Revenant

The trouble usually started a few nights after the funeral. In a Buckinghamshire village near the close of the twelfth century, a man who had been buried in good Christian ground came home. He let himself into his own house after dark and lay down beside his sleeping wife, and the weight of him nearly pressed the breath out of her. She woke the neighbours. The next night they kept watch, a crowd of them awake in the small room, and the dead man came anyway and threw himself about among them until the candles guttered and they scattered into the dark.

This is the revenant, the returning dead of medieval Europe. The word is French, from revenant, one who comes back, and it names a very particular fear. Not a spirit, not a cold breath on the stairs, but the body itself, out of the ground and walking, still dressed in its shroud and its rot. The living had words for a soul that lingered. The revenant was worse, because there was nothing ghostly about it. You could smell it.

Those who claimed to have seen one described a body that had gone wrong in the grave. Bloated and heavy, the skin darkened, the belly tight as a drum, the whole corpse looking gorged as though it had been feeding. When one was dug up at Melrose after a monk’s axe caught it in the dark, the wound was still wet and the flesh still full, and blood ran freely when the blade came away. A body long buried should not bleed. This one did, and it soaked the ground before they burned it.

The stories agree on the sort of person who came back. A revenant had usually been bad in life, or at least unquiet at the moment of death. A man of Anantis, a place scholars have taken for Alnwick in Northumberland, climbed onto the roof-beams to catch his young wife with another man, fell, and died a few days later without confession, too swollen with rage to repent. A priest at Melrose Abbey had spent his living years hunting and chasing women rather than at prayer. Others were the excommunicate, the buried in haste, the ones the church had never properly seen into the ground. Sin, or an interrupted death, left a door standing open, and the corpse walked back through it.

Once loose, a revenant did much the same thing everywhere. It left its grave at nightfall and made its slow rounds of the place it had known, sometimes with a pack of dogs howling at its heels, and where it passed the air turned foul and people began to sicken. The corpse at Anantis carried a stench that got into houses and into lungs, and within days the town was thinning, the survivors carrying out their dead faster than they could dig the graves. This was the revenant’s real menace. It did not need to lay a hand on anyone. It brought the grave with it, and the grave was catching.

Some of them did stranger things. Two runaway peasants from the manor of Drakelow died suddenly around 1090 and were buried the same day, and by that evening they were seen carrying their own wooden coffins on their shoulders through the fields. Night after night they returned, now as men shouldering their coffins, now in the shape of bears or dogs or other beasts, rapping on the walls of the houses and calling for the sick to come out to them. The villagers weakened and died until only three were left alive. That account, set down by the abbot Geoffrey of Burton, keeps the shape-changing that older tradition gave the walking dead, the same instinct that let the Norse imagine their draugar swelling to monstrous size inside the burial mound.

Stopping one was brutal, practical work. At Melrose the monks could not simply pray the dead priest back into his tomb. A young brother finally waited for the thing with an axe and struck it across the body, and only then did it flee underground, to be dug up at dawn and reduced to ash. Elsewhere the pattern held. The men of Anantis dragged the swollen corpse beyond the last house, tore it open with a spade, ripped out the heart, and threw the pieces onto a fire, and the dying stopped that same day. Walter Map tells of a dead troublemaker at Hereford who was exhumed, beheaded with a spade, splashed with holy water, and returned to the earth. The remedy was almost always the same. You broke the body until it could not come back, then you burned what was left.

There was a gentler cure, at least on paper. When the Buckinghamshire corpse would not settle, the case rose to Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, whose advisers told him bluntly to dig the thing up and burn it. Hugh refused. He had a scroll of absolution written out and laid on the dead man’s chest inside the reopened grave, and by that telling the corpse lay quiet afterward. The two remedies say a good deal about the age that produced them. The church wanted the revenant to be a soul that could be forgiven and released. The village wanted it dismembered. Often enough the village got its way.

What the revenant could do followed from what it was. It kept the strength and the malice of a living body without the frailty, moved through cold and dark that would have stopped a person, and spread disease simply by walking and rotting among the living. What it could not do was cross back over on its own terms. It was bound to the night and to the neighbourhood of its own grave, and it depended entirely on that grave staying whole. Destroy the corpse and the revenant ended with it. Burn the heart, scatter the ash, and there was nothing left to return.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a revenant?

A revenant is a corpse that rises from its grave and walks among the living, a fear widespread in medieval European folklore. Unlike a ghost, it is the physical body itself, reanimated and rotting, rather than a disembodied spirit. The word comes from the Old French revenant, meaning “one who returns.”

How did people stop a revenant?

Medieval communities stopped a revenant by destroying its body. The usual method was to exhume the corpse, cut off its head or tear out its heart, and burn the remains to ash, as recorded at Melrose Abbey and the village of Anantis. In one case the Bishop of Lincoln instead laid a written scroll of absolution on the corpse, treating it as a soul to be forgiven rather than a body to be burned.

What is the difference between a revenant and a ghost?

A revenant is a walking dead body, while a ghost is an immaterial spirit or apparition. Revenants in the medieval chronicles are solid enough to crush sleepers, be struck with an axe, and bleed when wounded. That physical, corporeal nature is what made them so frightening, and it links them to later folklore about vampires and the Norse draugr.

Who becomes a revenant?

In the medieval accounts, revenants were usually people who had lived badly or died without proper Christian burial. Examples include a worldly priest at Melrose, an angry husband who died unconfessed at Anantis, and those who were excommunicated or buried in haste. Their unresolved lives or interrupted deaths were thought to keep them from resting.

Where do the medieval revenant stories come from?

Most surviving English revenant tales were recorded by three twelfth-century clerics: William of Newburgh in his Historia rerum Anglicarum, Walter Map in De nugis curialium, and Geoffrey of Burton in his Life of Saint Modwenna. William alone reported four separate cases, at Buckingham, Berwick, Melrose, and Anantis.

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