the giants of cornwall

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The Giants of Cornwall Author(s): B. C. Spooner Source: Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 16-32 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258088 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Folklore. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:27:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: The Giants of Cornwall

The Giants of CornwallAuthor(s): B. C. SpoonerSource: Folklore, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 16-32Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258088 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Folklore.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.187 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:27:01 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Giants of Cornwall

The Giants of Cornwall

by B. C. SPOONER

A MAN called Havillan once wrote this - in Latin:'

'With such vile monsters was the land opprest, But most the farthest regions of the West; Of them thou Cornwall too wast plagu'd above the rest.'

So Havillan, about giants. But Geoffrey of Monmouth said it before him.

The Cornish giant population must have been at its very thickest in the Land's End peninsula, for there is hardly a prehistoric hill - or cliff-fortification or earthwork thereabouts, whose lordly inhabi- tants and builders were not thought of as 'giants' by the people of the countryside. In a simple way, it is the old story of the gaping wonderers told in 'The Ruin' in the Exeter Book:

'Curious is this stonework! The Fates destroyed it; The torn buildings falter; moulders the work of giants. ... Earth has the Lord-Builders.'"

And though this association of giants with the old strongholds thins out up the length of Cornwall, it can still shift to the occa- sional Norman or mediaeval castle; and the giants are still the lords in the high places. Or the lords have become giants. It was the 'giant' at the Norman castle of Launceston in north Cornwall who exchanged tools with the 'giant' of Warbstowbury earthwork by throwing them, and accidentally killed him. It was the 'giant' in the fourteenth-century castle once at Lanihorne near Tregoney, who threw stones at the 'giant' of the castellated mansion of Trelonk - and meant it!

The whole life of the neighbourhood spun round the local giant, whether in games, work, peace or war. It was the giant of Carn Galva in Morvah (and not any lord of the manor nor king), that gave Morvah its Fair which was once so popular and crowded that men used 'riding three on a horse, like going to Morvah Fair' as a

1 Havillan. 2 From the Exeter Book. Translation from Jaquetta Hawke's A Land.

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saying, while a quarter-acre field would not contain all the tethered horses of the riders. The St Levan young men would go to the great Treryn cliff-castle to play quoits or ninepins with the giant, who was 'very fond of old-fashioned games'. The giant of Carn Galva in Morvah favoured 'hide-and-seek'; 'Mop-and-heed', he called it. These games were amiable affairs, but a giant or so did sometimes forget how very frail a man is.

.... In the practical busi-

ness of life, the giants lived by levies and raids on the cattle of their neighbours. The giant of Carn Galva was paid a levy of sheep and oxen by the surrounding giants, while the Mount giant and the giants of Trencrom got their cattle by raiding the countryside. When war came the 'locals' would find shelter with their own giant, fighting beside him. The St Levan women made handy piles of the Treryn giant's sling-stones when sea-raiders attacked Treryn, and the young men of St Levan fed the stones to the giant's huge bull-hide slings as he stood on Carnole. Or so 'old folk held - and long tradition made it pass for true', says Bottrell. And everything considered, all this is not an unreasonable picture of life as it must have been lived in the earthworks.

Very much of a giant's time was spent flinging boulders. When he hurled them from his own stronghold at some other, in anger -

they were probably his version of sling-stones. He also used them to play the game of 'Bob-Button' across country with a neighbour, as the giants of Trencrom and the Mount did. This conveniently explains, of course, why there are so many loose boulders lying about.

But sometimes it was tools that got thrown. These would be shared by the giants of a couple of earthworks and hurled from one to the other as needed. Thus the giant of Warbstowbury earth- work shared a hook with the Lord of Launceston Castle until one day he caught death as well as the hook. And the giants of Trencrom and the Mount flung a cobbling-hammer to and fro until un- fortunately the Mount giantess got in the way. From Scotland to Brittany, there were tales of this sort in which tools were flung back and forth by giant builders; but the tool in these tales was nearly always a stone-hammer. Or a hammer of stone.

The giantess, for her part, carried her stones peaceably in her apron. This was either for building purposes or because she was

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clearing them off agricultural land, for hers is not the destructive or idle stone-throwing of the giants, but ordered, constructive labour. Often 'ordered' in more senses than one, as the giantesses were seldom the better men. It was also often frustrated labour. For her apron-strings were given to breaking, and when this happened she would find the spilled stones simply forming another feature of the landscape. The Mount giantess was sent to fetch granite from the mainland for her husband to use in building up St Michael's Mount. She had got halfway back with some greenstone that had happened to be rather nearer for her, when she was kicked by the angry giant. The apron-strings broke and the 'Chapel Rock' of today still lies where it fell, as a memorial to her. And three times Bolster, the St Agnes giant, sent his wife toiling up on to St Agnes Beacon with an apronful of stones; as a result of her labour there are three cairns there - one for each apronful. This may have been tiresome for her but at least it was not frustration. She was evi- dently dumping unwanted stones cleared from a patch of ground meant for agriculture and she left the place whence she had got the stones very clean of them, 'though the surrounding farms are as stony' we are told, 'as the Fourborough Downs.' The place that she cleaned was the giant's tenement, still called 'Bolster'.

