Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion, 1490–1690

Description

The expansion of the English state in the early modern era provoked resistance throughout Britain and Ireland, not least in Cornwall where this intrusion was challenged in a series of dramatic uprisings in the two centuries between 1490 and 1690.In this wide-ranging collection of chapters, several based on articles published previously in the series Cornish Studies, Philip Payton brings together an impressive team of international scholars, including Paul Cockerham, Bernard Deacon, D.H. Frost, Lynette Olson, Joanna Mattingly, Matthew Spriggs, and Mark Stoyle, to present a history of early modern Cornwall, focusing especially on the related issues of language, religion, identity and rebellion.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/LZGH4973

Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion Philip Payton 

Where Cornish was Spoken and When? A Provisional Synthesis Matthew Spriggs

‘a . . . concealed envy against the English’: A Note on the aftermath of the 1497 Rebellions in Cornwall Philip Payton

Tyranny in Beunans Meriasek Lynette Olson

The Helston Shoemakers’ Gild and a Possible Connection with the 1549 Rebellion Joanna Mattingly

Glasney’s Parish Clergy and the Tregear Manuscript D.H. Frost

‘On My Grave a Marble Stone’: Early Cornish Memorialization Paul Cockerham 

‘Sir Richard Grenville’s Creatures’: The New Cornish Tertia. 1644–46 Mark Stoyle 

Afterlife of an Army: The Old Cornish Regiments, 1643–44 Mark Stoyle

William Scawen (1600–1689) – A Neglected Cornish Patriot and Father of the Cornish Language Revival Matthew Spriggs

Who was the Duchesse of Cornwall in Nicholas Boson’s (c.1660–70) ‘The Duchesse of Cornwall’s Progresse to see the Land’s End . . .?  Matthew Spriggs

The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Cornwall Mark Stoyle

Propaganda and the Tudor State or Propaganda of the Tudor Historians Bernard Deacon 

