Gone Medieval - Medieval Monsters, Ghosts & Werewolves

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

The supernatural in the Medieval world was always close at hand. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis pays a visit to the only two residents still at History Hit Towers at the witching hour - After Dark’s presenters Dr. Anthony Delaney and Dr. Maddy Pelling - to regale them with some Medieval stories of the mythological and paranormal.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Have you subscribed to History Hits' newest offering After Dark yet? If not, you should. And while you're there, double check that you're still subscribed to Gone Medieval too. After Dark is hosted by the fabulous team of Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. One evening, I made the dangerous mistake of hanging around History Hit towers to find out what goes on.

after dark. I can tell you it's spooky, but it's brilliant. I ended up having a chat with the only two residents still here at the witching hour about medieval monsters, ghosts and werewolves. This is that chat. Turn out the lights, check under the bed, and find a hand to hold if you can. If you make it to the other side and you want more of this kind of thing, check out after dark for all your myths, misdeeds and paranormal needs. This story was recorded by a monk named William of Molesbury around 1125. It's called The Witch of Barclay. In this time, an event occurred in England which was not a celestial miracle, but an infernal wonder.

I'm 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 Barclay, there was a woman who, so it was later said, was accustomed to wickedness and to practice the ancient methods of augury and soothsaying. She had taken no heed of scandal throughout her life, but she was beginning to grow old and fearful of the battering footsteps of death. One day, as she was dining, a little crow which she kept as a pet, uttered a cry that sounded like human speech. This startled her so much, she dropped her knife, groaning sorrowfully. her face suddenly grown pale, she said,

Today, my plough has turned its final furrow. I'm about to hear and undergo great sorrow. The woman took to her bed and pained by a deadly sickness, summoned her remaining children, a monk and a nun. In a gasping voice, she said, My children, I have enslaved myself to the artifice of the devil and have been the mistress of forbidden things. Now, as I end my life, I am likely to face the prospect of being tortured and punished by those very beings who used to be my advisors in sin.

I do not expect that you can deflect the true judgment from my soul, but perhaps you can help me by attending to my body in the following way. So me up in the hide of a deer, and then place me face upwards in a stone sarcophagus, the lid sealed with lead and iron. bind the stone with three heavy iron chains and let there be fifty psalms sung each night and masses said each day to lessen the ferocious attacks of my enemies when I have lain secure in this way for three nights bury me on the fourth day although so grave are my sins

I fear the earth itself might refuse to receive me to its warming bosom all was done as she directed her children attending to the matter with great zeal and affection. But such had been her wickedness that no amount of piety and prayer availed against the violence of the devil. On the first and second night of the vigil, when choirs of clerics had gathered to sing melodious psalms around her beer, demons pulled apart the outer edges of the door of the church, which had been bolted with an iron bar. On the third night, around Cockrow, the enemy arrived

making the most terrible noise, and all of the monastery was shaken to its foundations. One demon creature larger and more terrible than the others threw down the entrance door which was shattered into fragments. The priests stood rigid with dread, hair on end and voices stopped in their throats as the creature approached the sarcophagus with an arrogant swagger. The creature called the woman by name and ordered her to rise up, to which the reply came that she was unable to do so because of the chains that bound the sarcophagus. By the power of your sin, you will be unbound, said the demon. And at once pulled apart the iron chain,

as though it were no more than a cord of flax. The coffin lid was thrown off, and the woman was seized and dragged out of the church before the horrified gaze of the observers. Outside the portals of the church, a fierce black horse stood neighing, with iron barbs protruding along the length of its back. onto these hooks the woman was placed and the entire demonic retinue quickly disappeared from sight

although their cries of triumph and the woman's pleas for mercy could be heard up to four miles away hello and welcome to after dark myths misdeeds and the paranormal i'm dr maddy pelling and i'm eleanor of aquitaine amazing it's so great to meet you what an incredible scoop we have episode. There was just momentary silence. I'm keeping that in. I'm not saying my name, so you might as well keep going with the introduction, Maddie. Okay, it's Dr. Montypelling and Eleanor of Aquitaine today. It's an amazing pairing. This episode, we're going to be diving into the murky, strange world of the medieval supernatural. We'll be heading off in search of the Middle Ages best-known monsters and thinking more about the power such beings held

