Robert Morton Nance (1873–1959) was a British writer and leading authority on the Cornish language, a nautical archaeologist, and joint founder of the Old Cornwall Society. Nance wrote many books and pamphlets on the Cornish language, including a Cornish dictionary, which is a standard work, and edited magazines and pamphlets about Cornwall, including Old Cornwall, the journal of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies. Nance was also a nautical archaeologist of distinction and was an originator of the Society for Nautical Research. His insight and learning were displayed in his book Sailing-ship Models which appeared in 1924. He studied art in Britain and France and was both a painter and a skilled craftsman. Work with the Cornish language In 1898, Robert Morton Nance wrote "The Merry Ballad of the Cornish Pasty". Nance began studying the Cornish language in 1904 from Henry Jenner's A Handbook of the Cornish language, although he would later steer the language revival towards mediaeval Cornish. He began to write and illustrate poetry for Arthur Quiller-Couch's Cornish Magazine. In 1909, Nance and Jenner met in Falmouth while the former was researching for the book A Glossary of Cornish Sea Words (published only after his death as a memorial volume in 1959). They became friends and spent the next decade researching Cornish and collecting tidbits of traditional Cornish. These were published in a series of papers which were read both to the Royal Institution of Cornwall and the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. Jenner and Nance formed the first Old Cornwall Society in St Ives in 1920. Its motto was "Cuntelleugh an Brewyon us Gesys na vo Kellys Travyth". By 1924, there were sufficient Old Cornwall Societies to for a Federation, with Jenner as its president and Nance as its recorder. The Federation established the periodical Old Cornwall in 1925. The 1920s to circa 1940 saw Nance and A. S. D. Smith using the works of Edward Lhuyd and Whitley Stokes, as well as Breton grammar, to resolve the issue of syntax and grammar in Cornish. In 1928, on the 21st of September, Nance, Jenner and others held the first Gorsedh Kernow at Boscawen-Un. Twelve bards were made, including Nance who took the bardic name Mordon ('Sea Wave'). In 1929, he published Cornish for All, a work which detailed a version of Cornish based on the Ordinalia and other mediaeval texts, creating the Unified Cornish spelling system and defining