Did People In The Medieval World Believe in Ghosts?| Medieval Afterlife | History Hit

ghosts ghouls Things That Go Bump in the night there's a kind of adrenaline rush that comes along with a good Ghost Story and there's a reason for this ghost stories survived us from across time and around the world every culture on Earth from the Amazonian rainforest to the Tiger in Russia has its own ghost stories often societies use ghost stories to reinforce their own values to figure out what makes a society tick it often helps to look at what makes that same Society [Music] frightened join us as we uncover the medieval Fantasmic to find out what the Restless Dead of the Middle Ages tell us about the anxieties of the living when I first came here he had a reputation as a haunted place this is not what you would want as your bual for this period it's completely outside the norm it's a very very visual reminder of the Stark reality of the death that will come to when you look at different cultures around the world people have been pretty much ghost hunting since the dawn of time I'm slightly freaked out now so I guess that we should go explore a little [Music] more [Music] you can hardly talk about ghosts without coming to a graveyard so we've come to one of the most beautiful graveyards in all of London this is abne Park Cemetery and it's one of the so called Magnificent 7 it's a wonderful place to come and think about burial practice and what it means ghost stories go back as far as any recorded human history in fact there are ghost stories diing back to ancient Mesopotamia in which the authors left clear instructions etched on stone tablets about how to correctly deal with things like demons and the ghosts of the deceased later there are ancient Roman sources like that of Plenty the younger which Tells A Tale of a brave philosopher using logic to confront Restless ghosts in the community and we think that ghost stories exist even before any written records do this is sort of tied with ideas about dead bodies themselves you see humans have an innate repulsion to dead bodies it's something that we call necrophobia animals have it as well and that's because corpses if unattended can actually injure your health corpses Decay just like anything else does so it's very very important that they're treated with the utmost care in order to protect communities around them give given the care taken in communities to ensure a proper burial it's not surprising that so many of our ghost stories both modern and historic center around the consequences of improper Burial at some point in time we even started to bury bodies with extravagant and useful grave Goods it suggests that people thought their loved ones were going somewhere and might still need these objects in death if you believe that there's such a thing as a journey into the Afterlife then it stands for the reason that the part of you that still exists without your body can also Journey back from that same afterlife and it's from this that we get our concept of ghosts the medieval period is often associated with horror tropes because some see it as a comparatively Grim time which experienced TOS like the black death and one which accepted corporeal punishment and sometimes torture and while their ghost stories may be similar to ours the way they understood the concept of things like spirits and death was very different to see how let's look at one of the earliest surviving ghost stories from my favorite time period in the reign of King Richard II in York a tailor named snowball was riding his horse home from the town of Gilling to the town of ampleforth suddenly a raven began to fly around his head repeatedly before it opened its wings and flew into the ground beating onto the ground as though it were dying Sparks began shooting out of the Raven's body the man drew his sword and began to fight with the Raven saying God forbid that you should have the power to hurt me on this occasion after hearing the name of God the Raven flew off for protection he began to hold the hilt of his sword in front of him like a cross the Raven returned but this time in the form of a giant dog with a chain around his neck he told the Taylor that he was a damned Soul who had been excommunicated from the church the spirit asked that the tailor go to the priest that had excommunicated him and ask for an AB Absolution of his sins however the spirit warned that if the tayor failed to do this the flesh would crawl from his bones and he would begin to physically Rock he immediately went to go find the priest but the priest refused eventually the tayor found a chaplain to whom he paid five pieces of silver in return the chaplain reinstated the man's Soul into the church and he gave the tayor a piece of parchment that stated that his excommunication was no longer valid the Taylor returned as the ghost had requested with the good news of his reinstatement into the church and several copies of the gospels the spirit thanked the Taylor for his intervention and said know that on Monday next I shall pass into Everlasting Joy along with 30 other Spirits the story that we just heard is one of the socalled band Ghost Stories they're called the bin ghost stories because they were written down here at bin Monastery in about the year 1400 as you can probably tell from the size of this complex viand was an incredibly important San Monastery and these buildings were finished around about 1177 the story of snowballer Taylor does a few things first of all it explains to audiences what Purgatory is for medieval people Purgatory is a kind of hell that isn't permanent so if you end up like