Cornish legends

By Charlotte MacKenzie

This book explores relationships between historical individuals and Cornish legends. The Cornish folklorists. How the Brontës’ novels were influenced by Cornish folk tales and other stories of their aunt Elizabeth Branwell. The women whose lives were affected by men on whom the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ may have been based. When and how the Cornish woman Mary Broad’s experiences were reinvented to create the legendary Mary Bryant. The choice of subjects make it clear that ‘legends’ is not used here to only refer to folk lore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781470938444

Book preview

Cornish legends

Charlotte MacKenzie

Cornwall History

2022

Copyright © Charlotte MacKenzie 2022

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-1-4709-3844-4

Imprint lulu.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

‘Cruel Coppinger’ the women’s stories

Mary Broad the creation of a Cornish legend

The Branwells and Penzance

Elizabeth Branwell, Cornwall and the Brontës

Cornish folklorists

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

My thanks to everyone who facilitated access to archives with courtesy. Bodleian Library; British Library; Devon Archives and Local Studies Service; Exeter University Tremough campus library; Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies; Kresen Kernow Archives and Cornish Studies Service; Morrab Library; Musée de la Civilisation, Québec; National Archives; Plymouth and West Devon Record Office; The Royal Institution; and Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Special thanks to Angela Broome, whose unique knowledge of the Courtney Library collections and personal dedication will be greatly missed by many readers at the Royal Cornwall Museum.

The research for this book was completed mostly from online digitised images. These included Ancestry; Art UK; British Library; Cornwall Family History Society; Cornwall Online Parish Clerks; Eighteenth Century Collections Online; Family Search; Find My Past; Musée de la Civilisation, Québec; National Archives; Old Bailey Online; Society of Australian Genealogists; Trove; University of Leeds Digital Library; University of Manchester Library; and Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. And Tim Causer (ed), 2017, Memorandoms by James Martin. An astonishing escape from early New South Wales.

Robert Heath’s account of the ‘Society of Skilful Aunts’ in A natural and historical account of the Islands of Scilly (1750) came to my attention through Rupert White, Physick and folk medicine: a history of healthcare in Cornwall (2020).

Many readers choose to purchase and read books on screen. The bibliography here lists the archives and printed content researched by me while writing this book. On this occasion, with on screen readers in mind, I have chosen not to include footnotes or endnotes separately itemising each primary source and printed item with page references. Readers are welcome to contact me by email cm2research at gmail.com

I research and write mostly about Cornwall’s Georgian history. The research for this book was completed at different times, for a range of purposes, during the last six years. ‘Cruel Coppinger - the women’s stories’ was the overall winner of the Cardew Rendle prize awarded by the Royal Cornwall Museum in 2016, and published in the RIC journal in the following year. I had previously collected information about maritime trade in Georgian Penzance, and discovered numerous myths about the Branwell family while writing Women writers and Georgian Cornwall (2020). I published a new, historical biography of Mary Broad, in 2021. Here, I explore when Mary Broad’s experiences were first embellished and partly fictionalised, and how the Cornish legend of Mary Bryant was later created. My interest in the interconnections between historical individuals and Cornish folk lore was not central to most of the research I completed during these six years, but became so in looking at the Cornish folklorists.

Some of the research on which this book is based has been partly presented, at earlier stages, to a range of audiences. I am appreciative of their formative input.

The definitive research and conclusions are published here.

I am currently completing further work on Cornish folk lore, and Georgian healthcare in Cornwall, and I am most grateful that new work is being partly supported by the Q Fund.

Charlotte MacKenzie

December 2022.

Preface

We live in the era of social media. Events are often captured instantly and reported by non-professionals. We live in the era of fake news. ‘A lie is half way round the world before the truth has got its boots on’. We live in the era of faction. In the 1920s, Joseph Hambley Rowe described Cornish folk tales as ‘a type of narrative, half fact, half fiction’.

This collection of essays is unified by their exploration of relationships between historical individuals and Cornish legends. I get as close as possible to individuals who were there at that time, making or recording history in a way that was sometimes intentionally shared, but historically often not intended for publication. Each of the essays is written to stand alone, and can be read separately.

These essays consciously include representations and perspectives of women. Three women who were affected by historical individuals on whom the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’, first written and published in 1866 by Robert Stephen Hawker, may have been based. When and how the Cornish woman Mary Broad’s experiences were reinvented to create the legendary Mary Bryant. The Branwell family and Georgian Penzance differed, historically, from Brontë related myths. As did Elizabeth Branwell, described here as a creatively formative Cornish influence on the Brontë sisters. The choice of subjects make it clear that Cornish legends is not used exclusively here in the context of folk lore.

The Cornish folklorists wrote for different intended audiences. Together they built a readership, as well as a substantial body of recorded folk lore. Thomas Quiller Couch wrote and published Cornish folk lore, from the early 1850s, initially for learned society journals including the Transactions of the Penzance Antiquarian and Natural History Society. In the early 1860s, folk lore featured in books intended for visitors to West Cornwall, by John Thomas Blight and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips. Robert Hunt, who systematically classified the Cornish folk lore he had collected, found a London publisher for his Popular romances in 1865. The list of subscribers to William Bottrell’s first series of Traditions and hearthside stories of West Cornwall, published at Penzance in 1870, included Cornish men and women, fellow folklorists, and Oxford academics. In the previous year, Hawker’s tale of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ was probably the most widely read Cornish legend of the decade, published in Charles Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round.

‘Cruel Coppinger’

the women’s stories

‘It may, indeed it must be interesting to Cornishmen to know what are the real facts as opposed to fables relative to Cruel Coppinger’ (Baring-Gould, 1892b).

The legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ forms an enduring feature in Cornwall’s cultural landscape, which shaped literary if not historical perceptions of smugglers and wreckers on the North Cornish coast. The legend was first written by the Morwenstow vicar and poet, Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, and published in Charles Dickens’ weekly magazine, All the Year Round, shortly before Christmas 1866. It was retold by Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, ten years later, in his biography of Hawker. John Betjeman described himself as ‘more indebted to [Baring-Gould] for a romantic sense of place and local legend than I am to any other writer’. Noting in 1961 that ‘Cruel Coppinger haunts me today’. To present-day readers the question may be why those who relayed the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ found it so compelling. One answer may be that it created a unified character who personified myths about Cornwall’s traditions of smuggling and salvaging from wrecks, while including incidents with a basis in locally recalled history, and three historical men surnamed Coppinger or Copinger. This chapter briefly reviews the origins of the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’, and its written transmission by Victorian churchmen and writers, but its primary focus is on the history before the legend.

Historical evidence from family law, church court, and other records is presented here for the first time. This evidence recorded and reveals the women’s stories: the experiences and views of three independent minded eighteenth century women – Mary Copinger, Anne Hamlyn, and Anne Coppinger – who were related by marriage to men on whom the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ may have been based. Copinger was first described as cruel in the 1787 divorce citation of Mary Copinger, which was posted on doors in Bodmin and St Austell. The similarities between incidents in the historical records, and some of those in Hawker’s story, suggest that these were known to Hawker before he wrote the legend.

The main elements of the legend, as written by Hawker, were as follows. Coppinger was sole survivor of a shipwreck on the North Cornish coast, where he married Dinah Hamlyn, who was a farmer’s daughter. Coppinger spoke English with a foreign accent, and was reputed to correspond with persons of high rank in Denmark. In Cornwall, Coppinger established himself as leader of a gang of smugglers and wreckers on the North coast. Coppinger acquired a schooner called the Black Prince which became ‘the chief terror of the Cornish Channel’; one of the men led by Coppinger was said to have beheaded a revenue officer and carried his body out to sea. The smugglers and wreckers controlled paths and bridleways, which converged on a cliff headland known as ‘steeple brink’. At the foot of the cliff, Coppinger filled a cave ‘as large and tall as Kilkhampton church’ with contraband, plunder from wrecks, and stolen livestock. Coppinger’s reputation for cruelty was exemplified by three incidents in which he was said to have intimidated local inhabitants including family members. Coppinger threatened to flog his wife, if his mother-in-law did not give him money; he assaulted the parson of Kilkhampton with a whip; and he frightened a tailor, whom Coppinger had urged to share his horse, by galloping at speed with the other man seated behind him, and then threatening to send the protesting tailor to the devil. Coppinger was said to have purchased a farm on the North coast of Cornwall. He had one son with Dinah, a deaf-mute ‘idiot-boy’, who one day was said to have been found laughing above a cliff at the bottom of which a neighbour’s child lay dead. The story ended with Coppinger leaving by ship for an unknown destination.

Robert Hunt’s Popular romances of the West of England included some tales of smugglers and wreckers in Cornwall. These did not include Coppinger, but the section on smuggling at Prussia Cove near Penzance referred to one notorious smuggler surnamed Carter, rather than to individual members of the Cornish seafaring family which included six brothers, some of whom built and owned ships, and were known smugglers. It may have been Hawker who melded disparate tales of smuggling, wrecking, privateering, and intimidation into one unified character and story of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ for the first time. In writing ‘Cruel Coppinger’ Hawker added darkly imaginative and folkloric elements: the cave as big as a church filled with contraband and stolen livestock; the alleged beheading of a ‘gauger’; the changeling-like child who was said to have no soul; and Coppinger’s disappearance on a ship ‘out of sight in a moment, like a spectre or a ghost’ followed by a dramatic storm. The children’s author Mabel Quiller Couch, whose father Thomas Quiller Couch was one of the Cornish folklorists, developed some of these elements further in Cornwall’s Wonderland, in which Coppinger’s son murdered his playmate, by pushing him over the cliff, before dancing with delight.

The unified character of ‘Cruel Coppinger’ led some readers to wonder whether Hawker was describing an historical person. In 1882, the lawyer Walter Arthur Copinger published a family history in which he identified Hawker’s subject as his great grandfather John Copinger, while dismissing the marriage to Dinah Hamlyn as fiction. This interpretation was echoed by Sabine Baring-Gould, whose novel elaborating fictional elements of the legend was followed by a brief genealogical note on John Copinger in the Western Antiquary. In 1903, Hawker’s Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall was reprinted with an appendix by R. Pearse Chope which made an alternative identification of Daniel Herbert Coppinger; an interpretation which was then publicised further in Charles G. Harper’s The Smugglers. These identifications suggest that, in writing the legend of ‘Cruel Coppinger’, Hawker drew on local stories which derived from historical events. This chapter identifies the historical persons associated with the notorious Black Prince privateer, which was seen near the Cornish coast in the early 1780s; and others who organised smuggling runs to the North coast of Cornwall in a manner which was echoed by Hawker in the legend.

There is more historical evidence related to the eighteenth century merchant John Copinger than the mariner Daniel Herbert Coppinger. The records related to Daniel Herbert Coppinger included the will of Anne Hamlyn, which protected the inheritance of her daughter Anne Coppinger, as well as legal proceedings which were brought against him, including for the alleged assault on a Kilkhampton clergyman. This article tells the story for the first time of the eighteenth century divorce suit in Cornwall of Mary Copinger on the grounds of adultery and cruelty; as well as the trading activities and bankruptcy of her husband John who lived in Cornwall in the 1770s-90s. Mary Copinger’s court deposition is a richly informative historical source which reveals many details of eighteenth century Cornwall.