Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories

An Online Version of the Byland Abbey Ghost Stories

Introduction by David Mimno¹ #

Stories transcribed by M.R. James from a manuscript from Byland Abbey. This collection is a wonderful perspective on James’ own ghost stories, along with his edition of Walter Map’s “Courtly Trifles”. If you haven’t read anything by James, “Casting the Runes” will give you an entirely new perspective on blind peer review.

The stories were published in the English Historical Review in July 1922.² A scan of the article is available at Google Books. I corrected the OCR from this edition, which was remarkably accurate given the rather obscure medieval Latin. I removed running page headers and marginal references to folio page breaks; if these are of interest they can be readily restored from the scan. The encoding is in Markdown format with UTF-8 character encoding. Anna Waymack identified an obscure character (Eboꝝ) as an “r-rotunda with cut” and pointed me to the Unicode codepoint for it. This character usually represents -rum but can represent any syllable starting with r. In this case it seems to mean to Ebo-racum, or York. York is the closest city to Byland Abbey so it seems likely to me that the scribe would have a ready abbreviation.

A recent discussion on the content and background of the work by Maik Hildebrandt can be found at JSTOR.³ The stories appear to be genuinely old – this is not merely the familiar “so I found this old manuscript” frame story. Waymack points to an image from the British Library of a page from the manuscript, which I can recognize as the material transcribed, but which would require considerable palaeographic experience to transcribe by itself. ⁴

The Latin is fairly straightforward, with a few medieval spellings, notably -e for -ae. Some topical vocabulary may be unfamiliar, such as scissor (tailor) and cista (coffin).

Mythologically, as James points out, the stories are closer to Danish folk tales of the sort collected by Evald Tang Kristensen than to modern ghost stories. Many of the ghosts are technically revenants. They must be “conjured” in order to speak.

An English translation was produced by A.J. Grant in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal⁵ two years after the publication of James’ transcription, with assistance from Dr. Hamilton Thompson. This volume is scanned in the Hathi Trust digital library, but as it is from 1924 it is not available through that interface until it definitively enters the public domain under US copyright law on Jan 1, 2020.

An OCRed edition, however, is available at the Internet Archive, which lists the Yorkshire Archaeological Society as a funder, so I presume that they have no problem if I anticipate this date by several months. I consulted a paper edition at Cornell’s Olin Library for reference, I have included an image of a diagram that was not possible to translate into text.

As with the Latin, I have made some minor corrections to the OCR transcript and removed running headers. The notes for the translation mix James’ original notes (M.R.J.) with notes by Hamilton Thompson (A.H.T.)⁶. I find the translation generally convincing, although the phrase “exsufflavit oculum concubine sue” reads more to me like the ghost blew a puff of air on her eye, not “blew away” or “blinded” as Grant and Hildebrandt take it, which, as Hildebrandt notes, seems unusually aggressive for these ghosts.