Is Wade the northern St Christopher?

Mediaeval mural of St Christopher in the Saxon church of St Peter and Paul in Albury

There can hardly be two more tantalisingly enigmatic figures in mediaeval folklore than Wade and St Christopher. One was a saint. The other was the father of the Anglo-Saxon god of smithying. But both were giants. And both were ferrymen, who would carry folk from one side of a river to the other. And apart from that we know very little about either.

In the case of Wade, I think we have to face up to the most obvious likelihoods when they stare us in the face and acknowledge that although nothing about him is certain there are some strong probabilities that should not be ignored.

Firstly, his name probably means exactly what he sounds like. He waded across his river carrying his charges. So although he is supposed to have had a boat it was presumably not always used - unless of course he pushed it across his river from outside. And of course, being a giant, it is quite possible that he would not have been able to travel in it himself anyway.

If Chaucer's reference to "Wade's bote" really was a common mediaeval double entendre, one might speculate why. Was it because it was so magical and tricksy that it might travel anywhere, including into fairyland or even under water? If the latter, then the possibility of a lewd double meaning (and "playing on Wade's boat") becomes obvious even to the least vulgar of minds. (As Wade crosses his river, with the water coming up to his waist, who knows what might be going on beneath the surface?)

And of course the likelihood that he was if anything a folksy anti-saint, like St Uncumber or St Guinefort, or even Santa Muerte today, makes this all the more possible.

Reconstructing an actual narrative is of course nigh on impossible, but we can imagine Wade as being a ferryman with a tricksy, possibly magical, possibly unreliable "bote". And if it was indeed liable to cart passengers off to perilous realms beyond or below the waves it might often not be there at all for its master's use - meaning of course that Wade would have had to resort to carrying his passengers across the river on his great shoulders.

Why, one wonders? How did Wade come to lose his magical boat? One suspects a supernatural, pre-Christian (or just "extra-Christian") intervention. And one suspects a punishment or a curse. And of course above and before ferrymen of the mediaeval Christian North one is tempted to imagine the involvement of the northern Charon himself - that all-wise one-eyed psychopathic psychopomp of Viking and Anglo-Saxon paganism alike. Indeed, could there have been some early version of the legend when "Wade" and "Woden" were one and the same?

Here perhaps we can follow the fairy-tale logic of the legend of St Christopher that we all know from school. Just as St Christopher's punishment, for serving the Devil, was to be almost crushed under the weight of the world's sins when he carried the Christ Child across his river, so perhaps Wade's punishment was handed down to him by Woden, to be a ferryman without a boat, presumably for some unspecified time until some sin is paid for.

And what could Wade's sin have been? Here we cannot know, and we can imagine him losing his boat to Woden in any number of ways, including in the usual contest of riddles or flyting. More likely though, following the logic of St Christopher's story, it would have been an act of hubris against Woden himself, repayable by the humiliation of having his boat enchanted and confiscated.

Finally, if Wade really was an anti-St Christopher, what would the mediaeval Christian mind have made of his story? Was the loss of his boat, by Chaucer's time, a punishment - like that of the Wandering Jew - for not aiding Christ? Could he be a pagan figure, albeit a virtuous one, sentenced to help travellers to cross rivers even until doomsday, when his boat will be restored to him, when Christ will come again?

Of course, nobody knows. But what does any of this tell us of St Christopher? Not much, it has to be said, other than that he's a very ancient and important saint whose influence in the early Middle Ages may just possibly have extended even beyond the boundaries of Christendom and into the pagan North.

And he is without a doubt well worth praying to for travellers, even to this very day.