But the scattered stones called the 'Apron Strings' on Rill head- land between Mullion and the Lizard in Cornwall, were to have formed a smuggler's bridge over to France, when the stone- carrier's apron-strings broke. And in this case the carrier with the apron was a male 'evil spirit'.3 There is a Welsh tale in which the Devil's 'lap' played the part of a giantess's 'apron'. There may also have been some confusion between apron and lap because of the small flat 'lap-stones' used by cobblers to hammer leather on: a giant cobbler threw any number of them from Godolphin to Tregonning Hill, where they formed a cairn.

The giants also played 'quoits'. There is apparently no Cornish word for 'quoit', the disc used in the game. But by the eighteenth century the Cornish called the stone-chamber dolmens, 'Quoits', because their capstones were supposed to resemble the discs and to have been used for them by giants or the deputising Devil. The capstone of Lesquite in Lanivet and of Coit near the northern Castle-an-Dinas were Devil-flung; Zennor, Mulfra and Lanyon

3 Male evil spirit: Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folklore. 18

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were giants' quoits. Boulders and the small capstones of cists were also used. Near the mouth of a St Hilary mine-shaft called the 'Giant's Shaft', lay the 'Giant's Coit', a worked stone with a sunken boss, said to have been flung at St Hilary church-steeple, St Michael's Mount and the Land's End; but as the giant's strength failed him in each case, the so-called quoit remains as proof of his failure.

One menhir or longstone is a giant's staff. Another near the stone circles called Hurlers and now carved with a cross, was once a giant waiting to catch and throw the Hurlers' gold ball over St Cleer church-tower: this George Borrow was told. The earthen barrows that Dr Borlase explored in the Scillies, were called giants' graves, and got him into trouble. The long barrow in Warbstowbury earthwork, near Boscastle, is a Giant's grave - or Arthur's.

What the giants looked like, can be pieced out from the various stories. The great earthworks they lived in seemed naturally the work of huge men. So they ranged in height from Bolster, who could stride a double league - down to Tom of Bowjeyheer in Ludgvan. And he was a mere eight foot. They are said to have dwindled in size from generation to generation. They often had other physical peculiarities as well. The giants of Trencrom and the Mount had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, while the Treryn giant was both deaf and dumb.

In character they were not bad on the whole - or shall we say, might have been worse. Bottrell says of the Land's End, that 'all traditional giant stories, in this district, describe them as amiable protectors of the common folk who lived near their castles. They were, however, invariably stupid and often did mischief unwittingly by having more strength than sense'. Like the giant of Carn Galva and the young man with the too-thin skull. '"Oh, my son, my son" ', bellowed the giant of Carn Galva after 'tapping' a young man on the head, ' "Why didn't they make the shell of thy noddle stronger? A es as plum (soft) as a pie-crust, dough-baked, and made too thin by the half! How shall I ever pass the time without thee to play bob and mop-and-heede (Hide and seek)?" '

There were what Bottrell called 'misrepresentations'. For in- stance, it was said that ghoul-like giants used to dig up the dead in

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the churchyard of Carminow in St Mawgan in Meneage parish, and as they avoided all the pitfalls made to trap them, the church had to be moved to the present site in St Mawgan churchtown.4 There was also the wife of the last giant of Tregonning Hill, 'three

generations ago', who would play on the fears of her neighbours and threaten them. ' "Bee Bo-Bum", she would fiercely cry, "I will have sumpan to ait. Ef my old man were to come round he wud kill tha !" '5 That is in the very best tradition of 'Fee Fi Fo Fum', in

spite of initial differences: but on the other hand she always left

money in exchange, and the giant was blind. There is the Nan-

cledry giant. He followed the quite ordinary giant's occupation of stone-throwing. At Trencrom, in his case. And the boulders he used still litter Nancledry Bottoms and the fields. There was really quite a homely touch about him when Bottrell wrote, for he had lived in a certain thatched house whose cob-walls were still

mouldering away about 1861. Yet twenty years later we hear that he 'lived principally on little children, whom he is said to have swallowed whole'.

