"Cousin-jacky", according to Jago's Glossary of the Cornish Dialect, Truro 1882, was current in Cornwall as "a local term of contempt". In the Exeter newspapers of the first half of the nineteenth century, Cousin Jackey or Cousin Jackee was used to mean a Cornishman or Cornishmen and, as often as not, contempt was implied.
Cornishmen in Exeter two hundred years ago, at least those who made news, seem in the main to have been either those wrestlers who visitied the city to contend for a prize, and the many who came up from Cornwall to support them, or innocent peasants, simple countrymen, come to Exeter to be duped and robbed and thus to amuse the sophisticated citizens of this city.
The nickname "Cousin Jackey" was used as a plural as when Olver, a famous Cornish wrestler, came from London to compete in The Ring that had been established behind the Countess Weir Inn, (Olver, by the way, was also a founding officer of Peel's Raw Lobsters, the New Police of the Metropolis), and "much interest was excited in "Cousin Jackey" to see the man whose fame had flown so far before him." (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 31st July 1830) When used ias a singular Cousin Jackey was for the Exonians the very idea of a rustic simpleton.
As I write this the Cornish are filling in their 2021 Census forms and Cousin Jackee is being encouraged to write down Cornish as his nationality. It pleases me therefore to add here that when, in 1848, an unfortunate vagrant, Richard Gillard, his wife and two children were up before the magistrates at the Guildhall in Exeter, charged, believe it or not, with singing in the Black Boy (sic) Road. Dr, Miller, the magistrate, asked Gillard, "Are you a Cornishman?" and Gillard stood tall, pulled back his puny shoulders, puffed out his insignificant chest and replied, "No yer honour, I'm an Englishman." (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 18 March 1848)
No comments:
Post a Comment