Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 19

By strict analogy, the name of the extreme south-western county of England ought to be Cornwales rather than Cornwall; and, indeed, that regular form made a hard fight for life, though it has long since been finally beaten in the struggle for existence by the modern received name of Cornwall. From the very first period when the English landed in Britain, they knew the Celtic aborigines of the land as Wealas, or Welshmen. The word, indeed, originally means no more than foreigners, and was the universal term applied by all branches of the Teutonic race to the alien peoples with whom they met in the course of their wanderings. Wälschland, the German name for Italy, comes from the same root: the walnut is the Welsh or foreign nut, and the turkey and French bean are known in Germany as the Wälsche Hahn and the Wälsche Bohne. But all early ethnical names tend in time to become territorial; and just as Suth Seaxe and East Seaxe, which originally meant the South Saxons and the East Saxons, have now come to mean the land itself of Sussex and Essex, so the plural name Wealas, or the Welshmen, has come to be used in its modern shortened form of Wales not for the people, but for the land which they inhabit. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that early history knows nothing of countries and districts, but only of tribes and kindreds. As in the older annals of Rome or Greece we meet merely with Samnites and Tyrrheni, with Achaians and Locrians, so in the most ancient annals of England we meet, not with Mercia and Kent, but with the Myrce and the Kentings; not with Wiltshire and Derbyshire, but with the Wilsæte and the Pecsæte, the men of the Wyly and the men of the Peak. Place-names as such hardly exist at all in the first period of English history. Even such forms as Hastings and Worthing were originally true plurals—Hastingas and Weorthingas—applied to clans or families; and down to quite a late date we find the Hastingas spoken of as a tribe side by side with the Kentingas and the Suth Seaxe.

The modern change of such plural and tribal names into singulars of local meaning is very clearly seen in the case of Cornwall. The Wealas of the West Country, after their isolation from those of the Midlands by the English conquest of Bath, were known as the West Wealas, which we usually modernise as West Wales, but which really means rather the West Welshmen. For we are now in this curious philological predicament, that having come to use the ethnical plural Wealas, or Wales, as the name of a country, we have been obliged to adopt the adjective Wylisc or Welsh as the name of the people. Various kinds of Wealas were, however, recognised by our English ancestors. There were the Bret-Wealas or Britons, and the Gal-Wealas or Gaels, the two main divisions of the Celtic stock. And there were minor local subdivisions of both races. So long as Devonshire remained unconquered the term West Wealas was applied to all the Britons of the western peninsula; while the Britons of the Cymric mountain-land were known as North Wealas, a word used to embrace the people of both North and South Wales in the modern sense. But after the Damnonii, or Defnas, had been finally subdued, and the independent Britons restricted to the west of the Tamar, this last remnant of the West Welsh came gradually to be known as the Corn-Wealas, or Welsh of the Horn—that is to say, the peninsula. Cernyw is the true Celtic form of the word. Throughout the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, the name Corn-Wealas was always used as an ethnical plural—“this year the Danes harried the Corn-Wealas, and the North-Wealas, and the Defnas”; or “Lyfing held three bishoprics, one on Devonshire, and one on the Cornwealas, and one on Worcestershire.” But in later English times, the word got shortened into Cornwales; and then, losing its plural meaning, became finally singular in form as Cornwall. An exactly analogous case occurs in the peninsula of Wirral, in Cheshire, between Dee and Mersey. The original form here is Wirhealas, which is [possibly] a tribal name; but in later days it was shortened into Wirheale, and finally into Wirral.

