‘The folk (populus) of these parts’, so Adam de Carleton wrote in his resignation letter from the archdeaconry of Cornwall in 1342, ‘are quite extraordinary (valde mirabilis), being of a rebellious temper, and obdurate in the face of attempts to teach and correct’. Within and without the boundaries of the county, Cornwall and its people have long provoked strong feelings. Since contemporaries believed that God had divided humankind into ‘peoples’ (gentes), the ethnographic origins of such collectivities proved essential to medieval understandings of the world. With a mythical founder, many shared customs, a powerful lordship and a strong identity of their own, the Cornish could supposedly join the English, the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh as a people in their own right. Yet although the county's residents enjoyed a shared identity that proved potent in practice and imagination, notions of Cornishness were far more complex than simple peoplehood.

A Shared Name and Land

A great deal is in a name, according to R. R. Davies. Whereas Cornwall's residents stand out as highly varied by status, descent and so on, under the label of ‘Cornish’ all these folk were drawn together into one local collectivity. In many ways it was this communal epithet that made the Cornish. Yet although they might appear unchanging and almost primeval, convincing people of unbroken continuity, names were in constant flux, meaning different things at different times. With the peninsula's Cornish-speaking residents calling their land Kernow in the fifteenth century, the assumption of a name formed a potent part of self-definition. Such a definition could be imposed by others, however, the Cornish being known by the Anglo-Saxons as the Corn-Wealas, the Corn-foreigners. Becoming imbedded in the county's name itself, this pejorative appellation had lost its meaning and negative connotations by the later middle ages. In 1402 one William Brewer actually chose to define himself as a ‘Cornyshman’, but it is actually only in the mid-fifteenth century that the word ‘Cornish’ is first attested in Middle English, with little known about how the term was used before this date.