Or take Trebiggan. About the end of the seventeenth century, Carew heard that tinners, a little earlier, had found the bones of an extremely big skeleton in a 'vault' or kist near a Land's End village. And this village, he said, was called 'Trebegean, in English, the towne of the giants grave'. Probably the downs and farm of

Trevegean, near St Just airport: Cornish 'Tre' is not necessarily a 'town' in the English sense. Anyhow, this find fully justified the name of the place to the people - who were no etymologists. And it evidently justified the making of a giant story too. A story of a gigantic giant - a proper child-scarer. 'Often', wrote Hunt, 'have I heard the unruly urchins of this neighbourhood threatened with "Trebiggan", a vast man, with arms so long that he could take men out of the ships passing by the Land's End, and place them on the Longships'. He did this by way of a joke, people said. But his daily dinner, chicks, was of little children fried on a flat rock near the cave.

It is like the story told of a Portreath giant who lived in a sea- washed chasm once known as the Giant's Zawn or Cave, but marked 'Ralph's' - that is, 'Rafe's' Cupboard, on today's maps.

4 Traditions - S. Rundle, Penzance Nat. Hist. & Antiq. Soc., I885-6. 6 Bee-Bo-Bum: S. Rundle, R.I.C., I888, v. 9.

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He was the terror of the St Ives fishermen. If the ships were in water too deep for him, he sank them by slinging rocks from the cliffs above. These formed a reef - as if he had dropped 'lap- stones'. Or he would lie in wait, wading a mile out in order to tie the ships to his girdle and drag them in, like Gulliver with the Lilliputians. Then he would pick out the fat sailors and eat them, throwing the others overboard. But Bottrell says many people thought the tale - with its grim flippancy about fat sailors, was largely due to the fisherman's horror of the tides that devoured men, and grabbed ships, and washed any corpses that floated, into the gulping 'Cupboard'. If there were such stories about the Giants' Caves near Mousehole and Lamorna Cove, they have been forgotten. The roof of the Zawn fell in 'when the giant died'.

The giant is spoken of as Wrath, spelled W.R.A.T.H., and the Rafe or Ralph of the Cupboard probably came from this word. Wrath wasn't the giant's name: he was a wrath. About 1727 Tonkin refers to a neighbouring 'famous wrath or giant, called Bolster', as the Wrath and says 'they still call' that fatal sea-outlet the 'Wrath's Hole'. The only Cornish word this might be, says an expert,6 is one which can take the form wrdth; but it means 'hag'. The 1928 O.E.D. word W.R.A.I.T.H. can also take that form - and mean water-spirit. One must just take Tonkin's word for it, that a wrath was a giant; and that apparently only these two giants with their sea-caves and holes, were known to be called wrdths.

Bolster was at least no ogre, only a bad husband. And his activities were on land; though a cave was his end. His odd name is probably corrupt Cornish, and certainly not what it seems to an English ear. It is still the name of the tenement he owned, but it would be hard to say which of them named the other. A great linear earthwork nearly two miles long crosses a piece of land from coast to coast, cutting off a tract of the richest tin country in St Agnes parish. Giant's work, of course. Bolster built it. Just as the Devil - or a giant - built one running from Lerryn to Looe one day when he had nothing to do. Bolster was so huge he could span six miles in a stride, one foot on top of the Beacon and the other on Carn Brea, and stoop his great head down to drink out of Chapel Porth Well. And in proof of this a stone in Chapel Porth Valley bears his fingerprints. He cast his eyes on the saint, Agnes, or her predeces-

6 R. Morton Nance. 21

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sor. But Agnes was another sort of match for him. He met his end when she persuaded him just to fill a certain hole on the cliff-top, in a little healthy blood-letting and he bled to death, for the hole opened into the sea. Then she tumbled him overcliff. The hole is not far from her chapel and well; and the sea-washed cave below 'being streak'd all over with bright red streaks like blood' was probably enough to start the story. A physician got rid of the giant of the Dodman promontory in Gorran in the same way, and if this was not coincidence it was the form of flattery we all know of. But the Dodman giant got buried - in 'an oblong square sunk into the rock' we are told.

Some of the giants' names are not Cornish. 'Cormelian' or 'Cormoran' was the name of the Mount giant in the chapbook stories of Jack the Giant Killer printed in Nottingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is not local. The name 'Blunderbuss', given by Robert Hunt to a Lelant giant, comes from the same source. 'John of Gaunt' was the incredible name of the giant of Carn Brea Hill near Redruth. His Wheel, Cradle, and Coffin are among the boulders. He was 'about the last of the giants', it is said; and he could take the usual huge stride - seven miles, from Carn Brea Castle to Tucking Mill Stile. He lived in that little 'castle' perched on the hill. This had served as a hunting-lodge for the Bassetts of Tehidy in the eighteenth century; for this is Bassett country. And it was by a grant from John of Gaunt in the form of a rhymed tenure, that the parent Devon line of the Bassetts was supposed to have held its family seat of Umberleigh.7 That seems the only possible explanation of the giant's name.

