Category: economic history

Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 2

By March 1801 the price of food in the market towns of Devon had reached an unbearable level. Residents began to adopt the by now familiar tactics of the food riot – imposing a maximum price at the markets and touring local farms with the aim of ‘encouraging’ farmers to send more grain to market. … Continue reading Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 2 →

Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 1

In May 1800 a less than crystal clear entry was made in the Gwennap vestry records. The vestry agreed to pay the constables for ‘putting down’ the Cornish Supplementary Militia. The militia was made up of part-time soldiers and had been re-introduced in the 1750s. They were greatly expanded in 1796 during an invasion scare. … Continue reading Gwennap and the 1801 insurrection: Part 1 →

The Old Poor Law in Gwennap

In the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, politicians made the workhouse the centrepiece of the New Poor Law, a more ‘efficient’ and cheaper way to relieve the poor in England, Wales and Cornwall. Workhouses were intended to discipline the poor by forcing idlers to work and shirkers to become strivers. But in practice, they … Continue reading The Old Poor Law in Gwennap →

12. Bennett/s

The distribution of the 578 households in Cornwall headed by someone called Bennetts or similar in 1861 would strongly suggest that the surname arose in west Cornwall. However, that would be a mistake. If we turn to a map of the name Bennet in the early 1500s and 1641 a very different picture emerges. In … Continue reading 12. Bennett/s →

Camborne-Redruth: Cornwall’s Central Emigration District

The Redruth RD of the nineteenth century included within its bounds the central mining district. Named such because of its geographical centrality in the emerging eighteenth century industrial region of west Cornwall, the central mining district was also the most prolific producer of tin and copper ore from the early 1700s onwards. Fittingly, after the … Continue reading Camborne-Redruth: Cornwall’s Central Emigration District →

St Austell: the clay effect

In the early 1800s St Austell differed little from the other small market towns typical of east Cornwall. Its fortunes were however about to be transformed by the expansion of copper mines to its east and then clay works in the hills to the north. Nonetheless, the population of the urban district of St Austell … Continue reading St Austell: the clay effect →

Liskeard: Just passing through?

Let’s return to the Cornish Victorian Lives database. Liskeard Registration District (RD) was large in terms of area and, relative to the other eastern RDs, population. Like the Calstock/Callington sub-district that was reviewed in the previous post and unlike the RDs to its north and east, it had been more than touched by mining operations. … Continue reading Liskeard: Just passing through? →

St Germans and Calstock: contrasting patterns of migration

The civil servants who drew up boundaries of registration districts in the 1830s were surprisingly modernist. They took scant regard of the boundaries of traditional counties, unchanged for centuries, crossing them whenever they wanted. Launceston Registration District (RD) for example included parishes in west Devon while Calstock was for a time part of the Tavistock … Continue reading St Germans and Calstock: contrasting patterns of migration →

State of the Cornish nation: jobs

What are the most common jobs for people in Cornwall? First, let’s dispatch a couple of myths. Those icons of Cornwall, the miner and the fisherman, together with the invisible member of the traditional triptych - the farmer and farm labourer - may have accounted for most male jobs in the 19th century. But no … Continue reading State of the Cornish nation: jobs →

The steam engine, more on Gothic Cornwall and the Cornish dialect

The fourth in my series of one sentence (sometimes two) summaries of recent academic work on Cornwall ... Mary O'Sullivan follows the money and tells us why the miners who were demonstrating in 1787 had a better grasp of economics than some mines adventurers of the time. Joan Passey is attracted by the 'Cornish Gothic' … Continue reading The steam engine, more on Gothic Cornwall and the Cornish dialect →