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| ISBN-13: | 9781849766463 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tate Publishing & Enterprises, L.L.C. |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 307,042 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The LIVING and the DEAD
In maner of a dyaloge it wente
ANON., 'A DISPUTATION BETWEEN THE BODY AND THE WORMS'
1. SAINTS, BEASTS AND SILVER SPOONS
3 February in the year 1014. At Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, the Danish conqueror Sweyn Forkbeard saw a sight that astonished him: the former East Anglian king, St Edmund, armed and advancing towards him. The terrified Sweyn, mounted on a stallion, shouted to his troops who were stationed around him, crying: 'Help, fellow-warriors, help! St Edmund is coming to kill me!' But none of his warriors could see Edmund, who was able to approach the king and to attack him fiercely with a spear. Sweyn, in great pain, fell from his horse and died that day at twilight. St Edmund, who had been murdered in 869 by Danish invaders, had apparently returned from the dead with a regicidal mission. Few acts of revenge can have been left to cool for as long as this.
This account was written in the first half of the twelfth century by an English monk, John of Worcester, and was one of many re-tellings and embroiderings of the posthumous miracles of St Edmund, the earliest collection of which was written around 1095 by Hermann, an East Anglian archdeacon. According to him, St Edmund's intervention at that particular time was the direct result of an appeal to the saint made by all the people of East Anglia, distressed by Sweyn's outrageous demands for an enormous tribute from Bury St Edmunds, where the saint's body lay.
Among the earliest illustrated biographies of the saint is The Life and Miracles of St Edmund, which dates from around 1130 and is now among the treasures held in the Morgan Library in New York (fig. 1). One of the miniature paintings in this gorgeously illustrated volume depicts the moment of supernatural spectacle. The artist shows Sweyn not on a horse but, as he is described in variant accounts of his death, tucked up in bed. He lies under a colourful bedspread (though still wearing his crown), while St Edmund, vivid against a blue background, springs light-footedly into his chamber, thrusting his lance into the king's chest. The composition is evenly balanced, the principal part divided into two arched fields. The deep blue of St Edmund's left-hand section suggests distance or eternity, while Sweyn's green right-hand section represents the domestic sphere, a bed-chamber hung with white curtains, from behind which three frightened-looking men peer, evidently unwilling to risk attracting St Edmund's attention. Each king moves into the other's space: just as Sweyn's lower legs and feet project into the blue section, implying his imminent entry into eternity, so the tip of Edmund's spear and his left hand, holding a moneybag, protrude into the domestic chamber as the supernatural encroaches into the everyday. Edmund's slender lance not only pierces both the king's half of the composition and his body; at its other end it extends out beyond the decorative frame and border where it strays into the undecorated margin, as though this uncanny object does not quite know where it belongs.
The timing of the earliest accounts of St Edmund's miracles is significant, written as they were so soon after the trauma of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Many Saxons in late eleventh-century England must devoutly have wished for protection by their old saints from their new oppressors. Sometimes this was expressed indirectly. One tale popular at that time, later written down by the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury, concerned Saint Edith of Wilton (fig. 2), who had died around 984 but was roused to posthumous action by an insult. In 1020, during a visit to her resting place at Wilton Abbey, Cnut, the son of Sweyn Forkbeard, began to make disparaging comments about Edith's status as a saint on the grounds that her father, King Edgar, was a 'vicious man, an especial slave to lust, and more tyrant than king'. Continuing to make 'taunts like this with the uncouthness characteristic of a barbarian', he demanded that Edith's tomb be opened so that it could be seen whether her body remained uncorrupted – a sure sign of purity and sainthood. He got more than he bargained for: as he was peering into her grave, she sat up and struck him.
Another story, concerning St Æthelthryth (also known as Etheldreda)dealt directly with the more recent invaders. This seventh-century Anglo-Saxon saint had been Abbess of Ely, which, following the Norman Conquest, had harboured anti-Norman dissidents. During the English revolt against the Normans in 1070–1, the rebels swore an oath of loyalty on St Æthelthryth's relics and regarded her as their special patron. When at this time a Norman, Gervase, was thought by the monks of Ely to be oppressing the monastery and hostile to the religious community, 'every-one who was for whatever reason oppressed by him, confronted him with the name of the lady saint'. Evoking St Æthelthryth's name, however, did not at first appear to be effective and, undaunted, Gervase 'would put one in fetters, pronounce condemnation on another, keep calling another to court', and so on. But when the Abbott himself was summoned to appear in court before Gervase, matters came to a head. That night:
St Æthelthryth appeared in the form of an abbess with a pastoral staff, along with her two sisters, and stood before [Gervase], just like an angry woman, and reviled him in a terrifying manner as follows: 'Are you the man who has been so often harassing my people – the people whose patroness I am – holding me in contempt? And have you not yet desisted from disturbing the peace of my church? What you shall have, then, as your reward is this: that others shall learn through you not to harass the household of Christ.' And she lifted the staff which she was carrying and implanted its point heavily in the region of his heart, as if to pierce him through.
