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3 - England's western neighbours

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Adrian Hastings
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

This chapter will briefly consider ways in which English nationalism impinged upon Cornwall, Wales and Scotland before turning, via America, to its principal subject, Ireland. Cornwall is an interesting but little considered case. Here was a Celtic ethnicity absorbed within the West Saxon kingdom well before the Conquest. Its elite was habituated to speak and write the national language and it is intriguing that in the fourteenth century it was actually Cornishmen – John Cornwall, Richard Pencrych and John Trevisa – who pioneered and proclaimed the replacement of French by English in the teaching of Latin grammar. No significant Cornish literature seems ever to have appeared, yet Cornish remained for centuries the common woman's vernacular. As such it raised no more problems than the oral dialects of other shires. One crucial factor within Cornwall's relatively successful integration seems to be that it did not begin with a ruthless and long-contested conquest of the Norman type, that it happened while the nation as a whole was itself coming into existence, a nation in which Cornishmen were no more alien to Englishness than Danes, and that Cornwall participated in the institutional development of England at every point. It was in fact almost excessively well represented in parliament from the fourteenth century, with the enfranchisement of no fewer than six boroughs: Bodmin, Helston, Launceston, Liskeard, Lostwithiel and Truro. The fate of this identity in ethnic-national terms was, it would seem, finally decided by the Reformation. While Latin was the language of the liturgy, Cornish had remained that of the community, and, doubtless, also that of many sermons. With the Reformation, Latin was replaced by English, despite Cornish protests that many people could not understand it.

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Chapter
Information
The Construction of Nationhood
Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
, pp. 66 - 95
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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