November 9, 2024 • 24 mins
(Host: Kristin)
Hundreds of years before Dante took us on a tour through the afterlife, there was Thurkill, an English peasant from the 13th century, who described his journey into hell and the edge of paradise. What was it like and what can we learn from his story? Come on a vision quest with Kristin, in this episode of Footnoting History!
For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hundreds of years before Dante took us on a tour through the afterlife,
there was Thurkill, an English peasant from the 13th century,
who described his journey into hell and the edge of paradise. What was it like
and what can we learn from his story? Find out today on Footnoting History!
(00:24):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin, keeping spooky season alive with a tale about a
journey to hell and back from medieval England. Spooky plus medieval England is pretty much my
dream history scenario and I am fond of using Thurkill to teach primary source reading in my
heresy and witchcraft course. I love Thurkill – I think his tale is incredible primary material to
(00:50):
read, both for its content and for its source. And in no small part because I love this guy’s name
and every time I hear it, I think Steve Urkell and that’s who I imagine going on this journey.
And you can too! There’s no rule saying you can’t. And if you don’t know who Steve Urkell is,
(01:11):
shame on you, pause right now and go look him up. I’ll wait. There you go. You’re welcome.
Thurkill was – allegedly, and I will explain later what I mean by that
allegedly – an English peasant who lived in the early 1200s in England. He was a farmer,
he was a good guy who had some incredible things happen to him which he later made
(01:35):
sure to tell as many people as possible. And I will give you the details of that story,
I promise, after a little bit of context for the work itself. Since I’m me and I always like
to think about how we know what we know (01:48):
I’m going to talk about the source material first.
Ok, so. Thurkill’s text is technically considered a religious document,
in that it’s about belief and someone’s reported experiences with the afterlife and it was used in
(02:09):
the religious instruction of others. Historians further categorize it with “monastic literature.”
Thurkill story is what is known as Visionary Literature, which means someone goes into a trance
or into a deep sleep and has either an out-of-body experience or a very vivid and deliberate dream in
(02:30):
which they learn … something. The something really depends. There is further a sub-genre
of this literature that Thurkill falls into and it’s based largely on Christian Harrowing of Hell
stories. What does that mean? Well, I’m so glad you asked because I, too, at one point, did not
know. In the Christian New Testament, there are a few verses that have been interpreted as being
(02:56):
about Jesus of Nazareth – after the crucifixion – going down into hell and showing the Devil what
was what – Jesus’ Excellent Adventure, if you will – and there were later stories that embellished on
this idea and others still that had different Christian characters – usually saints – going
off on similar quests to the afterlife. It’s not always hell and it’s not always saints. Sometimes
(03:21):
it was ordinary folks in this literature who went on these journeys and later talked about them.
Thurkill’s account survives in a few redactions, which is historian speak for manuscript versions.
Thurkill’s story takes place and was originally written down in the early 1200s, LONG before the
invention of the printing press in the European West. So, all medieval manuscripts were copied by
(03:48):
hand by someone who usually took some editorial decisions or maybe made some mistakes and so
they’re all a little different. No two medieval manuscripts are exactly the same – and the
manuscripts themselves are made up of different individual texts to form the book-like entity
(04:08):
that is a medieval manuscript. I am aware of 6 different redactions of Thurkill. The oldest,
longest redaction is held at the British Library and its shelfmark is MS Royal 13 D V in case
you’re looking for it, and it’s the one that I’m mostly going to be talking about today.
(04:30):
It’s about 5 folios, or manuscript leaves, which maybe doesn’t sound too long but for a manuscript,
it’s not bad – and it’s front and back, so it’s like 10 manuscript “pages.” It has three parts:
a redactor’s preface (meaning the person who literally wrote down
Thurkill’s story – which was not Thurkill himself, English people of this time and of
(04:52):
this class were generally illiterate). So, the redactor gives a sort of introduction;
the story itself of the journey is the second part; and then there’s a wrap up
section or kind of epilogue where Thurkill goes around telling people what happened to him.
The redactor’s preface is interesting. We don’t really know who the redactor was. There are some
(05:16):
theories that it was someone Ralph of Coggeshall who was the abbot of a monastery near to the town
where Thurkill lived, but historians definitely do not agree on that. The redactor – whoever they
were – seems pretty convinced that this vision is legit but admits that some people might be
skeptical. That could be a literary trope but that’s how it reads. The preface stresses the
(05:43):
purity and the simplicity of Thurkill – and it’s meant to persuade the audience that oh no,
this was definitely not made up, this guy was too simple to even THINK let alone nail such a plot.
