‘Wændel’ and the Long Man of Wilmington

Abstract

N his interesting article on 'The Linguistic Status of the Wandlebury Giants' (Folklore 89, 1978: 1, 75-8), Richard Coates argues, basing himself on A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, that the personal name Waendel from which 'Wandlebury' derives is more probably that of a human being than that of a deity (as T. C. Lethbridge claimed), but that the latter possibility 'cannot be ruled out.' There is a further piece of evidence, unknown both to Lethbridge and to Mawer and Stenton in 1926 when they wrote about Waendel as a place-name element,' which seems to me strong reinforcement for the nonhuman interpretation. It concerns the well-known hill-figure of a giant in East Sussex, the Long Man of Wilmington. It is a most remarkable fact that the district in which this figure lies, now part of Longbridge Hundred, corresponds to an older Hundred which at the time of Domesday Book was named Wandelmestrei. Commenting on this in their study of Sussex place-names in 1930, Mawer and Stenton explain the name as 'clearly a compound of treo(w) ... and a personal name. If the Domesday Book form is to be trusted it would seem to have been Wandhelm, or, more probably, Wendelhelm.'2 The situation at Wilmington is thus very like that at Wandlebury, except that the areas of uncertainty are reversed. At Wilmington the giant is present, but it is not quite certain that the place-name is derived from Wandel; at Wandlebury the derivation of the name is certain, but the original giant is lost, and the elaborate reconstruction proposed by Lethbridge is controversial. Nevertheless it would be pushing scepticism very far indeed to maintain that this repeated association of giant hill-figures with a similar place-name element is mere coincidence, or that it simply happened by chance that both places belonged to men with the unusual name Waendel. But why, it may be asked, is the Hundred name at Wilmington derived