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Script:
I’ll start today with a quick story, one of Walter Map’s stories. More on him in a moment.
I’ve heard it said that a certain knight once awoke to find his first-born murdered in its cradle. It was the very first morning after the baby’s birth.
He and his wife, a noble, well-born woman, went on to have more children. But a year later, the very same thing happened to their second child, and then in the third year, the same again to the third. Each tragic time, all efforts of their friends and family to keep them safe were futile. The couple prayed tearfully for a fourth child, giving alms and undergoing fasts.
In the fourth year, their prayers were answered. A boy was born, and the two set out to do all they could to keep him safe. That first night, they set a vigil, surrounding the baby with light and fire, and their eyes fixed on him as he slept. Then, a stranger arrived.
They welcomed him in. It was perhaps foolish for them to do so under the circumstances, but he was weak from a long journey, and seeking hospitality in the name of God. They did not deny him that.
The stranger sat with them a while, watching as the night wore on. It was well after midnight when the others in the room plunged into sleep, but he stayed awake, the baby before him.
He was the one to see the figure of an old woman appear by the cradle and lean down as if to seize its tiny occupant by the throat. Alarmed, he leapt forward and held her in his grip, alerting the others and not letting go.
Coming to wakefulness, all gathered round, and they soon realized that they recognized the woman, for she was well known of that city to be first in birth, manners, wealth, and honour. But to the name they knew her by, she didn’t respond, nor did she answer to any of their questions. Some thought her lack of response signified shame and they asked that she be released, but the stranger still held on.
He branded her face with the key to the local church and he asked them to look for that noble woman of the city, the one who they thought he now held. He asked them to bring her there.
This they did, finding the woman, leading her forward, and revealing that indeed the two were exactly alike, including now even the brand on their faces. They stared in astonishment. But the stranger spoke.
“The one who I hold is a demon,” he proclaimed, “the lady you bring now, virtuous and very dear to God. Her virtue has provoked the demons’ envy, and this base messenger of theirs, this baleful instrument of their wrath, has been shaped in her precise likeness to blight her noble soul with wicked deeds. Just see what will happen if I release my grip.”
And as the stranger did just that, the creature took flight through a window, a horrible howling noise trailing after her. And with that, their story was finished and that fourth baby, presumably, saved.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus; Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that follows stories in medieval history through its travellers. Today, it’s something a little different. Today, it’s a slightly spooky Halloween special. But we’ll get to that in a second. First, I want to point out that if you haven’t already, you can sign up to the Patreon for as little as a dollar a month. That means that for as little as a classic vending machine visit every 30 days, you can instead choose the healthy option and help sustain the podcast on what will hopefully be its own long and fruitful journey. And you can do that at patreon.com/humancircus or via my website at humancircuspodcast.com. I would also like to thank the newest supporter of that Patreon and of this podcast. Thank you, Brigit!
And now, to the stories, or to be more specific, to the stories of Walter Map.
Walter Map was a 12th-century career churchman and a courtier, born in the Welsh Marches to a family that was “faithful and useful,” he would say, to Henry II, useful enough for Map to live a quite comfortable life. In the 1150s, he studied theology in Paris and then returned from there to work as a clerk for the bishop of Hereford. He’d follow the bishop to London, where he became a canon of St. Paul’s, and where he served at the court of Henry II, his family’s loyalty apparently earning him entry. He travelled with the king, acted as a royal justice, and represented Henry at the Third Lateran Council. He was to be chancellor, precantor, and archdeacon within the church, and two bishoprics were very nearly his, one in Hereford and the other at St. Davids, but he died around 1210, having achieved neither.
And in all of this, he was not particularly spectacular.
The thing that brought him lasting attention was neither his career in the church nor his service to the king. It was his way with words, his writing. And it was admittedly not always writing he was actually responsible for. Soon after his death, his name would be incorrectly associated with works of secular Latin verse such as the Lancelot Grail Cycle, earning him no small amount of lasting renown, but he’s noteworthy also for the writing we do know to be his, for a text that seems not to have been circulated at all in his own time, one we know as De Nugis Curialium, or Of the Trifles of Courtiers, a sprawling collection of storytelling, satire, history, and anecdotal asides and jests.
