{53}

II. On the Wandlebury Legend.

The legend of Wandlebury has this connection with the subject of a Celtic population in Eastern England that it is apparently drawn from a Celtic source. But it does not support the conclusion that Britons survived in the land in some sort of independence after the Saxons occupied it. We cannot say when the story became incorporated in the folk-lore of the English-speaking inhabitants of the country. They may have learnt it from British lips in the first days of the conquest: they may have acquired it at a later date from British survivors in Cambridgeshire. And there is a feature in the story which should teach us some caution in our inferences. Not indeed in its original version, but in later times, the legend has become connected with the name of Gogmagog. The tale, as first told by Gervase of Tilbury at the beginning of the thirteenth century, has clear relation to the immemorial traditions of Wales and Armorica; but in its later association with the giant Gogmagog it betrays its affinity to the literary fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and, through him, with the Graeco-Persian romance of Alexander the Great, the mountains of the Caucasus, the prophecy of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation.

The story has always been popular. It forms a chapter in the Gesta Romanorum. It was retold by William Harrison, in his Description of England, in the sixteenth century. In its most familiar form it is told by Sir Walter Scott in the notes to Marmion. As all these versions contain divergences from the original, I will translate the tale from the words of Gervase in his Otia Imperialia, written about the year 1211.

“In England, at the boundary of the diocese of Ely, there is a town named Cantabrica, in the neighbourhood of which there is a place called Wandlebiria, from the fact that the Wandali, when ravaging Britain and savagely murdering the Christians, placed their camp there. Now, where they pitched their tents {54} on the hill-top, there is a level space surrounded with entrenchments and with a single entrance, like a gate. There is a very ancient tradition, attested by popular report, that if a warrior enters this level space at the dead of night, when the moon is shining, and cries ‘Knight to knight, come forth,’ immediately he will be confronted by a warrior, armed for fight, who, charging horse to horse, either dismounts his adversary or is dismounted. But I should state that the warrior must enter the enclosure alone, though his companions may look on from outside. As proof of the truth of this I quote a story told to me by the country people of the neighbourhood. There was in Greater Britain, not many days ago, a knight redoubtable in arms and possessed of every noble quality, among the barons second in power to few, to none in worth. His name was Osbert, son of Hugh. One day he came as a guest to the town I have mentioned, and, it being winter time, after supper, as is the fashion with great folk, he was sitting in the evening by the fireside in the family of his wealthy host, and listening to tales of exploits of ancient days; and while he gave ear to them it chanced that one of the people of the country mentioned the wondrous legend aforesaid. The brave man resolved to make personal trial of the truth of what he was told. So he selected one of his noble squires, and, attended by him, went to the place. In complete armour he came to the appointed spot, mounted his steed, and, dismissing his attendant, entered the camp alone. He cried aloud to discover his opponent, and in response a knight, or what looked like a knight, came forth to meet him, similarly armed, as it seemed. Well, with shields advanced and levelled lances, they charged, and each horseman sustained his opponent’s shock. But Osbert parried the spear-thrust of his antagonist, and with a powerful blow struck him to the ground. He was on his feet again in an instant, and, seeing that Osbert was leading off his horse by the bridle, as the spoils of conquest, he poised his lance and, hurling it like a javelin, with a violent effort he pierced Osbert’s thigh. Our knight however in the exultation of his victory either did not feel or did not regard the wound, and his adversary having disappeared, he came out of the camp victorious, and gave the {55} horse which he had won to his squire. It was tall, active and beautiful to behold. He was met on his return by a number of the family, who marvelled at the tale, were delighted at the overthrow of the knight, and loudly applauded the bravery of this illustrious baron. When Osbert took off his arms and discarded his iron greaves he saw one of them filled with clotted blood. The family were amazed at the wound, but the knight scorned fear. The neighbours, aroused from slumber, came thronging together, and their growing marvel induced them to keep watch. As evidence of the victory the horse was kept, still tethered. It was displayed to public view with its fierce eyes, erect neck and black mane; its knightly saddle and all its trappings were likewise black. At cockcrow the horse, prancing, snorting and pawing the earth, suddenly burst the reins that held it and regained its native liberty. It fled, vanished, and none could trace it. And our noble knight had a perpetual reminder of the wound which he had sustained, in that each year, as the same night returned, the wound, though apparently cured and closed, opened again. So it came about that the famous warrior, some years later, went over sea, and, after performing many deeds of valour against the heathen, by God’s will ended his days.”

Gervase is a born romancer. In his rambling book it is his constant and delightful hint to speak of giants and necromancers, of werwolves and lamias. But he is also an inveterate plagiarist, and the suspicion might naturally arise that he stole the story from Geoffrey of Monmouth or some other literary source. But we may fairly acquit him in this case. Geoffrey has no story at all resembling the Wandlebury legend. The story of the giant Gogmagog is written large in his History of the Britons, but in the tale of Gervase there is nothing about Gogmagog, and nothing about a giant. We may take his word for it that his story is, what he affirms it to be, “a very old tradition, attested by popular report, told to me by the country folk of the neighbourhood.” As an eastern-county man he may very well have heard the story, as Osbert heard it, at a fireside in Cambridge. His description of the camp is accurate enough to Drove his local knowledge. The name, Wandlebury, which he {56} gives it is an older name than that of Gogmagog Hills, for which I find no authority older than 1574 [56.1]. On the other hand Wendlesbiri is mentioned in the Chronicle of Ramsey Abbey [56.2] as the place of a hundred meeting in the tenth century, when the title of the Abbey to land at Swaffham was debated. As Wyndilbyry it is again mentioned in the Historia Eliensis [56.3] as the meeting place of nine hundreds in the time of King Stephen. I see no reason to quarrel with the derivation of the name given by Gervase. Colonies of Vandals were brought to Britain by the emperor Probus [56.4]. There is a village called Wendlebury in Oxfordshire, and it is significant that the parish contains the Roman camp of Alchester, and immediately adjoining are the Roman sites of Chesterton and Bicester. It looks as though the story of Gervase was referable to a people who knew the Vandals, or to a time when the memory of them was recent. At the time of the Saxon invasions of the middle of the fifth century the Vandal power was at its height. Genseric sacked Rome in 455, six years after the coining of the Jutes, and his fleets commanded the Mediterranean, which to the Anglo-Saxon chronicler was known as the Wendelsae.

Gervase does not say that the demonic antagonist of Osbert was a Vandal, but I think that that is his suggestion. This too gives a hint that the legend is Celtic, not English. Had it sprung from an English source the conquered warrior would almost certainly have been a Briton. The common feature of the tales to which the Wandlebury legend is related is the victory of the civilised invader over the representative of a vanished, inhuman race, primitive inhabitants of the land, and the scene is some monumental work of prehistoric man. This is clearly brought out in the wonderful legend told in the French romance of Fulk Fitzwarin, which was written in the early part of the reign of Edward I—two generations after {57} Gervase of Tilbury [57.1]. The part of the legend which I quote has for its hero a certain Payn Peverel, who accompanied William the Conqueror in an unhistorical invasion of Wales.

“As King William the Bastard drew near the mountains and valleys of Wales he saw a large town, formerly enclosed within high walls, which was entirely pillaged and burnt. Underneath the town, in a plain, he caused his tents to be pitched, and there he remained that night. Then the king enquired of a Briton what the town was called, and how it was thus destroyed. ‘Sire,’ said the Briton, ‘I will tell you. The castle was formerly called Castle Bran, but now it is called the Old March. There formerly came into this country Brutus, a very brave knight, and Coryneus, from whom Cornwall had its name, and many others derived from the lineage of Troy. No one inhabited these regions excepting very vile people, great giants, whose king was named Geomagog. They heard of the arrival of Brutus, and marched against him; but in the end all the giants were killed except Geomagog, who was wonderfully tall. The valiant Coryneus said that he would like to wrestle with Geomagog to try his strength. At the first bout the giant hugged Coryneus so tight that he broke three of his ribs. Coryneus grew angry; he gave Geomagog such a kick that he fell from a great rock into the sea, and then was Geomagog drowned. A spirit from the devil forthwith entered into Geomagog’s body, and he came into these parts, and defended the country for a long time, so that no Briton dared inhabit it. A long time after this King Bran, the son of Donwal, rebuilt the town, repaired the walls, and cleared out the great ditches, and made a fortress and a great market-place. And the devil came by night, and carried off all that was within; since which time no one has dwelt there.’”

Then follows the nocturnal visit of Payn Peverel to the ghostly city, his combat with Geomagog and his victory, all told in much the same way as the story of Osbert at Wandlebury.

The whole story of Fulk Fitzwarin makes no pretence of being historical. Yet curiously the Payn Peverel who is the {58} hero in this part of it and the counterpart of Osbert in the tale of Gervase is an actual personage and famous in Cambridge history as the benefactor of Barnwell Priory, who gave the Austin canons the site of their house by Barnwell springs. Both the Fitzwarin story and the Barnwell Memoranda mention that his son and heir was named William, and William died, like Osbert, while on a crusade. It is true that Payn died in England—at the Peak in Derbyshire according to the romance, in London according to the Memoranda—but the Barnwell chronicler says that he was standard-bearer of the Conqueror’s son, Robert Curthose, in the crusades. But the coincidence of his connection with the Welsh legend and with Cambridge may be dismissed as fortuitous.

In the tale of Fulk Fitzwarin, which presents such unmistakable features of affinity with the Wandlebury legend, the defeated warrior is the giant Geomagog. A tradition later than the times of Gervase of Tilbury undoubtedly connected the Wandlebury camp with Gogmagog. Layer says that formerly there was a gigantic figure cut in the turf on the Gogmagog Hills, similar to the Long Man of Willington in Sussex. In the name of Gogmagog we light on a tradition not indigenous to Cambridgeshire, nor of an origin ultimately Celtic. Though the tale of the haunted town and the fight with its ghostly warder seems to be genuinely British and ancient, the writer borrowed the name of Geomagog and the wrestling with Coryneus from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his Historia Britonum at some time before 1147. While there is no doubt that Geoffrey incorporated in his book much genuine British tradition it is equally certain that he “contaminated” his story with audacious fictions drawn largely from literary sources; and the name of Geomagog, or Goemagot, as he spells it, is unquestionably a foreign interpolation in a tale which may otherwise be genuinely Celtic. The traditional scene of the combat of Coryneus with Goemagot is the Hoe at Plymouth. I do not know what credit to attach to Geoffrey’s statement that in his day it was still called Lamgoemagot, or Goemagot’s Leap [58.1].

{59} But if the name of Gogmagog is foreign to Celtic lands it must have taken early root in them, for name and legend are found on both sides of the English Channel. In the Breton-French chronicle of John de Wavrin, written in the fifteenth century, he is called Gomago or Geomagon [59.1]. Geomagon appears in a modern Breton folk-tale as Gourmalon or Gurmailhon. From the Traditions de la Haute Bretagne of M. Sébillot I learn that, near a place called Goven in the department of Ile et Vilaine, there is a circular rampart which is called the Butte or the Tombeau of Gurmailhon. Gurmailhon is locally said to have been an earl of Cornwall and also chief of the Bretons at the time of their wars with the Normans in the tenth century, and he had the same impious character there as in Cornwall and in Wales. Formerly, the story goes, there was a large and fine castle on the spot, and the place was fertile and populous; now it is arid and desolate and lies under a curse. There is a tradition that it conceals a buried treasure, and an old woman informed M. Sébillot that her father once went there at night to dig it up; but at the first stroke of his pickaxe he was confronted by an ugly old goat with long horns, and, recognising it as the embodiment of the former owner of the place, he took to his heels. In the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer we may suspect that Gurmailhon survives as the giant Cormoran, far famed through the distich embroidered on Jack’s girdle,

“This is the valiant Cornishman
Who slew the giant Cormoran.”

Incidentally I may remark that learned editors of Shakespeare have been at pains to show that in King Lear, for reasons of his own, he wilfully corrupted the text of the nursery rhyme,

“Fee, fie, foh fum,
I smell the blood of an English man,”

{60} by substituting “British” for “English” man ; but I submit that his version is the older and more accurate. Jack the Giant-Killer was a Briton, not an Englishman.

