Nothing has come of this, and the relative disappointment of devolution in Scotland and Wales perhaps make it unlikely.

Cornwall’s folk songs recall its two traditional industries, fishing and mining. Both are ancient, but it was the latter which brought it into the European mainstream earlier than anywhere else in Britain, and as far back as the Greeks there was an awareness of tin islands somewhere out in the ocean. Archaeological evidence, certainly, points to long-standing trade links between the Mediterranean world and the British headland.

Du Maurier wrote how the tin miner was a uniquely independent figure. ‘He was not a serf, servant or hired labourer, but a free artisan. The tinners had their own Parliament, and their own Stannary courts for settling disputes’. Their job was dangerous and hard, and the mines were haunted by the evil spirits of dead tinners, called knackers, typically seen as a little gnarled old man ‘hideous and ill-formed, with a head too big for his body’. 

Du Maurier, as a storyteller and creator of fantasy, loved the mystique of a region in which ghost stories are often set, and wrote that, like the Irish, they’re noted raconteurs and storytellers. ‘As an outsider, with Breton forebears, I like to think that the two races, facing an Atlantic seaboard blown by similar gales, washed by the same driving mists, share a common ancestry, along with the Irish further west… Superstition flows in the blood of all three peoples. Rock and stones, hills and valleys, bear the imprint of men who long ago buried their dead beneath great chambered tombs and worshipped the earth goddess’.

To stand beside the ancient tombs, ‘great slabs of granite, weather-pitted, worn’ was to become ‘an astronaut in time’. She recalled how 19^th century traveller Walter White, who walked all the way from London – which puts my experience on the M5 in perspective - said that Cornwall was uniquely subject to visitations from the Evil One, for ‘The landscape everywhere was dreary, dangerous, and a painful sense of loneliness stole over him’. The weather presumably had a big influence on this view; White found the Cornish summer ‘produced on some constitutions a feeling of languor and depression unknown in a drier atmosphere.’

Another visitor, Frenchman Alphonse Esquiros, found the climate so unwelcoming that at one point had to seek shelter from gales alongside frightened sheep huddled beneath a block of stones. Just like Italy.

Du Maurier noted: ‘At times a gusty drizzle sets in and lasts for two or three weeks, making everything miserable out of doors, and damp within…. More irritating still, for those of us who clump about in oilskins and seat-boots on a midsummer day, is the telephone call from London telling us that the rest of the country swelters in a heatwave of equatorial intensity.’

Mining and fishing are among the most dangerous jobs around, and the sight of drowned mariners was not uncommon. On one occasion in the mid-19^th century a transport ship was wrecked off Lizard Point and 200 corpses washed up on shore, although this was good news for locals who were able to seize its cargo.

Mining went into sharp decline later that century after tin was discovered in Malaya and copper near Lake Victoria. Jackson recalls that ‘between 1861 and 1900, 45% of the Cornish male population aged 15 to 24 left for mining districts overseas’ often to go to America, South Africa or Australia; in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1857 there was even a report of a fight between ‘“Tips” [Irish miners], Geordies and “Cousin Jacks”’, as the Cornish were known as. Unsurprisingly, the exile song ‘South Australia’, popular with Irish folk singers, also features here.

The fishing industry would then be devastated in the late 20^th century, although much of this was just due to labour-saving technology rather than the EU. Instead, the region has come to rely on tourism, and Du Maurier quoted an enthusiast for the area who said that ‘Cornwall must become the playground of all England’. But they don’t just come because of its beaches or climate, but because of its soft power.

I’ve written before about how soft power derives from storytelling. so that Britain’s attraction to foreign visitors and investors is hugely raised by Lord of the Rings, Wind in the Willows, the Narnia tales and Paddington. Walter Scott in particular helped shape the very idea of Scotland, which is profitably marketed at American tourists. But these are all dwarfed by the huge power of JK Rowling, who has probably brought more money to the British economy than anyone in history, perhaps Shakespeare excepted, and which explains why Durham University is so popular with Chinese students.

Cornwall benefits from Du Maurier tourism, in particular the crowds heading to Jamaica Inn. The author had mixed feelings about this, and described how it had become filled with ‘motor-coaches, cars, electric light, a bar, dinner of river-trout, baths for the travel-stained instead of a cream-jug of hot water. As a motorist I pass by with some embarrassment, feeling myself to blame, for out of that November evening long ago came a novel which proved popular, passing, as fiction does, into the folk-lore of the district. As the author I am flattered, but as a one-time wanderer dismayed.’

But that is minor compared to Cornwall’s main draw, an ancient example of cultural soft power and the ability of a region to capture the imagination. For this, the Cornish tourist board must thank Geoffrey of Monmouth, the most popular historian of the Middle Ages and also arguably the worst.