Bellerus, as a name for a giant, comes from seventeenth-century England. The 'very fierce' giant of Maen near the Land's End, Bottrell wrote, was 'proud of his descent from old blustering Bellerus, who was said to have lived thereabouts in days of yore'. But the origin of this Bellerus is in Milton's Lycidas -

'Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold....

7 Western Antiquary, Vol. I, p. 7. Queries 24: 'I, J. of G.... Bumberlie'. 'I John of Gaunt; Do give the graunt Of all my land in fee; From me and mine - To thee and thine - Thou Bassett of Bumberlie.'

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There was no such name as Bellerus 'in the catalogue of the Cornish giants', wrote Wharton, the eighteenth-century commentator on Milton; and Halliwell and Bottrell admit that it was 'now unknown to oral tradition'. Milton had apparently made Bellerus up for himself out of Belerium, the old name the Roman geographers gave to the Land's End promontory. For the Cambridge Ms. of the Lycidas shows what that second line had originally been:

'Sleep'st by the fable of Corineus old' .. .8

And there was a Corineus 'fable'. Geoffrey of Monmouth took the name from the Aeneid for the companion of Trojan Brute, to whom, he said, Cornwall was given. Cornwall itself was named after Corineus. 'And naught', said Geoffrey, 'gave him greater pleasure than to wrestle with the giants, of whom was greater plenty there than in any of the provinces that had been shared amongst his old comrades.' One of the giants Corineus wrestled with, was Goemagog,9 and they called the high cliff Corineus flung him over, 'Goemagot's Leap' - or Lamgoemagot. It was on Plymouth Hoe that this wrestling-match was supposed to have taken place, and in 1494 and later, figures of Goemagot and Corineus were re-cut in the turf on the supposed site.1' I do not propose to enter into the vexed question of Gog and Magog, Gogmagog-Goemagot - but only wish to remark that as Geoffrey evidently knew something of the fame of Cornish wrestling, he may also have had some Cornish evidence for that 'plenty' of giants he speaks of.

Possibly the earliest recorded Cornish name for a giant, is the one we owe to Leland, who was King's Antiquary to Henry the Eighth in 1533. He visited the 'ruines' of 'Tredine Castel', that is, Treryn cliff-castle in St Levan, and there he 'hard say that one Myendu was lord of it. Myendu, blak mouth or chimme', he explains. Read 'chinne' for the last word, and you get the name myn-du or 'black-muzzle'.'1 And Miendu, that is, 'Black Face' the

8 David Masson, M.A., Ll.D., Poetical Works of John Milton, etc. with Memoir, I89o, Vol. 3: Notes on Lycidas.

''Goemagog' in Griscolm's and Faral's editions of Geoffrey's Historia, says Prof. R. S. Loomis in correspondence. '.... the Welsh redaction of Geoffrey (Jesus Coll. Ms. LCI) and Ross's Historia Regum Angliae etc. by Hearne, 1745, have 'Gogmagog.'

10 Records of the Corporation of Plymouth - from an old Audit Book; quoted in detail in White Horses and other Hill Figures, M. Marples, 1949.

11 Min Du, 'Black Muzzle', is a modern dog's name in Brittany; R. M. Nance. The Victoria History, suggests Pednmendu - Nance differs: Tredine is Treryn.

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name was 'according to an old tradition' in 1861. Poised on a cliff edge between Treryn and Porthcurno, was a Giant's Quoit or boulder flung by this Miendu.

But nineteenth-century Bottrell first said there was no name for the Treryn giant. Then he said it was Dan Dynas. And then he said it was 'Den an Dynas', the 'man of the Castle'. So in his version of the tales this giant is mostly nameless, as well as deaf and dumb. He hurled boulders at ships from Carnole on Treryn, and at his neighbour, the giant who lived in Maen cliff-castle on the other side of the Land's End. Skewjack Moor, where their lands met, was littered with flung boulders. Not to speak of the stones in a field behind Sennen church and in the neighbourhood of Mayon, dented

by the Maen giant's great foot, or his back, or used as his ladle and basin. It was this Maen giant's child, a great thing as big as a man when it was still wearing a bib, that Dan Dynas stole to pacify his own childless and tetchy wife, An' or Aunt Venna. But it grew up to be her lover. She pushed the old giant, her husband, over a precipice and he cursed her as he died; so she became stone. She got confused with the great Logan Rock, and was called the Logan Rock's 'Lady': 'When tempests rage, or anything else excites her' Bottrell wrote, 'she rocks to and fro, but her movements are languid with age or sorrow .. '

But in the words of a man in his eighties, who evidently believed what he said, wrote Halliwell, one of the giants ' "stabbed the other in the belly with a knife" '; and the two who remained lived happily and guiltily ' "for many years" '- at Treryn. The great jagged headland still stands as it did when the old giant first willed it up out of the sea. And the egg-shaped stone, the 'key' of the castle, is still safe where the dying giant put it in a hollow it cannot be got out of. Though the waves wash it round.

