The Medieval Ghosts of Byland Abbey

Some time around the turn of the fifteenth century, a Cistercian monk of Byland Abbey took it upon himself to pen a series of ghost stories on the empty pages of a folio containing some of the library's more prestigious works. A medieval monk scribbling down ghost stories was, in truth, not entirely unusual. In the case of the Byland monk, however, the stories seemed to be less concerned with religious matters and more with grisly details of the spirits themselves. Undead rising from the graves, shapeshifting from human to animal and back again, hunting down the living to gouge their eyes from their skulls. The monk was, in his way, reporting on the folklore of the day, leaving behind one of the middle ages' more unique documents on belief in the afterlife. Republished in its original Latin by medievalist and author M.R. James in 1922, the stories had, perhaps, more in common with his own writings than they did that of the church and opened a window on the prevalence of Pagan beliefs and folklore tradition that maintained throughout medieval Europe.

 

SOURCES

 

Scmitt, Jean-Claude (1998) Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. The University of Chicago Press, London, UK.

 

Bartlett, Robert (2008) The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. Cambridge Universtoy Press, Cambridge, UK.

 

Joynes, Andrew (2001) Medieval Ghost Stories. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, UK.

 

Grant, A.J. (1924) Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories. Yorkshire Archeological Journal, Vol. XXVII. Yorkshire, UK.

 

Fleischhack, Maria & Schenkel, Elmar (2016) Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media. Peter Lang, NY, USA.

 

Harrison, Stuart (2022) History of Byland Abbey. [online] English Heritage. Available at:

 

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