Medieval Ghost Stories Read online

  Medieval

  Ghost Stories

  “Strongly recommended.” M R JAMES NEWSLETTER.

  Stories of restless spirits returning from the afterlife are as old as storytelling. In medieval Europe ghosts, nightstalkers and unearthly visitors from parallel worlds had been in circulation since before the coming of Christianity.

  Here is a collection of ghostly encounters from medieval romances, monastic chronicles, sagas and heroic poetry. These tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still make the hair stand on end. Look at the story 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 golden rings on the surface of the river, just out of reach.

  The writer and broadcaster Andrew Joynes brings together a vivid selection of these tales, with a thoughtful commentary that puts them in context and lays bare the layers of meaning in them.

  ‘… The ghost

  is not simply a dead

  or missing person,

  but a social figure,

  and investigating it can

  lead to that dense site

  where history and

  subjectivity make

  social life …’

  Avery F. Gordon,

  Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

  (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

  Contents

  Preface

  Part One

  GHOSTS AND MONKS

  Introduction

  The Spirit of Paschasius the Deacon

  The Bathkeeper

  The Visions of Tortgith

  The Mission to Germany

  The Ghostly Gatherings

  The Domain of the Dead

  The Groaning Ghosts

  Wulferius and the Ghostly Martyrs

  A Demonic Visitor

  An Army of Wraiths

  The Burning Spear

  Herveus and his Debtor

  The Crying Child

  The Apparition of Bernard le Gros

  The Apparitions in Spain

  The Ghostly Chapter Meeting

  The White Lady of Stamheim

  The Spectre’s Warning

  The Load of Earth

  The Incestuous Ghost

  The Gift of Snakes and Toads

  The Devilish Tormentor

  The Shoes of the Hunted Woman

  Whispers in the Choir

  The Brimstone Potion

  The Hair that Turned to Gold

  Part Two

  GHOSTS AND THE COURT

  Introduction

  The Priest Walchelin and Hellequin’s hunt

  The Dark Hunters of Peterborough

  The Witch of Berkeley

  The Jealous Venus

  The Two Clerks of Nantes

  The Tale of King Herla

  A Lady of the Lake

  The Wife of Edric Wilde

  The Sons of the Dead Woman

  The Demon at the Cradle

  King Arthur and the Butterfly Bishop

  The Fight with the Ghostly Army

  Dreams and Portents

  Eel Pie

  The Figure by the River-Pool

  The Child Tumbled from the Cradle

  The Cemetery of Aliscamps

  The Flying Mortar

  The Ghost of Beaucaire

  The Hand of Ryneke

  Part Three

  THE RESTLESS DEAD

  Introduction

  Grendel the Nightstalker

  The Defeat of Grendel

  The Burial of the Foster-Brothers

  The Buckinghamshire Ghost

  The Berwick Ghost

  The Hound’s Priest

  The Ghost of Anant

  Hrapp’s Ghost

  The Ghost in the Doorway

  The Ghost of Thorolf Halt-Foot

  Thorgunna’s Supper

  Deaths at Frodis-water

  The Companies of the Dead

  The Ghosts on Trial

  The Tomb of Kar the Old

  Glam the Shepherd

  The Fight with Glam’s Ghost

  The Basket of Beans

  The Haunting of Snowball

  The Frightened Oxen

  The Silver Spoons

  The Howling Ghost

  The Child of Richard Rowntree

  The Sister of Adam de Lond

  Part Four

  GHOSTS IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

  Introduction

  Bisclavret the Werewolf

  The Vision of the Knight Lorois

  The Ghost of Guinevere’s Mother

  The Phantom Knight of Wandlesbury

  The Ghostly Butler

  The Demons’ Castle

  The Huntsman of Ravenna

  Select Bibliography

  Preface

  The emergence of the ‘ghost story’ as a distinct genre is a relatively recent literary development. Medieval accounts of supernatural events were different in both style and function from those of modern times, and many of the stories I have brought together in this anthology were products of the encounter between the Church’s teaching and vernacular belief which characterised much of the culture of the Middle Ages. The book does not of course contain all the medieval texts which refer to ghosts and apparitions: such a collection would not only be unwieldy but repetitive, since many of the accounts which are modelled on hagiographical episodes closely resemble each other. It does, however, bring together a number of texts which are significant in that they indicate various aspects of medieval belief about the possibility of traffic across the mysterious border between the living and the dead. They are drawn from an extremely wide range of source material, from chronicle histories to Icelandic sagas, and the reasons which may have led the medieval writers to record them were as varied as the sources themselves. I hope the stories will prove useful as indications of some of the preoccupations and reference points (what today might be called the ‘agenda’) of the medieval mind.

  The definition of a ghostly occurrence which I have used as a criterion in the selection of these texts is a broad one. For the most part, the ghosts which walk through this anthology are the departed spirits of ordinary, rather than extraordinary, people. In other words, they are not saints, although in the case of monastic writings, the stories are often closely modelled on hagiographical accounts of saints’ miraculous doings. These ghosts are spirits, or ‘undead’ corporeal presences, which come back across the border between the dead and the living and re-visit in an imploring or menacing fashion the communities where they once dwelt. They are not spirits glimpsed in revelatory visions of the afterlife, as in the Irish account of St Patrick’s Purgatory or in the Divine Comedy of Dante. Not all of these medieval ghost stories take as their subjects the spirits of the departed. I have felt it appropriate to include in this anthology accounts of Wild Hunts, shape-changers and monstrous nightstalkers, since many of these stories have their origins in the pre-Christian beliefs about the supernatural which continued to have currency throughout the Middle Ages. Although King Herla, Grendel and Bisclavret are not ghosts in the sense that we understand the term today, they crossed a border – which was clearly a significant one for medieval popular belief – between this world and a parallel existence, and their insistent presence caused, at the very least, unease among the living who came into contact with them.

  Most of these medieval ghost stories, however, were not intended in the first instance to chill the blood or entertain by frisson, as is the case with more recent examples of the genre. Today, the effect of a story of the supernatural is frequently enhanced by the fact that it runs counter to the supposedly rational teno
r of modern culture. In the Middle Ages, a time of unquestioning religious faith, a ghost story often had an exemplary purpose and was intended to evoke a wondering response from its listeners. This is the main theme of the stories which I have grouped together in Part One of the anthology. In the centuries that followed the first Christian millennium, the nature of this wondering response to stories of the supernatural itself developed and evolved. From the twelfth century onwards, the increasingly sophisticated presentation of stories which drew upon folklore and popular legend prompted a sense of the marvellous which, although still some wayfromour own frisson-laden responses to the modern ghost story, might have begun to justify the much-quoted assertion by Hamlet, a product of the Renaissance, that there were ‘more things in heaven and earth’ than could be encompassed by medieval philosophy. In compiling Part Two of this anthology, therefore, it has been one of my aims to bring together texts which may have provoked just such a response, and in which stories of ghosts and apparitions were perhaps used as a means of fostering philosophical speculation.

  The roots of vernacular culture during the Middle Ages thrust deep into the past of the peoples of Northern Europe, and nourished a continuing popular belief in the ghost as a grotesque corporeal revenant. The stories which figure in Part Three of this collection, many of them from Scandinavia where the connection with the Germanic Age of Migrations remained strongest during the Middle Ages, contain a robust image of the ghost which is far removed from the monastic vision of a pale spirit pleading for relief from the pains of Purgatory. The fact that a number of these stories of wandering, vengeful cadavers were recorded by churchmen (who tried, not always convincingly, to add a moralistic conclusion for exemplary purposes) perhaps reveals the cultural pressure upon the Church in its continuing encounter with the pre-Christian past of the laity. Finally, in Part Four of the anthology, I have brought together some examples of ghosts in medieval vernacular literature. The narrative formulation of these ghostly episodes is much more sophisticated than the accounts of ghosts in monastic chronicles and preachers’ manuals; for the writers of these stories, the ghost was a useful literary device which could provide coded support for particular cultural attitudes.

  The source of the wording of each text is cited at the end of the story itself. Many of the translations are my own, but in some instances I have had to abridge and fashion material to make the extracted account of a ghostly episode more of a story in its own right. For that reason I have used the phrase ‘re-told from the Latin’ in my source reference. To this end also I have given each of the accounts a title of my own invention which refers to the nub of the story, and I have used that title in the contents list and placed it in italics before each extract. I hope this will have the effect of helping readers come to terms with material which is often unsophisticated from the point of view of developed narrative, and will be useful for subsequent reference. In those cases where I have reproduced material from earlier translations, I have often had to adapt the original English text to avoid the kind of arch phraseology with which earlier medievalists sprinkled their translations: in these instances I use the phrase ‘adapted from’ in my source reference. Wherever relevant, I have followed my source reference with details of recently published edited translations of the entire medieval work in which the story features. This will, I hope, assist readers who are interested in researching further the manuscript context in which the story first appeared centuries ago.

  Among the reference works listed in the bibliography, I should draw particular attention to the writings of the French scholars Claude Lecouteux and Jean-Claude Schmitt, which I found particularly useful when I set about the task of grouping texts for inclusion in this anthology. I am very grateful to my former tutors Professor Ian Short and Dr Alison Finlay of Birkbeck College, University of London, for their advice and comments on the draft text of this book, and to Dr Robert Ireland of University College London for his help in translating some of the more obscure passages of medieval Latin. I am obliged to the University of Minnesota Press for granting permission to use the epigraph quotation at the start of this anthology, and to Dr Richard Barber and his colleagues at Boydell & Brewer Ltd for their help in preparing the text for publication.

  Andrew Joynes

  Part One

  Ghosts and Monks

  Introduction

  ‘The dead by their nature are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living …’1 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.2 It is likely also that, during the centuries when the political and cultural edifice of medieval Christendom was being built, little or no written credence would have been given to stories of restless ghosts returning from the world of the dead; for at a time when the church was refurbishing the cultural structure of the classical world before embarking on the conversion of the tribes who had over-run the Roman Empire in Northern Europe, such stories might have carried undesirable overtones of classical pagan superstition about the unappeased dead, or of Germanic beliefs about vengeful corporeal revenants. According to St Augustine, and to the early churchmen influenced by his teaching, it was the task of the Christian faithful simply to pray for the souls of the departed, and to leave their fate in the afterlife to the merciful wisdom and justice of God. Given such a relatively simple theological chart of the passage between life and death, there would have been no reason for widespread narrative accounts of the restless or returning dead.

  It was not until the onset of the first Millennium that accounts of apparitions and significant ‘inter-actions’ between the dead and the living began to be written down on a regular basis. Before that time of course it is likely that, despite the teaching of the church, vernacular culture had continued to accord value to folktales and oral accounts of ghostly occurrences. With the looming millennial terrors of the year 1000, and the general expectation that, with the Second Coming, heaven and earth would pass away, vernacular belief seems to have irrupted into the citadels of Church teaching. Stories of restless spirits of the departed, of ghostly violation
s of the traditional boundaries between the living and the dead, began to be recorded even by eminent churchmen.

  At first such stories had the purpose of demonstrating the apocalyptic quality of the times, symbolising the perturbation of the natural order which was anticipated by the generations which had to take account of the approach of the first Christian Millennium. Soon, however, the stories began to be used specifically and discernibly for what today would be called ‘propaganda’ purposes. Most of them were told in such a way that they corresponded to hagiographic models by which the miraculous events of saints’ lives were traditionally recorded; and, as we shall see from a number of the stories that follow, the narrative structure of these Miracula (accounts of apparitions of the departed spirits of ordinary – and often decidedly unsaintly – people) served the institutional interests of the Church well. The stories invariably depicted the secular conduct of the knightly classes as requiring atonement in the afterlife; while actions which brought specific financial and territorial benefit to the monasteries where the stories were recorded resulted in a happy narrative outcome for the spirits of the deceased. Some medieval historians have seen the proliferation of such accounts, with the common theme of the ghost seeking the help of the living to lessen its suffering in the first stages of the afterlife, as representing the growing complexity of the theological charts, which now indicated a sojourn in Purgatory as part of the final journey of each departed soul.3 Others have linked the stories with the fostering, by a network of Cluniac monasteries, of the so-called Cult of the Dead, which resulted in the growth of suffrages, or endowments to provide for prayers for the deceased, as a source of monastic revenue.4 Undoubtedly such broad factors played a part in determining the narrative shape of these Miracula. However, it is also worthwhile reading them as ghost stories in their own right and not merely as monastic propaganda or naive examples of preachers’ theology. Some of them might even be considered as versions of the kinds of story which continued to hold sway in the vernacular imagination, albeit taken over, adapted and ‘controlled’ by the Church.