As a courtier himself, Map was in fine position to skewer the culture of the court and its occupants with his trademark satire. That court was likened to hell, its denizens to sharp toothed fiends and the foulest creeping things, and those were not the only victims of his pen. Rome, the Templars, the Cistercians and, most mercilessly by far, Bernard of Clairvaux are all abused and insulted in turn, and the vices and weaknesses of various figures of royalty put on display.
But it’s not exactly his comedic destruction of famous abbots that we’re talking about today. It’s his stories of apparitions, Other Places, and the undead.
Let’s start with that of Edric Wilde.
Edric Wilde was known to be of great worth and nobility, and lord of the manor of North Ledbury. He was renowned for the charm of his speech, the vitality of his body, and his skills as a man of the woods.
One night, he returned late from the hunt, having only a lone boy for company. He knew those forests well, but he could not seem to place himself. He could not seem to find his way.
Midnight found him still wandering in doubt, when he happened upon an unfamiliar grove and at its edge a great house, one of those guild houses of drinking of the sort that every parish has. Drawn by the shining light of its windows, Edric drew closer, looked inside, and was immediately transfixed.
Before his eyes was a great band of noble women, unlike any he’d seen before. In their beauty, their fine linen robes, their stature and stately appearance, in their sheer height, they were not like the ladies of any court he knew. Not quite like human ladies at all.
They floated about the room most airily, their every gesture and spoken word most pleasing, though the words were not any he’d heard. He could not look away. From one of them in particular, he could not look away.
He had heard before of roaming spirits, of troops of demons who came by night bringing death, of bands of dryads and spectral squadrons, and he had heard of how offended divinities or demons wrought vengeance upon those who came on them unexpectedly. He remembered stories of how they kept themselves apart from the places of men, how they hated those who might find them, and how extreme were the punishments by which they protected their secrets.
Still, he could not hold himself back. From the darkness, he looked into the merry house. His eyes were fixed on that one woman, if that was what she was, and his desire turned him to something unsavoury.
He rushed in and grabbed ahold of her, dragging her outside, the boy beside him, both fighting against the others, who held them fiercely and wounded them with hand and tooth. Despite their efforts, he carried her off to his manor. For three nights, he kept her there. She did not fight him or attempt to escape, but she didn’t speak either. Then, on the fourth, she spoke.
“Dear one,” she said, “safe you will be and joyful too, and it is a happy lot that shall be that of you and yours from now until you speak in anger of my sisters or of that forest grove where you snatched me from them. This shall you do, and you shall fall from happiness. Having once lost me, you shall lose much more besides. Because you have failed to respect time and season, you will die before your time.”
But Edric only babbled happily over top of this. He had no hearing for the punishment of his crime. Instead, he professed his love, long-lasting, his steadfast promise to be faithful.
He called together all the noblest and the fairest of far and near, wishing their presence for the wedding, wishing them to witness the beautiful woman he was marrying. And he evidently did not hide her origins. Even the newly crowned king of England, William the Bastard, summoned the married couple so that he could look upon this lady who he’d heard so much about and know the truth of this marvel for himself.
It is said they brought with them many witnesses, though who they could have been is hard to imagine as only that boy had borne witness that night in the woods. It is said they brought with them evidence from many who could not be there, though again, it’s hard to say what this testimony might have been. In any case, the most convincing argument as far as the king was concerned was the evidence before his eyes. Anyone could see that the lady was not human; her fairy nature was clear to any who could look upon her.
Having created quite a stir at the king’s court, having astonished all who saw her and left them with no doubt as to what she was, the fairy lady returned with Edric to his manor, and for years they lived together.
Time passed, time for Edric happily spent, time enough for him to forget all that had been said by his fairy wife when she first spoke to him. Time passed until he came home one night from the hunt and he could not find her. He called and he called, and when she came, he snapped at her in anger, “Did your sisters keep you?”
As the word “sisters” left his mouth, she disappeared, and Edric knew regret.
He returned at once to the place he had first found her, that merry house in the grove, but try as he might and for all his lamentations, he could not bring her back. Broken, he cried there, day and night, to his own undoing. Indeed, his life was undone there in sadness and sorrow. Just as the lady had foretold.
There is a happy prologue of sorts to this story.
Walter Map notes that such tales of unions with otherworldly beings are common, with demons, incubi, or succubi, featuring regularly but it was less common, unheard of even, for a child to be produced that ended their life happily. Such, he says, was the unusual case here.
