On this island, we are not very used to experiencing serious armed conflicts about language issues, even if there are some people who do tend to get in a bit of a state about the Oxford comma, and others who write cross letters to the Times about split infinitives. But mostly we have been happy to leave actual physical fighting about language issues to other nations.
In the mid-1500s, however, things were not quite so peaceful. King Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, came to the throne of England in 1547, when he was only nine years old. He was the first English monarch to be an out-and-out Protestant, and his government introduced a number of reforms which were designed to cement Protestantism into the fabric of the nation and to ensure that there would be no return to the Catholicism which had most recently been espoused by his Aunt, “Bloody” Mary Tudor.
One of these reforms concerned the compulsory introduction into English churches of the new Protestant Book of Common Prayer, which was written in English instead of Latin. It had been compiled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who Queen Mary had had burnt to death in 1556.
The prayerbook change was intended to see the total removal of the Catholicism-linked Latin language from church services in England, but it also had the consequence of leading to the exclusion of the Cornish language from churches in Cornwall.
A large proportion of the people of Cornwall, particularly in the far west, could not speak English at that time, and they were understandably furious about the change of language which was now being imposed upon them from London, meaning that they could no longer comprehend what was going on in church.
There were very many public protests, a lot of them violent, and groups of armed Cornish men, some of them even led by clergymen, formed themselves into an army which marched towards London demanding an end to these enforced liturgical changes.
The Cornish-speaking forces went on to capture Plymouth and, with the support of Devonians, moved on into the rest of Devon, where they besieged Exeter for over a month. After a number of large and ferocious battles the Cornish rebels were eventually defeated. Many of them, including clergy, were imprisoned and brutally hanged by members of the English forces, who had been sent down from London.
The consequences of this defeat, with all the fear that must have been engendered, the destruction that had been wrought, and the imprisonments and executions which had been inflicted, turned out to be devastating for Cornish culture and the Cornish language.
Once things had eventually calmed down, it was never seriously suggested that the prayerbook should be translated into Cornish, which would have been a very sensible move for guarding against further unrest. But the rebellion and its aftermath meant that everything Cornish was now regarded in London with great disfavour and suspicion, and no proposal for such a translation would have got off the ground.
This failure to translate the Protestant Book of Common Prayer into Cornish was one factor leading to its rapid decline during the 1600s, to the point where Cornish gradually became an endangered language.
THE LAST CORNISH SPEAKER
The last monolingual Cornish speaker who had no English is reported to have been a woman called Chesten Marchant, who died in 1676 at Gwithian, which is 15 miles west of Truro, although we cannot have any real confidence about the accuracy of this report.
