Gone Medieval - Birth of Cornwall

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

In the fifth century, Western Europe began remaking itself in the turmoil that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. In south-west Britain, old tribal authorities and identities reasserted themselves and a ruling elite led a vibrant and outward-looking kingdom - today’s Cornwall - with trade networks that stretched around the Atlantic coast of Europe and abroad into the Mediterranean. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to historian John Fletcher about the early history of Cornwall, and how its unique language, culture and heritage survived even after politically merging with England in the tenth century. This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here >If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android > or Apple store > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Cornwall. It's a county at the southwestern end of England, right? It's great for holidays and clotted cream. Well, John Fletcher is wincing at me as I'm saying this because he's here to tell us why there is so much more to Cornwall's medieval story than sun, sea and sand, as I do my best not to offend Cornish sensibilities. John's book, The Western Kingdom, The Birth of Cornwall, charts the history of this fascinating, independently minded part of these aisles.

Welcome to God Medieval, John. Thank you very much for having me. It's wonderful to have you on. In all fairs, I was only wincing because county, technically a dutchy. Oh, okay. See, I'm starting off badly here. I'm being corrected straight away, so I'm prepared to be pulled up at various points throughout this. So if we start our chat with, let's face it, when history gets interesting, when the Romans leave, the Roman Empire is gone, the medieval period,

begins. What do we know about Cornwall at that time? What does it look like politically, demographically, who lives there? Yeah, it's a really interesting time for Cornwall and Southwest Britain generally, because the people who live here are, to a certain extent, the people who've always lived here. The Romans, when they arrived, found a tribal grouping called the Demoniae. Now, there may have been subgroupings within that of the Kornowai, which is where people sometimes think Cornwall comes from, but that literally just means people who live on a horn of land. So that could be referring to any number of people around the UK. So Demonia is the kind of the overriding tribal confederacy. And when the Romans then leave,

what emerges is a kingdom of Demonia. So same people essentially emerging as a post-Roman political body. The reasons for that, I think you could talk a lot about people have a very strong image of the Romans leave and everything's chaos and people are burning and villas are abandoned and the horrible Anglo-Saxons come in. But actually, a lot of those events, particularly the more catastrophic ones, are happening in kind of the southeast and the north of England where big Roman power centres like Lundinium, like Ibaroacum, which will become York, were based, where much of the economy and much of daily life was based around this Roman Empire and the stability. Further west and further in the outskirts of the north, you still had

essentially pre-Roman tribal identities, not necessarily the same tribes, these weren't exactly the same, culturally speaking, people that were there before, they were impacted by Rome, but they still had a very strong sense of identity and they still had, as far as we can tell, their own leadership structures which were able to step into this chaotic scene and reestablish a level of control fairly quickly. So Demonia, from what we can tell, seems to be one of the larger of these political bodies. It's very active, very quickly. We have a lot of evidence that they are essentially trading people. They are bringing in still Roman luxury goods from the Byzantine Empire, from these still existing places in the Mediterranean. And they're also

colonizing. They're moving out. Again, we have these sort of stories of Brittany, obviously the area in France, where people speak Britannic or a Celtic language, if we want to call a Celtic, is founded in this time. And the traditional story is, oh, they're running away from the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxons are the other side of the country. They're in East Anglia, in Norfolk, that area, when these waves of migration start. And generally, refugees, when they arrive in a place, they don't usurp the local population completely. They don't install their own language. So what you're actually looking at is a colony being founded. And the reason that's being founded is because the main concern for the Domenians when the Romans leave is who am I going to sell all this tin to?