in a world in which the magical seemed always. lays close at hand. There will discover terrible, clawed, hairy beasts and ghosts from beyond the grave, and how they could seemingly return at any moment to preach the importance of good Christian worship. Eleanor, over to you. Today, we are going to be hearing stories of revenants, of ghosts, and of werewolves, and telling these stories is not Maddie and I today, as you probably will have deciphered from the opening section of this episode, but it is, Matt Lewis. And Matt, if you don't know, is a historian and the co-host of Gone Medieval, which of course is History Hits podcast all about, yes, that's right, the medieval world. And like

us, Matt is drawn to the darker side of history and is fascinated by the menagerie of beasts and ghosts and werewolves and zombies that prowled the land. So Matt, you are very welcome as today's guest on After Dark. Thank you very, very much for having me. I thought that earlier introduction about Claude Hairy Beast was going to be my intro, but maybe not. And also, I'm slightly tongue-tied talking to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Oh my God. It's really you. She turns up sometimes.

Every now and again, she does a very rare appearance on a podcast. This is the one she's chosen today. What can I say? Well, when I see you, I'm going to have to get you to sign the book I wrote about you then. And can I just say as well that it's so nice to find that there is something deeper and darker in history hit towers than the gone medieval dungeon. I always wondered what that trap door in the corner was. Yeah, we've gone there. We've gone there.

So Matt, today we've got you on to talk about the supernatural in the medieval world, and we're going to get into werewolves, reverence, ghosts, a whole litany of really terrifying beings. Now, the supernatural in the medieval world is always, as we said at the start, it's close at hand. It's something that is told by the fireside. It's something that is preached from the pulpit. it's something that every strata of society has some understanding and some fear of, right?

So can you give us a sort of an overall sense of the kinds of supernatural beings, supernatural realms that are evoked in the medieval world and why they matter so much? Yeah, I think in if you live in a Protestant country as I do, you know, I'm a Christian, but I was brought up Protestant. I think it's easy to become disconnected from the Catholic Church's close association with mysticism and the supernatural. The Catholic faith, I think, particularly in the medieval world, is very keen to embrace those things. They accept that those things exist. They exist and they are capable of delivering messages to the living. And invariably, that message will be about

correcting the way that you behave in life, because that's what the church always wants you to do, just be better people. And they can use some of these supernatural stories, beings as lessons, ways to deliver those stories. You know, if you misbehave in life, this is the kind of horrendous thing that's going to happen to you. If you meddle with demons and you step outside the circle

while you're talking to a demon, you're going to get dragged to hell. And then you better hope you've got, one of the guys in the story happens to be able to convene a council of demons who can get your soul back for you. But lots of the ghost stories will always tend to be about spirits

that are struggling because they did something in life for which they didn't at home. before they died and they reach out to the living to help them. So there is this idea that if you say masses for the dead and prayers for their souls, you can speed them through purgatory. And your sins to an extent can be forgiven after you're dead by the activities, the actions of the living. So even when people are died, we still have a duty to think about them and to care for their souls and to continue to pray for the suffering that they may be going through whilst they're in

purgatory. And then you get things like, so revenants is kind of a medieval version of a zombie. So the word comes from the French ravenia to come back. And these are much more corporeal beings. They're always much scarier in the stories because they can do actual physical damage to you. An encounter with a ghost will invariably leave you feeling seriously ill for several days. But a revenant is capable of doing you actual physical harm. Revenants are noted as killing people in a way that ghosts quite often aren't. And reverence are often, the remains of people who have been on the outside of society during their life. So they're those who were kind of on the margins or othered in some way during their life.

And so their body sits in this weird position of still being othered from the spiritual realm after their death too. And generally, the way to deal with a revenant is to follow it back to its grave, wait till daylight, dig the body up, dismember it and burn it. That tends to be the only way you can stop these things coming back and get it. you? It really strikes me from what you're saying there, Matt, that there's so much categorisation. There's a real taxonomy of different kinds of monsters, different kinds of threats. And there are all these common sense ways of dealing with them. They're an accepted form of life. They're legitimized by the church. But this way of categorizing them, I find so fascinating and that all these

creatures, these monsters have very specific characteristics, I suppose. One of the ones, one of the the ways that we know about some of these categorizations and these depictions of different kinds of beings is through the medieval bestiary. Can you give us a sense of what that is? Because it's a quite unique medieval phenomenon. I suppose it carries through in terms of a sort of taxonomic natural history later on, but it's very much rooted in the medieval world and these beliefs in the supernatural. Yeah, bestiaries are interesting and they tend to deal more with less supernatural things. So these are beings that people thought might exist somewhere in the world. And they range from things like the monopods are a classic who have one really thick leg and one absolutely huge foot,

which it says in lots of the sources they use as a sunshade because they live in sunny climates. So they recline on their backs. Practical. Practical, except that no one ever seems to answer. Doesn't the soul of your foot get sunburnt if you just hide underneath it all day? I don't know if I'm overthinking. Don't ask too many questions. Matt, just go with us.

