SOMETIME AFTER SUNDOWN on a cold night in 1196, in the graveyard of Melrose Abbey, the corpse of a most impious priest crawled from his tomb. He attacked the monks of the monastery but was driven off. He stumbled to the home of his former mistress, where he hovered outside her bedchamber groaning and murmuring horribly, until the terrified woman pleaded to one of the friars for help.

The friar recruited a colleague and two strong young men. They gathered weapons and stood vigil at the tomb. Past midnight it grew colder, and the friar's companions left him to seek shelter in a nearby house. The dead priest chose his moment, rose from the grave and attacked the friar. The friar struck the corpse with an axe, driving him back into his tomb. The friar's friends, perhaps also choosing their moment, ran to his side. At dawn they dug up the corpse, carried it beyond the monastery walls, burnt it and scattered the ashes. They had no more trouble from the dead priest after that.

At least that is the way the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh tells it.

Such incidents were becoming a problem. The dead were rising throughout England and Scotland, and on the Continent as well. Similar events are recorded in the Low Countries, France and Germany, as well as in Eastern Europe, and even Iceland. Taken on their own, these stories could be interpreted as vestiges of pagan belief in revenants from which the Christian hierarchy could not dissuade the laity. But considered in the context of the history of the age, the development of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cults of the body and of the saints, and alongside literature and art being produced during the same period, a more complicated picture emerges, one that involves a sort of chemical reaction between fear of death, Christian eschatology and the human imagination. By the High Middle Ages, accounts went abroad of the dead rising from their graves to attack the living. William of Newburgh tells us he knows ‘frequent examples’ of corpses rising from the dead: