Folklore - The Yorkshire Revenant.

A Revenant stalks the land…

A revenant is a very particular kind of undead and can be imagined as a kind of medieval zombie. They are usually associated with remote, out-of-the-way villages, where they would terrorise the local population. The name revenant comes from the Old French word revenant, meaning “returning.”

A revenant would often possess a set of characteristic features, which included corporeal (physical) bodies - very often bloated or rotting. They were harbingers of plague; like modern zombies, revenants were thought to spread disease. They were believed to have been sinners during their lives or to possess unshriven souls. In most cases, it was thought that the only way to lay these fiends to rest was to exhume the body and either burn or behead it.

William of Newburgh was a 12th-century historian and chronicler, and one of our best sources for medieval revenant stories. He came from Bridlington in Yorkshire, in England’s northeast.

William told the story of a “man of evil conduct” who fled York to avoid justice. He later married, but being a distrustful fellow, he concealed himself in the rafters of his home, hoping to catch his wife in the act of infidelity. However, he accidentally fell from his perch and died of his injuries a few days later. William goes on to say:

A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.

It seems this ghastly being was held responsible for the deaths of some local people, and so a group of stout hearted young men:

Snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames...

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