Gervase disturbed his household with his 'terrible groaning and horrible screaming' and his cries of 'Lady, have mercy! Lady, have mercy!' And, with that, he died. St Æthelthryth had finally had enough – and for a long time afterwards, the story of her post-mortem return was enough to protect Ely's religious community.
*
But what about the other side of the coin? Not all those who returned from the grave came to fight on the side of the oppressed. In the twelfth century, remarkable accounts began to be written that described 'revenants' – a name derived from the French word revenir, to return. They too were tangible, corporeal presences; but this species of return was definitely not regarded as miraculous. These dead refused to stay in their tombs and insisted on climbing out and stalking back to their towns and villages, night after night, to attack the living. But what was the background to these stories? Had generations of people looked out fearfully towards the wild, lonely places – the marshes, the moors and the misty hills – and shuddered at what their imaginations conjured up, glad to close their doors and to reach the safety of the hearth?
The idea of something not quite human lurking malevolently out there in the darkness is buried deep within our collective imagination and has a long history. It is at the centre of the greatest surviving Old English poem, Beowulf, the text of which is preserved in a single medieval manuscript now in the British Library. Beowulf tells a story that was, to the late tenth- or early eleventh-century scribe, already as old as the hills. It was probably composed in the eighth century, but it tells of a Scandinavian prince of some two centuries earlier who had crossed the sea to Denmark with a band of warriors to fight Grendel, a man-eating monster who was tormenting the Danes. Grendel cannot strictly be described as a ghost, because he has not returned from the dead, but he has some decidedly ghostly features, and descriptions of him share common elements with later accounts of revenants.
At the beginning of the poem we are taken to Heorot, a magnificent mead-hall. This venue – 'hart's hall' – represents fellowship and harmony, a special place where men gather together to eat and drink, to tell and to hear stories. Accompanied by a harp, a minstrel sings of God's creation, of how He 'set up in triumph the radiance of sun and moon as light for those dwelling on land, and adorned the corners of the earth with branches and leaves'. The scene is set – the gathering by firelight inside, doors shut against the cold and darkness outside. The Beowulf poet then describes Grendel as one who lives in darkness in his lair of marsh and fen, a far cry from the decorative, radiant landscape celebrated in the minstrel's song. Grendel makes his first devastating attack when he is angered by the music he hears from Heorot, its intrinsic order and harmony at odds with the darkness and disorder he represents.
But what kind of creature is Grendel? He is certainly a monster: he wields an overwhelming muscular force, and is eventually dispatched in a very physical way, when Beowulf tears off his huge arm. The Beowulf poet uses epithets that suggest a more complex being, however. He introduces Grendel as a 'grimma gæst', when gæst in Old English meant spirit, and was a word that could be used in the context of the Holy Spirit or an individual soul. It could also mean an angel, or a demon; but, equally, it could signal the concept of a supernatural being more like a ghost. Grendel is further described as a 'deorc deathscua', a dark death-shadow, which suggests not a solid figure but a shifting and insubstantial fog. His manner of approaching Heorot is also odd. We might expect the land to shake under a giant's heavy tread, but Grendel is described as a 'scrithan sceadugenga', and while 'sceadugenga' means walker in darkness, the word scrithan denotes a gliding movement. There is the suggestion that in his own territory he has the ability to be as vaporous as the 'mistige moras', the misty marshes in which he dwells. For all Grendel's fabled physical strength and his violent nature, for all his monstrousness, he possesses an additional dimension of the uncanny; he is a dreadful, half-glimpsed being we would not be surprised to encounter in the pages of M.R. James or Robert Aickman. In all essential aspects – his appearance in darkness, his shadowy form, his gliding motion and his penchant for disrupting human affairs – Grendel can be seen as a proto-ghost. Considering how central the ghostly figure would be to the British imagination as the centuries unfolded, his place in such an important early literary work is fitting.
*
When in the final years of the twelfth century the Yorkshire canon William of Newburgh sat down to write his great work, the Historia rerum Anglicarum or history of English affairs, he did not think it amiss to record 'prodigiosa' – unnatural marvels – alongside political events of the previous hundred years or so. William was only interested in reliable sources; and although it seemed odd to him that the dead were said to walk, it was because there were so many believable accounts that they deserved a place in his chronicle:
That the corpses of the dead, moved by some kind of spirit, leave their graves and wander around as the cause of danger and terror to the living before going back to tombs which open up to receive them, is not something which would be easily believed, were it not for the fact that there have been clear examples in our own time, with abundant accounts of such events.