He basically is like hey, I’m just trying to put down in a simple language the story told by simple
Thurkill, exactly as I heard it from Thurkill, and it’s like, say “simple” one more time,
(06:10):
buddy. And actually he does it again at the end of the text where he talks about how all the
people were so amazed by Thurkill’s eloquence at telling his story because he was always so
“rustic” and tongue-tied before. But, here’s the thing. This story is written in Latin – which
was the language of the Roman Church in medieval England. Thurkill did not speak Latin – so even
(06:34):
if these are his exact words, they are coming to you through multiple filters, especially
if you read it in a modern English translation. Thurkill likely knew a few basic Latin prayers,
but he probably spoke Middle English. Probably a monk in a fancy monastery writing this story
(06:55):
down spoke Anglo-Norman, which was a dialect from Normandy France that the upper classes of England
spoke after 1066 and definitely still in 1206. The Latin here is also pretty sophisticated,
it’s pretty good (which is not always the case for medieval ecclesiastics). But historians
(07:16):
believe this to be a literary trope – I’m not worthy to write this down but I’ll do my best,
poor humble Thurkill couldn’t make this stuff up, poor humble me, I’m just doing my job,
smoke and mirrors. Whatever your personal beliefs about what happened or didn’t,
Thurkill’s Vision was used as a religious instructional text – and so it has an agenda
(07:40):
to inspire and persuade, so you have to always keep that in the back of your head.
So, our story begins about 800 years ago, in 1206, in Essex England. There are a few other
named places in Thurkill’s Excellent Adventure and you can plug them into Google maps if you’re
(08:02):
feeling so inclined and would like to see where things are. I really like doing that, and I
highly recommend you try it. Thurkill’s village was called Stisted – it was (and is) small,
it’s about 12 miles west of Colchester, it’s now incorporated into Braintree and it’s pretty much
(08:24):
just a small parish. You can see a picture of the church of All Saints in Stisted on the Footnoting
History website, and parts of that church existed in Thurkill’s time and maybe that’s where he first
told his story. In the Vision, we also get a really specific time and day when the story
begins, which isn’t usually the case for these sorts of texts. So, on the evening of October 27,
(08:52):
1206, our man Thurkill was out, digging ditches to drain the water from his flooded fields
that he had just planted. A stranger walks up to him and asks for a place to stay for the
night. And this does sound like the beginning of a horror story. And I guess it kinda is,
(09:13):
but not in the way I was thinking when I first read it. No way would I invite some
strange guy home on a darkening October night. But this is maybe why I don’t get
invited to go on vision quests. And this is what Thurkill does because he’s such a nice guy.
The stranger revealed himself to be St. Julian the Hospitaller who was the patron saint of inns
and travelers, so (09:37):
appropriate. Thurkill was afraid at first and says the Lord’s Prayer for
protection and Julian says that he will take him away on a journey the following night.
This is definitely meant to be an instructive religious text, but dear budding historians,
you don’t have to view a primary source solely through the lens in which it was written.
(09:59):
I love the first part of the text because it tells us all kinds of things about English peasant life
that can be really hard to see in the existing source material. I think it’s fascinating that
Thurkill can bust out the Lord’s Prayer – he knew it and that bad boy was in Latin at
the time. It shows you that lower classes could recite a few basic prayers, even if they didn’t
(10:23):
know the word-for-word translation, they likely knew the gist. After the ditch-digging scene,
Thurkill goes home and he washes up and sleeps in a separate bed from his wife, and … guys,
I think that is just super interesting. First, it’s a really good indication that
medieval peasants were aware of cleanliness, and they did the best they could with hygiene – he
(10:44):
had soap and water and a basin. And it’s not presented as unusual that Thurkill would have
this stuff. Also I think the thing about having multiple beds in their house is interesting – the
text doesn’t say anything about kids, but he probably had some, so maybe he just poached the
bed from one of them or maybe they just had an extra. His house isn’t depicted as being weird
(11:09):
or odd or super nice or super sucky. He’s just an Ordinary Dude who doesn’t have a lot but is
very generous with those in need. He’s an Ordinary Guy and if THIS INCREDIBLE THING happened to him,
it could happen to you, too, dear reader, if only you too are so kind to the stranger.
(11:29):
So then St. Julian returns when he said he would, and he takes the soul
of Thurkill on a most excellent and terrifying adventure through the Christian afterlife.
