In the 1930s Cornwall County Council officially adopted its coats of arms – the 15 bezants topped by a chough and flanked by a fisherman and a miner, the iconic male occupations of the nineteenth century. Yet, by that time this representation was already far from reality. While the chough was heading for temporary extinction, … Continue reading The occupation Cornwall’s coat of arms forgot
Category: farming
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
Gothic Cornwall, daffodil pickers and mining heritage
Impress your friends with your wide knowledge of recent academic work on Cornwall ... Tanya Krzywinska and Ruth Heholt claim that Cornwall has inspired Gothic novelists and explain the composition of 'Gothic Cornwall', simultaneously exciting and disturbing, attractive yet terrifying. Constantine Manolchev presents the narrative of a daffodil picker from Bulgaria working on a Cornish … Continue reading Gothic Cornwall, daffodil pickers and mining heritage
Withiel: stay at home farmers
One question the Victorian Lives database will help to answer is how the likelihood to emigrate varied by occupation. For instance, a quick check of the current state of the database, probably over 90 per cent complete, shows that of those men who were working in mines in 1871 and had survived to 1891 at … Continue reading Withiel: stay at home farmers
Treneglos: women wave the farm goodbye
This parish, to the north of Bodmin moor, was possibly the Cornish parish most dominated by farming in the Victorian era. In 1861, fully 85 per cent of its adult men were farmers, farmers’ sons or farm labourers and virtually all of the adult women were married to farmers or their labourers or were servants … Continue reading Treneglos: women wave the farm goodbye
St Merryn: before the tourists arrived
Situated in the north coast of mid-Cornwall, St Merryn is now part of Cornwall’s supposed honeypot tourism periphery, with a high number of second homes and holiday cottages. As much as 60-70 per cent of the housing stock in the coastal areas of the parish had no permanent resident in 2011. We’re still waiting for … Continue reading St Merryn: before the tourists arrived
St Mellion: trees, wooden and family
St Mellion near the Tamar in south-east Cornwall is now home to an Australian-owned up-market golf resort with its hundreds of holiday lodges and periodic controversial planning disputes. In the 1800s it would have been much less manicured. It’s another in what sometimes feels like an endless run of smallish rural parishes that were mainly … Continue reading St Mellion: trees, wooden and family
St Martin in Meneage: the state of agriculture in the ‘Great Depression’
As we saw in the previous blog, farmers in south-east Cornwall were getting along relatively well in the face of the so-called ‘Great Depression’ of British agriculture that began around 1873. Were farmers in the west at St Martin in Meneage equally fortunate? On the Lizard it was reported in 1882 that more farms were … Continue reading St Martin in Meneage: the state of agriculture in the ‘Great Depression’
St Martin by Looe: what could keep them down on the farm?
St Martin by Looe was the mother church of the town of East Looe. By the 1800s East Looe had long been hived off, leaving St Martin as a small rural parish in east Cornwall, where farming employed almost 90 per cent of its men. Farm track near Treveria, where Thomas grew up Only two … Continue reading St Martin by Looe: what could keep them down on the farm?
St Keyne: farm labouring, shoemaking and gender relations
St Keyne is a small, easily overlooked parish in the south east Cornish countryside. In the 1800s its economy was almost entirely dominated by its farms. Farmers, their sons and farm labourers made up fully 92 per cent of the working male population in 1861. St Keyne Well, made famous by Robert Southey's poem of … Continue reading St Keyne: farm labouring, shoemaking and gender relations
Cornish studies resources 