Cornish Studies

The event known as “Padstow Mummers Day” or “Darkie Day” that takes place in the town during Boxing Day and New Year, involves revellers disguising themselves by dressing up in colourful clothes and blacking their faces. It is part of a “guizing” tradition in Cornwall that has its roots in the medieval Cornish mystery plays and the black faces are a simple form of disguise. In recent times, however, it has been the target of criticism because of the black faces. This paper explores the “Padstow” debate and asks why a small Cornish village is particularly singled out when blackened faces feature in folk traditions across the length and breadth of the British Isles.

The cultures and stories of peripheral populations and conquered peoples, which have largely been drowned out by the accepted discourse of the nation states that colonised them, have begun to be recouped and re-told. The subaltern school of post-colonial theory provides the writer of fiction with a range of theories from which to devise the means of voicing the unvoiced. Among these, Ranajit Guha's work on the prose of counter-insurgency provides the author with the key to finding lost voices, in particular those of the vanquished peasant rebel.

In Reversing Language Shift, Joshua Fishman (1991) distinguishes between the threatened minority language (termed ‘Xish’) and the dominant language (‘Yish’). He advises that the ideological distinction between ‘Xians’ and ‘Yians’, and between Xish and Yish culture must be clarified early on in any attempt at language revitalisation, and warns that all efforts to reverse language shift “will be conflicted and contested from within” unless these clarifications are made at the onset of such initiatives. This paper is based on a study conducted in 2007 and examines the varying degrees to which the Welsh, Scottish Gaelic (henceforward ‘Gaelic’) and Cornish languages are regarded as symbols of minority identity in twenty-first century Britain. In order to quantify this tripartite comparison, questionnaires were used to measure the identities, language abilities and language attitudes of young people in full-time education at schools in Ceredigion, the western Highlands and west Cornwall. The first section of the article introduces the theoretical context and provides an analysis of existing literature on attitudes to Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish, and on the role of these ‘Xish’ minority languages in the expression of ‘Xian’ cultural identities in each context. The second section outlines the methodology employed and assesses the roles assigned to Welsh, Gaelic and Cornish in the construction of identities by students in each of the three locations.

""The Vocabularium Cornicum is a multilingual glossary that has since the eighteenth century been regarded as a Latin-Cornish glossary.It is shown here that this glossary is in fact multilingual and includes not only Cornish glosses but also Old Welsh, Old Breton, Old Norman French and Old English glosses.This is corroborated by what is known regarding the historical development of glossography. The Old Welsh and Old Breton glosses are identifiable from their phonological features. The Old Norman French and Old English glosses lack reflexes in Middle and Late Cornish and thus cannot be assumed to have ever been loanwords into Cornish.It is concluded that the Vocabularium Cornicum was compiled from a corpus of glossed Latin texts that include Old Cornish, Old Welsh, Old Breton, Old English and Old Norman French glosses.

Das Vocabularium Cornicum ist ein mehrsprachiges Glossar, seit dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert wurde es als ein lateinisch-kornisches Glossar angesehen. Hier wird gezeigt, dass dieses Glossar in der Tat mehrsprachig ist und nicht nur die kornischen Glossen, sondern auch altwalisische, altbretonische, altnormannisch-französische und altenglische Glossen beinhaltet. Dies wird bestätigt durch das, was über die historische Entwicklung der Glossographie bekannt ist. Die altwalisischen und altbretonischen Glossen sind an ihren phonologischen Merkmalen zu erkennen. Den altnormannisch-französischen sowie den altenglischen Glossen fehlen Reflexe im mittleren und späten Kornisch und können somit nicht Lehnwörter für das Kornisch gewesen sein. Abschließend kann gesagt werden, dass das Vocabularium Cornicum aus einem Korpus glossierter lateinischer Texte entstammt, der altkornische, altwalisische, altbretonische, altenglische und altnormannisch-französische Glossen beinhaltet.
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A comparison of Cornish and Irish immigrants to Nevada's Virginia City, the Comstock Mining District, provides an opportunity to consider differences in adaptation. The Cornish had a choice: emphasize ethnicity or blend into the general, protestant population. They touted their Cornish origins, and benefited economically as a result. The Irish had less of an opportunity to blend in because the dominant American, protestants saw them as Catholic foreigners. Conflict between Irish and Cornish immigrants frequently resulted.