Holiburn is the name of the giant of Carn Galva in Morvah parish - when he is given one. With Bottrell he is nameless; he is that simple and unmarried great thing, who died of grief 'seven years or so' after he had cracked the too-thin skull of the young man in play: 'Oh, my son, my son...' - you will remember. Hunt's Holiburn, also, mourned the killed boy. But he married a far- mer's daughter and fathered, says Hunt, a 'very fine race, still bearing a name not very dissimilar'. This was probably the sur- name Honney, which is short for 'Hannibal': Hannibal's Carn,

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flanking Carn Galva, is said to have been named after Holiburn. Both Bottrell and Hunt had another giant in Morvah besides

Holiburn. He, too, was inoffensive, remarked Bottrell, and said nothing else about him. But with Hunt, he was a 'very savage old creature' who lived on a hill and had twenty sons. What later became Morvah's Fair originated with him. Each year on the first day of August, he would get all his family round him; and vast crowds of onlookers sitting on the rough stone walls of the fields - for he was harmless that day - would drink his health and watch while he carried out on the slopes of Carn Galva, mysterious rites either never known or now forgotten; or walked to Bosporthennis Croft to perform them. A field on Carn Galva slopes is still called the Giant's Field. When he died, the jollifications were simply shifted from the first day of August to the first Sunday in August, which was the parish 'Feast Day'. And it lost nothing in vigour. They celebrated it to the point of the vicar's public remonstrance, in 1750. But the change had its influence on the story, and the giant (being dead) was now made to visit Parc-an-Chapel Well on that day, and go to church at Morvah, 'by way of countenancing the feast.'12

The giant met a violent end. A character called Tom wanted his hill and told another character called Jack the Tinner or of the Hammer, to get rid of him - or there would be no marriage between Jack and Tom's daughter, Jennifer. So Jack started 'pitching quoits' at the giant's house during the games played at a local wedding - having already weakened the roof of an adit driven into the hill the giant lived on. Out came the giant, like thunder; charged down the hill at Jack's taunts and disappeared through the ground. For ever. Just to make sure they hurled boulders down after him. And the anniversaries of the wedding of Jack and his Jennifer - and of Tom's son and a Morvah girl - were celebrated until their descendants were so many, that the celebration became like a fair - 'and the remembrance of this fair is observed in Morvah down to the present time.'

As late as 1889 the members of a Cornish antiquarian society went down a lane east of Morvah church. To the west of this lane was a stone of about a ton weight. They were told this was the Giant's Grave by tradition, and the ' "old people" used to hear

12 Penzance Nat. Hist., 1888-89, Annual Excursion to Morvah.

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voices from beneath it'. They were also told it marked the pit-fall made of an old mine-adit by Jack, and how when the giant came

storming down the hill and fell in they piled stones on him and crushed him. If one walked three times round the stone and threw stones at it, even now one might still hear him roar .... It was this

'happy event' - the giant's death --said the guide, that was commemorated by Morvah Feast.13 So even the credit for the Fair, shifted from the giant.

Next comes the story of Jack the Giant Killer, known everywhere. It was being sold by travelling sellers of chapbooks as the 'Pleasant and Delightful History of Jack and the Giants', at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its Jack was a farmer's son, born near the Land's End in the reign of King Arthur - which for one thing is

only another way of saying 'a long while ago', though it is capable of another interpretation. Hearing of the desperate reward offered for killing the Mount giant, who was wading to the mainland and carrying off cattle wholesale on his back or strung from his belt, Jack dug a deep pit, covered it with long sticks and straw and blew his horn, Tantivee, Tantivee! Out rushed the giant - and the whole Mount shook with his fall into the pit. There Jack finished him off. And for this he was given the giant's treasure, the title of 'Giantkiller' and a sword with an embroidered belt that bore the words we all know from our nursery-days:

'Here's the right valiant Cornishman Who slew the giant Cormelian.'

