In 1552, Elis Gruffydd, a Welshman turned English soldier who spent much of his life in Calais, published his lengthy Cronicl Chwech Oes y Byd (The Chronicle of the Six Ages of the
World), which narrates the history of man from the beginning of time until the reign of Henry
VIII. His writing demonstrates his erudition and exhibits a clear understanding of contemporary political and cultural issues. Cronicl Chwech Oes y Byd is equal parts chronicle, memoir, and folklore compendium: Elis deftly incorporates legendary Welsh tales as well as stories drawn from his personal experience as a Tudor soldier into the framework of universal history.1
Throughout the text, he juxtaposes Welsh oral and folk material with his written historical sources, occasionally privileging the former over the latter when they contradict. Like many of his contemporaries, Elis also expresses a deep interest in the accuracy of Galfridian history and its role in the development of a Welsh national historiography; his chronicle weaves Welsh, English, Latin, and French sources to defend the reputation of the Welsh pseudohistorical tradition in the face of English and continental attacks against its veracity.2 However, he does not defend the
tradition blindly. Jerry Hunter has suggested that Elis positions himself as a canolwr diwylliannol (“cultural middleman”) between the medieval chronicle tradition and modern humanist
scholarship who willingly exposes the logical inconsistencies in the Galfridian legend.3 His competing desires to defend medieval Welsh history (and thus Welsh identity) and to engage in contemporaneous historical debates often collide, resulting in a polysemous and, at times, conflicted text.
1 For a brief history of Elis and his chronicle, see Thomas Jones, “A Welsh Chronicler in Tudor England,” Welsh History Review 1.1 (1960): 1-17.
2 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, “Portread Elis Gruffydd o’r Brenin Arthur” in Ysgrifau Beirniadol XXIII, Ed.
J.E. Caerwyn Williams (Dinbych: Gwasg Gee, 1997), 118-133.
This tension clearly informs the section of Elis’s chronicle usually entitled Ystori’r Llong
Foel, or “The Story of the Barren Ship,” which is an imaginative retelling of the legend of Albina
and her giant offspring found in the Anglo-Latin “De origine gigantium.”4 Although he includes the narrative in his chronicle, Elis equivocates with regard to its truthfulness, calling this origin story into question and hinting at alternative histories regarding the foundation of Britain:
Ac o ddechreuad preswylua yr ynys hon J mae llaweroedd o ymraualion
oppiniwns a dwediadau hryuedd. Achos hrai a ddengys mae’r ail henw a vu ar yr ynys yma vu Albion, a’r hennw nesa ar y uu arnai hi yn ol hynny vu Ynys y Keuri ne ynys Brydain Vawr, ac yn ol hynny Lloegyr. J mae yn ysbys J bob darlleawdyr o bob vn o’r ddwy Jaith, megis ac J mae kronick o Gymraeg ac o Sayssonaeg yn dangos yn ddiymrauael, vod J wr a elwid Diackleshian, yr hwn, megis ac J mae’r ysdori yma yn dangos, ydoedd yn vrenhin o Syria, ddeudeg ar hugain o ferched, y rhain oll, megis ac J mae yr ysdori yn dangos, a brioded ynn yr un dydd a deuddeg ar hugain o vrenhinoedd
And concerning the beginning of the inhabitation of this island, there are many diverse opinions and wondrous stories. Some say that the second name of the island was Albion, and its next name after that was the Island of the Giants or the Island of Great Britain, and after that, England. It is clear to every reader of both languages, as the Welsh and English chronicles uniformly show, that there was a man named Diocletian who (as the story goes) was king of Syria and had thirty- two daughters, all of whom (as the story goes) were married on the same day to thirty-two kings.5
The story continues as follows: after their wedding, the thirty-two sisters murder their husbands and are placed in a barren ship stripped of its sails and rudders. They are exiled and left to drift at sea until they reach the island of Britain. Once they arrive at the as-yet unpopulated island, they christen their new homeland Albion after the eldest sister. Their peace does not last long: they are promptly seduced by a group of native incubi who impregnate them with a race of giants. These giants become the indigenous population of Albion and rule it until Brutus, the legendary Trojan progenitor of the Britons, eradicates them upon his own arrival to the land. Elis rejects much of this story as unbelievable; he consistently draws attention to the outlandish elements of the tale
4An edition of Elis’s version of the tale can be found, along with two other sixteenth-century Welsh
redactions in Brynley Roberts, “Ystori’r Llong Foel,” Bulletin Board of Celtic Studies 18.4 (1960): 337-62. Roberts labels Elis’s redaction Version C.
and distances himself from them with his persistent interjection megis J mae’r ysdori yn dangos (“as the story goes”). He claims to doubt the legend of Albina and her sisters for several reasons, some more compelling than others. He expresses skepticism that the women would not have encountered inhabited land before they reached Britain. He also notes the unlikelihood that one king would have produced so many wicked daughters. Elis ultimately concludes that the name Albion likely derives from the Latin name for the White Cliffs of Dover that Roman visitors would have seen as they approached the island, and he cites the corresponding ancient Welsh name yr Wen Ynys (“the White Island”) as further proof for this theory.
