England’s Adam: the short career of the Giant Samothes in English Reformation thought
Jack P. Cunningham
Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln
jack.cunningham@bishopg.ac.uk
Jack P. Cunningham, "England’s Adam: the short career of the Giant Samothes in English Reformation thought."EMLS 16.1 (2012)]: 4 http://purl.org/emls/16-1/adam.htm
- It was John Bale, dramatist, virulent anti-Catholic and Bishop of Ossory, who first introduced English audiences to their
ancestral father, Samothes. His popular history, The Actes of English
Votaryes (1546) described an ancient hero, the offspring of Japheth and
grandson of Noah, who made his way to Western Europe and fathered the English
nation. Bale’s audience seemed unperturbed with the author’s description of
their ancestors, the Samotheans, as giants.[1]
There was, after all, Biblical precedence in Genesis 6; the Geneva Bible of
1560 was categorical when it told its readers that, ‘there were giants in the
earth in those days.’ Significantly the King James’ version of 1611 (with
perhaps a nod toward the Samotheans) added the words, ‘and after that.’ Thus
the colossus Samothes was launched on his career as an English patriarch, not
only in the works of Bale but others including Shakespeare, Philip Sidney and
the enormously influential Raphael Holinshed. In Sidney’s Old Arcadia,
the doleful shepherd Philisides tells us that he is from the land of Samothea,
a place ‘so famous that, telling you I am of that, I shall not need to extend
myself further in telling you what the country is.’[2]
- It seemed, on the face of it, that the English nation and its men of
letters had taken an immediate liking to their recovered ancestor, a liking
that is not hard to appreciate since Samothes provided them with an heroic
parentage that measured up to anything claimed in the classical world. He also
gave them a direct root to Noah, a patriarch who was seen as the second Adam,
father of all the postdiluvian world. In spite of these benefits by the end of
the sixteenth century the career of Samothes was in terminal decline. John Stow’s
Annales claimed that the founding of England was ‘irrecoverable,’ and
then in the first decade of the seventeenth century the great William Camden
dismissed the legend entirely.[3]
It has previously been tempting to see the myth of Samothes as being killed off
by a new wave of more sober-minded and professional historians. However, it
will be argued here that we should not regard writers such as Stow and Camden as
Reformation giant-killers. They were not involved in an act of debunking for
the sake of a more proof-driven history per se. Far from being unhappy with the
mythical nature, or stature, of Samothes they were instead expressing major
misgivings with the sources, elsewhere they seemed perfectly content to accept histories
that were equally as fabulous. This article sets out to explore the short but
remarkable career of Samothes and will argue that the giant was not killed by a
shot from the sling of a more modern scholarship that refused to place credence
in the mythological; rather he tumbled to his death because he was standing on shaky
foundations.
- The story of Samothes as set out in Reformed national histories may
be summarized as follows. After the flood Noah took his three sons to the top
of a mountain and there he divided the unpopulated world between them. The
three portions were Europe, Asia and Africa. In 1587, William Harrison realized
that this traditional account needed an update and he made a half-hearted
attempt to incorporate the New World into his schema by relating that America
was part of the division, though he seems reluctant to dwell on who exactly was
allotted this land and the subject is passed over rather hastily. However,
Harrison explains that before the flood there were no great seas, so St
Augustine need not have troubled himself when he pondered the mystery of how
animals that lived on remote islands could have made their way to the Ark.[4] Europe was given to
Japheth and when it was latter divided among his progeny it was Samothes, the sixth
son, whom the Bible calls Mesach and whom Julius Caesar named Dis, who received
both France and England and became the father of the Celtic race. Samothes went
on to become a model monarch teaching his people not only the course of the
stars but ‘many other matters incident to the moral and politic government of
man’s life.’[5]
He also gave them an alphabet and we are told that the Greeks derived their
letters from Samothean writing. The ancient King then established a School of
philosophy, the Σεμνοθέους (Holy
Ones) who impressed no lesser a figure than Aristotle. Nor were the qualities
of these patriarchs confined only to the mind, they were also depicted as religiously
sound in the Reformed sense of the word. Holinshed’s influential chronicles
press the point further than most authors when he claims that the Samotheans
were ‘passing skilful both in the laws of god and man and for that cause
exceedingly given to religion…some of them were not ignorant of the immortality
of the soul and the one everlasting God.’[6]
- Writing at a time when the English Church was anxious to exert its
national independence the notion that they might claim a cultural superiority,
as well as a religiously unsullied past, had some obvious merits. The golden
age of the Samotheans would have been a useful complement to contemporary
revivals of the Glastonbury legends that staked a claim for an evangelization
of England that bypassed Rome. Unlike the Vatican-sponsored mission of
Augustine, we are told that Joseph of Arimathea arrived on the English shore
directly from Jerusalem via France and was therefore untainted with papal
association.[7]
It is not difficult to imagine that just as the English Reformed movement was
keen to embrace Joseph as an ecclesiastical founder it might now rejoice in the
discovery of a religious lineage which could be traced to such a prominent
Biblical patriarch as Noah’s grandson.
- In most of the versions of the legend the Samotheans ruled for 300
years.[8]
Four kings in direct succession follow each other and each furnished the nation
with a skill appropriate to their name. Magus came after Samothes and taught
his people the art of divination; hence the Magi. Sarron founded schools and
Druis established the druids as early philosophers. Lastly Bardus invented music
and poetry and thus provided the Celts with their bards.
- In spite of these auspicious beginnings however, as is often the
inclination in Protestant histories, the inevitable corruption set in. The
Golden Age gave way to the Silver and ultimately to the Iron, as the Samotheans
turned from the path of righteousness. Just as inevitably they were visited by
divine justice in the shape of another giant accompanied by his own race who
Harrison tells us proceeded from the cursed Ham.[9]
This was Albion, an evil tyrant, but no more than the early English fathers
deserved. Holinshed explained what happened;
After Bardus the Celts…loathing the strait ordinances of their ancient kings, and betaking themselves to pleasure and idleness, were in short time, and with small labour brought under the subjection of the Giant Albion, the son of Neptune.[10]
It is curious to note that, according to Holinshed, Albion is the offspring of a pagan deity and it is interesting to see how apparently comfortable certain Reformed writers were with incorporating Classical gods into their histories. Even the idolatry-hating John Bale, was happy to inform his readers that Albion was the son of Neptunus, who was later killed by Hercules as he attempted to stop his passage into Rhodanus.[11] At first Harrison appears more cautious when he takes care to tell us that Neptune was merely a great sailor who was only considered a god after his death. Later however, he forgets himself as he recounts the battle with Hercules in which Jupiter rained down stones from heaven onto Albion and his brother Bergion, ‘which came so thick upon them, as if great drops of rain or hail should have descended from above, no man knowing which way to turn him from their force, they came so fast and with so great a violence.’[12] Harrison, is perhaps more eccentric than most other writers, usually referred to the Greek pantheon in more secular terms. The poet William Slayter drew up a family tree as a prefix to his work Palae- Albion, onto which he grafted a host of pagan deities. His genealogy contains the kings and queens of Europe, as well as Samothes, Triton (as a son of Noah) and Jupiter. This treatment of Classical myths has been described as ‘euhemeristical’ and it functions by treating the gods as earthly kings, indistinguishable from their more mundane cousins.[13] In this way they both enrich the royal bloodline and provide a worthy role model. Slayter describes their function, ‘And whence it may well be a solace to a noble spirit and disposition to be descended from honourable Ancestors; thereby encouraged to emulate their virtues and achievements.’[14]
- In his work on antiquarian thought Stuart Piggot claimed that Bale
simply invented Samothes to suit his polemical purposes.[15] In fact Bale had
borrowed him from a unlikely source. The Biblical giant was first presented to
the world by a late fifteenth-century Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo. He
claimed to have unearthed the ancient writings of Berosus, a Chaldean priest
and chronicler from the third century BC. Berosus actually existed but it is
extremely doubtful that the Italian Friar had acquired a new example of his
works. Besides, it seems Annius of Viterbo had a history when it came to the
manufacture of ancient artifacts. A well authenticated account describes how he
had once had a foundation stone of Viterbo carved and then buried. He then
‘discovered’ it and attempted to garner credit for establishing the ancient
founding of his home town.[16]
Quite why an Italian would take similar trouble to establish the pedigree of the
Celts is not known: though R. E Asher has plausibly been conjectured that he
was not motivated by Francophile sentiments but rather an urge to get one over
on his nation’s main rival for classical acclaim, namely Greece.[17]
- Perhaps more unusual than the provenance of the tale is that it went
on to gain credence with English writers. Not only was its author a papist, but
he was a member of one its most vilified religious orders. The Dominicans were synonymous
with the inquisition. T. D. Kendrick’s great work on the use of legend in the
forging of national consciousness called Annius’ work ‘the most mischievous
study of the remote past published during the Renaissance.’[18] Nevertheless, it had
an obvious allure for a body of writers anxious to trace their nation and their
Church as far back into antiquity as was possible. The anti-Catholic Bale is
unashamed to reveal his source as ‘Ioannes Annius in Commentariis Berosi.’[19] Holinshed
quotes him directly telling us that what he has to say reason ‘also enforceth.’
