Free Folklore of Yorkshire by Kai Roberts Page B

version of Wade’s legend, he was Duke Wada, a Saxon noble and one of the conspirators who murdered Ethelred, King of Northumberland, around AD 849-862. The story was first recorded by William Camden in his seminal antiquarian work, Britannia , published between 1586 and 1607. He also notes that, ‘Here within the hill between two entire and solid stones above seven foot high (Wada) lies entombed: which stones because they stand eleven foot asunder, the people doubt not to affirm that he was a might giant.’ Nonetheless, there is no corroborative evidence for Camden’s Duke Wada, so it seems probable that this is a back-formation and the legend of the giant Wade circulated in these parts long before the name of the Saxon duke.
    Local legend also relates that Wade built Mulgrave Castle at the same time as his wife Bel was building Pickering Castle, but having only one hammer between them, they would regularly throw it to each other across the moors. To facilitate their movement across this hilly terrain, the giants were supposed to have constructed Wade’s Causeway – actually a well-preserved Roman road running from Eskdale to Malton across Wheeldale Moor. Legend claims Bel used this road to access her herd of cattle for milking. The giantess seems to have been particularly associated with her cattle and during the eighteenth century, credulous visitors to Mulgrave Castle were shown the jawbone of a whale and told it was the rib of one of Bel’s cows.
    It seems entirely plausible that prior to the growth of antiquarianism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the general populace sincerely believed that only giants could have been responsible for edifices such as prehistoric megaliths and Roman roads. Long after the knowledge of their construction was lost, these remarkable feats of engineering must have seemed beyond the capabilities of any normal-sized human. One writer on giant lore, H.J. Massingham, suggests this process may have actually started in the prehistoric period itself as the non-megalith building Celts of the Iron Age looked back on the work of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Britons with wonder and bafflement. Of course, it is a theory that is entirely impossible to verify.
    Still, many commentators have regarded landscape-shaping giants as a direct inheritance from pagan belief, perhaps a corrupted remembrance of pre-Christian creation deities. This may possibly be true in the case of Wade, who seems to have been derived from a character common to Norse and Germanic mythology. The earliest reference to this figure is found in an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem called ‘Widsith’, although the majority of what is actually known about him comes from the ‘Saga of Thidrek of Bern’, which only survives as a thirteenth-century fragment. In these sources, he is a sea-dwelling giant who ascends to dwell on land and father the more famous Wayland the Smith.
    However, by the late medieval period, the giant Wade seems to have been remembered in England not as a mythological demi-god, but a heroic warrior. Most of the stories attached to his name have been lost, although one is preserved in Walter Map’s twelfth-century work, ‘De Nugis Curilaium’, in which Wade is portrayed as a comrade of the eighth-century Mercian king, Offa, and together they repel a Roman invasion (despite the fact that by that time, Rome had long since lost interest in Britain). Otherwise, Wade only receives passing mentions in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century poems, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde , and Thomas Mallory’s fifteenth-century compilation of Arthurian legends, Le Morte d’Arthur .
    Wade’s legend seems mostly to have died out with the Middle Ages in England, other than in the stories told around the North York Moors. Nonetheless, it seems unlikely that his persistence in the region represents evidence of an enduring Norse pagan heritage. These stories of Wade bear far more resemblance to the