Origins

The Cornish homeland is a peninsula called Cornwall located in the far corner of southwestern Britain. The peninsula, whose farthest western extremity is known as England’s Land’s End, is bounded by the Irish Sea to the north and west and the English Channel to the south. The eastern side of Cornwall is bounded by the Tamar River, which forms the region’s traditional boundary with England.

The Cornish are a Celtic people most closely related to the Welsh and Bretons. Cornish, a Celtic language that at its height was spoken by no more than an estimated 30,000 people, began to be influenced by English as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries, and survived as a spoken language until the last fluent native speaker died in 1777. The language has been revived in the twentieth century as part of the efforts towards Cornish cultural renewal, and it has begun to be taught in some schools. English, however, remains the first language of the inhabitants of Cornwall today.

The Cornish trace their origins to Celtic tribes that settled in the peninsula during the last centuries B.C.E. These newcomers introduced mining and smelting to the area that began Cornwall’s long association with tin mining that lasts to this day. Roman rule, which began in the first century C.E., had little impact on Cornwall. Following the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Cornwall experienced an influx of Celts from Ireland and Wales whose Christian missionaries were instrumental in establishing numerous churches and monasteries.

Anglo-Saxon influence expanded gradually westward until the late tenth century when Cornwall was definitively incorporated in the kingdom of England. In 1337 King Edward III granted his eldest son the title duke of the newly created Duchy of Cornwall. Successive English dukes became the largest landholders in the duchy. Cornwall gradually lost its autonomy during the trend towards government centralization that characterized English rule during the reign of the Tudor monarchs (1485–1603) and the seventeenth-century Cromwellian era. As a result of the Act of Uniformity of 1549, English was introduced for religious matters throughout the kingdom, while the Cornish language came to be exclusively associated as the speech of the uneducated local inhabitants.

By the first half of the nineteenth century, Cornwall was a world leader in tin and copper mining and smelting. The 1870s, however, began a period during which the Cornish mining industry declined sharply as a result of competition from Australia, Malaya, and Bolivia. The economic decline, which lasted nearly half a century, forced large-scale emigration abroad, with nearly 100,000 Cornish – skilled miners, engineers, and workers – settling permanently in North America. The extent of the exodus had such a profound impact on Cornwall’s population that, in sharp contrast to the rest of the United Kingdom, it declined from 369,000 in 1861 to 342,000 in 1961.

Although Cornwall has been fully anglicized during the past two centuries, a distinct Cornish identity has been refashioned on what has been called “industrial prowess.” Among the symbolic elements associated with such Cornishness are factory machines (“Cornish” engines or boilers), Christmas carols, choirs, rugby, Methodism, political liberalism, and brass bands. This invented tradition from the Victorian era is, in part, claimed by present-day Cornish activists who are learning the Cornish language for the first time, building closer ties with other Celtic peoples, and lobbying for a regional assembly or even a separate seat for Cornwall in the European Parliament. The underlying thrust of such activity is the belief that the Cornish are a people distinct from the English.