The lost kings of Cornwall

One of the genealogies of the kings of Glamorgan includes a line of kings assumed to be Cornish/Dumnonian because of the inclusion in it of Custennin (Constantine) and Gereint (Gerent). We know that Constantine was a king in the south west of Britain around 530. We also know that Gerent was described as the ruler of a realm to the west of Wessex around 700. However, between Custennin and Gerent the genealogy includes just one other supposedly south-western king. That was someone called Erbin, of whom nothing at all is known.

Where are the others, as Erbin could not have ruled for 150 years or more?

My answer to this is that the kingdom of Greater Cornubia, perhaps known as Dumnonia, collapsed in the late 500s. Erbin may possibly have been its last king. But kingship in the south-west then disappeared until the late 600s. At that point, threats from the expansive and aggressive English kingdom of Wessex led to Gerent’s appearance as a war leader, mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as waging war on King Ine of Wessex.

Gaps in the lists of kings in the genealogies that later circulated in Wales and Brittany is not the only evidence for no kings from Cornwall. We must also note:

– the absence of Dumnonia or Cornwall from the comprehensive collections of Celtic royal genealogies in Harleian manuscript 3859.

– the analogy of Brittany, Cornwall’s closest cultural neighbour, where kingship also vanished from the 630s to the 800s.

Moreover, the decentralised nature of the Christian church in Cornwall and the lighter demands of landlords also strongly suggest that ‘top-down structures in general were light or even absent in Cornwall between the sixth and ninth centuries’. For more in support of this see chapters four and seven of the new edition of my Cornwall’s First Golden Age: from Arthur to the Normans.