Ahead of this evening’s “Drink” with historian Peter Jones on Self-Help from the Middle Ages, we republish Mary Ruskin‘s marvellous essay on the 12th-century scholar Gervase of Tilbury, who travelled Europe writing a collection of weird and wondrous tales for the amusement of an Emperor

Taking the train from London to Southend, on a rare-surviving branch line through the industrialised lower reaches of the Thames, it might be hard to believe that one is passing the birth place of one of the most interesting and well-travelled writers of the High Middle Ages (roughly AD 1000 to 1300). Present-day Tilbury is dominated by the Ford factory, the QE2 Bridge and, in the oddest of juxtapositions, a brand-new terminal for luxury liners.

It was in this most unlikely of places, on the marshy shores of the tidal Thames, some 25 miles from the City of London, that Gervase of Tilbury, diplomat, lawyer, historian and folklorist, was born in around 1150. His Essex-boy credentials were, however, slight: he seems to have spent very little time in his home-town and soon found his way to the court of Henry II.

Later, he studied, and then taught, canon law at the University of Bologna. His biography is tantalisingly scant, but he crops up variously at Rheims, Arles (where he married and joined the upper echelons of Provençal society) and Sicily. It’s possible he ended his days in Essex, in a Premonstratensian Monastery.

Around the year 1211, Gervase wrote the masterpiece that would ensure his fame throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the wonderfully named Otia Imperialia, a three-book compendium of geography, history, Biblical studies and marvels, intended to while away the leisure hours of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV, who was then his employer. The title, which could be translated as The Emperor’s Spare Time or Imperial Idling, paints an enticing picture of hours of story-telling and merriment at the Emperor’s sumptuous travelling court.

The Otia Imperialia can be compared with the arguably more famous Courtiers’ Trifles, written for the diversion of Henry II and his court by a similarly prolific raconteur, Walter Map. Both Walter and Gervase illustrate the importance of storytelling as a pastime for the upper classes of the High Middle Ages.

It might seem surprising that an Emperor who found time to go crusading with Richard Coeur-de-Lion, to be excommunicated by Pope Innocent III, to fight his way through Italy to Sicily and to be an ally of the ill-fated King John, would have had much leisure time, but was he perhaps a closet idler? It’s our good fortune that he found such a splendid writer as Gervase of Tilbury to entertain him.

Book Three of the Otia is a collection of stories of mirabilia (wonders), of strange beings and strange things. Many are set in the British Isles, others are located in the Rhineland, Italy or France. The Middle Ages had inherited from antiquity a taste for such stories, but – for an orthodox Catholic such as Gervase – such wonders were strictly part of God’s rational creation; it’s only our ignorance that causes the wonder.

There are 130 stories in the standard edition of Book Three, ranging widely in subject. Some seem to take their cue from Isidore of Seville’s encyclopaedic approach and describe such “marvels” of nature as magnets, balsam, vermillion and silk worms. Some are overtly Biblical, if somewhat Apocryphal: there are, for example, discussions of the Veronica (the veil said to bear the face of Jesus), the tomb of Moses and the cross of the Good Thief. Others seem akin to Herodotus’s version of ethnography, as when Gervase tells us about men with no heads, women with the teeth of wild boars, and men with eight feet.

For me, however, the most interesting are the stories involving supernatural beings – pixies, fairies, lamias, mermaids and werewolves. Gervase is one of the most important sources for a little-known species of sprite called the Portuni. Old, wrinkled and tiny, the Portuni are fairy “home helps” who work all night in domestic drudgery for exhausted peasants. They’re forbidden by nature from doing harm, but may – and do – cause mischief: one of their favourite nocturnal tricks is to lead horses into marshy ground and run off chuckling. They must surely be distant ancestors of Puck.

Gervase also tells us about the Grant, a peculiarly English sprite, shaped like a colt, which prances on its hind legs and has eyes that spark with fire. Despite its terrifying appearance, the Grant is considered an obliging spirit as it’s a warning of a fire – its appearance allowing the townsfolk to take the necessary precautions.