Yeah, no, it's fine. Except the sunshade thing, yeah. There are supposedly people who don't have a head, but they have eyes and a nose and a mouth in their chests. So they're sort of headless beings wandering around somewhere. There are the dog men, which we might think of something like a werewolf. There are lots of medieval werewolf stories, which are fascinating too. But the dog people, you know, there's a theory that perhaps they represented the Viking

berserkers that used to wear either the hide of a wolf or a bear or something like that over them, so that you would literally be confronted by a raging wolf-looking thing charging across the battlefield at you to destroy you. And that develops into stories of these wolfmen who are desperate to kill people and whatever else. These are all interesting ways of people filling in the gaps in the map. So at this point, we don't know what's on the farthest edges of the world. You can push further and further,

and every time someone travels a little bit further, they're still a little bit more over the horizon. People can wonder about what might be in these far-flung, unseen places. But I think also in the medieval mind, they're quite often a way of thinking about the nature of religion and of ourselves and of our souls. If there are monopods out there who aren't like us, they're humanoid, but they're not like us, do they still have a soul? Do they still belong to God? Should we still be thinking about whether we need to go on missions to them, to convert them? Should we be preaching to monsters?

Do they have a soul in the same way that we do? I think it's a way of people exploring those kinds of things, the differentiation between humans and animals and whether there's anything in between that. Is there a grey area somewhere? This grey area in between, I'm really drawn to that, and I think it's really fascinating. And you mentioned there, Matt, about revenants

and the idea that once you die, you could potentially return, and the form in which you return after you've died is pretty terrifying. And this is a story that people tell again and again throughout medieval Europe, isn't it? So can you give us a sense of some of the stories that people say about revenants and what exactly they are and why they're relevant to the medieval world and medieval society?

Yeah, revenants are, as I said, they're kind of a more corporeal version of a ghost. They're the ones that can do you actual physical harm. They don't come to you. So quite often a ghost will come to you with a request for help. There are ghost stories of a friar who died who appears. to someone and explains that his soul is stuck because he'd stolen some silver spoons while he was alive and not returned. So he directs this person to where he'd stashed the silver spoons and that is enough to free his soul from this kind of torment of eternally wandering

in the forest at night, hoping that someone will find you. Revenants are slightly different in that they don't tend to have that idea of redemption. They want to come and hurt you. And there is no way you can save them. You have to destroy them. and we get quite a lot of stories of people. I mean, there's one that's quite a sad Revenant story where the Revenant seems to go around telling people how to stop it. It doesn't want to do this. It's saying, you know, go and find my grave and burn my body.

Please, I don't want to do this anymore. Kind of an unwilling zombie that doesn't want to hurt anybody. Quite often some of these interactions will take places in the doorways or portals, they call them of churches. So the entrance to churchyards, the doorways to churches, that threshold between the world of the living and the world of the spiritual is an important place to engage with these things.

We get revenant stories where these revenants will go to towns and villages at night and terrorise their neighbours. So there's one story of a guy who dies and each night he returns to visit his wife in bed and he tries to climb on top of her in bed. So this poor woman is confronted by the putrified, rotting corpse of her husband trying to clamber on top of her.

in the middle of the night back from the dead. Apparently she puts up for this for three nights before she does anything about it. But then she gets kind of all of the town to come down and hang out in her bedroom and wait for this thing to come. When it turns up, they all kind of hit it and chase it away and it leaves. And then he goes to visit his two brothers

and torments them for a little bit until they do the same sort of thing. And then he's forced out into the fields where he starts harassing the cattle and all of the animals of the town and village. So again, you see that. othering of this person being slowly pushed further and further away from society. And ultimately then the only way that they can save him is that they can sort of priest.

