Professor Charles Thomas
Historian and archaeologist who led the excavations at Gwithian and pioneered Cornish studies
PROFESSOR CHARLES THOMAS, who has died aged 87, was a historian of Cornwall, founder of the Institute of Cornish Studies, the first professor of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter; a Bard of Gorsedh Kernow (the Cornish equivalent of the Welsh Gorsedd), and prolific author, researcher and field archaeologist.
When, in 2008, he was presented with the Royal Institution of Cornwall’s Henry Jenner silver medal “for eminence in all fields of Cornish studies”, Lady Mary Holborow the then Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall described his contribution to Cornish life as “unparalleled”. “History, language, archaeology, folklore, art, place names, dialect, military history, landscape, Methodism – these and much more have come under his scrutiny,” she went on. “He truly is a Cornish polymath.”
When Thomas’s fellow Cornishman, the historian AL Rowse, was appointed Companion of Honour in 1997, Thomas wrote a sonnet in his honour, later included in a collection of Thomas’s
writings Gathering the Fragments: the Selected Essays of a Groundbreaking
Historian (2012). The book demonstrated the breadth of Thomas’s scholarship, with essays on topics ranging from folklore (“Youthful ventures into the realm of folk studies: present-day charmers in Cornwall”) and archaeology to military and local history (“The Camborne Volunteer Training Corps in World War I”) and from cerealogy to cryptozoology (“The ‘Monster’ episode in Adomnan’s Life of St Columba” and “A black cat among the Pictish beasts”).
One reviewer observed that “if anyone deserves to be now wearing the mantle of the late AL Rowse as our ‘greatest living Cornishman’, then it has to be Professor Thomas”.
The son of a solicitor, Antony Charles Thomas was born in Camborne, Cornwall, on April 26 1928. His family, originally from the Land’s End peninsula, had moved to Carwynnen (Cornwall’s central east-west uplands) in the 1680s. As a boy, he became fascinated by local folklore and history – and ancient monuments such as the Carwynnen Quoit, a Neolithic dolmen enticingly nicknamed “The Devil’s Frying Pan”.
Around his family home in the Godrevy-Gwithian headland of St Ives Bay, north Cornwall, he was collecting Mesolithic flints from his early teens. During vacations from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Jurisprudence after education at Winchester College and three years in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, he helped sort objects in a local museum. In the last vacation before his finals he and some friends excavated a Bronze Age barrow at Godrevy, guided by Richard Atkinson’s Field Archaeology (1946), where they discovered an underlying surface, rich in Mesolithic flint objects and typical Late Mesolithic pebble-tools. “No surprise,” he recalled later, “that my degree was a poor Third.”
Thomas had always been unenthusiastic about Law, but Oxford then offered no degree in Archaeology and in 1951 he managed to persuade Gordon Childe, director of the Institute of Archaeology (then independent, now part of University College London) to admit him as a student to the Institute, based in St John’s Lodge, Regent’s Park.
It was an exciting time for British archaeology and Thomas would recall “the shuffling arrival of the great Abbé Breuil; Kathleen Kenyon striding in, dressed as a Red Cross commandant and accompanied by a small barking dog (which Childe loathed because it once stole his teacake); and, on a Friday afternoon, Childe himself in what he thought was rustic garb, greeting a tall dreamy lady with a much shorter, darker, spouse and announcing to us all ‘I’m just off for a weekend with Max and Agatha’ (Professor Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie).”
Armed with a diploma in European Archaeology, Thomas spent the next four years as a tutor with the Workers’ Education Association in Cornwall, where he led excavations at Gwithian until 1963. The project was one of the first multi-period projects in England and Thomas’s careful analysis of the occupation of the site from Mesolithic to medieval times (including the discovery, in 1958, of evidence of Bronze Age cross-ploughing using an ard, a feature previously known only from Scandinavia and the Netherlands), provided a model for subsequent archaeological projects.
His excavations of Gwithian and Tintagel (where he rejected any association with King Arthur), and
other early Christian island sites such as Ardwall and Iona in Scotland, Scilly and Lundy, shed light on a period commonly referred to as the “Dark Ages”.
In 1958, aged 30, Thomas became a Lecturer in Archaeology at Edinburgh University, and subsequently held two chairs, at Leicester from 1967, and at Exeter, where he was appointed Professor of Cornish Studies in 1971 and first director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, co-founded by the university and Cornwall County Council. He examined and advised at several other British and Irish universities, served on many archaeological and conservation bodies and retired in 1991. From his first major work, Christian
Antiquities of Camborne (1967), Thomas wrote some 20 books. In Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500 (1981), he argued that, far from being limited to a few Roman settlers, Roman Britain had seen a widespread evangelisation that put paganism on the defensive and then on the decline. Although the Saxon invasions put a halt to this spread, the continuity of Christianity remained unbroken and, he argued, British in its practices.
His Exploration of a Drowned Landscape: Archaeology and History
of the Isles of Scilly (1985) was an interdisciplinary narrative described by one reviewer as a “tour de force”. In it he ranged over archaeology, ocean mechanics, botany, palaeobotany, prehistory, place-names, linguistics and history ancient and modern – as well as “polite literature”.
Thomas was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1960 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989. He was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall in 1988 and CBE in 1991.
In 1959 he married Jessica Mann, who had come to Gwithian to work as a volunteer. She went on to become a successful novelist, and in 2009, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary (and the 150th anniversary of the building of the Godrevy Lighthouse), they published Godrevy Light. She survives him with their two sons and two daughters.