Conclusion Philip Payton

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Revolutions
• Cornualles
• History of the British Isles
• General officer
• Ireland
• Military
• Cornish
• Revolution
• History of Europe
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• General
• Cornwall
• Renaissance
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 28 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781905816224
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion
Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion
1490–1690
EDITED BY PHILIP PAYTON
First published in 2021 by University of Exeter Press Reed Hall, Streatham Drive Exeter EX4 4QR UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
Copyright © 2021 Philip Payton, Bernard Deacon, Matthew Spriggs, Lynette Olson, Joanna Mattingly, D.H. Frost, Paul Cockerham, Mark Stoyle.
The right of those listed above to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-905816-20-0 Hardback ISBN 978-1-905816-22-4 ePub ISBN 978-1-905816-23-1 PDF
https://doi.org/10.47788/LZGH4973
Typeset in Goudy Old Style by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Front cover: Map: John Speed map of Cornwall c .1676, © The British Library Board Background pattern: www.myfreetextures.com
In memory of James Charles Arthur Whetter, 1935–2018, Historian of Late Medieval and Early Modern Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Philip Payton
1 Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion
Philip Payton
2 Propaganda and the Tudor State or Propaganda of the Tudor Historians?
Bernard Deacon
3 Where Cornish was Spoken and When: A Provisional Synthesis
Matthew Spriggs
4 ‘A concealed envy against the English’: The Aftermath of the 1497 Rebellions in Cornwall
Philip Payton
5 Beunans Meriasek —A Political Play?
Lynette Olson
6 The Helston Shoemakers’ Gild and a Possible Connection with the 1549 Rebellion
Joanna Mattingly
7 Glasney’s Parish Clergy and the Tregear Manuscript
D.H. Frost
8 ‘On My Grave a Marble Stone’: Early Modern Cornish Memorialization
Paul Cockerham
9 Afterlife of an Army: The Old Cornish Regiments, 1643–44
Mark Stoyle
10 ‘Sir Richard Grenville’s Creatures’: The New Cornish Tertia, 1644–46
Mark Stoyle
11 William Scawen (1600–1689): A Neglected Cornish Patriot and Father of the Cornish Language Revival
Matthew Spriggs
12 Who was the Duchesse of Cornwall in Nicholas Boson’s ( c. 1660–70) ‘The Duchesse of Cornwall’s Progresse to see the Land’s End’?
Matthew Spriggs
Annex Rediscovering Difference: The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Cornwall [2002]
Mark Stoyle
Notes on contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion owes its genesis to Simon Baker and Anna Henderson, who some years ago suggested that articles from the annual series Cornish Studies , then published by University of Exeter Press, might lend themselves to republication as chapters in new thematic volumes. Cornwall in the early modern period stood out as a prime candidate, partly because the subject had attracted some of the most prominent writers on Cornish history, and partly as a vigorous historiographical debate had by now carved out for Cornwall a hard-won place in the ‘new British history’, setting Cornwall alongside Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England in discussions of state formation and identities in the Tudor and Stuart period. Thus this present collection was born, with the original contributions revisited and, in one or two instances, significantly revised by their authors, with a newly written Introduction and Chapter 1 furnishing additional background and context. Fortunately, Nigel Massen, managing director of University of Exeter Press, has embraced the project with eager enthusiasm, and the result is this volume.
Work for Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion had commenced when I went back to Cornwall in September 2017, and among those I visited during my Cornish sojourn was my old friend James Whetter. His classic Cornwall in the Seventeenth Century: An Economic Survey of Kernow , based on his London School of Economics PhD thesis, was first published as long ago as 1974. It was followed by a steady stream of other books, many on late medieval and early modern Cornwall, establishing James as an authority on the period. I could not know in September 2017 that James had only months to live. He passed away on 24 February 2018, a profound loss for those of us who owed our early enthusiasm for Cornish history to James’s encouragement and example. Fittingly, this book is dedicated to his memory.
Philip Payton,
Flinders University,
Adelaide, Australia
Introduction
Sometime between 1660 and 1670, Nicholas Boson, gentleman merchant of Newlyn, wrote a short story, partly in the Cornish language but mainly in English, for the amusement of his children. Entitled The Duchesse of Cornwall’s Progresse to see the Land’s end and visit the mount , the tale has a sea-monster and mermaid and a wicked hermit who can conjure up storms, a delightfully heady mix calculated to excite the attention of young minds. But behind the folklore, according to Matthew Spriggs in this collection, was a yet deeper significance, for the story may have echoed ‘a confused folk memory of rebellion nearly two centuries before’, a dim remembrance of the Cornish risings of 1497. 1
It is possible, maybe even likely, argues Spriggs, that the ‘Duchesse’ in question was none other than Katherine, wife of the pretender Perkin Warbeck, perpetrator of the second of the 1497 rebellions. There is no evidence that Warbeck styled himself ‘Duke of Cornwall’ (although he was proclaimed ‘Richard IV’ at Bodmin) but again it seems probable, and his wife Katherine was reputedly ensconced in St Michael’s Mount when she surrendered to the King’s forces in the aftermath of the rebellion. Significantly, too, in one of Boson’s Cornish-language interludes in the ‘Duchesse’ story, there is an insistence that ‘we’ (the Cornish) will have to fight for the Duchess of Cornwall:
‘Rag gun Arlothas da
Ny en gweel gun moyha’
(For our most excellent Dutchesse Right
Unto the utmost we will fight)
That the story so enthralled Nicholas Boson’s eldest son, John, is evidenced, perhaps, in the fact that he christened his own daughter Katherin[e], perpetuating the association into the next generation.
One cannot tell how widespread ‘a confused memory of rebellion nearly two hundred years before’ may have been, nor whether it existed far (or even at all) beyond the Cornish-language heartland of the far west. But what is surely remarkable, is the possibility of a continuous popular memory over two centuries of the events of 1497, passed in this instance from father to son and on to his daughter. It lends credence to the argument that there were threads of continuity between the rebellions of 1497 and 1549 and the events of the Civil War in Cornwall, in which elements of a dynamic Cornish identity—or identities—coalesced and metamorphosed to produce an enduring resistance to external intrusion and a stout defence of the territory of Cornwall during the upheavals of Tudor and Stuart state formation in the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, the British and Irish Isles. Although some recent scholarship has cast doubt on the strength (or even existence) of such continuity, preferring to see the Cornish ‘commotions’ as discrete events, each with its own causes and motivations, 2 it seems clear that Cornwall ‘in the age of rebellion’ was characterized by a habitual resistance to outside interference—political, cultural, religious, military—which ultimately created the modern territorial identity so readily observable by the end of the seventeenth century.
This argument is outlined in Chapter 1 , newly written, where the ‘St Tudy fragment’ of the late seventeenth century, with its catch-cry ‘And shall Trelawny die?’, is presented as evidence of this continuity, popular sentiment having not only ‘survived’ but been moulded and perpetuated by the series of upheavals during the preceding two hundred years. Subsequent chapters, some extensively rewritten, first appeared in the series Cornish Studies , published by University of Exeter Press between 1993 and 2013, a period during which the place of Cornwall in the ‘new British historiography’—the debates about the making of the Tudor and Stuart state in the early modern period, not least the complex interactions between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales—was discussed with a vigorous intensity. They culminate in this collection in the Annex ‘The Recent Historiography of Early Modern Cornwall’, first published in Cornish Studies in 2002, by the principal architect of the Cornish debate, Mark Stoyle. As relevant today as when it was first written, Stoyle’s commentary, as well as reviewing recent contributions, looked to the future. Presciently, he predicted a more nuanced examination of the cultural diversity of Tudor and Stuart Cornwall, then only recently advocated by Bernard Deacon, and called for a more careful analysis of the nature of the avowedly conservative Anglican Church in Cornwall between the Reformation and the Civil War, especially in its relationship with Cornish identity. The latter has largely failed to materialize, as has Stoyle’s other major prediction, that after the flurry of ‘Kernowcentric’ writing there would surely be a ‘Kernowsceptic backlash’, intent on denying Cornwall’s newly won place in the ‘new British historiography’ and forcing the study of Cornwall in this period back into the confines of ‘English local history’.
John Chynoweth’s unimaginatively titled Tudor Cornwall (shades of A.L. Rowse), published in 2002, appeared at the time to herald such a backlash but, as Stuart Dunmore has observed, Chynoweth’s attempt to reject ‘the theory of Cornish distinctiveness’ is inadequate, based as it is on his plainly stated hostility to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘Celtic revival’ in Cornwall, including the contemporary Cornish-language revival which, Chynoweth contends, ‘cannot be regarded as genuine’. 3 As Dunmore explains in his shrewd assessment of Chynoweth’s intervention, by ‘setting out his ideological perspective so early in his work Chynoweth appears to undermine his own analysis, and his int