If you needed to pick a single thread for much of Cornish history, that's it. It's the tin trade. It's selling their most valuable resource, which never really loses its value, and who are they going to sell it to? So they found Brittany. They found another settlement in Galicia, northern Spain, which people don't often think about. And if you look at a geological map of Europe, the thing those three sites have in common, the southwest Britain, northwest France, and very north of Spain, is that we find tin in northern Europe. Those are all tin deposits and they very quickly are moving out to secure that and to secure a route for ships going to the Mediterranean. I mean, that's fascinating. So right at the beginning of the medieval period, we're seeing the formation of a kingdom,

which seems to have been maybe less affected by the Roman Empire than lots of areas of the country, but which has still taken things from it, so the international trade aspects in particular. I think I would associate tin most closely with Cornwall, and that seems like that's always been the case. But the idea that they're spreading out that they're becoming an international force already in the immediate aftermath of the Romans leaving England is new to me. In some ways, this isn't so much a new development as returning to the pre-Roman norm. Because we have writers from even 50 BC, there are writers who are saying, Blerion or Land's End, they are more civilized in their manner of life.

They prepare tin working very carefully with the earth in which is produced. There are these stories basically from Greek writers, saying that actually if you go to southwest Britain where the tin is, you'll find very cultured people who are used to trading with us. We found tin ingots from Cornwall that have been traced to Cornwall off the coast of Israel from the Bronze Age. They have been trading with the world this whole time. What changed with the Romans is obviously where they were previously trading at the ports. They were very much maritime focused. The Romans built roads. The Romans had a, similar to what we have now, the roads lead to London. London is where all the tax and administration is done to a certain

extent, although there are various stages on the way like Exeter, and then it's shipped on to the continent that way. Where they're now having to focus and where they're now changing is back to the sea, the sea that they've always looked out on. Cornwall and Devon is a peninsula. It's surrounded by the ocean on three sides. So they are building ports. We have the port of Bantham, which is actually underneath the car park of Bantham Beach, if any of your listeners have been on holiday to Devon. What they found, again, Mediterranean pottery, they found remains of this big trading city that was built up to facilitate, again, trade with the outside world. Because one of the problems they are faced with very quickly with the Romans, as well as the chaos in southeastern Britain, which causes all sorts of problems

with the infrastructure of logistics, is that without people actively maintaining the roads, other than the road to Exeter, it gets very hairy in places. You've got the Somerset levels, where if that land's not being actively managed, it floods. As later as 2015, the entire of the southwest was effectively cut off by flooding because that's just what the landscapes like around here. So they were mainly concerned, and to a certain I've always been concerned with looking outwards, because really the rest of Britain was a little bit hard to get to and was a little bit far away, and they'd always had these strong maritime links. Being a peninsula, being effectively, you know, surrounded by sea on three sides,

having this nature to their outlook, did that create some kind of disconnect with the rest of Britain, with the rest of the Britonic tribes that made Cornwall feel like it was somehow different, different from everyone else on the island? Yeah, it's actually really interesting because people have looked at this. Ari Cunliff, who obviously published a very important book about a Celtic world, he comments that when you look at the artifacts, the demonians, or demoni, as they were in pre-Roman times, are culturally more similar to the Veneti of Amorica, which is what will become Brittany, than they are to their fellow Britons.

They are much more similar to these other sort of continental people than they are the people who are theoretically closest to them. And I think that you can see that in many different ways, even if we talk about the Roman invasion, the Dura Trigges, who are their nearest neighbors, and Dorset and bits of Somerset in that area, they ferociously resist the Roman occupation and get horribly crushed. The maiden castle is stormed. It's this great feat of Roman military engineering. And we don't have that for the Southwest.

The Romans arrive, and there's no histories of the great conquest of Demonia they just get here, build Iska Donorum, which will become Exeter, and then the Demonians'Henoram, which will become Exeter, and then the demonians hand over the tin. They've been trading this the whole time. We might as well do it to you. And I'll left alone. And they compromise very quickly rather than we're going to stand our ground

and lose, essentially. And interesting that they managed to keep their cultural individuality better than places that try to stand up to the Romans and preserve it. Maybe because they acquiesce a bit more quickly and easily, they manage to cling to that individuality. And I think if you look back on the quotes

from BC, the Greek writers, they knew who the Romans were. all the tribes of Britain did, they were used to dealing with these people. And I think they probably saw what was going to happen and move to preserve their own status and wealth, rather than fight or battle they couldn't win, essentially. Makes sense. I think as the medieval period moves on through the Anglo-Saxon period, we tend to think of the southwest as predominantly being the kingdom of Wessex. So at what point do we lose the kingdom of Demosia and Wessex becomes the driving force, and how does Demonia react to that?