Their first stop, which is described as being in the middle of the world, was at a big church that
had a baptismal font with fire coming out of it. Julian tells Thurkill the amazing light of the
(11:52):
fire was because of all the people on earth paying their tithes, which is a kind of religious tax
that is a percentage of your income. Tithes were just starting to become an enforced thing in
Thurkill’s time. There is a horrible smelling smoke coming from the sides of the church and
it attaches itself to the souls of people who tried to skip out on paying up. Julian also tells
(12:18):
Thurkill that the church is a first-stop for the recently departed – some get assigned a mansion
to go live in, reflective of how good they were in life … and some are sent to damnation … and some
are sent to purgatory. Thurkill describes some souls as white with young faces, some speckled
black and white and some black and deformed. Some medieval color-coding for you there. We are told
(12:44):
G-d built the church, called the Congregation of Souls, because the Virgin Mary asked him too. It
was a place where souls could go to be judged and not be immediately harassed by demons. Mary
does intercessory stuff like that a lot in medieval literature. It’s kind of her thing.
St. Julian then shows Thurkill a glimpse of purgatory, presided over by Santa
(13:08):
Clause – aka St. Nicholas. I guess that’s what he does in the off season. Souls who
weren’t good enough for heaven but not bad enough for hell have to go through a fire,
then a cold salt lake, then over a spikey bridge. This version of purgatory doesn’t
seem to take too long but maybe time also ticks differently on this other plane,
(13:33):
it’s not explained. The idea of purgatory is also in the process of formation and solidification in
Thurkill’s time. It will eventually become official doctrine in the later 1200s but
it’s definitely in process much earlier and it’s around Thurkill’s time in the later 12th/early
13th century that purgatory is being thought of more as a place than just a state of being.
(13:59):
After that, it’s back to the church where archangel Michael and Saints Peter and Paul
are judging souls. St. Domninus is also there – and it’s not entirely clear who St. Domninus is,
but that’s another story for another day. Michael, Peter, Paul, and Domninus
are inside the church and the devil is outside, waiting at a pit of flames. In the judging area,
(14:24):
there is of course a scale. The good guys have two weights and the devil (who is still outside)
has two and the souls come up to be judged and their deeds assessed. If the bad deeds weigh more,
the devil laughed and snatched up the soul and threw it into the fire pit. This part
always makes me think of Egyptian visions of the immediate afterlife.
(14:46):
There is then this odd interlude where a demon comes riding into the church on a black horse
that’s really the soul of a person who had been a nobleman who died without confession
or communion – so he missed out on the Last Rites. The demon says that he was a huge jerk
in life and was not good to his subordinates and pushed them into “extreme need” – and this
part is the kicker for me (15:12):
“which he had done particularly at the inspiration of his wife.”
And the demon was like, yo, I turned him into a horse because we’re allowed to change the forms
of the damned into whatever we want – and like I would have just taken him to hell,
but it’s almost Sunday, so I couldn’t. The demon then sees Thurkill and is like,
(15:33):
Oh I recognize you, I’ve seen you in the church at Stisted. The demon is then asked
in what form he entered the church and here comes some more misogyny for you:
“in the shape of a woman” but then he was hit with some holy water and he yelled and
ran out – and Thurkill was like, Oh I remember hearing this yelp, yeah, that all checks out.
(15:55):
The demon tells the saints and Thurkill that on Sunday, demons put on plays. And
St. Domninus says, oh yeah, we wanna see that, so he and Julian and Thurkill go
with the demon riding the horse-man down into hell to a very macabre broadway production.
This framing technique of the demon theater is great. Historians have been really interested
(16:20):
in this and not just for what it’s doing in this story but also just for theater history
in general. We have very little information about medieval theaters. We do not know what
they or the performances looked like, we don’t have a lot of performance scripts. We
know medieval people did these things but they did not keep very excellent records of them,
(16:44):
so any hint historians can find, we pounce on it. Why are the demons going to the theater on
Saturday night? Was that the night you went to the theater? But in any event,
it seems to answer the question about whether or not theaters existed in 12th/13th century England.
