The Guildhall Giants, Gog and Magog

Enter the London guildhall today and look up. You will notice two very odd looking and rather unusual interlopers from a former time. These are two figures made of papier mâché, proportioned like dwarves but the size of giants. One is named Gog and the other is named Magog, and they are the mascots of London. They have historically been wheeled out to take part in public events such as the Lord Mayor’s show. But who are they and how did they come to be here?

Gog and Magog, the Guildhall, London — I think that this is Magog, but I’m not quite sure. From Snapshooter 46

Attentive readers of this blog may perhaps have had a flashback at their name. Previously I blogged about the medieval legend of Brutus of Troy. In it, Brutus led a band of warriors who fought with Gogmagog, king of the giants. They slew the fearsome Gogmagog, and took possession of Britain. This Brutus to found London.

It’s pretty clear that Gogmagog is related to Gog and Magog. Gogmagog belonged to Geoffrey of Monmouth and his Latin chronicles, written and read by churchmen. Gog and Magog are something a bit different: popular folklore that belong to the people of London.

By investigating Gog and Magog, maybe we can get a bit closer to the people of medieval and Tudor London. We can understand what they knew of the ‘official’ history of London – what they kept, what they added and what they changed.

Gog and Magog probably represent two different strands of street theatre: one linked to the Mayor, the other to the King. Both go back to the 1400s.

The Mayor’s Giant

In the 1400s, the biggest party day of the year was midsummer. This was the day of the ‘Great Watch’. Originally it was a parade in which London mustered its military forces. But during the 1400s it came to be an all-round celebration with massive pageants and street theatre, much like the Lord Mayor’s Show is today.

Bruts fights the giants of Albion. From British Library, Harley 1808. Public domain.

Every year at the head of the pageant, there was at least one giant. The Venetian ambassador in 1521 wrote home about the ‘very tall canvas giant, armed with bows, arrows, sword and buckler, so constructed that he turned about from side to side, looking in every direction’.

The exact set up of the giant changed year on year. Some years there was only one, who walked at the head of the Mayor’s pageant. Other years there were three groups of giants, one for the mayor, and one each for the two sheriffs. In some years there were male and female giants together, or figurines representing giant children.

A nineteenth century image of the Guildhall Gogmagog. Public domain

The focus on Giant families probably means that these were meant to represent Albina and her race of ancient giants, who were supposedly the first inhabitants of Britain.

The Great Watch became increasingly unruly. Henry VIII had been a fan of it early in his reign and even dressed up as a commoner so that he could go and join the crowd. However, by the 1530s he began to see it as an unruly threat, a time of disorder and chaos. Great Watches became less and less frequent, and after the 1540s they never happened again.

The King’s Giant

In 1432 London held a massive parade for the young King, Henry V. As Henry crossed London bridge, he encountered a massive figurine of a giant, named Champion. As the poet laureate John Lydgate wrote at the time:

Entering the bridge of this noble city,
there was a pillar raised like a tower,
And thereupon stood a sturdy [Giant, named] Champion
Of look and cheer stern, like a lion.
His sword up reared, proudly with menace,
And in defence of the King’s state royal,
The giant would abide each adventure,
And all assaults that are martial,
For the king’s sake he proudly would endure.
In token whereof the Giant had an inscription
On either side declaring his intent
Which said thus, by good advisement:
“All those that be enemies of the king,
I shall them clothe with confusion,
and make him mighty by virtuous living,
His mortal foes to oppress and bear down,
And him to increase as Christ’s champion,
All mischiefs from him to abridge!”
John Lydgate, Triumphal Entry of Henry VI, 1432. See here.

Champion the giant represented London. The massive power of the city and its military might would always be used as a champion for the king.

A French example of a royal entry, from 1450s. Public domain.

Londoners liked the figure of champion, who first appeared in the great Triumphal entry of 1413. They kept messing with the format: in 1415 in the celebrations for the battle of Agincourt, Champion had a wife and a message that he would ‘teach the French some courtesy!’. In 1421 he had a hinging mechanism that allowed him to bow to the queen. However, by the mid-1400s, Champion the giant seems to have gone out of fashion and wasn’t much used in royal pageants any more.

Old London bridge. The giant pageants mostly would have occured on the south gate. Public domain.

The death of Henry VIII left England an uncertain and fearful place. His son, Edward was still a child. The next in line were the Catholic Mary and her younger sister Elizabeth. Civil war and religious war beckoned. In this disordered atmosphere, some looked backwards for answers. And Londoners rediscovered Champion.

