To be hanged, drawn, and quartered was the particularly barbaric punishment reserved for high treason in England. The condemned man (women convicted of treason were burned at the stake) would be carted to the place of execution, hanged until near the point of death, then cut down, castrated, and disemboweled, his entrails and genitals burned before his dying eyes. His carcass was then decapitated and cut (or often pulled by horses) into four quarters, with the gory head propped atop a pike for all to see.
Such was the punishment meted out to many of the men who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I. The diarist Samuel Pepys watched one of those regicides, Thomas Harrison, get ripped apart in October 1660. Looking “as cheerful as any man could do in that condition,” Pepys recorded, Harrison was hanged, drawn, and quartered. His “head and heart [were] shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.” Tearing him asunder might not stop his returning, however; “he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.”
Even the dead were not immune from this long arm of the law, for traitors could be hanged, drawn, and quartered posthumously. Three months after Harrison’s demise, for example, his fellow regicide, Oliver Cromwell—the lord protector who had ruled the Commonwealth of England with an iron fist—was removed from his tomb in Westminster Abbey. On January 30, 1661, what was left of his putrefying cadaver was ceremonially hanged, drawn, and quartered before being tossed, it seems, into a pit (although his family was rumored to have spirited it away). Cromwell’s severed head, however, was impaled before Westminster Hall, where it stood in the sun, wind, and rain for nearly 15 years before finally being blown to the ground by a storm. Passed from one collector to another, it became one of the most grotesque objects in any cabinet of curiosities—brown and wizened and repulsive. Mercifully and at long last, Cromwell’s head was interred in the gardens of Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge—in 1960.
And then there was burning. As an explicit punishment for heresy, burning is at least as old as the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century. Upon spreading to Catholic Europe, this most dreadful of all methods for sundering body from soul was employed with appalling frequency during the witchcraft hysteria of the 16th and 17th centuries. Death by flame, though agonizing, was swift; the corpse itself, however, seemed to almost actively resist incineration—as we saw in the case of Johannes Cuntius. When St. Joan of Arc, the soldierly Maid of Orleans, was convicted of witchcraft by an opposing English army and put to the torch in 1431, she had to be burned three times; some of her organs, it was said, were impervious to the flames. This was interpreted as a miracle, leading to her canonization 500 years later.
Intriguingly, in 1867, a jar was discovered in the attic of a Paris pharmacy bearing the label “Remains found under the stake of Joan of Arc, virgin of Orleans.” Inside was a paltry set of objects: a charred human rib, some carbonized wood, a fragment of linen, and what turned out to be a cat femur, probably the result of tossing black cats—witches’ familiars—onto the pyres. Yet, all of the items quickly achieved the status of relics.
In 2006, a French forensics team gained permission to examine the articles. Applying cutting-edge spectrometry alongside such traditional techniques as pollen analysis, the team also engaged the noses of celebrated perfumers, who detected traces of “burnt plaster” and “vanilla” in the remains—yet vanillin is the product of decomposition, not cremation. The black crust on the rib bone, long assumed to have resulted from charring, instead turned out to be a mixture of resin, bitumen, and malachite—a mixture akin to that used in primitive embalming. The linen fragment, for its part, matched similar ones from ancient Egypt. Finally, carbon-14 dating fixed the origin of the remains between the third and sixth centuries B.C. Far from being saintly relics, these were pieces of an ancient mummy.
Perhaps the dead feed off the living, perhaps not; but in the cultural cannibalism that was the medieval mummy trade, the living were feeding off the dead.
Mummy, or mumia, comes from the Arabic word mumiya, which originally meant “bitumen”—the sticky, tarlike petroleum derivative that was once spread abundantly over the sands of Mesopotamia. Its use as an embalming agent in ancient Egypt gave the word its modern meaning; it also encouraged the belief that bits of a cadaver treated with bitumen, once swallowed, would have a strangely powerful preservative effect on the eater.
This is why, by the 12th century, pulverized Egyptian mummies, mixed with bitumen, pitch, tar, and spices, were being imported into Europe in astonishing numbers, there to be consumed as a tonic, a panacea, and a preservative. “Mummie is become Merchandise,” mused Sir Thomas Browne, “Mizraim [ancient Egypt] cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for Balsoms.”