Alnodus, as he was called, lived to be an elderly man before suffering sickness, a medically incurable one that rendered him paralyzed with trembling head and limbs. Certain wise men told him he must go to Rome, to the burial places of Peter and Paul, and only there could he regain his health. But he went instead to Hereford, where he was carried to the altar of the martyr king St. Ethelbert, and was there miraculously cured. After that, he gave away all his inheritance and lived to even more advanced age, spending it in pilgrimage.
Walter Map muses on this turn of events a little.
He ponders the idea of phantasms and their connection to fantasies, how they are but passing things, forms which demons sometimes assume with God’s permission, to tempt and to tease humankind, at times to great harm at others not, but always as God wills. But that idea doesn’t seem to fit these stories very well. It does that one I started with, I suppose, if by “passing fantasy,” you mean “three years of killing in the cradle,” but this last one and the next, these fairy tales, these seem like something different, something that does not sit well as demons temporarily out of uniform.
And Walter Map seems to acknowledge this. What’s to be made, he asks, of cases such as Alnodus? Or, to use another example, that of “a certain knight” who buried his dead wife and then later snatched her away from a band of strange dancers and had with her first children and then grandchildren, and then great grandchildren, and so on, so that those who were called “sons of the dead woman,” became legion. These were not fleeting phantasms, not in human time at least.
We’ll take a quick break now, and after the break, another story.
It will seem very familiar to anyone who’s read or watched something like Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell with its parallel realm, where time, among other things, functions differently. It’s an early version of a tradition that goes by many names, one you may know as the Wild Hunt.
It’s the story of King Herla.
...
There once was a king. An ancient king of the Britons, his name was King Herla. This is his story.
King Herla was all alone when he received the visitor. A king he was, but not like Herla.
He was for one thing very short, no greater than an ape in height. For another, he rode on the back of a goat. His head was enormous, his face aglow, and his red beard ran down to his chest. Most striking of all, beneath his hairy belly, his thighs tapered down into hooves. He was, in short, very much in appearance like Pan.
“I am the lord of many lords and of people beyond count,” this Panlike figure announced to King Herla. “You know me not, but in your glory and fame, you are nearest to me of all the kings, and so I will honour you as a guest at your wedding, just as you will come as a guest to mine. You see, you do not know it yet, but messengers are coming from the King of France. He offers you his daughter in marriage. The messengers comes today.”
And with that, the pygmy king rode away, vanishing unseen by anyone else, and King Herla returned to his court, deep in bewildered thought. As he reached it, his amazement increased, for it was just as his strange visitor had promised; there were the French king’s ambassadors offering terms for marriage, terms which he readily accepted.
The day of the wedding arrived, and Herla was seated in state, when the visitor returned, this time not alone. He came in before the first course with such a retinue of his people that every seat was soon filled, and even more guests were made to sit outside. There, they found places under their visitor’s pavilions where their every need was quickly satisfied. Servants leapt forward with finely worked jugs of crystal, gold, and precious stones. They brought plate after plate of food from their own stores, touching nothing of King Herla’s, so that the king’s servants stood idly by.
The night was a tremendous success, and all through it, the visitors were the brightest stars, outshining everyone, even the sun and moon, in their fine clothes and jewels. Every guest, they charmed and won over, and their king, turning to King Herla, told him this:
“Oh most honoured of kings, God has witnessed me here at your wedding, as agreed, and anything that you want, beyond what we have given you here tonight, I will gladly provide. But you must not fail to return the honour when I require it.”
And with that and the rooster’s call, he was gone, and with him his people, pavilions, and all they had brought. They disappeared and went away, and for a period, there was no sign of them or their king. It would have been very easy for the king to forget it had ever happened, to fall into distraction as a newly married king at the height of his powers.
But that strange king who’d come to him on a goat, that king who had spoken to him of things yet to be and been a guest at his wedding, he had not forgotten.
A year passed, probably very quickly for Herla, but long enough that the goat-hooved king’s return would have come as some surprise.
It was exactly one year later, when he reappeared, suddenly right there before the king. He had fulfilled his part of the promise and now he fully expected Herla to fulfill his. King Herla, being an honourable man, did not hesitate to do so.
