After describing the Gogmagog Hills, near Cambridge, the sixteenth-century topographer William Camden goes on to say:
On the top of these hilles, I saw a fort intrenched, and the same very large, strengthned with a threefold rampire… Gervase of Tilbury seemeth to call it Vandelbiria.
This is Wandlebury Camp, a massive Iron Age hill-fort on the summit of the Gogmagogs. Parts of the defences of the circular fort were destroyed in the seventeenth century, when Lord Godolphin built a mansion on the inner ring and landscaped the grounds. Now only the Cupola Stable Block remains, and the memorial to his famous stallion, the Godolphin Arabian, buried here in 1753.
Gervase of Tilbury (fl. 1211) mistakenly derived the name of the hill-fort from ‘Vandal’, and his notion that the Germanic tribe known as the Vandals had built it has since given rise to both the spelling of the place-name as ‘Vandlebury’, recorded from 1608, and the theory that Vandal prisoners serving in the Roman army c. AD 300 may have cut the figure of a giant visible on the Gogmagogs in the eighteenth century. Etymology supports none of this: ‘Wandlebury’ contains the Old English personal name Wændel, perhaps the name of an early Anglo-Saxon owner of the land it stood on. Having said that, place-name evidence indicates that the Long Man of Wilmington, Sussex, was in Anglo-Saxon times known as ‘the helmeted Wændel’, and it is possible that in both places the name refers to a forgotten giant, and that the name ‘Wandlebury’ records an early instance of the widespread tradition of ‘giants as builders’.
Camden was contemptuous of a local ghost story Gervase had to tell about Wandlebury, saying dismissively:
Touching the Martiall spectre, or sprite that walked heere, which he addeth to the rest, because it is but a meere toyish and fantasticall devise of the doting vulgar sort, I willing[ly] over-passe it. For it is not my purpose, to tell pleasant tales, and tickle eares.
Gervase himself, writing for the entertainment of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV (1198–1218), had no such reservations. He says:
There is a very ancient tradition, attested by popular report, that if a warrior enters this level space at dead of night, when the moon is shining, and cries ‘Knight to Knight, come forth!’, immediately he will be confronted by a warrior, armed for fight, who, charging horse to horse, either dismounts his adversary or is dismounted. But I should add that the warrior must enter the enclosure alone, although his companions may look on from outside.
This tradition was once put to the test by a knight called Osbert Fitzhugh, who had been told about it while staying at Cambridge Castle. He and his squire rode up to the Camp, but only Osbert passed through the ramparts and rode into the inner court. He cried ‘Knight to Knight, come forth!’ as he had been instructed, and in response a knight, or what looked like a knight, came forth to meet him.
The knights rushed at each other, and at the end of their shadowy combat, under the light of the moon, Osbert unhorsed his adversary and cast him to the ground. He seized hold of the bridle of the horse to lead it away as spoils—and no doubt also as proof of the encounter—but at that the knight leapt to his feet and hurled his spear, deeply piercing Osbert’s thigh, then vanished.
Osbert led the horse out of the Camp and gave him into the care of his squire. It was a beast of exceptional beauty and strength, tall, with fierce eyes, and black as midnight, including its gear. Leading it back to Cambridge Castle, they tethered it in the courtyard and got everyone out of bed to hear Osbert’s adventure. At cockcrow, the horse, prancing, snorting and pawing the earth, suddenly burst the reins that held it, fled, vanished, and none could trace it.
However, another proof that this had been a supernatural encounter remained. Every year on the night that Osbert had fought with the phantom, his wound would open and bleed afresh. Gervase’s story of the Black Knight later entered English literature, being the main source of the ‘Host’s Tale’ in Canto 3 of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808).