Richard Carew. The Ordinary, The Ordinalia, and the Ordinary Actor ...

Carew's Ordinary 42
William Bodye. (See Carew’s account of this sensational political murder cited below). For
Kilter, see George Clement Boase, and William Prideaux Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis. A
Catalogue of the Writings, Both Manuscript and Printed, of Cornishmen, and of Works Relating
to the County of Cornwall, With Biographical Memoranda and Copious Literary References.
Volume III. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1882), p. 1260.
20 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.1.88-98. See Palfrey, and Stern, Shakespeare in
Parts, p. 157 on Flute’s comic misunderstanding of the function of the actor’s “part,” which
includes only the text of his own role and his cues.
21 J. P. D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the Westcountry,
Oxford Historical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. 202. Matthew Spriggs,
‘Where Cornish Was Spoken and Where: A Provisional Synthesis’, in Cornish Studies, Second
Series 11, edited by Philip Payton (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), pp. 239-45,
provides a fresh view of the decline of Cornish as English progressively replaced it from East to
West in the County. See particularly illustrations 2 through 6 that map the areas of where
Cornish was spoken between 1200 to 1799.
22 Jane A. Bakere, The Cornish Ordinalia: A Critical Study (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1980), p. 13. likewise points out that “Even if Carew were himself a spectator, his limited
knowledge of Cornish as revealed in the Survey makes it doubtful how much he would have
understood of what was happening.” She draws attention as well to “Nance’s comment on
Carew’s Cornish in the Nance MSS at the Royal Institution [of] Cornwall, Truro” in support of
her characterization of Carew’s limited knowledge of Cornish (p. 174 n. 25), but I have not been
able to consult this source.
23 Cranmer was quick to point out the illogic of this demand: “I would gladly know the reason
why the Cornish men refuse utterly the new English, as you call it, because certain of you
understand it not; and yet you will have the service in Latin, which almost none of you
understand. If this be a sufficient cause for Cornwall to refuse the English service because some
of you understand none English, a much greater cause have they, both of Cornwall and
Devonshire to refuse utterly the late service; forasmuch as fewer of them know the Latin tongue
than they of Cornwall the English tongue” ; Frances Rose-Troup, The Western Rebellion of
1549: An Account of the Insurrections in Devonshire and Cornwall Against Religious
Innovations in the Reign of Edward VI (London: Smith, Elder, 1913), p. 493 and appendix G.
24 Cooper, Propaganda, p. 64. See also Jon Mills, ‘Genocide and Ethnocide: The Suppression of
the Cornish Language’, edited by John Partridge (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp.
199-200: “Following the Prayer Book Rebellion, the Cornish language was to become
stigmatised as a ‘backward’ language, and the language of Catholics potentially allied to enemies
of England. . . . The Cornish language was thus largely abandoned by the Cornish gentry.” In the
late-seventeenth century, William Scawen, an early Cornish language revivalist, made essentially