the ghost in this story you will be experiencing the torments of hell but it also reminds audiences that if they want to and they're worried about their loved ones in the afterlife they can intercede for them you probably noticed that this ghost story is different in a lot of ways from our own modern ghost stories when medieval ghosts appear they usually do because they specifically want something from you more to the point they want something religious from you however the bin ghost stories are specifically significant because they inform a lot of horror tropes today these are some of the first recorded instances of things like necromantic ritual invoking the name of God in order to intercede with ghosts really familiar things that wouldn't be out of place in any horror movie today but ghost stories aren't the only way that members of the church communicated ideas about the afterlife there's also physical ways of doing that same thing to find out more we're going to visit the most important religious site in medieval England canterberry Cathedral Cur Cathedral is the most important cathedral in medieval England and there's a couple of reasons for this the first is that it's home to the arch Bishop of Canterbury and this is the most important of all of the Bishops of England the hints in the whole Arch bit of the name secondly it's home to the murder of one of the most important medieval English Saints St Thomas Becket you may have heard of him he was also an Archbishop of Canterbury kind of got murdered accidentally sort of on the orders of the king but for our purposes it's particularly interesting because it's home to a few stories about sightings from Beyond the Grave if you look closely at some of the stained glass in Canterbury Cathedral you'll see illustrations of St Thomas Becket floating in through a window coming back to intervene in the lives of the living but not only that there's even been a sighing of the saint here in the cathedral as late as the 20th century so if you hang around long enough who knows you might just catch a glimpse of the saint himself this reminds me of one of my favorite medieval ghost stories it comes to us from the old English blickling homy 10 in it a rich man's beloved relative dies he's absolutely bereft racked by grief he leaves the country he sojourns in distant lands for years until one day he's compelled to return home specifically to go see the corpse of his dead relative but when he does the bones rise up out of the grave and instead of greeting him with sweet nothings demand to know what he's doing there to see them when they're nothing but dust and decay the man is shocked and he completely changes his life around and dedicates himself to religion this is a classic Trope from the medieval period which historians call Dry Bones speak it's seen in religious texts like homilies mostly to warn the audience against sin and remind them that as the bones were once alive so too will the audience one day be dead but we don't just see this idea expressed in pictures and man scripts eventually by the later medieval period the idea comes out in a physical expression in what are called transits or cadaver tombs here at canterberry Cathedral there is a wonderful example of the idea that it doesn't matter how rich you are how powerful you are or how gorgeous your clothes are eventually your body's going to Decay the tops of these tombs display the deceased in all their splendor but at the bottom lays a decayed and sobering reminder of what a Waits even the noblest of people I met up with archives manager cresa Williams to find out more this is the transi tomb of Archbishop Henry Chipley who died in 1443 and it was completed during his lifetime even perhaps over 15 years before he died so this is incredible because since it was finished so quickly before his death that means that he would have actually been going by it every day wouldn't he absolutely absolutely because we're here in the choir the monastic choir of Canterbury Cathedral so he would have been seated in here on the south side near where the throne is so it's quite an extraordinary thought that he had that visual regular reminder of his own mortality wow there's a legend on the North and South sides of the Tomb conveying that message to those present and those who passed by CR takes me into the Canterbury Cathedral archives to see some more examples of what historians call momento Mor a Latin phrase which means remember you will die this is a printed primer um so a prayer book printed in 1554 in Ru in France but very much for English use and what do we have here in this image then so we have the three living and the three dead engraved here with some verse underneath in English it's a visual reminder of our mortality the three Knights the three Huntsman here en counting skeletons on the left hand side so this is such a fascinating Jos isn't it because you've got these three Huntsmen they're very rich they're very powerful and they're doing the thing that's the most fun for Rich powerful people isn't it just going hunting and they have to come face to face with these skeletons that are reminding them that none of this matters eventually they are going to be a corpse right yes it's it's a very very visual simple reminder of the Stark reality of the death that will come to them this is a really great example of how individual Christians are really thinking about Christianity and their own salvation aren't they yes so it's for personal devotion it's for the the individual to reflect on this image and to to reflect on the destiny of their soul after death [Music] not only were ghost