Cornish people

“ With regard to the Cornish people, I can but reiterate what has already been said relative to the Western folk generally. What differences exist in character are not due to difference of race, but to that of occupation. The bulk of Cornishmen in the middle and west have been associated with mines and with the sea, and this is calculated to give to the character a greater independence, and also to confer a subtle colour, different in kind to that which is produced by agricultural labour. ”

“ The people of Helston are blessed with water running free in the same way.
Cornish people do not live much in towns; they seem to prefer living amongst the rocks and trees, upon the downs, amongst the shadows of they know not what, and sounds which are as echoes from long ago. A very small town elsewhere fills the untravelled with amazement ”

“ One of the most pleasing traits of the Cornish people, which is but one manifestation of the spirit I have been speaking about, is their love for little children. Nowhere in the kingdom, town or country, do you see a brighter, happier, better-dressed company of small children than here in the narrow stony ways of the old fishing town. The rudest men exhibit a strange tenderness towards their little ones ”

“ He said how hills and dales were covered with fat herds in that happy land, whose inhabitants had not to hunt half-starved wild animals for their subsistence, but only followed the chase for pastime; how by a process, unknown in other lands, a liquor was there brewed from grain, which made those who drank it as strong as giants and brave as lions; how the Cornish people merely washed the soil of their valleys and found metals—more precious than silver or gold. ”

“ The Cornish people are incomparably better off now, so far as material comforts go, than they were in the last half of the sixteenth century, when Richard Carew wrote his Survey of Cornwall; but there have been no really great, no radical changes—no transformations, as in so many other parts of Britain. The life of to-day is very much like the old life, and the people now are like their forefathers of three centuries ago as described by Carew. ”

“ The Cornish are not a booky folk, they have not produced a great literature, [Pg 88] and even nowadays they read little but their Bibles. Such a people would be likely to remember and treasure up the stories handed down from mother to child. They are, moreover, very social. ”

“ The folk were orderly, as might be expected of the Cornish people, even on Saturday evening.
The Cornishman is imaginative, and deeply, emotionally, but unaffectedly religious. He is a Celt, and consequently he generally wears an air of gentle melancholy. Hospitality and warm-heartedness are also among his characteristics, as all who have journeyed much in Cornwall have occasion to know.
But although the Cornishman is so religiously disposed, Cornwall is by no means a stronghold of the Established Church ”

“ It is said of the Cornish, as it has been said of the Irish and of Celtic people generally, that they are cruel. I doubt if they are more cruel than others if we restrict the word to its proper meaning—the infliction of pain for the pleasure of it; but there is a great deal of barbarity of the kind one sees in Spanish and Italian countries which results from temper. The Cornish, like the Spanish, are passionate and when anything goes wrong they are apt to wreak their fury on the poor unresisting beast—cow, calf, horse, donkey or sheep. ”

“ The stories attaching to rock and well and hill were unending; every man and woman had folk-lore to tell us youngsters. We took to them naturally—they seem to fit in wisely with the solitudes, the expanses, the superstitious character of the Cornish people, and never clashed in our minds with the Scriptural teachings which were our daily portion at home. ”

“ It is indeed curious to note that while those who have written on the Cornish people almost invariably say the pleasantest things about them, the English, or Anglo-Saxons, who live among them, the strangers who reside permanently or for long periods within their gates, have a very different opinion. The praise and the dispraise to my mind are equally far from the truth ”

“ In 1630 Sir John Dodridge in his History of the Ancient and Modern estate of the Principality of Wales, Duchy of Cornwall, and Earldom of Chester, says: “The people inhabiting the same [i.e. Cornwall] are call’d Cornishmen, and are also reputed a remanent of the Britaines . . . they have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use) , differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” ”

“ In 936 the “Welsh” were driven out of Exeter by Æthelstan, and from that time the Tamar appears to have formed a general boundary between English and Cornish, though there seems to be evidence that even as late as the reign of Elizabeth Cornish was spoken in a few places to the east of that river. The decay of Cornish has been largely attributed to the Reformation. Neither the Prayer-book nor the Scriptures were translated into the vernacular, and we find the same apathy on the part of the Church of England in Cornwall as in Wales and Ireland. ”

“ Carew gives the numerals and a few other specimens of the language.
In a survey of Cornwall, by John Norden, entitled Speculum Magnæ Britanniæ, pars Cornwall, addressed to James I., the following account of the language is given.
“The Cornish people for the moste parte are descended of British stocke, though muche mixed since with the Saxon and Norman bloude, but untill of late years retayned the British speache uncorrupted as theirs of Wales is. ”

“ Ia, that it is difficult to set them down with the clearness they deserve. We Cornish people are an imaginative race, just as all people of a Celtic origin are, but we never dreamed of what has taken place. ”

“ The Cornish had a long way to walk when they wanted just to talk matters over with their sovereign. They went in their thousands to London on several occasions when things were not to their liking, and the late Queen was the first sovereign of the realm to come into the county and "God bless" the people on their own doorsteps. ”

“ A CRABBER'S HOLE, GERRAN'S BAY.
[Pg 43]
"Delighted to see you, ladies; delighted to see any friends of the Professor's; and I hope you enjoyed the Cove, and that you're all hungry, and will find your tea to your liking. It's the best we can do; we're very homely folk here, but we try to make people comfortable," and so on and so on, a regular stream of chatty conversation, given in the strongest Cornish, with the kindliest of Cornish hearts, as she ushered us into a neat little parlour at the back of the inn. ”