The very name of Cornwall is, however, thoroughly significant of its real history. The people are to this day Cornwealas, Welshmen by blood and character, with an extremely slight Teutonic admixture. They were the last Britons of Wessex to be conquered, and they were far the longest in being assimilated by their English lords. Though Egbert “harried among them from east to west,” he did not succeed in subduing the people; and of the two solitary villages in the county bearing English clan titles, one, that of Callington, lies close to the site of his later victory at Hingston. Ten years after, the now Saxonised men of Devon fought against their old fellow-countrymen at Camelford, but with what success we are not told. When the Danish invasions set in, the Cornish joined even the heathen pirates against their West Saxon foe, and Egbert put them both to flight at Hengestesdun, now Hingston. About the same time with this defeat the schismatical Cornish Bishops made a profession of obedience to Canterbury. Under Athelstan, Howel, King of the West Welsh, finally acknowledged the English supremacy; as did also Constantine King of Scots, Owen King of Gwent, and Ealdred of Bamborough, lord of the Northumbrian English. Cornwall becomes thenceforward a mere English shire. Still, it was another quarter of a century before an Englishman was appointed as Bishop to the see of Cornwall. From that time forth English names began to be adopted by the Cornish, though we still meet with plenty of true Celtic Griffiths, and Owens, and Riols among the serfs whose manumissions are recorded in the mass-book of St. Petrocs or Padstow. Even after the fashionable Norman Roberts and Henrys and Williams began to drive out the local Cymric Christian names, the Cornish of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took to themselves those native surnames in Tre-, Pol-, and Pen- by which the true Cornu-Briton may still often be detected in Teutonic England. The Cymric language continued to be spoken over the whole county down to the time of Henry VIII. By Queen Anne’s reign it was confined to five or six villages in the western portion of the shire. Even now it is not wholly extinct. It is usual, indeed, to say that Dolly Pentreath was “the last that jabbered Cornish”; but in truth several phrases of the old tongue are still current at the present day in the mouths of a few aged country people near Penzance.

The Celtic imagination of the people lingers rather upon an earlier and less certain history. As miners and fishermen the Cornish are naturally prone to superstition and poetry. The long backbone of granite hills, the gray moors, the jagged and water-eaten crags of the Land’s End, the serpentine caves and rocky islets of the Lizard, the sheer cliffs of the north coast, inhabited by the cormorant and the sea-eagle, have all helped to mould the Cornish fancy into weird and curious shapes. The tin mines worked under the sea [gave to this island the name of] Cassiterides [a form used by] the old Greek chroniclers, the earliest part of Britain brought into connection with the Mediterranean culture by the Phœnician merchantmen. Ictis, whither the ingots of metal were conveyed at low water for shipment to the Continent, was not Vectis or Wight, the patriotic Cornish antiquarians tell us, but St. Michael’s Mount itself. Cornish tin undoubtedly went to make up the bronze of the great bronze age, and the armour of the Homeric Achæans. Marazion or Market Jew is a Phœnician name, say these bold philologists; and the modern Cornish surname of Honeyball is really a latter-day corruption of a long-surviving Hannibal. Such vitality is a little too much for the critical Teutonic mind. Then, coming down to a later though still mythical date, if there was ever an Arthur, it was here that he lived. He was (if anybody) a prince of the Damnonian Welsh, and he fought against the heathen West Saxons who invaded his lands. Cornwall, the last fragment of the old Damnonian realm, is full of his memory; his castle still stands on the cliffs of Tintagel, and his spirit still haunts Dozmary Pool. It is thus to Cornish fancy, handed down in part through Breton and Welsh sources, that we owe indirectly much of our most beautiful English poetry and romance—[Tristram and Isolt] Merlin and Arthur, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad, Guinevere and Elaine, the Round Table and the Holy Grail, Malory’s Mort Arthur and Shakespeare’s Lear, Spenser’s Faërie Queene and Tennyson’s Idylls. All these stories, now an integral part of English literature, are in their origin dim traditions or myths [circling about] the resistance offered by a Cornish or Damnonian prince to an English invader. Our national epic cycle is at bottom a Cornish legend. Arthur is the hero of the conquered race, adopted and naturalised by the conquerors. But it is to the Welshmen Geoffrey of Monmouth and Walter Map that we owe the introduction of these British tales into English literature; while Breton, Welsh, and Cornish alike are but different varieties of the same Cmyric Celtic stock.