stories used by the church to remind both's poor and Wealthy practitioners about Sin and death they had another role in upholding the hierarchy within the church as [Music] well Pope Gregory the Great recorded two ghost stories in the 6th Century this is one the Deacon pesus was by all accounts a wonderful man he gave lots of money to ch was active in his local church and well respected by all of his fellow clergymen however at this time elections for Pope were hotly contested pesus ended up supporting a losing candidate Lawrence over the successful Pope sakas a few years later the bishop of Capa was visiting bass on order of his physician as he relaxed in one of the thermal tubs he noticed through the steam the ghost of pazus standing there as though he were going to attend him like a servant the bishop was terrified and he asked pasus why he was there pascus replied it was because he was being tormented for supporting Lawrence he begged that the bishop would return and say prayers for his soul so that he would be released from the bath house and his torments pascus told the bishop that he would know if his intervention was successful if he returned to the bath and found that pascus was no longer there lo and behold after saving dozens of masses for his soul the bishop returned and pascus was [Music] gone fundamentally this ghost story is doing a couple of things the first is it's showing how important it is to support who whoever is elected Pope it doesn't matter who you were supporting in the run-ups to the election once it's over it's a done deal if you don't do that you might end up haunting a bath house interestingly the bath house itself is doing a couple of different things sure it's a bath house but the hot water in there is supposed to remind you about the fires of hell that are going to consume your soul if you don't support the Pope the second thing that this story does is it shows how prayer and intervention can save sinners provided that they lived a pretty allright life this shows us a lot about ghosts in the early medieval period first it says that even at that highest eons of society people really do believe in them but stories about them can also be used to reinforce extent hierarchies it's very very important to understand that the hierarchy of the church works the way that it does for a reason but that church power can also be used to save individual Christians Souls so art tropes like the three living and the three dead or transoms or literary tropes like dry bones speak aren't just about creeping people out or being gory they are a really important way of underlining one of the fundamental messages of Christianity and that's that this life that you're experiencing right now is by necessity going to end so you shouldn't be focusing on things like outward beauty or riches instead you need to understand that your physical body is going to die and instead focus on your spiritual body turn towards God and prepare yourself for your eventual afterlife if a ghost story survives to us for over a thousand years it's going to be because somebody who had a lot of money and power wants you to be aware of that story there's going to be a political reason for [Music] that it makes perfect sense that a place as important as canterburry could Cathedral has a few spooky things around the shop the Church of course is the spiritual intermediary for every Christian in England at the time they're the ones who are supposed to be telling you how to live your life correctly so that you don't end up haunting anyone in the afterlife of course for some people like Saints it's perfectly acceptable to come back in the afterlife but that's usually because you're trying to intervene and make sure that other people spiritual lives are on course so in a cathedral as important as this of course there's reminders of the that you're going to die that's the entire point of spirituality you will die so make sure that your religious life is correct now so if ghost stories help reinforce the right way to bury someone it's because in the Middle Ages there actually was a right way to bury someone that's in consecrated or Hallowed Ground consecrated ground would be pre-prepared by a priest so it's blessed and that's where you know that people are going to be buried so we can learn a lot by looking at what we call deviant or atypical burials this could mean sometimes that someone is just not buried in consecrated ground so for example they might be buried specifically outside of the walls of a churchyard or in certain cases in places that are really unpleasant like marshes similarly we find atypical burials that will for example have the head severed and between the knees this is usually a symbol that this person is a criminal and there's been some worry that the Revenant dead were going to come back haunt their communities and even attack people however some atypical burials are just a bit of a mistake somebody died and there wasn't time or the wherewithal to bury them in actual consecrated ground so we have to be very very careful when we look at archaeological finds before we declare that someone is necessarily outside of their community [Music] however by revealing some of the interesting ways we've buried people over time archaeological finds can tell us a lot about what past cultures thought of the afterlife and are important if we want to learn more about how people viewed this transitory period between life and death the University of Bradford houses the UK's largest collection of skeletal human remains and we've come here to look at burials with biological Anthropologist Dr Joe Buck starting