The hell theater itself as described in this text sounds kind of like an ancient theater,
(17:09):
with the stage in the center and the rows of seats around and up. And maybe that’s the input
of the redactor who would have been aware of classical theaters or maybe this is Thurkill,
because there were Roman theater remains in medieval England. The show is one of spectacular
punishments for people who led particularly sinful lives without repenting. They are what’s known
(17:33):
as “contrapasso” punishments, meaning the people are tortured in ways related to their misdeeds in
life – and this is a very Dante thing except this is way before Dante. There’s a proud man whose
clothes suddenly light on fire and he’s burned – not alive because he’s not alive, but he suffers,
and demons then tear him apart limb from limb with pitchforks and fiery iron hooks because of
(17:59):
course that’s what they use. The weekly Zoom meeting that could have been an email hadn’t
been invented yet. They then hammer sheets of metal to the proud man – Thurkill’s story
makes sure to note that a sheet was nailed to his genitals – and after the man has been lit on fire,
torn limb from limb and then nailed with metal sheets, they shove him back in his seat in the
(18:21):
audience and he has to sit there like that and suffer and watch the other performances.
And there are a few. There’s a priest who did a really crappy job of being a priest.
He has his throat cut, his tongue pulled out and “sliced at the root” – and then
it’s almost kind of an “etc he was torn from limb to limb yadda yadda yadda.”
(18:42):
There’s a knight who only cared about killing people and pillaging
and tournaments. He was pulled onto stage on a black horse that spewed putrid black smoke,
his saddle was studded with burning nails and all his armor set on fire. They made him charge on his
horse at full speed and all the weight from the armor and the spikes on the saddles and all the,
(19:03):
you know, fire tortured him. Then he gets knocked of his horse,
the requisite limb from limb tearing happens … and then they make him eat his limbs after
they were roasted in a fire (because I guess the armor didn’t cook them enough? I dunno.)
Then he got nailed with the metal sheets and had to go back and sit in the audience.
(19:25):
And there are more, too many to tell you in detail: there’s a lawyer, there are slanderers,
thieves and arsonists, merchants, and of course adulterers. It’s a veritable
sampler of medieval perceptions of sin and torment. And Thurkill is hiding out in the
audience and watching this very messed up performance and getting the crap scared out
(19:47):
of him and (hopefully) scaring the crap out of the medieval audience who is listening to this tale.
As all this is happening to Thurkill’s soul, Thurkill’s body is still in his house in Essex and
his family is really worried. They describe him as entirely motionless and almost not breathing
and he’s like this for two days. They finally get so worried that they try to force feed him
(20:12):
some water and thus inadvertently waterboard him into waking up. He says “benedicte” which
is Latin for blessed and which he had never said before and he complains that they interrupted him
because he was about to see some really nice visions of heaven. He tells his relatives and
friends and the village parish priest something of the vision but, at first, he apparently did a
(20:35):
bad job telling the story which was not what he was told to do: he was told to tell people what
he saw and spread the word but the way he does it is fuzzy and disjointed and so St. Julian comes
back on the night of October 31 and is like (20:49):
get it together, pal. So, on November 1 and 2 – All
Souls Day and All Saints Day – Thurkill does. He goes out and presents his vision – clearly – to
the community and everyone was amazed and moved. Thurkill confesses that he hadn’t been so good
(21:10):
about tithing and he was scared straight. And then he gives everyone in the church intel on
their dead relatives – he tells people where their souls are and if they’re in purgatory
how many prayers and masses are needed before they can be granted eternal peace. Which is, I guess,
good to know and also probably a little disturbing to people. Thurkill’s message
(21:35):
was so moving he was invited to go tell it at other churches and monasteries.
But of course between when Thurkill told his story and when it got written down there is
a bit of space. We have no idea how much time passed, but it was some. Does that mean some
of Thurkill’s original story got changed? He talked to a lot of people, apparently,
(22:00):
maybe they influenced how the tale was told and retold? If you are willing to accept that
Thurkill was a real person and he did have an experience like this – and not everyone
is convinced he was real – you still have to make room for the possibility that it probably did get
changed a bit from its original form. It’s not like Thurkill could read the Latin version and
(22:23):
check that the redactor got it right. He may not have even known himself who that redactor
was. And then there were other versions written down after that.
I personally like to think that Thurkill was a real person, even if his tale ended up a little
– or a lot – modified. There are some pretty local saints who make special guest appearances in this
(22:46):
story, such as St. Ositha who would only have resonated with people near the village of Stised.
And then there are the details of peasant life that gently nudge me toward Thurkill being a real
person. Especially that part about the flooding and the ditches. If you go to that area of Essex
today in October, it still floods like that. I can’t say whether St. Julian still wanders
(23:11):
around but if a stranger approaches you at dusk, dealer’s choice if you want to invite him home.
I probably wouldn’t and I’d probably miss out on the Excellent Adventure, but … I’m okay with that.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please be sure to visit
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(23:33):
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Remember that this and all of our epsiodes are available captioned on our website and
(23:54):
on our YouTube channel. And remember, the best stories are in the footnotes.
Hundreds of years before Dante took us on a tour through the afterlife,
there was Thurkill, an English peasant from the 13th century,
who described his journey into hell and the edge of paradise. What was it like
and what can we learn from his story? Find out today on Footnoting History!
(00:24):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin, keeping spooky season alive with a tale about a
journey to hell and back from medieval England. Spooky plus medieval England is pretty much my
dream history scenario and I am fond of using Thurkill to teach primary source reading in my
heresy and witchcraft course. I love Thurkill – I think his tale is incredible primary material to
(00:50):
read, both for its content and for its source. And in no small part because I love this guy’s name
and every time I hear it, I think Steve Urkell and that’s who I imagine going on this journey.
And you can too! There’s no rule saying you can’t. And if you don’t know who Steve Urkell is,
(01:11):
shame on you, pause right now and go look him up. I’ll wait. There you go. You’re welcome.
Thurkill was – allegedly, and I will explain later what I mean by that
allegedly – an English peasant who lived in the early 1200s in England. He was a farmer,
he was a good guy who had some incredible things happen to him which he later made
(01:35):
sure to tell as many people as possible. And I will give you the details of that story,
I promise, after a little bit of context for the work itself. Since I’m me and I always like
to think about how we know what we know (01:48):
I’m going to talk about the source material first.
Ok, so. Thurkill’s text is technically considered a religious document,
in that it’s about belief and someone’s reported experiences with the afterlife and it was used in
(02:09):
the religious instruction of others. Historians further categorize it with “monastic literature.”
Thurkill story is what is known as Visionary Literature, which means someone goes into a trance
or into a deep sleep and has either an out-of-body experience or a very vivid and deliberate dream in
(02:30):
which they learn … something. The something really depends. There is further a sub-genre
of this literature that Thurkill falls into and it’s based largely on Christian Harrowing of Hell
stories. What does that mean? Well, I’m so glad you asked because I, too, at one point, did not
know. In the Christian New Testament, there are a few verses that have been interpreted as being
(02:56):
about Jesus of Nazareth – after the crucifixion – going down into hell and showing the Devil what
was what – Jesus’ Excellent Adventure, if you will – and there were later stories that embellished on
this idea and others still that had different Christian characters – usually saints – going
off on similar quests to the afterlife. It’s not always hell and it’s not always saints. Sometimes
(03:21):
it was ordinary folks in this literature who went on these journeys and later talked about them.
Thurkill’s account survives in a few redactions, which is historian speak for manuscript versions.
Thurkill’s story takes place and was originally written down in the early 1200s, LONG before the
invention of the printing press in the European West. So, all medieval manuscripts were copied by
(03:48):
hand by someone who usually took some editorial decisions or maybe made some mistakes and so
they’re all a little different. No two medieval manuscripts are exactly the same – and the
manuscripts themselves are made up of different individual texts to form the book-like entity
(04:08):
that is a medieval manuscript. I am aware of 6 different redactions of Thurkill. The oldest,
longest redaction is held at the British Library and its shelfmark is MS Royal 13 D V in case
you’re looking for it, and it’s the one that I’m mostly going to be talking about today.
(04:30):
It’s about 5 folios, or manuscript leaves, which maybe doesn’t sound too long but for a manuscript,
it’s not bad – and it’s front and back, so it’s like 10 manuscript “pages.” It has three parts:
a redactor’s preface (meaning the person who literally wrote down
Thurkill’s story – which was not Thurkill himself, English people of this time and of
(04:52):
this class were generally illiterate). So, the redactor gives a sort of introduction;
the story itself of the journey is the second part; and then there’s a wrap up
section or kind of epilogue where Thurkill goes around telling people what happened to him.
The redactor’s preface is interesting. We don’t really know who the redactor was. There are some
(05:16):
theories that it was someone Ralph of Coggeshall who was the abbot of a monastery near to the town
where Thurkill lived, but historians definitely do not agree on that. The redactor – whoever they
were – seems pretty convinced that this vision is legit but admits that some people might be
skeptical. That could be a literary trope but that’s how it reads. The preface stresses the
(05:43):
purity and the simplicity of Thurkill – and it’s meant to persuade the audience that oh no,
this was definitely not made up, this guy was too simple to even THINK let alone nail such a plot.
