“We the Cornishmen utterly refuse this new English” The Prayer Book Rebellion was an expression of cultural as
well as religious defiance, explains Mark Stoyle
An intriguing point about the Western Rising is that it appears to have been partially fuelled by a desire to protect the distinctive Cornish culture. At the start of the 16th century, Cornish – a Brythonic language closely related to Welsh – was still widely spoken in western Cornwall. But the onset of the Reformation accelerated its retreat, and the reformers’ determination to ensure that English, rather than Latin, became the chief language of religious instruction meant that the Cornish found themselves increasingly obliged to learn it.
In 1548, Edward VI’s government directed that a new “order of communion” in English should be incorporated within the traditional Latin mass. The fact that a popular insurrection broke out in west Cornwall within days of the new order of communion being introduced seems unlikely to be coincidence. And when, a year later, the regime replaced the Latin liturgy with the Book of Common Prayer, it provoked a powerful sense of Cornish “cultural defensiveness”.
Among the demands sent to the government by the western rebels in 1549 was one declaring that: “We will not receive the new service… we the Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English.” Tragically, the protesters’ defeat helped sound the death knell for the Cornish tongue. By making an issue of the language, they had inadvertently ensured that it would be tainted, in the eyes of the ruling classes, with the stain of sedition. As a result, the Cornish were denied the liturgy in their own tongue that was later granted to the Welsh, and – English having become the language of daily worship throughout Cornwall – the Cornish language went into steep decline. Within 150 years, it had all but disappeared.