with a remarkable medieval graveyard this is um a plan of a cemetery from Northampton called Ron and you see we've got a small two cell Church in the center and all of these individuals are buried with the heads at the West End of the grave and their feet at the East End of the Grave one of the ideas is that come the resurrection these people would be able to sit up and they'll see the Rising Sun um so your feet are towards the sort of Sunrise angle it's clear from these carefully aligned Graves that medieval Christians were very particular about how they were buried and this regularity makes individuals that fall outside of those Norms very easy to spot one of the things we know from sort of textual information is that people who had sinned in particular ways and suicides and criminals fall into this is that they would not be buried on consecrated ground so this is the cemetry of walkington world in East Yorkshire and if you look at the burials they're quite dis organized so first of all we have them in they're no there are no rows but they're also different orientations they're not all aligned West East we actually have a grave down here with multiple people in it it looks like there's three there's actually four of them wow and it is unusual for people to be buried in clusters like that normally you have an individual in a grave and apart from these two individuals up at the top none of them have actually got a head in addition to these headless bodies we actually have a series of skulls buried around the cemetery these may have been displayed in some way and we do have references for in the early medieval text to the use of head Stakes to display heads as a warning being separated from your community and buried in unconsecrated ground was a huge deal because it meant that you were unlikely to make it into heaven but looking at a photograph of this excavation reveals a more Grizzly story behind these unusual burials well they're clearly executions we have evidence of decapitation we have this individual over here and this is the leg and the knee of a second individual and they're practically touching so that suggest that they're contemporaneous burials okay and then this individual over here we know from the radiocarbon dating that he's a little bit later this is over a few hundred years we're looking at maybe one execution a generation so it's a really infrequent occurrence beheadings happened in the medieval period for a number of reasons not only were painful deaths considered a great deterrent against Crime but the gruesome and unusual death also underlined the fact that your community thought you were unlikely to end up in heaven allowing sinful people to go unpunished was thought to create an additional problem the Revenant dead the word Revenant means to return and these are people who Rose from the grave to trouble the living so beheading served an additional purpose ensuring you didn't come back after your death to haunt the community the idea seems to be that you can't get up out of your grave if your head isn't attached these three individuals all have evidence of decapitation right but we don't know for certain if that decapitation happened as the form of execution although we can make that inference or if it was done as a postmortem sort of Mutilation of the Body for what reason would you decapitate someone after death what is it kind of showing disrespect really and you know otherness and it is not the type of thing that you would do with a typical medieval burial for this individual what you can see is this enormous wedge cut with a polished surface look at that there's another one just to the side of it that's quite shallow and there's another one in here that just takes off the surface of the bone these are not in the right orientation for a decapitation the decapitation should be coming in like this these blows are actually coming upwards and that is really strange because you can't really wield a sword in a sort like an upwards motion into the back of somebody's head so that suggest to me that this individual was probably bending over the mismatch of the orientation suggests that the person who did this aimed very badly it could be that the Executioner was not as experienced perhaps right and I think that ties into the idea that this is kind of almost like a once in a generation occurrence it's not something that people did again and again and it must have taken at least four blows to have detached this Cranium and it wasn't buried with a body so presumably at some point it was fully decapitated the haphazard nature of these Cuts is interesting because if these beheadings were crudely carried out after death it's possible that they were either done to put the heads on display to deter crime or done to prevent these people from becoming Revenant dead and the fact that their heads were found buried outside the community in unconsecrated ground only makes this seem more likely this is not what you would want as your death or as your burial for this period it's completely outside the norm for what people would been expecting for the end of their life and the way that they would have their the start of their [Music] afterlife so for medieval people improper burial not only jeopardized one's chances of getting into heaven but it could also mean that your community was threatened by visits from Beyond the Grave acts like torture and beheading which make sense within a medieval context and are sometimes used to Stave off attacks from the Revenant dead mean that the Middle Ages is often associated with horror by people now even its Gothic buildings have become a