Jack went on into Wales, giant-killing; but that is only of Welsh interest. What does interest Cornwall is that Jack in his further chapbook adventures kills no giant but the Cornish one by using a pitfall - which is evidently quite a Cornish method of dealing with giants, when one thinks of the Carminow ones and the one at Morvah as well as the one at the Mount. Also, there are two Cornishisms: the way the Welsh giant addresses the Giant-killer with the now world-wide nickname for all Cornishmen- 'Cousin Jack'; and that other one by which Jack respectfully addressed the giant as 'Uncle', regardless of relationship.

Halliwell, speaking of the Cornish incident, thought it not likely 13 Ibid.

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that the 'printed story was founded on the traditions of the county'. Though he added that 'aged people' did have their own versions of the tale. I think he is right. There are local accounts of the giant's end which are more or less in keeping with the printed tale; Jack dug the pit under a large stone with a cross on it, that stood on the shore opposite Marazion and immediately the giant put foot on the stone it tilted, throwing him violently into the pit. Some added that the pit was filled with water, and the giant drowned. Local tradition may therefore have absorbed some of the printed version.

But it was not the tradition of the County. The Cornish had their own Jack, the Tinner or the Tinkeard, or Tinker. In the long Cornish drolls or tales about Tom of Bowjeyheer and Lelant, and his friend, Jack the Tinner, for example, Tom is kind to the Mount giant. And Jack does not even meet him. That he does kill that rather out-of-character 'bad' giant at Morvah under circumstances very like those of the Mount affair in the 'Pleasant History', makes it look as if the Morvah version itself had not always belonged to the droll of Tom and Jack in which it appears, but had wandered from the Mount of the 'Pleasant History' in the wake of the name 'Jack'.

The Mount giant of the drolls lives to get old and toothless. In the story of his last cattle raid, which was told to Bottrell by an old Lelant tinner as part of the Tom and Jack droll, the hungry old creature on the Mount wades across to steal a bullock belonging to the enchanter of Pengersec on the mainland, and is made to spend the night spell-bound in the rising sea unable to move until morning, with the bellowing bullock tied round his neck. It is the last time he ventures to leave the Mount. Kind Tom of Lelant visits the old giant, finds him starving, and brings over his own Aunt Nancy from Gulval with all her butter and eggs, which the giant buys. As giants eat a lot, and this one paid for it, Aunt Nancy's family became the wealthiest in the parish of Gulval. And that story of an immobilized thief is quite popular in these parts; it is told twice, each time of a different eighteenth-century Mr Williams of Sennen and an old woman stealing furze bundles.

These drolls about Tom and Jack were recorded by Bottrell and Hunt about the middle of the nineteenth century. They heard from 'a miner, on the floor of Ding-Dong Mine', from a 'farmer living in

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Lelant' - and so on. The districts covered are Lelant, Morvah, and Ludgvan parishes.... The drolls begin with an eight-foot Tom the Hedger, of Bowjeyheer in Ludgvan, leaving his widowed mother in order to drive an ox-drawn wain-load of beer to St Ives for Honney Chyngwens. Honney was a famous tin-dealer and brewer, and also mayor of Marketjew or Marazion - according to the drolls, that is, the nearest approach to his name among the real mayors, being William Chirgwin, mayor in 1611. At Crowlas Tom stopped to load single-handed on to a dray, a tree that twelve men couldn't shift. A little farther on he found his way barred by a giant's 'castle-court', but as the road - he said to himself, 'belongs to go straight through here', he went right through the gate and in. Out came old Denbras, fifteen foot of giant, with an elm-tree. So Tom overturned the wain and took the axle-tree and the wheel it was fixed in: but the giant was old, and got his death-blow in spite of every consideration on Tom's part. His last words, in recogni- tion of the fair play of the distressed Tom, were to tell him of the gold, silver and tin-filled caves that lay under the castle, watched over by two dogs who were called Standby and Holdfast - or Catchem and Tearem, according to whether you prefer Bottrell or Hunt. This was on Midsummer Eve. By Midsummer Night Tom had buried the giant, got a wife called Joan, and taken up residence in the castle - which appears to have been in the Towednack hills or else in Ludgvan, near Crowlas.14 And it was now Tom's turn to be challenged. The challenger was a travelling tinker, tool-bag on back and hammer in hand, by name Jack 'the Tinkard', Tinker, or Tinner, alias Jack of the Hammer.15 He was not only a tinker but a tinner, attracted West from his own hilly tin-streaming country, far east of the Tamar, by tales of tin and of rich giants. So he said,

i' Crowlas. O. G. S. Crawford, 'The Work of Giants', Antiquity, June 1936, suggests the earthen bank near Ludgvan Lees, called 'Giant's Grave' on the maps as the obstructing castle. Hunt places it near Ludgvan Lees. Others differ.