He basically is like hey, I’m just trying to put down in a simple language the story told by simple
Thurkill, exactly as I heard it from Thurkill, and it’s like, say “simple” one more time,
(06:10):
buddy. And actually he does it again at the end of the text where he talks about how all the
people were so amazed by Thurkill’s eloquence at telling his story because he was always so
“rustic” and tongue-tied before. But, here’s the thing. This story is written in Latin – which
was the language of the Roman Church in medieval England. Thurkill did not speak Latin – so even
(06:34):
if these are his exact words, they are coming to you through multiple filters, especially
if you read it in a modern English translation. Thurkill likely knew a few basic Latin prayers,
but he probably spoke Middle English. Probably a monk in a fancy monastery writing this story
(06:55):
down spoke Anglo-Norman, which was a dialect from Normandy France that the upper classes of England
spoke after 1066 and definitely still in 1206. The Latin here is also pretty sophisticated,
it’s pretty good (which is not always the case for medieval ecclesiastics). But historians
(07:16):
believe this to be a literary trope – I’m not worthy to write this down but I’ll do my best,
poor humble Thurkill couldn’t make this stuff up, poor humble me, I’m just doing my job,
smoke and mirrors. Whatever your personal beliefs about what happened or didn’t,
Thurkill’s Vision was used as a religious instructional text – and so it has an agenda
(07:40):
to inspire and persuade, so you have to always keep that in the back of your head.
So, our story begins about 800 years ago, in 1206, in Essex England. There are a few other
named places in Thurkill’s Excellent Adventure and you can plug them into Google maps if you’re
(08:02):
feeling so inclined and would like to see where things are. I really like doing that, and I
highly recommend you try it. Thurkill’s village was called Stisted – it was (and is) small,
it’s about 12 miles west of Colchester, it’s now incorporated into Braintree and it’s pretty much
(08:24):
just a small parish. You can see a picture of the church of All Saints in Stisted on the Footnoting
History website, and parts of that church existed in Thurkill’s time and maybe that’s where he first
told his story. In the Vision, we also get a really specific time and day when the story
begins, which isn’t usually the case for these sorts of texts. So, on the evening of October 27,
(08:52):
1206, our man Thurkill was out, digging ditches to drain the water from his flooded fields
that he had just planted. A stranger walks up to him and asks for a place to stay for the
night. And this does sound like the beginning of a horror story. And I guess it kinda is,
(09:13):
but not in the way I was thinking when I first read it. No way would I invite some
strange guy home on a darkening October night. But this is maybe why I don’t get
invited to go on vision quests. And this is what Thurkill does because he’s such a nice guy.
The stranger revealed himself to be St. Julian the Hospitaller who was the patron saint of inns
and travelers, so (09:37):
appropriate. Thurkill was afraid at first and says the Lord’s Prayer for
protection and Julian says that he will take him away on a journey the following night.
This is definitely meant to be an instructive religious text, but dear budding historians,
you don’t have to view a primary source solely through the lens in which it was written.
(09:59):
I love the first part of the text because it tells us all kinds of things about English peasant life
that can be really hard to see in the existing source material. I think it’s fascinating that
Thurkill can bust out the Lord’s Prayer – he knew it and that bad boy was in Latin at
the time. It shows you that lower classes could recite a few basic prayers, even if they didn’t
(10:23):
know the word-for-word translation, they likely knew the gist. After the ditch-digging scene,
Thurkill goes home and he washes up and sleeps in a separate bed from his wife, and … guys,
I think that is just super interesting. First, it’s a really good indication that
medieval peasants were aware of cleanliness, and they did the best they could with hygiene – he
(10:44):
had soap and water and a basin. And it’s not presented as unusual that Thurkill would have
this stuff. Also I think the thing about having multiple beds in their house is interesting – the
text doesn’t say anything about kids, but he probably had some, so maybe he just poached the
bed from one of them or maybe they just had an extra. His house isn’t depicted as being weird
(11:09):
or odd or super nice or super sucky. He’s just an Ordinary Dude who doesn’t have a lot but is
very generous with those in need. He’s an Ordinary Guy and if THIS INCREDIBLE THING happened to him,
it could happen to you, too, dear reader, if only you too are so kind to the stranger.
(11:29):
So then St. Julian returns when he said he would, and he takes the soul
of Thurkill on a most excellent and terrifying adventure through the Christian afterlife.
