Why 'Cousin Jack'? The origins of the nickname of the Cornish overseas

The following draft is concerned with the curious use of the nickname 'Cousin Jack' for the Cornish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 'Great Emigration' of the Cornish between around 1815 and the First World War saw what has been termed the 'wholescale scattering' of the Cornish to the new mining frontiers of North and South America, Australia and South Africa. From at least the mid-nineteenth century, these emigrants were known as 'Cousin Jacks', but the origin of this term seems rather obscure. The aim of the following note is to investigate the evidence for the early usage of the term 'Cousin Jack' and make some suggestions as to its origins in light of this evidence. 

The cover of Oswald Pryor's Cousin Jack Cartoons (Sydney, 1945); Pryor was the son of Cornish parents and born at Moonta, South Australia. The books says the following of the front cover image: 'The cover design suggests a miner who has knocked off early, and has come up a ladderway remote from the main shaft in order to avoid running into the boss. Unfortunately he has run into the trouble he meant to avoid. This situation will be, obvious to all who know the Moonta scene. —The miner's hat here depicted is made of hard compressed pulp and colored a deep maroon when new. The candle is stuck on the front of the hat with a lump of wet red clay. This was the practice of old Cornish miners for generations.' (Image: State Library of Victoria)

The 'Great Emigration' of the Cornish in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems to have occurred on a quite remarkable scale. Margaret James-Korany has, for example, identified 42,000 individual emigrants sailing from the principal ports of Cornwall for Canada between 1831 and 1860, with some 6,200 leaving from Padstow alone in that period, and this outflow continued long after 1860 too. Thus the Cornish Telegraph for 5 September 1866 published a piece regretting 'the rage for emigration' in recent years, noting that 'the rush for Australia and America has been very great', and recent calculations suggest that at least 240,000 Cornish went overseas between 1860 and 1900, with a similar number leaving for England and Wales, with the result that Cornwall lost around a third of its population across the period. This depopulation was particularly marked amongst the youngest age-groups. Philip Payton observes that 44.8% of the Cornish male population aged fifteen to twenty-four left for overseas between 1861 and 1900, along with 26.2% of the female population in the same age group, and another 30% and 35.5% respectively left for other counties within Britain as well.(1)

The use of the term 'Cousin Jack' for the Cornish, particularly miners and especially emigrant miners, along with its companion-term 'Cousin Jenny', is well-evidenced from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. John H. Forster's account of 'Life in the copper mines of Lake Superior', given to the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society in 1887, contains the following illustrative passage:

The Cornishman, or "cousin Jack," is a native of the duchy of Cornwall, England... The Cornishman of the present day, like his father, is of a roving disposition. His footsteps may be traced around the globe. There is no prominent mining field in the world wherein you will not find "Cousin Jack." He is in Alaska, California, the Rocky Mountains, Mexico, Central and South America, in Australia, India and Lake Superior. He is a first rate miner and possesses a certain sturdiness of frame and disposition that commends him to the observer. He works hard, eats well and fights bravely. He is, numerically, very strong in our northern mines, and, being, as a rule, steady, conservative and skillful, he finds ready employment. He likes mining; esteems his vocation among the most honorable, if not aristocratic. He despises the duties of an ordinary day laborer. In short, he is a born miner and nothing else... But "Cousin Jack's" language attracts most attention. His dialect, pure and simple, is unique. He uses many English words with a strange twist, while other words of his you would look for in vain in Webster's unabridged... But we find in the mines many gentlemen of Cornish birth who are well educated and efficient, occupying positions of trust and responsibility. Many of the captains and agents are Cornishmen.(2)

Quite when and where these Cornish emigrants started to be known as 'Cousin Jacks' is not wholly clear, unfortunately, and various theories have been proposed over the years, most of which locate the genesis of the term overseas in America, Australia or other places where Cornish miners emigrated to in the nineteenth century. The Cornubian and Redruth Times in 1908, for example, carried a piece suggesting that the term 'Cousin Jack' was first used in the California mining districts in the very late 1840s and spread out from there, with the additional claim that 'twenty years ago the term in Cornwall was unknown'; however, as we shall see, neither claim stands up to scrutiny, and the reality is perhaps even more interesting.(3)

An Australian Cousin Jack cartoon by Oswald Pryor from 1915; the caption reads 'Cousin Jack miner:- "Call isself Cap'n 'e do; and I 'spoase ef the truth ez known, 'e never did a day's work underground in all 'ez life."' (Image: Trove)

Looking at the documentary evidence for the usage of the term, a traditional place to start is with the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites a number of examples of the use of Cousin Jack under their Cousin, n. and Jack, n.¹ entries. One, from Rolf Boldrewood's Australian novel Miner's Right of 1890, describes 'a short man, whose blue-black curly hair and deep-set eyes betrayed the Cousin Jack',(4) whilst the earliest given is from The Star newspaper of Ballarat, Victoria (Australia) on the 19 March 1857, which runs as follows:

They were ‘Tips’, and ‘Geordies’, and ‘Cousin Jacks’, altogether, and I did as well as I could.(5) 

The fact that both of the early citations are from Australia has sometimes been taken to suggest that the term could have emerged there, and it is certainly treated as such by the English Dialect Dictionary under its entry for Cousin.(6) In addition to these entries, the OED also records what it treats as a variant of Cousin Jack, Cousin Jacky. This is said to be documented first in the South Australian Register, from Adelaide, for 2 June 1854, via the following passage: 'John O'Connell then said to him, ‘You're a b——, Cousin Jacky, an't you?'', although the term also occurs in dialogue from Australian court reports of the 1840s too, e.g. 'I don't like you cousin Jackies, keep your own company, and I'll keep mine', which appeared in the South Australian, 30 May 1848.(7) However, 'Cousin Jacky' is not only documented in Australian contexts; it also appears in, for example, Thomas Quiller Couch's East Cornwall Words, published by the English Dialect Society in 1880, where it is treated as an East Cornwall term for a miner from West Cornwall:

There is a marked difference between the speech of East and West Cornwall... At the beginning of the present century mining adventure, especially in the search for copper, became a furor in East Cornwall, and a passionate enthusiasm brought hither the skilled miners of the West, who flocked to the banks of Tywardreath Bay, and further east to the central granite ridge about the tors of Caradon. These immigrants brought with them and have left an infusion of their language, especially its technical portion, but I remember when it was a great mimetic feat, and productive of much mirth amongst us, to be able to imitate the talk of Cousin Jacky from Redruth or St. Just.(8)

T. Q. Couch of Bodmin, the father of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (aka Q), was born in 1826 at Lansallos near Fowey, and seems to be here recounting a usage known to him in his youth, and is clearly referring to someone from West Cornwall, not a Cornish emigrant overseas. Likewise, in a letter printed in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser for 28 March 1862, Christopher Childs of Liskeard uses 'Cousin Jacky' in passing as a seemingly well-known, common and friendly term traditionally used between Cornish miners:

The very motto of the Cornish miners, "One and All," at once bespeaks our favour, and indicates that [Cornish miners] are not naturally selfish, but on the contrary, are kindly disposed one toward another. If any one doubt this, let him attend the funeral of a miner, and observe how they congregate to pay the last sad tribute of respect, and drop a tear over the grave of their departed comrade... How forcibly does the familiar name "comrade," and the expression of "Com'se along Cousin Jacky," speak in favour of his friendly and social disposition.(9)

In contrast, in Margaret Ann Courtney's West Cornwall Words (which was bound together with Couch's East Cornwall Words of 1880), 'Cousin Jacky' features as a local dialect term meaning 'a foolish person, a coward', with 'Cousin Jan' instead being given as the name for Cornishman—the latter variant is discussed further below, as is the former definition for Cousin Jacky.(10) 

The first two pages of Elfin's A Cornish Ghost Story, first published at Truro sometime before 1862; these two pages are taken from an 1868 edition of the text in Cornish Tales in Prose and Verse (Truro: Netherton, 1868), pp. 37–8 (image: Internet Archive).

Needless to say, the above references do seem to cast serious doubt upon the implication of the report in the Cornubian and Redruth Times in 1908 that the term 'Cousin Jack' and similar was unknown in Cornwall in the late 1880s, and in this light it is worth noting that Sharron Schwartz has, in fact, suggested that the 'evidence seems to point to the mines of Devonshire in the eighteenth century' as the place where the term Cousin Jack originated, via migrant Cornish miners seeking work in Devon rather than overseas.(11) Although she unfortunately offers no citation to support this, this suggestion certainly would seem to accord reasonably well with the apparent mid-nineteenth-century Cornish usage of 'Cousin Jacky' for a miner from West Cornwall discussed above. Some further evidence that supports such an early usage in Britain, rather than just overseas, for 'Cousin Jack'/'Cousin Jacky' might be sought in the following three publications. The first is A Cornish Ghost Story, by Georgina Verrall writing as "Elfin", of which only the second edition survives, which was printed at Lemon Street, Truro, in 1862, priced 3d. Quite when the first edition was printed is unfortunately unrecorded, although a notional date of c. 1860 has sometimes been supplied; this poem starts as follows:

One foggy night, a year ago
Ere yet had fallen December's snow,
A Cornish miner half afraid,
Stroll'd down Tremaine to meet his maid...
Poor Cousin Jack felt ill at ease,
And totter'd on with trembling knees,
In short, dear reader, you may see,
Jack had his failings,—so have we...
Now cousin Jacky was, no doubt,
A comely youth when "oal trick'd out;"
To use his own expression, he
A "clain-off man" was said to be,
And many a maiden inly sighed
To be the handsome miner's bride;...(12)

It then continues with long passages written to reflect Cornish dialect, relating the meeting of the miner 'Cousin Jack/Jacky' with his maid, Mary, and their subsequent talk and deeds. Needless to say, this passage would seem to provide evidence for a Cornish usage of 'Cousin Jack/Jacky' for a miner still living in Cornwall sometime in the 1850s or very early 1860s. Interestingly, the same pamphlet also offers evidence for 'Cousin Jan' and perhaps Jenny—both Jan and Jenny occur for other characters in the text of the poem, suggesting they too were seen as conventional names for Cornish characters, and 'Cousin Jan' moreover recurs in the titles of two further pamphlets that are advertised on the rear of A Cornish Ghost Story, namely The Bâl, or, 'Tes a Bra' Keenly Lode, Cousin Jan's Story (first published at Helston in 1850) and its sequel Cousin Jan's Courtship and Marriage (first published at Truro in 1859), both by William Bentinck Forfar. The earliest of these, published three years before the first reference in the OED reference to Cousin Jan (which is, in fact, taken from a newspaper advert for this pamphlet from 1853, although the OED doesn't mention this), includes the following passage:

If you'll listen to me for a moment, you shall
Hear all about trying and working a Bâl;
How the Lode is discovered by a small hazel twig,
Carried over the ground by some knowing old prig...
When the knowing old Dowzer this discovery's made
He marks out the spot and then calls his comrade,
Saying, "Hallo! Cozen Jan, d'ee come 'long wi' me,
'Tes the keenliest gozan thee ever ded'st see...(13)

Cousin Jan in the narrative then takes a sample of the ore to a Captain Polglaze, 'a Purser, well known, Who quickly, by mining, a rich man had grown'. He declares that they must go to London to raise funds ('The went up to Bristol by a steamer from Hayle, And proceeded from Bristol to London by rail'), and their adventure is then recounted in Cornish dialect by Cousin Jan. Subsequently, the form 'Cousin Jan' is found in a handful of Cornish newspaper articles from the 1860s to the 1890s as the name of a Cornish 'everyman' or as a general name for Cornishmen/Cornish miner, i.e. it seems to have functioned as a variant form of 'Cousin Jack'/'Cousin Jacky'. This is supported by the fact that 'Cozen Jan' first appears in Forfar's poem as part of a phrase that seems essentially identical to Christopher Child's traditional Cornish miner's phrase "Com'se along Cousin Jacky".

The second publication that further illustrates an early usage of 'Cousin Jack' and similar in Britain, without obvious reference to Cornish emigrants, is a report in The Cornish Telegraph for 27 September 1854. This briefly recounted the exhumation of a miner who fell down the shaft of Pednandrea Mine, Redruth in the 1820s. The rediscovery of his remains apparently prompted 'great excitement' and his funeral procession on Sunday, 17 September 1854, was attended by four thousand people, equal to around half of the population of Redruth at that time. What is particularly striking is that, although his real name is given as John Stephens, the newspaper notes that in life he was 'better known as "Cousin Jack Cobbler,"'(14) something that obviously suggests the use of the nickname 'Cousin Jack' in Cornwall as far back as the 1820s. The status of Stephens' alternative name as a nickname is confirmed by the report on the inquest published the previous week in the Royal Cornwall Gazette:

On Saturday the 16th instant, an inquest was held... on the body of John Stephens, aged 25 years. According to the evidence of William Thomas, miner, it appeared that as long ago as the 9th of August, 1828, the deceased and his brother were employed in stripping the shaft, and drawing up the materials in the Pednandrea Mine, near Redruth... The deceased and witness both fell into the shaft together... Deceased was well known in the neighbourhood by the nickname of "Cousin Jack Cobbler."(15)

A mid-nineteenth-century advert for H. J. Daniel's The Cornish Thalia, published c. 1860 at Devonport, which included two poems with 'Cousin Jack' in the title (image: Internet Archive).

The third interesting early publication from Cornwall to refer to Cousin Jack is the collection of comic poems by Henry John Daniel's published as The Cornish Thalia, Being Original Cornish Poems, Illustrative of the Cornish Dialect. Although this was published at Devonport without date, it is advertised in the rear of a pamphlet published in 1859 and advertised in the Cornish Times on 28 July 1860, so was presumably written in the 1850s and in print by either the end of that decade or 1860.(16) This volume included poems with the titles 'Cousin Jack and the London barber' and 'Cousin Jack's song for the volunteers', and H. J. Daniel followed it up in 1862 and 1863 with new books of poems entitled Mirth for "One and All;" or, Comic Tales and Sketches and Mary Anne's Career (continued) and Cousin Jack's Adventures, which included items with the titles 'Cousin Jack and the sun-dial', 'Cousin Jack at Summercourt Fair', 'Cousin Jack and the Piskies', and 'Cousin Jack and the Gipsy'.(17) In the front of The Cornish Thalia, Daniel has the following to say, which suggests that 'Cousin Jack' was being used by him at least partly in the West Cornwall sense of 'a fool', as documented by M. A. Courtney in 1880 for 'Cousin Jacky', in addition to being a commonplace term for a Cornish miner: 

In the following pages, merely to illustrate the mode of thought and expression amongst a certain class of the mining population of Cornwall. Whatever surprise the uninitiated reader may experience from the exaggerated and bizarre observations of Cousin Jack, they are strictly in accordance with fact. This arises from an ignorance of the world at large; at the same time there is no race of men possessed of better natural abilities. Shrewd, quick, and discriminating, they may be deceived once, but seldom twice; besides this, a rich vein of originality frequently runs through their remarks, which affords considerable amusement.(18)

This sense is confirmed by Daniel's first poem in The Cornish Thalia, 'Cousin Jack and the London barber', which begins thus:

About a dozen years or so
                                          Ago,
A Cornish Miner (let the truth be written)
Was walking through the streets with wonder smitten—
His eyes wide open, staring at the shops. 

Subsequently, Cousin Jack, as he wanders around London, spies a barber's shop and declares 'There's nething down to Camebourne like this here' and goes in for a shave. He then becomes confused by a bar of soap and a basin of suds and water ('What es it here?'); taking it for broth with potatoes in, Jack consumes it entirely to the shock of the London barber, declaring that he:

lapp'd it in a moment like a cat...
I dedden mind for spoons, or sives [=herbs], or bread;
I liked your brath oncommon well I ded...
[but] I cudden bear the tetties[=lumps of soap], no my dear!(19)

Needless to say, the poem seems rather mean-spirited, but it does at least once more add weight to the case for 'Cousin Jack' being a well-understood phrase in 1850s Cornwall, and one that Daniel, a Cornishman born at Lostwithiel in 1818, could freely use both as a generalised term for a Cornish miner and to make a mock of such men without worrying that it would need explaining. In this context, it is worth pointing out that the similar use of 'Cousin Jacky' as a name for both a miner and a fool seems to underlie the following passage on a mine captain from T. R. Higham's A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners, printed at Truro in 1866: 

Tom: "What soort of Cappen es he down to thy Bâl, Bill" 

Bill: "Well, I b'lieve he's so good a heart as ever took a mug in hand; but we dooan't knaw what to maake of un sometimes, caase he do git 'pon his jokes so often; he do think we are oall Cousin Jackies, but we arn't so bad fools as he do think we be, for we do knaw a passel moore 'bout copper an' tin than he do..."'(20)

John Tabois Tregellas, a Cornishman born in St Agnes in 1792, seems to use 'Cousin Jacky' in this manner too in his The St Agnes Bear Hunt, published at some point in the 1840s, a tale concerning a group of St Agnes miners taken in by a hoax about a yellow bear loose in the countryside: 

So off to Dirtypool the throng
Of Cousin Jackies went,
Up to Wheal Kitty, where they stopped,
As if by one consent.(21) 

 Cousin Jack and the London barber, from Henry John Daniel's The Cornish Thalia, published in the late 1850s or 1860; Cousin Jack has just drunk the barber's bowl of soap-suds and soap, thinking it broth and potatoes (image: Internet Archive).

If the date by which Cornish miners started to be known as Cousin Jacks/Jackies is somewhat uncertain (although the term would certainly seem to have been in use in Cornwall by the 1820s and Australia by the 1840s, if not before), the same is true for the question of quite why they were called this. Much of the literature on 'Cousin Jacks' and the Great Emigration seems to pass over these questions or address them only briefly, frequently suggesting that it may result from the oft-cited 'clannishness' of the Cornish emigrants. For example:

The term “Cousin Jack” is believed to have originated from the fact that Cornish miners were clannish. It was very typical for a miner to assist his skilled countrymen in finding work in the mines of Grass Valley [California]. The tight relationships that formed amongst the Cornish led to criticism by outsiders that they all seemed to have a cousin named “Jack” with whom they were willing to work to the exclusion of everyone else.(22)

‘Cousin Jack’ is an informal term for a Cornishman, apparently originating with regard to labour migration during the 19th century. Several theories as to its development exist, but the most popular suggests that upon gaining employment at a mine, Cornish miners would lobby the management for the employment of fellow Cornish miners, stating that a newcomer was his ‘cousin Jack’.(23)

In the early days “Cousin Jack” evoked envy, jealousy and even hatred, for it seemed that every position in the mine was reserved for yet another “Cousin” from Cornwall.(24) 

Certainly, the 'clannish' Cornish miners seem to have often been commented upon in contemporary and near-contemporary reports. For example, in an article entitled 'Cornishmen on the Rand' about South African mining, published in the West Briton and Cornish Advertiser for 14 May 1908, the following passage occurs: 

The Witwatersrand has proved a happy hunting ground for large numbers of Cornish miners, and at one time there were large mines here that employed only Cornishmen as skilled labourers... Often the manager was neither a Cornishman nor a mining man, and he found the Cousin Jack mine captain indispensable. A Cornish mine captain invariably meant Cornish shift bosses, and that, in turn, means Cornish workmen.(25)

A view of Cornish Town, also known as Cousin Jack Town, Inangahua County, New Zealand, with working men's huts, a narrow railway line running through the centre, and native forest behind; photograph taken by William Archer Price c. 1910s (image: Flickr/National Library NZ).

Whilst there is thus clear evidence that the Cornish miners in South Africa, Australia and America were indeed perceived as 'clannish' and could dominate mines in the manner suggested above, the idea that Cornish miners overseas suggesting their mine managers employ their supposed relatives could offer a full explanation for the origins of the term 'Cousin Jack' is certainly open to question. Not only does such an 'origin story' have the distinct feel of folk-etymology about it, but it is worth noting that whilst 'cousin' nowadays usually carries with it some sense of a claimed direct kin relationship, in the past it could also be used 'as a familiar and friendly term of address among non-kin', and it was apparently especially so used in this manner in Cornwall.(26) Perhaps most importantly, such a scenario also seems out of accord with the fact that the terms 'Cousin Jack' and 'Cousin Jacky' were not restricted in use to Cornish miners overseas, but were also known and used in the same period in Cornwall too, back at least as far as the 1820s, as discussed above. This is not to say that the 'clannishness' of the Cornish miners overseas might not have played a very large role in popularizing the wider usage and longevity of this phrase, but the idea that the term 'Cousin Jack' actually had its origins in Cornish miners overseas claiming to have a supposed 'cousin named “Jack” with whom they were willing to work to the exclusion of everyone else' seems unlikely to be strictly true in light of the evidence we have.

How, then, might the names 'Cousin Jack' and 'Cousin Jacky' be explained? A potentially more plausible scenario may be that the term 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky' actually had its roots in England, not overseas, as Sharron Schwartz has indeed suggested, perhaps being used originally of Cornish miners from West Cornwall working in Devon and/or East Cornwall in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some of the Cornish references would certainly suggest that it was a familiar and well-known local nickname for a Cornish miner by the mid-nineteenth century, with no obvious indication that it meant someone who had been overseas. Of particular interest here may be the apparent 'mocking' tone of some—though by no means all—of the references: this is explicit in Daniel's Cornish Thalia and related poems of the late 1850s/1860s, and probably also underlies Thomas Quiller Couch (1826–1884) of Lansallos and Bodmin's apparent youthful memory of the fun to be had by mimicking 'the talk of Cousin Jacky from Redruth or St. Just'. The negative connotations are made particularly clear in Margaret Ann Courtney's West Cornwall Words, where 'Cousin Jacky' is defined as a local dialect word for a fool, the same sense as it clearly has in Higham's A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners. Moreover, another dialogue of Higham's—entitled The Billy Goat and the Pepper Mine, published prior to 1870—makes it clear that 'Cousin Jacky' was considered to be a word used by people in England of Cornish miners:

Good hevening to 'ee, Zur... you'm a Straanyer en these here paarts, I blaw, by yer ways of spaikin'!... you cudn't 'ave cum'd to a keenlier boddy fur to tell 'ee oal 'bout we "Cousin Jacky's," as you Lunnoners [=Londoners] do caal us! S'pose you'm a Doctur, maakin' so bould? How ded I come fur to thenk like that theere? Why, Zur, ef we been Cousin Jacky's we do kaip out gunnin' eye opun, an' we do knaw Tin an' no mistaake!(27)

All of the above suggests that the name may not have been entirely appreciated by some Cornish miners, at least at first, and may well have originated from outside of the Cornish mining communities, i.e. it was applied to them by those whom they encountered outside of West Cornwall (the use of 'Cousin' could be a further element in this, referencing and/or mocking the apparently particularly West Cornish usage of 'cousin' as a term of friendly endearment for non-kin).(28) In this light, it is interesting to note that two of the handful of other compounds of the form 'Cousin X' in English are also negative in tone. Thus, Cousin Betty and Cousin Betties occur from at least the first half of the eighteenth century as a generic name for one or more female beggars or itinerant prostitutes, whilst Cousin Tom occurs from the 1740s as a name for a male beggar. Be this as it may, the name 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky' seems subsequently to have been 'reclaimed' and adopted by the Cornish miners both at home and, especially and increasingly, abroad, losing its negative/mocking connotations. As Sharron Schwartz notes, the term “Cousin Jack” became one 'used to express an “otherness”', with the Cornish overseas particularly leveraging it to promote their claimed identity as a 'distinct people with specific mining skills that they jealously guarded'.(29) Certainly, by the mid- to late nineteenth century it was being used as a self-designation by Cornishmen both at home and abroad, with people signing letters to newspapers in this era as either 'Cousin Jack' or 'Cousin Jacky'.(30) 

Nonetheless, all of this does still leave open the question of why, specifically, 'Cousin Jack' came to be a nickname applied to Cornish miners and used by them, and not some other name. There is no sense that 'Jack' is a specifically or typically Cornish name, being rather a common English personal name (a by-name for John), despite occasional claims to the contrary. Jack might, of course, be being used in 'Cousin Jack' simply as a word for an 'everyman'. The OED 2 notes under Jack, n.¹ that 'Jack' was generally used in English as a term 'for any representative of the common people' or for any 'lad, fellow, chap; esp. a low-bred or ill-mannered fellow' back to at least the sixteenth century, if not before, so this is not an implausible suggestion.(31) Yet such a case would still not tell us why this specific nickname became so exclusively associated with the Cornish miners, initially perhaps being used of them by people outside of these communities who felt threatened by them and/or were mocking them before being adopted as a badge of ethnic identity and pride. There may, however, be a potential answer to this in the name and story of one of the most popular fictional Cornishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely Jack the Giant-Killer.

A woodcut of Jack killing the giant of St Michael's Mount, Cormilan (aka Cormilion/Cormelian/Cormoran), from a chapbook version of The History of Jack the Giant Killer published in c. 1820 (image: Wikimedia Commons). Jack, a farmer's son from the Lands End district, dug a pit 24 foot deep in a single night with a shovel and pick-axe, into which he tricked the giant the next morning, whereupon Jack finished him off with his pick-axe.

