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Tristan, of Tristan and Isolde fame, was a prince of Lyonesse, a country that is sometimes written of as the birthplace of the Arthurian Guinevere and even of King Arthur himself. There are several genealogies of the royalty of Lyonesse from this period derived from stories and legends rather than reliable historic documents.
It is often argued that Lyonesse must have been somewhere, maybe in Brittany, Spain, or the Leominster district in Hereford & Worcester, UK (all have areas currently or formerly called "Leon") or, more plausibly, the former Celtic kingdom of Lothian in Scotland (known in Old French, the language of many Arthur/Tristan stories as Loenois, often spelt "Leoneis") and the supposed inundation has been invented to explain the fact that Lyonesse is plainly not in, or near, Cornwall. (It is important here to appreciate that in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly Lyonesse is pronounced "lioness" as in the name of the animal and not "leon-ess" as people generally seem to prefer (perhaps by inference from "Lyons" in France. The long "i" sound after an "l" as in "lie" is not all that common in British place names and does not seem to occur in Cornish or Welsh).
Another interesting possibility is that Lyonesse is related to Caerleon in Gwent, Wales or Carlyon near St. Austell, Cornwall. Caerleon was a Roman fort and subsequently attracted many Arthurian legends. "Caer Leon" (or "Caer Llion" in Welsh) derives from the Latin Castrum Legionum, "Fort of the Legions", while "Car Lyon" is said to come from the Cornish Car Leghan, "Slab Fort". Malory refers to a Castle of Liones as well as a country of Liones and places it within reasonable riding distance of Tintagel which would fit Carlyon. Someone coming from a place called "Lyon" or "Lion" would be called in Latin "de Lionis".
The inundation idea seems partly to be based on historical facts that have been muddled up together. During the last 5000 years many parts of western Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly have sunk below sea level. As Camden says, there are the remains of a drowned forest in Mount's Bay off Penzance, St. Michael's Mount at Marazion was once said to be in the middle of a forest, rather than the island it is today, and many of the larger islands of the Scillies formed one land mass. In the latter case the lines of ancient walls have been found on the sea bed between the islands. Some of these events would have taken place during the period when Cornwall and the Scillies were populated by the people who built many of the prehistoric stone monuments and their folk tales relating to this could well have passed into Celtic culture and then have been "updated" to make a better story of later events. Lyonesse has almost certainly, in common with other ancient places and people, attracted many events that were widely spaced in time and place and condensed them into a brief, but catastrophic, episode.
One well-known legend, used by Tennyson at the start of his poem Morte d'Arthur, is that King Arthur was killed in battle in Lyonesse. It is also said that the ghost of Merlin caused Lyonesse to vanish beneath the waves. Mordred and his army were drowned, but Arthur's remaining troops survived on the Isles of Scilly. Geoffrey of Monmouth gives Arthur's death as 542 AD, which thus provides one potential date for the inundation.
Two other dates are 3rd November 1099 and St. Martin's Day, 11 November 1099. Entries in both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Chronicle of Florence of Worcester refer to disastrous sea floods on these dates, but they link them with no specific place. However, in The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea it says, under Lyonesse, that the country, including its sudden and unexplained disappearance beneath the sea, is described in great detail in several of the early English chronicles, such as that of Florence of Worcester, who died in 1118. This does not seem to be correct as Florence of Worcester only writes one line about the inundation. However, such specific dates imply that there was some catastrophic event at this time and it is worth doing further research to try and establish where and what this was. There is possibly a link with St. Martin's in the Isles of Scilly. This island was called "Brethyoke" or "Brechiek" until the 16th century, after which it took the name of the patron saint of the church there. It is conceivable that there is a link between the name of the church and whatever it was that happened on St. Martin's Day 1099.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also mentions two other sea floods without saying where they were and the one in 1014 has also been associated with the inundation of Lyonesse.
Whenever the date was, there are several events that supposedly relate to the inundation of Lyonesse. There is the story of Trevilian, an ancestor of the modern Trevelyan family, related by Camden who rode his white horse to high ground at Perranuthnoe east of Penzance. The family once used to keep a permanently saddled white horse in their stables in case of another similar event.
Sennen Cove was, prior to the 19th C, called Porth Gone Hollye, which is reputed to mean "the port serving Ganilly in the Isles of Scilly." Ganilly (Cornish for "saltwater downs") is currently uninhabited, but it is one of the closest of the islands to Sennen. There is a legend that a survivor of the drowning of Lyonesse, the Lord of Goonhily, landed at Sennen Cove and founded a chapel there in thanks for his deliverance. This was Chapel Idne, which is now destroyed and replaced by a car park.
Crantock, near Newquay, also has various archaeological sites buried in its sand dunes that have been linked with Lyonesse. This was once an important port and it seemed to decline after what was described as a period of three days when windblown sand smothered much of the town. A number of these buildings have since been excavated, so clearly something happened.
Another event which may be connected is the inundation of the City of Ys, or Ker Ys, in Douarnenez Bay at the western end of Brittany. Ys was reputed to be a large and rather wicked place built below sea level. One night the sea gates were deliberately opened and the city permanently drowned with, as in the case of the Cornish stories, one man escaping on a horse. The legend of Ys is part of Breton folklore and, real or otherwise, the inundation would have occurred sometime around the 4th or 5th century and could therefore be consistent with an event in the Arthurian period. It is interesting in this context that the Bay of Douarnenez has a Tristan's Isle in it where some of King Mark of Cornwall's troops landed in the 6th century.
