Matt, I believe you have another little ghost story for us that if our listeners are at home, make yourselves cozy, settle around a fire if you have one, and listen to Matt's next installation.

Yes, so this is one from those violent chronicles and it relates to a man named Snowball. It is said that a certain tailor of the name of Snowball was returning on horseback one night from gilling to his home in ample forth, and on the way he heard, as it were, the sound of ducks washing themselves in the back. And soon after, he saw, as it were, a raven that flew around his face and came down to earth and struck the ground with its wings as though it were on the point of death. Then it flew off with a great screeching for about the space of a stone's throat. Then again, he mounted his horse, and very soon, the same raven, met him and flew at him and struck him on the side, and threw the tailor to the ground from the horse upon which he was riding. And again, it flew off with a horrible screaming, as it were, the space of the flight of an arrow. And the third time, it appeared to the tailor in the likeness of a dog with a chain on its neck. And when he saw it, the tailor, strong in the faith, thought within himself what would become of me. I will have jaw him in the name of the Trinity and by the virtue of the blood of Christ, that he speak with me and tell me his name and the cause of his punishment and the remedy that belongs to it. And he did so, and the spirit, panting terribly and groaning, said, thus and thus did I, and for thus doing, I have been excommunicated. Go therefore to a certain priest and ask him to absolve me, and it behoves me to have the full number of nine times twenty masses celebrated for me. Here that you shall come back to me on a certain night alone, or otherwise, your flesh shall rot and your skin shall dry up and fall off from you utterly. The tailor conjured the ghost to go to Hodgebeck and to await his return, and the ghost said no, no, and screamed, and the

tailor said, go then to Bile and Bank, where at

he was glad.

The man of whom we speak was ill for some days, but then got well and went to York to the priest who had been mentioned, who had excommunicated the dead man and asked him for absolution. Then the tailor went to all the orders of the friars of York, and he had almost all the required masses celebrated during two or three days, and coming home, he buried the absolution in the grave as he had been ordered. And when all these things had been duly carried out, he came to the appointed place and made a great circle with a cross, and he waited for the coming of the ghost. The spirit came at length in the form of a she-goat and went thrice round the circle, saying ah, ah, ah, and when he conjured the she-goat, she fell prone upon the ground and rose up again in the likeness of a man of great stature, horrible and thin, and like one of the dead kings and pictures. And when he asked whether the tailor's labour had been of service to him, he answered, yes, praise be God. No therefore that on Monday next, I shall pass into everlasting joy with thirty other spirits. And then the tailor asked the ghost of his own condition and received answer. You are keeping wrongfully the cap and coat of one who was your friend and companion in the wars beyond the seas, give satisfaction to him, or you will pay dearly for it. And as they went their different ways, the ghost that had been aided by him advised him to keep all his best writings in his head until he went to sleep. And keep your eyes on the ground and look not on a wood fire for this night at least. And when he came home, he was

seriously ill for several days. Some of that story

is obviously

missing chunks

and I think that's where you get this being more of an oral tradition that's been noted down, kind of in a format that will allow people to expand on that as they tell the story a little bit. But there's also lots of really interesting elements in there about what medieval people thought of ghosts. A ghost is a spirit that has done something in life. Maybe it's not the most serious thing in the world, you know, they've stolen some silver spoons that they haven't returned. The ghost tells the guy, it tells the tailor snowball that his biggest sin at the moment is keeping a cap and a coat that he's borrowed from someone who's since moved away and now he doesn't know where the guy is, you know, some of these sins aren't huge. And so, unless it's important that you purge your soul of all of these things before you die. And so the lesson to the living would be you have to make sure that you are living a pure life because even the smallest thing can follow you beyond the grave and it can lead to your spirit being forced to wander around the woods until you find someone who's willing to help you and that could take who knows how long and you're excluded from heaven while all of this is going

on. For a two-part question, as I so often do, number one, why is he called snowball?

Well, in the manuscript, it says a tailor named and then there's a space and snowball, so we don't know snowball is a surname or a nickname, but there's clearly a blank. And I wonder whether I think lots of these ghost stories are probably meant to be played to an audience. So you think about a stand-up comedian today, you know, they will go to a town and they will talk about the next town along the rivals in derogatory terms. They will make it kind of local and feel a bit more true and a bit more organic. So he talks about towns of ample forth and all places like that. Those could easily change to be a town that people know that's far enough away, that it's slightly distant, but actually they know about it. Perhaps they work in the name of a tailor from a local town or village that they might know. So the blank space could be anything and then somehow snowball gets put in there. Maybe that's just a nickname that's used for it. We get the ghost saying, you know, I did such and such in the story. These were my sins, such and such. You could insert something in there, you know, what would the local audience think was maybe a mediocre sin or what might they think was really bad or what could be something that maybe there's a local story that someone did something that you could work into that, you know, the local story of the guy who stole a load of money from the Abbey. Maybe that could have been his sin. Who knows? And I think sometimes where they say such and such or they leave gaps, it's where people can work their own versions of the story. I love that. And I love the idea that they're invoked in the story. And I think sometimes where they say such and such or they leave gaps, it's it's it's where people can work their own versions of the

