has survived from pagan ritual – Abbot's Bromley being only 35 miles (55 km) away from the tribal centre of Viroconium. Webster also asserts that Professor Charles Thomas made a good case for totemic ethnonyms based on animals and birds in Scotland. The Morris thesis In an attempt to explain the same name being used by the Midlands and Cornwall tribes, the historian John Morris put forward a theory in his work The Age of Arthur (1973), that a contingent of the Cornovii from the West Midlands was sent to Dumnonia in the mid-fifth century to rule the land there and keep out the invading Irish, seeing that a similar situation had occurred in North Wales. Morris's theory is not generally accepted by modern scholarship. Philip Payton, in his book Cornwall: a history, says "...the Morris thesis is not widely accepted by archaeologists and early historians, and we may safely conclude that the Cornovii located west of the Tamar were an indigenous people quite separate from their namesakes in the Midlands and Caithness." References Celtic Britons Historical Celtic peoples Ethnonyms