15 Tinkeard: Hunt: 'Staen, or ystaen cerdd; a worker in tin'. Mr Nance: 'The Celtic derivation of "tinkeard" is very unsatisfactory. In Welsh ystaen = "tin", but cerdd "art", "craft", the noun from which, cerddor, doesn't mean "crafts- man", but "singer", "musician". In Welsh a "tinker" is tincer from English; "tinman" is alcaydd from another word for "tin", alcan. In Irish stdn is "tin" and cdard is a "workman", "craftsman", etc., but for "tinker", ceard alone is used or else stdnadoir or possibly cdardstain, but never stdncdard. "Tinkeard" has a "d" added to "Tinker", just as "Tinkler" has an "1" and "Tinker" itself has nothing to do with "tin", anyway.' Corres. R.M.N.

Skeat: Tudor English (Levine) - Tinkler. 28

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having taken Tom for the late giant's son. When he had beaten him at singlesticks, the two settled down into partnership. Jack taught Tom how to use a bow and arrows instead of sling-stones and how to make leather coats like his own. These soon became the fashion- able wear of the district. For it was not the chapbook giant-killer's coat of invisibility Cornish Jack had, but one made of black bull's hide, shaped on the wearer's back till it became iron hard and roared like thunder at a blow. Jack it was who rediscovered the balls of richest tin, that made up the neglected grass-covered mounds in the castle-court. It was he who sold this tin to Honney Chyngwens. There was a great feast at Marketjew in celebration of this.

And now the droll annexes from the borders of Mount's Bay, part of another tale-cycle, that of Pengersec. They met him at the feast: Pengersec, the enchanter, tall, swarthy, crafty, beguiling, all that an enchanter should be. He enchanted Tom, literally; but not Jack. Pengersec visited Tom. What he came after, was to ride off with Tom's daughter - says Bottrell, or to find where Tom hid his tin - says Hunt. What he did do, was to make them all helpless under his spells. Then came Jack, and with a blow of his hammer, routed him.

Finally the droll moves to Morvah. Jack was to marry Tom's daughter, Jennifer, and they had built themselves a house there. They called it 'Choon', which means the House on the Down. But Ch in is the name of an Iron Age hill-castle on the edge of Morvah parish. And as what Bottrell says implies that this was supposed to be the Tinner's home, it is not surprising that attempts to make a 'house' of it vary between the prehistoric and the merely rough and old. For instance, the building is described as ordinary in appearance and measurements, with a door, flanked by windows, set in the middle of the front. There is the usual Cornish talfat or half-upper-floor inside. But the proposed bed, a flat slab of stone about twelve feet by eight and raised by other stones four feet from the ground, has more resemblance to those dolmens of the dead which are sometimes called 'beds' - and small wonder: Chin Quoit was its model. There was also a nice prehistoric fogou or artificial 'cave' in addition to the spence and dairy.

And with the already-related death of the bad giant of Morvah, and the wedding celebration which was the beginning of Morvah Fair, the droll ends.

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With regard to Jack: It was a good idea to give the Tinner Chin for his home, Chin hill-castle, with its smelting-furnace and the iron and the tin slag that archaeologists in our century have dis- covered there. He comes into Tom of Bowjeyheer's Cornwall as the Tinner - with a capital T. He is the skilled worker in metals and 'had also', says Bottrell, 'acquired many of the stone-workers'

mysteries among the rest.' He rediscovers the old forgotten wealth of Tin and is skilled in so many things new to the stupid Tom, it is clear he must represent the introduction of at least some advance in the tinners' art into Cornwall. This is a very different Jack from the one in the 'Pleasant History'.

Whatever his origin, 'Tinner' might be only a Cornish naming of him: he is also called Jack of the Hammer. Morvah people can never have ceased telling how he used his hammer not only as a tool but as a weapon for 'killing wolves and smashing the skulls of sea- robbers who landed on the shore to steal the tin'. But a hammer is not in particular a tinner's tool. And this one had more potency than a mere weapon. In his encounter with the enchanter Penger- sec, one blow of the Hammer smashes Pengersec's circlet, which is 'set with seven precious stones, for the planetary signs'. And with the signs he himself makes 'in the air with his hammer, the mode and use of which', says Bottrell, 'are only revealed to the brethren of certain ancient Mysteries', Jack breaks Pengersec's spells. These signs of course may be simple Bottrell. But in the northern countries the sign of the Hammer was as potent as the Cross against evil - and the Tau cross itself, very like a hammer.6. ... And it is quite possible Jack's story was once independent of Tom of Bowjeyheer's.