The History of Jack and the Giants seems to have been first published in the early eighteenth century, with the earliest reference to it being sold coming from 1708 and the earliest surviving text having been published in 1711.(32) The tale proved to be incredibly popular and went through multiple print-runs, adaptations and revisions over the next century and a half, and Jack's origins in far west of Cornwall remain a strong thread throughout these. The chapbook tale begins as follows:

In the reign of King Arthur, near the Lands-End of England, namely, the county of Cornwall, there lived a wealthy Farmer, who had one only Son, commonly known by the name of Jack the Giantkiller.(33)

Jack's initial enemy is the giant Cormilan who lived at St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, and who Jack tricks by digging and disguising a hole, then rousing the giant and finishing him off with a pick-axe when he falls into the trap. Jack's reward is the giant’s treasure and he is named by the worthies of Marazion "the Giant Killer," a title that carries with it a sword and an embroidered belt, which read: 

Here’s the right valiant Cornish Man, Who slew the Giant Cormilan.(34)

Jack subsequently leaves Cornwall for overseas, in this case Wales, where he encounters further giants in need of his special skills. In one encounter, he holds the following important conversation and so tricks a Welsh giant into hiding in his dungeon whilst Jack and King Arthur's son feast in the monster's hall:

Jack rides full speed, when coming to the Gates of the castle, he knock’d with such force, that he made all the neighbouring hills resound. The Giant with a voice like thunder, roared out; who’s there? He answered, none but your poor cousin Jack quoth he, what news with my poor cousin Jack? He replied, dear uncle, heavy news; God wot prithee what heavy news can come to me? I am a Giant, with three heads; and besides thou knows I can fight five hundred men in Armour and make them fly like chaff before the wind. Oh! but (quoth Jack) here’s the King’s Son coming with a thousand men in Armour to kill you, and so to destroy all that you have. Oh! Cousin Jack, this is heavy news indeed; I have a large vault under the ground, where I will immediately hide myself, and thou shalt lock, bolt and bar me in, and keep the keys till the King’s Son is gone.(35)

Jack the Giant Killer gives the finishing blow to the giant of St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, from J. Corner, Favourite Fairy Tales (Edinburgh, 1861), p. 79 (image: Internet Archive).

Needless to say, this is arresting. We have here a very well-known hero of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular tales who was named Jack, who grew up in West Cornwall, who achieved fame through the excavation of the Earth (digging a hole which the giant Cormilan could fall into and be finished off with a pick-axe), who travelled overseas—here Wales—to pursue his calling, and who, whilst there, was at least on occasion known by the name 'Cousin Jack'. This tale was adapted variously and frequently as, for example, a farce, a ‘musical entertainment’, a ballet, a 'burlesque extravaganza', and multiple times as a 'favourite Serio-Comic Pantomime' and similar.(36) It also became a popular nursery and children's tale, being issued variously with lurid woodcuts, tinted pictures, or grouped in collections with Jack and the Beanstalk (itself arguably a variant of Jack the Giant-Killer), Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood.(37) As The Illustrated London News opined in 1848, Jack the Giant-Killer was:

the hero dear to all boys who have a particle of generosity and imagination in their souls. Does there exist a man who never envied Jack his seven-league boots and his invisible coat, and who never laughed at that inimitable trick by which he made the gluttonous, false-hearted Welsh giant commit suicide? If there do exist such a man, he is like the man who hath no music in his soul... Let no such man be trusted... The man who did not, when a boy, admire Jack the Giant-Killer... is a hard, dry man, with no poetry in his composition; and does not deserve to see Jack reproduced even in a magic lantern.(38)

In other words, the immensely popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fictional Cornish hero Jack, aka 'Cousin Jack', would clearly be a natural reference point for anyone encountering a person from West Cornwall. In such circumstances, it seems quite credible that the widespread knowledge of Jack's adventures might have led to people from West Cornwall, especially those who dug holes(!), being jokingly—and perhaps somewhat mockingly—nicknamed 'Cousin Jack' after him in the manner hypothesised above, with the nickname being subsequently reclaimed and adopted as a badge of ethnic identity and pride by the Cornish, particularly those living overseas. Certainly, such a scenario seems to offer the only really plausible explanation thus far advanced for why miners from West Cornwall were specifically nicknamed 'Cousin Jack', rather than any other name.

In conclusion, although the nickname 'Cousin Jack' is often thought to have emerged overseas and to reflect the 'clannishness' of the Cornish emigrant mining communities and their desire to have mine-owners employ only other Cornish emigrants, claiming them to be their supposed 'Cousin Jacks', the evidence does not really support this. Instead, the term seems to have been used from at least as early in Britain too, if not earlier, and it appears to have additionally been thought by the nineteenth-century Cornish to have had some sort of mocking connotations. One potential explanation for this situation is that 'Cousin Jack' was originally a joking or mocking nickname applied to miners from West Cornwall by those outside of this community who encountered them, perhaps initially in Devon or East Cornwall in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. This name is most plausibly explained as a jovial reference to the immensely popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hero Jack the Giant-Killer, whose tale tells how he came from West Cornwall, killed a giant by excavating a large hole into which he fell, and was known on occasion as 'Cousin Jack' when away from home. At first, the nickname would seem to have been seen with some ambivalence by Cornish miners, but it would subsequently appear that 'Cousin Jack' was reclaimed and adopted by the Cornish, especially by those taking part in the 'Great Emigration', who used it to express their 'otherness' and promote their own distinctive identity.

An Australian Cousin Jack cartoon by Oswald Pryor, 1945; the caption reads '"An' what part do 'ee com' from, Maister?" "Gahd's own country, Boy." "Well, tha's funny, I should NEVER 'ave tak'd 'ee for a Cornishman." (Image: The Wonderment of Illustration).

Footnotes

1.     See especially P. Payton, The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall's 'Great Emigration' (Fowey, 2005), and P. Payton, Cornwall, A History (Fowey, 2004), chapter 10. For earlier scholarship see, for example, A. L. Rowse, The Cousin Jacks: the Cornish in America (New York, 1969).

2.     John H. Forster, 'Life in the copper mines of Lake Superior', Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, 9 (1888), 175–86 at pp. 183–4.

3.     '"Cousin Jack" and "Cussing Jack"', Cornubian and Redruth Times, 4 June 1908, p. 3.

4.     Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition, 1989), s.v. Jack, n.¹, sense I.1.c.

5.     'Court of General Sessions for the District of Buninyong and Ballarat', report, The Star (Ballarat, Victoria), 19 March 1857, p. 2; Oxford English Dictionary (Third Edition, December 2019), s.v. Cousin, n.

6.     J. Wright (ed.), The English Dialect Dictionary (London, 1898), vol. 1, s.v. Cousin, 5.2, p. 750; J. Ruano-García, 'On the colonial element in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary', International Journal of Lexicography, 32 (2019), 38–57 at p. 43. 

7.     'Coroner's inquest.—manslaughter', South Australian (Adelaide), 30 May 1848, p. 2.

8.     T. Q. Couch, East Cornwall Words, in Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall (London: English Dialect Society, 1880), pp. 70–1.

9.     C. Childs, 'The social and moral improvement of the working miners of Cornwall and Devon', West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 28 March 1862, p. 8.  

10.     M. A. Courtney, West Cornwall Words, in Glossary of Words in Use in Cornwall (London: English Dialect Society, 1880), pp. 14–15.

11.     S. P. Schwartz, ‘Creating the cult of “Cousin Jack”: Cornish miners in Latin America 1812–1848 and the development of an international mining labour market’, The Cornish in Latin America Project, online paper, p. 33.

12.     G. Verrall, writing as Elfin, A Cornish Ghost Story, a Night's Adventures at the Devil's Stile, or, Jack Trevose and Mary Trevean, 2nd edn (Truro, 1862), pp. 3–5.

13.     W. B. Forfar, The Bâl, or, 'Tes a Bra' Keenly Lode, Cousin Jan's Story (Helston, 1850), reprinted in Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse, by Various Authors, With a Glossary (Truro, 1867), pp. 55–6, and see OED 3, s.v. Cousin, n., under 'Cousin Jan'. This collection includes a number of other tales of Cousin Jan, including Cousin Jan's Courtship and Marriage (Truro, 1859); for the original publication dates, see W. W. Skeat (ed.), A bibliographical list of the works that have been published, or are known to exist in MS., illustrative of the various dialects of English. Compiled by members of the English Dialect Society (London, 1873), pp. 21–2. Note, 'Cousin Jenny' isn't treated further here; Rowse, The Cousin Jacks, p. 9, suggests it is a 'later addition', and the newspaper records seem to confirm this, the first instance I have come across coming from 1868 in The Brisbane Courier, 25 July 1868, p. 5: 'Cousin Jacks and Cousin Jennies (a nick-name given to miners and their wives coming from the Burra Burra mine, being mostly Cornish) have a barbarian custom belonging to an unenlightened era...'.

