“It is autumnal isn’t it, you can feel the death and decay,” said the clearly delighted historian Michael Carter as he prepared to embark on a new venture at some of England’s most spectacular and atmospheric ruins.
English Heritage will this weekend begin a new series of ghost story tours at five of its northern monasteries.
A collaboration between Carter, a senior historian at English Heritage, and Dale Townshend, professor of gothic literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, the tours will use ghost stories to shine light on places that have deeper, more fascinating histories than visitors sometimes realise.
It is a joke but it is also true, said Carter, that “it is about using the dead to keep medieval monasteries alive”.
The stories include accounts of saintly visions, the walking dead, divine retribution and demonic visitations.
Carter said they were steering clear of the “ethereal grey lady” or “headless horsemen” stories that many heritage sites have in their arsenal; stories that were “modern fabulations”, he said.
Instead they were using historical sources “to get to the heart of the purpose of the monasteries”.
He hopes it will be academically rigorous but entertaining and bring in new audiences who may soon find themselves sharing Carter’s abundant passion for medieval monasteries.
The tours will be at the Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, the first Cistercian abbey in the north of England, Furness Abbey in Barrow, Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire, Lanercost Priory in north Cumbria, and Byland Abbey in the North York Moors, once one of the greatest abbeys in England.
Byland is the place where a monk wrote one of the most important collections of ghost stories to survive from medieval Europe. They were collected and published in their original Latin by the horror writer MR James in 1922.
They are generally stories of what awful things happen if you die without confessing sins or righting a wrong, and are often about “affirming the role of the monasteries”, said Carter.
Often the terrors can be resolved but not always. One story concerns a local priest buried at Byland but whose body wanders at night. On one wandering he gouges out the eye of a woman who was his concubine.
It results in his body being dug from the grave and conveyed to the Gormire, a lake in the North York Moors. When his body was about to be thrown in the water “the oxen drawing the wagon panicked and almost drowned in fear”, the story says.
In the story, the priest is “beyond redemption”, said Carter. “He is going to hell. He has lived an evil life, he’s got a concubine and he has obviously died unrepentant. Even in death he is capable of causing harm. All the church can do in these instances is dispose of the body.”
There are no extant ghost stories linked to places such as Furness Abbey but some visitors in the late 18th and 19th centuries were inspired to write their own, including Ann Radcliffe, the greatest Gothic romancer of her day, who peopled the abbey with a train of ghostly friars.
Carter said that in the middle ages “the monasteries were considered to be a glimpse of heaven here on earth. Passing through the gatehouse, you entered what would have been considered the heavenly Jerusalem.
“Life as a monk is thought to provide the opportunity to live the angelic life here on Earth.”
Today the monasteries are ruins because of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, which will also be explored in the tours.
Carter said there were still many things to be learned about the period, particularly around the dissolution.
There has been a wealth of new historical and fictional work but, said Carter: “It still isn’t fully explained why somewhere like Rievaulx Abbey can go from, in 1535, receiving requests from people for the singing of masses for the souls to being a pile of ruins a few years later.
“I don’t have a full explanation for it although people have put forward various theses. Monasteries have always been criticised from the time of St Benedict onwards and there was nothing about monastic life in the 1530s that was any worse than at any other point in the middle ages. In some cases their observances had been better then than they ever had been.”
The first tour is at Roche Abbey on 1 October. They are free and do not need to be pre-booked, but entrance fees for the sites apply.
