Qualla: Bodmin

Bodmin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Cobb, CC0. In 1497 a Cornish blacksmith and a Bodmin lawyer led an army of perhaps 15,000 men from this town to the edge of London. Michael An Gof and Thomas Flamank had decided that Henry VII's war taxes were intolerable, and the working people of Cornwall agreed. They marched east, met the king's army at Blackheath, and were cut down. Both leaders were hanged, drawn, and quartered. It was not the last time Bodmin would shake the throne. Over the next half-century the town hosted Perkin Warbeck's claim to be King Richard IV, then in 1549 became the staging ground for the Prayer Book Rebellion, in which 4,000 Cornish and Devonian people were killed for preferring Latin mass to Edward VI's new English liturgy. For a small Cornish market town, Bodmin has had a remarkably violent relationship with the English crown.

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Image: Simon Cobb | CC0

Bodmin: Dwelling of the Monks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. St Petroc founded a monastery here in the 6th century, and Bodmin grew up around it as Petrockstow, the place of Petroc. The town's later Cornish name, Bod-meneghy, means dwelling of or by the sanctuary of monks, recorded in early forms like Botmenei in 1100 and Bodmen in 1253. B...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Bodmin: Three Rebellions

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bodmin became the centre of three Cornish uprisings in just over fifty years. The Cornish Rebellion of 1497 began with resistance to a war tax raised to fund a Scottish campaign that meant nothing to Cornish workers. Michael An Gof, a blacksmith from St Keverne, joined forces wit...

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Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bodmin: Plague, Asylum, Gaol

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theroadislong, Public domain. The Black Death killed half of Bodmin's population in the mid-14th century, around 1,500 people. The town recovered, but its later history reads as a chronicle of institutions. Bodmin Gaol, where Matthew Weeks was hanged for the 1844 murder of Charlotte Dymond on Bodmin Moor, bec...

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Image: Theroadislong | Public domain

Bodmin: The Silver Ball

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0. Every five years or so, the Mayor of Bodmin stands beside a body of water called the Salting Pool and throws a silver ball into it. The game of Cornish hurling follows, a free-for-all in which there are no teams and anyone can carry the ball along a set route through the old A30,...

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Image: Richard Croft | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bodmin: What Endures

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Walker from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. Modern Bodmin lives in the long shadow of its institutions and its rebellions. Some areas of the town show real deprivation; the proportion of children in poverty exceeds the Cornish average, and county lines drug trafficking has reached even this corner of the southwest. The tow...

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Image: Tim Walker from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0