Medieval Zombie? Medieval Vampire? You Decide
This is a story recorded by William Parvus of Newburgh in Historia Rerum Anglicarium in 1198 AD:
In Melrose Abbey, there was a priest known only as Hunderprest. He was a jerk who preferred hunting and being mean to the woman who hired him as a Chaplin to being a good monk.
He died in 1196, but then he hopped out of his grave and tried to break into Melrose Abbey. The monks there fended him off.
Hunderprest then turned his attention to a woman in the neighborhood. I think the original said this was the elderly woman who had hired him as a Chaplin, but there is a version out there saying that this woman was a former mistress. William said that Hunderprest sucked the woman’s blood, another article says he broke into her room repeatedly.
She didn’t die though. She went to Melrose Abbey and begged the monks to do something about this jerk, so they dispatched a pair of monks to Hunderprest’s grave.
The monks whacked him on the head with an axe that night, and the next morning the abbey cremated his remains and spread his ashes. This removed Hunderprest forever, apparently.
So…What Happened Here?
There are a number of ways to approach this. One of the ways is to ask if this meant that High Medieval Scots believed in vampires or revenants, and what could we glean about their beliefs from this story.
This isn’t a small question. There are stories about witches whose one power is that they can turn themselves into wolves, and there are legends that a dead werewolf becomes a vampire.
A book written back in the first years of the 2000’s spent three chapters explaining how witches and werewolves had similarities with vampires.
But…isn’t this all kind of ahistorical? Coming at it from the wrong angle?
The Problem of Categorization
Is Hunderprest a zombie? (As we would know it. This is obviously not a traditional zombeh of Haiti. He has way more in common with the dragur of Scandanavia.)
Is he a vampire? William’s account does include blood-drinking.
Or do all we humans share certain fears, and we create individual monsters to address them. We fear that our world is not as solid and predictable as it should be, so our major monsters can change shape. We fear death, especially sudden and unplanned for death, so our monsters rise from the grave and come from things like infants that died before they could be baptized.
Did Medieval Scotland harbor vampire lore, or did Medieval Scots fear that not even death can stop the depredations of a bad monk? That God allows real harm from a supernatural entity? That death is temporary and no escape from a bad situation? Are the consequences of this fear conjuring up Hunderprest?
Because before Victorian times, a label for a monster was fluid. Troll could just mean ‘magic entity.’ Kobold could just mean ‘spirit messing with a particular spot.’
There were people trying to categorize them and explain them in more sociological terms, but they weren’t reaching your average person and I don’t think they were tackling it from a personal angle.
I think we are categorizing the wrong thing.
What Communal Fears Are the Story Addressing Here? According to Me, Anyway
- We acknowledge that some people in the church are not there because they are called to God but because they want a job where they can be rich without doing any actual work.
- Death is on a continuum and the only way you can be certain that the jerk you don’t like is dead is if you roast that sucker.
- It’s the church’s job to police its own, darn it. Some poor little ol’ lady can hardly be expected to go to bed with an axe every night just because the abbey couldn’t rein in the menace while he was alive.
- We all fear the normal order getting out of whack, and we would prefer death to something weird happening in the grave.
Source:
Legends of Blood: Vampires in Myth and History
spookyisles.com/william-of-newburgh
scotsman.com ‘The Zombie priest of Melrose Abbey’