You're Dead to Me - Medieval Ghost Stories

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Michael Carter and actor Mathew Baynton to learn all about ghost stories in the European Middle Ages. From the twelfth century onwards, medieval Europe produced a huge number of ghost stories, often written in monasteries. But why were monks so interested in ghosts? How were ghost stories related to wider Christian beliefs about death and the afterlife? And what happened to these beliefs with the arrival of the Protestant Reformation? From creepy child ghosts to friendly apparitions via the fires of purgatory, this is a glimpse into the strange, spooky and sometimes sinister side of medieval beliefs.Research by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Jon Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Caitlin Hobbs Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Chris Ledgard

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Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are scaring ourselves silly with a horrifying Halloween special. A podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are scaring ourselves silly with a horrifying Halloween special all about medieval ghost stories. And to help spook us all, we have two seriously spooky guests. In History Corner, he's a senior properties historian with English Heritage

and is an expert in medieval monastic and religious history. Lucky for us, he's also writing a book all about monasteries, ruins and ghost stories. It's Dr Michael Carter. Welcome, Michael. Hello, it's a real pleasure to be here to talk about three of my very favourite things. Monks, monasteries and the macabre. Excellent. And alliterative too. Perfect. And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-award winning writer,

actor and actual ghost. Sort of. You'll have seen him star in The Wrong Man's Yonderland peep show, Quacks, plus my old gig, Horrible Histories. And he's played Shakespeare himself in the movie Bill. He'll soon be sharing screen with Willy Wonka, but you will definitely know him as tragic romantic poet Thomas Thorne

in the smash hit BBC sitcom Ghosts. It's Matthew Bainton. Welcome, Matt. Thank you for having me. So we spent five years working together on Horrible Histories. Do I therefore get to consider you a history knowledge person? Are you good on the history?

Well, this is a mistake that many people make in my life, is that they presume because of Horrible Histories that I, like you, I'm going to know an awful lot about history. And what it turns out I know is a few things about how people use toilets and even of that i've tend to have forgotten a lot of stuff my memory is is like a sieve so i i can barely remember what i did last tuesday let alone what king ethelred did in the century the ninth century you're not far off within a standard deviation you're within 150 years give in the century. I was waiting for you to say that. The 9th century? You're not far off.

Within a standard deviation, you're within 150 years, give or take. Get it! You and your BBC Ghosts castmates, you're about to launch the final series. I'm heartbroken that it's the final series. You've also written a lovely book, Fleshing Out,

the backstories of your beloved inhabitants of Button House. But today we're talking about actual ghosts, proper real ghosts, so stuff about ghosts, not written by ghosts. So what do you know of medieval ghost stories? Do you know any? Well, you've just confirmed that they're real, so you've solved that debate immediately. You heard it here first, yeah. I'm amazed by that, wow.

Medieval ghosts, the idea of ghosts, you just feel like that must be ancient. The idea that maybe we stick around in some form beyond our body. So I presume that ghost stories have been around for as long as stories have been around. But I could be completely wrong about that. It's a good presumption. The ghost stories are there in the earliest literature we have from the Bronze Age. So you're absolutely right. And they are global.

They go around the world. But today we're going to be just doing European medieval ghost stories. So what do you know? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I'm going to assume, like Matt, you've heard of ghost stories. You've probably read some in your time. You've got Casper the Fredney Ghost.

You've got your moralising messengers, and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. And you can go all the way to the hair-raising horror hauntings of The Conjuring. There really is a ghost story for everyone. But what about medieval ghosts? Maybe you're thinking of scary headless spectres floating around creepy castles,

or gruesome ghouls hanging around murky monasteries. But I'm guessing you're not that well versed in how they were understood 800 years ago. So what did medieval Europeans in Christendom think happened to your soul when you died? Why were monks so often on ghost watch duty? And what should you do if a dead nun named Margaret starts haunting you in your bedroom? Let's find out. Right, Michael, ghost stories. As we said, they're global, but we're doing European medieval Christendom. Which centuries are we looking at here? Because medieval history is quite big. Yeah, we're going to be looking at stories written between about the year 1100

through to the middle of the 16th century. It's what nerds like me call the high and late middle ages. But it's only around the time of the first millennium that you start to get ghost stories written down in any kind of number. And they come from all over Europe. Now, there was a real talent for writing ghost stories in medieval England. And a lot of them come from up in the northern counties. So medieval England, northern England, home of the medieval England. And a lot of them come from up in the northern counties. So medieval England, northern England, home of the ghost story. And Matt, what do you think the medieval Catholic church

says about the existence of ghosts? Where do they stand on the subject? Is it heretical? It's not strictly a Christian belief, is it? That your soul should hang around? Purgatory's not even in the Bible, is it that your soul should hang around i mean purgatory is not even in the bible is it that's a sort of right isn't that a sort of subsequent tacking on of an idea michael's giggling am i getting this completely wrong that those ideas about hell and the devil were sort of post bible ideas maybe to shame people into behaving better.

Ooh. Well, I was giggling with delight because all those years of horrible histories have rubbed off on you. Oh, yes. But you've picked up a bit of English Protestant propaganda on the way. Oh, lovely.

We'll get to that later. Now, there's a kind of definite chronology to medieval ghost storytelling. And it's the world of late antiquity shaded into what is called the Middle Ages by scholars today. Well, the church authorities took a kind of dim view of ghost storytelling. And that's kind of because of the culture wars then raging. They were all a bit too close, ghost stories, to the pagan beliefs of the Romans. And, you know, we need to get away from that. And in actual fact, party boy turned church

father and bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine's, took a very, very dim view of ghosts indeed. And he said, the dead, by their very nature, are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living. He wrote that these were only a spiritual image of a dead person that had appeared in an apparition, but that demons liked also to put these images into people's minds. And so many ghostly visitations, or what were believed to be ghostly visitations, would in fact have been the work of the devil. Although he did concede very occasionally these spiritual images of the dead might actually be genuine visions in dreams and they were mediated by the powers of angels.