For good measure he boldly adds that the tale is also confirmed by Moses in
Scripture.[20]
It is as well to note that the Commentarii does not actually mention
Britain. When John Bale employed the source he extended its terms of reference
westwards, presumably on the assumption that Celts also inhabited these
islands.
- There was another source for Samothes which though more tenuous, was
less controvertible. As mentioned above Genesis 6 tells us that there were
Nephilim in the world in those days, a word which became variously translated
as ‘sons of God,’ or ‘giants’ after the Septuagint had rendered the word ‘gigantes.’
Verse 4 adds that they were, ‘the same as were the mighty men which were of old,
the men of renown.’ These mysterious figures appear again in Numbers 13:33 when
Joshua’s spies report seeing them in the land of Canaan. They might also be
found in Job 1:6 and 2:1 and in Psalms 29 and 89. In the New Testament they are
alluded to in Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 where they are described as fallen angels.
It is however Genesis 6 that provides the Biblical source for the Samothean
myth and here the character of the Nephilim is ambiguous. On the one hand they
are heroic and at the same time they seem to be the cause of the flood which
destroys mankind. The problem seems to boil down to miscegenation which takes
place after the sons of God take human wives, ‘There were giants in the earth
in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the
daughters of men, and they bare children to them… And God saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth...’ (Gen 6: 4-5). This has potential
to greatly extend the life span of humankind, perhaps to the point of
immortality. We are told that God was not prepared to suffer this for he has
already declared, ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever; for he is flesh,
but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.’ (Gen 6:3). Shortly after
this God repents of ever having made man and he sends the great deluge to blot
them out.
- None of the Biblical sources mention Samothes directly and it is
therefore incumbent upon his supporters to make the reference more explicit.
William Lambarde’s, A Perambulation of Kent (1576) confidently asserts
that Samothes is Mesach, and 250 years after the flood he set up in France and
England. Perhaps not surprisingly the author goes on to assert that in his
entire kingdom it was no doubt the Garden of England where the wise King chose
his home.[21]
- This link to the Bible played a crucial part in making the myth
palatable for Reformed tastes and for a brief period certain sections of the
English literary world seemed keen to embrace their Samothean ancestry. The
list includes not only Bale, Harrison and Holinshed, but scholars such as John
Caius in his history of Cambridge, Historia Cantabrigiensis academiae (1574).[22] The poet Richard
Lynche translated Annius as an historical record of the travels of Noah in
Europe in 1602, Slayter’s poem Palae-Albion was published in 1621 with
the Samothean kings as a major theme. John Lewis’ history of Britain written 1603-12
makes references to gigantic ancestors. Nor is the great race confined to the
pages of academia. The major artists of the age appear to be well aware of the
myth. In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, when Prince Hal is asked why everyone
who pricks their finger claims to have spilt royal blood; he replies, ‘Nay,
they will be kin to us, but they will fetch it from Japhet.’[23] And Sidney’s Old Arcadia,
in a passage apparently penned as a patriotic spur to encourage a reluctant
England to war, waxes lyrical about a more noble age.[24]
Of Samothea land; a land which whilom stood
Spenser does not mention Samothes but there are several references to British giants in his Faerie Queene, including the huge son of ‘hideous Albion, whose father Hercules in France did quell.’[26]
An honour to the world, while honour was their end,
And while their line of years they did in virtue spend.
But there I was, and there my calmy thoughts I fed
On nature’s sweet repast, as healthful senses led.
Her gifts my study was, her beauties were my sport;
My work her works to know, her dwelling my resort.[25]
- On the face of it Noah’s grandchild appears to have mustered a
significant army of followers among the English intelligentsia, and yet a
closer reading of these text might cause us to somewhat modify this assessment.