A consideration of pixy traditions of Devon and Cornwall reveals similarities and differences. Although people from both places described the supernatural beings in similar ways, examples of migratory legends diverge, particularly when comparing those from the far west of the peninsula with those from Devon. A method employing Reidar Christiansen’s index demonstrates that differences in these narratives reflect the isolation of far western Cornwall. This analysis indicates that nineteenth-century Cornish folklore should be seen as distinct from English traditions.

Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can see the similarities within these two cognate sets from orthographic similarity alone. This is because Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish are related. As the six remaining Celtic languages, they unsurprisingly share similarities in their phonetics, phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax. However, the exact relationship between these languages and their predecessors has long been disputed in Celtic linguistics. Even today, the battle continues between two firmly-entrenched camps of scholars- those who favor the traditional P-Celtic and Q-Celtic divisions of the Celtic family tree, and those who support the unification of the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the tree under Insular Celtic, with this latter idea being the Insular Celtic hypothesis. While much reconstructive work has been done, and much evidence has been brought forth, both for and against the existence of Insular Celtic, no one scholar has attempted a phonetic reconstruction of this hypothesized proto-language from its six modern descendents. In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to the Celtic languages; explore the controversy surrounding the structure of the Celtic family tree; and present a partial phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic through the application of the comparative method as outlined by Lyle Campbell (2006) to self-collected data from the summers of 2009 and 2010 in my efforts to offer you a novel perspective on an on-going debate in the field of historical Celtic linguistics.

Despite being dormant during the nineteenth century, the Cornish language has been recently recognised by the British Government as a living regional language after a long period of revival.
The first part of this paper discusses the history of traditional Cornish and the reasons for its decline and dismissal. The second part offers an overview of the revival movement since its beginnings in 1904 and analyses the current situation of the language in all possible domains.

Authenticity is a multi-layered and highly elusive concept, which seems to change its significance when it is applied to an object, a statement or a situation. In folk songs, the matter is further complicated by the fact that, on the one hand, they can be referred to as objects collected on paper or sound-recordings, i.e. as artefacts, while on the other hand, they also come to life the moment they are being sung, i.e. in performance. In this chapter we discuss folk songs both as artefacts and in performance and evaluate how the concept of ‘authenticity’ changes according to these perspectives. We do so by introducing a concept of multiple authenticities, based on notions by Denis Dutton and Regina Bendix. In the second part, we demonstrate how these insights work in practice with a case study of a folk song complex called Where Are You Going To, Fair Maid? with Roud number  298. We conclude that ‘authenticity’ is a dialogic concept, which becomes ‘in-authentic,’ as soon as its parameters become static.

We all have our stories to tell. Where we have born, where we have lived and the places we have visited. The spatial history of our lives reveals much about the ways we identify with space and how we narrate our belonging. The way we identify with space is always unique, reflexive and emotional. Space around us can be thought of as scaled, in which the landscapes and communities hold differently scaled spatial meanings. Regions are part of such an identity matrix, but identification with regions is a complicated issue in the late modern world, in which space does not provide a clear and meaningful collective discourse. Regions, however, provide one source of identification. Geography has a rich tradition of regional studies, and it remains important for geographers to understand what regions mean for people today, how individuals use regions in their reflexive identity narratives, how they entitle themselves to regional discourses, how they might feel regions as an obligation or as an inseparable part of the Self-Other dialectic. This dissertation is in short about how reflexive individuals share and narrate their identities and how they understand the spatially and historically defined social.

The aim of this dissertation is to understand space as open in relation to different positionalities, life-paths and differently scaled worldviews. People construct their identities throughout their lives. Aside from highlighting the processes that construct identities and the part time plays for individual identities, the research also argues for understanding the role of time in forging the conceptions of regions. The research articles included here explicate the processes of identification with space, the role of identity discourses and belonging for both citizens in civic organizations and regional actors in regional institution, the importance of understanding how regional legacies condition various reflexive identity narratives and how regions form a part of the scalar spatial identities. In addition, the synopsis explains how regions have evolved in the case countries, Finland and England, and questions the relevance of regional imaginaries married to nation-building imaginaries.

