There can be little doubt that the notion of Cornwall remains contested to this day. Within and without its boundaries, sundry folk reimagine the peninsula as both a shire of England and a Celtic nation, fiercely debating contemporary Cornish identity and the county's place in the British Isles. The history of Cornwall itself forms one of the most disputed strands of this struggle for Cornishness, with the so-called ‘Kernowsceptic’ and ‘Kernowcentric’ interpretations of the county's past vying for dominance. Arguing that an Imperial England subverted Cornwall's nationhood and forever regarded its Celtic people as a conquered alien other, the Kernowcentric school of thought holds that the history of Cornwall is entirely separate from that of England.

Although few medievalists are yet to subscribe to this ‘Grand Kernowcentric Narrative’, the medieval past forms an integral part of the latter's discourse. It was the alien Anglo-Saxons, after all, who conquered Cornwall back in the 800s. While preserving the peninsula's separate administration and identity, in 1337 Edward III at the same time gave it a special status in the kingdom by raising it to a duchy. ‘A little government of its own’, the ‘Celtic Duchy’ supposedly fostered an ‘aura of semi-independence’ securing Cornish autonomy. As the duke of Cornwall also oversaw the stannaries, this special constitutional settlement removed the peninsula from the mainstream of the realm. Combined with the county's extreme remoteness, such a political and social structure is said to have given rise to ‘feudal anarchy’. In this narrative, the Cornish are said to have formed a subjugated people much like the Welsh and Irish, with language marking out their alterity. Inaugurated by the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the far south west, this first great phase of peripherality was finally brought crashing down by the centralising might of the Tudors, irrevocably dragging Cornwall out of its glorious isolation. Such Kernowcentricity is fast on the way to forming the new orthodoxy.

As we have seen, however, virtually none of this was actually the case.