For the coronations of Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, giants made a comeback. London was to be represented by two giant figurines again. But this time they were given different names: Gogmagog and Corineus. At Mary’s coronation, the two figures acted out their battle in a reference to London’s founding myth.

Gog and Magog, the modern giants

Ever Queen Mary’s coronation, London has always kept two figurines of giants in the Guildhall. They’ve been rebuilt a couple of times and their names have changed a bit, but there has been some basic continuity.

A nineteenth century image of Gog/Corineus, Public domain

Londoners stopped using them for Royal coronations. However, in the late 1500s, they invented a new festivity: the Lord Mayor’s show. This came to be every bit as big and exciting as the Great Watch had previously been. The two figures that they made for Mary’s Coronation appear to have been wheeled out most years for the past 500 or so to join the celebrations. Over time they have become a part of the city’s folklore. The name ‘Gogmagog’ has split in half and the two figures are now known as Gog and Magog.

Enterprising Londoners added to the Folklore. By 1728, Elkanah Settle’s New History of the Trojan Wars and Troy’s Destruction added a new layer of myths. The Guildhall was now said to be the remains of Brutus’s ancient palace. Brutus had led two giants, Gog and Magog, in chains into London after his victory. He set them as porters at his door, and the effigies remained in the guildhall forever as tokens of the victory of man over giant.

The Giant surveys his domain in the Guildhall. From the Guildhall website.

Of course, they’ve been rebuilt a few times since then. They were rebuilt once in the early eighteenth century, and another time after they were burned by German bombs in the blitz.

All Hallows by the Tower: a window on Anglo-Saxon London

In September 1666, the Great Fire devastated London. In a desperate scramble, the authorities at the Tower of London set about destroying buildings to create a fire block between the city and the Tower of London.

Diarist and man about town Samuel Pepys ran from the flames towards the tower. He stopped off at the church of All Hallows by the Tower, and climbed its steeple. From it, he watched the world burn. He wrote in his diary:

“So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge.”
Samuel Pepys Diary, September 1666: see here.

Most of the medieval and early modern city passed away on a single day. But the actions of the men at the tower meant that a little pocket of the medieval and early modern city survived in the very east corner of the London.

Today I want to look at All Hallows by the Tower, one of London’s great survivors. Today this little church is a time capsule for two thousand years of London’s history.

Above: All Hallows by the Tower in 1955. The tower, built in 1658, is the same one that Pepys would have climbed. Commons license

The earliest architecture on the site can be found in the basement, where a Roman pavement peeks through the floor. It is thought to be the floor from a second century house.

The roman pavement. Taken from trip advisor, see here

The church was built on top of this Roman layer. Its origins can be dated as far back as 675, when it was founded by the nun and saint, Ethelburgh (Aethelburh) of Barking. On this blog we have met Ethelburgh and her brother Erkenwald bishop of London in other posts.

It was long thought that there were no traces left of this early Anglo-Saxon church. However, in 1940 the church was hit by a falling German bomb. Amid the tumbling masonry some fascinating discoveries were made. Within the walls was hiding an old Anglo-Saxon arch.

Above: The Anglo-Saxon arch of All Hallows by the tower. Taken from the parish website, here.

We can’t date this arch precisely, but one interesting feature is that the top of the arch is made up mostly from recycled Roman bricks and tiles – this probably suggests that it was put up at a time when Roman ruins were still visible and accessible. It probably argues for an early date.

A little later in the Anglo-Saxon period, a crypt was built. This is now the under-croft chapel. There are still some Anglo-Saxon burials here.

The Undercroft chapel. Taken from the parish website, here.

Several other Anglo-Saxon and medieval artifacts can be seen in the church’s museum, including an Anglo-Saxon stone cross with an inscription that states that it was made by Thelvar.

The church also has numerous medieval and Tudor tombs. Perhaps the most remarkable survival is this Tate panel, a late fifteenth century Flemish altarpiece

The Tate alterpiece, from the Parish website, here

All Hallows by the Tower is a building with so many layers of history buried within it. People sometimes think that all of Old London passed away with the great fire. In All Hallows by the tower we can get a little window onto Anglo-Saxon and medieval London.

The main aisle of All Hallows by the Tower. Commons licence.

If you liked this blog post then why not check out the virtual tour of All Hallows by the Tower on the parish website; or maybe listen to this podcast by London Undone.

A Pub crawl with Tudor Poets, part 1: A bawdy ballad of the 1400s

This is part one of a two part blog. You can find part two here

The pub today is at the centre of the social lives of many English communities. It’s a centre of community life, fun and sociability. You can often learn a lot about a local area and its people from its pubs.