Their first stop, which is described as being in the middle of the world, was at a big church that
had a baptismal font with fire coming out of it. Julian tells Thurkill the amazing light of the
(11:52):
fire was because of all the people on earth paying their tithes, which is a kind of religious tax
that is a percentage of your income. Tithes were just starting to become an enforced thing in
Thurkill’s time. There is a horrible smelling smoke coming from the sides of the church and
it attaches itself to the souls of people who tried to skip out on paying up. Julian also tells
(12:18):
Thurkill that the church is a first-stop for the recently departed – some get assigned a mansion
to go live in, reflective of how good they were in life … and some are sent to damnation … and some
are sent to purgatory. Thurkill describes some souls as white with young faces, some speckled
black and white and some black and deformed. Some medieval color-coding for you there. We are told
(12:44):
G-d built the church, called the Congregation of Souls, because the Virgin Mary asked him too. It
was a place where souls could go to be judged and not be immediately harassed by demons. Mary
does intercessory stuff like that a lot in medieval literature. It’s kind of her thing.
St. Julian then shows Thurkill a glimpse of purgatory, presided over by Santa
(13:08):
Clause – aka St. Nicholas. I guess that’s what he does in the off season. Souls who
weren’t good enough for heaven but not bad enough for hell have to go through a fire,
then a cold salt lake, then over a spikey bridge. This version of purgatory doesn’t
seem to take too long but maybe time also ticks differently on this other plane,
(13:33):
it’s not explained. The idea of purgatory is also in the process of formation and solidification in
Thurkill’s time. It will eventually become official doctrine in the later 1200s but
it’s definitely in process much earlier and it’s around Thurkill’s time in the later 12th/early
13th century that purgatory is being thought of more as a place than just a state of being.
(13:59):
After that, it’s back to the church where archangel Michael and Saints Peter and Paul
are judging souls. St. Domninus is also there – and it’s not entirely clear who St. Domninus is,
but that’s another story for another day. Michael, Peter, Paul, and Domninus
are inside the church and the devil is outside, waiting at a pit of flames. In the judging area,
(14:24):
there is of course a scale. The good guys have two weights and the devil (who is still outside)
has two and the souls come up to be judged and their deeds assessed. If the bad deeds weigh more,
the devil laughed and snatched up the soul and threw it into the fire pit. This part
always makes me think of Egyptian visions of the immediate afterlife.
(14:46):
There is then this odd interlude where a demon comes riding into the church on a black horse
that’s really the soul of a person who had been a nobleman who died without confession
or communion – so he missed out on the Last Rites. The demon says that he was a huge jerk
in life and was not good to his subordinates and pushed them into “extreme need” – and this
part is the kicker for me (15:12):
“which he had done particularly at the inspiration of his wife.”
And the demon was like, yo, I turned him into a horse because we’re allowed to change the forms
of the damned into whatever we want – and like I would have just taken him to hell,
but it’s almost Sunday, so I couldn’t. The demon then sees Thurkill and is like,
(15:33):
Oh I recognize you, I’ve seen you in the church at Stisted. The demon is then asked
in what form he entered the church and here comes some more misogyny for you:
“in the shape of a woman” but then he was hit with some holy water and he yelled and
ran out – and Thurkill was like, Oh I remember hearing this yelp, yeah, that all checks out.
(15:55):
The demon tells the saints and Thurkill that on Sunday, demons put on plays. And
St. Domninus says, oh yeah, we wanna see that, so he and Julian and Thurkill go
with the demon riding the horse-man down into hell to a very macabre broadway production.
This framing technique of the demon theater is great. Historians have been really interested
(16:20):
in this and not just for what it’s doing in this story but also just for theater history
in general. We have very little information about medieval theaters. We do not know what
they or the performances looked like, we don’t have a lot of performance scripts. We
know medieval people did these things but they did not keep very excellent records of them,
(16:44):
so any hint historians can find, we pounce on it. Why are the demons going to the theater on
Saturday night? Was that the night you went to the theater? But in any event,
it seems to answer the question about whether or not theaters existed in 12th/13th century England.
