Bernard Deacon's Blog, page 7

State of the nation: identity

In 2021 79,941 of Cornwall’s residents went to the trouble of writing ‘Cornish’ in their response to the census question on national identity. Another 9,031 wrote ‘Cornish’ while also checking the tick-box for ‘British’. Together these accounted for 15.6% of residents. This was an increase of about 16,000 on the 13.8% who declared a Cornish … Continue reading State of the nation: identity →

St Germans and Calstock: contrasting patterns of migration

The civil servants who drew up boundaries of registration districts in the 1830s were surprisingly modernist. They took scant regard of the boundaries of traditional counties, unchanged for centuries, crossing them whenever they wanted. Launceston Registration District (RD) for example included parishes in west Devon while Calstock was for a time part of the Tavistock … Continue reading St Germans and Calstock: contrasting patterns of migration →

State of the Cornish nation: pay

What’s been happening to wages and salaries in Cornwall recently? The gross weekly pay of full-time workers in Cornwall, although still languishing behind that of Britain as a whole, has been catching up since 2021. Time will tell whether this is a post-covid short-term blip or whether it means the long-awaited ‘high-wage economy’ that policy-makers … Continue reading State of the Cornish nation: pay →

The lost kings of Cornwall

One of the genealogies of the kings of Glamorgan includes a line of kings assumed to be Cornish/Dumnonian because of the inclusion in it of Custennin (Constantine) and Gereint (Gerent). We know that Constantine was a king in the south west of Britain around 530. We also know that Gerent was described as the ruler … Continue reading The lost kings of Cornwall →

Launceston data trigger dilemma

I have to admit to being somewhat perplexed by the migration pattern of the generation of 1850 in the Launceston Registration District (RD) as revealed in my Victorian lives project. In this largely agricultural and rural RD adjacent to the border with Devon one might expect more short-distance migration across that border and a lower … Continue reading Launceston data trigger dilemma →

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 →

Cautious conclusions from Camelford

As members of homo sapiens (purportedly), we like to impose patterns on the world around us. Often, however, the information available mean that those patterns exist in our minds rather than in the world around us. So it could be with the pattern of migration from the Camelford Registration District (RD) in the later nineteenth … Continue reading Cautious conclusions from Camelford →

Who was St Piran?

Degol S.Peran da tha whye oll. You can find a brief account of the modern association of St Piran with Cornwall here and an introduction to the placenames associated with the saint here. Let’s add a few more details from the Life of St Piran. Written in the 1200s, 700 years after he was supposed … Continue reading Who was St Piran? →

Sojourners from Stratton

Stratton Registration District (RD) in the far north of Cornwall was the smallest in 19th century Cornwall in terms of population. This was because it had one of the lowest population densities of the 13 Cornish RDs. Yet, the proportion of the Cornish Lives sample born in this primarily rural and agricultural RD was probably … Continue reading Sojourners from Stratton →

Dumnonia: Region? Kingdom? Or at times both?

In the new edition of Cornwall’s First Golden Age the most extensive changes occur when discussing the earliest period – the fifth and sixth centuries. The original chapter 2, with some material from later chapters and new content, has been restructured into three separate chapters focusing in turn on Tintagel, Dumnonia and the issue of … Continue reading Dumnonia: Region? Kingdom? Or at times both? →