Cruel Coppinger is the dark legend of the north Cornish coast around Morwenstow and Welcombe, a semi-historical figure swollen by folklore into something near demonic. The story tells of a huge and terrible Dane cast ashore from a wreck in a storm, who seized a local heiress, took over her house and lands, and gathered the smugglers and wreckers of the coast into a gang that he ruled by fear, threatening death to any who showed mercy to shipwrecked sailors.
The story
The legend as it survives was largely shaped by the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, who collected the local tales and published them — with embellishments of his own — in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round in 1866. Behind the myth lie probably one or two real Coppingers, shipwreck survivors and smugglers active around 1792–93, conflated and magnified into a single monstrous outlaw. He is said to have vanished as he came, carried off the coast in a storm, leaving the cliffs of Hartland and Morwenstow to keep his fearsome name.