The four research articles and this synopsis draw from  focus-group interviews with four different civic organizations in four regions in Finland and two regions in England. The 15 focus groups in Southwest Finland, Päijät-Häme, North Karelia and North Ostrobothnia were comprised of members of Local Heritage Associations, Youth Societies, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth/Nature Conservation Association, and the eight focus groups in Devon and Cornwall involved groups of Local Heritage or Old Cornwall Society, Local Association or Amateur Operatic Society, Amnesty International and Transition. In the research, these are categorized as more locally-orientated or universally-orientated social movements or civic organizations. In addition to these focus groups, one of the articles uses one-to-one semi-structured interviews with regional actors in different regional institutions operating in Päijät-Häme. The empirical research was conducted between September 2008 and June 2010. Some of the articles and the synopsis analyse the historical legacies of the countries’ regional systems through historical source materials.

The dissertation makes a contribution to geographical knowledge by addressing three main themes. First, I argue that people have a need to identify with space and that such identification draws from their life-paths and their ability to reflect on past experiences. Second, identification with space can take place in multiple scales and individuals construct their identities by piecing together and negotiating different spatial ideas and representations. Third, while regions might form a solid source of identification for some identity narratives, the ways people relate to regions, their histories, symbols,  institutions and discourses, depends on the choices the individual makes and how she or he negotiates entitlement and obligation to discursive space among social connections. In addition, the synopsis opens up the regional histories of  Finland and England. Along with regions becoming institutionalized, they can be thought of having been synchronized as a part of administrative systems. Yet the legacies different regions have left behind influence discourses of regional identities, identification with regions and how national communities are seen through regional positions. Finally, the dissertation argues that comparing different experiences of regions, regardless of state administrations and regional systems, and that the way individuals tell emotionally driven stories for themselves and to others is, perhaps, the most fruitful way to understand identities and their transformation in everyday life.

In this paper I am concerned with the superstitions of mining, specifically folkloric ideas about Jews and Fairies and Jewish fairies in Cornish mines.  I am also interested in the changing social ontology that underlies these beliefs, including changing forms and formulations of anti-Semitism, as well as changing notions of nature and economy, from medieval to modern Cornwall that underlie these superstitions.i  But, in a move that will surprise no one, I will argue that these beliefs are embedded in technical and financial and other institutional of their mining context.  Part of this context is the rise of Cornish-style capitalist modernity.  It includes changing ideas about nature and exchange that would bring dead Jewish miners to life as nature spirits, and then later, banish them from nature to the hazy supernatural half-life of folklore.

This paper follows the story of folk tradition and its symbiosis with identity in Cornwall. It is a story that starts with Cornish medieval mystery plays and brings us to a 21st Century where the Cornish are recognized as a national minority in Britain with their own distinctive language, culture and folk traditions. At the same time this paper synthesizes current thinking to propose a model of folk tradition as a dynamic contemporary process rather than historical stasis. It is a model that can be applied to understand the process behind any folk tradition.

A literature survey of prior research on 3SG.MASC English dialect en/un was carried out, with clarifications and additional questions raised pertinent to the use of this pronoun in English dialect in Cornwall. A statistical survey of the middle Cornish corpus was carried out, reporting findings about the use of certain instances of infixed pronouns, in chronological, textual and geographical terms – including the relative preponderance of 3SG.MASC ‘n. The use of infixed pronouns in the later Cornish corpus was discussed, examining 3SG.MASC ‘n among others. Circumstantial evidence was found, but no conclusive proof of 3SG.MASC English dialect en/un being a substratal reflex of Cornish 3SG.MASC ‘n.

(Presented in 2015 at Skians conference on Cornish language.)

ADDENDUM: I wrote, "No post posited pronoun ending /n/ is known." However, among a number of phrases recorded only in the Archæologia Cornu-Britannica (1790), edited by W Pryce, is found, "Cabm-thavaz en mettyn, Glaue boz etten" ('Rainbow in the morning, rain will be in it/en') (#5, 'A collection of proverbs, rhimes &c' (sic)). Note the conjugated preposition not <eta> (as in J Boson's Genesis 1:11,12,30, ) but <etten> in.3SG.MASC, carrying the couplet's rhyme with <mettyn> and of course ending /n/. Thus, contrary to what i wrote here, in fact there *is* a known conjugated pronomial 3SG.MASC ending /n/ in traditional Cornish language.