So he basically said, yeah, ghosts can be real as long as it was God who said so. As long as it was somehow his work along the way. But also the devil doing bad trickery. Naughty, deceptive, satanic apparition bringing to people to tempt them, to scare them, to spook them. I think what we can say from this is St Augustine's version of Ghostbusters would be a lot less fun than the Hollywood movie.

St Augustine's one of the biggest heavy hitters of the early church. He's like one of the great writers. If he's debunking ghosts, Michael, that means that someone must be bunking them. There must be someone going around going, ghosts are real, right? So it's really from the 12th century onwards. And many authors around the time actually do comment on how many of these stories are being recorded at the time. And there's a chap called William of Newburgh

from a monastery up in Yorkshire, and he just said it wouldn't be believed if they were not being recorded by really reliable witnesses. So I believe them, and so should you. It may well be related to new commemorative rites gaining importance in the church, a whole elaborate liturgy for the dead, which really starts to spread from the 9th century onwards. And then you start to get formalisations of the concept of purgatory.

And yeah, we've already had that word mentioned. And that really kicks off in the 12th century. So purgatory, you're right, Matt, comes in late in the 12th century. But I wanted to ask, in your show, Ghosts, the sitcom, is purgatory what you were thinking when you're putting your ghosts stuck in a house? Not necessarily. We sort of thought about almost more the Sartre idea of hell is other people. Just if you're stuck in a place seemingly forever with the same bunch of people, then you don't need fire and torture. That would be bad enough. I suppose the message flipped itself, not really with us trying too hard, but we actually just found naturally that the characters just wanted to soften towards each other somehow.

So it actually kind of ended up being a message of tolerance, I suppose, that if you're forced to really, really commune with people and see each other eye to eye, even if you've got differences, you're going to see the humanity in each other eventually. Because what's interesting, for people who haven't seen your wonderful show, and they should see it, it's absolutely brilliant, and there's an American remake as well,

both of which you can watch on the BBC, but your ghosts are trapped in Button House, they can't get out of the grounds, they've died at different times in history, and occasionally they get sucked off, which is not what you think it is radio for listeners it's where they go into some sort of afterlife they suddenly go they move on where we do not answer what it kind of amused us to sort of have a

concept in which ghosts exist but then present that plane of existence with the same complete lack of conviction about what anything means or what happens next yeah that we are existence with the same complete lack of conviction about what anything means or what happens next yeah that we are stuck with here on earth where we've all got different ideas about what happens when you die it's just a metaphor for life really you're born you look around and think i don't know what any of this means or what i'm supposed to do or whether that person is right or whether that person is right but they're certainly arguing very passionately about what they believe. And then one day you move on and you don't know why. It's a very compassionate universe you've created.

What do you think purgatory means in a medieval context? So we've heard that it's coming in in the 12th century as a new concept. What do you think it's for? How do you think it feels to be in purgatory what's what's the vibe of the purgatory was it a sort of wage of sin a measuring up of how how sinful you've been in your life if you've done this this and this then that's going to be red hot pokers and sort of you know that's my possibly wrong understanding of it. I think you're quite close there, Michael. I think you really do have the makings of a theologian.

A second calling. St. Matthew of Bainton, yeah. Well, medieval Christians, and it still remains part of Roman Catholic dogma to this day, believed that after death, you're going to be judged for what you've done. And you actually get judged twice. When you die, you're going to go to either heaven, hell, or purgatory. And then you're going to go there and you're going to get judged a second time. If you've been really sinful, it is the red hot pokers.

And if you have died, getting a little bit nerdy with unconfessed mortal sin, that's very, very serious sin on your soul. You've had far too many good nights out with all that that might entail or got a bit too medieval for the wrong reasons and felt very sorry about it, then I'm sorry, there is one place you are going and one place only. And that is not a good place. Slough. Oh, sorry.

Hell, sorry. And then, well, if you'd be very virtuous, you're going straight up to heaven. Most of us, however, would be going to the third place. That's purgatory, an intermediate state where your souls are scrubbed clean of lesser sins. where your souls are scrubbed clean of lesser sins. And you've got to have died in what's called the state of grace, that you've got to have been genuinely sorry for all these sins you have committed. But there's only one way out, and that is to go upwards. Now, the concept of purgatory, there is something there in the Bible that seems to suggest its existence.

It develops over the Middle Ages and as I said it gets formalised in the 12th century. Some people have argued that it's really the church trying to latch on to what was a pre-existing folk popular belief going back right to the times of classical antiquity. I'm not that persuaded by the argument to be honest. I do think it has solid justifications in christian theology and the word purgatory comes from the latin purgare that's right and it's you know and i don't think you need a first and classics from uh oxford or cambridge to work out that that it just means to purge to purge so you're purging your sins you're working them off it's it's almost

like you know burning off the calories it is really, really bad day at the gym. And the punishments inflicted on souls in purgatory to burn those souls clean are every single bit as horrific as those inflicted on souls in hell. But it is a temporary state. It might be quite short, but it could be until the very eve of the end of time. When they say the eve of the end of time,

there's not an end of time to heaven, is there? Oh, that's a question. You get let in just as they're shouting last orders, basically. You've been through purgatory almost forever, and then you get into heaven and they go, shut up. The lights go off. You've been to the schools in Paris, as they would have said in the Middle Ages. To a school in Paris.

Tussling with questions like that. And it's kind of earthly time. Right, end of earthly time, yeah, sure. So, Matt, in the 12th century, we get the theological development of the idea of purgatory we also start to get people ascribing it to a real place on earth they're saying that purgatory is an actual physical thing you can see and visit do you want to guess where on the planet they think purgatory might be? The South Pole. Other way. Not far off. It's Iceland. Right. Oh, OK. Yeah. Do you know why? No. Frankly, no. I thought Iceland was meant to be quite nice and beautiful. Yeah. But it's got

volcanoes. Oh. Lava, flames, burning rivers of molten stone. Right, Michael? It's scary and gothic and smoky. And also it hasn't been settled for that long. Some Irish monks might have gone there early on because they really did like sort of travels to purgatory, you know, make life as hard as possible, and then the Vikings pitch up. But the 13th century Lanarkos Chronicle in the library of the monastery of Lanarkos

up in Cumbria near the Scottish border. That records that a Scottish bishop, William of Orkney, said there was a place in Iceland where the sea burns for a mile, leaving a trail of black and filthy ashes. In other places, he said, fire bursts from the earth and burns down whole towns and it can only be extinguished with holy water, which any good medieval Christian would want to have by them at all times. And what is more wonderful, he said, is that you can clearly and plainly hear amidst the fires the souls of the tormented. Hang on. How did they think people got there when they died then? Did they think they just

sort of just appeared in Iceland? You left your body behind in Yorkshire or wherever and then you just found yourself in Iceland. Mum's gone to Iceland. Mum's gone to Iceland. It's a spiritual portion of you.

I guess so. Yeah. It's the idea that the kind of purgatory is underneath the earth and you can see the cracks in the top. So you could get there by boat but you wouldn't see purgatory itself because it's underneath. Yeah, you could hear it. And it wasn't just here in medieval Britain

that they thought that Iceland was purgatorial. you also find it in some 12th century french texts as well is that by coincidence or do you think they were talking to each other i think it may well have something to do with the fires and a ready association of molten fire and noises as well and then also as i said you know iceland didn't have the best of reputations and you know it's a bit remote. And not that much is really known about it. And Vikings.

Evil comes from the north in medieval belief. And some of that does have to do with the Vikings. Wow. These ghost stories have a purpose, Michael. They are. They're creepy and they're sad and they're touching. You know, we mentioned in the introduction Margaret, the nun called Margaret.

She visits someone and says, help, I'm in purgatory. But that is, again, she's asking for help. The living are still responsible for the souls of the dead. And so your job as a living person is to help them out, Michael. Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah, good work. So you sort of send some nice treats in a hamper to Iceland on a boat.

You send the very, very best of treats in the hamper to Iceland on a boat. You send the very, very best of treats in medieval belief. Delicious biscuits. Yeah, yeah. And in actual fact, you know, in a spiritual sense, yes. What is the very best kind of medieval biscuit? Well, it's the communion wafer. Nicely done, Michael. Nicely done. best kind of medieval biscuit? Well, it's the communion wafer. Nicely done, Michael. Nicely done. And what indeed are the prayers being said for souls languishing

in purgatory of being like water touching the parched lips of people dying of thirst. So prayers, masses and charitable giving, alms giving, were all thought to help speed the passage of a soul through purgatory. Now this is one of the reasons why monasteries,

monks and nuns were so important in medieval society. They are prayer factories for the dead. Monks and nuns prayed for the souls of dead people and people could actually make donations pious donations so that prayers and masses would be said for the relatives for their dead relatives and indeed all christian souls it was one of the great acts of charity to pay for these for someone you've never even heard of never never encountered in your life. And the more that was said, the more prayers and masses that were said, the quicker the soul of somebody is going to get on that express elevator and you've got these brilliant medieval manuscript illuminations showing souls being plucked out of purgatory by angels and on their way up

and you've got these little ones languishing there in the flames going, oh, me next, me next, me next. And how can you make that be me next? Well, you get really posh people would pay for loads and loads of masses to be said. They'd found what are called chantries. I was reading a will the other day and some lady de Poche made a bequest to pay for 13,000 masses to be said for her soul. That was for her own soul.

Consecutive or concurrent? They would have been said at various foundations. Nothing bad about that. It seems perfectly sane. So, you know, there's a transactional nature to it. Monasteries do benefit from this. Now, after about the year 1030 or so, people also celebrated an annual feast day on the 2nd of November. That's All Souls Day.

And it remains part of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar to this day. And it's recently, in more recent years, it's come back into the calendar of the Church of England. And it was a day of prayer and remembrance for the dead, particularly the dead in purgatory. Now, people who weren't rich also got remembered. It's an obligation as a Christian to pray for the souls of everybody. ghosts in purgatory, who are coming back because they want these kinds of spiritual services to be performed. So they sort of row back over from Iceland and say, I'm having an awful time over there. You won't believe the food. It is, honestly, I'm going to say it, a nightmare over there. It hurts.

Please. They don't just appear to family members. They will also appear to complete strangers. Right. Because you will have to, as a good Catholic Christian, perform these good works on behalf of this poor soul languishing in purgatory. And it's also in your own interest as well to commit these acts of Christianity Because one of these deeds in itself might move you closer to heaven right? Yeah and also

well and also that you know you're probably going to be ending up in Iceland yeah exactly you're going to be ending up there yourself you know you're going to have well instead of 3,000 years it's 2,800 and every little helps that's not help that's not iceland

that's not sorry so monks are telling these ghost stories you're finding them in monastic collections monks and nuns writing them down so it's less the conjuring more the nun during it's more like you know these these are kind of stories by religious communities but involving ordinary people who supposedly are coming back from the dead and saying oh oh, woe is me, please help my soul. And we have Caesarius of Hesterbach. That's a good name. Where are you from? Hesterbach. Yeah, it's good.