14.     'Local Intelligence: exhumation of a miner', The Cornish Telegraph, 27 September 1854, p. 3.

15.     'Inquest on a body, twenty six years dead', Royal Cornwall Gazette, 22 September 1854, p. 5.

16.      H. J. Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, Being Original Cornish Poems, Illustrative of the Cornish Dialect (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.). This was advertised in the rear of C. Mansfield Ingleby's The Shakespeare Fabrication (London: John Russell Smith, 1859), p. 32 of the 'Catalogue of books published or sold by John Russell Smith' appended to the volume, and is mentioned in an advert from 28 July 1860 in the Cornish Times, when it was described as 'just published'; as such the notional date of '1870?' assigned to it in J. Milroy & L. Milroy (eds), Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 326, can be disregarded. 

17.     H. J. Daniel, Mirth for "One and All;" or, Comic Tales and Sketches (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.), advertised in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 7 February 1862, p. 8, and H. J. Daniel, Mary Anne's Career (continued) and Cousin Jack's Adventures (Devonport: W. Wood, n.d.), advertised in the Cornish Times, 13 June 1863, p. 1.

18.     Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, p. 3.

19.      Daniel, The Cornish Thalia, pp. 20–2.

20.      T. R. Higham, A Dialogue Between Tom Thomas and Bill Bilkey, Two Cornish Miners (Truro, 1866), reprinted in Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse, in the Cornish Dialect (Truro, 1890), pp. 51–2.

21.     J. T. Tregellas, Tremuan; and the St Agnes Bear Hunt. Two Cornish Tales (Truro, n.d.), published at some point in the 1840s—see Skeat (ed.), A bibliographical list, p. 25, for the date—and reprinted in I. T. Tregallas, Cornish Tales, in Prose and Verse (Truro, c. 1870), p. 17, from which this quotation is taken. Note, 'Cousin Jackies' is footnoted as a 'Local term of derision' in some editions e.g. I. T. Tregallas, The Adventures of Rozzy Paul and Zacky Martin; the St. Agnes Bear Hunt; and the Perran Cherrybeam: Three Comic Cornish poems (Truro, 1856), p. 28, although not in the c. 1870 edition.

22.     F. G. Wolf, B. Finnie & L. Gibson, 'Cornish miners in California: 150 years of a unique sociotechnical system', Journal of Management History, 14 (2008), 144–60 at p. 150. 

23.     E. K. Neale, Cornish Carols: Heritage in California and South Australia (University of Exeter and Cardiff University PhD Thesis, 2018), p. 37. See also, for example, Rowse, The Cousin Jacks, p. 9, who says 'When men were wanted for the mines, or a job was going, they always knew somebody at home for it: Cousin Jack. So they became known all over the world as "Cousin Jacks"; "Cousin Jennies" for the womenfolk seems to be a later addition'. J. Rowe, in The Hard-Rock Men: Cornish Immigrants and the North American Mining Frontier (Liverpool, 1974), p. vi, similarly comments that "The most common explanation is that when a job fell vacant there would be a Cornish worker ready to tell the boss or foreman that he would send home for his "Cousin Jack" to fill it', although he also notes a Northern Michigan theory that, due to the profanity of the Cornish miners, they were called 'cussin' Jacks'! The same 'folk-etymology' for the name Cousin Jack has also been, interestingly, attributed to a Californian context, as follows:

A Cornishman who was familiarly known as Jack, reached a mining camp in the western state in 1848, and being profuse in his use of profanity, soon won himself the name of "Cussing Jack." In time other Cornishmen arrived in the Californian camp and naturally they associated themselves with their erstwhile countryman, "Cussing Jack." The cosmopolitan mining population, not knowing the names of the newer arrivals, dubbed them all "Cussing Jacks," which was soon changed to "Cousin Jacks." ('"Cousin Jack" and "Cussing Jack"', Cornubian and Redruth Times, 4 June 1908, p. 3)

24.     Payton, Cornish Overseas, p. 225.

25.     'Cornishmen on the Rand: the past and the future', West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 14 May 1908, p. 8.

26.     N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), p. 160; OED 3, s.v. Cousin, n..

27.     T. R. Higham, The Billy Goat, and the Pepper Mine (Truro, n.d.), which is advertised in the rear of the British Library's copy of Tregellas's Cornish Tales, dated c. 1870 (General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store X.907/2143), and is reprinted in The Billy Goat and the Pepper Mine, and Six Other Cornish Tales (Truro, 1882), p. 3.

28.     Courtney, West Cornwall Words, p. 14; Tadmor, Household, Kinship, and Patronage, p. 160 n. 285; OED, s.v. Cousin, n., sense 2a.

29.     Schwartz, ‘Creating the cult of “Cousin Jack”’, p. 33. 

30.     To give some examples, a Cornish correspondent signed a letter critical of a local Cornwall MP in the Western Morning News in 1884 that was reprinted in the Royal Cornwall Gazette on 3 October 1884, p. 8, with a follow-up letter written under the same pseudonym to the Royal Cornwall Gazette being printed on 10 October 1884, p. 5. Likewise, someone signing himself 'Cousin Jack' wrote a letter about how well the men of Newlyn were doing in terms of joining up to fight the First World War in the Daily Mirror for 7 May 1915 (p. 5), and another correspondent, commenting on mine policies at the Providence Mines, Carbis Bay, wrote to the The Cornish Telegraph in December 1869 and had their comments summarized in the 22 December 1869 issue on p. 2. Overseas, a correspondent signing as COUSIN JACK is mentioned in The South Australian Advertiser, 21 February 1860, p. 2, whilst a letter signed by COUSIN JACK entitled 'A hint to mining managers' was printed in the Mount Alexander Mail (Victoria, Australia), 28 December 1860, p. 5, and the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser carried a letter signed by A COUSIN JACKY from British Columbia on 26 September 1862 (p. 6).

31.     OED 2, s.v. Jack, n.¹, senses I.1.a and I.2.a, https://www.oed.com/oed2/00122699. For the suggestion that it was a peculiarly Cornish name, see for example 'Why are the Cornish "Cousin Jackies"?', Western Morning News, 13 April 1939, p. 3.

32.     C. Green, 'Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer: two Arthurian fairy tales?', Folklore, 118.2 (2007), pp. 123–40 at pp. 129–35; C. Green, Arthuriana: Early Arthurian Tradition and the Origins of the Legend (Louth, 2021), pp. 143–4.

33.     I. Opie & P. Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford, 1974), p. 64.

34.     Opie & Opie, Classic Fairy Tales, p. 66.

35.     Quotation taken from the 1787 chapbook printed in Falkirk and housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, transcribed in Green, Arthuriana, pp. 148–65 at p. 156, my emphasis; the text is almost identical, albeit slightly modernized, in the 1711 text published by James Halliwell and included in Green, Arthuriana, at pp. 170–1.

36.     For example, Jack the Gyant-Killer: A Comi-Tragical Farce of One Act (London: J. Roberts, 1730); An English Musical Entertainment, called Galligantus (London, 1758); the 'New Grand Mock-Heroic Serio-Comic Ballet of Action, called Jack the Giant-Killer', advertised in The British Press, 14 August 1810, p. 2; H. Byron, Jack the Giant Killer; or, Harlequin King Arthur, and Ye Knights of Ye Round Table: A Burlesque Extravaganza (London, n.d., first performed 1859); and the 'favourite Serio-Comic Pantomime of Jack the Giant-Killer', as advertised in The British Press, 27 June 1803, p. 1. Other instances of The History of Jack and the Giants being adapted into a pantomime are advertised or reviewed in, for example, the Caledonian Mercury, 8 March 1800, p. 1, and the Morning Advertiser, 14 January 1829, p. 2 ('a splendid Comic Pantomime, called Harlequin and Jack the Giant-Killer'), and the Morning Post of 31 December 1831, p. 3 ('The new Christmas pantomime, Jack the Giant-Killer promises to have a run... through the holidays. Some of the tricks and scenery are very good. To-morrow evening the performances will be honoured with the immediate patronage of Prince George of Cambridge').

37.     As advertised as a series in, for example, the Illustrated London News, 10 January 1846, p. 15, or a separate series in the London Daily News, 30 May 1846, p. 7.

38.     Uncle Tom, 'Christmas sports', Illustrated London News, 23 December 1848, p. 22.

The content of this post and page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2021, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission.

