5: Cornwall/Kernyw

Blake and Lloyd rightly point out that Cornwall became enmeshed in the Arthurian legends largely as a result of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s use of the word Cornubia to refer to his birthplace. They see this as a mistranslation of Kernyw as found in the Brut.

In Asser’s Vita Ælfredi Regis Chapter 74, we find the statement that … quodam tempore, diuino nutu, antea, cum cornubiam uenandi causa adiret, et ad quandam ecclesiam orandi causa diuertisset, in qua sanctus guenir requiescit ‘at some time previously, by divine will, when he [King Alfred] had gone to Cornubia for hunting and had turned aside for praying at a certain church, in which St Gwenyr now rests’. Saint Gwinear was an Irish ecclesiastic whose medieval cult was prominent in the far west of Cornwall. In Chapter 81, nam sequentis temporis successu ex improuiso dedit mihi exanceastre, cum omni parochia, quae ad se pertinebat, in saxonia et in cornubia, exceptis cotidianis donis innumerabilibus in omni genere terrestris diuitiae, quae hoc in loco percensere longum est, ne fastidium legentibus procreant ‘For, with the passing of time, he [King Alfred] unexpectedly gave me Exeter, together with its entire see, together with all that belonged to it in Saxonia and Cornubia’. Saxonia is England (the land of the Saxons), while Cornubia is evidently somewhere close to it and under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Exeter; it is, beyond any doubt, Cornwall. We also saw above that in Chapter 102, King Alfred made grants to churches in britannia et cornubia, gallia, armorica, northanhymbris, et aliquando etiam in hybernia ‘in Wales and Cornwall, Gaul, Brittany, Northumbria and sometimes even in Ireland’. In Asser, therefore, Cornubia is not a province or region of Britannia/Wales, but a separate place.

Now, in Blake and Lloyd’s scheme, this is unimportant. When Geoffrey used Cornubia, he knew that it meant Cornwall; they suggest, though, that he mistook the Middle Welsh Kernyw in his source (which they identify as the Brut y Brenhinedd) to mean Cornwall, whereas it in fact meant part of Wales. However, the word is found in Middle Welsh independent of Geoffrey. In the Dialogue of Arthur and the Eagle, which appears to be twelfth-century (like Geoffrey), reference is made to glyncoet Kernyw, ‘the valley-woods of Kernyw’, which appears to refer to the Glynn valley near Bodmin.

Corneu is used as an epithet in a number of Middle Welsh genealogical collections for members of the royal family of Dumnonia, the state based around the former Roman Civitas Dumnoniorum, the local government unit covering the southwestern peninsula of England. This was the state ruled by the Constantius upbraided by Gildas (de Excidio et Conquestu Brittanniae 28). In the anonymous Ravenna Cosmography of c 700, compiled from Roman sources, the name puro coronauis is found at 10548, in a section dealing with the southwestern peninsula. This is usually emended *Durocornouio and has been identified (not altogether convincingly) with Tintagel. This is the earliest evidence for the application of the placename *cornouio- to this part of Britain and shows the antiquity of the name Cornwall.

We cannot ignore the Cornish language, even though it is now extinct (the current revival of Cornish comes after several centuries of its disappearance as a living language). A substantial medieval literature survives and it is clear that the Cornish language shared many features with Breton and, to a lesser extent with Welsh, and a considerable vocabulary is known. Literature survives principally in the form of saints’ lives, mystery plays (the Ordinalia) and an important eleventh-century Old Cornish vocabulary (the Vocabularium Cornicum), containing about a thousand words of Cornish. What is most important to the present argument is the indigenous name for Cornwall: Kernow. This is linguistically identical to the Modern Welsh Cernyw and Breton Kernèo.

Nor is the association of Arthur with Cornwall a result of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mistranslation. Caradoc of Llancarfan’s Vita Gildae, written for the monks of Glastonbury in the 1120s or 1130s, without using Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae, mentions (Chapter 10) that Arthur mouit exercitu totius cornubiae et diberniae to glastonia, id est urbs uitrea ‘moved the army of all Cornubia and Dyfneint’ to ‘Glastonbury, that is the Glass Town’. Before Geoffrey of Monmouth, then, there were associations between Arthur and Cornwall, historical or not.