John Aubrey’s Natural History, Part 9: Giants
In the buttery of Stourton House (now rebuilt) once hung a ‘monstrous bone’ that had belonged to a giant.
The two-foot-long bone was purported to be the hip bone of a member of the Stourton dynasty. It had been found buried at Glastonbury, but by Aubrey’s time had been brought to the Stourtons’ ancestral home, where it was preserved on account of its antiquity and wonder. Aubrey examined the bone and recorded that the knobs at either end of it were ‘about the bignesse of two fists of good lusty man, which exceeds the proportion of humane thighbones.’ He proposed, however, despite an accompanying epigram which suggested it was from a Herculean Saxon hero, that it was not a giant human bone at all. And, after dwelling briefly on another monstrous bone he knew at Greenwich, and mention in literature of such specimens in Essex, he suggested his own hypothesis, ‘why might they not be elephants’ bones? For the Romans brought elephants into Britaine.’ Aubrey understood that the Romans had used war elephants in their conquest of the country. Elephant bones — particularly the great leg bones — could conceivably be mistaken for human ones by those unfamiliar with them. Aubrey had seemingly looked at evidence for giants and reached a rational, sceptical conclusion — giants’ bones were really the bones of elephants. But this is not the whole story, because Aubrey carried on collecting evidence.
His fullest evidence came from Gloucestershire, near Thornbury. A skeleton of extraordinary dimensions had been found in a massive stone vault, accompanied by Roman coins. Aubrey's friend Thomas Guidott, physician and Fellow of the Royal Society, had visited the site himself, and Aubrey quoted his published account at length. The sons of the landowner who had paid for the excavation told Guidott that the bones of the larger skeleton suggested a man about 9 feet tall. Local tradition said it was the tomb of Offa, King of Mercia. Meanwhile, William Gauntlett of Netherhampton, born at Amesbury, told Aubrey that within living memory, diggers had uncovered bones in the churchyard at Amesbury far exceeding those of ordinary men. At Highworth at the Bull Inn, Aubrey had been told by Richard Brown, rector of Somerford Magna, of a skull ‘half as big again as an ordinary one.’ And so on, Aubrey built an evidential record. He neither dismissed nor confirmed the claims, although the Roman coins found in the vault by the Thornbury giant seemed to strengthen the case for elephants considerably.
However, Aubrey’s account was highly nuanced. Between anecdotes of possible giants at Amesbury and Highworth, Aubrey quoted two passages from Pliny's Natural History. The first observed that humans appeared to be shrinking and that it was now rare for sons to be taller than their fathers. The second noted that the largest creatures were found in the ocean not on land because of the rich fertility of liquid — implying that environment directly shaped physical size. The latter was not a direct quotation, but Aubrey’s precis, retaining the sense of the original, and maybe thereby better evidencing his view. So, if body size was shaped by environment — as Pliny's marine creatures suggested — and if humans had been diminishing for millennia — as Pliny's observation about sons and fathers implied — then the further back one went, the larger humans may have been. Giants in this reading may have existed, but they were creatures of a more fertile, more vigorous world. The bones of extraordinary dimensions that remained in Aubrey’s own time did not belong to that earlier period. Those bones were probably those of elephants.
In his chapters on geology and fossils, Aubrey had argued for deep time — a past so vast that the surface of the earth itself had been fundamentally transformed. In his chapter on the terraqueous globe, he had developed a theory of the earth's slow internal heat driving change over immense periods. Aubrey’s account of giants belonged to that same scientific mindset. The earth had changed. Species had changed. And so had man. And maybe, just maybe, in a very distant past, men had once been giants.