Where was Cornish spoken in the middle ages?

From around 1100 to the 1330s Cornwall’s population tripled, from under 30,000 to a peak of around 100,000. After a few decades of stability, the Black Death in the middle of the 1300s turned population growth into fall. In fact numbers in Cornwall steadily declined to a low of around 60,000 by the beginning of the 1500s.

During the period of agricultural expansion and population growth between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries new farms and hamlets were established. Often, this involved dividing existing settlements. When this happened, a descriptor might be attached – such as, in Cornish, mur/byan (great/little) or wartha/woles (upper/lower). In English the equivalents were over/nether or muchel/little. In addition, in English points of the compass were used – north, south, east, west – a fashion that was not adopted in Cornish-speaking districts.

If we map the language of the names of these divided settlements we can reconstruct the linguistic geography of Cornwall. I’ve taken all those settlements where the first evidence appeared in the period 1200-1500. Obviously, the names would have been present before they were first recorded in writing but the lag between formation and record would presumably vary in a random fashion. That said, for some of the smaller places it could be a century or more before we find evidence of their existence. And for some that evidence may never have appeared.

Therefore, a map of the names recorded in 1200-1500 is more likely to reflect the situation on the ground between 1100 and 1400. Moreover, given the demographic context outlined above, we would expect it to be centred in the growth period before the mid-1300s.

We might take two things from this map. First, in most parishes, the divided settlements were either all named in English or all in Cornish with little overlap. The number of parishes with examples of both languages is relatively small. Given that the map encompasses a 200-300 year period this implies that the language divide in Cornwall at that time was very stable.

Second, the absence of any Cornish names in large swathes of east Cornwall suggests that Cornish was no longer being used for naming new settlements in those areas from at least 1200. Yet, most of that same area is dominated by Cornish placenames apart from the far north beyond the River Ottery. We don’t know exactly when those names were coined but it’s unlikely to be much later than the 800s.

Previously, I’ve argued that the loss of the Cornish language in east Cornwall was somehow linked with the population growth and the associated colonisation of new land. The chronology above strongly suggests this is mistaken. The Cornish language had already been replaced by English in most of east Cornwall by 1200, before the period of demographic growth. The reasons for the loss of Cornish in east Cornwall must lie elsewhere, perhaps in English settlement in the tenth and eleventh centuries or the political and administrative take-over of Cornwall in those same centuries or with other socio-economic changes in that earlier period.

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