Kevin J. Harty, ‘Malory and the cowardly Cornish knights – “The strangest races that dwell next door”’, Études Anglaises 66.3, 2013, pp. 379-87.
Thomas Malory appears to have had a problem with the Cornish. In Book V of his Morte d’Arthur the knights serving the Cornish King Mark are repeatedly charged as cowards. Their ‘character, reputation, chivalry, prowess and bravery’ are questioned not just once but 15 times. Malory’s somewhat negative view of the Cornish knights was itself based on the thirteenth century Old French version of Tristan and Isold.
Kevin Harty in this article situates Malory’s distaste for the Cornish knights as part of a long tradition of ‘seeing Cornwall and its inhabitants as distinctly other’. According to him, Malory reflected more general English (and French) attitudes from the days of Cornish independence through to the time of Gladstone, a very long time indeed.
Not that the Cornish never responded in kind. In the 1200s they ‘repeatedly snubbed … and did bodily harm to representatives of the Crown and to members of the English clergy’. Meanwhile the Cornish landed class demanded and got the right to elect their own sheriffs and choose their own peace-keepers. In this history of sullen rebellion the series of risings in 1497, 1549 and the seventeenth century then get their due mention.
Chaucer and Shakespeare are found also to have harboured anti-Cornish sentiments. On occasion Harty’s efforts to construct a universal othering of the Cornish veers into an excessive enthusiasm however. Rather oddly for example, that early cataloguer of all things Cornish, Robert [sic] Carew, is described as making ‘a career of denigrating Cornwall and its people’, a verdict that would have surprised Carew no doubt.
While describing (and projecting) instances of the ‘othering’ of the Cornish over a wide span of time, this contribution does not inform us why such othering was so persistent or repeated so assiduously by outsiders. In this respect, a recent doctoral thesis by David Lees (‘Identities in 12th century Cornwall’, Aberystwyth, 2023) might offer a clue.
Lees’ study of identities in twelfth century Cornwall concludes that the Cornish had a ‘peculiarly ambiguous identity’ as a ‘quasi people’. This uncertainty undermined the creation of a coherent identity. Nevertheless, the Cornish retained an ambiguous relationship with an England to which they were theoretically but never unequivocally attached. In the long run this rebounded in the othering by outsiders. As we see all too well nowadays people dislike ambiguity and prefer certainties, however daft they might be. Cornwall’s ambiguity was a constant irritant for the English, an itch that had to be regularly scratched. Although, as we also know, a feeling of repulsion is often accompanied by the tantalizing thrill of attraction, installing a wildly fluctuating love-hate relationship that has bemused and irritated both insiders and outsiders over the centuries.