And normally they would want to dig the body up and burn it. But in this instance, they're actually given a document to excuse him for all of his sins. And they go and dig his grave up and they place this document on the chest of the corpse inside the coffin. And then it stops. So as soon as he's absolved of his sins, it can be stopped, but it isn't him that's asking it to be done in the instance of a revenant. It's interesting to me there, Matt, that what this revenant in this story is coming back to is his property in life. And I suppose there's a juxtaposition there, a contrast there that's being drawn attention to about owning physical things in life.

So he goes to the cows. He goes to his home, his wife, who, you know, I suppose in the medieval world women are considered the property of their husband. So he's going to kind of reclaim all of that material wealth when actually he should be focusing on the wealth, the health and wealth of his soul. And once that is dealt with, he's quietened. Would you say that's a fair interpretation of that story? Yeah, there's a number of these stories

which are about people being ordered to return deeds to property or to hand over land that they're holding, which they shouldn't have. So there is a, the moral of this story, I guess, is to do with that obsessive connection to the material world, which will then anchor your soul. It will stop you leaving if you're that kind of obsessed with the material world. It will hold you and it won't let you move on to this more spiritual plane,

which ought to be your ultimate aim. And the worry for the people hearing these stories then is that you will literally be a rotting corpse that will wander around places indefinitely until someone fixes this 40. you. You won't be able to ask for help, but you will be reliant on the community to fix this for you, but that you shouldn't have obsessed about those things in life. You shouldn't have stolen property. You shouldn't have felt that that was the most important thing, because now it's the lead weight that is stopping your soul kind of ascending to heaven. I mean, there's even one revenant story,

which turned into a vampire story. So this revenant kind of roams around everywhere, and everywhere that he goes, people fall ill. And people think it's, it's, it's a little. kind of a plague that this dead body wandering around the town is bringing with it. And so eventually they follow the revenant back to its grave, wait till morning, dig the grave up with the idea that they're going to dismember it and burn the body. But when they crack the coffin open, they find that this body is really red-faced and swollen and full of fresh blood. So they drive a stake through it and fresh blood kind of spurts out everywhere from it. And then they do dismember it and burn the body but what they draw from this is that this was actually a vampire, that this was someone who was

the plague that had been killing people wasn't actually a plague, it was a vampire who was sucking people's life from them and taking it back to his grave with them. And then you do get these kind of, what are called deviant burials, which are quite often categorized as vampire burial. So you get people that are buried with stones lodged between their jaws. And you get people who are bound in chains or that appear to have a stake or an iron pole through their heart or something like that, which look a lot like what we would think are ways of dealing with vampires, but probably points more to an idea that there was a genuine concern that revenance could exist, that this body could rise from the grave, and that if this was someone who had died having been excluded from the

community in some way outlawed or in some way not a core part of the local community that they had been othered in life. they could come back. So this was a kind of final othering of them that they didn't get a proper Christian burial, that their burial even had to be different and separate from everybody else is to take account of the fact

that the way they'd live their life might mean that they could come back and terrorise the community afterwards. I'm just wondering, Matt, as you're describing all of this, firstly, the idea of reverence and zombies, I suppose, as we would recognise them. There is something in this about like the Walking Dead, isn't there? where, as you're describing it, I'm really thinking plague and death spreading amongst communities.

So that was one of the things that really struck me about that. But the other question I had was, how are these stories coming to us? How do they get handed down? I'm thinking in terms of medieval literacy rates. I'm thinking about who these stories are for, where they're being, how they're being spread amongst communities. And then who, if anybody, decides, right, let's write this down. How are these coming to us today? The ones that we have surviving today are most often written down by monks.

And I think that's because there is always a conscious effort to write some kind of religious moral story into them about the correction of your sins or living as pure a life as you possibly can because you don't know what's awaiting you when you die. I think there are a lot of monks who, I mean, there's the Byland Abbey Scrolls, which is a collection of ghost stories from Byland Abbey up in Yorkshire. And that just seems to have been a monk who was probably just fascinated by. this stuff who is jotting down notes. But quite often what we see are really abbreviated versions of a story. So the Byland Abbey stuff is kind of condensed ghost stories. So I think what we have to imagine is that most of these stories will be told around a campfire in the middle of the night and they will be oral tradition stories that may have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and perhaps pagan stories that will have had a Christian edge put on to them. But this idea

that there was scary stuff out there in the dark, there's always been something that has frightened but fascinated human beings at the same time. And so many of these stories, what really chimes with me in terms of modern ghost stories is so many of these stories, if you read them, the Witcher Barclay, for example, that we heard earlier is a great example.

