‘Not only the ends of the earth’, so goes Bishop Grandisson's lament of Cornwall in 1327, ‘but the very ends of the ends thereof.’ The bishop's bewailing of the county as an isolated wilderness, scarcely integrated into the realm, typifies many interpretations of the medieval peninsula. So remote was Cornwall that Richard II's government even employed Tintagel Castle as a place of exile for John Northampton, the demagogue mayor of London. Standing in the furthest south-western corner of the kingdom, Cornwall is undoubtedly distant from the heartlands of England. On three sides the sea envelopes the Cornish peninsula, with the Tamar demarking the greater part of its border on the east. In this way, the county forms a defined geographic space.

Yet Cornwall also contains striking topographical variation between the granitic moorland and sub-tropical valleys, being by no means perfectly uniform. Neither was the county completely isolated. ‘Much frequented by travellers’, the county's major road artery, the Via Regalis Cornubiensis, ran from the far west of the peninsula along its spine to Launceston and across Polston Bridge into Devon, whence it charted a course via Exeter to London. A busy main southern route linked Fowey, Looe and beyond, crossing the Tamar by ferry at Little Ash, near Saltash; while yet another busy route, this time running from Padstow to Fowey, connected the north and south coasts. Vessels also thronged the sea that enveloped Cornwall, for all Bishop Grandisson's bemoaning its rarely navigable nature. Ships from places as diverse as the Mediterranean and the Baltic were to land on the peninsula, while many vessels sailed from county harbours on to London and elsewhere. Although storms and the rocky Cornish coast could challenge seafarers, while the county's narrow lanes and branching estuaries could slow journeys on land, a heavily used and increasingly dense ‘transport system’ connected Cornwall to the rest of England and beyond.

For all these journeys, however, a fleeting glance suggests that the county remained relatively impoverished. Recording movable wealth varying from less than £5 per square mile up to £9, the 1334 lay subsidy shows that comparable figures for parts of East Anglia stood at over £30.