Now for Tom. One of the most interesting things about this droll is the remarkable similarity between the Tom-Denbras part of it - and the tale of Tom Hickathrift of the Isle of Ely, told in a seventeenth-century chapbook; though the Tom-Denbras part has naturally developed along Cornish lines. Both Toms had widowed mothers. Both were exceptionally strong. Both wrestled. Both startled onlookers by a show of strength on some particular occasion. Finally their mothers drove them to work. Cornish Tom got a job driving a wainload of beer from Marketjew to St Ives, for

16 Johannes Brondsted, The Vikings, p. 273. 30

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Honney Chyngwens; Cambridgeshire Tom got a job with a Lynn brewer, taking beer for him to the Marsh and to Wisbech. The direct way of each Tom was blocked by the fastness of a giant and each decided to take the direct way through. Out, in each case, came the giant. Each Tom took the axle-tree of his cart with one wheel fixed, and with that killed his giant - Cornish Tom, with becoming reluctance. Hickathrift built himself and his mother, Jane, a fine house with his giant's treasure; Cornish Tom took up residence in his killed giant's castle with his wife, Joan. And to each came a lusty Tinker .... each Tinker with a coat of leather so hard that it roared under a blow. . . . Here, with the first and oldest part of the chapbook version, the similarity between droll and chapbook tale ends.

But how did Cornwall come by its version? Through the chap- books? Orally? It was being related as traditional by Cornishmen who were already old at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but was confined, says Hunt, to Lelant, St Ives, Sancreed, Towed- nack, Morvah and Zennor, a small cluster of parishes in the Land's End district. The oldest of the chapbooks on Hickathrift appears to be that in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene, Cambridge, printed between i66o and i69o according to Gomme; and well into the nineteenth century they were still being printed .... Yet why should chapbooks make such an impact on so small an area? Where else have they made it? It is the same question with oral tradition - why here and where else?

There was an oral Fenland Hickathrift tradition in existence before and after the chapbooks, and independent of them. The earliest reference to it is that made by Spelman in his Icenia in I640. He writes of a certain Hickifric of Marshland and Tylney near Wisbech. He says he does not know who this Hickifric may be; but that there is a story derived from ages long past, that he defended his land and fought off his enemies successfully with the axle-tree of his cart for sword, and the wheel as a shield. By the time of the earliest chapbook he is already that plain Tom Hicka- thrift, so strangely paralleled by our Cornish Tom. And like our Tom, from fighting a giant, he has in his own homeland folklore gradually become one himself, with his stones and his stone- throwing. Even his supposed grave in Tylney All Saints church-

3'

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yard is the exact length Cornish Tom would require: eight foot, six inches.... .~ Where chapbook and droll similarity ended, each

county developed its own Tom and Tinker in its own way. ... But what contact gave Cornwall and the Fenland the same tale? Cornwall did not react to the tales of that other Fenman, Hereward.

I can only suggest that all this is the wreck of something large and once generally understood, now lying in pockets of the land that had remembered it whole .... The crux of the Hickifric- Hickathrift tale is the wheel and axle-tree episode: Spelman saw a Scottish parallel to it in the story of Haii, winning the tenth-century battle of Luncarty with his plough-yoke. And at least one writer has suspected a god behind Hickifric.18 There are possibilities: statuettes from the Marne district now in the Musee du Louvre, hold thunderbolts and a wheel.... In Cornwall the emphasis is on the Tinker. He is Jack of the Giants; he has the Hammer. And 'Kettle-vendor', was the name the South Germans gave Thor because of the overhead racket of his thunder-chariot ....

But this is dangerous ground. And my concern is simply with Cornish giants. Those simple giants... our Tom and our Jack, who began as giant-killers, and themselves ended their careers as the 'Giants of Towednack'. ....

Tom stepped quietly into Denbras's shoes: he was after all eight foot high on his own merit. And when people tell of the Giant of Morvah and of his twenty sons and of the Fair that resulted from their meetings, it is Jack, of wlkom they speak, says Bottrell. For his descendants, 'for more glory, made him out to be a giant. ....' 'Many of the ancient families of Morvah and the adjacent parishes had their rise' in Jack of the Hammer and An' Jennifer his wife. And among the descendants of Tom were the Trewhellas, and the Tregarthens, the Trenwiths, the Curnows and the Hoskins.... The Cornish have a fellow-feeling for their giants.

But not all the giants were peaceably represented after death by the Trewhellas, etcetera. . ... For the most part their spirits very actively guarded their old haunts - as spriggans, the goblins of the fairy tribes. But that is another tale.

"1 Miss E. M. Porter, 'Folk Life and Traditions of the Fens', Folklore, Vol. 72, December 1961, pp. 590-I.

8i T. C. Lethbridge, 'Gogmagog: The Buried Gods'. 19 E. Hull, Folklore of the British Isles, p. I86. Statuettes in the Musee du

Louvre, carrying thunderbolt and wheel.

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