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Historical difference
4.1
In 1993 the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly explicitly defined
‘national minority’ in their Text of the proposal for an additional protocol
to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
In that definition they made their implicit intention, discussed above in
paragraphs 3.2 – 3.4 much more explicit. In 1993 they decided that the expression ‘national minority’ refers to a group of persons in a state who
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reside on the territory of that state and are
citizens thereof;
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maintain longstanding, firm and lasting ties with that state;
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display distinctive ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic
characteristics;
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are sufficiently representative, although smaller in number than the rest
of the population of that state or of a region of that state;
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are motivated by a concern to preserve together that which constitutes
their common identity, including their culture, their traditions, their
religion or their language
4.2
Both this definition and that of ethnic group suggested by Lord Fraser in
1988 share a recognition of two aspects common to all identity claims. These are
the presence of difference and the agency of members of the group in acting upon
those perceived differences. At the outset we must realise that differences can
be both material/objective and imagined/subjective. They can also be quite
subtle. And to a large extent it is not the attributed ‘difference’ that
makes the group but the group that makes the ‘difference’ important.
4.3
Nevertheless, claims of difference underlie the Cornish case. We will
identify, for illustration, three material differences, historic, linguistic and
cultural, that are often, singly or separately, taken as the basis of the
Cornish claim to be a distinct ethnic community or national minority.
4.4
Although administered as a county of England, the origin of Cornwall is
not the same as that of English counties. While the latter were originally
administrative sub-divisions of Saxon kingdoms, Cornwall was formerly a separate
kingdom, populated by a Celtic-speaking populace and with its own ruling
families. In 936 Athelstan, the ruler of Wessex, fixed the east bank of the
River Tamar as the border between Wessex and Cornwall, thus creating the
geopolitical entity of Cornwall as the home of the ‘West Welsh’, who were at
the same time forcibly evicted from Devon. Because of its size, roughly
equivalent to an English county, Cornwall came to be administered as a county,
but this was a later and contingent outcome.
4.5
In the period before the Reformation Cornwall was certainly not regarded
as a ‘mere’ English county. There are three aspects to this. First, Cornwall
was exceptional in its ‘Celtic’ inheritance “within England"
(Robbins, 1998, 8-9). This inheritance guaranteed Cornwall formally equal status
as one of the four constituent parts of the ‘island of Britain’ in medieval
times. As late as 1543 it was written that "Britain is divided into four
parts, wherof the one is inhabited by Englishmen, the other of Scots, the third
of Welshmen and the fourth of Cornish people" (Polydore Vergil, cited by
Payton, 1992, 57). To the sixteenth century Cornwall was regularly distinguished
from England in government documents such as Magna Carta and in other writings
and given a prominent status (for examples see Payton, 1996, 87ff). Secondly, an
ambiguous constitutional position was reflected in what has been described as
devices of ‘accommodation’, special institutions that helped solve the
problems of governing this remote territory in the medieval period (Payton,
1992, 47). Examples were the Duchy of Cornwall, formed in 1337, and the Stannary
courts and parliament, guaranteed by charters of 1201, 1305 and 1508, the last
of which extended the Stannary Parliament’s legislative powers and
"provided (an) aura of semi-independence" that recognised Cornwall’s
distinct constitutional position in the medieval British Isles (Payton, 1992,
52).
4.6
Finally, ideas of national identity before the 1600s differentiated
ethnic from political status. Thus the King’s political subjects included the
English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, French, Flemings and anyone else who happened to
live within the realm (Ellis, 1999, 104), Nevertheless, these ‘ethnies’, or
early ethnic communities, were regarded as separate cultural groupings well into
the 1600s. The Cornish were located as a group with a clear identity, but
absorbed into a multi-ethnic England, and this was only challenged with the
coming of the Reformation and the appearance of the modern notion of one ethnic
group in one ‘national’ space (Hastings, 1997, 67). Given the size of the
Cornish group in relation to the dominant English they were clearly vulnerable
to a process of semantic ethnic cleansing that commenced in the 1600s.