The Otia also contains longer narratives for the edification and entertainment of Otto. One of my favourites is set in the Peak District, in a cave called the Devil’s Arse. The cave was justly famous there for the blasts of wind it almost constantly emitted (presumably the Devil’s farts). One winter’s day an idle swineherd lost sight of a valuable pregnant sow. Having searched all over the peaks for her, he decided she must’ve wandered into the Devil’s Arse.

By chance, no wind was blowing from it so the swineherd entered the cavern without difficulty. Having crawled through the dark cave for some time, it suddenly became light and he found himself in a bright and sunny country at harvest time. He found the sow surrounded by a litter of healthy piglets, and somehow managed to transport all the animals back out to the Peaks, where it was, crucially, still winter.

This is one of the more famous of the Medieval Antipodean stories – tales which speculate about the existence of a land on the other side of the world. Others from the period are more elaborate, such as the Green Children of Woolpit, in which a green-skinned boy and girl from an unknown land suddenly appear in a Suffolk village, with not wholly happy results.

Some of the stories have a more obvious moral intention. For example, Gervase tells us about a glade in a Gloucestershire forest where weary huntsmen may cry, “I am thirsty!” and a merry-faced, richly attired butler will come forth to offer him a drink from a golden bejewelled horn. The drink is a magical nectar of such potency that it immediately banishes all thirst and tiredness. Many huntsmen experience this supernatural largesse before, one day, a greedy trickster steals the horn and offers it to his master, the Earl of Gloucester, who promptly has him executed.

Similarly moral is Gervase’s story about a law-court of swans in his native Essex. In Ongar, Richard de Lucie, the Lord of the Manor, witnesses a group of swans apparently giving evidence against an adulterous female swan. The evidence is compelling and the guilty pen is stripped of her feathers and left to die. There are many other marvels of the animal kingdom recorded in the Otia: one of the best is a description of squirrels crossing water by using leaves as rafts and their tails as sails.

Other stories seem to lack a moral, but are simply entertaining. At Wandlebury, just south of Cambridge, was a magic clearing in a wood in which a spectral knight, upon hearing the words “Let knight come against knight!”, would joust with all-comers. A certain Osbert Fitzhugh, lodging at a nearby castle, heard the story and decided to put it to the test.

At the prompt, the spectral knight duly appeared. A fight ensued in which Osbert unseated his opponent and took his horse, but received a terrible wound in the thigh from his opponent’s lance. The stolen horse, entirely black, was too spirited to be stabled and vanished back to the wood. Osbert’s injury, however, remained as proof of the tale, an incurable wound opening up each year on the anniversary of the magical tourney.

And what are we to make of the story of Saint Simeon’s horn? A knight, out hunting in the forests of Carlisle, loses sight of his companions and is suddenly overcome by a terrible storm. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, he glimpses a terrifying fire-breathing hellhound. Suddenly, out of the storm, a second knight appears saying, “Fear not! I am Saint Simeon, on whom you called for protection. Take my horn: it will hereafter protect you and your family from any storm.” The knight takes the horn and Saint Simeon speeds off in pursuit of the dog. In vain. The dog has already entered the house of a priest and burned it down; his entire (illegitimate) family perishes.

We’ve only touched the surface of this amazing piece of literature, but the good news is that there exists an excellent English translation, with facing Latin text, of the entire work. Edited and translated by SE Banks and JW Binns, it’s called Gervase of Tilbury: Otia Imperialia, Recreation for an Emperor (Oxford University Press). Enough stories, surely, to while away many a dreary commute from London to Southend.

Mary Ruskin is a teacher and translator of Classical, Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin.

This article appears in Idler #99.

A Drink with the Idler

Our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this evening is medieval historian Peter Jones, author of our Book of the Week, Self-Help from the Middle Ages.

Peter will be chatting to Tom Hodgkinson about medieval approaches to the Seven Deadly Sins and how these ideas can teach us about living well today.

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