The importance of Lincolnshire in the fifth to seventh centuries AD

The following post is largely the text of a lecture that was given at the time of the launch of the first edition of my Britons and Anglo-Saxons back in 2012, with a handful of minor additions. It offered a little light-hearted musing on the importance, or apparent lack thereof, of pre-Viking Lincolnshire; in the absence of a formal launch for the second edition of the book in 2020 due to the ongoing pandemic, I thought I would post this here in case it is of interest.

Two maps showing (a) the location of the ceremonial county of Lincolnshire and (b) a reconstruction of the coastal landscape of pre-Viking England, showing the low-lying areas and wetlands in the Lincoln region, along with the 'barrier islands' that existed off the Lincolnshire coast until the thirteenth century (images: map a—Wikimedia Commons; map b—Caitlin Green).

By and large, most people are accustomed to thinking of Lincolnshire as peripheral. Whilst it has cities, they are not large; most modern major routeways pass it by or skirt its edges; and although Lincolnshire is the second largest ceremonial and historic county in England—encompassing over a twentieth of the total land area, with the distance from Barton-upon-Humber in its north to Stamford in its south being the same as the distance from Stamford to London—it has far less than its fair share of the total population, around 1.9%. Even when we go back into the Anglo-Saxon period, this sense of Lincolnshire as peripheral to the main historical action often continues to pervade. When historians deal with the pre-Viking era in general, they generally talk about the northern kingdom of Northumbria, or the Midland kingdom of Mercia, or the kingdoms of Wessex, Kent and the East Angles. However, despite this, there are good indications that Lincolnshire was rather more important in the early medieval period than is sometimes allowed.

From an archaeological perspective, the notion that Lincolnshire was truly peripheral in the pre-Viking period is difficult to justify. For example, metal-detectorists continue to recover astonishing quantities of pre-Viking coinage from Lincolnshire. Nearly thirty years ago, Mark Blackburn observed that the quantity of coinage from Lincolnshire marked it out as one of the richest parts of seventh- and eighth-century England, and this conclusion has only been strengthened by recent finds and the work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS). So, a significant quantity of Merovingian gold coinage has been found in this area of Britain, testifying to significant trading with the continent from an early date, whilst one site at Garwick in southern Lincolnshire has produced the second largest group of Middle Saxon coins from any site in England, exceeded only by the major West Saxon trading-site at Southampton. Likewise, if we look at the overall ranked totals for seventh- to eighth-century coins recorded on the PAS, Lincolnshire is not only is in 'first place', but has over twice as many coins recorded as is the case for the second-place county, Suffolk, and many more times those recorded in counties like Oxfordshire, Wiltshire or even Kent (a fact that becomes even more impressive once one notes that around a third of Lincolnshire's land area, the entire Fenland district which lies below 5m OD, has produced virtually no finds of this date at all). 

Bar chart showing the number of seventh- to eighth-century coins recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme from each county through to December 2020; note, this only represents a proportion of the total coin finds known, with others recorded on the Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds or EMC, but it is a large enough dataset for the present purposes (image: Caitlin Green).

Two maps; click here for a larger version of both: (a) A map of the distribution of seventh- to eighth-century coin finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in the Lincoln region to December 2020, showing how they are largely absent from the extensive low-lying parts of Lincolnshire, especially the Fenland district of Holland; note, a significant number of other finds from this region are also recorded on the EMC, but the broad pattern is the same even if these are added (image: Caitlin Green, based on data from the PAS and my base-map of the pre-Viking landscape from Britons and Anglo-Saxons)
(b) A map of England showing John Blair's core ‘eastern zone’ of pre-Viking English identity and building tradition (forward hashing) and Toby Martin's zone of fifth- to sixth-century Anglian immigration, burial tradition, costume and ethnogenesis (backward hashing, based on the primary area of his Phase B brooches), combined with the distribution of Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries (image: Caitlin Green).

This apparent significance for Lincolnshire before the ninth century is confirmed by other finds and evidence types too. For example, it has been argued that the distribution of sixth-century imported amber from the Baltic, an Early Anglo-Saxon luxury good used in jewellery, clusters at several 'nodal points' from which amber may well have been redistributed to the surrounding regions, one of which is at Sleaford in southern Lincolnshire, the site of an exceptionally large inhumation cemetery that also contains notable quantities of imported rock crystal beads and ivory rings. Similarly, it can be observed that Lincolnshire and East Anglia together are where the earliest and largest fifth- to sixth-century Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are found, the great cremation urn-fields, with well over a thousand such burials at sites like Cleatham (Kirton-in-Lindsey) and Loveden Hill. Indeed, Lincolnshire lies at the heart of the core ‘eastern zone’ of pre-Viking English identity and building tradition that has recently been identified by John Blair, and at the heart of Catherine Hills, Toby Martin and John Hines’s core zone of fifth- to sixth-century Anglian immigration, burial tradition, costume and ethnogenesis too. Finally, it is worth noting that Lincolnshire and East Anglia together seem to have also been amongst the most densely populated parts of England at the time of the Domesday Survey in the eleventh century, suggesting a long-lasting economic importance for these east coast regions.

If Lincolnshire was thus significant and even, in some respects, 'central' in at least the fifth to eighth centuries when looked at from an archaeological perspective, what then of its political importance in this period? Unfortunately, Lincolnshire suffers from a lack of early documentary evidence for these centuries, which may well have led to its import being under-estimated. The narratives that historians have developed are often based on those regions that lie outside the archaeologically identified core 'eastern zone', but which have significantly better documentation, such as Kent, Northumbria and Wessex. The reason for this lack of documentation in the east is uncertain and disputed, but whatever the case may be, the effect is clear. In addition, we perhaps also suffer from the fact that the name of Lincolnshire’s own seventh-century kingdom—Lindsey or Lindissi—survives today as a district-name in Lincolnshire. Although reasonably extensive, the modern district of Lindsey isn’t really large on a national or regional basis, and its present size can lead to an assumption of a relative lack of importance for this kingdom. That this assumption is problematical is demonstrated by my own research, which indicates that the modern district of Lindsey was very much smaller than the seventh-century kingdom whose name it preserves.

Two maps showing the difference between the likely extent of the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindissi and the modern district of Lindsey; note, the map also shows the pre-Viking landscape of the Lincoln region, with light-blue representing low-lying wetlands. Click the image for a larger version (images: Caitlin Green).

Even more interesting are those few glimpses we do get of Lincolnshire and the kingdom of Lindsey in the documentary record relating to the seventh century.  Perhaps the most arresting thing is the fact that the major players in the seventh century all seem to have wanted to rule Lincolnshire. The kingdom of Lindsey appears to have been finally conquered and dissolved by the Midland kingdom of Mercia (based around Tamworth and Repton) in the later seventh century. However, this is the very last act in a remarkable saga, whereby the kingdom of Lindsey looks to have been the major prize that the better-known and documented kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria were fighting repeatedly over. So, for example, the kingdom of Lindsey appears to have changed hands at least seven times in less than half a century, and some of the most important battles of the seventh century that were fought between Mercia and Northumbria probably actually took place within the kingdom of Lindsey itself. Indeed, Bede himself is reasonably explicit on this topic, stating that the kingdom of Lindsey was what the king of Northumbria had won from the Mercian king when he defeated him in 678 (‘the kingdom of Lindissi, which King Ecgfrith had recently won by conquering Wulfhere and putting him to flight’, Historia Ecclesiastica IV.12).

This apparent political importance of control of Lincolnshire to the two major semi-'imperial'/imperium-wielding dynasties of seventh century England is, of course, intriguing, and it is supported by other evidence too. For example, when King Edwin of Northumbria (Deira) was the overlord of Lincolnshire in the 620s and early 630s, he seems to have taken an exceptional interest in the province. He oversaw, for example, the completion of a stone church in Lincoln before even his own likely 'capital' of York had one (HE II.14, II.16). Such churches were highly symbolic, and this favouritism for a place which was a conquest over his own ecclesiastical and potentially royal city is most curious. Moreover, when he—as the most powerful ruler in England at that time—was in a position to control the process of consecrating the next Archbishop of Canterbury (named Honorius), he didn’t insist that the politically and symbolically important consecration took place in York or even his own kingdom, but rather in the stone church he had built at Lincoln, the probable chief centre of the conquered kingdom of Lindissi/Lindsey (HE II.16, II.18).