4.7
It was this process that effectively marginalised and rendered invisible
the Cornish. It also helps to explain the lack of visibility of the Cornish as a
distinct group in the late twentieth century UK. Indeed, it is only in recent
years that historians have begun to re-emphasise the distinct status of Cornish
ethnicity in medieval and early modern England, a status that was culturally
similar to the Scots and the Welsh, despite differences in governance. In a
recently published article the historian Mark Stoyle concludes that, in terms of
a distinct "tradition of descent… language, law, life-style, dress…
agricultural practices, (and) code of social values… naming forms and cultural
practices" the Cornish "emerge as a ‘people’ on every count"
in the period before the 1600s (Stoyle, 1999, 426). The same historian has also
called for the Civil War, now often regarded as a ‘war of four nations’ to
be thought of "in terms of a ‘war of five peoples’: English, Irish,
Scottish, Welsh – and Cornish" (Stoyle, 1998, 51).
4.8
Moreover, historical difference did not cease in the 1600s and 1700s with
the decline of the more visible markers of difference such as language and
cultural practices. While there was some cultural convergence in the 1700s and
1800s, a period when Cornwall was one of the centres of European
industrialisation, "nevertheless, there remained a stronger sense of
separate identity and common purpose… among the people of Cornwall than in any
other southern shire… Such politicisable ethnicity could hardly be found
elsewhere" (Hastings, 1997, 67). In fact, events of the nineteenth century
produced new tokens of historical difference. Early industrialisation based on
metal mining was followed by early de-industrialisation and, at the same time,
Cornwall became one of the major emigration regions of Europe (Baines, 1985,
157; Payton, 1999). This heightened the distinctiveness of the Cornish
experience during the late 1800s, opening up new family and community links that
were not bound by the parameters of the British nation-state or even by the
British Empire. The resulting international context of Cornish cultural identity
is on a scale matched only by the Irish and the Scots Highlanders within the
British Isles. This again provided another element of difference, which together
with an earlier ‘Celtic’ history, supplies a rich repertoire of symbols for
assertions of historical difference by the contemporary Cornish.
4.9
The separate origins of Cornwall and the Cornish people and their
qualitatively different status from English counties and their inhabitants have
been recognised by various state institutions as well as by historians. In 1855
the Duchy of Cornwall claimed that "Cornwall, like Wales, was at the time
of the Conquest, and was subsequently treated in many respects, as distinct from
England" (Observations on behalf of the Crown by way of a reply to the
statement showing the grounds upon which is founded the alleged right of the
Duchy of Cornwall to the tidal estuaries, foreshore , and under sea minerals
within and around the coast of County of Cornwall, 1856, appendix). In 1973 the
Kilbrandon Commission stated that "The early inhabitants of Cornwall were
of Celtic origin. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of England did not extend to their
territory and the people of Cornwall continued to be Celtic" (Kilbrandon
Commission, 1973, para 329). As recently as 1998 the Office of National
Statistics, when supporting the case for Cornwall to be regarded as a Level 2
European Union region for statistical purposes, argued that separating Cornwall
from Devon would recognise the former’s "distinct cultural and historical
factors reflecting a Celtic background" (ONS press release, 29 June 1998).
A final example of
official recognition of the existence of a distinct Cornish group comes in the
allocation, for the first time also by the ONS, of a Local Code to the Cornish
relating to the ethnic identity question in the 2001 Census.
Summary
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The
historical evidence suggests that the Cornish can lay claim
to a history that has much in common with that of the
Scots and Welsh. Non-English origins and a Celtic inheritance
provide the raw material for a distinct history.
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A distinct origin separate from England was recognised
by state bodies in the medieval period
and still referred to into modern times.
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This qualifies the Cornish as national minority under the definition of
the Race Relations Act as
they have a ‘historic national identity’.
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