DEVONSHIRE
THE FOUNDING
OF BRITAIN:
BRUTE THE TROJAN AND GOGMAGOG
MICHAEL DACRE
Michael Dacre has been a professional storyteller specialising in traditional tales and legends from the West Country for over twenty years.
This is the Devonshire legend to cap them all - the founding of Britain by Brutus the Trojan at Totnes. The stone is still there, halfway up the High Street, to prove the truth of the tale!
After the fall of Troy, when the Greeks took the city by means of the wooden horse devised by the wily Odysseus, some of the Trojans, led by Aeneas, fled the carnage, rapine and pillage and set sail into the Mediterranean, coming at length to the shores of Italy, where they founded a new city that would one day be Rome.
Aeneas's son Ascanius had a son called Sylvius, and when Sylvius's wife was about to give birth, Ascanius had his wizards surround the bed to predict the child's future and whether it would be a boy or a girl. The wizards duly intoned their tone-deaf incantations, drank their hallucinogenic potions, lit their noxious concoctions and examined their reeking entrails, thus by art-magic terrifying the young mother out of her wits. They pronounced that the child was a boy who would be the death of his mother and father, who would be outlawed, outcast and exiled and who would found a race and country whose power and fame would extend over the whole world.
Nor were the wizards out in their forecast. The mother died in giving birth to the boy, who was duly named Brute, and in his sixteenth year Brute killed his father in a hunting accident. The huntsmen drove the deer in front of them and Brute, taking aim, loosed a fateful arrow which whistled through the air and struck Sylvius under the left pap. He died instantly. Brute's surviving relatives were uneasy at the proximity of a boy who had killed his parents, so the lad was exiled and made his way to Greece, where he freed the enslaved Trojans, numbering some 7,000, and in 320 ships this outlawed people, having no country to call their own, embarked on their greatest adventure, sailing into the Mediterranean and into the unknown.
On the misty morning of the third day, they came to the uninhabited island of Leogecia, which had been laid waste by pirates some years earlier. Brute sent a party of men to spy out the land and, after killing many deer in the forest, they chanced upon the ruins of a city, overgrown by trees and undergrowth. Among these eerie and abandoned buildings they discovered a ruined temple dedicated to Diana, goddess of the hunt. In the temple stood a marble statue of the goddess; intact, perfect, with bared breasts, raised bow and arrow, and features so lifelike that the men were afraid of her, for the eyes followed them around the clearing.
Returning to the ships with the venison, the hunters told Brute of the city and its temple, and that night he made his way alone to the place with all things needful for a sacrifice. He set up an altar before the statue, raised a goblet filled with wine mixed with the blood of a pure-white hind, drank from it and said, in thrilling, ringing tones:
Great Goddess, Diana, forest queen, protecter of lost children,
You who walk the maze of Heaven and the forest paths,
Tell us what land, what safe home and haven we may inhabit,
That we may build temples to you there, Great Goddess Diana.
Then he walked three times round the altar, poured out the wine and blood upon it, and lay down in front of it on the hide of the white hind who had kindly donated the blood. At midnight Brute slipped into the sweetest sleep he had known since killing his father and dreamed that he awoke, that the marble image of the goddess turned her luminous eyes upon him, that she stepped down from the plinth, the new moon in her hair, a sceptre in her hand, the morning star glittering at its point. Fixing him with her lovely green eyes, the goddess Diana spoke these words in a voice like a peal of silver bells:
Brute, lost child, you sacrificed your father to me
And you shall be exalted to the highest honour.
You will sail from this sea, centre of the old world,
Past the Pillars of Hercules into an unknown sea,
Where you will find an island, the abode of giants,
Sad remnant of a strong race but old now and past it.
The Island of the Mighty will be your new home
And you will found a race, the mightiest ever known.
When Brute awoke next morning, he hastened back to the ships and told his companions of his wonderful vision and with great joy they got underway, making full sail to the west in search of the island-home Diana had promised them.
