It is a fact universally acknowledged that medieval Cornwall was a county quite unlike any other. Distant from the political and social heartlands of England, lamented as ‘the very ends of the earth’ by its bishops, overseen by a powerful lordship and inhabited by men and women who at times were labelled an ‘obdurate folk’, believing that their county formed ‘a large land long ago bearing the name of a kingdom’, Cornwall was viewed as somewhere curiously distinctive by many contemporaries and historians alike. The county's leading lineages, bearing names the like of which you find nowhere else, among them Bodrugan, Carminow and l’Ercedekne, exercised great influence over Cornish affairs, not least through office-holding in the peninsula. By the fourteenth century, when royal government had come to reach out into the entire realm, Cornwall ranked as one of the country's great seigniorial enclaves. Together, myths, saints, government and lordship were to endow the name and notion of Cornwall with authority in the minds of its inhabitants. Combined with the continued currency of the local Cornish language and the circulation of chivalric literature that marked out the county as historically different, the land of King Arthur, it is not difficult to explain the trope of Cornish otherness.

Yet, despite the peninsula forming a remote and idiosyncratic corner of the kingdom, the county most emphatically still held a place in the realm of England. In this respect, the position of Cornwall contrasted sharply with that in parts of Ireland and Wales, where power remained fractured and an English elite attempted to rule over people whom blood, birth, administration and law regarded as inferior. Since the king's writ always extended to west of the Tamar, constitutionally Cornwall did not even correspond to an English palatinate, which enjoyed the status of a liberty. Indeed, the common law regarded all Cornishmen and women as English; Cornwall's residents like those of every other county paid parliamentary subsidies for the common good; the county possessed a substantial voice in the parliamentary Commons; the king directly appointed nearly all local government officials; and Cornishmen owed military service for the defence of the realm.