These nostrums didn’t always come from Mizraim, and they certainly weren’t always pharaoh. Unscrupulous middlemen, it appears, made substitutions. The corpses of suicides were passed off as mummies, as were those of executed criminals who had hung in the sun too long, and even bodies discovered in bogs by Danish peat cutters. In 1645, a Dutch apothecary scolded his colleagues for labeling certain concoctions “mummy” when what they were really offering was an “arm or a leg of a decaying or hanged leper or of some whore-hopper suffering from syphilis.”
WARNINGS FOR POSTERITY
Twelfth-century England, in our imaginations, is the green and pleasant land of Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Richard the Lionhearted. We do not normally associate it with pestilence, much less with sanguisuga, or “bloodsuckers.”
Yet, such creatures were apparently plentiful, at least in the imaginations of the ecclesiastical chroniclers who, by guttering candles in cold abbeys, penned their tales of prodigies “as a warning to posterity.” The Abbot of Burton told of two peasants who returned from the grave with their coffins on their shoulders, roamed village and field, and spread disease everywhere they went. But once their bodies were exhumed, the heads cut off, and the hearts removed, the evil abruptly ceased.
Witty, charming Walter Map—prelate, sometime diplomat, and friend of both Henry II and Thomas Becket—wrote of a Welsh maleficus, or wizard, who had been reanimated by an “evil angel.” The maleficus returned from the dead to sow death and destruction before a particularly heroic knight beheaded him at his tomb.
But William of Newburgh mined the richest vein of such stories. William spent most of his life as an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Abbey, which once nestled at the foot of the Yorkshire moors. It is long gone now, having been dissolved by Henry VIII and replaced by the house where, curiously enough, Oliver Cromwell’s desecrated remains may have been clandestinely reburied. Newburgh Abbey was not far from the Old Northern Road that once ran from London to Edinburgh, and along that road, William’s fame as a chronicler and historian spread. His masterpiece was the Historia rerum Anglicarum, or History of English Affairs, which told of the varying fortunes of kings and nobles in the century since the Norman invasion of 1066. It also included a section entitled “Of Certain Prodigies.”
“It would not be easy to believe,” William wrote, “that the corpses of the dead should sally…from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact….” Ever the dutiful historian, William had combed through works of all the ancient authors known to his age but had found nothing to compare with the stories he was about to relate. “Moreover,” he wrote, “were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome.”
William heard one such instance from a “venerable archdeacon” in Buckingham, southwest of London. A certain man died and was laid in his tomb:
On the following night, however, having entered the bed where his wife was reposin
g, he not only terrified her on awaking, but nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body. The next night, also, he afflicted the astonished woman in the same manner, who, frightened at the danger, as the struggle of the third night drew near, took care to remain awake herself, and surround herself with watchful companions. Still he came; but being repulsed by the shouts of the watchers, and seeing that he was prevented from doing mischief, he departed. Thus driven off from his wife, he harassed, in a similar manner, his own brothers, who were dwelling in the same street; but they, following the cautious example of the woman, passed the nights in wakefulness with their companions, ready to meet and repel the expected danger. He appeared, notwithstanding, as if with the hope of surprising them should they be overcome with drowsiness; but being repelled by the carefulness and valour of the watchers, he rioted among the animals, both in-doors and out-of-doors, as their wildness and unwonted movements testified.
Soon the entire town was alarmed, and before long, the dead man began wandering during daylight as well, though he was visible to only a few people. The terrified populace sought the protection of the church. William of Newburgh’s informant then wrote for advice to the Bishop of Lincoln:
…but the bishop, being amazed at his account, held a searching investigation with his companions; and there were some who said that such things had often befallen in England, and cited frequent examples to show that tranquillity could not be restored to the people until the body of this most wretched man were dug up and burnt. This proceeding, however, appeared indecent and improper in the last degree to the reverend bishop, who shortly after addressed a letter of absolution, written with his own hand, to the archdeacon, in order that it might be demonstrated by inspection in what state the body of that man really was; and he commanded his tomb to be opened, and the letter having been laid upon his breast, to be again closed: so the sepulchre having been opened, the corpse was found as it had been placed there, and the charter of absolution having been deposited upon its breast, and the tomb once more closed, he was thenceforth never more seen to wander, nor permitted to inflict annoyance or terror upon any one.
