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'Cornwall A History' Curnow on Prof Payton's Book

Cornish History
By Curnow (payton) June 19 2008
If it is in the Iron Age that Cornwall acquires that Celtic identity which we recognise today, then it is in the succeeding era – as we move from prehistoric to historic times – that Cornwall begins to develop the territorial idenitity which marks it out geo-politically as the land apart.
As we have seen, characterising Cornwall is never that simple, and as ever there are difficulties and paradoxes.

To begin with, the modern territorial identity emerges out of a wider geographical construct – Dumnonia – while the defining act of setting the River Tamar as the Cornish border was a function of English intrusion in the tenth century. And yet, there is also a suggestion that Cornwall was long before that time an administrative sub-division (pagus) of the Roman canton of Dumnonia.

Cornwall was airbrushed out by the English
Map From The Medieval Period
(In the state-funded 'Historical Atlas of South West England'
distributed free to all comprehensive school in Cornwall, Cornwall was airbrushed out.)

However, (in a further paradox) if we are to acknowledge the Romans as the first to establish Cornwall as an administrative-political unit, then we must also admit that in other respects Roman influence west of the Tamar was in fact minimal.

Even so, we are constrained by historical convention to speak of pre-Roman, Roman and post-Roman Cornwall, a relatively harmless convenience if we can agree what we mean by these therms but altogether more misleading (and dangerous) should we infer that Cornwall was somehow an exemplar of Roman Britain.

Roman Britain is an inherently misleading concept, implying as it does a homogenous political and cultural Romanisation of the entire island. Worse still is the idea of a Roman Britain that gives way to an Anglo-Saxon England, a view of early history that leaves little room for consideration of indigenous continuity (not least in Cornwall), ecourgages the erroneous equation of Britain with England, and reduces British (and thus Cornish) experience to a succession of invasions – Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans.

This is the approach of the so-called National Curriculum, the staple diet of schoolchildren in Cornwall as much as it is in Sussex or Hampshire, one that leaves pupils in many Cornish schools with little idea of the reality and issues of early Cornish history.

We can only agree with Professor Charles Thomas when he expresses ‘sorrow and annoyance….at the undue extension of words like England, English or a philosophy of a taught British past underlying such book –titles as Everyday Life in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Times, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, or Roman Britain to Saxon England. There are still others of us, west of Offa’s Dyke and the river Tamar, and north of Hadrian’s Wall’.

In fact, there is still remarkably little evidence for the Roman conquest of South West Britain, and the popular assumption of a relentless westerly thrust following the arrival of the Legions in AD43 is probably flawed. A fort was established at Isca Cumnoniorum (Exeter) in cAD 55, the base of the Second Augustan Legion, and it was from there that Roman rule was exercised and Roman power extended in the far West.

As far as Cornwall is concerned, there are few clues to the extent of this rule and power. The only tangible evidence of military intrusion is the Roman fort at Nanstallon, near Bodmin. Contructed cAD55 – 60 and excavated in the early 1970’s by Aileen Fox and the late Professor W.L.D. ‘Bill’ Ravenhill.

Situated in the middle of Cornwall near the Fowey-Camel trade and communication route, Nanstallon was probably a forward operating base and was strategically well-placed for the Roman presence to be felt. However, the Legion at Exeter was withdrawn cAD 75 and, with no Roman town west of Isca Dumnoniorum, Cornwall (as Ian Soulsby puts it) ‘settled down to four centuries of only nominal Roman rule.

Cornwall was part of the Civitas Dumnoniorum, the canton of Dumnonia, with its administrative centre in Exeter. The Dumnonii themselves were a tribal grouping that had emerged during the Iron Age, and their name may mean or be derived from their reputation as ‘Worshippers of the God Dumnonos’.

Their territory included modern Cornwall, Devon (which name comes from the work Dumnonia). The western parts of Somerset and perhaps the fringes of Dorset. The Romans formalised this tribal territory into their administrative region of Civitas Dumnoniorum although, as suggested above, there is evidence to indicate that Cornwall may have been a pagus in its own right.

Both Charles Thomas and Malcolm Todd have pointed to the seventh or eighth-century Ravenna Cosmography wherein is a reference to Purocoronavis, almost certainly a corruption of Durocornovium –‘fort or walled settlement of the Cornovii’. Thomas conludes ‘that in late Roman, and putatively in early Roman times.

The lands west of the Tamar were those of the Cornovii; Todd adds that ‘This is the earliest mention of a people who presumably formed a sect of the Dumnonii and who in a later period gave their name to Cornwall (Kernow)’. They were established sufficiently for their territory (Cornwall) to be recorded as Cornubia by cAD 700.

The root corn means a horn (probably a reference to the Cornish peninsular), a prefix which has given us both Kernow and Cornwall (the latter including the Anglo-Saxon suffix wealas, foreigner, the same word as in Wales and Welsh).

Continued
Cornish History from From Dumnonia to Cornubia >>>

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