History of Cornwall
The history of Cornwall goes back to the Paleolithic, but in this period Cornwall only had sporadic visits by groups of humans. Continuous occupation started around 10,000 years ago after the end of the last ice age. When recorded history started in the first century BCE, the spoken language was Common Brittonic, and that would develop into Southwestern Brittonic and then the Cornish language. Cornwall was part of the territory of the tribe of the Dumnonii that included modern-day Devon and parts of Somerset. After a period of Roman rule, Cornwall reverted to rule by independent Romano-British leaders and continued to have a close relationship with Brittany and Wales as well as southern Ireland, which neighboured across the Celtic Sea. After the collapse of Dumnonia, the remaining territory of Cornwall came into conflict with neighbouring Wessex.
By the middle of the ninth century, Cornwall had fallen under the control of Wessex, but it kept its own culture. In 1337, the title Duke of Cornwall was created by the English monarchy, to be held by the king's eldest son and heir. Cornwall, along with the neighbouring county of Devon, maintained Stannary institutions that granted some local control over its most important product, tin, but by the time of Henry VIII most vestiges of Cornish autonomy had been removed as England became an increasingly centralised state under the Tudor dynasty. Conflicts with the centre took place with the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 and Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.
By the end of the 18th century, Cornwall was administered as an integral part of the Kingdom of Great Britain along with the rest of England and the Cornish language had gone into steep decline. The Industrial Revolution brought huge change to Cornwall, as well as the adoption of Methodism among the general populace, turning the area nonconformist. Decline of mining in Cornwall resulted in mass emigration overseas and the Cornish diaspora, as well as the start of the Celtic Revival and Cornish revival which resulted in the beginnings of Cornish nationalism in the late 20th century.
Cornwall's Early Medieval history, in particular the early Welsh and Breton references to a Cornish King named Arthur, have featured in such legendary works as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, predating the Arthurian legends of the Matter of Britain.
Pre-Roman Cornwall
Stone Age
Cornwall was only sporadically occupied during the Palaeolithic, but people returned around 10,000 years ago in the Mesolithic, after the end of the last ice age. There is substantial evidence of occupation by hunter gatherers in this period.The upland areas of Cornwall were the parts first open to settlement as the vegetation required little in the way of clearance: they were perhaps first occupied in Neolithic times. Many megaliths of this period exist in Cornwall and prehistoric remains in general are more numerous in Cornwall than in any English county except Wiltshire. The remains are of various kinds and include menhirs, barrows and hut circles.
Bronze Age
Cornwall and neighbouring Devon had large reserves of tin, which was mined extensively during the Bronze Age by people associated with the Beaker culture. Tin is necessary to make bronze from copper, and by about 1600 BCE the West Country was experiencing a trade boom driven by the export of tin across Europe. This prosperity helped feed the skilfully wrought gold ornaments recovered from Wessex culture sites. Ingots of tin, some recovered from shipwrecks dated to the 12th century BCE off the coast of modern Israel, were analysed isotopically and found to have originated in Cornwall.There is evidence of a relatively large-scale disruption of cultural practices around the 12th century BCE that some scholars think may indicate an invasion or migration into southern Britain.
Iron Age
Around 750 BCE the Iron Age reached Britain, permitting greater scope of agriculture through the use of new iron ploughs and axes. The building of hill forts also peaked during the British Iron Age. During broadly the same time, Celtic cultures and peoples spread across the British Isles.During the British Iron Age Cornwall, like all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, was inhabited by Celts known as the Britons. The Celtic language spoken at the time, Common Brittonic, eventually developed into several distinct tongues, including Cornish.
The first account of Cornwall comes from the Sicilian Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, supposedly quoting or paraphrasing the 4th-century BCE geographer Pytheas, who had sailed to Britain:
Image:England Celtic tribes - South.svg|350px|thumb|A map of Iron Age Celtic tribes of Southern Britain.
Claims have been made that the Phoenicians traded directly with Cornwall for tin. There is no archaeological evidence for this and modern historians have debunked earlier antiquarian constructions of "the Phoenician legacy of Cornwall", including belief that the Phoenicians even settled Cornwall.
Toponymy
By the time that Classical written sources appear, Cornwall was inhabited by tribes speaking Celtic languages. The ancient Greeks and Romans used the name Belerion or Bolerium for the south-west tip of the island of Britain, but the late-Roman source for the Ravenna Cosmography introduces a place-name Puro coronavis, the first part of which seems to be a misspelling of Duro. This appears to indicate that the tribe of the Cornovii, known from earlier Roman sources as inhabitants of an area centred on modern Shropshire, had by about the 5th century established a power-base in the south-west.The tribal name is therefore likely to be the origin of Kernow or later Curnow used for Cornwall in the Cornish language. John Morris suggested that a contingent of the Shropshire Cornovii was sent to South West Britain at the end of the Roman era, to rule the land there and keep out the invading Irish, but this theory was dismissed by Professor Philip Payton in his book Cornwall: A History. Given the geographical separation between the three tribes known as Cornovii–the third being found in modern-day Caithness– and the absence of any known connection, the Cornish Cornovii are generally assumed to compose a completely separate tribe. While their name may derive from their inhabitation of a peninsula, the absence of a peninsula in the other two cases has led to the postulation of a derivation from these tribes' worship of a "horned god."
The English name, Cornwall, comes from the Celtic name, to which the Old English word Wealas "foreigner" is added.
In pre-Roman times, Cornwall was part of the kingdom of Dumnonia, and was later known to the Anglo-Saxons as "West Wales", to distinguish it from "North Wales".