They will always start with, I heard this from a man who saw it. I heard this from someone in the local community. this happened in the next village to me. So it's always really proximate to the person that's said, it's not like somewhere in the far and distant past, in a distant land, there's no Star Wars in a galaxy far, far away. This is always on your doorstep.

And if you think about ghost stories that we think about being told around campfires today, they will always start with, you know, someone at my school once had this happen to them. And that is always that human connection, of a smaller removal as you can possibly have from the story so that it's immediate. While talking about ghost stories and talking about sitting around cozily listening to eerie tales from the past, Matt, I believe you have another little ghost story for us that if our listeners are at home, make yourselves cozy, settle around a fire if you have one, and listen to Matt's next installation.

Yes, so this is one from those byland chronicles, and it relates to a man named Snowball. It is said that a certain tailor of the name of Snowball was returning on horseback one night from Gilling to his home in Ampleforth and on the way he heard, as it were, the sound of ducks washing themselves in the beck and soon after he saw, as it were, a raven that flew around his face and came down to earth

and struck the ground with its wings as though it were on the point of death. Then it flew off with a great screeching for about the space of a stone's throat. Then again he mounted his horse and very soon the same raven met him and flew at him and struck him on the side and threw the tailor to the ground from the horse upon which he was riding. And again it flew off with a horrible screaming as it were the space of the flight of an arrow. And the third time it appeared to the tailor in the likeness of a dog with a chain on its neck. And when he saw it the tailor, strong in the faith, thought within himself what would become of me.

me. I will adjure him in the name of the Trinity and by the virtue of the blood of Christ, that he speak with me and tell me his name and the cause of his punishment and the remedy that belongs to it. And he did so, and the spirit, panting terribly and groaning, said, Thus and thus did I, and for thus doing, I have been excommunicated. Go therefore to a certain priest and ask him to absolve me, and it behoes me to have the full number of nine times 20 masses celebrated for me. Hither you shall come back to me on a certain night, alone, or otherwise your flesh shall rot and your skin shall dry up and fall off from you utterly. The tailor conjured the ghost to go to Hodgebeck and to await his return,

and the ghost said no, no, and screamed, and the tailor said, go then to Byland Bank, whereat he was glad. The man of whom we speak was ill for some days, but then got well and went to York to the priest who had been mentioned, who had excommunicated the dead man and asked him for absolution. Then the tailor went to all the orders of the Friars of York, and he had almost all the required masses celebrated during two or three days, and coming home he buried the absolution in the grave as he had been ordered. And when all these things had been duly carried out,

he came to the appointed place and made a great circle with a cross, and he waited for the coming of the ghost. The spirit came at length in the form of a she-goat, and went thrice round the circle, saying, ah, ah, ah, ah. And when he conjured the she-goat, she fell prone upon the ground, and rose up again in the likeness of a man of great stature, horrible and thin, and like one of the dead kings and pictures. And when he asked whether the tailor's labour had been of service to him, he answered, yes, praised be God. Know therefore that on Monday next I shall pass into everlasting joy with 30 other spirits.

And then the tailor asked the ghost of his own condition and received answer. You are keeping wrong the cap and coat of one who was your friend and companion in the wars beyond the seas, give satisfaction to him or you will pay dearly for it. And as they went their different ways, the ghost that had been aided by him advised him to keep all his best writings in his head until he went to sleep. And keep your eyes on the ground and look not on a wood fire for this night at least. And when he came home, he was seriously ill for several days. Some of that story is obviously missing chunks and I think that's where you get this being more of an oral tradition that's been noted down kind of in a format that will allow people to expand on that as they tell the story a little bit.

But there's also lots of really interesting elements in there about what medieval people thought of ghosts. A ghost is a spirit that has done something in life. Maybe it's not the most serious thing in the world. You know, they've stolen some silver spoons that they haven't returned. The ghost tells the guy, it tells the tailor snowball that his biggest sin at the moment is keeping a cap and a coat that he's borrowed from someone who's since moved away and now he doesn't know where the guy is. You know, some of these sins aren't huge. But nevertheless, it's important that you purge your soul of all of these things before you die.

And so the lesson to the living would be you have to make sure that you are living a pure life because even the smallest thing can follow you beyond the grave. And it can lead to your spirit being forced to wonder around the woods until you find someone who's willing to help you. And that could take who knows how long. excluded from heaven while all of this is going on. A two-part question, as I so often do. Number one, why is he called Snowball?