It's interesting, I think what you've said hits the nail on the head for our view of early medieval history. Obviously, a lot of the sources that we have for early medieval history are written in Wessex. A lot of the versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we have are written in Wessex by people who Alfred the Great is essentially employing. So we get a very pro-Wessex view of history. But what's really interesting is that if you even take a step away from Demone, if you look at Wessex as it starts, they're not in the best position. They're in the kind of Thames Valley, area in that sort of region. They're surrounded by other English and Britonic polities. They are being pressured from all sides. And it's only a series of kings can make decision to start pushing westwards

that really they eventually get this powerful position from which to survive the Viking invasions and come back. But we completely gloss over this. People have this view of history of, oh, the Saxons arrive, Wessex is in the west, Mersey is in the middle, Northumbry's in the north, and East Angles in the East. That's the way it is, and then the Vikings arrive. That's essentially, maybe being a little bit unfair to the history teachers of Britain, but that's more or less the sort of early medieval history that we've given. But if you look at the stories and even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is a pro-Wessex source, it's talking about a very slow grinding advance into the West. They have the great victory at Deerham in the sixth century where they

essentially cut off the Britons of the Southwest from the Britons and Wales, and at that point, the languages probably start diverging a bit, even though there's still a lot in common between Welsh and Cornish even today. But then a little while later, one of my favorite bits of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the Battle of Fethynlag, which, again, is one of these battles. It's in 5-84. We don't really hear a lot about. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded as Caelan, who's the King of Wessex, and Cuthar, who's his brother, who's in quite a lot of entries really in him, fought against the Britons at the place called Fethethan-Lag, and there Cuthar was slain, and Caelan took many towns and spoils innumerable and

wrathful he thence returned to his own. And it's one of my favorite bits, because if he won, why is he wrathful? If he won, why is his brother dead? Because, you know, a prince of Wessex, which is what Cuthers would essentially be, would have been in the very center of the best troops that Wessex was able to raise. This is fairly early periods, so we're not talking massive armies here, but we're still talking about a warrior elite around him. And very interestingly, a few years after Caelin is kicked out as king, and it's Cuthers' son who then replaces him, and that's in 5-9-1. So he has this kind of big victory, Dereum, and then he continues pushing West, and you're moving at that point from the area of scattered British political things. It talks about

three kings from Bath and Gloucester and these other areas to hitting up against what might be a much more solid opponent in the form of the South West Britons. And reading between the lines, it might not go as well as the version of history that we've been left with makes it sound. And there's a really interesting burial from around this time at Lowbury Hill, which is in Oxfordshire, of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. But there's a couple interesting things about him. One is they've done a little bit of isotopanalysis, and they've shown that he spent his childhood either in Cornwall or the west of Britain, and a spear that he was buried with has enamel decoration, which is much more commonly found among Britonic peoples than is Anglo-Saxons.

There are lots of reasons why this might be. They're doing more genetic studies now to figure it out. One of the interesting things might be that he could have been a hostage traded to the Southwest Britons as part of ensuring a piece after this battle that maybe didn't go so well, and that's one possibility of how he could have ended up there. Another one is he might have been fostered because sending your young nobles to live in the courts of other medieval powers was pretty common practice. But equally, that means that the South West Britons

were this kingdom that was seen as powerful or respectable enough that it was a good place to send your high-status sons to be raised. This was a very sort of high-level politics. This isn't just something you do on a whim. So it is really interesting because we get given this kind of, oh, it just happens, it's fine. I think even today, if you look at the encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon history, it says, oh, Cornwall's not important by about the 600s.