So, what on earth is going on here? Why was Edwin so concerned with Lincoln, apparently over and above even York? And why was the kingdom of Lindsey such a prize for both Northumbria and Mercia, to the extent that multiple battles appear to have been, at least in part, fought specifically over its control? Both economics and strategic position have been suggested in the past as explanations for these actions, but whilst the former may well have been a significant influence, given how wealthy eighth-century and earlier Lincolnshire seems to have been, these factors are perhaps insufficient on their own. I would tentatively suggest that it is possible that a full explanation may additionally involve recognising that Lincoln and Lincolnshire actually had a somewhat greater significance in the early stages of the evolution of 'Anglo-Saxon England' than is usually allowed for, just as some of the archaeological evidence noted above seems to hint at. What will be discussed in the remainder of this piece is just what this significance might have been that could have resulted in Lindsey and Lincoln being such a prize and focus for the two great powers of seventh-century politics, Mercia and Northumbria. In doing this I’d like to focus on focus on two potential key factors, which can be roughly summarized as the ‘political baggage’ and the ‘family baggage’ of these two seventh-century kingdoms.

The sequence of late/post-Roman churches at St Paul in the Bail, Lincoln, showing their relationship to the Roman forum— the second, fifth- to sixth-century apsidal church would have able to hold up to 100 worshippers (image: Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, 2012, fig, 12, copyright English Heritage).

Dealing with the potential ‘political baggage’ first, it is important to remember that Lincoln was a major political centre at the end of the Roman period, being both the probable seat of one of Britannia’s four bishops and a provincial capital. So, the question is, could this political importance and and 'centrality' for Lincoln have continued beyond the end of the Roman period and thus have had an effect on the later-recorded Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, perhaps making the city and its territory a real political and symbolic prize for these kingdoms, as the fragmentary historical evidence for the seventh century implies that it was? In my view, the answer to this ought to be a tentative ‘yes’. Certainly, I have made the case both in print and elsewhere for Lincoln having been an important British political centre in the fifth and sixth centuries too, with a sizable apsidal church built in the centre of the Roman forum that can now be confidently dated to the fifth to the sixth centuries and exceptional quantities of high-status British metalwork of the fifth and sixth centuries known from across Lincolnshire. Furthermore, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom-name Lindissi and the modern district-name Lindsey both derive from the Late British name of this territory, *Lindēs, rather than any Old English name, which is notable. Indeed, looking at all of the available evidence, it can be credibly argued that the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindissi was, to a large extent, the direct descendant of this fifth- to sixth-century British territory of *Lindēs, which is a point of considerable interest in the present context.

There is no need to go into depth here on the evidence for the British territory of *Lindēs and its links to the subsequent kingdom of Lindissi, but it is worth pointing out that the apparent avoidance of the former provincial capital by the major fifth- to sixth-century Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries of this region—each containing hundreds or thousands of burials—is most interesting. As can be seen from the map below, the great cremation cemeteries form, in effect, a ring around Lincoln, with the nearest large cremation cemetery to Lincoln being that at Loveden Hill, over 27 km to the south of the city, with this avoidance appearing to continue at least partly into the sixth century. This offers a very marked contrast to the situation at and around other major Roman centres in eastern and northern Britain such as York, Leicester, and Caistor-by-Norwich, where Anglo-Saxon cremation cemeteries are found close by. Furthermore, it has been observed that the distribution of these cemeteries is very similar in pattern to that of the apparent last stage in the deployment of the late Roman army in the Lincoln region (based on recent artefactual studies), leading to the suggestion that the people who used these large cemeteries could have been initially tasked with a similar defensive role with regard to fifth-century Lincoln and *Lindēs. 

Indeed, there are even hints that a vestige of Roman provincial control from Lincoln survived at least some way into the fifth century. Although we do need to be cautious here, it has been suggested that a real distinction appears to be observable between a mainly Anglian cultural zone and a mainly Saxon one in the archaeology of the fifth century, and that the dividing line between the two accords surprisingly well with the most recent reconstruction of the Late Roman provincial boundaries, with early Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries being nearly all located within the province controlled by Lincoln. In this context, it is likewise intriguing to note that the probable Late Roman provincial governor's residence at Lincoln, the Greetwell villa-palace, was not only maintained to a high standard right through until the end of the Roman coin sequence in the early fifth century and even potentially a little beyond, but also has notable evidence for estate continuity into the medieval period at both the local and sub-regional levels, with its wider territory in the Witham valley recently argued to have become a major royal estate of the seventh century and after. 

Two maps showing (a) the large early Anglo-Saxon cremation cemeteries of the Lincoln region, set against the late/post-Roman landscape, and (b) the distribution of both the large and small early Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries, represented by filled squares, plotted against Saxon artefacts of the second half of the fifth century, represented by stars, and the Late Roman provincial boundaries as reconstructed by J. C. Mann in ‘The creation of four provinces in Britain by Diocletian’, Britannia, 29 (1998). Click here for a larger version of these maps (images drawn by Caitlin Green, based on Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, figs 11 and 21a).

If Lincoln was thus a former Late Roman provincial capital that was subsequently the centre of a late-surviving British Christian state of the fifth and sixth centuries, which was apparently able to 'control' Anglo-Saxon activity in its immediate region for several generations and eventually became the seventh-century kingdom of Lindissi, then this could certainly begin to provide a potential motive for why the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon dynasties of Mercia and Northumbria might have seen control of the city and the kingdom of Lindissi as an important symbolic and political prize. This is particularly the case if the distribution of almost all Anglian cremation-predominant cemeteries was indeed somehow related to the territory of the Late Roman province controlled by Lincoln, as has been tentatively suggested. In such circumstances, it would seem more than credible that the imperium-building seventh-century rulers of both Mercia and Northumbria—who, it should be noted, claimed descent from Anglian immigrant groups—would have seen Lincoln and *Lindēs/Lindissi as a prize well worth fighting over, if only for the symbolism it possessed deriving from its apparent fourth- to sixth-century importance.

The second point relates to the personal origins of the ruling lineages of both Mercia and Northumbria themselves in the seventh and eighth centuries, and is part of the ‘family baggage’ referred to earlier. To put it simply, it seems possible to trace at least key groups within Northumbria, and possibly within Mercia too, back not only to Anglian groups claiming immigrant descent within Lincoln's wider former province, but also to groups who actually had roots within the Lincoln region/*Lindēs itself. The key piece of information here has come up in the questions to virtually every lecture and talk I’ve ever given on early Anglo-Saxon Lindsey—namely, the relationship between the group-name of the people of Lindsey, the Lindisfaran ('the people who migrated to the territory of *Lindēs') and the northern island-name Lindisfarne, Old English Lindisfarena ea/Lindisfarnae, Anglo-Latin insula Lindisfarnensis. The link between the Lindisfaran and the island-name Lindisfarne has been much discussed over the years. Numerous researchers have attempted to explain why the two names look so alike, most relying on etymologies for the name Lindisfarne that deliberately don’t involve linking it to the Lincolnshire Lindisfaran and then assuming a quite remarkable coincidence to explain why the names look so similar. Unfortunately, none of the proposed etymologies stand up to scrutiny—they all have serious problems that cannot be easily avoided. In consequence, it can be argued that the only really credible explanation of the name Lindisfarne is that it is indeed intimately related to the group-name of the inhabitants of Lindissi in Lincolnshire, the Lindisfaran—the final element in 'Lindisfarne' is simply the Old English word for island, whilst the first part is the regular Old English genitive form of Lindisfaran. In other words, it quite transparently means ‘the island of the Lindisfaran’.

A map of Lincolnshire, Lindisfarne and the North, showing key sites, groups and place-names (image: Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, fig. 46)

Now, the question has to be asked, why was it called this? The great place-name scholar, Eilert Ekwall, wrote many decades ago that if we accept the transparent Old English etymology for Lindisfarne, then the primary interpretation has to be that this island was settled by people from Lincolnshire. Recent work on the archaeology of Northumbria has arguably tended to back up this conclusion. Whilst the available archaeological evidence clearly indicates that there was a notable degree of 'Anglo-Saxon' activity in the Lindisfarne region from around the middle of the sixth century onwards (as evidenced by, for example, the settlements and cemeteries at Yeavering, Milfield, Thirlings, Ford and Bamburgh), south of this general region there is relatively little evidence for significant pre-seventh-century Anglo-Saxon activity until we reach the vicinity of Hadrian’s Wall. This raises the possibility that the area around Lindisfarne was indeed under the control of a group of people making use of 'Anglo-Saxon' material culture who had maritime links to regions significantly further south, just as might be expected if Lindisfarne and the surrounding area were somehow occupied by Lindisfaran from Lincolnshire, as the name of the island implies.