But he's giving us a dialogue of lots of ghost stories. But the most famous English collection is called the Byland Abbey Collection. Is it Yorkshire? That's right, yeah. It was a Cistercian monastery in what's now North Yorkshire, and they date to around about 1400. We don't know the name of the monk who wrote them down, but he found a manuscript in his monastery's library

and it had some blank pieces of vellum in them, and monks could never resist filling pieces of blank vellum with doodlings of... Sometimes it actually is the most interesting bit about it. Monks often had terrible gastric complaints and they are endless recipes for the treatment of diarrhoea or constipation annotated in manuscripts from medieval monasteries. But no, this chap decided to record 12 local ghost stories

and they're a very, very famous collection and one of the reasons they're so famous But no, this chap decided to record 12 local ghost stories. And they're a very, very famous collection. And one of the reasons they're so famous is because the great Cambridge medievalist whose works on illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, are still read to this day, Montague Rhodes James, came across them and published them in the English Historical Review in 1922. crossed them and published them in the English Historical Review in 1922. Now, he didn't do anything quite so vulgar as translate them into English, but he transcribed them. You know Latin. We all know Latin. Of course we do. And he commented archly that the Latin was refreshing, which meant really bad. So he copies them all out and they get published in the English Historical Review.

This is M.R. James. You've called him Montague whatever, fancy, fancy academic name. But M.R. James, one of the great ghost story writers. I would argue the greatest ghost story writer ever. And indeed, reading those ghost stories as a teenage boy, the reason I became a medieval historian. teenage boy, the reason I became a medieval historian. I found them so captivating, those descriptions of monasteries, of discovering illuminated manuscripts in a small French town, or stained glass in a chapel in the English countryside.

Utterly, utterly captivating. Yeah, I mean, he is best known today for his ghost stories. There we go. He's finding a medieval source, the Byland Abbey. I did not know that. Everything good is medieval, Matt. That's basically the rule. Okay.

I mean, we've already covered a few fairly bad things that were medieval. Yes, all right, that's fair. Everything interesting is medieval. I mean, occasionally we've got slightly bizarre legal records. Very, very quickly, there's one where someone claims a ghost told him in a legal trial. The judge is like, what's happening here? He's like, a ghost told me that someone else should give a house back? And the judge is like, did that happen?

He's like, no. So we've got one of those stories, which is quite fun for legal history. But what was interesting about watching your sitcom Ghosts, Matt, is that your ghosts are all lovely and there's no horror. It kind of is horror initially through the eyes of the person who can first see them. And then we have them try to sort of haunt them out of the house yeah but they're so lovely yeah but it's that idea you know and and there's sort of the overlap with ideas about poltergeists and and devils and evil spirits and stuff and ours are very much just the idea that

a person's soul might linger on and so they're only going to be as evil as that person was in life and also we liked the idea that they would have next to no skills really to be able to affect the living so the sort of most they manage when they try and haunt them out of the building is to move a vase about a centimeter that they're attempting to smash so horror it's not there in every medieval story some ghost stories as you said are religious So horror, it's not there in every medieval story. Some ghost stories, as you said, are religious and theological and it's about someone returning from the dead and saying, oh, please pray for me, I'm having a horrible time in Iceland.

And that's not that particularly traumatising because it's someone you love. I mean, most of them, they follow a formula. An ethereal spirit appears, sometimes in really odd form. A bale of hay or a flapping piece of canvas flapping canvas is my wrestling name by the way i like the idea i mean how do you decide that a flapping piece of canvas is the spirit that's gone to be it's just the way it's flapping yeah it annoys you for a very very long period of time as well. It leaves you in no doubt.

It will often shapeshift. It will often go from being a flopping piece of canvas or to being a rearing horse. Well, that definitely is a red flag. A fearsome, like, rearing horse. And then you command it, you know, to reveal itself. And it will go, oh, yes, you know, my name is such and such. Trevor, yeah.

And I was a hired hand at Revo Abbey, and I really need your help because I'm languishing in purgatory. And you've got to find a priest to say all these masses. Now, they are scared. The people to whom these apparitions appear do report being really, really quite scared. But they will say something like the name of Jesus. And, you know, that's a reflection of a very important medieval devotion

called the Holy Name of Jesus. And saying the name of Jesus in itself is just a prayer, and it's very protective. And then in other stories, you often get people with holy relics. They use those to give them some kind of comfort. But there are some genuinely, genuinely scary stories. And one of them is in the Lanercost Chronicle, and it involves a happily married young couple

who on a winter's day are returning from markets, and they've got to cross a stream. And the husband's ridden on ahead to light the fire, and she's got to cross a river. And there is this demon child there. It's like a seven-year-old girl who seizes the woman from her horse drags her down and it said her hands are like hooves that she does it and she rips the flesh from this poor woman's hands and then causes such a terrible wound in her back that it's said that a man's fist might go into it.

And as you can imagine, she's really rather badly hurt by all this. And, you know, Hubby comes back, gets her back to the house, where she dies a couple of days or a couple of weeks after. It does actually have, in medieval terms, quite a happy ending

because she takes the last sacrament, is shriven of her sins and therefore will find eternal peace in heaven. But there is a moral message there as well, not just that there's this evil in the world and this demon child, but also to be prepared for your death. It's the

husband I'm suspicious of. He's very quiet, isn't he? He's the one who's gone out and told this story. I went to get the fire ready. I wasn't even there. It was a demon child. So you've gone from theologian in the schools at Paris to DCI. Yeah, I'm afraid so.