And that's just incredibly early, even by the Anglo-Saxon sort of chronicle. And yeah, so we get a much more slow grinding picture when you actually stop and look at the source and look at what they're actually telling us, rather than just Wessex is our heroes of our stories, so they must always be the heroes. So there's a sense that Demosia was much more able to preserve an element of independence for longer

then Wessex would have us believe, because obviously we have to view Wessex as incredibly successful, inevitable, and ultimately victorious. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time

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history to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. How does Cornwall in that region fair, were in the Viking age. So we tend to think that, you know, the Vikings come in from the North East. We know that they're in Ireland. We know that they storm across England. I think we have this general view. You know, they're stopped by Wessex. Their approach is halted. But given that they're in the northeast, given that they're in Ireland, which is obviously not a million miles away from Cornwall, is Cornwall a target? I mean, you've got the tin trade

there. It's perhaps a backdoor into Wessex. Is it ever targeted by the Vikings in particular for any reason? Targeted is really interesting. We don't have a lot of records for Viking raids in Cornwall. And again, because we have essentially Wessex-focused sources, you would expect to hear about it if there were lots of burning and pillaging going on. What we do have is at least one entry which shows the Cornish and the Vikings working together. So in 838, a large fleet of Viking ships visits among the West Wales, which is the West Welsh, which is what the Cornish, as they were at that time called, and joined with the Welsh and attacked King Eckbert's kingdom, and he had to go and respond at the place called Hengistong or Hingston, or Hingston,

down and he puts the Danes and the Cornishmen to flight. That's a really interesting thing, because if you pull it back to even its most basic levels, like you say, we get the image of the Vikings as these kind of raiders, these merciless kind of attackers coming in, you would almost expect them wanting to just burn or raid wherever they landed, but they're actually working together with the Cornish against Wessex, who is obviously the mutual enemy. On a cultural standpoint, they are very different. The Vikings are still at this point predominantly pagan. There may well some Christian converts among them, but certainly they're not the big Christian kingdoms that we would see later on the period. The Cornish have been Christian for hundreds of years at this point,

so they are devout practicing Christians, but they hate Wessex enough that they put their differences aside. So Hinkstendown is the last battle that we know of between Cornwall and Wessex. It's in 838. So again, significantly later than we would normally say. But what's interesting is there are no royal charters in Cornwall immediately after that. There are, no grants of land, with the small exception of Alfred the Great leaves a little bit of land around Launston, which is the very northeast of Cornwall right on what is the land border above the Tamar to his son and his will. So there's very little evidence that Westex's actually able to control Cornwall. But what we do have is lots of Scandinavian evidence. So we've potentially

three hogback graves in Cornwall. These are more typically found in the northwest of Britain and Scotland, where areas of heavy Scandinavian settlement. We've got crosses which have typical Scandinavian decoration on them. We have even items like manuscript called Dereris Fabulous, which is on Uncommon Tales, which survives in the Oxford Codex, is we believe at least large sections of it were written in Cornwall, including a mass for St. Germans, who's the patron saint of St. Germans in Cornwall, who was where the bishops was based. On the front of it, it has Futhark, Scandinavian runes that have been written in there. And we also, very spectacularly, have the Trouittle hoard. So Trouilloward is an enormous hall of silver objects.

which were found in Truital and Cornwall. It gave its name to Trudeau style, which is a style of Anglo-Saxon metalwork and decoration. But what's really interesting is you find Trudeau style objects in the Midlands. You find them to a certain extent in sort of East Anglia and the North. You don't really find them in Cornwall or Devon or Somerset beyond the Trouiddle Horde itself, which has quite a few of them, obviously, and a few other stray finds. The other objects in the Trouwolder Horde are things like an Irish silver chalice, a silver cord called the Sourable Horde called the Sourable Horde, gorge, because we're not actually sure what it does, all these different chords tied together. You've got bits from drinking horns. It's a very eclectic hoard of silver. So people have said things like, oh, maybe it was being hidden from the Vikings. But when you look at where all of this stuff had to be pulled from to come into a single hoard, it seems more likely that actually this may have been

