Monsters stalk the pages of Anglo-Norman historiography in a variety of forms, but most often they are human. Sometimes they are humans whose behavior is considered monstrous, such as Robert of Bellême and his mother Mabel: their lack of humanity in their personal dealings and their treatment of prisoners marked them as monsters as far as the historian Orderic Vitalis was concerned. Or they could be humans with unusual physical characteristics, such as the conjoined twin sisters with two heads and four arms described by William of Malmesbury in the Gesta regum Anglorum, whose appearance was regarded as a portent regarding the condition of the Anglo-Norman realm. Sometimes, however, Anglo-Norman historiography features humans of another monstrous variety: humans who have died and then returned to haunt the living. This essay examines the corporeal revenants described by William of Newburgh in the Historia rerum Anglicarum.

William of Newburgh was an Augustinian canon from Yorkshire who produced his Historia rerum Anglicarum between 1196 and his death in 1198. While most of the Historia is a conventional history that treats events in England from the Norman Conquest to the end of the twelfth century, it also contains several accounts of the reanimated dead. A cluster of four stories about revenants appears in the middle of the Historia's fifth and final book, in chapters 22 through 24. The revenants in these stories share several features. They are people whose sinful lives predispose them to returning from the dead. These restless corpses leave their graves to inflict terror upon the living, most often their own family, friends, and neighbors. Finally, in several cases, they affect people physically either by spreading pestilence or committing physical attacks. Usually William will note that people thought the corpse was animated by demonic power, but on one occasion he pointedly neglects to say anything at all about how the corpse came to walk again. Finally, William details two kinds of rituals – one tried and true and one improvised – by which the living put these walking corpses to rest.

William's revenant stories have caught the attention of a number of scholars. Jean-Claude Schmitt noted them in his wide-ranging survey of clerical representations of ghosts in the high and late Middle Ages, where he connected the noticeable surge in ghost stories around the turn of the first millennium with the rise of the cult of the dead in the ninth century.