f premodern Cornwall conjures images of windswept coastlines as dramatic backdrop in the BBC television adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, or the mythic and misty landscape of King Arthur’s Tintagel and the kingdom of Lyonesse where the tragic hero Tristan is said to have been born, contemporary readers would do well to consult Sam J. Drake’s recent and magisterial study of the county in the fourteenth century. At 317 pages of text and 113 pages of appendices, Drake offers a lengthy but compelling corrective to the idea of Cornwall as “a land apart, in England but not of it” contained in Albert B. Osborn’s 1913 As it is in England. Instead, readers of Drake’s Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity are reminded that Cornish writer and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Trevisa, author of the English Polychronicon, described his place of birth as being very much in England and ruled by the law of England (66). Viewing late medieval Cornwall through the Trevisan lens of connectivity, Drake’s project is to document how fourteenth-century Cornwall was intertwined with and integral to the development of English identity under the later Plantagenets.
Drake’s study of late-medieval Cornwall sets out to correct the 1994 corrective offered by Christine Carpenter to the longstanding idea of the “county community” as the defining unit of medieval identity--this had dominated studies of local society for many decades under the influence of the long shadow cast by K.B. McFarlane’s seminal work. Carpenter’s forceful attack on the pull of the county community called for a new focus on the social networks which formed indissoluble ties between the gentry and nobility. Drake observes that unlike Carpenter’s Warwickshire, Cornwall’s unique geography--the county is a peninsula surrounded by the sea on all but its eastern border--and unique political structure--in 1337, Edward III elevated the earldom of Cornwall to the first duchy in the kingdom, granting the title to his son the Black Prince, heir to the crown--make it an ideal laboratory for reassessing the pull of the feeling of community, with perhaps a twenty-first century emphasis on the feeling of belonging to the English nation while at the same time maintaining the feeling of a distinct identity that shut the door to England’s creeping hegemonic interests. This is quite a line to straddle, being together and apart from the crown all at once, and lest we have our doubts about the feasibility of this approach, Drake reminds us that “a whole array of identities could co-exist, with different ones coming to the fore at different times and locations” (65). In Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, Drake does not advocate for a rigid return to an idyllic focus on the county community, but instead sets out to trace the notion of “commonality,” as “a collective sense of purpose and a common organization embracing the entirety of the Cornish gentry and the local earldom-duchy officials” (43).
This important but perhaps elusive idea of commonality is made more concrete through the many points of connectivity between Cornwall and the English government documented in thematic fashion throughout the book. To offer just one example, though the endless Cornish coastline might be regarded a haven for piratical lawlessness and the violence endemic to medieval society, Edward III and the Black Prince regarded Cornwall’s coastline as vital to England’s wartime efforts against France, and “the war at sea created many points of contact between the county, the Crown, and the earldom-duchy” (196). Royal demands for the participation of Cornish representatives on maritime councils ensured that Cornish mariners thought of themselves as partners in the war effort, and at the same time the war encouraged the expansion of the royal administration into the county. Drake argues this expansion was not unwelcome, and the Cornish did not feel any reason to strain against the yoke of emerging English statehood as did the Welsh. This is a running theme of Drake’s work--late medieval Cornwall is a very different place than late medieval Wales, and by gaining a better understanding of Cornwall’s balance between separateness and integration, the heterogeneous character of late medieval England comes into sharp relief (20).
Drake divides the examination of Cornwall’s connectivity into three parts. Part I, chapters 1 to 4, focuses on the very things that make Cornwall distinct, such as the Cornish language, collective mythology and hagiography--a “world of imagination” which resonated with the local Cornish gentry who were at the same time eager officeholders. As documented in chapter 2, they were terribly pleased to be drawn into royal service and participate in what Drake characterizes as “the collaborative business of government” (30). The core argument of Part I might be found on page 95, when Drake suggests that “Englishness came to form another layer of Cornishness, an identity that was embraced and resisted in turn.”