As a chronicler, William naturally wanted to put these accounts into some sort of historical context. Had corpses always got up out of their graves and gone on the rampage, menacing their family and erstwhile neighbours, he wondered? He thought not. He describes how he had searched for earlier stories of the dead returning to menace the living, but without success: 'Nothing of the sort is reported in books of former times', he wrote. And surely, he continued, 'since these ancient books recorded the everyday and matter-of-fact events of former times, they would not have been able to suppress accounts of stupefying and horrible events if indeed they had occurred'. William concludes that it must be a recent phenomenon. Indeed, it was something of an epidemic: contemporary accounts were so abundant, he complains, that 'it would be extremely tedious for me to have to write down all those things I have heard of which happened in our own times'.
Could it have been, however, that in the past the clergy had suppressed accounts of these 'stupefying and horrible events'? They were, after all, the scribes; it was they who controlled what was included in histories, and what was left out. And ghosts were not entirely absent from earlier writings: the Venerable Bede, of whose work William approved, occasionally referred to supernatural visitors in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, or Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed in 731), but his ghosts were special envoys sent from heaven – a much more respectable class of revenant.
On the face of it, William's life was a highly circumscribed one, spent within the community of the Augustinian priory of Newburgh in the lonely hills of North Yorkshire. And yet he spoke with men and women in different parts of the country when he made visits to other regions, and it was from them, it seems, that he got to hear about supernatural goings-on. One story concerned a ghost that appeared in Buckinghamshire – he remarked that he 'was first told about it by the people of the neighbourhood, and afterwards more fully by Stephen, a venerable archdeacon of that district'. A man died, and was buried 'with full customary rights'. However:
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. When the dead man came back, he was greeted by the alarmed shouts of the watchmen, and, unable to cause any more mischief, went away.
How was one to tackle such a problem? There were, it was generally agreed, two methods, one secular and one religious; and both could be effective. In the case of the Buckinghamshire ghost, the church offered a solution when the man's family consulted an archdeacon and his assembly, who took the story to the Bishop of Lincoln. The bishop was 'just as amazed as everybody else', but his advisors shrugged their shoulders and informed him – with impressive nonchalance – that 'such things had often happened in England', and vouchsafed that 'the usual remedy (which gave comfort and reassurance to a frightened community) was to dig up the body of whichever miserable person was causing the nuisance and cremate it'. The bishop, however, looked upon this with some distaste, finding it 'both unseemly and sacrilegious'. He came up with a solution that was just as ritualistic – and presumably reassuring to the public – but that replaced the savage gesture of pagan tradition with the lighter touch of Christian doctrine:
he prepared a scroll of absolution and gave it to the archdeacon with the instructions that the dead man's grave should be opened, and the scroll placed on his chest, and the grave closed up again.
The deed was done, and it worked; the revenant 'never wandered again, and was kept from molesting and terrorising anyone else'. Another story William relates occurred in Berwick, where a wealthy man, who 'had been given over to sinful behaviour' died, but repeatedly rose from his tomb and wandered through the town, accompanied by the sound of barking dogs. People worried that he might attack them if they ran into him, and also that, as a walking corpse, he would contaminate the air and bring sickness to the town. They took matters into their own hands, assembling ten strong young men 'who dug up the offending corpse, dismembered it and burnt the pieces in a fire'. The ghost was seen no more; but according to William they had been sadly right about the risk of contagion, which affected the town badly and killed a great many.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION, 6,
I THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, 14,
1. Saints, Beasts and Silver Spoons,
2. 'Such shall you be',
II QUESTIONABLE SHAPES, 34,
3. 'Are they all gone into Italie?',
4. News out of Purgatory,
5. 'Revenge, Revenge!',
6. Collecting Ghosts,
III GHOSTS FOR A NEW AGE, 84,
7. 'Strange and Wonderful News',
8. True Relations and Diverting Histories,
9. Credulity and Common Sense,
IV TERROR AND WONDER, 114,
10. Come Down into the Vaults,
11. Sublime Spectacle,
12. 'Hopes of high talk with the departed dead',
V APPEARANCES AND DISAPPEARANCES, 142,
13. A Satirical View,
14. Sheets and Clouds,
15. In the Olden Time,
VI A HAUNTED CENTURY, 184,
16. Haunts Old and New,
17. 'Is there anybody there?',
VII RE-INVENTING GHOSTS, 212,
18. 'The dear old sacred terror',
19. The Haunted Land,
20. 'Hallo, George!',
21. Ghosts at Large,
Postscript, 268,
Notes, 271,
Select bibliography, 278,
Sources of epigraphs, 282,
Sources of illustrations, 283,
Acknowledgements, 284,
Index, 285,
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