John Bale who was responsible for anglicizing the Gallic giant is far from
painting a picture of England as a Samothean idyll. His Actes of Englysh
Votaryes extends his theory that there have been two types of religious
people in history: the ones that follow Noah, Moses and Christ, and the ‘Votaries’
who follow the Antichrist.[27]
In his own words his purpose is, ‘To fetch the matter from the first foundation
so to stretch it forward.’[28]
In other words, he is seeking to trace the corruption of the Roman Catholic
Church to the beginning of history. One of Bale’s favourite targets is celibacy
and here he likes to dwell upon both its malignant effects and its want among
the hypocritical Roman clergy. He finds the prototypes of the Catholic cleric
in the Samothean priests. Bale is drawing on the myths of the Roman Vestal
Virgin when he informs us that these priests kept virgins in their temples who
were beaten by bishops if they allowed their lights to expire. A worse fate
awaited the inopportune girl caught in the act of adultery who would be buried
alive. The author asks us;
Yet was not this abominable superstition to tyrannize handled among them than [sic], as it hath been since among their successor the papists, who by their cruel corrections [lived they never so long] they sent at last to hell…were not the Lord more merciful.[29]
Bale’s version of history makes for an interesting contrast with French work at the time. The French regarded the druids as Samothean priests; the precursors of the holy monk. They went to extraordinary lengths to integrate them into a Christian schema. As Asher has documented on the matter of human sacrifices they claimed that this activity prepared the world for the realization that salvation would be attained by the ultimate sacrifice of God as man.[30] Bale was a good deal less impressed telling us that the druids had little regard for chastity. Rather unconvincingly he quotes Daniel 13 and Baruch 6 as evidence in which we find, ‘their custom was to deck their whores with jewels and ornaments of their idols.’[31]
- It is also interesting to note that among those authors
who apparently subscribe to the myth there is nearly always a strong air of
caution in what they write. Harrison is usually cited as one of the chief
proponents of Samothes and yet as he rehearses the myth even he is only
prepared to endorse it as an idea, ‘which unto me doth not seem a thing
impossible.’[32]
Holinshed begins his history in the same tentative manner telling us that the people
who inhabited Britain cannot certainly be known. Before he sets down Bale’s
version of events he warns us, ‘I wish not any man to lean to that which shall
be here set down, as to an infallible truth.’[33]
It seems that the Samothean myths had their attraction for a certain section of
English writers but few were prepared to risk their reputation with anything
like an unqualified endorsement. Even the artists of the age, much given to
poetic flights of fancy into Britain’s historical past, appear to have dropped
Samothes after 1580: Drayton, Spenser and Warner all appear to be impervious to
his allure.[34]
- Perhaps the hesitant manner in which Samothes was
proposed weakened his candidature as England’s Adam but it was other forces
that dealt him the death blow. The Portuguese humanist Gaspar Barreiros was the
first to expose the pseudo-Berosean texts as an audacious hoax in his Censura
in quendam auctorem, qui sub falsa inscriptione Berosi Chaldaei circumfertur
which appeared in Latin in 1565. In England John Stow published his damning
assessment thirty year later, adding that the tale was ‘upholden and bolstered
only by the credit and authority of a new small pamphlet falsely forged and
thrust into the world under the title of the ancient history of Berosus.’[35] At the beginning of
the next century William Camden was also unimpressed with the descendents of
Noah.
But that sometime it was named Samothea of Samothes the sixth son of Japhet, believe it who that will, for me. Out of whose shop of forge this comes, I wote full well : even from Annius Viturbiensis forsoth, who under a goodly title, as the manner is of crafty retailers, hath in the name Berosus published, and thrust upon credulous persons his own fictions, and vain inventions.[36]
A few years later Walter Raleigh is no more convinced. Notwithstanding Harrison’s description of the boats that the Samothean used to navigate their way to England, Raleigh is incredulous. Reasonably assuming that he had a certain amount of knowledge of these matters he asserts that such a journey would have been impossible.Surely he knoweth what it is to embark so great a people as we may just suppose those conductors carried with them, will not easily believe that there were any vessels in those days to transport Armies, and [withal] their cattle by whose milk they lived and fed their children.[37]
Katherine Duncan-Jones was wrong to say in her 1974 article that Sidney erased the Samotheans from his revised Arcadia. As Godshalk observed, Philisides’ song has been given to Amphialus’ ‘fine boy’ in the New Arcadia.[38] However she was undoubtedly correct when she told us that he, along with the majority of his countrymen, had rejected the myth after 1580.[39] In a second article she provides a graphic illustration of Sidney’s developed sense of scepticism by way of a book burning. In a letter in 1574 his friend and mentor Hubert Languet mirthfully told him that he had accidently burnt a copy of Humfrey Lhuyd’s Commentarioli Britannicae with a candle. The Welsh scholar’s history had defended the myth-laden writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth against modern detractors, in particular the much despised Polydore Vergil. The poet clearly had little sympathy with Lhuyd’s efforts and in response his servant devised a mocking funeral oration and his master performed the appropriate ceremonies amid much hilarity.[40]
- Victor Skretkowicz has recently argued that Sidney was
motivated to go to war, and ultimately to his death, in 1585 because he was
part of a pan-Protestant movement that took its inspiration from the Samothean
ideal that we find in the Old Arcadia.
For several years Sidney joined the rest of Europe in believing in Annius’s construction of the biblical origins of European monarchical history. For the like minded militant Protestants, this provided the political impetus towards recreating a united Christian Europe…[41]
According to Skretkowicz the poet statesman would also have been inclined by a strong sense of his French (Norman), over Saxon, heritage to have empathized with the Celtic Samotheans.[42] However this thesis fails to convince for a number of reasons. Firstly this is an unusual interpretation of how the Samotheans are portrayed in the text where Sidney uses them as a metaphor for the indolent English who are reluctant to go to war to defend their fellow Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands. Somothea, like England, once had ‘honour as their end’.[43] In an argument that runs counter to his Defence of Poesy (1581) in which he claims that his art form is ‘the companion of camps,’ in Arcadia it has reduced a once noble race of Samotheans causing Philisides to mourn their lost virtue and honour. This degraded image is also found in Holinshed where the once warlike tribe eventually gave over to ‘effeminate pleasure’ and ‘were become now unapt to withstand the force of their enemies’.[44]
- Secondly, Skretkowicz conjures up an image of a significant movement
inspired by the Samotheans and yet by way of example he can supply as few as
four authors. Further, any reading of three of the works cited would preclude
their authors from membership of any such group. Richard Verstegan’s A
restitution of decayed Intelligence (1605) is keen to trace English ancestry
to the Saxons, as befitted the grandson of a Gelderlander. His version of
events has the sons of Noah actually punished for not dispersing over the World
for fear of a second flood. Nimrod then persuades them to build the ill-fated
Tower of Babel as protection against a further deluge and from this catastrophe
we derive our nations.[45]
Verstegan specifically tells us that the grandson of Japheth fathered the
German and Dutch people rather than the Celts.[46]
- Edward Waterhouse’s An humble apologie for learning
and learned Men (1653), also cited by Skretkowicz, mentions ‘Berosus’ the
Chaldean as well as ‘Our Samotheans’ but he brushes over the myth in a fashion
that betrays little inspiration from the legend.[47]
- Finally, we are told that although Aylett Sammes dismissed
pseudo-Berosus as fabulous he nonetheless embedded the legend in his
historiography. This is in fact far from the case. Indeed Sammes tells us;
If any one object and say That the Islands of the Gentiles (among which Britain is one) were given to Japhet and his sons, and therefore Britain was not so long before peopled; [author’s italics] Let them consider, that by Japhet and his sons, is meant his Progeny, and that in order to enjoying of his Patrimony…the delivery of a Turf to him and his sons was not necessary, but sufficient that his seed inherited the Blessing.[48]
Besides, asked Aylett, why would they have passed over the empty lands in Africa, Italy and Spain to get to the remoter British islands?[49] Rather than the Celts, Aylett also prefers to look to the Saxons for British ancestry.
- As for Sidney in the late 1580s, a short time before he
went to war he had begun the translation of his Huguenot friend Philippe Du
Plessis-Mornay’s work, De la Verité de Religion Chrestienne which
debunked Annius. It is possible that this was a late development in his
thinking but given what we know about his attitude to Lhuyd’s Commentarioli,
a work that was written in the same vein as the Commentarii Berosi, more
credible seems Duncan-Jones’ analysis, that Sidney regarded the myth as little
more than poetic inspiration. It would also appear that the cult of Samothes, far
from providing an impulse for the poet to leave his wife and unborn child, was
something that he did not take seriously. ‘Like many Elizabethans of his
generation and later, he may have regarded the earlier Tudor cult of Ancient
Britain as a bit of a joke.’[50]
- Indeed, this may provide the context for Prince Hal’s
quip. 2 Henry IV was written some time in the late 1590s. It is not
difficult to conceive that by then English audiences would have been entirely
in on the joke that only very foolish Englishmen would trace their bloodline to
the Samotheans.
- If we conclude that Samothes was killed off by these writers it might also be tempting to regard the real culprit as the emerging art of modern history writing. Men like Stow and Camden are often regarded as ushering in a new age of more exacting and professional historiography which was less likely to be accepting of fabulous accounts. However, in the case of England’s giants this was not entirely true. Stow might not have liked the Samotheans but he is perfectly happy to record the death of Albion at the hands of Hercules.[51] Camden also may have curled his lip at Samothes but he tells us that he is ‘unwilling to impugn the story of Brutus.’[52] In England John Selden seems to be the only writer willing to cast off the entire tribe of giants.[53] For the most part his compatriots were not at all averse to the idea that giants were the progenitors of the English nation. What they are not prepared to tolerate for long were giants that were the product of an Italian, Roman Catholic forger. After all, Spenser’s Albion may well have been ‘hideous’ but at least he was one of their own.