So one way that we might try to get to know Tudor London is by visiting one of its pubs. In this blog I want to look at some of the poetry and literature that came out of Tudor England that celebrated the pub and pub culture. By looking at how Londoners had fun and relaxed, I hope we can see humanise the past a bit.

One thing that is surprising about Tudor pub literature is that an awful lot of it focuses on one topic: women! Many modern pubs remain quite manly spaces. This might well have been true for the Tudors too: female pubgoers are portrayed as massive cliques of raucous women, much like modern hen parties. This invasion of a manly space by large groups of women was, of course, ripe for comedy.

So for today’s blog we are going to go on a sort of literary pub crawl with three city poets. Each of them describes a group of women in the pub. All are satirical and humorous; sometimes they are dirty, other times surprisingly sad. Whether they reflect real pub culture or not, they give us an insight into the sort of things that readers in Tudor London found funny.

A talk of ten wives on their husband’s ware (National Library of Wales, MS. Porkington 10, a manuscript of the late 1400s)

The oldest of our three poems is also the one that puts city men’s insecurities most obviously on show.

This poem, rather like the Canterbury Tales, starts with an assembly of people in the pub. In this case though this assembly consists of ten women. As with the Canterbury Tales, our heroines decide to create a competition in which everyone present should tell a tale.

                Leave off, and listen to me
                Two words or three
                And harken to my song
                And I shall tell you a tale
                How ten wives sat at Ale
                with no man them among.
                [The first said:] “Since we have no other song
                For to sing us among
                Tales let us tell
                Of our husband’s ware
                Which of them most worthy are
                Today to bear the bell. (i.e. to win the competition)

Husband’s “ware” here could mean their goods, perhaps suggesting that their husbands are merchants. However, it is also a euphemism. She has actually challenged everyone to tell a tale about their husbands’ penises.

If this poem is to be believed – (hint: it isn’t) – then one thing united wives in the late 1400s: they all had tales of woe to tell about their husband’s penises. Here is a representative example:

                The third wife was full of woe
                And said, “I too have one of those
                That does nothing at time of need
                Our sir’s breech, when it is ajar,
                His pentil peeps out before
                Like a worm’s head.
                It grows all within the hair!
                Such a one saw I never
                Standing upon a groin!
                Yet the shrew is hoodless
                And in all things is useless!
                For that, Christ give him care!

The poem is, as you can see, not very high brow. In fact, it is often both crude and artless. Our poet had a clear taste for “gross-out” humour. Each woman’s woes are pretty similar and overall the poem feels a bit repetitive.

Most of the wives either complain about small penises, or about impotence:

                The ninth wife sat them night
                And held her sausage up high
                The length of a foot:
                “Here is a pentil of fair length;
                But it bears a sorry strength.
                God do him good!
                I bow him, I bend him,
                I stroke him, I wend him;
                The devil may him starve!
                But be he hot, be he cold,
                Though I could tear him twofold
                Yet he may not serve”

By the end of the poem, the wives (and the poet) have quite forgotten that this was a competition and there was meant to be a winner. Then again, the wives probably believe that no husband was worthy to win it. If you take this poem at face value – (and again, you shouldn’t do that) – then married women were having a pretty miserable time in the late 1400s. No wonder they turned to drink!

Men may not come off very well in this poem, but I still think that this is quite a man’s poem. It is built wholly around a penis joke and there is no attempt to characterise the women or show their friendships. When women are left alone, they have nothing to talk about but men and their penises! It strikes me as something that would go down well as a private joke between men in the 1400s, but probably not as a great sample of real tavern talk

If you want to know more about this poem, you can find an edition here

You can see the original poem in its manuscript context on the website of the National Library of Wales. Our poem starts on image 114, here

This is part one of a two part blog. You can find part two here

Chronicle of London

I’ve set up Chronicles of London to blog about Medieval and early modern London. For my research I work on 1400-1550 so expect to see that period well represented. I also want to expand my comfort zone so will range backwards and forwards from 600 to the Great Fire of 1666. I’m especially interested in history, literature and learning.

On this blog I want to try to explore the reality of life in the pre-modern city.

Another particular interest will be the Literature of London. Historians sometimes act as though the Tudors invented the idea of writing about cities. I want to show that there was a long and fascinating tradition of writing about London. I will retell, and where appropriate translate, some of the best literature of London.

I will also do series on Myths and Legends. This will cover what Londoners thought about their own past. It will cover their parades, statues, law books, chronicles, literatur and any other ways that Londoners used to talk about the history of London.