In 1233 Richard, Earl of Cornwall and younger brother of King Henry III, swapped three manors for a small parcel of land on the Cornish coast, among the most unpromising bits of real estate in the kingdom. Unlike his rather simple-minded brother, Richard was no fool; when Pope Alexander tried to sell the English royal family the island of Sicily in a shoddy deal that required them to also conquer it, Richard had told the papal representative: ‘You might as well try and sell me the moon as a bargain, saying “go up there and grab it”’.

Yet Richard was willing to invest in this inhospitable outpost with good reason, for it was here at Tintagel that the legendary King Arthur had supposedly been conceived. Richard built a castle, complete with a drawbridge between the mainland and a rocky outpost, even though the location makes no real sense, and as Marc Morris pointed out in A Great and Terrible King, it had ‘no strategic or domestic benefits’ whatsoever.

Du Maurier recalled how ‘My husband, with a soldier’s professional eye and an appreciation of high ground, declared that Castle-an-Dinas and Castle Dor could have been held in the old days against all comers. Tintagel, as a landing place for Tristan with his uncle’s bride Iseult, he laughed to scorn. Not even a goat in charge of a flat-bottomed punt would breach his craft here.’

But it made sense as a fantasy, a result of the epic popularity of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae, or History of the Kings of Britain. This was enormously influential, probably the second most-read book after the Bible, and over 200 copies from before the age of printing survive, suggesting that it must have sold like Dan Brown novels, and contained as much genuine history. Geoffrey fired the imagination across the courts of Europe, creating a powerful fantasy world set in the rocky outposts of Britain.

As early as 600AD a British poem, Y Gododdin, mentions in passing an Arthur and later a collection called The Annals, which may date to the 10^th century but probably later, mentions some of Arthur’s battles. The last of these, according to the chronicler Nennius, was at Badon Hill, and here he allegedly killed 960 of the enemy single-handed while also carrying a life-size replica of the ‘cross of our lord Jesus Christ’ throughout.

Almost no historian believes Arthur to have existed or, if there was a sub-Roman warlord with that name, he bears so little relation to the later myth as to be meaningless. Tom Holland, at least, suggests that the growing popularity of the myth during the 10^th century hints that, if he was influenced by any real figure, it was Athelstan, England’s first king and undisputed overlord of all of Britain, who was noted for his courage, generosity and learning.

In Geoffrey’s telling Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, king of Britain, who went to war against Gorlois of Cornwall because he desired his wife Igraine. Gorlois sent his spouse to Tintagel for safety, which Uther found impossible to besiege because it was surrounded by sea on three sides and accessible only by a narrow rocky passage. Undeterred, Uther employed Merlin to use magic to make him appear as Gorlois and duly impregnated Igraine – which admittedly, by 21^st century standards, seems ‘problematic’.

These stories also became popular in France after the Norman Conquest, and for the French-speaking elites who ruled north-west Europe the tales made the Celtic fringes places of great imagination and wonder, drawn to the more mystical, misty Brittany, Cornwall and Wales. It was a fantasy world, and it was this that inspired Richard to spend huge amounts on a castle that was in some ways a medieval Dark Ages Disneyland.

Not everyone was caught up by this fantasy, however; the Yorkshire chronicler William of Newburgh wrote at the time of Geoffrey’s story that ‘everything that man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors, was made up!’ Nothing like a historian bitter at a rival’s success. 

Despite these naysayers, Arthurian myth had an immense hold on the popular imagination. Richard’s nephew, Edward I, had a real-life round table created, and the English royal family’s adoption of the British legend went hand in hand with their conquest and colonisation of the last independent British lands in North Wales. Roger Mortimer, lover of Edward II’s queen Isabella, would stage entire re-enactments of Arthurian chivalry during his brief rule in the 1330s. Yet by now the castle at Tintagel was already in ruins, and the drawbridge would eventually fall down – although visitors must now cross a modern construction to see its wonders. Geoffrey had created an idea that gave the area soft power, and still provides an income for the various businesses around Tintagel which trade in Arthur’s name.

Of course it’s all fantasy, yet curiously enough recent archaeological evidence has found evidence that Tintagel was a sort of palace in the time of Arthur. Two digs in the 2010s showed evidence of a building from the 6^th century and these included remains of amphorae that had once contained olive oil or wine, as well as fragments of high-quality tableware imported from the eastern Mediterranean. Inevitably, this was reported as evidence of a real-life Camelot even if Somerset, the Scottish borders and Wales have also been put forward as possible locations. In reality there was no ‘Camelot’, a much later term, and what existed there wouldn’t have looked anything like the magnificent medieval castle of Arthurian legend, or the real-life remains of Richard of Cornwall’s creation. This, in fact, is a spectacular example not just of how we imagine the past but of how people in the past imagined the even more distant past. It’s certainly a count(r)y that captures the imagination.

If you like this sort of stuff, buy my book Saxons vs Vikings