The problem with all this is that the archaeology and textual evidence is also clear that the area around Lindisfarne was the heartland of the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia (northern Northumbria). It is here that the famous palace site of Yeavering is found, and it is also here that the fortress of Bamburgh was located. Situated only a couple of miles to the south of Lindisfarne itself, this was—according to Bede—the ‘royal city’ of Northumbria, and recent excavations have discovered a massive Anglo-Saxon-era inhumation cemetery here, which dwarfs all other known cemeteries from north of the Humber. Indeed, Lindisfarne itself appears in early medieval accounts as a major sixth- and seventh-century possession and sanctuary of the kings of Bernicia. It is consequently difficult to avoid associating the mid- to late sixth-century 'Anglo-Saxon' material in the region around Lindisfarne with the documentary evidence for the mid- to late sixth-century 'arrival' of either the founders of the kingdom of Bernicia or the ancestors of the same here; certainly the rulers of Bernicia seem to have been based in this area from this period onwards. Needless to say, it is unlikely that another group would be subsequently allowed to take possession of the island of Lindisfarne after the establishment of the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia, given the apparent status of the island as a royal territory and sanctuary and the fact that the neighbouring fortress of Bamburgh was ‘the royal city’ of the Bernicians. At the same time, the archaeological and textual evidence doesn't really support the idea of a previous Anglo-Saxon 'arrival' or 'influence' in this region that occurred before the mid-sixth century. Consequently, the natural conclusion is that the migration of the Lindisfaran to Lindisfarne (recorded by the place-name Lindisfarne, ‘the island of the Lindisfaran’) must be identical with the settlement of ancestors of the historically recorded Bernician kings. That is to say, it seems quite possible that the Bernician royal family were ultimately Lindisfaran who had migrated to this region from Lincolnshire.

St. Paul's church, Jarrow; part of the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Jarrow survives today as the chancel of St Paul's Church (image: Stanley Howe/Geograph).

Such a conclusion is far less implausible than might be at first thought. After all, the Bernician royal family is usually considered to have moved to the Lindisfarne region from somewhere further south. Furthermore, there is actually a selection of other evidence that backs up the idea that Anglian groups from Lincolnshire may have played a key role in settling Northumbria in the fifth and sixth centuries. Take, for example, Jarrow and the area around the mouth of the Tyne. The available historical accounts imply that this was the second early heartland of the Bernician kings after the Lindisfarne–Bamburgh region, and it was moreover where Bede worked and wrote. What is particularly interesting about this second Bernician royal heartland, however, is that the key settlement within it, Jarrow, bears a name meaning ‘at the settlement of the Gyrwe’, a group-name that is also recorded as that of a well-attested south Lincolnshire and northern Cambridgeshire Anglian group, in whose territory Crowland once lay. Moreover, it has also been suggested by James Campbell that both Bede and the founder of Jarrow, Benedict Biscop, may have actually themselves been members of the royal lineage of the Lindisfaran, which is a point of considerable interest too.

Similarly, if we look for the largest Bernician Anglo-Saxon cemetery which lay outside of the Lindsifarne area, it can be found at Norton-on-Tees. This sixth-century cemetery is far larger than any of the other ones outside of the Lindisfarne area, suggesting some degree of local importance, but the place-name Norton is probably later in date and can’t refer to settlement that the cemetery served. However, only half a mile to the east of the cemetery is Billingham, a documented pre-Viking estate-centre that bears a name that is said to be ‘one of the earliest Old English settlement forms to survive’ in the region and which current place-name chronologies would place within the early Anglo-Saxon period. Once again, this name is most intriguing, as it means the ‘estate of the Billingas’, a group-name that likewise recurs in Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire, where it applied to a significant sub-group within the southern part of the kingdom of Lindissi, based around Sleaford. Finally, attention can be directed the largest cemetery in the southern half of Northumbria, Sancton cremation cemetery. This is not only the location of the largest and earliest Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Deira, which seems to have its origins in the fifth century and from which the remains of 454 cremated individuals have been excavated, but it is also very close to the site of the principal heathen shrine of Deira, according to Bede. In other words, a credible case might be made for this area as a key centre of the southern Northumbrian kingdom of Deira. What is especially interesting here, however, is the fact that, first, the cemetery lies on the Roman road leading north from the bank of the Humber; second, that there are close links between the cremation urns found at Sancton and those from the Lincolnshire cremation cemeteries of Cleatham, Elsham, South Elkington, and Baston; and third, that just to the west of Sancton there is an extensive district known as Spalding Moor that includes a hamlet called Spaldington on its south side, both of which names contain the population-group name Spalde/Spaldingas, which is once again the name of a major group in southern Lincolnshire who were based on the siltlands of the Lincolnshire Fenland around Spalding and who appear in the 'Tribal Hidage'.

In sum, whilst each of the above instances of population-group names occurring both in Northumbria and in southern Lincolnshire might be individually dismissed as coincidences, the combined weight of these coincidences is difficult to explain away. Furthermore, in each case the group-name is found at or next to some of the most important sites in Northumbria, as identifiable both from the archaeological and textual evidence, and there is archaeological evidence of links to Lincolnshire in at least one of these locations. All told, the simplest and most credible solution would seem to be that Anglo-Saxon population groups from Lincolnshire did indeed play a major role in both the settlement of Northumbria and the foundation of the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, just as the place-name Lindisfarne implies.

A sixth-century gold sword pommel from Rippingale ('the halh of the Hrepingas'), Lincolnshire, mentioned below (image: PAS/British Museum)

With regards to Mercia, the evidence is less clear-cut, but we may well have a partially analogous situation. In particular, attention might be drawn to the place-name Repton, where the pre-Viking kings of Mercia were buried, which means ‘the hill of the tribe called Hreope/Hrype’. It is usually agreed that the group- and territory-name Hrepingas that occurs in early Mercian charters represents an alternate form of this group-name (compare Spalde/Spaldingas above), and that the Hreope/Hrepingas were moreover one of three major sub-groups within the seventh-century Mercian kingdom. Needless to say, in this light it is intriguing to note that the Hrepingas also occur as an early Anglo-Saxon group within Lincolnshire, with Rippingale in southern Lincolnshire being ‘the valley of the Hrepingas’. This population-group seems to have been located just to the south of the Billingas and there is, moreover, archaeological evidence for elite activity in the late fifth and sixth centuries from the Rippingale area, including a recent find of a high-status gold sword pommel, pictured above.

We also have the interesting case of the Hwicce, whose kingdom in the West Midlands to the south-west of Mercia is multiply-attested, but who also appear in a significant number of place-names in and around Rutland, immediately to the west and north of Stamford, Lincolnshire. So, not only is their name apparently preserved in that of the eleventh-century Whitchley Hundred that met at Wicheley Heath, 'the woodland of the Hwicce' (Hwicceslea), a district that encompassed around a third of modern shire of Rutland, but there are also other Hwicce names within Rutland, with yet another potential 'Witchley' name in the north-west of this small county—Wichley Leys—and a probable *Hwiccena-denu, 'valley of the Hwicce', there too. Quite what this means is open to debate, but both A. H. Smith and Barrie Cox suggest that these names could reflect a situation whereby the Hwicce originally controlled a territory in this area prior to the establishment of their documented seventh- to eighth-century (sub-)kingdom in the West Midlands, which is notable given what has been discussed already. 

Map of Rutland, showing the Rutland Hwicce names; the names in italics are those of the Witchley East Hundred and Witchley West Hundred, as recorded in the Northamptonshire Geld Roll of 1072–8, and the approximate position and extent of 'Wicheley Heath' is based on the maps of 1603–11 and 1756, along with the location of the surviving Witchley Warren Farm in Edith Weston parish. The grey lines reflect the late eleventh-century hundred boundaries, with the dotted line representing the division between the later East and Wrangdike hundreds, which is thought to perpetuate that between Witchley East Hundred and Witchley West Hundred (image: Caitlin Green).

In conclusion, it can be suggested that the apparent seventh-century Mercian and Northumbrian interest in Lincoln and Lindissi/Lindsey is perhaps explicable not simply in terms of the exceptional wealth of seventh-/eighth-century Lincolnshire, but also the political history of that region and the family 'baggage' of the two major imperium-building Anglian dynasties. Put simply, it seems possible that the seventh-century Anglian rulers of Northumbria and Mercia may have additionally wanted to enhance their own position, status and rule by controlling a city that had probably been one of the last centres of Romanitas in the east, perhaps able to control Anglian activity in not only the Lincoln area but also the wider region during parts of the fifth and sixth centuries, and a part of eastern Britain with which they may well have had personal, family ties. If so, then it is perhaps not quite so surprising that the control of Lindissi was so contested through the course of the seventh century between these two dynasties, nor that Edwin of Northumbria, who was apparently concerned with portraying himself as a Roman-style ruler (HE II.16), seems to have favoured Lincoln over his own likely 'capital' of York, building a new stone church there first and then having the consecration of Archbishop Honorius held in this structure.

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