On the western edge of the low-lying hills of Northern Yorkshire, England lies the deserted medieval village (DMV) of Wharram Percy. While the earthworks of the village have been known about for many years, it wasn’t until between 1950 and 1990 that teams of archaeologists, historians, and even botanists began researching the site after it was singled out for study.
A more recent study at Wharram Percy, conducted by researchers from Historic England and Southampton University, sheds a great deal of light on written accounts, dating back to the 11th-century, of “reverents,” – visible ghosts or animated corpses that are believed to have revived from death to haunt the living.
Belief in revenants was widespread in Medieval northern and western Europe. Revenants were usually not very nice, spreading disease and physically assaulting the living. Most of the stories have a common thread. Reverents were typically wrongdoers in their lifetime, often described as spreading disease, or were wicked, vain, or unbelievers.
In Medieval texts, the revenant is a fleshed corpse rather than a skeleton. It is during that limited period between death and the decay of the flesh that the body poses a threat, and according to the medieval texts, the only way to stop a reverent from bothering or harming the living was to dismember and burn the offending bones in a fire.
The bones found at Wharram Percy
The research team studied bones excavated from a burial pit at Wharram Percy between 1963 and 1964. The bones appeared to have been chopped, broken, and burned post-mortem, in the way the old texts described, and the likely conclusion reached was that the mutilations were consistent with the community attempting to “lay revenant corpses,” according to the study.
A total of 137 bones found in a pit outside the church graveyard were studied belonging to 10 different people between the ages of 2 and 50. All the bodies had been dismembered and decapitated between the 11th and 14th centuries. The researchers looked at two possible scenarios for the mutilated bodies, reverent-corpse evidence, and survival cannibalism.
But as the authors explain in the study, “The patterning in knife-marks appears more consistent with decapitation and dismemberment, as documented as a means of dealing with cases of reanimated corpses, but the balanced age and sex ratio conflicts with textual accounts of revenants.” They conclude, though, that this is more consistent with attempts to lay revenant corpses than with starvation cannibalism.
The researchers were also able to lay to rest a theory that the remains belonged to foreigners after a strontium isotopic analysis of the teeth revealed the dead grew up near to where they were buried. As for the age of the bones, radiocarbon dating of the bones was used.
Conclusions about medieval superstitions and practices
The thing to remember after reading about this discovery is this – Medieval times were far different than what they are today. And in the case of the bones at Wharram Percy, we have to look at the history, economic status and overall beliefs of the population at that time.
During the medieval period, villagers had to deal with the plague, which was rampant, an oppressive feudal system and a church that could be heavy-handed at times. Illiteracy and fear of the unknown fueled superstitious beliefs and the church actually didn’t help in allaying people’s fears.
With the help of the Church, Satan became real and was able to enter a person’s body, and hence, make the dead arise after death to become the walking dead, a reverent. The belief in superstitions was so potent at that time that even Parish priests were often seen as tolerating superstition or even practicing it themselves.
And remember this, many of the superstitions we still believe in or at least practice today, like avoiding a black cat, or not walking under a ladder, were common practices during the medieval ages, and have their origin in Christian beliefs.