Roman Cornwall
During the time of Roman dominance in Britain, Cornwall was rather remote from the main centres of Romanisation. The Roman road system extended into Cornwall, but the only known significant Roman sites are three forts:- Tregear near Nanstallon was discovered in early 1970s, the other two found more recently at Restormel Castle, Lostwithiel and a fort near to St Andrew's Church in Calstock. A Roman style villa was found at Magor Farm near Camborne.Pottery and other evidence suggesting the presence of an ironworks have been found at the undisclosed location near St Austell, Cornwall. Experts say the discovery challenges the belief that Romans did not settle in the county and stopped in east Devon where Isca Dumnoniorum became a flourishing provincial capital of the Dumnonii. Prof. Barry Cunliffe notes that "in the south-west peninsula of Devon and Cornwall the lack of Romanization, after a brief military occupation in the first century, is particularly striking. West of Exeter the native socio-economic system simply continued unhindered".
Only a few Roman milestones have been found in Cornwall; two have been recovered from around Tintagel in the north, one at Mynheer Farm near the hill fort at Carn Brea, Redruth, another two close to St Michael's Mount, one of which is preserved at Breage Parish Church, and one in St Hilary's Church, St Hilary. The stone at Tintagel Parish Church bears an inscription to Imperator Caesar Licinius, and the other stone at Trethevy is inscribed to the Imperial Caesars Trebonianus Gallus and Volusianus. According to Léon Fleuriot, however, Cornwall remained closely integrated with neighbouring territories by well-travelled sea routes. Fleuriot suggests that an overland route connecting Padstow with Fowey and Lostwithiel served, in Roman times, as a convenient conduit for trade between Gaul and the western parts of the British Isles.
Archaeological sites at Chysauster Ancient Village and Carn Euny in West Penwith and the Isles of Scilly demonstrate a uniquely Cornish 'courtyard house' architecture built in stone of the Roman period, entirely distinct from that of southern Britain, yet with parallels in Atlantic Ireland, North Britain and the Continent, and influential on the later development of stone-built fortified homesteads known in Cornwall as "Rounds".
Post-Roman and Medieval periods
In the wake of the Roman withdrawal from Great Britain in about 410, Saxons and other Germanic peoples were able to conquer and settle most of the east of the island over the next two centuries. In the west, Devon and Cornwall held out as the British kingdom of Dumnonia.Dumnonia had close cultural contacts with Christian Ireland, Wales, Romano-Celtic Brittany and Byzantium via the West Atlantic trade network, and there is exceptional archaeological evidence for Late Antique trading contacts at the stronghold of Tintagel in Cornwall. The Breton language is closer to Cornish than to Welsh, showing the close contacts between the areas.
Relationship with Wessex
The early kings of Wessex are notable for the possible prevalence of Brythonic names among them and therefore care should be exercised in assuming a stark ethnic antipathy between emergent 'British' and 'English' identities, peoples and culture; rather a struggle for dominance of warring elites more or less aligned with eastern 'Germanic' and western 'Romano-Celtic' cultures and peoples. Atlantic Brythons were often recorded in alliance with Scandinavian forces such as the Danes, or Normans in Brittany, up to the period of the Norman Conquest.In the early eighth century, Cornwall was probably a sub-division of Dumnonia, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 710, Geraint, king of Dumnonia, fought against Ine, king of Wessex. The Annales Cambriae states that in 722, the Battle of Hehil "among the Cornishmen" was won by the Britons. In the view of the historian Thomas Charles-Edwards, this probably indicates that Dumnonia had fallen by 722, and that the British victory of that year against Wessex secured the survival of the new kingdom of Cornwall for another one hundred and fifty years. There were intermittent battles between Wessex and Cornwall for the rest of the eighth century, and Cuthred, king of Wessex, fought against the Cornish in 743 and 753.
According to John Reuben Davies, Dumnonia ceased to exist around the beginning of the ninth century, but:
In 814, King Egbert of Wessex ravaged Cornwall "from the east to the west", and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 825 the Cornish fought the men of Devon. In 838 the Cornish in alliance with Vikings were defeated by the West Saxons at the Battle of Hingston Down. This was the last recorded battle between Cornwall and Wessex: possibly, it resulted in the loss of Cornish independence. In 875, the Annales Cambriae record that king Dungarth of Cornwall drowned, yet Alfred the Great had been able to go hunting in Cornwall a decade earlier suggesting Dungarth was likely an underking. Kenstec became the first bishop of Cornwall to profess obedience to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in the same period the bishop of Sherborne was instructed to visit Cornwall annually to "root out the errors of the Cornish Church", further indications that Cornwall was becoming subject to Wessex in the middle of the ninth century. In the 880s Alfred the Great was able to leave estates in Cornwall in his will.
William of Malmesbury, writing around 1120, says that in about 927, King Æthelstan of England expelled the Cornish from Exeter and fixed Cornwall's eastern boundary at the River Tamar. T. M. Charles-Edwards dismisses William's account as an "improbable story" on the ground that Cornwall was by then firmly under English control. John Reuben Davies sees the expedition as the suppression of a British uprising, which was followed by the confinement of the Cornish beyond the Tamar and the creation of a separate bishopric for Cornwall. Although English kings granted land in the eastern part in the ninth century, no grants are recorded in the western half until the mid-tenth century.
Cornwall now acquired Anglo-Saxon administrative features such as the hundred system. Unlike Devon, Cornwall's culture was not anglicised. Most people still spoke Cornish, and place-names are still mainly Brittonic. In 944 Æthelstan's successor, Edmund I, styled himself 'King of the English and ruler of this province of the Britons'.
The antiquarian William Camden wrote in his book Britannia in 1607: