by Kai Roberts
At length, the giant himself discovered the lost boar, pierced by an arrow and lying dead in the undergrowth. He was so incensed by this outrage that he demanded every man and boy in the neighbourhood capable of wielding a bow assemble outside his castle. The giant ordered them to give up the person responsible for killing the swine but when nobody came forward, he told them that they must assemble there again at sunset the following day along with their wives and children, and if he still did not have the culprit, he would kill the lastborn male of every family. Upon hearing this threat, an old man known as the Seer of Carperby stepped forward from the crowd and warned the giant that if he left the castle tomorrow with evil in his heart, he would never again enter its walls – alive or dead.
The giant initially laughed off this prophecy but he was secretly perturbed. When morning came the next day, one of his few loyal retainers told the giant that he’d dreamt nine ravens had circled the castle and alighted on its battlements before cawing nine times. The ancient retainer thought it must surely be an evil omen and advised the giant not to follow through with his threat to the local children. However, this infuriated the giant who beat his old servant for daring to voice such dark thoughts and then left the castle intent on brutalising his neighbours into submission. After the giant had left, the bleeding and resentful retainer summoned his remaining strength, gathered together all the peat, straw and furniture he could find in the castle and built it into a great pyre.
Meanwhile, as the giant progressed towards the spot where the local villagers were assembled, he discovered another nine of his boar felled with arrows. This drove the giant into a bloodthirsty rage and he swore that unless those responsible came forward, he would slaughter every man, woman and child right there on the hillside. But as he ranted, the Seer of Carperby pointed to the plume of black smoke now rising from the giant’s castle. Observing that the prophecy had come true, the giant was aghast but as he turned to slay the Seer, an even more unnerving sight met his eyes. Before him stood the apparition of the shepherdess he had so callously murdered, holding Wolfhead on a leash. The giant stepped back in horror as Gunda released the hound and it leapt at its former master’s throat, so driving the tyrant over the edge of a nearby cliff to his death.
Much has been claimed for the legend of the giant of Penhill. Its collector, Richard Fairfax-Blakeborough, believed it to be descended from ‘the sagas of the Norsemen’, whilst a later commentator thought it represented evidence of a lost chalk hill-figure created during the Bronze Age. However, neither of these hypotheses seem to be supported by the narrative itself: the tale has little in common with the Norse sagas and it is certainly unlikely to be as old as the Bronze Age. Rather, the story appears to preserve a distorted memory of a cruel local landowner, possibly an early Norman lord who was excessively harsh in his prosecution of forest law in the Forest of Wensleydale. Under such law, an offender could be executed for killing any game animal (such as a boar) and it was so deeply unpopular that veiled criticisms survive in many medieval texts.
The giant of Penhill falls into the second category of giant found in English folklore: the murderous ogre. Many of these legends display characteristics which suggest they derive from the medieval period. Indeed, a few seem to have been created to stress the knightly credentials of local landowning families and in this respect have a great deal in common with many dragon legends (See Chapter Three). These stories even have similar legendary relics in church architecture. For instance, in the All Saints’ Church at Wighill near Tadcaster there is a tomb which bears the effigy of a knight and on one side, the grotesque carving of a head. Although the monument is no older than the seventeenth century, local legend has interpreted it as the burial place of a famed giant-killer – the carved head on its side representing that of the monster he slew.
The legend describes how the district was being terrorised by a giant of Turkish origin who lived on a small island off the coast and came ashore to feast on children. Such was the giant’s notoriety, a reward for its execution was offered by the king himself. Nobody dared take up the challenge but a young lad named Stapleton, who sailed out to the island and confronted the monster. After a lengthy struggle, the giant succeeded in knocking Stapleton to the ground, but as it moved to deliver a final blow, the boy thrust his sword through his adversary’s armpit and so mortally wounded the brute. He finished the job by decapitating the giant and carrying its head back to the king as evidence of his victory. Stapleton was rewarded with the Manor of Wighill, which his family owned for many generations thereafter.
A legend attached to Sessay in the Vale of York seems to have performed a similar function, explaining how a particular family came to own land in that district. Thomas Parkinson gives a particularly vivid description of the giant that once plagued the people thereabouts:
He was a huge brute in human form – legs like elephants’ legs, arms of a corresponding size, a face most fierce to look upon with only one eye placed in the midst of his forehead; a mouth large as a lion’s and garnished with teeth as long as the prongs of a hayfork. His only clothing was a cow’s hide fastened across his breast, and with the hair outwards; while over his shoulders he usually carried a stout young tree, as a club for offence and defence. Now and then he made the woods ring with demoniacal laughter; now and then with savage, unearthly growls.
The villagers attempted to band together to drive their tormentor out, but invariably lost their resolve at the last moment. It was not until Sir Guy D’Aunay of Cowick Castle in South Yorkshire came to Sessay that the giant finally met its match. He had come to visit Joan Darrell, daughter of an old friend of his father’s, to ask for the girl’s hand in marriage and admitted that this was primarily in the interests of a union of their families’ estates. Miss Darrell admired Sir Guy’s honesty and being a canny individual, replied that if the knight could slay the giant that so persecuted her tenants and left her servants unwilling to enter the wood to collect kindling, then she would assent to his request.
In addition to its taste for small children and local farmers’ livestock, the giant liked to steal sacks of meal from the local windmill which it used to mix with the blood of slaughtered animals to create a grisly porridge. Hearing of this, Sir Guy staked out the mill and sure enough after a while, the giant came along. Made wary by the size of the ogre, the knight bided his time, spying on his quarry from the trees. His caution was soon rewarded for as the giant reached through an upper window of the building to snatch a sack, the wind changed direction and one of the sails of the mill struck it on the head, sending the colossus sprawling to the ground. Seizing the opportunity, Sir Guy ran over and drove his sword through the giant’s single eye. His marriage to Joan Darrell followed shortly afterwards and the D’Aunay family came into possession of her Sessay estates.
A very similar legend is attached to the village of Dalton nearby, and the parallels are so pronounced, it seems that the two tales must stem from the same source. However, whilst the Sessay narrative is a typical medieval charter-legend, the Dalton story is inverted, with a commoner as the hero and may well have represented the vernacular form of Sessay’s gentrified myth. Dalton’s giant was similarly cyclopic and a mill also features in the legend. But whereas the Sessay giant stole from the local mill, the Dalton giant resides in one and uses it to grind meal from human bones to bake into bread. It spared only one victim from this fate: a young boy who was captured on Pilmoor and kept as a servant to help with the milling.
Unsurprisingly, the boy resented his confinement and one day asked permission to visit the celebrated Topcliffe Fair. When the giant refused, the boy decided that he would take his leave anyway. He waited until the giant had gorged himself and fallen into a slumber, took the knife it had used to cut bread and like Sir Guy D’Aunay stabbed directly into the monster’s eye. Unfortunately, this did not kill the giant straight away and the brute rose up, blocking the only door. But the boy still had a trick up his sleeve and as the giant raged, he kil
led and then skinned his master’s dog. Draping the pelt over his shoulders, the boy dropped down onto all fours and began to bark. Unable to tell the difference, the half-blind giant let the boy crawl through his legs to the door and safety.
The giant must have succumbed to his wound eventually, as a tumulus known as Giant’s Grave once stood beside the mill at Dalton – although it had long since been destroyed by the time the legend was recorded in the late nineteenth century. Whilst this has something in common with the tradition of landscape-shaping giants, the Dalton example is in all other respects a typical ogre, much like the giants of Wighill and Sessay. It is possible that these three represent a corrupted memory of some brutal outlaw leader, but they are all conceived as a classic bogeyman figure and by the time these legends were recorded, they were probably told only as bedtime stories to children or to tease gullible visitors.
This certainly seems to be the case with the giant that occupied Yordas Cave in Kingsdale. Although this cavern is now accessible to anyone with a sturdy pair of boots and the spirit of adventure, during the nineteenth century it was a show-cave, with a fee charged for guided tours. One sightseer records being shown, ‘the great hall of Yordas – the fabulous giant from Norway – and there we see his throne, his bed-chamber, his fitch of bacon, his mill and his oven, wherein he ground and baked the big white stones or the bones of naughty boys and girls into bread.’ However, it is unclear if this is anything more than an invention of the tour-guide. There is no Nordic giant named Yordas and the name more likely derives from the Old Norse phrase jord ass meaning ‘earth stream’ – doubtless a reference to the subterranean waterfall which dominates the main chamber.
Nonetheless, this evolution (or devolution?) is a familiar folkloric process and the transition of narratives from sincere belief, to fireside yarn, to children’s story is widely recognised. Whilst it now seems excessive to claim that legends encode the beliefs of pre-Christian cultures – as many early folklorists did – a kernel of historic conviction may still be found in many of these narratives. Whether that is the animistic personification of prominent landscape features, an incredulity at the size of prehistoric megaliths or the memory of some feared local tyrant, the stories provide a valuable glimpse into the concerns and cosmologies of the people who first told them and the generations that preserved them.
FIVE
FAIRY LORE
In the summer of 1917, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths and her sixteen-year-old cousin Elsie Wright claimed to have captured two photographs of fairies playing around Cottingley Beck, near Bradford. By 1920, news of these remarkable images had reached the creator of Sherlock Holmes and prominent Spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was working on an article about fairies for the Christmas edition of The Strand Magazine. At their request, the two girls produced another three photographs and all five pictures were unleashed upon the general public over the following year to a considerable storm of publicity. Although very few commentators were as credulous as Doyle, the story nonetheless provided a popular talking point and gripped the British imagination for many decades thereafter.
In 1983, improved photographic analysis techniques finally pushed the cousins into admitting that they had faked the photographs, using cardboard figures copied from a popular children’s book of the era. Whilst a study of folklore is not the place to examine the historical and philosophical dynamics that led to the hoax being so readily accepted by Doyle and his ilk, or the public sensation that followed, the episode can nonetheless be seen as a manifestation of a centuries-old fairy tradition in Yorkshire, a tradition in which Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright had once been thoroughly initiated. For although Elsie disavowed all the photographs, Frances continued to maintain that the fifth and final image was genuine, and both women insisted until their dying day that they really had seen fairies around Cottingley Beck.
In the previous century, a number of striking accounts of fairy sightings were recorded in the region, often purporting to be the personal experiences of respectable, upstanding citizens whose word could not be questioned. In the mid-1800s, for instance, a labourer named Henry Roundell was known to have encountered fairies early one morning somewhere in Washburndale, possibly in the vicinity of Fewston. When the report was published in 1870, the journalist’s correspondent saw fit to note, ‘A shrewd fellow he was, who knew quite well the difference between a pound and a shilling: and a steady church-goer … If he had not been such an exceedingly respectable man, all would have been set down at once to a mere drunkard’s fancy.’
Roundell claimed that after rising unusually early one morning, he had set off to hoe a field of turnips and upon arriving at his destination a little before sunrise, noticed that the leaves seemed to be:
… stirring strangely. When he looked again he saw that what was moving about were not turnip-leaves at all. Between every row of them was a row of little men, all dressed in green, and all with tiny hoes in their hands. They were hoeing away with might and main; and chattering and singing to themselves meanwhile, but in an odd, shrill, cracked voice, like a lot of field-crickets. They had hats on their heads, something in the shape of foxglove bells, Roundell thought, but he was not near enough to distinguish them plainly, only he was quite certain they were all dressed in green, the same colour as the turnip leaves.
Up until this point, the story is in many ways atypical. It is quite unusual to find fairies engaged in any form of labour; often they are portrayed as decadent, hedonistic beings forever revelling in the moonlight and dependent on pilfering the fruits of human endeavour for the necessities of life. However, it concludes as so many fairy narratives do. Roundell proceeded to stumble over the gate to the field and alert the field’s occupants to his presence, whereupon they all immediately fled: ‘Whirr! Whirr! off went the little men like innumerable coveys of partridge.’ If there is any recurrent theme to narratives concerning the fairies, it is that they are shy creatures who resent humans spying or interfering in their affairs.
Yorkshire is the scene of one of the earliest recorded fairy narratives in England and even several hundred years prior to Roundell’s experience, these creatures were portrayed as profoundly hostile to uninvited human intrusion. The legend was documented around 1198 by the monk, William of Newburgh, who wrote that he had known it since his childhood, suggesting an even older provenance. Indeed, it is one of the most common migratory legends in English fairy lore and a version was recorded in Gloucestershire only thirty years later. Although William does not explicitly identify the location of this fairy encounter, it is clearly supposed to be Willy Howe, a Bronze Age burial mound on the Yorkshire Wolds, close by that mysterious stream, the Gypsey Race. The theme of hollow hills and prehistoric burial sites is a common one in fairy lore.
Willy Howe, a Bronze Age tumulus on the Yorkshire Wolds haunted by fairies. (Kai Roberts)
In William’s account, a peasant returning home late at night was disturbed by the sound of singing and feasting emerging from Willy Howe as he rode past. Deciding to investigate further, he discovered a door into the barrow and beyond this portal, ‘a large and luminous house, full of people, who were reclining as at a solemn banquet’. As the peasant entered, an attendant offered him a cup, but rather than drink from it, he poured out the contents and tried to pocket the vessel. Unfortunately, the fairies noticed his actions and ‘great tumult arose at the banquet’. The assembled host then pursued him as he fled from the barrow and he was only able to escape thanks to the swiftness of his horse. However, the adventure had been worth it. The purloined cup proved to be fashioned from an unknown material and of such rare quality that he later presented it to King Henry I.
Perhaps it is unwise to assume that the fairies seen by Henry Roundell and William of Newburgh’s rustic were the same category of being. Folklorist Jeremy Harte has observed that during the medieval period, they were typically referred to as elves and the idea of a universal class of ‘fairies’ did not emerge in popular tradition unt
il much later. The term ‘fairy’ has an Old French root and whilst it was a popular term in late medieval romances, primarily consumed by a courtly audience, the word does not seem to have appeared in vernacular English until the eighteenth century. It was only following this that fairies in native folklore began to assume the characteristics which we typically ascribe to them today. For instance, diminutive size was not a characteristic of any fairy-type entity until the Victorian period; it is instructive that whilst Roundell describes the fairies he saw as ‘tiny’, William of Newburgh makes no such reference.
It may be, therefore, that during the nineteenth century a number of diverse entities were subsumed under the catch-all term ‘fairy’, distorting their original significance. Given the passion of Victorian collectors for taxonomising, this would hardly be surprising. One feature common to fairy lore of all ages, however, seems to be the idea of a parallel society to our own, but one that is largely invisible to us and sometimes antagonistic. Indeed, the seventeenth-century Scottish minister, Reverend Robert Kirk, dubbed it ‘The Secret Commonwealth’. This society also seems to have been more intimately connected to the natural world than our own and it is significant that whilst ideas about fairy physiognomy and behaviour changed over the centuries, the places they were supposed to inhabit remained more constant – in the northern counties at least.