Well, in the manuscript, it says a tailor named, and then there's a space and snowball. So we don't know if Snowball is a surname or a nickname, but it's clearly a blank. And I wonder whether, I think lots of these ghost stories are probably meant to be played to an audience. So you think about a stand-up comedian today, you know, they will go to a town and they will talk about the next town along the rivals in derogatory terms. They will make it kind of local and feel a bit more true and a bit more organic. So he talks about towns of Ampleforth and all places like that.

Those could easily change to be a town that people know that's far enough away that it's slightly distant, but actually they know about it. Perhaps they work in the name of a tailor from a local town or village that they might know. So the blank space could be anything. and then somehow Snowball gets put in there, maybe that's just a nickname that's used for it. We get the ghost saying, you know, I did such and such in the story,

these were my sins, such and such. You could insert something in there, you know, what would the local audience think was maybe a mediocre sin? Or what might they think was really bad? Or what could be something that maybe there's a local story that someone did something, that you could work into that, you know, the local story of the guy who stole a load of money from the abbey.

Maybe that could have been his sin. Who knows? and I think sometimes where they say such and such or they leave gaps, it's where people can work their own versions of the story. I love that and I love the idea that they're invoking the areas

and that you can almost travel with them. There's a sense that the areas haunt the story just as much as the ghost does or just as much as the Revenant does. Speaking of which, we've touched upon what medieval ghosts were, looked like, why they were there, what they wanted,

the same with Revenants zombies, as we might refer to them today. Tell me a little bit more about medieval werewolves. So the medieval world is littered with stories of werewolves too, and they're actually quite often not horrendously terrifying animals. I'm going to be cautious about how I say this in front of Anthony, I guess, but Ireland is full of werewolf stories. The Irish are notorious werewolves. Oh, yeah, no.

You don't need to be cautious, Ireland. I've never heard one, but I believe you. There are, according to medieval stories, there are families of genetic werewolves in Ireland who hand this curse down through the generations. There are some stories in which the werewolves pass the curse onto other people, so they're looking to divest their family of this curse,

so they'll look for a way to pass it on to other people. And that's maybe where you get the idea that if you're bitten by a werewolf, you become one, because they're looking to shift that curse onto somebody else. you quite often get werewolves that can talk to people so they'll engage with people. We get some accounts from monks who say, I met quite a nice werewolf. He was quite a decent guy. Now, we had a good chat, you know, and he was just worried about providing for his wife and his children.

You know, nothing too unusual about him. He was really good. It's actually quite rare that you get a werewolf story in which the wolf is simply a mindless animal that wants to attack people. There's a really good story in a book called The Lays of Marie de France. So this is written in the 12th century by a French female sort of poet and writer. And she writes the story of Bisclavei, the werewolf. So she says in Brittany there was a knight who was incredibly handsome. I guess he has to be.

He's very well respected. He's in with the king and all of that kind of thing. He's married to a beautiful noble woman, of course he is. But each month he vanishes for three days and nobody knows where he goes or what he does in these three days that he's missing. And one day eventually his wife kind of broaches the subject. And she sort of says, you know, I need to know what's going on. Are you having an affair or something like that?

And he kind of resists telling her what it really is. And he says, you know, if you know what it is, you won't want to be with me anymore. And she was like, no, it can't be that bad. And so eventually he says, for three days every month during the full moon, I become a werewolf and I go and hunt in the forest. So I have to take off my human clothes. I leave them under a boulder next to this church on the way into the forest. I'm a wolf for three days, I hunt animals in the forest,

and then I come back and I can put my human clothes back on, and it's all restored. But it's the act of putting on his human clothes again that turns him back into the night. And his wife then is utterly shocked, does not want to be married to a werewolf. And so she contacts this local knight, who she knows has a bit of a crush on her,

and she says, you know, I need my husband dealing with, and if you deal with my husband, I'll marry you. And she gets this night to follow her husband when he wanders off to this church. When he folds up his clothes, wanders off into the woods. And then this other knight kind of steals his clothes so that when he comes back three days later, these clothes aren't there and he can't turn back in to a human being. And so this man just disappears for a long time. Eventually his wife marries this other night and they begin their life together.