Yeah, I got the Christy over here trying to solve it. I'm fairly cynical about that one. So that's a terrifying, the horror children in Hollywood cinema, it's like the Shining Twins. Yeah, classic scary thing, isn't it? Because it's something that's meant to be innocent. Yes, right. Yes, it's meant to be adorable and safe.

And so... Evil in the form of something that's meant to be pure is always an unsettling, uncanny thing, isn't it? Yeah, so that's quite harrowing. So when I said that some of these stories get horrific, that's pretty horrific. Yeah, that's pretty bad. She's mauled to death by a kid. Of the ghost

stories, that is one of the most chilling that I think of. We had some other ones that were sort of listening to what are called revenant stories, and they're a different kind of ghost. Most of the ones we've been talking about, these ethereal spirits that want pious services performed on their behalf. And revenants, which I

think you touched on in an earlier episode. When we did our vampire gothic literature episode, we sort of mentioned them briefly. They're kind of more zombie stories, almost. Yeah, but they're kind of, you know, they're not just these animated corpses. They've got malevolent will, and they call them in the Middle Ages, not revenants.

That's a modern term. They call them satellites of Satan. Brilliant. And these satellites of Satan are often... are sure i've heard that band yeah they supported slipknot and milton keens i think yeah and these satellites of satan well they're they're normally guilty of doing really quite bad things whilst alive and often these bad things involve sort of transgressive sex in some way and they very much died with unconfessed mortal sin on their souls and they get animated after their death and they rise from their graves bodily to do harm to the living and now this isn't a case where pious prayer

is going to intervene and you know these things are rotten to their core. And one of them was written by the Byland monk. It involves the case of a local priest called James Tankley. He's buried in a really, really top-notch place in the monastery. It's normally reserved for people who are dead important, pun intended, or have been very, very holy. And, well, Tancel, he was neither of those things. And he rises bodily from his grave at night

and wanders six miles over the moors to the nearby village of Cold Kirby. And there he encounters his former mistress or concubine and gouges out her eye. The violent story then says, well, the monks were much troubled by this occurrence. You won't be surprised to learn. So they decide to...

You won't believe what happened last Thursday. Much trouble. They decide to exhume the body, as you do, and they put it on a cart and they take it to a nearby lake called the Gourmire and they throw it in there. In the Middle Ages, it was believed to be bottomless. And another way of dealing with revenants

is that you cut out their heart, chop them up, chop their heads off, take the limbs off and things like that. And interestingly, there's a deserted medieval village on the Yorkshire Walls. War and Percy, right? War and Percy, yeah, where they excavated various disarticulated human remains. And recent analysis of them showed that the way the remains were treated isn't consistent with crisis cannibalism, but much, much more consistent with medieval descriptions of what you did to a revenant.

A ghost village. Wow. Yeah. you did to a revenant. A ghost village. Wow. And there's evidence of revenant belief from all over Europe of bodies being pinned to their graves. Bricks in their mouth. We see a brick put into their jaw so they

can't bite anymore. In the grave. Buried, so they're facing downwards so they claw downwards rather than out of their graves. And this would all have been subsequent to them first being buried. Oh, yeah, they're dead. This is like they're dead, they're buried, and then they have got up and done some bad stuff.

No, not necessarily. It's like if you die a suicide, if you're some way transgressive. So you've got enough grounds to suspect they're going to be a satellite of Satan. Yeah, there's a poor prior of Wyndham in Norfolk in the 13th century, I think it is, and he gets sent to Bynum Priory nearby and he's gone mad from overstudy.

He's gone a bit bonkers because he's done too much book learning. I know the feeling. Do you though, really? Let's be honest. No, not... It's been a while. And they're not very nice to him. They whip him and they sort of put him in a cell and things like that. And then when he dies, they bury him in chains in the monastic cemetery.

They don't actually explicitly say that they fear he's going to be a revenant, but that is the way that they did it. It's one of the ways they dealt with revenants. So, you know, mad scholar, they think, you know, he's going to get up and try and get to the monastic library. Oh, no.

Stop him from reading all the books. These aren't just stories anymore. We have archaeology of bodies that seem to have been treated in a suspiciously macabre way. We've also got moralising ghost stories. So when I think of ghost stories, I tend to revert back to Dickens and I think about the fact that Marley returns and says,

look what happened to me. This will happen to you, Scrooge. You've got to change your ways. You're going to be visited by three ghosts. That's a medieval thing as well, Michael. We get these visitation ghosts from those in hell or those in purgatory saying, I have been pulled down into the flames of torment.

Save yourself. Oh, absolutely. And they often involve monks, and it's often a way of getting people to become a monk. Now, there's a 12th century monastic chronicler called William of Malmesbury, and he describes the Cistercians, who were like boot camp back to basic monks as being the surest roads to heaven.

And a number of stories tell of a couple of mates who might have sinned together. And that could, you know, don't be too 21st century in your conversation of that, you know. And they'll make a pact that should you pre-decease me, come and tell me what the next world's like. And one of them involves two priests in the French city of Nantes and they don't want to do the hard work of being priests. But one of them pre-deceases the other, dies quite suddenly. And he comes back from the dead.

And it isn't after 30 days as had been expected. It's much later. And he said, well, what took you so bloody long? Well, you know, have you come here now? He said, well, actually, I'm in hell. And it is absolutely horrific. And I am now utterly hopeless. I've got no way of saving myself.

But you can save yourself. And you've got to go and become a monk, a marmoutier. And his mate said, what, you are out of your mind. What, me, a monk? And he goes, no, I am being deadly serious. If you do not do as I say, you will end up as me. And, of course, he does. And there we are.

He gets dragged back to hell. He gets dragged back to hell and his mate goes off and becomes a monk. That is a very Dickensian device, right? Your old friend comes back to warn you. It seems sort of baked into the idea in the first place really especially if ghosts are tied up with the idea of purgatory is that it seems like your conscience talking as a Christian that that's where those stories would kind of naturally emanate from that sense of wanting to live a good life and fearing the judgment of your misdeeds, you know.

