Giants

Giants are the earliest rulers of Britain in the origin legend recounted in the novel, a people born from the union of Albina’s exiled princesses and the demons inhabiting the island. Their defeat by Trojan Brutus brings their long reign to an end, but their story persists in the folklore and political imagination of later England. The legend frames the island’s history as a succession of arrivals and contests for rule, while the giant Bolster’s tale links that distant myth to Thomas Cromwell’s family memories.

Origins in the Albina legend

The story begins with a king of Greece whose thirty-three daughters rebel against their husbands. Rather than kill his daughters, their father exiles them in a ship provisioned for six months. Wind and tide carry them to an unnamed, mist-covered island at the edge of the known world. The eldest names it Albina, after herself.

The island has no human inhabitants, only demons. The princesses’ descendants become the Giants: the first generation is followed by further generations, and the resulting people spread across the whole landmass of Britain. The legend describes their world as lacking priests, churches, laws, and even a means of measuring time. It gives the Giants not merely a monstrous ancestry but an alternative, pre-institutional beginning for Britain.

Defeat by Brutus

After eight centuries, the Giants are overthrown by Trojan Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas. Brutus is born in Italy; after his mother dies in childbirth and he accidentally kills his father with an arrow, he flees and becomes leader of men who had been enslaved in Troy. Their northward voyage, driven by wind and tide, repeats the sisters’ earlier passage to Albina.

On landing, Brutus and his followers fight the Giants, who are led by Gogmagog. The Giants are defeated, and Gogmagog is thrown into the sea. Brutus and his descendants rule until the coming of the Romans. The parallel voyages make conquest appear cyclical: a people arrive from elsewhere, displace those already there, and establish a new account of sovereignty. The narrative’s blunt conclusion is that Britain’s beginnings are inseparable from violence and overthrow.

Bolster in Cromwell’s family memory

The ancient Giants survive in local legend as well as in the national origin story. Bet Cromwell tells her brother Thomas about Bolster, a giant associated with St Agnes. In her account, when Bolster hears that Agnes is dead, his grief fills a cave and reaches down through the seabed into Hell; she concludes that he is dead, though only until the next time. Thomas answers with mock reassurance that he had been worried about Bolster.

The exchange presents folklore as something retold within family life, neither solemnly affirmed nor simply discarded. Bolster’s legend gives Thomas a local counterpart to the Giants of Britain’s legendary past, while Bet’s closing qualification leaves the giant’s disappearance temporary. The myth therefore persists through recurrence: its figures may be declared dead, but the story leaves room for their return.