The hell theater itself as described in this text sounds kind of like an ancient theater,
(17:09):
with the stage in the center and the rows of seats around and up. And maybe that’s the input
of the redactor who would have been aware of classical theaters or maybe this is Thurkill,
because there were Roman theater remains in medieval England. The show is one of spectacular
punishments for people who led particularly sinful lives without repenting. They are what’s known
(17:33):
as “contrapasso” punishments, meaning the people are tortured in ways related to their misdeeds in
life – and this is a very Dante thing except this is way before Dante. There’s a proud man whose
clothes suddenly light on fire and he’s burned – not alive because he’s not alive, but he suffers,
and demons then tear him apart limb from limb with pitchforks and fiery iron hooks because of
(17:59):
course that’s what they use. The weekly Zoom meeting that could have been an email hadn’t
been invented yet. They then hammer sheets of metal to the proud man – Thurkill’s story
makes sure to note that a sheet was nailed to his genitals – and after the man has been lit on fire,
torn limb from limb and then nailed with metal sheets, they shove him back in his seat in the
(18:21):
audience and he has to sit there like that and suffer and watch the other performances.
And there are a few. There’s a priest who did a really crappy job of being a priest.
He has his throat cut, his tongue pulled out and “sliced at the root” – and then
it’s almost kind of an “etc he was torn from limb to limb yadda yadda yadda.”
(18:42):
There’s a knight who only cared about killing people and pillaging
and tournaments. He was pulled onto stage on a black horse that spewed putrid black smoke,
his saddle was studded with burning nails and all his armor set on fire. They made him charge on his
horse at full speed and all the weight from the armor and the spikes on the saddles and all the,
(19:03):
you know, fire tortured him. Then he gets knocked of his horse,
the requisite limb from limb tearing happens … and then they make him eat his limbs after
they were roasted in a fire (because I guess the armor didn’t cook them enough? I dunno.)
Then he got nailed with the metal sheets and had to go back and sit in the audience.
(19:25):
And there are more, too many to tell you in detail: there’s a lawyer, there are slanderers,
thieves and arsonists, merchants, and of course adulterers. It’s a veritable
sampler of medieval perceptions of sin and torment. And Thurkill is hiding out in the
audience and watching this very messed up performance and getting the crap scared out
(19:47):
of him and (hopefully) scaring the crap out of the medieval audience who is listening to this tale.
As all this is happening to Thurkill’s soul, Thurkill’s body is still in his house in Essex and
his family is really worried. They describe him as entirely motionless and almost not breathing
and he’s like this for two days. They finally get so worried that they try to force feed him
(20:12):
some water and thus inadvertently waterboard him into waking up. He says “benedicte” which
is Latin for blessed and which he had never said before and he complains that they interrupted him
because he was about to see some really nice visions of heaven. He tells his relatives and
friends and the village parish priest something of the vision but, at first, he apparently did a
(20:35):
bad job telling the story which was not what he was told to do: he was told to tell people what
he saw and spread the word but the way he does it is fuzzy and disjointed and so St. Julian comes
back on the night of October 31 and is like (20:49):
get it together, pal. So, on November 1 and 2 – All
Souls Day and All Saints Day – Thurkill does. He goes out and presents his vision – clearly – to
the community and everyone was amazed and moved. Thurkill confesses that he hadn’t been so good
(21:10):
about tithing and he was scared straight. And then he gives everyone in the church intel on
their dead relatives – he tells people where their souls are and if they’re in purgatory
how many prayers and masses are needed before they can be granted eternal peace. Which is, I guess,
good to know and also probably a little disturbing to people. Thurkill’s message
(21:35):
was so moving he was invited to go tell it at other churches and monasteries.
But of course between when Thurkill told his story and when it got written down there is
a bit of space. We have no idea how much time passed, but it was some. Does that mean some
of Thurkill’s original story got changed? He talked to a lot of people, apparently,
(22:00):
maybe they influenced how the tale was told and retold? If you are willing to accept that
Thurkill was a real person and he did have an experience like this – and not everyone
is convinced he was real – you still have to make room for the possibility that it probably did get
changed a bit from its original form. It’s not like Thurkill could read the Latin version and
(22:23):
check that the redactor got it right. He may not have even known himself who that redactor
was. And then there were other versions written down after that.
I personally like to think that Thurkill was a real person, even if his tale ended up a little
– or a lot – modified. There are some pretty local saints who make special guest appearances in this
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story, such as St. Ositha who would only have resonated with people near the village of Stised.
And then there are the details of peasant life that gently nudge me toward Thurkill being a real
person. Especially that part about the flooding and the ditches. If you go to that area of Essex
today in October, it still floods like that. I can’t say whether St. Julian still wanders
(23:11):
around but if a stranger approaches you at dusk, dealer’s choice if you want to invite him home.
I probably wouldn’t and I’d probably miss out on the Excellent Adventure, but … I’m okay with that.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please be sure to visit
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