Yeah, there's another story that I quite like. That's a 12th century monk. He's considering leaving the monastic life. He's like, this isn't for me. I'm not going to. Bit boring. Bit boring. Don't love all the handwriting't for me. I'm not going to. Bit boring. Bit boring. Don't love all the handwriting.

What terrible digestion problems. Whatever it was. And he is visited by the founder of his monastic order, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who beats the crap out of him. Who basically just

kicks him down the stairs and says, you leave and I will come for you. And so he's like, all right, all right, I'll stay.

Guess I'm staying. Yeah, it's a terrible thing to do to denounce your monastic vacation. But imagine if the ghost of Christmas past had just done the same to Scrooge, just kicked him down the stairs and beaten him with a cricket bat. Yeah, it's a shorter story.

Two pages, sorted out, smash. All right, all right, all right, I'll change my ways. Dickens, he was paid by the word. To stretch it out a bit. So we've got moral messengers. These ghost stories give us terrible hauntings, scary children attacking women. We've got friends returning from the grave who say,

we did bad stuff together and I'm in hell and you're going to do the same. We've got the punishment of monks who might want to leave the church or leave the monastery. So there's a variety of these stories. Ultimately, they're always about you've got to save your soul. That's always the fundamental purpose, isn't it? But we also sometimes have

prophecies, right? We've got Gerald of Wales, our 12th century favourite. We mentioned him in our medieval Irish folklore episode because he's weird. But he tells a story of a guy called Walter, I think, who is visited in a dream by his mother, who's dead. And the mother says, don't go to battle, tomorrow you'll die.

And he goes to battle and he dies. I'm just wondering who he told that his mum had come. That's a fair critique of the genre of advice, isn't it? Yeah. What did she say? Don't go to battle. Why are we both on our way there right now, as you tell me this? Just remembered, we have something for you to read, actually.

And I don't want to forget it. So I'm going to pass you this. Pop my reading glasses on. This is a story from the Dialogue on Miracles by our favourite, Caesarius of Heisterbach. Do you want to tell us this story? In the Diocese of Cologne lived two knights, one called Gunther, the other Hugo. Gunther?

Gunther, yeah. Yeah. In the Diocese of Cologne lived two knights, one called Gunther, the other Hugo. One night, when Gunther was overseas, a maid took his sons, just before they went to bed, into the court to answer the call of nature. As she stood by them, behold, a woman's shape in a white dress with a pallid face looked straight at them. A woman's shape in a white dress with a pallid face looked straight at them. Saying nothing but frightening the maid by her appearance, the monster went to Hugo's land, looked over the fence and then returned to the graveyard from which it had come.

Beautifully written. Oh, that was lovely. Properly spooky. And this story is chilling because Gunther's children all die and then the mother dies and then the maid dies and then Hugo dies and then the son dies. What's the moral message here, Michael? You are going to die. Okay. There is a very good...

And I see it's really fascinating as well, isn't it? Going down to the courtyard and to the call of nature. Right, that's going to the toilet, right? Yeah, and it's really interesting that the details these stories provide as well, not just of being about medieval belief, but about the practicalities of life in the Middle Ages. You can learn so much about them

from about the art and architecture of monasteries, about how they're arranged, but also just the mundane things of taking two little boys down into what in the Middle Ages would have been called the necessarium, to where they would do that with the necessities of nature. So anyway, there we are. That was one thing that jumped with that. But here we go.

You know, we've got the ghost coming from the graveyard as well. A pallid faced lady ghost as well. Yeah. And it is. It's the inevitability of death and to be prepared for your end. It's the inevitability of death and to be prepared for your end. Now, Caesarius is a very good, to some extent, a good historian because he gives his sources. And he also gives you details as well to lend credibility to the stories.

So he tells you who has told him these stories. And he'll say, well, it's a trustworthy person. William of Newburgh does this in 12th century Yorkshire, and so does the Byland chronicler, the Byland Abbey ghost story writer as well. They tell us who told them this story, and it's somebody who you should believe because they're a reliable witness. That's sort of really hung around in ghost storytelling, isn't it? I mean, there's an episode of Ghosts where Pat tells a ghost story

and he starts by saying, this is a true story, it happened to my friend. And it's always done that way, isn't it? It's always happened. If you say it happened to you, you're going to be interrogated. If you say it happened to a friend, it still has that immediacy, but it's got a sense of, well, then i guess it's true it's a reputable source but it's passed on from somewhere else so i can't answer all your questions exactly but i've got yeah i find that story particularly chilling that one feels to me much more victorian in the

gothic like everyone dies for no real reason one by one this old ghost lady just murders all the kids for no reason it just feels chilling whereas the other stories felt like they had a sort of simplicity to them. But what I think is quite interesting is that we move into a different era when you get to Henry VIII. Do you remember this, Matt? We did a sketch, I think, sort of kind of Thomas Cromwell's Homes Under the Hammer style parody of the dissolution of the monasteries. Do you remember what that is?

Homes Under the Hammer style parody of the dissolution of the monasteries. Do you remember what that is? Was it Henry sort of deciding, well, he needed a divorce and the Catholic Church wouldn't grant him one so he founded the Church of England so that he could have a divorce. So the monks all just got turfed out.

Yeah. And all their stuff was just sort of taken and sold. That's pretty much it, yeah. So that's going to become a major transgression. This is what's called the dissolution of the monasteries as well. It's where the actual monastic land, the buildings, these abbeys, these homes for monks and nuns, they're stripped of their value, they're stripped of their land, people are turfed out.

