44 results
Introduction
- from Part One - Ghosts and Monks
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 3-7
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
‘The dead by their nature are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living …’ It was by such adamant statements that St Augustine, one of the most influential fathers of the early Christian Church, rejected a central belief of the classical world about the afterlife and the spirits of the dead. For Augustine, writing in the fifth century in a Roman province in North Africa, and for many early medieval churchmen influenced by his teaching throughout the cities and provinces of Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the classical tradition of appeasement of the dead by elaborate funerary rites represented precisely the kind of pagan superstition which Christianity required them to ignore.
This discrediting by the early Church of the Roman emphasis upon funerary ceremony carried with it an implicit rejection of the connected belief that unappeased spirits of the dead (those who had not been properly buried, or those like criminals or suicides who had died in exceptional or dishonourable circumstances) wandered restlessly at the margins of the living world. Stories of the uneasy dead, who made the living aware of themselves by sounds and apparitions, were commonplace in the classical world; at the same time, stories of ‘revenants’, corporeal ghosts who returned to mingle with the living, were likely to have been a mainstay of the non-Christian culture of the Germanic tribes which over-ran Northern Europe from the fifth century onwards. As we shall see in Part Three, many of the narrative traditions relating to such ghosts were later preserved in medieval Scandinavia. There were, however, remarkably few stories of apparitions of the dead recorded by Christian writers in the early middle ages, during the period, indeed, when these Germanic tribes were being converted to Christianity.
This is not surprising, given that the recording function was carried out by monastic scribes who, whether or not they were familiar with the precise teaching of St Augustine, were operating within an ecclesiastical culture which would have been influenced by his overall contention that visions of the dead were illusory, mere phantoms of the imagination, of no more substance or significance than the images which occurred in dreams.
The ‘Gesta Romanorum’
- from Part Four - Ghosts in Medieval Literature
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 199-205
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One of the most widely read works in the late Middle Ages was a collection of stories or fables with a Latin title which means, in effect, ‘The Deeds or History of the Romans’. There are many surviving manuscripts of the work, in English and German as well as Latin, and it was to have a considerable influence over writers such as Chaucer and Boccaccio, both of whom borrowed heavily from it. The title might have suggested that, in the manner of earlier medieval chronicles which told of the gesta (the history and deeds) of a people, the stories had an historical basis and that they were drawn exclusively from Roman classical sources. That might indeed have been the case with early versions of the work, but as its popularity grew during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new and fanciful stories drawn from many sources were added to the collection. Two of those which are reproduced here, for instance, were recorded originally by Gervase of Tilbury, while it is thought that many of the other fables in the compilation came from the Middle East and the Orient. The collection of stories may have had the primary purpose of providing narrative entertainment: the secondary aim (perhaps a subsidiary one, judging by the often cursory manner in which a pious conclusion was added at the end) was to demonstrate points of morality and theology.
The Phantom Knight of Wandlesbury
Tale CLV
On the borders of the episcopal see of Ely, there is a fortified place called Cathubrica [the castle of Cambridge] and a little below this there is a place which is distinguished by the name of Wandlesbury – because, as they say, the Vandals, having laid waste the country and cruelly slaughtered the Christians, pitched their camp here.
This place is situated on the summit of a hill, on a round plain surrounded by trenches and ramparts, to which there is only one entrance. According to many ancient legends, it was often reported that if any knight went there in the light of the moon at dead of night and called aloud, he was immediately confronted by another knight who rose up from the opposite side of the plain ready armed and mounted for combat. The encounter invariably ended in the overthrow of one or other of the combatants …
The ‘Imperial Diversions’ of Gervase of Tilbury
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 103-114
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Gervase of Tilbury (c.1155–c.1234), was a widely travelled cleric and lawyer whose career in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries took him to the most glittering courts in Europe. In the 1180s, Gervase was a confidant of Prince Henry, the eldest son of Henry II of England, before moving to southern Italy and the court of William II of Sicily. During the last decade of the twelfth century, he took service with the Emperor Otto IV of Brunswick and was rewarded by being made an honorary marshal of Arles, one of the Emperor's domains on the river Rhône. There he wrote the Otia Imperialia, the third part of which consists of a collection of legends, marvels and anecdotes which no doubt provided fuel for speculative discussion about theology and philosophy at the imperial court. Like Giraldus Cambrensis, Gervase places his accounts of supernatural events in the context of the fantastic and the exotic. He attempts to divert his imperial patron with chapters devoted to the phoenix arising from the flames, and to women with boars’ tusks and men with eight feet and eyes. In the extracts that follow, all of which relate to events which Gervase heard about in the region of Arles, the accounts of ghosts and the activities of the dead, and of apparitions and fairy creatures from ‘parallel’ worlds, correspond to the definition of Mirabilia which Gervase gives in the preface to his work (see p. 46). The following stories relating to water-sprites, and to the marvellous self-propulsion of the funerary barges approaching the cemetery of Aliscamps, are obviously based on local folklore relating to the river Rhône, while Gervase's account of the mischievous activity of lamias or the spectres of the night is perhaps linked with Walter Map's more bloodthirsty tale about the demon at the cradle. The last two stories, about the spirits of the recently deceased, most closely correspond to the modern notion of a ‘ghost story’. The account of the Ghost of Beaucaire, in particular, which attached itself invisibly to a young girl and provided a succession of visiting church dignitaries with insights into the nature of the afterlife, is one of the most celebrated of all medieval reports of returning spirits.
The ‘History of the Events of England’ of William of Newburgh
- from Part Three - The Restless Dead
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 134-142
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Yorkshire canon William of Newburgh (1136–98) included in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum a collection of gruesome ghost stories – Prodigiosa, or ‘unnatural marvels’, is the way he describes them – which strongly resemble the accounts of monstrous revenants in the Scandinavian sagas. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that many parts of Britain (particularly the Scottish borders and the north of England, where William places the accounts contained in the second and third extracts from his history) were subject to Danish and Viking cultural influences. Similarly, as we have seen from Grendel's appearance in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, there is likely to have been a general belief in monstrous nightstalkers in Anglo-Saxon England which persisted into the later medieval period. William seems to have no doubt about the veracity of these stories, as his self-justificatory preface to the story of ‘The Hounds’ Priest’ makes clear. His accounts are noteworthy for the active part played by ordinary people in ridding their afflicted communities of the ghostly nuisances: quite as much as the clergy with their scrolls of absolution, it is the sturdy commoners with their mattocks and bonfires who are the ‘heroes’ of these stories. In this respect, as in the monstrous and corporeal nature of the ghosts which William describes, these stories have much in common with saga accounts of the dead returning to threaten the communities where they formerly dwelt.
The Buckinghamshire Ghost
Book V, Chap. XXII
At this time in the county of Buckinghamshire, a most iextraordinary thing happened. I was first told about it by the people of the neighbourhood, and afterwards more fully by Stephen, a venerable archdeacon of that district. A certain man died, and his wife, an honourable woman, and his family took care to bury him with full customary rites on the feast of the Lord's Ascension. But the very next night he entered the bedchamber of his sleeping wife. She woke, greatly afraid, as he attempted to lie upon her in the marital bed. The same thing happened the next night, and on the third night the terrified woman struggled with her dead husband yet again before arranging for some of her family and neighbours to stay awake on watch with her throughout the night.
The ‘Courtiers’ Trifles’ of Walter Map
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 86-95
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Walter Map (c.1140–c.1209) was one of the ‘court clerics’ who thrived at the Plantagenet court of Henry II. He was born near Hereford, on the Welsh border, and much of the material devoted to the supernatural in his De Nugis Curialium draws on Celtic traditions. Written in the 1180s, the work is a compendium of the kind of gossip, anecdotes and accounts of marvellous happenings that courtiers in the royal household might indeed trifle with during their idle hours. In the chapters where Walter Map tells stories of the supernatural, his apparitions and phantoms are not so much the returning spirits of the dead as the inhabitants of a parallel world which interacts with the real world on occasion to produce the kind of marvels which he recounts. One of his most significant distinctions is that a particular story is ‘not a miracle but a marvel’. Thus, in the tale of King Herla, the mortal king's pygmy counterpart (perhaps one of the ‘little people’ of Celtic folklore) lures the protagonist and his companions away to a world where time has no meaning. When the royal retinue seek to return to their own time, they become lost wanderers, forming the basis of yet another version of the Wild Hunt legend. The stories which Walter Map tells about ghostly women reinforce this notion of a parallel world. ‘A Lady of the Lake’ and ‘The Wife of Edric Wilde’ are, according to his description, phantoms willing to take on physical form for as long as they are accorded honour by their mortal husbands; the tribute to Edric Wilde's heir Alnodus, and the recording of the epithet ‘The Sons of the Dead Woman’, attest perhaps to the persistence of an ancient belief that it is possible for mortal men to sire children upon the women of a parallel world. In the last of these stories, ‘The Demon at the Cradle’ bears a gruesome and sinister resemblance to Gervase of Tilbury's description of the ghostly creature known as the Lamia.
The Tale of King Herla
Part I, Chap. XI
We are told in old stories that Herla, the king of the ancient Britons, was enticed into an agreement by another king, who was a pygmy: his bodily height did not exceed that of an ape.
The ‘Deeds of the English Kings’ of William of Malmesbury
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 77-85
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The monk William of Malmesbury (c.1090–1143) was both an historian in the tradition of Bede and a recounter of Mirabilia in the manner of later court writers. His De Gestis Regum Anglorum was begun in about the year 1125, and is largely a chronicle of the history of Britain from its earliest times. Among the historical references there are a number of anecdotal accounts of supernatural events in Britain and elsewhere, which William presents as being no less true than the achievements of the kings whose deeds he is chronicling. In the first of the extracts that follow, the spirit of a woman who has led an evil life is claimed by the same hellish emissaries who led her astray in her lifetime. The story that I have called ‘The Jealous Venus’ is a variation on ancient tales of statues which come to life; in William's description of the bizarre procession observed by the young man there are strong overtones of the Hellequin's Hunt motif. The final story presents a warning about the dangers of pacts with the dead and attempts to forestall divine judgment. Indeed, the common theme running through all three stories is William of Malmesbury's disapproval of any activity which might involve the conjuration of spirits. The Witch of Berkeley is punished for sins which included the practices of augury and soothsaying; the Roman magician Palumbus who helps the young man regain conjugal bliss eventually dies a shameful death, punished for his necromancy; and the speculative philosophy in which the Two Clerks of Nantes indulge during their lifetime leads them to make an agreement which will eventually involve the raising of the dead.
The Witch of Berkeley
Book II, Sec. 204
At this time an event occurred in England which was not a celestial miracle, but an infernal wonder. I am sure none of my listeners will doubt the story, although they might in fact wonder at it. I heard of these events from a distinguished man who swore he had seen them for himself, and I would be ashamed not to believe him …
… In Berkeley there was a woman who, so it was later said, was accustomed to wickedness and to the practice of ancient methods of augury and soothsaying. She was a creature of immodesty, who indulged her appetites.
Part Four - Ghosts in Medieval Literature
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 175-176
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
The Saga of Grettir the Strong
- from Part Three - The Restless Dead
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 158-165
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Grettis Saga, which was written early in the fourteenth century, tells of the deeds of the outlaw Grettir Asmundsson, who is likely to have lived in Iceland during the early eleventh century. The saga tells of his travels across the North Atlantic to Norway, and of his many victorious encounters with his foes, whether living men or dead tomb-dwellers who had come back to life as revenants and draugar. Although Grettir is the hero of the saga, he is not a particularly admirable figure by the noble standards of late medieval chivalry. In his youth, he is a typical folk-tale ‘Bear's Son’ character: he is lazy, quick to anger, and the basis for his outlawry is the crime of murder. Expelled from the company of law-abiding men, he subsists in the glacial wilderness of the Icelandic highlands by stealing sheep. There are times indeed in the saga when the figure of Grettir can almost be regarded as a kind of living counterpart of the predatory revenants whom he defeats by his quick wits and physical strength. At the end of his fight with the ghost of the shepherd Glam, which is one of the pivotal events of the saga, there is a kind of ‘recognition’ between himself and the defeated ghost, who curses Grettir and leaves him with a fear of the dark and a hunted sense of his own luckless destiny. Earlier in the saga, before Grettir's luck has begun to turn, there is an account of his successful raid on the tomb of Kar in the island of Hamarsey. Grettir's attention had been drawn to the likelihood that treasure was buried within the tomb by the sight of a fiery glow on the headland where the howe was situated. The description of the tomb-dweller's existence within the ‘howe’ or tumulus, and his fierce defence of the possessions of this underground domain, convey a strong sense of Scandinavian notions of the after-life.
The Tomb of Kar the Old
Chap. XVIII
Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent.
The ‘Ecclesiastical History’ of Orderic Vitalis
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 66-73
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Orderic Vitalis (1075–c.1142) was an Anglo-Norman monk whose thirteen-book Historia Ecclesiastica was an attempt to provide for the Norman people the equivalent of Bede's earlier history of the English. The work was written at the abbey of Saint-Evroul in Normandy, and its author would have been acutely conscious of recent pressures upon the abbey arising from the rivalry between successive bishops of Lisieux, in whose diocese Saint-Evroul was situated, and leading lay barons of the region. In Orderic's account of the reported vision of a local priest in the last decade of the eleventh century, many of the misdeeds which have led to the spirits of the dead being punished in the afterlife were committed in the context of local disorder. The priest Walchelin initially assumes that the ghostly army is a real troop of soldiers on their way to join the fearsome Robert of Bellême's campaign against another warlord of the region, while Orderic's monkish disapproval of the lifestyle of the local aristocratic families is apparent in the relish with which he describes the torments of the noblewomen who are being punished for their lasciviousness while alive. What makes this account different from other medieval examples of the morally instructive ghost story is the tacit acceptance on the part of the chronicler that the subject of his narrative was witnessing a troop of the dead, a ‘rabble’ or retinue gathered around a mysterious dark lord called Herlequin or Hellequin. This name may have derived from the Old French ‘hèle-chien’ – ‘hunting dog’ – or may have been a diminutive of ‘helle’, the German word for the underworld. In the first part of this book, there have been other references to spectral armies (see, for instance, Peter the Venerable's ‘Apparitions in Spain’, and Rodulfus Glaber's ‘Army of Wraiths’), but in the passage that follows the familiar monastic theme of purgatorial suffering for secular transgression is addressed in the context of a much older vernacular tradition of a Wild Hunt or troop of phantoms. This tradition is rooted in the folklore of Northern Europe, and derives perhaps from the popular concept of the pagan god Wotan as a wandering huntsman.
The ‘Awntyrs of Arthure’
- from Part Four - Ghosts in Medieval Literature
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 194-198
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
One of the most impressive English alliterative poems of the fourteenth century is The Awntyrs of Arthure (‘The Adventures of Arthur’) at the Terne Wathelyne. The geographical setting of the poem is on the banks of the Wadling Tarn, a hill-loch in Cumberland. The poem may well have been written in the Scottish border-country, where there was a strong tradition of Arthurian folklore, and the anonymous author is likely to have borrowed from better-known alliterative poems such as Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the first part of the poem Arthur's queen Guinevere and her hunting companion Sir Gawain are separated from the rest of the royal party. The sky darkens, pelting rain and drifting snow scatter the hunting party, and in a lowering atmosphere in which nature itself seems to share their apprehension, Guinevere and Gawain are approached by the ghost of the queen's mother. In its exchanges with the queen, the ghost acts as a Memento Mori, a reminder of the transitoriness of life and beauty, and in its responses to Sir Gawain the ghost is cast in a soothsaying role, which links the first part of the poem to the second. The ghost's warnings about the pride and arrogance of Arthur's court, which it predicts will eventually end in internal strife and ruin, are a key narrative preparation for the appearance in the second half of the poem of the wronged knight Galeron with his demand for the restitution of land which the king had confiscated and given to Gawain.
The Ghost of Guinevere's Mother
Then there came from the loch a creature which seemed to have been fashioned in Hell, in Lucifer's likeness, and glided screaming towards Guinevere … Its body was almost naked, for it was only partly covered with a shroud, and its dark bones could be seen, for it had no skin or living colour. It stopped and stood immovable like a stone, glaring, groaning and raving, awaiting the approach of the fearless Sir Gawain. A toad clung to the cheek of this grim and grisly ghost. In the depths of the hollow eye-sockets there was a glow like the embers of a fire. Its scant clothing was covered with writhing serpents.
The ‘Lay du Trot’
- from Part Four - Ghosts in Medieval Literature
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 189-193
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This 300-line verse narrative in Medieval French (its title means in effect ‘the song of the jolting horse’) probably dates from the late thirteenth century. Its theme, the punishment in the after-life of those who disdain to love while they are alive, was taken up and developed across Europe throughout the late Middle Ages. There are variations on the theme in Latin, Italian and English literature, and such works reveal the formative influence of a twelfth-century treatise on courtly love written by Andreas Capellanus, which he called De Arte Honeste Amandi (‘The Art of Respectful Love’). In this treatise, the God of Love is depicted as a demanding deity with palaces and temples who requires all mortals to serve him; as the elaborate codes of courtly love developed still further, the convention was established that Love would take supernatural revenge upon those who refused to give their lives over to amatory pursuit. What is perhaps most striking about the Lay du Trot and its account of the two groups of loving and lovelorn ghosts is the narrative similarity to earlier medieval accounts of ghostly processions purporting to show conditions in the afterlife. The poem opens with the knight Lorois who, like the priest Walchelin in the account of ‘Hellequin's Hunt’ by Orderic Vitalis, is to be the witness of the procession, setting off on a springtime quest.
The Vision of the Knight Lorois
The knight mounted his horse and on his feet the squire placed spurs of gold. He took up his sword with its golden hilt, and then, in solitary state, Lorois left his home and cantered towards the forest. Along the river-bank, through the meadows that were filled with many flowers, cream-coloured, vermilion and blue, he rode fast without stopping. He had resolved that he would not return before he had heard the nightingale for the first time in an entire year.
As he neared the forest, he saw in front of him some eighty women in stately procession emerging from the trees. They were of noble appearance, well-dressed and lovely. They were without capes and headgear, but wore flowered posies of roses and eglantine upon their heads to give off the sweetest perfume. Each of them wore a light gown, which was uncovered because of the warm weather.
The ‘Decameron’ of Boccaccio
- from Part Four - Ghosts in Medieval Literature
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 206-212
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) was the son of a prosperous Florentine merchant. After a brief apprenticeship in his father's bank, and after giving up his studies of canon law, he devoted all his time to literature. As a young man he spent some years in Naples, which, under the rule of Robert of Anjou, was one of the major intellectual and cultural centres of Italy. He returned to Florence in 1341 and half a decade later witnessed the effects of the Black Death on the social structure of the city, which he was to describe in the introduction to his best-known work. The setting for the Decameron is a country villa in the hills outside Florence, where a group of ten young men and women have taken refuge from the plague which has begun to infect their city. To entertain themselves, it is arranged that each of them will tell a story every day for a period of ten days. The basic theme of the ghost story which follows (that it is an offence which is punishable in the afterlife to refrain from love during one's brief mortal existence) corresponds to the philosophy of courtly love. In the same way that the anonymous author of the Lay du Trot used an earlier medieval motif of a sorrowful procession of ghosts to uphold the tenets of this philosophy, so Boccaccio adapted the story of a woman hunted inexorably in the afterlife to accord with the specific circumstances of a lovelorn suitor and a scornful mistress. The social context and physical setting of the story-telling process in the Decameron would have underlined the message: like all the other tales, this story is related to a group of youthful listeners who, as refugees from a city infected with the plague, would have been fully aware of the fragility of mortal existence and the necessity of seizing the chance of transitory pleasure.
The Huntsman of Ravenna
Fifth Day, Story VIII
In Ravenna, that ancient city of Romagna, there dwelt among the nobility a young man called Nastagio degli Onesti, who inherited great wealth after the death of his father and his uncle. Being without a wife, Nastagio fell in love, as young men do, with the daughter of Messer Paolo Traversaro.
Part One - Ghosts and Monks
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 1-2
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Contents
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp vii-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
The Chronicle of Lanercost Priory
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 96-98
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Lanercost Priory, near Carlisle, was an Augustinian community which was founded in c.1166, and at some later date this strange little legend about a meeting between the bishop of Winchester and the spirit of King Arthur was recorded in its chronicle. The entry date in the chronicle giving the year 1216 as the time of the meeting corresponds to a particularly chaotic year during the period when Peter des Roches held the see of Winchester. This bishop played a key role as an adviser to King John during the civil war which followed the king's alienation from his barons. As we have seen in ‘The Dark Hunters of Peterborough’, supernatural incidents of this kind were often recorded as a means of highlighting the portentous implications of turbulent political events. Quite why the chronicle of a monastery near the Scottish border should record a legend about a churchman from the south of England is unclear, although both the border country and the district around Winchester itself had legendary associations with Arthur (there is a hilltop called Sleepers’ Hill near Winchester where the recumbent king supposedly lies awaiting the call of destiny). There are themes in this story – the palace in the woods, the attentive servants, the powerful monarch from another time who lives on in a dimension close to our own – which are reminiscent of Walter Map's accounts of apparitions and the wandering of King Herla. The folk-tales connecting Bishop Peter des Roches with butterflies may have arisen from the tendency of ‘this kind of fluttering creature’ to hatch out from the crevices in his tomb when the winter sunlight fell on his effigy in Winchester Cathedral.
MEDIEVAL GHOST STORIES 97
King Arthur and the Butterfly Bishop
AD MCCXVI
At this point I will record the stories told to me by older men about Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, to whom I have referred from time to time. He was a proud man, overly attached to secular affairs, in the manner of many of our churchmen. As he enjoyed pleasurable pastimes rather than the healing of souls, it is said that on one occasion he went off with some huntsmen on one of his frequent forays to pursue game in a nearby forest which was owned by his bishopric.
Medieval Ghost Stories
- An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001
-
Stories of spirits returning from the afterlife are as old as storytelling: accounts of ghosts and revenants which have crossed the mysterious border between the living and the dead are a dominant theme in many cultures, and in medieval Europe ghosts, nightstalkers, wild hunts and unearthly visitors from parallel worlds have figured in stories already in circulation before the coming of Christianity.
Medieval Ghost Stories is a collection of ghostly occurrences from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; they have been found in monastic chronicles and preaching manuals, in sagas and heroic poetry, and in medieval romances. In a religious age, the tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still make hair stand on end; unfailingly, these stories give a fascinating and moving glimpse into the medieval mind. Look only at the accounts of Richard Rowntree's stillborn child, glimpsed by his father tangled in swaddling clothes on the road to Santiago, or the sly habits of water sprites resting as goblets and golden rings on the surface of the river, just out of reach...
Andrew Joynes's thoughtful commentary relates content and form to events of the time: the monastic reform movement following the first millennium, the growth in philosophical speculation during the twelfth century renaissance, and the channelling of ancient Norse beliefs by Christian authors into the saga literature of Iceland.
ANDREW JOYNES is a freelance writer, historian and broadcaster.
The Chronicle of Henry of Erfurt
- from Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 115-118
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Henry of Erfurt was a German Dominican who died in 1370, and who compiled his Liber de Rebus Memorabilioribus, or ‘Book of Remarkable Events’, as part of a Chronicle of his times. In this entry for the year 1349, the chronicler gives an account of the interrogation of a cheerful and lively ghost called Reyneke, or Reinhard, who seems to have come to town and taken up temporary residence in a house which, given the numerous references to an overburdened host, was probably an inn. The account is noteworthy both for the detail of the phantom hand with which Reyneke announces his presence, and for the impression that is conveyed of the dead leading an untroubled ‘parallel’ existence in the mountain ranges near the town where the conversation with Reyneke occurs. In the to-and-fro of the dialogue between the townspeople and the ghost, and in Reyneke's apparent attachment to the serving maid in the house where he is staying, there are echoes of Gervase of Tilbury's description of the interrogation of the Ghost of Beaucaire. The ejection from their makeshift accommodation of the importunate townspeople who insist on staying in the house resembles another of Gervase's stories about mischievous nocturnal spirits causing havoc in wine-cellars, while the marvellous preparation by Reyneke of an impromptu banquet recalls Memorabilia accounts of attentive servants (‘The Tale of King Herla’ and ‘King Arthur and the Butterfly Bishop’) as well as the story of the Ghostly Butler in the Gesta Romanorum (see Part Four).
The Hand of Reyneke
In 1349, the second year of the reign of Charles IV, another ghost revealed itself in the town of Cyrenbergh, part of the domain of the landgrave of Hesse. Although I am not sure whether it did actually occur, or whether it was a ‘fantasma’ or product of men's imaginations, the occurrence was said to have been something quite remarkable: a little human hand, soft and elegant, allowed itself to be seen and touched, and perhaps as many as a thousand people did indeed touch and feel it. Nothing apart from the hand was visible or tangible, but one could also hear quite distinctly the hoarse whispering voice of a man.
Part Two - Ghosts and the Court
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 59-60
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
The Autobiography of Guibert of Nogent
- from Part One - Ghosts and Monks
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 32-35
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Although the monk Guibert of Nogent (c.1064–c.1125) is best known as a chronicler of the First Crusade, his autobiography, De Vita Sua, which was written towards the end of his life in a conscious attempt to emulate the Confessions of St Augustine, contains many examples of the way the medieval mind tested every experience, however personal, against a theological model. The following story, however, is unusual in that it conveys the extent to which, even in the ‘theo- logically correct’ eleventh-century, a strong-minded individual such as Guibert's mother could take control of the spiritual and emotional pattern of her own life. The story is not a ghost story as such; the apparitions of Guibert's father and his illegitimate child appeared to his mother in a kind of waking vision, which, significantly, occurred on the Sabbath so that its contents would have been interpreted as having heavenly authority. However, it does contain a strong suggestion that Guibert's mother was in effect haunted, as by a piteously crying ghostly child, by the knowledge of her husband's infidelity and its illegitimate outcome. Guibert describes how, with extraordinary self-denial, his mother adopted and cared for an orphaned baby in the belief that by doing so she was relieving the suffering that her vision had shown the spirits of her husband and his child to be undergoing. It was a process of symbolic transference (what Guibert calls ‘measure for measure’) which might have won the approval of a modern psycho-therapist as a means of laying the emotional ghosts of the past.
The Crying Child
Book I, Chap. XVIII
One summer Sunday night, just after Matins, my mother lay down on her narrow bed and began to fall asleep, and it seemed to her that her soul was leaving her body, although she was still aware of what was happening. It seemed that she was being led along a kind of corridor, and at last she left it behind and came to the edge of a deep abyss. Suddenly from this abyss creatures with the appearance of ghosts jumped out, with worms in their hair, and made as if to grasp her and pull her down to them. She was greatly frightened, when suddenly from behind her a voice cried out: ‘Do not touch her.’ At the sound of that commanding voice, the creatures fell back into the abyss.
The Book of the Preacher of Ely
- from Part One - Ghosts and Monks
- Andrew Joynes
-
- Book:
- Medieval Ghost Stories
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 May 2017
- Print publication:
- 03 May 2001, pp 55-58
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
During the late Middle Ages, ghost stories were often recorded in manuals containing material that could be adapted for use by itinerant preachers. This story comes from a fifteenth-century manuscript which is likely to have been the commonplace book of a preacher who had connections with Ely and its cathedral, but whose travels took him much further afield (the inclusion of material relating to Lancashire may well have been a means of adding convincing local colour during a preaching journey to the north of England). Some of the details of the story – the journey by night along a lonely road, the looming shadow of a spirit suffering the tortures of Purgatory, the readiness of the living to finance the redemption of the dead – resemble those Yorkshire tales about the restless dead recorded by the Monk of Byland (see Part Three), but in its simple and touching conclusion this account falls firmly into the Miracula tradition of medieval ghost stories.
The Hair that Turned to Gold
From Master Richard de Puttes comes a story dealing with the celebration of the Mass, in the year of the Lord 1373. A man from Haydock in the county of Lancashire kept a mistress with whom he had two sons; when she died, he married another woman. One day he went to a nearby black-smith's forge, which specialised in the preparation and sharpening of ploughshares, in order to obtain a coulter. The blacksmith lived at the estate of Hulme, two miles from Haydock.
As he came back that night, the man had just reached the cross beside the road which is called Newton Cross when he was subject to the most terrifying experience. In his fear, he gazed around in the darkness and saw what seemed to be a dark shadow. He begged it not to hurt him, and asked who it was. From within the shadow came a voice: ‘Have no fear. I am the woman who was once your lover and I have been allowed to approach you and ask for help.’ When the man asked how things were with her, she replied: ‘Not well. But you can help me if you are willing.’