They had many adventures, fighting off Moroccan corsairs and escaping from sirens, and in Gaul they found more refugees from Troy, led by a huge man called Corineus, 7ft high, strong and valiant, whose favourite hobby was giant-wrestling. They joined forces, sailing into the unknown sea, a fair wind behind them and on the third day they saw land. It was a place of mists and mellow fruitfulness, with a gentle coastline, richly forested, with red cliffs and sandy beaches. A soft rain was falling on their ships as they steered into the mouth of a river, tree-clad hills rising on either side as they rowed, slowly and wonderingly up this turning, twisting river, until they came to a broad, open place, the wooded hills lying back from it, a great dark moor in the distance. Here the river ran broad and shallow; ahead it narrowed, becoming unnavigable so here it was that Brute decided to land.
He was the first to step ashore and, as he did so, his foot made an imprint in a large, granite rock lying on the bank and he said, 'Here I stand and here I rest and this place shall be called Totnes.' Actually he said it in Trojan or Crooked Greek but there, where the salt tide mingles with the brown waters of the moorland Dart, Totnes still stands firm and the stone that Brute stepped on lies halfway up the High Street, outside No 37. You can see the footprint and it's called the Brutus Stone, to prove the truth of what I say.
At that time the island was called Albion after the giant of the same name, son of the Celtic sea-god Manannan Mac Lir. He fathered a race of giants and they were the indigenous people when Brute arrived on these shores. But Brute wanted this land, for it was beautiful and bountiful and had been promised to him by the goddess Diana, so they drove all the giants up onto the high moors, where they sheltered in caves, and the Trojans took the land. But the giants were only biding their time. They gathered in a huge cave on Dartmoor, where they plotted their revenge, electing a leader for the first time, being natural anarchists - Gogmagog, who was 20ft tall. He could uproot an oak tree, strip off the branches like celery leaves and wield it like a hazel wand.
The Britons were celebrating the anniversary of their landing at a festival of thanksgiving to Diana at Totnes when the giants burst into the feasting hall and fell upon the surprised invaders, ripping off arms and legs, wrenching heads from bodies and gouging out hearts and entrails, Gogmagog laying about him with his enormous club. But the Britons soon rallied, fighting back fiercely, and the giants - huge, lumbering has-beens - could not dodge the British swords, spears and arrows. They fell in great bloody heaps until only Gogmagog was left alive and him they caught and bound, for Corineus had a mind to wrestle with him. For this they went to the place where Plymouth now stands, for there was much clearing up for the womenfolk to do at Totnes - burying the bodies, sluicing the blood from the hall, aromatherapy and new feng shui.
On what is now Plymouth Hoe Corineus, a giant of a man himself at 7ft high, faced Gogmagog, 20ft tall and ugly to boot, and soon they were hugging each other tight in the shackles of their embraces, making the very air quake with their heaving and gasping. Gogmagog broke three of Corineus's ribs - cric-crac! cric-crac! cric-crac!
Roused by pain and fury and suddenly imbued with divine strength from Diana, Corineus broke the giant's grip, heaved him up on his shoulders and ran to the edge of the cliff, where he hurled the monster onto the sharp rocks below, so that he was mangled to pieces and dyed all the waters of Plymouth Sound red with his blood. Thereafter that place was known as 'Lamgoemagot' or 'Gogmagog's Leap'.
The echo of this fight survives down the centuries to the present day. A Plymouth woman told Theo Brown, the late folklore recorder for the Devonshire Association, that the red earth of Devon was due to the county being formed from the body and blood of a giant, while in Tudor times, two giant figures were cut into the earth on the hillside of Plymouth Hoe. The Plymouth Corporation audit book for 1529 states, 'Cleansing of the Gogmagog 8d ', and in 1566, 'New cutting the Gogmagog 20d '.
Alas, these figures, one of whom was surely Corineus, were destroyed when the Royal Citadel was built in the reign of Charles II; but during the excavation for the foundations the builders turned up a huge pair of jaws and teeth that could only have belonged to a giant.
Two giant effigies have stood in the Guildhall in London for centuries. The present figures replaced a pair destroyed in the Blitz of the Second World War, which in turn replaced a pair consumed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. They are now called Gog and Magog but Queen Elizabeth I would have known them as Gogmagog and Corineus.
After this great victory over the indigenous inhabitants...