Trope almost synonymous with the genre sometimes when we think about ghosts or horror stories it can be kind of confusing how we use historical terms because of the word gothic Gothic technically is a reference to the art and architecture from about the 12th century onwards in the Middle Ages however the main way we use it today is to reference Victorian things because probably the only group of people who are more obsessed with the Middle Ages than I am are the victorians so we see references to the Middle Ages all across the Victorian period And even in their own ferary monuments this is an absolutely gorgeous example right here of what we would call a neogothic tomb so neogothic because it's Victorian but it's using medieval elements so here you have a gorgeous pointed Gothic Arch the entire thing is what you would call a false arcade so it's got a series of pillars that are kind of indicating that there's space behind it you'll also see this gorgeous Stone Vine here and this is a reference to a medieval art Motif about the sins of the world you needed to avoid sinning like getting entangled in Ivy in order to live a correct spiritual life but victorians aren't just obsessed with medievalisms when it comes to architecture or funerary monuments they're often the first people to record stories about what they say are medieval ghosts so I'm off to chillingham Castle where we can look at ideas about medieval ghosts through a Victorian [Music] lens if I were to say the words haunted castle to you your mind would probably conjure up an image something like this this is is chillingham Castle and even the name sounds like something fantastic I've made up specifically to talk about ghosts but I assure you this location has a long and storied history in the 12th century it was the home to a monastery by the 13th century because of increasing incursions from Scottish forces this Castle was built Edward the the Hammer of the Scots LED his Scottish campaigns from this location over the years it's been host to Royals been home to several noble families but now it's probably best known as the home to dozens of [Music] ghosts but unlike other medieval ghost stories these ones come to us from a little later in time the first recorded accounts of the ghosts of chillingham Castle were penned by Lady Leonora tankerville she moved here from the US after marrying the Earl of tankerville in 1895 during what was something of a golden age for Ghost Stories imagine an American interested in medieval ghosts the Victorian and Edwardian eras were a time of great modernization and secularism with major shifts away from religious explanations of the natural world but the flip side of all this worldly rationalism was that it actually increased interest in the occult of spiritualism ghost stories were a hugely popular part of fiction as people became increasingly interested in the Paranormal seances and finding different ways of interacting with the dead places like chillingham found themselves in the middle of the spiritualist Revival Sur Holmes author and notable believer in the Supernatural Sir Arthur Cronan Doyle wrote to lady tankerville to commend her reports of the chillingham ghosts from the 15th century onwards the castle had been a seat of the gray Bennett and later tankerville families I met with its current owner married to a member of the original gray family Sir Humphrey who has taken great care in the castle Renovations this great Castle was built really to keep the Scots out of England mhm began being one strong tower and then the 1200s 1300s they built three more tows MH and then they built between the Towes for the king to come and stay to make it into worthwhile Palace and so in this room here you see ancient Tower there ancient Tower there and this room just built between for the king and the rooms above so it's been like that ever since really you know with so much battle and action and and so much back and forth you know on the Scottish border here it's really no wonder I think that we get so many reports of ghosts in the 18th century there was a figure who SP his time waing and moaning and shimmering in blue digging between thick castle walls join up two rooms they find the bones of a child and they buried it and that solved that problem but when I restored that room my guest kept saying You must have electric fault back which there's a flash of blue on the edge of the door well there's no electric there at all we must left a toe bone or knee bone when I first came here it had a reputation as a haunted place mhm there was a lovely priest who's one of the family he said well look I go all around the country getting rid of G so I'll do that yeah and so he came along and next morning he said there's too many I can't deal with them so that sounds fairly creepy and it seems that the ghosts Leonora documented over a hundred years ago are still hanging around and causing trouble for today's residents I wanted to hear more about the ghost that Leonora wrote about when she lived here so I've gone to meet Richard chillingham resident Ghost Hunter so we are here in this absolutely gorgeous medieval castle I hear that it is allegedly one of the most haunted castles in England if not Europe I would agree about how many ghosts do we think are here in chillingham about 50 that I know of 50 okay that's that's a lot what periods do we think that they come from a lot of the ghosts in here go back back to Medieval Times and indeed it became the home of the torturers back in the day but I can't tell if I'm excited or scared but one way or another can you show me absolutely let's go so we're here in this