Revenants appeared with alarming frequency in the literature of Anglo-Norman and Angevin England. In his account of the miracles attributed to Saint Modwenna, written between 1118–1150, Abbot Geoffrey of Burton (r. 1114–1150) recorded acts of vengeance undertaken by the saint against those who had threatened the interests of the abbey in Stapenhill, Stratfordshire, where her bones lay buried. Among these stories was the unusual tale of two peasants who fled their obligations to the abbot and sought the protection of a local count, whom they roused to anger against their monastic master by “speaking wickedly” against him. Saint Modwenna protected her monks from the count’s aggression, but the two fugitive peasants suffered a terrible fate. They died suddenly and received burial, but then, to the horror of their neighbors, they proceeded to wander around at night, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs, sometimes in the form of wild animals. Even worse, they called out to their living neighbors and brought disease in their wake. After most of the villagers had died, the bishop allowed the locals to put a stop to the revenants. Their bodies were dug up, their heads cut off and placed between their legs, and their hearts were burned on a fire, until they cracked open and released evil spirits in the form of crows. Anglo-Saxon burial sites, including one at the village of Stapenhill itself, sometimes contain corpses decapitated in this way, which lends support to the argument that Abbot Geoffrey of Burton was describing a traditional way of dealing with the threat of the wandering dead.
When an insult against the church occurred once again, the Lord inflicted punishment because of the merits of the virgin Modwenna with a terrifying judgment of the kind I am about to describe. For there were two villagers living in Stapenhill under the jurisdiction of the abbot of Burton, who fled to a nearby village called Drakelow. They wrongfully abandoned their lords, the monks, in their desire to live under the authority of Count Roger the Poitevin. The abbot of the monastery sent word and had their crops seized, for the villagers had not yet removed it from their barns, and then he had every last grain of it moved to the abbey’s granaries in the hope that he could in this way summon them back once more to their proper dwellings. But those villagers, going off and spreading lies, brought a querulous complaint to the count, riling him up and saying the worst possible things to him, to such an extent that the count became furious with the abbot to the point that the count threatened to kill the abbot wherever he might find him. Then, in his wrath, the count gathered a multitude of peasants and knights with carts and weapons and sent them in haste to Stapenhill to the granaries of the monks in a great show of force and ordered them to seize with violence all of the crops therein, both the stores of the abbey, which provided for the monks, and also the crops belonging to those wicked fugitives, concerning whom we have already spoken. Then, not content with this, he again sent many men and knights to the fields of the abbey near a place called Blackpool with the command to destroy the church’s crops with all of their might. The count encouraged them especially to draw out the ten knights, who were family members of the abbot and members of his entourage, if they could devise some way to provoke them to a pitched battle. When he understood what was happening, the abbot forbade his knights from going outside under any circumstances, while he and the monks, with bare feet and much groaning, entered the church and with many tears set down on the ground the shrine of the blessed virgin Modwenna, where her most sacred bones lay at rest. Together they all cried out to the Lord with the sum of their effort, beseeching and praying for his immense power from the bottoms of their hearts, so that he might deign to lend aid to his servants in his blessed goodness, if he so desired, and that he might reveal his willingness to help those struggling in such difficulty with a manifestation of his power.
Meanwhile, as all of the monks were inside offering prayers with unanimous intent, the ten knights disregarded the abbot’s prohibition and without the knowledge of him or his monks, they took up arms with shared intent. Boldly mounting their horses, they galloped onto the field, ready for battle, a few against many. Spurring his horse to charge, one of the abbot’s knights suddenly struck the count’s steward and knocked him to the ground with such force that the violence of the blow broke one of his legs. This feat of strength terrified the entourage of their enemies as the battle commenced. Then another of the abbot’s knights likewise spurred his horse quickly to charge in the same way. He struck a knight from the household of the count with a tremendous show of force and knocked him into a nearby stream, hurling him into the mud a long way from his horse. The rest of the monks’ knights, each and every one of them, fought so valiantly in this battle that the ten of them put to flight more than sixty opponents and, to the great disgrace of the vanquished, these few men chased a great many more from the field of battle through the merit of Modwenna and the power of God.
The evening of the very next day, the two fugitive peasants, through whom and because of whom this whole evil affair had begun, were sitting down to eat when both were suddenly struck down dead. On the very next evening, both of them were laid in wooden coffins and buried in the churchyard at Stapenhill, the village from which they both had fled. What followed was exceedingly strange and especially astounding. On the same day on which they were buried, they appeared at dusk, while there was still a hint of light, at Drakelow, carrying upon their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. Through the next night they wandered through the paths of the village and the nearby fields, sometimes in the form of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, sometimes in the likeness of bears or dogs or other kinds of animals. Moreover, they spoke to the other peasants, banging on the walls of their homes and crying out to everyone who could hear, “Get moving, quickly, get moving! Get up! Get up and come!” When these uncanny events had repeated themselves every evening and every night for quite some time, a disease struck the village and all of the peasants living there suddenly found themselves in such a dire situation that within three days, with the exception of three individuals whom we will talk about later, every last one of them succumbed to sudden death in the strangest way.
The count was stunned and struck with a great fear when he realized that such strange events had begun to unfold. He immediately repented and came to the monastery with his knights. Seeking pardon with humility, he made a binding peace with the abbot and the monks, petitioning them with prayer to placate God and the virgin Modwenna, whom he had offended. In the presence of everyone, with faithful devotion, he ordered Drogo, the reeve of the village, to pay twice the amount for all of the damages that he had inflicted. And so he left the monastery with relief and departed without delay to his other lands. Then Drogo, returning quickly, restored double what was owed to the monastery and, begging pardon once more, departed to other regions with all haste for he wished to escape the destruction wrought by death. The two peasants who still remained in the village—Drogo had been the third—became sick and languished for a long time. Furthermore, they lived in fear of the dead men, those phantoms who carried their wooden coffins on their shoulders in the evening and at night, as we described above. With the permission of the bishop, they sought out the graves of these men, dug them up, and found their bodies intact, but the linen wrappings over their faces were stained with gore. The peasants cut off the heads of the corpses and placed them between their legs in the graves. Then they ripped the hearts out of the bodies, which they buried once more in the earth. They carried the hearts to a place called Dodefreseford, where they burned them from morning until the evening. Finally, once the hearts had been burned, they cracked open with a great sound as though due to immense pressure and suddenly everyone there clearly saw an evil spirit in the shape of a crow flying from the flames. Soon after these things occurred, the deathly sickness and the phantoms disappeared once and for all. The two peasants who were lying sick in their beds recovered their health as soon as they saw the smoke rising from the fire where the hearts had been burned. They got up immediately, gathered up their children and wives and everything they owned, and gave thanks to God that they had escaped. They made their way to a neighboring village called Gresley, where they remain to this day. Thus, the village known as Drakelow was abandoned and for a long time no one dared to live there, fearing the judgment of the Lord that had happened there so strangely and marveling at the wonders that the All-Mighty worked through the holy virgin Modwenna.