Zombies and Shapechangers in Medieval Yorkshire April 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval , trackback
There are twelve medieval supernatural tales in Byland collection, which I’ve just published in a booklet for Pwca press (UK, US)* and which Chris and I discuss on this month’s podcast. And there are four important questions to ask about their author and how they came to be written: the ‘Where’, ‘Who’, ‘When’, and ‘Why’ of source-based history. We can, at least, answer the first three confidently. ‘Where’? the tales appear in some spare folios of a manuscript, Royal MS. 15, A. xx, which once belonged to Byland Abbey. Most of the stories are set within fifty miles of the Abbey and the closer the stories are to the Abbey the more detailed they become. This was unquestionably a Byland production, then. Once we accept that the tales were written at Byland Abbey we have also answered the ‘who’. The author was necessarily a monk working in some capacity there. The ‘when’ is also quite straightforward. Internal clues and the handwriting suggest that they were written between 1399 and c. 1420.
The big mystery with the tales is ‘why’? What possessed a Cistercian monk to take up valuable vellum with such fantastic farragoes? Most scholars have been satisfied with the idea that these were exempla: short texts with moral messages. Exempla were often used as the basis for sermons or for pious conversations in the Middle Ages: the kind of material that would be particularly valued within a monastery. And it is true that other medieval writers used ghost, demon and magic exempla to get across Christian messages. The best known instance is Caesarius of Heisterbach’s The Dialogue On Miracles, written some two hundred years earlier in Germany.
But there are differences. Of the fourteen Byland texts thirteen concerned the supernatural, with a particular concentration on departed spirits. There is no other medieval collection from anywhere in Europe which is so relentlessly focused on ghosts. Then, also, the Byland tales are written in a rather abbreviated way: they were as M. R. James had it ‘compressed’. It is almost as if the author is writing notes, knowing that he and fellow readers will recall or easily be able to find out the details. The tales are in no sense literary works: even the most extensive, tale II, misses out parts of the narrative. So, again, why were the tales written down?
My guess is that we had, c. 1400, a monk at Byland with a real fascination for the supernatural. He had been, to use Jean-Claude Schmitt’s word ‘seduced’ by the subject. He asked for and received permission to write up the creepy tales he so loved. How did he justify his request to his seniores? He claimed that his tales would have moral value. He certainly took care, though the results are sometimes perverse doctrinally, to justify the stories in Christian terms. The text was in no way a priority for the scriptorium. Indeed, the author was only given some spare folios in an old manuscript. Royal MS. 15, A. xx was two hundred years old when our monk set to writing on some blank pages.
What of the supernatural world that the anonymous author portrays in the North York Moors, some six hundred years ago? There were doubtless many different forms of the supernatural there, as there were in the 1800s in the same area, when folklore was collected in a more systematic fashion. But there are two striking forms that emerge from the Byland tales: the shape-changer and the revenant.
The shape-changer is familiar from later folklore in the same part of Yorkshire, and, indeed, through most of England. These are beings that change from one form to another to frighten or to catch the attention of night-time walkers: in one moment they are, thinking of tale II, a raven, then a peat stack (though the Latin is uncertain), then a dog, then a she goat, then a tall cadaverous human. In tale VIII (in another difficult Latin passage) we seem to have a later shape-changing favourite from the north: the rolling wool bogey (a shape-changer in the form of a bale of textiles spinning along the ground). The Byland author, like some later folklore writers, associates these shapechangers with spirits of the dead.
The second category (and from what I can see it is utterly distinct from the shape-changer) is the revenant. These are the actual bodies of the dead that rise from their graves and walk around the moorland parishes. In the view of our author they are animated by the suffering soul. Unlike the zombies of modern dystopian fiction, they had agendas: they did not just zig-zag from place to place groaning. One Byland zombie strolled across the moor to blind his quondam mistress; while another (I find this unbearably poignant) hung around outside windows and doors hoping to be noticed by his old neighbours! The revenant did not have the shape-changer’s stamina. He had long disappeared from Yorkshire folklore by the 1800s.
It is fascinating to see incidental details in these tales showing the continuity of folklore across the centuries. We have, for instance, in tale X, reference to a night-time cavalcade of the dead, where departed spirits have with them the cattle they had given to the church in their lives: as James implies, this is likely a Christian adaptation of the cattle slaughtered in pagan times to accompany their lords to Valhalla. In tale I, meanwhile, a spirit is stopped by a stream. Fast forward five hundred years and anxious Yorkshire pedestrians hurrying through the countryside at night knew that ghosts would not follow them past running water.
We will never know the circumstances in which the anonymous author put down his tales. But anyone interested in English folklore has reasons to be grateful to him for doing so. Any other thoughts on the Byland supernatural tales: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
*This is the first time that the Latin (1922 edition) and a translation (1924) have been put side by side.