The legend of the haunted camp which we have discovered in Wales and Brittany, so far as I am aware is connected with no place in England except Wandlebury. If it had existed in the counties intermediate between Cambridgeshire and Wales or Cornwall we might suspect that it had percolated through them from West Britain to East Anglia. As it does not exist it is at least a reasonable surmise that it has been rooted in Cambridgeshire from the days of the Celtic occupation of the country.

But the name Gogmagog has another pedigree, which is literary. Geoffrey of Monmouth borrowed it from the medieval cycle of Alexander romances. The original in Europe of all these romances was the Life and Acts of Alexander the Macedonian, translated from Persian into Greek about the year 1070 by Simon Seth, keeper of the imperial wardrobe at Constantinople. Translations into Latin, French and other languages soon followed, and Alexander’s mythical adventures became one of the commonest subjects of medieval romance. As an English specimen of the type we may take the thirteenth century lay of Kyng Alisaunder (edited by Professor Skeat for the E.E.T.S., 1877). There it is recorded that, when the king was in India, he was informed that, far in the north, there dwelt a monstrous people, of unnatural savagery, the godless sons of Nebrot (i.e. Nimrod), builder of the town of Babylon. He thereupon levied a host and sailed to Taracun, the capital of the land of Magog. At first he was unable to overcome the sons of Nebrot, but presently he bethought him that, in a certain land called Meopante, between Egypt and India, which was half water and half land, the amphibious natives built walls of bitumen which became as hard as iron and was impervious to water. He loaded many thousand ships with this substance, and, while part of his army was engaged with the monsters, he stopped the passage from Magog to the sea of Calpias (i.e. the Caspian)—a passage between two rocks—by a wall of bitumen. Thereby he confined within the mountains thirty of these {61} savage tribes, among which are enumerated the Magogecas and the Gogas; and there they will remain until Antichrist comes to set them free, when they will waste the world and tear with their teeth all who will not serve him.

As Warton says in his History of English Poetry [61.1], the books of the Arabians and Persians are full of stories of Gog and Magog. They are called Jagiouge and Magiouge, and the wall between the Caspian and Black Seas, which in portions still exists and is traditionally said to have been built by Alexander, is called the wall of Jagiouge and Magiouge [61.2]. Once a week, the story goes, it was the practice for the governor of a neighbouring castle to ride with attendants to a gate in the wall. He struck the gate three times with a hammer, and in response, from within, was heard a murmuring noise which was supposed to proceed from Jagiouge and Magiouge, confined within the wall.

In Jagiouge and Magiouge it is not difficult to recognise the Calmucks or Tartars of southern Russia and Asia, to prevent whose incursions into Asia Minor the wall was built at some time long before Alexander’s. Attila is said to have been a descendant of Magog, and contemporary Christianity recognised in the incursion of the Huns the fulfilment of the prophecies of St John the Divine. Magog according to Genesis (x. 2) was a son of Japhet and brother of Gomer. In Ezekiel (chapters xxxviii., xxxix.) Gog is a prince of the land of Magog and allied with Gomer. He comes from “the north parts” and is the leader of a great invasion of Asia, and his defeat and ruin are foretold by the prophet. He and his host will be buried under a great cairn called Hamon-gog. In Revelation (xx. 8) Gog and Magog typify the host of Satan, gathered after the millennium for the conquest of the world, their number as the sands of the sea. The interpretation of the names Gog, Magog, Gomer is fairly certain. The Gomer of Genesis and Ezekiel represents the Cimmerii who dwelt north of the Black Sea. Professor Sayce [61.3] identifies Gog with Gyges, the first king of {62} Western Asia Minor known to the Assyrians, whose name, like that of Pharaoh, probably became a dynastic title. In Herodotus (i. 16) the Cimmerii are associated with the son of Gyges, as Gomer with Gog in Ezekiel. In Hesiod (Theogony, 149) Gyges is a giant. Magog probably means “land of Gog”: Josephus identified it with Scythia.

Finally I may observe that in all versions of the Gogmagog legend Gogmagog is a single giant, not two. The names Gog and Magog given to the Guildhall pair are recent. In the sixteenth century they were known as Coryneus and Gogmagog.