It is the end, in some ways, of a hugely important part of society, Michael. And you get Protestantism coming in. Yeah, absolutely. They move away from the Catholic faith, a kind of pushback. So it's the Reformation. And that's changing ghost stories. Matt, actually, quickly, do you think Protestants believe in ghosts at this point, early Protestants, 16th century? Well, I'd have presumed not.

early Protestant, 16th century? Well, I'd have presumed not. You associate Protestantism with, let's take away all of the sort of decorative stuff that the Catholic Church has done and strip it back to the basics of what is Jesus' message and what's there in the Bible. So that would be my presumption. It's a good answer.

I mean, I think it's a complicated answer. I don't think it's a yes, no, but I think Matt's sort of right there that ghost stories are not going to be embraced in the early Protestant church. No, absolutely not. And then in later Protestantism as well, and it becomes one of the big dividing lines

between Catholics and Protestants in the 16th and 17th century is a belief in ghosts. Catholics still retain the belief that ghosts are coming back from purgatory to request spiritual services. There's a brilliant diary written in the 18th century by a Catholic gentleman on what's now the outskirts of Liverpool. His name's William Blundell and he in his diary includes the case of haunting which could have been written by a medieval monk. And it shows how current and how immediate those beliefs still were for early modern Catholics.

Protestants, however, well, they have to come up with rather different explanations for apparent supernatural events. And the supernatural very much has a place in Protestant theology and worldview. Well, it has to have an altogether more sinister explanation is this where sort of witch superstitions and stuff then comes in because you have to explain it through malevolent sort of dealings with the devil instead i mean i think the 17th century is the era of witchcraft right we tend to think of it as medieval but it's the 17th century the 1600s where the european witch craze really takes off

and that is the era of the religious wars in Europe and so I think there's something to that I mean it's complex because they are interpreted as

demonic I know there are ones that say absolute nonsense you know what the hell were you eating it was that Stilton again

wasn't it come on you know how many times have I told you to lay off that cheese dreams but it also is this thing oh well it's it's the devil it's the devil himself which is back to

saint augustine so at the beginning of the episode we talked about the augustine going to get it right you've sort of people are always going to see things and hear things and believe they've seen and heard things so you've got to find a way to justify that within your framework yeah Yeah. And he, at the beginning, we talked about, he was like, look, it's mostly going to be Satan, right? It's mostly Satan. It could be God sending an angel, but it's mostly Satan. Which I guess is where we're back to with the Protestant Lutheran Reformation

where they're saying similar, that this is not how the system should work. And we've got sort of spooky stories. There's the story of Edmund Howard, subseller of WALL-E. Yeah, it's a fantastic story. And WALL- sub-seller of WALL-E. Yeah, it's a fantastic story. WALL-E, Abbie. WALL-E, sorry.

Actually, I gave a lecture on the disillusionment of the monotheist once, and all the way through, I said WALL-E, WALL-E, WALL-E, WALL-E. And this woman came up to me at the end, and she said, I sat there with my mouth shut for 45 minutes.

It's not WALL-E, it's WALL-E. Sorry. Don't make that mistake, it's Wally. Sorry. Don't make that mistake again. And she was a ghost. Well, you know, she was certainly fearsome. But no, actually, it's recorded towards the end of the 16th century, a generation or two after the cataclysmic events

of the mid-16th century. And it actually comes from a manuscript from a nearby Catholic manor house. It records how in 1520, the ghost of one Edmund Howard, who had been sub-sallier at Worley Abbey in Lancashire, and he died on the 7th of May that year. And shortly afterwards, he appears as a ghost to Abbot John Paslew, who is then full of his pomp.

He's just been granted papal permission to wear the mitre and other ornaments normally reserved for bishops. And, you know, Worley Abbey is a really important monastery. And Howard says to Paslew, you are going to live 16 years and no longer. And this manuscript records that this does indeed come to pass. Because in 1537, on very, very weak evidence indeed, Pazlou is executed after his monastery becomes tangentially involved

in the Pilgrimage of Grace, which is a great northern rebellion against the dissolution of the monasteries. And indeed, the Earl of Sussex, who's Henry VIII's commander commander in the north says i there's no way i can convict pasley what he gave them a horse after they threatened to burn down his monastery and he's thought very well of and he goes into the dock the interrogator says yeah fess up i did it there's an implication in this in this later 16th century source that it was this ghost story, the prediction that this was going to happen,

that had prompted him, well, the game's up. He's destined to die. He's watched Final Destination. He knows he can't escape death. And then you get what are called sacrilege narratives start to be written in the 16th and 17th centuries, which is a kind of early kind of heritage preservation

kind of attempt and it's like if you try and despoil a monastery something evil will happen to you because there's often a ghost or a spirit protecting the monastery and so for instance at Netley Abbey down in Southampton someone tries to

nick some things and a wall falls on them and kills them. Kind of unpaid voluntary night security But also ghost protecting their home sounds awfully familiar from a BBC sitcom I've seen recently. I mean that's sort of the premise right? I was actually thinking back to when we filmed Horrible

