While I’ve been silenced by the demands of work, my friend Steve Muhlberger has become more voluble, with longer and more detailed blog entries, inspired by his European travels. These can be read at Muhlberger’s Early History. Among them are items on Latvia, Medieval robots, the enchanting Cornish landscape, the truth about the Cornish pastie, and a particularly fine one on the legacy of Cornish tin mines. The discussion of the distinctive pride of the miners reminded me of a medieval mining town of Kutná Hora I visited in Czech Republic. There, the gothic Church of St. Barbara (Chrám svaté Barbory) is decorated with wonderful frescoes that depict the daily life and work of miners and minters. The miners had considerable political and social power and independence, and expressed it in this extraordinary art.
Cornwall’s independent spirit during the middle ages was also expressed artistically, in the form of a unique dramatic literature, some of which survives. The Cornish-language plays were performed in circular open-air ampitheatres, called Plen-an-gwary, earthen embankments surrounding a green. There were hundreds of them, but only two survive. One, at St. Just, has mutated into a village common, but the one at St.Piran (not signposted, but it is 1.2km along the B3285 from Goonhavern, towards Perranporth, on the north side of the road, just off a small lane opposite a pink house) is in its original form, after local initiative cleared away the overgrowth of brush. The Bewnans Meriasek, a drama of the life of a Cornish saint, has been successfully performed there, as well as bardic festivals. Another Cornish classic, the Ordinalia, has been performed at St. Just. Steve didn’t stumble on these, but he writes with delicate feeling about many other sights.
One aspect of Cornish history that is largely forgotten is the fact that it suffered heavily from slave raids in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is described in Giles Milton’s White Gold, reviewed on my reading page.
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