This essay considers two groups of people in Cornwall with competing interpretations of Cornish folk tradition and the identity it represents. The first group is that of the home grown Celto-Cornish movement, which sees local folk tradition as part of Cornwall’s Celtic heritage. The second is that of the British / English folk movement, which understands Cornish tradition as part of a wider English culture tradition and therefore sees no barrier to importing material from England to represent Cornwall. There are three concepts which underpin this  discussion: understanding folk tradition as a process rather than stasis; recognising the significance of “lore” in relationship to folk tradition and identity; and the notion of “speech communities” as groups of people with a shared set of understandings and a shared language which reinforces these understandings.

The translation of a 1595 Latin document, included in the Library of Congresses Hans P. Kraus collection, sheds light on the activities of an English Catholic exile living at the Court of the Spanish Archduke in Brussels. A soldier in William Stanley's English regiment, serving Spain, Tristram Winslade was deeply entrenched with the English exiles in Brussels, and this document reveals a plot to invade south-west England and turn it back to Catholicism. Translation by Michael Kelly and Judith Owen.

The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars have made separate attempts to reconstruct its written remains, each creating a different orthography. Later, following recognition under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2002, Cornish gained new status. However, with government support came the governmental framework of “New Public Management”, which emphasises quantifiable outcomes to measure performance. This built implicit pressure towards finding a single standard orthography, for greatest efficiency. There followed a six- year debate among supporters of the different orthographies, usually quite heated, about which should prevail. This debate exemplified the importance of standardisation for minority languages, but its ultimate conclusion saw all sides giving way, and expediency, not ideology, prevailing. It also showed that standardisation was not imposed explicitly within language policy, but emerged during the language planning process.

'Welcome to Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur' is a phrase often repeated at this small village on the north coast of Cornwall where legend, childhood stories and merchandise all serve to attract thousands of visitors per year. As 'a place to go', the area provides stunning coastal scenery, a romantic ruined castle and a highly commercialised village. Tintagel Island, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall but managed by English Heritage, plays centre stage as the 'birthplace' in question. On-site, the character of Arthur is largely debunked as a literary phenomenon and, furthermore, a survey of day-trippers revealed that visitors were left in an interpretive limbo — arriving with ideas of Arthur and leaving knowing little about Tintagel.

Whilst the aesthetics of the castle and scenery go some way towards mitigating against disappointment, on site encounters with kitsch representations of the past combine with more amorphous senses of pseudo-spiritual atmospheres as well as experiences of walking, eating and drinking to ultimately provide a 'grand day out'. The marketing ephemera and heritage presentation all serve to create, reinforce and suppress different identities of place which are revealed as being a fairly cohesive package of Celtic-Arthuriana. This paper questions the ways in which visitors' expectation and imagination are mediated through experience of place.

Lyver Canow Kernewek, the Cornish Song Book, was edited by Dr Ralph Dunstan and published in 1929.  It was the first of its kind and more than eighty years after publication continues to be a magical inspiration for those interested in Cornish music. It also has a degree of internal tension which is reflected in the sometimes strange inclusions and even stranger exclusions.  This internal battleground provides a glimpse of the different ideologies of the contributors and of the Cornish organisations of the time. We will first explore the background to the book and the differing world view of the contributors. We will overview the contents of the collection as a whole and then look at what seem to be major anomalies.

It is well established that while folk festivals appear to illustrate an ancient, bucolic past, they are contemporary markers of history and belonging. Cornish folk festivals can provide a valuable illustration of this. The Padstow May Day celebration, the Obby Oss, epitomises this sense of timelessness and spontaneous celebration. It attracts numerous tourists keen to join the spectacle of dancing and singing, and is seen by the Cornish tourist industry as the stellar event of the festival year. In contrast, Padstow's mid-winter Mummers celebration is downplayed by county officials. This event sees participants dance, drum and sing around the town, wearing black face-paint, with a repertoire that includes Minstrel ditties, while critical questions have been asked at regional and national levels. Both raise questions about the ways in which belonging is negotiated as a critical element in the Cornish festival landscape.

This fundamental essay by R. Morton Nance is not unfortunately available online. I've, therefore, put it up for general use. Please share and disperse! A bit of Cornish heritage that deserves to be better known. The Newspaper article on the last page is dated 25 Oct 1956 and appeared in the Cornishman.