Histories in sort of National Trust properties and we had to go outside to spray hairspray things like that yes please don't ruin our lovely walls no yeah very and rightly they're very careful about that yes they are it's the nation's heritage and we're a bunch of idiots um well there we go so we've had all sorts of chat about medieval and early modern ghost stories and I think we can conclude spooky and interesting Yeah, absolutely and I think I stand by

what I said at the beginning which is that ghost stories feel just inherently there in the fabric of the human imagination and so they will move and change through and reflect at whatever time they're told in but there's such a basic human sort of fascination

with what happens when we die that, of course, we're always going to tell those stories. The nuance window! Well, that brings us to the nuance window, that lovely bit of nuance from Matt there. This is where Matt and I lie quietly in bed and hope we're not visited by unearthly apparitions. Dr Michael, you get two uninterrupted

minutes to tell us something we need to know so my stopwatch is ready. Without much further ado, the nuance window please. Byland Abbey and its ghost stories have featured prominently in this Halloween special. It's therefore appropriate that it was on the

vigil of the Feast of All Saints, that's Halloween to you and me, that its white-clad monks arrived at this rural monastery almost exactly 850 years ago. The austere life of a Cistercian monk was believed, in the words of one 12th century author author to provide the surest roads to heaven. And it was this vision of eternity that shaped the art and architecture of the Abbey and countless other medieval monasteries. But how do you evoke this belief system? How do you start to explain its coherence and relevance to the shattered ruins of Byland and other monasteries

in a Britain which is ever more distant in time and faith from the Middle Ages. Well, in my job as an English heritage historian, I spend a lot of time thinking, talking and writing about death and commemoration. That's because medieval monasteries were, in a very real sense, communities of the living and the dead, where the tomb of a long-deceased holy Abba or Abbas was as potent a reminder of the ideals of the religious life as any ghostly tale of purgatorial pain. They belonged to a moral system where actions, good and bad, most definitely had consequences, where actions, good and bad, most definitely had consequences,

where obligations to the living and the dead transcended earthly degree. Popes, princes and paupers alike would ultimately be judged for their actions. In medieval monastic belief, your eternal life and enduring memory was in large part determined by your good works. I think there are potent lessons here for some Silicon Valley billionaires and their quest for immortality. Beautifully done. Thank you. And very punctual too. Excellent. So what do you know now? All right. Well, that was lovely. Thank you, Michael.

And it's time now for our quiz. This is called the So What Do You Know Now? This is where we fire 10 quickfire questions at lovely Matt to see how much he has learned. Matt, are you feeling confident? Have we spooked you too much? Are you shivering in fear in the corner? I'm nervous.

Of course I'm nervous. OK, we've got 10 questions. I think we've talked about most of these things I think maybe one or two of these things we snuck past quite quickly So I might have to be generous in the scoring Let's see where we go But ten questions, here we go Question one Purgatory was the fiery place between heaven and hell

Where medieval Christians thought they could work off their sins But which modern country was suggested as its location? Iceland. It was Iceland. Question two. Which group of people wrote many of the medieval ghost stories that Michael was telling us about? Monks.

It was monks. Question three. Which late Roman church father, who'd been a party boy in his youth, was sceptical of ghosts? Ooh. Was this St Augustine? It was. Well done.

Augustine of Hippo Very good Question four When was All Souls Day celebrated where people prayed and gave offerings for the souls of the dead? Is this Halloween? Just slightly after Oh, November the 2nd

Yay, very good Question five Name one way that medieval Christians helped the souls of the dead get out of purgatory. Praying for them. Yeah, absolutely. Arms giving prayers, masses for the soul. You could buy in advance as well, all that stuff. Question six.

Which famous ghost writer based his stories? M.R. James. I hadn't even finished the question, but you're absolutely right, on the Byland Abbey Collection. The only covered one. Question seven. In the 13th century German story of Gunther the Knight and his unfortunate children,

what happened when the maid took the kids out to the toilet room before bedtime? They saw an apparition of a lady with a pale face. Yeah. Who did nothing, but then they all died. But then they all died. Absolutely. You're doing so well.

Question eight. What were medieval revenants? They were the satellites of Satan. Oh, very good. And they were people who had done stuff so bad in life, sometimes sexual stuff, that their bodies rose and came and did bad stuff to the living, and then you had to turn them face down or chain them up or cut them into pieces to stop it happening again.

Perfect answer. Look at you, medieval historian. Question nine. In a 12th century French story... Ask me any of this tomorrow and I'll be scoring very differently. Classic actor's brain, right? Question nine. In a 12th century French story,

why did Bernard of Clairvaux's ghost beat up a monk? Because he was thinking about leaving the monastery. Very good. This for a perfect ten. What major religious event in the 1530s led to a change in the style of ghost stories? Dissolution of the monasteries. Very good.

That is spot on. Ten out of ten. Perfect score, Matthew Bainton. And only one of them did you have to hold up your fingers to tell me the date. In my defence, I like you and I wanted you to do well. Thank you. I didn't want you to get off track early.

I wanted you to power through. You knew the answer. Ah, yeah. Maybe I'd have got there. If you'd allowed me to name every number from one to the other. But, listener, if you want more medieval stories, more medieval literature, check out our episode on Old Norse literature,

plus we've got episodes on medieval animals and medieval Irish folklore. We're good at medieval over here. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share it with your friends. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. I'd like to say a huge thank you, of course, to our guests in History Corner. We had the dreaded Dr Michael Carter from English Heritage.

Thank you, Michael. Thank you. It was real pleasing terror, to quote M.I. James. And in Comedy Corner, we had the macabre Matt Bainton. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Go check out Ghosts on BBC.

It's a wonderful, wonderful show. And buy the book. And buy the book, which you can. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we crack open the crypt and exhume another historical subject. But for now, I'm off to go and haunt Elon Musk. Build a hospital, you loser. Bye.

This was a production for BBC Radio 4. The episode was written and produced by Bye! with Chris Ledger. Following our favourite phantoms and the spooky stories that unfold episode by episode. I met the elephant man. What was he like? Rather boring, couldn't see the past. I'm Nathan Bryan and join me for ghostly gossip with the stars from the show. What the ballyheck is going on? And take an exclusive peekaboo behind the scenes. Woo!

Now, beat that. Inside Ghosts. Listen on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. Inside Ghosts. Listen on BBC Sounds. you