“ These little uncharitablenesses—to describe them all in one word—are universal in man or woman, perhaps in both, and being part of our nature they probably have their uses: if they strike us more in the Cornish than in our own people it is because of the difference of temperament or disposition—because their feelings, good or bad, are more readily excited and are expressed with less restraint. ”

“ We then meet with what is practically a third type: large, dignified, handsome people, distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon not only by their prominent noses and well-formed chins, but also by their unaffected grace and refinement of manner. In many a little out-of-the-world Cornish farm I have met with the men of this type, and admired the distinction of their appearance and bearing, their natural instinctive courtesy, their kindly hospitality. It was surely of such men that Queen Elizabeth thought when she asserted that all Cornishmen are courtiers. ”

“ In Cornwall everything is alive—the mine, the moor, the sea, the deep pools, the brooks, the groves, the sands, the caves; everything has its moan and harmony and inspiration. And the land under the sea, which is called Lyonesse by the poets, was a fairy zone, and some say it sank in the night, and some say other things harder to believe.
Cornwall under the sea has been there a long time. Some people, who like to be accurate above all things, say it disappeared in the year 1089, and contained 140 parish churches, and God wot how many chapels, and baptistries, and holy wells, and places. ”

“ There are other ‘kinning stones’ [145] within reach, but examples are not common; their virtues are familiar to the people, and instances are to be met with among the country folk, whose recovery from a ‘kinning’ in the eye (‘kennel,’ West Cornwall) is attributed solely to the use of these charms.”—Notes on the Neighbourhood of Brown Willy (North Cornwall) , Rev. A. H. Malan, M.A.
In every small Cornish village in olden times (and the race is not yet extinct) lived a charmer or “white witch.” ”

“ It is no uncommon thing for a Cornishman to build his own house, make his own shoes, be both fisherman and miner, and, possibly, small shop-keeper besides; and wherever the Cornish miner emigrates, he is pretty sure to take the lead in enterprise and danger.
Wilkie Collins says: "As a body of men they are industrious, intelligent, sober, and orderly, neither soured by hard work, nor depressed by harsher privations"; and the old poet Taylor, in 1649, writes: "Cornwall is the compleate and repleate Home of Abundance, for high, churlish hills and affable, courteous people. ”

“ The proverb may be relied on as authentic. The Prince of Wales has been the Duke of Cornwall ever since, so the Cornish people have had a very close connection with royalty from pre-historic times, as the Bookworm discovered; then through Kingsley's "guano and polecat" period, and then from Edward the Black Prince down to the present, which we can verify for ourselves every year, when the Duchy accounts are published, and the ancient tribute passes into the noble Duke's banking account. ”

“ We wish to correct an error that many persons, not Cornish, entertain with regard to the language of Cornish working people. Their mistake originates, in many instances, from seeing in stories—misnamed Cornish, and for the most part written by strangers to the country—such an uncouth jargon, put into the mouths of West Country folks, which is no more the common dialect of Cornwall than it is of Jericho. ”

“ Here, where the British race had its last stronghold, the stamp of the national characteristics was retained in its effects much longer than elsewhere. Nowadays of course there is intermarrying and travelling, and frequent streams of new blood coming in—half the people you speak to are not Cornish at all—but still there is something remaining which stamps them as a whole. ”

“ The manners of the Cornish of all ranks, down to the lowest, are remarkably distinguished by courtesy—a courtesy of that kind which is quite independent of artificial breeding, and which proceeds solely from natural motives of kindness and from an innate anxiety to please. Few of the people pass you without a salutation. Civil questions are always answered civilly. No propensity to jeer at strangers is exhibited—on the contrary, great solicitude is displayed to afford them any assistance that they may require ”

“ It is not that the Cornish are to be under-valued or slighted, but they are to be defended from the foolish claims of casual visitors and the equally unwise assertions of some natives. There is one grave charge that may be laid against the people—Mr. ”

“ A common charge against the Cornish is a want of solidity or stability of character. You cannot rely on them. You are constantly deceived by their manner: they are the readiest of any people on earth to fall in with your views and do exactly what you want. ”

“ It has been thought that because Cornwall is preeminently the land of strange beliefs and of old tales and legends relating to mythical saints and heroes, to giants and demons with a great variety of fantastic beings—mermaids, fairies, pigsies and piskies and other little people—the Cornish are a highly imaginative people. ”

“ It is generally supposed that the Cornish are a Dissenting people, yet they all took kindly to the building of this minster, and they all feel a pride in it. Gifts poured in from all parts of the Duchy to assist in its erection, and, suitably enough, very little but Cornish material was used in its construction—Cornish granite, china-stone, polyphant, and serpentine, with Cornish copper in the clock-tower. It might, perhaps, have been better if Perpendicular, the prevalent church style in Cornwall, had been adhered to, instead of a rather French-looking Early English ”

“ The Christian form which the Irish peasant has given the legend does not touch its relevancy here. Perhaps one might venture to generalize, that in these islands great men and women were believed to continue their existence in the form of eagles, hawks or ravens, swans or owls. But what became of the souls of the obscurer majority of the people? For an answer to this perhaps we can only fall back on the Psyche butterfly, which may here be illustrated by the fact that Cornish tradition applies the term ‘pisky’ both to the fairies and to moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls8. ”

“ Michael's Mount in Cornwall [pg 335] was once surrounded, and all the evidence that remains to substantiate the former presence of trees on and around the Cornish Mount is reduced to the name “the Hoar rock in the wood,” given by William, and the Cornish names of Cara clowse in Cowse or Cara Cowz in Clowze, given by Carew. How much or how little dependence can be placed on old Cornish names of places and their supposed meaning has been shown before in the case of Marazion. Carew certainly did not understand Cornish, nor did the people with whom he had intercourse ”