The purpose of this research was to locate and define Cornish identity in Australia at the turn of the 21 st Century, in the context of globalization and postmodernism. During the latter half of the 20 th Century, the processes of globalization and multiculturalism highlighted the position of 'normalcy' – even colourlessness-occupied by Anglo-Celtic Australians, and left many feeling cultureless. The condition of postmodernity that followed, characterized by a breaking down of traditional and institutional boundaries, added feelings of alienation and uncertainty. One of the antidotes to this condition was 'authenticity', and the search for it was manifested in a surging interest in genealogy as people tried to locate a distinctive 'ethnie' with which to identify.

This paper presents a review of industrial archaeology literature and offers some initial thoughts on how this literature relates to my research on public perception and experience of Cornish mining landscapes. A brief summary of the development of industrial archaeology is given, which reflects on its amateur origins, its 'identity crisis' and its slow integration into university archaeology departments. The reasons for the transformation of industrial sites into industrial heritage is then examined and temporal models of change presented which relate to both an acceleration of the past into the commodity heritage as well as an affective progression from disdain to acceptance. The public's attitude to industrial archaeology is then discussed — which raises complex questions over the nature of such sites including, the importance of time and aesthetics as well as the phenomenological nature of perception and experience.

This is the second chapter of my book, The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation (Exeter, 2018). The chapter offers a comparison of Irish and Cornish storytellers with a discussion of the role of creativity and conservatism in the storytelling process. It considers how different cultures place different emphasis on the two extremes of storytelling - to tell a story more closely to the way it was heard or to change a story to suit the moment.

Industrial Celts explains how Cornwall’s early industrialisation produced a unique society and a distinct regional culture. Socially, Cornwall became home to a dispersed paternalist society. In economic terms, it was based on mining and merchant capitalism. Culturally, it was dominated by Methodism. The twin symbols of mining and Methodism became central to a sense of Cornishness, encapsulated in the popular dialect literature that flourished in the mid-1800s. At the same time, identification of the Cornish as Celts became more widespread. That self-description had been recognised by Cornish historians as early as the 1700s and did not have to await either the later ‘Cornish Revival’ or romantic, metropolitan dreamers. Moreover, early de-industrialisation and mass emigration meant that Cornwall’s rural industrial economy and society retained material differences well into the twentieth century. However, the sense of identity produced by its industrialisation had its limits and proved incapable of competing with more powerful territorial discourses. (Available from Amazon. Contents and Introduction uploaded.)

"Revisions of typo-chronologies emerging from Mediterranean research must, necessarily, impact understandings of the Insular imports" (Duggan 2020, p. 423). One such revision re-dated Phocean Red Slip (PRS) forms 3C, E and F, which have been found at Tintagel, to the late 6 th century. Although Duggan understood the revision to extend the date range of these shapes (Duggan 2020, p. 423), the author's intention was to demonstrate that their entire date range should be moved a century later (Sanders 2020, pp. 359-72). This paper extends the inquiry to the other shapes at Tintage.

Assibilation of Middle Cornish word-medial /θ/ <th> voiceless dental fricative in Later Cornish is found most consistently where /θ/ is in a front-vowel-fronted consonant cluster. Several cases are examined: severally and jointly, no steady rule of LC assibilation is found.

The Lanlawren urn, a Bronze Age Trevisker vessel, was illustrated in W C Borlase’s classic nineteenth century work on Cornish barrows, Naenia Cornubiae, but is not known to survive. The recent unearthing of a watercolour illustration of the urn, apparently painted at about the time of its discovery, provides an opportunity to review what can be said of the depiction of the urn and to consider its archaeological context and parallels in the Early Bronze Age ceramic record.

Over the last few decades, scholars have gathered extensive ethnobotanical and dietary data from archaeological contexts. Though sources are common, particularly in the American West, they often do not provide sufficient consideration of preserved botanical elements, but rather focus on faunal analysis and literary accounts. With these considerations, archeological investigations were carried out in 2010 in an area of Virginia City, Nevada, designated Cornish Row (26-ST-413). Sediments collected from privy deposits were subjected to macrobotanical analysis, which yielded five botanic genera, including two anthropogenic species: blackberry (Rubus sp.) and common grapevine (Vitis vinifera). Here we present the findings and associated implications of using macrobotanical analysis to more fully understand late 19th century diets in western Nevada.