story. I love that. And I love the idea that they're invoking the areas and that you can almost travel with them. There's a sense that the areas haunt the story just as much as as the ghost does or just as much as the Revenant does. Speaking of which, we've touched upon what medieval ghosts were looked like, why they were there, what they wanted, the same with Revenant's zombies, as we might refer to them today. Tell me a little bit more

about medieval werewolves. So the medieval world is littered with stories of werewolves too, and they're actually quite often not horrendously terrifying animals. I'm going to be cautious about how I say this in front of Anthony, I guess, but Ireland is full of werewolf stories. The

Irish are notorious werewolves. Oh yeah, no, you don't need to be cautious. I've never heard one, but I believe you.

There are, according to medieval stories, there are families of genetic werewolves in Ireland who hand this curse down through the generations. There are some stories in which the werewolves pass the curse onto other people, so they're looking to divest their family of this curse, so they'll look for a way to pass it onto other people. And that's maybe where you get the idea that if you're bitten by a werewolf, you become one, because they're looking to shift that curse onto somebody else. You quite often get werewolves that can talk to people, so they'll engage with people. We get some accounts from from monks who say, I met quite a nice werewolf. He was quite a decent guy. Now we had a good chat, you know, and he was just worried about providing for his wife and his children. You know, nothing too unusual about him. He was really good. It's actually quite rare that you get a werewolf story in which the wolf is simply a mindless animal that wants to attack people. There's a really good story in a book called The Lays of Marie de France. So this is written in the 12th century by a French female poet and writer, and she writes the story of Biscla vie the werewolf. So she says in in Brittany, there was a knight who was incredibly handsome. I guess he has to be. He's very well respected. He's he's in with the king and all of that kind of thing. He's married to a beautiful noble woman. Of course he is. But each month he vanishes for three days and nobody knows where he goes or what he does in these three days that he's missing. And one day eventually his wife kind of broaches the subject and she sort of says, you know, I need to know what's going on. Are you having an affair or something like that? And he kind of resists telling her what it really is. And he says, you know, if you know what it is, you won't want to be with me anymore. And she was like, no, it can't be that bad. And so eventually says for three days every month during the full moon, I become a werewolf and I go and hunt in the forest. To have to take off my human clothes, I leave them under a boulder next to this church on the way into the forest. I'm a wolf for three days. I hunt animals in the forest and then I come back and I can put my human clothes back on. And it's all restored. But it's the act of putting on his human clothes again that turns him back into the night. And his wife then is utterly shocked, does not want to be married to a werewolf. And so she contacts this local night, who she knows has a bit of a crush on her. And she says, you know, I need my husband dealing with and if you deal with my husband, I'll marry you. And she gets this night to follow her husband when he wanders off to this church. When he folds up his clothes, wanders off into the woods. And then this other night kind of steals his clothes so that when he comes back three days later, these clothes aren't there and he can't turn back in to a human life. And so this man just disappears for a long time. Eventually his wife marries this other night and they begin their life together. And a year or so later, the king is hunting in the woods when his hounds chase down a wolf. And when it's cornered, it runs over to the king and begs the king for mercy. So it speaks to the king. The king is utterly amazed, thinks this is incredible and adopts the wolf as a kind of pet, takes it back to his castle. It lives in his household that sleeps among his household men. There isn't a danger to anybody. Then one day the king has a feast at which the night who is now married to Bisclevay's wife turns up and the wolf attacks him several times. And everyone's amazed because this wolf has never behaved this way before. And eventually, you know, this night is happy to leave and make himself scarce. But then the king returns to the forest to hunt again. And what is in the area, Bisclevay's wife kind of comes to do homage to the king, you know, he puts on a best dress and shows up to do homage to the king. And now the wolf attacks her and it bites off her nose. And biting off people knows he's quite a common medieval form of punishment for something. And so an advisor points out that this wolf has only ever attacked this woman and her current husband. And this woman is the wife of a knight who had disappeared. And so this advisor says to the king, there must be something about this couple because he doesn't behave this way to anyone else. And so the king eventually has this woman tortured until she admits everything. She admits ordering this knight to go and steal the clothes. So the king sends her away to fetch Bisclevay's clothes and bring them back to him. They locked the wolf in a room with Bisclevay's clothes, leave him for a period of a few hours. And when they open the door, Bisclevay

walks out. And so

everybody is amazed. The woman and her new husband are both sent off into exile and Bisclevay is kind of restored to his life as a noble knight. But there you see, you know, this guy is trapped in the form of a wolf, but it's like a pet around court. He's not a threat to anybody except for the people who've caused him to be trapped like that. And he will he will attack them when he sees them. And it just takes someone to make that link between the fact that the only people he's mean to,

and this married couple who the former husband has disappeared.