Repentant soul or walking corpse? Debatable apparitions in Medieval England [1]

Every one of these details can be parallelled from East European vampire lore, and some also apply to Icelandic draugar. However, this does not mean that these cultures borrowed from one another; the physical facts about delayed putrefaction which underpin the concept of the "undead" are universal, and could produce similar accounts independently in many countries.

There can be no doubt that William of Newburgh and his informants, together with Walter Map and William of Malmesbury, were describing a genuinely ancient folk belief which was apparently quite widespread at that time, and which they were able to harmonise with their religion by claiming that it was Satan who reanimated the corpses. However, practices based on it seem to have fallen into disuse in subsequent generations. True, there remained a folk tradition that the evil dead should be buried face down or pinned with a stake to prevent them walking; but the urge to reopen graves in order to seek and destroy any undecayed and blood-filled corpses is never recorded again, even during times of plague, and does not feature in the corpus of British local legend. This change may well be due to the more spiritual theology of Purgatory which developed from the thirteenth century onwards, as exemplified in the Byland Abbey ghost stories.

The Doctrine of Purgatory

The doctrine of Purgatory, still fairly novel in the 1190s, became fully developed between 1250 and 1300 (Le Goff 1984), and was universal from about 1400 until the Reformation (Thomas 1971, 587-95); it is still standard among Roman Catholics. Purgatory differs essentially from Hell because the souls of sinners in that state (or place) are assured of their salvation; either they have repented of their sins while still living, and these sins are forgiven, or else the sins were too slight to cause damnation. All that is needed is for them to undergo whatever punishment is still, in legalistic terms, "due" for their forgiven sin(s), and to be purified and made ready for Heaven. Although theologians and preachers stressed the pains of Purgatory, often using imagery of fire identical with that of Hell, the eventual happy outcome is never in doubt. The process can be greatly assisted by prayer and Masses offered by the living on behalf of the dead.

The Byland Abbey Ghosts

M. R. James, who first drew attention to the Byland Abbey tales in 1922 by editing the Latin text, picked out as significant their precise localisation and their informal style, which "evidently represent[s] the words of the narrators with some approach to fidelity;" he also said they reminded him of the tales which E. T. Kristensen recorded in late nineteenth-century Denmark--tales which in modern terminology are classified as memorates and local legends.

It is clear that the writer was one of the Byland monks, not only because he had access to the manuscript but because most of the hauntings he describes occurred within a very few miles of the abbey, at places which he names with great precision. The alleged happenings were probably close to him in time as well as space. One is dated to the reign of Richard II (1377-95), and the writer was at work around 1400; the rest may well have been equally recent, apart from one which is specifically said to have been "handed down by old men." Certainly the casual way in which people are named suggests that their lives and deaths were still within living memory, and there are passages which hint that those who were in the know would recognise scandalous gossip under the veil of anonymity: "Some say he had known of, or had had a share in, the murder of a certain man, and had done other wicked deeds, which it would be wrong to speak of even now." Indeed, it has recently been suggested (Collins 1999) that there was a malicious motive for recording the stories: to discredit the Augustinian Newburgh Priory two miles away, a long-standing rival to Byland Abbey, by associating it with sin and hauntings. In Story VI, "a certain Canon of Newburgh" is said to have died excommunicated for stealing silver spoons, while in Story II a ghost chooses to be laid on land belonging to the Priory rather than on that of the Abbey. It is an attractive theory, but my concern here is with the beliefs embedded in the tales, not whether they were exploited to further a clerical vendetta.