a raiders treasure, which he was burying him to come back for later. Because obviously people bury hordes to come back for them, that's the ideal purpose. So it seems more likely this might actually be a Vikings treasure, and the implications of that alongside the lack of evidence of raiding is that potentially the Cornish were, to a certain extent, playing both sides. They had stopped fighting Wessex, but they also aren't exactly being good sub-vassals of Wessex. I think it's very notable that King Alfred built his furthest west ber at Lidford, which is essentially right on the border between Devon and Cornwall. It's right on the River Tamar, and it very much is in the middle of Devon. It's not on the coast or anything else. It's looking west as much as it's looking towards the sea,

just to be sure that everything is as he wants. So I think the implications there, particularly with the Scandinavian objects that we've got, is that there was a lot of Viking activity around Cornwall, and very little of it was potentially hostile. There is eventually one raid at 900's Padstow gets destroyed, but that is significantly later on, and at that point, Wessex and Cornwall are very much linked together. So there are elements of, is it just because it's time. It's also possibly, but not definitely, Olliffe Trigvison, who's a very prolific raider. He might have just fancied going rating, to be honest.

And so the Cornish holiday for a change. Absolutely. It's fascinating listening to all of that. There may be a connection there, I wonder, between that Cornish view of looking outward, and the Vikings are coming from overseas, so they're not necessarily quite so scary or foreign even to the Cornish as they might be to everybody else,

because I was wondering whether the 10th, Tin trade in particular makes that region wealthy, makes them a target for the Vikings. I would have thought you'd expect Vikings to be there raiding, stealing, trying to get their hands on a load of tin and everything else. But it seems like they were more on trading terms with the Cornish, as well as using it maybe as a backdoor to Wessex. I think you're right, and I think there's probably a couple of factors that might help to explain that. One is, from the evidence we have a lot of the Vikings active in Cornwall were coming from Ireland, so they were what we would call Hiberno Norse, which means they're arriving on the north coast of Cornwall. So the north coast of Cornwall is very pictures, very beautiful, lots of nice beaches, lots of cliffs.

The beaches tend to be at the bottom of extremely steep hills, which make great photos, but if you are a Viking and you've just pulled your long ship up to a beach and you see the tiny narrow track that you would have to go up to find the village, having almost assuredly been spotted by somebody on the cliffs on your approach, at that point it probably makes more sense to sit and talk to the people you find rather than attempt to make a surprise raid. Because we have to remember Vikings, particularly the earliest part where they are truly Vikings, not the armies of Scandinavian nobility, are opportunists. If it's a weak target, that will attack. If it's a strong target, they might stand and talk. So I think geographically, there was probably some things that worked in the

Cornish's favour. They were used to dealing with raiders from that direction. We have evidence of Irish raiders in the time after the Romans leave. We also have evidence of them becoming integrated into Cornish society, but we know there were these kind of raids coming from Ireland. So they were probably used to it to a certain extent. But then, yeah, you also have the TIN trade, and tin is, as a metal, very difficult to refine with early medieval technology, particularly in large quantities. This is a reason why the Stannery Parliaments, later in the medieval period, were granted such wide powers by the English monarch, because you needed to keep tin miners and the people producing tin on side, because they had the specialist skills that no one else really had. So you wouldn't necessarily want to antagonize them when they do control such an important commodity.