He gathered his retinue around him, and together they followed their peculiar guide where he led them. They followed as he went to a high cliff face and into a cavern at its base. They passed through dark passages, winding their way deeper into the rock, into total darkness. And then there was light.
It was not the light of the sun or the moon. It was of some other source. There, beneath the ground, they had entered the realm of the little folk.
The glow was that of many lamps, their surroundings, not a cave, but a mansion. It was like that in Ovid’s account of the sun palace, where columns towered up in gold and bronze gleaming like fire, ivory crowned the roof, and fine-worked doors shimmered with silver.
In that magnificent place, they celebrated the wedding in style for two or three days, and Herla, having made good his promise, received many gifts. He was given horses, hawks, and hounds, and everything needed for falconry and hunting, and then he made to leave. He and his retinue were guided out by the king himself, just as far as the darkness. He gave them a small bloodhound, told them it must, without question, be carried until it leapt down from its bearer’s arms, forbade any man to dismount from his horse until it did so, and then he left them with his blessing.
King Herla and his party emerged, blinking, from beneath the cliff, one of them still holding that little bloodhound. They saw an old shepherd, and Herla asked him what he knew of his queen. But the shepherd only looked at him, bemused.
“My lord,” he said. “I can scarcely understand your speech. I’m a Saxon, and you, I can tell, a Briton. I know not any queen such as that you speak of, save one, and she was queen of the ancient Britons and married to King Herla. Legend has it that her husband disappeared into these very cliffs with a stranger, never to be seen again. The Saxons drove their people out of this place over two-hundred years ago.”
King Herla stared in astonishment. Two hundred years? It could surely have been only three nights at the most.
Some of his people climbed down from their horses, but the bloodhound had not yet done so. As their feet touched the ground, immediately they collapsed into dust. Herla ordered the rest to hold fast, to wait for the dog to leap down. But it never did.
King Herla and his men were going to ride on, to march without rest or reprieve, year after year. Or so it was said. And many in the countryside said they saw them, and other things besides. There were reports of she-goats in great flocks in the night air above, of soldiers silently marching, leading caravans of treasure through the dark. Some were said to take cattle or horses from these caravans, sometimes to their profit but at others to their own destruction.
Even up to the rule of King Henry II these things were seen, but that was when they were last sighted, those gatherings of men that folk called the Followers of Herla, the Herlethingi, “an army of infinite wanderings, of the maddest meanderings, of insensate silence, in which appeared alive many who were known to be dead.”
They were spotted on the borders of Wales at noon, in the first year of King Henry, in all their hushed masses of men and women, chariots, steeds, and luggage-bearing beasts, with bird and hound.
The people of that land took up arms and went out to meet them. Steadfast, they formed up and stood ready. Their challenges received no answer, so they readied their darts, thinking those might bring some reply. They readied their darts, and their enemies rose into the sky and disappeared. Their Wild March ended, King Herla and his people were at last granted rest.
Walter Map adds that King Herla and his sorry company seemed to have bequeathed their burden to us:
“…foolish folk, through which we wear out garments, lay waste provinces, break oft bodies and those of our beasts, and are never free to find a cure for our sick souls; no benefit comes to us unbought, no recompense avails us...; we do nothing in measure, nothing at leisure, so futile and fruitless is the haste by which we madmen are borne onward; and since our rulers confer always in secret corners, with approaches barred and guarded, we gain nothing from this counsel. We are whirled along by storm and stress. We give little or dull attention to the present; we entrust the future to chance.”
Perhaps that addition was intended to frame the whole tale as a barb aimed at his fellow “poor fools” of the court, but it cuts pretty well in directions other than that.
We’ll finish up here with a quote from Walter Map, in translation of course, on how we might read his stories, how we might glean their meaning. Really though, it’s more of a deflection than an explanation.
Quote:
I set before you here a whole forest and timberyard, I will not say of stories, but of jottings; for I do not spend time upon cultivation of style, nor, if I did, should I attain to it. Every reader must cut into shape the rough material that is here served up to him, that thanks to their pains it may go forth into the world ... I am but your huntsman. I bring you the game, it is for you to make dainty dishes out of it.
And that, I think, is as good a place as any to leave things off this Halloween. I hope you enjoyed these stories. If you’re on the Friars’ feed on Patreon, keep listening because I have another one to tell you, this one about the shoemaker of Constantinople. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you soon.