Postcard from Yorkshire: ghostly tours

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Legend has it that the ghost of James Tankerlay, a rector buried in front of the chapter house at Byland Abbey, once blinded a woman as it roamed the North Yorkshire countryside one night. The abbot had Tankerlay’s body dug up and hauled as far as Gormire Lake, where, as they attempted to dispose of the body, the oxen carrying it nearly drowned from fear.

This tale was copied, along with 11 others, into the blank pages of a manuscript by a monk at Byland Abbey around the year 1400. On the 100th anniversary of their translation by the medievalist scholar MR James, historian Michael Carter is leading us through the ruined remains of the monastery to the threshold of that same chapter house for a reading. The sky is a patchwork of dark grey punctured here and there by the sunlight, casting dramatic shadows through the empty arches. A rabbit bounds across the hall in the direction of the graveyard. “A familiar?” he suggests hopefully.

Travel map Yorkshire

As Halloween nears and the nights draw in, English Heritage, the ordinarily strait-laced charity responsible for 400 historic buildings and sites, is using the Byland stories to form the basis for a series of ghostly tours in northern England. Led by Carter, they aim to place ghosts back into their rightful home: the monastery. The two may not seem like natural bedfellows, but the importance of intercessory prayer, through which monks and nuns would appeal to the heavens on behalf of the recently deceased (often spurred by a healthy bequest, of course), meant that death was the business of religious orders.

And business was good: almost all the gifts to the abbey recorded on a 15th-century manuscript specified salvation of the soul as the motivation behind them. And what Carter refers to as the monastery’s “geography of death” was a layout designed such that tombs and graves actively blocked lines of sight to remind you to say prayers for their occupants.

“This is a landscape soaked in blood,” says Carter as we skulk around the cloister of the abbey. Robert the Bruce’s Great Raid of 1322 pillaged the abbey and the surrounding area; two decades later they were beset by the Black Death. By 1391 only 11 monks and three lay brothers remained on a site designed to accommodate around 300.

Byland Abbey in North Yorkshire; it was founded in 1135 © English Heritage

Those who needed prayers saying for them were often those who died with unresolved business on earth, and so minor were potential infractions in the eyes of the church that stories of guilt-laden ghosts were bound to spread. One of the Byland tales tells of a former canon, tormented in death because he had stolen some silver spoons; only upon their return did his haunting cease.

Ghost stories they may be, but Carter is keen to stress their grounding in history. Remains found at nearby Wharram Percy, a medieval village deserted at the turn of the 16th century, show evidence of postmortem decapitation, burning and hearts being removed from bodies ranging from infants to the middle aged. It all points towards attempts from the village to ward off revenants, reanimated corpses returning to haunt or attack the living.

“We have fearsome ghost stories of young children committing terrifying acts,” says Carter. “And we’ve only got a fraction of the stories.” The fear of spirits and the undead, regardless of whether they actually existed, was clearly very real.

Wharram Percy

Rievaulx Abbey © English Heritage

At Rievaulx Abbey, where Carter will also lead tours, the devil is supposed to have visited two monks in their dormitory one night. One wonders if they had, in a moment of weakness, broken their vows of abstinence. They would have been disturbed regardless at two in the morning for matins prayers, processing past an image of St Christopher (himself something of a historical ghost) in the transept, thought to provide protection against a bad death and against tiredness in toil.

The Rievaulx ruins today are even more spectacular than those at Byland Abbey. You may find yourself colouring in the missing windows or rebuilding its many chapels in your mind. In the 12th century, the abbot Waldef thought he saw a ghost in the cloister one afternoon (pathetic fallacy be damned: “A remarkable number of medieval ghost stories take place during the day,” says Carter), a white-clad former abbot sporting strings of jewels, each of which represented a soul saved from damnation.

Byland and Rievaulx are fitting homes for ghosts, themselves shadows of their former selves, victims of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. But they are beautiful still, and vividly reconstructed by Carter’s narration. Whether or not the stories of the dead are true, the medieval monastery has never seemed more alive.

Details

Chris Allnutt was a guest of English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk). It is running its ghost-focused “Revenants and Remains” talks at Byland Abbey on November 5 and 6, Lanercost Priory on November 12 and 19 and Rievaulx Abbey on November 26 and 27

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