In this section of the text, Elis’s own incredulity closely mirrors that of his primary source, John Rastell’s 1529 The Pastyme of the People.6 Elis appeals to his readers’ common
sense and warns that the belief in such tall tales has led many other nations to mock the Welsh:
mae kenhedlaethau a nashiwns eraill…yn chwerthin gwattwar am yr ehudrwydd a’r ffolineb
yssydd ynnom ni am roddi yn kreduniaeth a’n koel ar ysdori a chwedyl mor anghysbell ac mor
anghyffelib (“other peoples and nations…ridicule and mock the credulity and the foolishness that
exists among us for placing our credence and faith in a story and fable so absurd and so unlikely”).7 Despite his disdain for what he views as the gullibility of Welsh, however, Elis paradoxically seems to accept the existence of a race of native British giants. While he doubts many of the specific details of the Albina legend, he is reluctant to fully disregard the
foundational role giants play in much of early Welsh history. Although a large portion of Elis’s version of the llong foel legend is an almost verbatim translation of Rastell’s history, Elis considers the existence of giants much more carefully than his source material. Rastell
6 John Rastell, The Pastyme of the People (London, 1529). A facsimile and critical edition of the text can
be found in Albert J. Geritz, ed., The Pastyme of the People and A New Boke of Purgatory by J. Rastell (New York: Garland, 1985). An edition of Rastell’s version of the Albina legend can be found in Roberts, “Ystori’r Llong Foel,” 361-362. For more on the relationship between Cronicl Chwech Oes y Byd and The
Pastyme of the People, see Hunter, “Difyrrwch y Bobl, Soffestri’r Bobl Seisnig: John Rastell ac Elis
Gruffydd” in Soffestri’r Saeson, 51-77.
unequivocally rejects the legend’s historicity, stating that “I se nat why those chylderne so gendred shuld be Gyauntes;”8 Elis, on the other hand, concedes the implausibility of giants, but
remains open to the possibility that this aspect of the story can be verified. His translation engages theological and philosophical debates regarding the theoretical, if not actual, probability of the existence of giants. Elis cannot simply dismiss the giants of Albion as pseudohistorical fantasy; whereas Rastell discredits stories concerning such monsters, Elis gives them his full consideration. The Welshman editorializes that although natural wonders such as giants and incubi are no longer present in the modern era, written and oral evidence supports claims of their existence throughout antiquity. Histories, both secular and religious, describe such creatures, and thus their existence cannot be uniformly denied. He concludes that the llong foel legend may be historical fantasy, but not once does he state that the presence of giants in prehistoric Britain would be impossible, instead only, in his words, yn sickyr hryuedd Jawn “surely very wondrous.”9
In other sections of his chronicle, Elis actively defends the existence of giants and other equally remarkable creatures. For example, he includes marvelous tales concerning the labors of Hercules and the reincarnations of Taliesin within the pages of his history.10 The wide variety of legendary and folkloric sources upon which Elis draws suggests that he was not averse to incorporating the wondrous into conventional histories. In fact, Elis doubts certain aspects of the
llong foel legend not for its inclusion of monsters, but for its relative lack of them. He suggests
that Albina and her sisters could not have wandered from Syria to Britain without meeting the many marvelous people who live on the world’s edge. He cites the mappae mundi, the medieval