A more dependable means for dispatching the roving dead was resorted to at Berwick, at the mouth of the river Tweed, where an “equally wonderful” event had occurred. A wealthy man died and was buried, but he soon “sallied forth (by the contrivance, as it is believed, of Satan) out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings.” This struck terror into the townsfolk, and soon the leaders convened to debate the best course of action. No one wanted to be beaten senseless by this “prodigy of the grave,” and the wiser among them concluded that, “were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death.”
Curiously enough, the monster, “while it was being borne about (as it is said) by Satan, had told certain persons whom it had by chance encountered, that as long as it remained unburnt the people should have no peace.” So ten young men dug up the horrible carcass, and after dismembering it, they burned it. Nevertheless, a “pestilence, which arose in consequence, carried off the greater portion of them: for never did it so furiously rage elsewhere, though it was at that time general throughout all the borders of England….”
Today, the ruins of Melrose Abbey loom in melancholy splendor over the hills of southern Scotland. In William of Newburgh’s day, however, the abbey was a thriving Cistercian center. One of its chaplains, lamentably, was overfond of women and the chase. His weakness landed him in some metaphysical trouble, at least in William’s eyes, for after the chaplain’s death, Satan used his corpse as his “own chosen vessel.” Thanks to the “meritorious resistance” of the monks, the vampire was barred from doing any great harm within the abbey itself, “whereupon he wandered beyond the walls, and hovered chiefly, with loud groans and horrible murmurs, round the bedchamber of his former mistress. She, after this had frequently occurred, becoming exceedingly terrified, revealed her fears or danger to one of the friars who visited her about the business of the monastery; demanding with tears that prayers more earnest than usual should be poured out to the Lord in her behalf as for one in agony.”
The friar enlisted three companions. “[F]urnished with arms and animated with courage,” they maintained a chilly, all-night vigil. When midnight passed with no monster, three of the quartet slipped off to the nearest warm house:
As soon as this man was left alone [William recounted], the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, and, turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds. These things I have explained in a simple narration, as I myself heard them recounted by religious men.
Finally, there was the story William heard from “an aged monk who…related this event as having occurred in his own presence.”
A man of “evil propensities” had fled the province of York and had found sanctuary at nearby Anantis Castle. There he married, only to become a jealous husband. Determined to catch his wife dallying with her young lover, he pretended to be away and hid on a beam overlooking his wife’s chamber. Enraged at the sight of his wife lying in her lover’s arms, he lost his balance and fell to the floor. Severely injured, the husband died before he had a chance to confess his numerous sins or to receive the sacrament.
That crucial omission should suffice to alert us to his fate. Although the dead husband received a Christian burial, “it did not much benefit him,” wrote William archly, “for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at nighttime, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses; while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster. But these precautions were of no avail; for the atmosphere, poisoned by the vagaries of this foul carcase, filled every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.”
The once-bustling town was quickly abandoned. At that point, two brothers who had lost their father to this plague undertook a desperate mission:
Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcase, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been
taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart.
Then came the miraculous conclusion: “When that infernal hell-hound had thus been destroyed, the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased, as if the air, which had been corrupted by the contagious motions of the dreadful corpse, were already purified by the fire which had consumed it.”
EVER DEEPER
Some 500 years would pass before Henry More learned about Johannes Cuntius and the Breslau shoemaker. Yet, the same pen could have written both these accounts. There is the same emphasis on sins (of omission or commission) determining the subsequent events; the same depiction of physical brutality in the revenant; the same hysterical reaction in the various towns; and, one letter of absolution aside, the same means of destroying the pests: cutting off the heads, ripping out the hearts, and burning the carcasses.
Another pen might have written the story of Arnold Paole and that graveyard full of Serbian vampires (see Chapter 4), and a third pen still might have described those hideous undead larvae, the nachzehrer (see Chapter 5). But are these really different conceptions? Or are they rather outcroppings, each shaped by the forces of history and geography, of an even deeper, underlying layer?
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