Part II, chapters 5 to 7, takes the inverse approach, focusing on lordship in the county and the crown’s interests in elevating the earldom to a duchy. Chapter 5, which documents the final years of the earldom to 1336, pauses to address Hannes Kleineke’s view in his essay “Why the West was Wild: Law and Order in Fifteenth-Century Cornwall and Devon,” that late-medieval Cornwall was particularly lawless owing to a predilection for violent action. Drake concedes that the valuable tin trade encouraged criminal activity, the Cornish coastline provided ample cover for piracy, and the absence of a natural leader among Cornish landholders meant the gentry were unrestrained in pursuit of their self-interests (130). However, Drake sees an upside to this lawlessness in the chaotic period leading up to the elevation of the Black Prince as Duke of Cornwall, for “lawfulness and lawlessness are best seen as inexorably bound together,” and so the lordship of Piers Gaveston, made Earl of Cornwall by Edward II, resulted in Cornishmen voicing discontent through parliament while resorting understandably to violent self-help (132). Drake discourages us from seeing this period as exceptionally lawless, but rather a prelude to the assertive lordship exercised by the Black Prince from the lengthy period of 1337 to 1376 which was to the benefit of and welcomed by the Cornish gentry, drawing Cornwall ever closer to the crown.
Part III, chapters 8 to 14, aims to put the crown and its Cornish subjects on equal footing, thereby considering how a range of activities from the tin trade to those centered around the peninsula’s coastline and seemingly limitless proximity to the sea were at once uniquely Cornish and at the same time integral to the project of good governance and coherence in late medieval England. Readers as unfamiliar as was this reviewer with the inner workings of taxation on the medieval tin trade will have to work a little harder than they might like to piece together how and where the coinage operated (I briefly consulted G. R. Lewis’ 1908 The Stannaries, a Study of the Medieval Tin Miners of Cornwall and Devon, cited in the bibliography). Chapter 14 on maritime connectivity offers a lively discussion of “water-based redistribution” or piracy, and those Cornish sea-raiders who contributed to the supremacy of English sea power (290).
Throughout all three sections, the name of one individual in particular stands out, though certainly not one most readers will recognize. Sir Thomas l’Ercedekne (spelled Arcedekne in The Complete Peerage), governor of Tintagel, seems a figure who is everywhere and doing everything at once, from fighting for Edward II in the Marches to serving as sheriff-steward, an office of which he was stripped after just one year for exploiting for personal gain. The particulars of his Cornish life would make a wonderful case study to illustrate the idea of Cornish connectivity. As it stands in Drake’s extensive study, l’Ercedekne pops up and disappears like a game of whack-a-mole, and it is hard to know exactly what to make of his contribution to Drake’s thesis. The wish for a clearer biographical over prosopographical approach to figures such as l’Ercedekne is the slightest of criticisms. Drake’s work embraces a broader approach influenced by recent work on Mediterranean connectivity as exemplified by Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, which opts to emphasize vastness of scope over an individual focal point. The lengthy appendices on office-holding, where we do find more information on the elusive Thomas l’Ercedekne, on men-at-arms, and on Cornish ports will prove useful to those wishing to study medieval Cornwall up close.
As I write this review, it is mid-June, 2021, and the G7 has just concluded meeting in Cornwall. The same windswept landscapes as seen in the BBC’s Poldark are now the stage for international leaders coming together again, in a post-Covid-19 and post-Brexit moment of hopeful international diplomacy. This deliberate choice of a Cornish setting as central to a green technology future makes plain Drake’s case about Cornwall’s dual nature, both distinct from everywhere else and yet fostering connectivity through a forward-thinking approach. Thanks to the careful research and convincing argument presented in Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, we should now regard Cornwall’s distinctiveness not as separateness, but as holding an important place in the project of governing a heterogeneous polity, the history of which dates back to the fourteenth century and the Plantagenet project of creating an English kingdom.