I think the other less savoury aspect is that the Cornish, from what evidence we have, are very active participants in the Irish C slave trade. So they do appear to be selling slaves. There are a few bits that point to this. There are two riddles in the Exeter book, which talk about slavery, and both of them talk about Welsh people being involved. And given where the Exeter book was written in Exeter, they're almost certainly referring to Cornish people who would be the closest Welsh people to them. One of them even talks about being dragged in fetters over moors, which is very much. to the landscape between Exeter and Cornwall. Equally, by the time you get to the doomsday book,

Cornwall has a very high population of slaves as a percentage. Again, the sort of traditional view is, oh yeah, the Anglo-Saxons conquered so effectively that these are all the slave, Cornish people. And that doesn't really pan out. Seems more likely this essentially is unsold stock, because William the Conquer did outlaw slavery. So

for the Vikings, there are basically two big commodities that they want and do trade in. The Cornish are active members of that trade. And I think your colleague in Dr. Jarman's book, River Kings touches on this concept of these sort of market networks that they set up as well. I think you can see that start to form in the Southern Irish Sea, where you've got Cornwall, Southern Wales, where there's a few Viking sites,

and then Wexford and Waterford, which are obviously very important Viking towns, which we tend not to think too much about today because Dublin was such a huge Viking market, but actually it had this rivalry at the time with the southern Viking cities, and they would spend time joining various Irish kings to fight each other and all the rest of it. but it all plays together and the Irish Sea is right at the heart of all of that and the Cornish had been at the heart of the Irish Sea for again thousands of years at that point. If we wind on a little bit further forward in the medieval period, we loosely say that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms eventually become a unified kingdom of England.

How do the Cornish take that? How do they take being part of England eventually? Do they resist that in any way? The answer is yes, they did resist it for a long time. What changes in the middle of the 10th century is that King Athelstan comes to the threat? and Alfred the Great's grandson. One of the things that everyone remembers about Athelstan is he burns the Cornish out of Exeter, rids the defilement of that filthy race, which is what Jeffrey Monmouth says. Unfortunately, it seems to be utter tosh. There's no evidence that this is true at all.

It's completely out of character from everything else we see about Athelstan. It comes from, as I've said, a 14th century monk called Geoffrey Monmouth, who basically went to Exeter, and we have no reason to believe he didn't, and asked a bunch of people in Exeter for stories about Athelstan, who founded his monastery, was essentially one of his personal heroes. And it may come as no surprise whatsoever to anybody who spent time in the Southwest that people from Devon did not have a lot of nice things to say about the Cornish at the time. What Athelstan actually does is he seems to start to talk directly to the elites in Cornwall. One of the big changes we have is the re-establishment of an official Cornish bishop, which had essentially been ignored. There's good reason to suspect there

always was a Cornish bishop that the Cornish had kind of carried on doing their own thing. But the Kings of Wessex were very insistent that their bishop in Creditin was the bishop for all of the Southwest. But it wasn't working very well. Edward, when he establishes the Bishop of Crediton, he puts a note in and a small allowance for the bishop to go and visit the Cornish. And quote is, for stubbornly they resist the truth, which is just a great quote for Wessex-C Cornwall relations. But yeah, you can see that they've essentially tried to force this integration. King Alfred equally made Asa, his biographer, the Bishop of Devon in Cornwall, although he was based out of Exeter. And again, we have very little evidence that he was able to make any serious inroads with the Cornish Church. So this re-establishment

of a Cornish bishop is essentially an acknowledgement that the previous ways of doing things haven't worked. And we can see they haven't worked, because as I said, there's no charters, there's no land in Cornwall that's being traded by English nobles. Athelstan changes that. He changes attack. We know at Egmont Bridge, a howl of the West Welsh, as it says in Anglo-South Chronicle, swears fealty to Athlstan. Now, many people now say that's Hibaldah, who's a very important king in Welsh history. I would argue with that for a couple of reasons. Hildar is witnessing charters in Athelstand's court well before Egmont Bridge. So he doesn't really need to swear fealty. He already has done that. He's accepted Athelstans' overlordship. Secondly,

if he was there, it would be very strange that Idwell of Gwyneth, which is the other major Welsh powerful kingdom wasn't there, and he's not mentioned at all. He again is witnessing charters that Athelstand's court at this time. And the third part is that West Welsh is one of these weird terms in the Anstack Chronicle. It doesn't appear as much as people like to think it does. It appears, I think, three times it could be wrong. But the other two times are both very firmly referring to the Cornish as the West Welsh. So it would be a bit odd for a scribe to suddenly change it,