8 Ibid., 362. 9 Ibid., 360.
10 Thomas Jones, ed., "Ystorya Ercwlf, pt. 1," Bulletin Board of Celtic Studies 10.4 (1941): 284-97; Ibid.,
“Ystorya Ercwlf, pt. 2,” Bulletin Board of Celtic Studies 11.1 (1941): 21-30; Ibid., “Ystorya Ercwlf, pt. 3,”
Bulletin Board of Celtic Studies 11.2 (1943): 85-91; Bianca Ross, "Elis Gruffud, 'The Soldier of Calais',
and his Version of the Story of Hercules," Studia Celtica Japonica 8 (1996): 47-57; and Patrick K. Ford, ed. Ystoria Taliesin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
world maps whose borders teem with illustrations of various monstrous creatures, as proof: the Syrian ship would have chyuwrdd a thir mewn ymrauaelion leoedd kyn dyuod ohoni J Vor
Ogshion, yr hwn sydd ynn amgelchynv yr ynnys hon, megis ac J gall y ssawl bobyl yssydd olygus ac ynn ddyssgedig yn y Mappa Mwndi (“touched land in a number of places before it came to the
Ocean Sea, the one that encircles this island, as the many people who are skilled and learned in the Mappa Mundi know”).11 For the story to conform to classical and medieval understandings of
history and geography, it should feature more, not fewer, topographic and ethnographic curiosities.
One might wonder why Elis, a worldly and educated man, found himself defending, however tepidly, the legend of the giants of Albion. The answer to this question lies in nature of the medievalism of sixteenth-century Wales. Although both humanist and Protestant scholarly methods established a foothold among Welsh thinkers of the period, they did not replace the medieval literary traditions that prized the marvelous and extraordinary as inherent to a Welsh national and historical consciousness. The rise of Welsh antiquarianism in the late sixteenth century allowed these scholars to seamlessly blend medieval texts and modern historical methods, which resulted in a wave of treatises debating the use and disuse of the medieval Welsh literary and historical heritage.12 In these texts, Welsh historians often promoted narratives from the
medieval chronicle tradition and rewrote them for new political ends.
Although a strong antiquarian impulse can be seen in Welsh manuscript and print culture from the late middle ages onward, late sixteenth-century interest in medieval Welsh, and in particular Galfridian, history was spurred by external forces: namely, the histories of English and continental humanist scholars such as Rastell and Polydore Vergil, whose writings cast doubt over early British history derived from Welsh (or in the case of Geoffrey, pseudo-Welsh) sources.
11 Roberts, “Ystori’r Llong Foel,” 360.
12 R. Geraint Gruffydd, “The Renaissance and Welsh Literature” in The Celts and the Renaissance: Tradition and Innovation, Eds. Glanmor Williams and Robert Owen Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales
In particular, they considered the marvelous elements of these histories, such as the giants of Albion, proof of the general unreliability of medieval Welsh history. This history had long featured in the political rhetoric surrounding Welsh culture and identity. By the late fifteenth century, it gained international relevance when Henry Tudor employed its imagery to garner Welsh support for his military campaign and invest his claims to the English crown with historical prestige and precedent. Because of its long life in the Welsh collective imagination, Welsh scholars felt compelled to defend this marvelous pseudohistory in the face of the humanist attacks in the mid-sixteenth century. Part of this defense took the form of an increased production of Middle Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, the Brut y
Brenhinedd, which experienced a surge in popularity during the early modern period.13 Others
such as Elis Gruffydd composed humanist works of their own in Welsh, Latin, and English that supported the value, if not veracity, of medieval Welsh historical narrative.
This historical revisionism led to the creation of a modern Welsh identity intrinsically tied to medieval narrative. This medievalist self-identification often and uncomfortably drew Welsh intellectuals in two competing directions. On one hand was the desire to participate in contemporary European intellectual trends that increasingly called into question the historical worth of the Matter of Britain, especially such unlikely elements as giants, Trojans, and Arthurian empire; on the other hand was that the fact that much of Welsh historical and bardic lore was deeply rooted in these same myths. By denying the claims of pseudohistory, Welsh historians would thus be denying their own cultural heritage and their claim to a rich antiquity equal to that of Rome. This dilemma took on greater urgency as the Acts of Union, and the subsequent legislative and linguistic changes they engendered, posed genuine challenges to the concept of a Welsh identity independent of English cultural hegemony. The Acts threatened to absorb the
13 Graham C.G. Thomas, “From Manuscript to Print: I. Manuscript” in A Guide to Welsh Literature, 1282- 1550, Vol. 3, Eds. A.O.H. Jarman, Gwilym Rees Hughes, and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: University of
Welsh into a unified British body politic that ensured the erasure of regional and ethnic traditions and histories. In this environment, the medieval narratives that had argued for the uniqueness of Wales based on its geographical and zoological mirabilia found renewed political relevance. As sixteenth-century Welshmen defended medieval Welsh legend, they defended their own viability in the modern world. In this chapter, I will provide a brief historical background of the
controversy concerning medieval insular origin legends that followed the publication of Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia. In particular, I will examine the role that giants played in Welsh and English histories of the period. By doing so, I will demonstrate how medieval literary tropes helped shape the political discourse of the Tudor era within Wales.