Cornovii (Cornish)

The Cornovii are a hypothetical tribe who would have been part of the Dumnonii, a Celtic tribe inhabiting the South West peninsula of Great Britain, during some part of the Iron Age, Roman and post-Roman periods. The Cornovii would have lived at the western end of the peninsula, in the area now known as Cornwall, and the tribal name would be the ultimate source of the name of that present-day county.

The existence of this sub-tribe, clan, or sept is not mentioned in Ptolemy's 2nd century Geography, as are many of the other Iron Age tribes in Britain. It has been inferred solely on the basis of a place-name listed in the Ravenna Cosmography of c. 700 CE as purocoronavis, which is considered to be a scribal error for durocornavis (or durocornovium), interpreted as meaning "the fortress of the Cornovii".

According to Ptolemy, there were two other tribes known as the Cornovii, one in the Midlands and one in Northern Scotland. It is on this basis that the name of this putative ancestor-tribe of Cornwall is inferred. Although the Brittonic name is clearly derived from the word *cornu-, which means "horn", opinions diverge over whether or not this refers to the shape of the land. Considering that Cornwall is at the end of a long tapering peninsula, many scholars have adopted this derivation for the Cornish Cornovii. For instance, Graham Webster in The Cornovii (1991), which is primarily about the Midlands tribe, states that this could apply as long as the geography was apparent, as it might have been to Roman surveyors in the first century, and Victor Watts in the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names (2010) interprets the name *Cornowii, a different spelling for latinised Cornovii, as "the people of the horn".

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