gorgeous little medieval Chapel I've noticed these wonderful little medieval oxen who are holding up the roof beam you've got this really interesting kind of carving in the wall back here but it's a chapel and you're telling me there's ghosts here the famous Ghost in This Chapel is a young girl 8 years old her bones were found under the floor when she was buried this wasn't consecrated because the the original Chapel moved in the castle from one side to another oh so she got buried here it later became a chapel ah I see okay so that is very medieval of her it's very medieval of her I love that moving through the castle we enter the grand hall Welcome to our lovely medieval Great Hall I love this room if I was a medieval ghost this is exactly where I would be hanging out in here in the top Corner we often get Lady Mary Barkley she likes to walk the top part of this Hall M and she manifests herself with the smell of roses and if you're really lucky a little wafting chill to go with it heading further up into the tower we come to a room with a more Regal appearance this is where King Edward I stayed on his way to engage with William Wallace at the Battle of fer in 1298 the wonderful Gothic window behind me that was installed for Edward the First's visit you can really see that this kind of is a room Fit For A King You've Got gorgeous natural light you've got really high ceilings incredibly detailed woodwork you know it feels really Royal oh indeed you know Richard I've been looking a lot lately at these medieval accounts of ghosts and so obviously medieval people really feel the need to explain ghosts they want to record them they need to get out into the world the fact that these ghosts exist so ghost hunting certainly has existed for quite some time but obviously the way that we do it now is a lot different to you know waiting for a damned soul to come and ask their brother La for help people have been pretty much ghost hunting since the dawn of time but there's always been an interest when you look at different cultures around the world it's an absolutely fascinating subject I want to find out how Richard finds these ghosts so he shows me some of the tools of the ghost hunting trade these are divining rods or ding rods this is a term I know uh the what you do with them I have no idea I have a pair especially for you amazing okay take all of the rods mhm okay now what you need the rods to do keep them about 10 in or so apart nice and level okay ask the spirits in the room to move the rods for you see what happened okay if there's any spirits in the room who want to move the rods for me give give me a go oh girl there's the right one going no it's scary there's the right one going maybe I didn't want to know this Spirits should I stay here tonight look they're both moving North moving oh look at this look at this these guys I'm slightly freaked out now um thank you spirits that was very kind of you to chat I'm not 100% sold on the Dalling rods but in using them Richard is upholding a hundreds of years old practice that wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows in the Middle Ages before it was banned by the church in the 1500s with the permission to stay the night from my Phantom hosts I prepare to settle in for a night in brit 's most haunted castle and hopefully no more encounters from Beyond the Grave whether you believe in ghosts or not it's clear that a natural fear of the supernatural has haunted us Through the Ages the ghost stories I've explored from the medieval period bear an eerie resemblance to our own they were used to uphold establishment values and sway political contests from Stark ERS of the death that is to come to the importance of good behavior and proper burial to ward off the undead it's no surprise that the victorians and edwardians had a love of medieval ghosts to rival my own and lurking below the surface of these spooky Tales lies a fascinating window into society's changing norms and values well it was a bit of a restless night I will admit it but I didn't see any ghosts even though Richard did give me a bit of a fright however we did learn a lot about medieval Society for medieval people ghosts do a really specific thing they're a reminder to live your life correctly in a world that's dedicated to Christian theology if you end up coming back from Beyond the Grave it means something very seriously has gone wrong either you need help yourself or you're warning someone else about how they need to live their life correctly it makes sense that this isn't how we see ghosts anymore because our society is very different from that in the medieval period Now by and large if we think about someone being a ghost it's because a terrible tragedy has befallen them for medieval people often times a ghost would be responsible for that tragedy even if I didn't see any ghosts today one of the things I think we can all agree on is that by and large we're all haunted just by societal expectations thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel History hit. 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Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, medieval history, history hit medieval, medieval life, middle ages, eleanor janega history hit, eleanor janega medieval, eleanor janega going medieval, history hit tv, eleanor janega, medieval times, life in medieval europe, life in middle ages, eleanor janega youtube, medieval peasants, middle ages history, everyday life in medieval europe, history hit documentary, history hit eleanor janega

Id: giDElNiAitY

Length: 37min 16sec (2236 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024