because I think I've just murdered the Welsh on that, which is Hilada's kingdom is in the west of Wales, the far southwest, it would be very odd to identify that, particularly as I've touched on when the Welsh political scene is split, and almost always has been split north-south, between Gwyneth and Duhabath or Powis, depending on which period of Welsh history are in. So we have a howl of the West Welsh, who I would argue as a Cornish king, who officially swears field-lead Athelstan, and in the years that follow that, we start to see the elites coming in line with the English state, charters being issued by English kings for land in Cornwall,

Interestingly, you also see Cornish elites taking English names. Very famously, we have a bishop, Sig, Komor, which is two names. It's an English name, Woolzig, and then a Cornish name, Comor. And he is in the bottom of many missions, which are these great big books. It's officially the Gospel Book of St. Petroch, but it's got lists of freed slaves and Cornish dictionary and a few other really interesting bits of Cornish language. But you can see him using both names there. We also have charters where people are issuing an English name and a Cornish name.

So the elites do seem to move over. What's interesting is we don't really know how the average Cornish person might have felt like about this. Of course, at the same time period as all this is going on, somebody in Wales writes the Amis Pridane, the Dream of Britain. And that is an absolutely barnstorming poem about how the Welsh and the Cornish are specifically mentioned, and the Vikings from Dublin, and all these people are going to rise up and they're going to kick out the English and drive them all the way back to the sea and unto their boats and off to Denmark or wherever. So while that's in Wales, I think probably that might be tapping a little bit into some discomfort with the way that Hewalda and the other Britonic elite may have been dealing with Athelstan and coming more into this united kingdom, if you like. Because obviously, Athstan achieves the title of Rex Totius Britann, the king of all of Britain. And this is one of the key ways does this.

There's another really great quote from After the Conquest, which is by Orderick Fitalis, where he says, But in the marches of his kingdom to the western north, the inhabitants were still barbarous and had only obeyed the English king in the time of King Edward and his predecessors when it suited their ends, which I think is just a great idea of these still a little bit rule by agreement rather than rule strictly by decree. Equally, we can see a fairly uncomfortable relationship with Harold Godwinson and the Godwins. Again, we think Harold of Wessex. He's really, from the southern coast of Britain, he doesn't spend a huge amount of time in the far west of England. what he does do every time he gets exiled to Ireland, which is fairly frequently, is raid and burn along the far southwest coast.

He lays waste various towns and times. So after he's defeated at Hastings, his sons come to North Devon and try and raise a rebellion, and local forces see them off. So they certainly didn't seem to be any fan of King Harold. Obviously, people are very familiar with, he sent his troops home after Musta, and not everybody made it back. and you do wonder, given that the men of Devon eventually do raise their own rebellion in Exeter, so there obviously were quite few of them left, you do start to wonder how many of the troops from the South West didn't make it back on how many just didn't really want to go die for Harold Codons.

Fascinating kind of lingering sense of separation and independence from everything else that's going on around the country. I guess as we move on further through the medieval period as well, as dukedom's arrive in England, we will see Edward III make his son Duke of Cornwall as a mark of the heir to the throne. And that's something that still happens today. We've just seen that Dutchie pass from now King Charles to Prince William as Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall. Does that speak at all to Cornwall's identity, its kind of almost separateness in the same way as it speaks to Wales? I think it's a really interesting microcosm of the problem the British state has

getting its head around Cornwall. This Cornish identity survive into the medieval period. Cornwall is listed as a separate place on medieval maps until the 1500s. The Cornwall is listed as a separate place on medieval maps until the 1500s, the Cornish language survives until the early modern period and is still being smoking by people. So when we look at the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duke of Cornwall, it exists now in two forms. There is the Duchy of Cornwall as a real estate and investment body which supports the heir to the throne financially, and they will be very keen to tell you. They only hold about 13% of land in Cornwall. They also have investments in London and Devon and Dorset and all these other places. And it's purely about raising money for good causes as well.

