Prior to George A. Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, the word ‘zombie’ was associated with the belief systems of West African communities in the Caribbean. But, according to the chronicles written by medieval monks, British history has seen its share of the walking dead.
Take William of Newburgh, for example. His Historia Rerum Anglicarum (The History of the Affairs of England), written about 1198, is mostly concerned with the events of the reigns of kings Stephen, Henry II and Richard I. Wars, rebellions, epidemics – the usual jolly carnival of the Middle Ages. Then, for no apparent reason, William breaks off from his conventional history to tell his readers a few stories about people who have returned from the grave.
One cadaver from Buckinghamshire, we are told, clearly had not left all the desires of the flesh behind: 'having entered the bed where his wife was reposing, he … nearly crushed her by the insupportable weight of his body.' A man from York fled to another castle, where he died – only to then straying about in a dangerous fashion: 'all men made fast their doors…for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.' The shambling, disease-bearing corpse was finally despatched when its heart was torn out, and every bit of flesh and bone burned to cinders.
After giving two Scottish cases – in Melrose and Berwick-upon-Tweed – the venerable William tells us that he knew of 'frequent examples', but to describe them all would be 'beyond measure laborious and troublesome.'
We find other instances in the literature of the period. In The Life and Miracles of Saint Modwenna (1118 to 1150) Geoffrey, the abbot of Burton-on-Trent, describes two Derbyshire corpses walking to their native village with their coffins on their backs. They, too, spread disease and attack people before being hacked apart and burned. Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium (Courtier’s Trifles written before 1190), gives us a similar tale from Hereford, while the fourteenth-century Chronicle of Lanercost tells of a 'hideous, gross and tangible' corpse which attacked people around Paisley, and even murdered one man. Finally, in 1400 an anonymous monk of Byland Abbey in Yorkshire described several local zombiform entities, one of which, a former clergyman, 'struck out one eye of his former mistress.'
Are any of these tales true? Their monkish authors swore they were, so who are we to argue?
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