Article Cerne Abbas Giant
Summary: A famous chalk figure carved into the side of a hill in Dorchester, England may be an enormous seventeenth-century hoax.
The Cerne Abbas Giant Deep in the heart of Dorchester stands the Cerne Abbas Giant. He’s a naked chalk figure carved into the side of a hill.
The giant is one of a number of presumably ancient hill figures that dot the English countryside, such as the Long Man of Wilmington and the White Horse of Uffington. But the Cerne Abbas giant is uniquely distinctive for a number of reasons. First, there’s the large club that he holds, and then there’s the enormous erect phallus that he sports. Most people find that latter feature kind of hard to miss.
Despite the giant’s ‘impudent anatomy’ (or really because of it), he occupies a treasured place in British culture. He’s widely believed to be an ancient fertility god, possessing the power to make childless women pregnant. And as the historian Glyn Daniel notes, postcards of him are the only images of a naked man cheerfully accepted by the British post office. But in recent years controversy has swirled around him. A growing number of historians have begun to suggest that he’s not as ancient as most people assume. Instead, they argue, he may be nothing more than an enormous seventeenth-century hoax.
On May 23rd, 1996 a mock trial was held in the town of Cerne Abbas to settle once and for all the question of the giant’s age. A jury listened to different arguments before voting for one of them.
The case for the giant’s antiquity was presented first. Its proponents noted the antiquity of the hill-carving tradition and pointed out the pagan, pre-christian symbolism of the figure. This evidence, they argued, suggested that the giant was many centuries old.
Next, the historian Ronald Hutton spoke in favor of a modern giant. He presented expert witnesses who pointed out that the first written reference to the giant only occurred in 1694. This was not because early descriptions of the Cerne Abbas landscape were scarce. Quite the opposite. Many pre-seventeenth-century surveys of that region have survived, but none of them mention a giant. By contrast, the presence of the Uffington Horse was noted as early as the eleventh century.
Joseph Betty then presented an even more specific case for a modern giant. He argued that a local landowner called Denzil Holles created the giant in the seventeenth century during the English Civil War. Holles harbored a passionate hatred of the puritan commander Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s followers often represented their leader as a modern-day, club-wielding Hercules. Therefore, what better way for Holles to satirize the commander, Betty suggested, than to plaster a 180-foot rude caricature of Hercules on a hilltop in the middle of England? But Betty noted that given the dangerous political situation during the Civil War, Holles would have been careful not to make his authorship of the figure too obvious or too widely known.
When the jury cast its votes, 50% of them stuck with the traditional ancient-origin theory. But 35% of them sided with Hutton and Betty. 15% felt that the giant’s age was unimportant.
Although the trial was supposed to end the debate over the giant’s age, it almost certainly only inflamed the issue by bringing it before an even wider audience. This means that scholars will probably be arguing for years over what the giant really is: prehistoric art, or an enormous seventeenth-century hill hoax.
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References
- Timothy Darvill, Katherine Barker, Barbara Bender, and Ronald Hutton. The Cerne Giant: An Antiquity on Trial. Oxbow Books. 1999.