And a year or so later, the king is hunting in the woods when his hounds chase down a wall. and when it's cornered, it runs over to the king and begs the king for mercy, so it speaks to the king. The king is utterly amazed, thinks this is incredible, and adopts the wolf as a kind of pet, takes it back to his castle. It lives in his household, it sleeps among his household men. It isn't a danger to anybody. Then one day the king has a feast at which the knight who is now married to Bisclavé's wife turns up, and the wolf attacks him several times. and everyone's amazed because this wolf has never behaved this way before. And eventually, you know, this knight is happy to leave and make himself scarce.

But then the king returns to the forest to hunt again. And while he's in the area, Bisklave's wife kind of comes to do homage to the king, you know, he puts on her best dress and shows up to do homage to the king. And now the wolf attacks her, and it bites off her nose. And biting off people noses is quite a common medieval form of punishment for something. And so an advisor points out that this wolf has only ever attacked this woman and her current husband. And this woman is the wife of a knight who had disappeared. And so this advisor says to the king, there must be something about this couple because he doesn't behave this way to anyone else.

And so the king eventually has this woman tortured until she admits everything. She admits ordering this knight to go and steal the clothes. So the king sends her away to fetch Bisclavé's clothes and bring them back to him. They locked the wolf in a room with Biscolvet's clothes, leave him for a period of a few hours. And when they open the door, Bisco Lave walks out. And so everybody is amazed. The woman and a new husband are both sent off into exile, and Bisclauze is kind of restored to his life as a noble knight. But there you see, you know, this guy is trapped in the form of a wolf, but it's like a pet around court.

He's not a threat to anybody except for the people who've caused him to be trapped like that. And he will attack them when he sees them. And it just takes someone to make that link between the fact that the only people he's mean to, are this married couple who the former husband has disappeared. Again, in this story, you've got that useful dichotomy of light and dark, of good and evil. And in this case, I think, as well, you have civilisation and something that is othered.

And it's interesting to me that the idea of the werewolf and of the monster more generally in the medieval world is sort of transitions out of being local gossip, local storytelling, into the world of sort of medieval knightly quests. And I suppose in that regard, the monster becomes, it's a useful opposite for the knight who represents good Christian values and a way of living, a way of living as a man, a way of sort of leading people, leading medieval society,

and that the monster is a foil for that at various points, and that he only is accepted back into the fold when he has been civilised, or this idea that he transformed, back into a man when he's given his clothes is very interesting to me and it's again it speaks to that grey area in between the light and dark where these worlds are bleeding into each other and a strange transformation of people into monsters and back again that the monsters that are described in the medieval world that exist in these stories are not separate beings they're in all of us and that they can be

tapped into and exercised, I suppose, from us at various points. Yeah, and I think one of the things that interest me across kind of all of these medieval versions of ghosts, Revenants, Weirwolves is the fact that it's never that you can solve your own problems on your own. It's always a community effort. It has to be the community that does it. If you're dead, you need the help of someone who is living to deliver this stuff. Bisclavé needs this advisor to connect the dots and then someone to bring him his clothes so that he can regain his human form again. And the revenants need quite often the community to come together to find the body and

dig it up and destroy it. It has to be a community will to deal with this menace. And that really reinforces a lot of medieval thinking about the responsibility of the community. Again, we've probably lost that in today's world. We have quite a lot more individualism than would have existed in the medieval world. But the medieval law required the community to be responsible for finding criminals within the community. And in the same way here, the community is responsible for dealing with the sins of its members and for correcting those things and for helping all of them. Even when someone is dead,

your responsibility to them hasn't ended. I think that is the key takeaway from all of this, particularly in the context of the medieval world, and you'll know more about this than I will, Matt. But as soon as you said that suddenly everything aligned in my head, where I went, yes, it's community. It's about community building and it's a bad. bringing those communities together through story, through fear. Sometimes there's an element of control coming in there, of course, particularly when we align it with the early church. But it cements people together.

These are shared experiences, shared fears, shared stories, shared entertainment sometimes, I suppose. And there's something community bonding about that. Well, listen, I think that's a good place with the community in mind, the medieval communities in mind, It's a good place to wrap things up for today. Thank you so much to Matt Lewis for those lovely medieval stories. It was very nice for Maddie and I to sit back and listen to stories this week.

So thank you, Matt, for sharing those stories with us. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history and check out After Dark to wherever you get your podcasts from. Don't forget to subscribe or follow Gone Medieval and After Dark. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone, spookyly medieval, with history hit.