really good work in Cornwall and in other rural areas with farms and putting young local people into farms and this sort of stuff. However, there's also the constitutional duchy, which does still exist. The constitutional commission in the 1970s did come to the conclusion that actually you should refer to Cornwall as a duchy, hence my wince at the start of this, because for many Cornish people, this is a very important note of pride. And the Duke does have certain powers here, which are usually the domain of the monarch in Britain. He has the right of, I'm going to say this bonafaccia so if you die without airs and stuff your goods eventually do pass to the duchy of cornwall if there are goods that are washed up on shore they technically have first refusal there are

various bits and pieces of slightly strange slightly eccentric british legislation but that are all still vested powers in the duke of cornwall and i think it's not really acknowledged i don't think charles really acknowledged it when he was the duke of cornwall he did again this sounds like a criticism i do think he did a lot of good work in cornwall and i think he was very fond of cornwall he was very fond of Cornwall he liked coming down to the Royal Cornwall Show and all that sort of stuff. But if you compare it to the Prince of Wales, he learned Welsh, he addressed the Senate in its first meeting in Welsh. He really got to grips with that. I don't think the Duke of Cornwall as a title holds the same level of, I guess, engagement. I think it'd be really great to see it more engaged and more public. And I think

certainly some Cornish people would feel the same that they would want that level of acknowledgement of the historical difference, because it's been here for a long time, as you said, it was created by King Edward, but it took over from the earldom of Cornwall, which comes in the post-conquest period. Robert the Earl of Mortain, who is Duke William, the Conqueror's half-brother, he's made the first Earl of Cornwall. He builds Lonson Castle. He basically has this fiefdom in Cornwall and the far southwest, where he holds a significant amount of lands and power, and that's the body that then becomes the Duchy of Cornwall. So it's this kind of continuous,

from the early medieval period onwards, identity, if you like, and marker of difference in a very constitutional and, I guess, geographic sense, that I do think it's a bit of a shame that we don't more acknowledge, but there's a hesitancy, I think, in several areas of the British state to encourage separate regional identities. Yeah, it's tricky one. That's absolutely fascinating, though, to think that parts of the way that Cornwall operates today stretch back 1,500 years. You can see that kind of continuity of separation, if that makes sense.

however much it's become a part of England and Great Britain and the United Kingdom, it's still very much Cornwall. Absolutely. And I think if there's one through thread, it's the tin trade and tin mining. As late as the 18th, 19th centuries, Cousin Jacks, Cornish miners are going out all over the world. It's rightly recognized as this UNESCO heritage site. But they are taking this trade that they've practiced for thousands of years and taking it worldwide. And it's this tiny part of Britain.

When you look at it geographically and it's had this massive impact globally, and even in British history that we just ignore, and I think that's a real shame. Well, fortunately for us, your book is now there to put that right. We can all go learn an awful lot more. I'm going to end on a really unfair question, which you are free to refuse to answer. Cornish independence or not? I will admit, and as I admit in the introduction to my book, because I'm not native Cornishman myself, obviously,

if I was to see my will made manifest, I think there's a very strong case for further Cornish devolution. I don't know that I would go as far as an... independence. I don't think I'm a full, died-in-the-wall nationalist. I think there is a strong case for further devolution. And I think you can see some people are a little bit worried by it because of the things they've done to try and head it off, like the current debate over a mayor of Cornwall, which is a slightly weird idea. It's a debate that's gone on for a thousand years, and I'm sure it'll go on for a thousand more. Thank you very much for joining us, John. I found that absolutely fascinating,

a tour of medieval Cornwall, and its importance, which is so often overlooked. So thank you very much. No, always. Thanks again. John's book, The Western Kingdom, The Birth of Cornwall, is available now if you'd like to learn even more about how this fascinating region developed. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify now. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life,

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