One possible explanation of the 11th/12th C sea flood events (if any took place in Cornwall at all) is that they were tsunamis. These are powerful, fast moving waves that arise from the sea bed following an earthquake, underwater landslide or volcanic explosion. They are capable of travelling thousands of miles, and strike the land unexpectedly with great destructive force. Most tsunamis occur in the Pacific (it is a Japanese word), but they have been recorded in the Atlantic and there is no reason why such an incident should not have affected west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
Possible sites for the earthquake or volcanic explosion are the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Iceland or Macaronesia (the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands), however, Bill Collins, who studies Atlantic tsunamis for the US Geological Survey, thinks that a tsunami in west Cornwall would more be more likely to arise from a bolide or meteorite of suitable proportions falling into the sea. Dr Walter C. Dudley from the University of Hawaii's Kalakaua Marine Education Centre suggests that a submarine landslide is the most likely candidate. Relief maps of the Atlantic to the south west of Cornwall and Brittany show what appear to be massive slides from the continental shelf in the Meriadzek Terrace area into the deeper water beyond, especially a massive feature called the Celtic Sea Fan.
Places linked with Lyonesse - the Isles of Scilly, Perranuthnoe, Sennen Cove, Crantock - are all areas that, because they are low-lying, would be affected by a tsunami. However, unlike Papua/New Guinea or some of the Hawaiian Islands, because of the cliff-girt nature of the land, relatively little damage would be done by a tsunami in Cornwall generally.
Another possible, and maybe more probable, explanation for the 11th/12th C sea floods is that they were tidal surges of the kind that has necessitated the building of the Thames Barrier in London. Occasionally a mass of water travels across the Atlantic from the Newfoundland Banks area and, when it is compressed by funnelling into the North Sea or English Channel, it can cause a tidal surge and extensive flooding of low-lying coastal areas. The same can happen to the west and south of the Straits of Dover and affect Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly or Brittany.
Whatever its origin, the story of Lyonesse, through the legends of Tristan and King Arthur has been well-known all over Europe for many centuries and it still features in books, poems, films, music and other manifestations either under its own name or in transmuted form. The early Celtic peoples used to believe that there was a hidden world parallel to our own and that occasionally someone from here changed places with someone from there. These parallel countries were not necessarily more favoured than the visible world, but human beings always seem to have been intrigued by the concept of there being more in existence than they are normally capable of discerning. It may be that the idea of Lyonesse arose as a parallel world story, something hinted at by poet Edmund Spencer who, in his account of Tristan, says he was born in Cornwall, bred in Lyonesse and was taken to safety as a child to the Land of Faery. Maybe Lyonesse was the Land of Faery.
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raditionally Lyonesse, an extensive country with 140 churches, was a land that lay between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly to the south west of the United Kingdom. It has also been equated with the Little Sole Bank, an under-sea hill on the edge of the Celtic shelf to the south west of the Isles of Scilly and with the Isles of Scilly themselves. It is sometimes said that the Cornish language name for Lyonesse was Lethowsow, but this refers only to the Seven Stones reef between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly, a place said to be all that is left of the City of Lions, one of the Lyonesse towns.
According to legend, Lyonesse disappeared beneath the sea and this has led to its sometimes being identified - or confused with - Atlantis. The country is frequently mentioned in Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur written in the 15th century and by other authors of this period, although there is no mention of its inundation. It does not, however, feature in any of the earlier sources written between the 6th and the 11th centuries, sources that were extensively quarried by later authors in the creation of the Arthur and Tristan stories. The earliest mention I have so far tracked down is in a 13th century French poet called Beroul who refers to it as Loenois.
Lyonesse (sometimes spelt, particularly by 19th C authors, as "Lyonnesse" and by Malory and others as "Liones") was a large place with many towns and 140 churches. This latter idea has given rise to various folk tales of muffled church bells chiming under the sea off Land's End and so on. There is an account of it in Camden's Britannia of 1586 and he is said to have got much of his information from Carew's A Survey of Cornwall. In the revised and enlarged edition of Britannia published by Edmund Gibson in 1695 the Lyonesse entry is as follows:
Mr Camden mentions a Tradition that this promontory (Land's End) stretched itself farther towards the West; to which, these hints may perhaps contribute something of probability: That about the middle way between Land's End and Scilly, there are rocks call'd in Cornish Lethas, by the English Seven-stones; and the Cornish call that place within the stones Tregva, i.e. a dwelling, where it has been reported that windows and other such stuff have been taken up with hooks (for that is the best place of fishing
that from Lands-end to Scilly is an equal depth of water; that St. Michael's Mount is call'd in Cornish Careg cowse in clawse, i.e. the hoary rock in the wood; that 'tis certain, there have been large trees, with roots and body, driven in by the sea between St. Michael's Mount and Pensance of late years. To these add the tradition, that at the time of this inundation, Trevilian swam from thence, and in memory thereof bears Gules an horse argent issuing out of the sea proper.