Well that arrow looks decidedly phallic to me, and if the hare is symbolic of fertility......

The woman isn't trying to slay lust at all, rather saying bring it on.

Edit. And the poor old hare looks terrified

Snails also abound in the Copenhagen Chansonnier,  a late medieval book of songs on the subject of love

http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/702/eng/0+verso/

http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/702/dan/13+recto/?var=

http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/702/dan/16+recto/?var=

http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/702/dan/16+verso/?var=

http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/702/dan/35+recto/?var=

Islanddawn wrote:

Edit. And the poor old hare looks terrified.

I think he looks like Benny Hill.

But let us be serious again - well sort of serious, because I'm going to give a Wiki reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_and_hares_in_art


As a symbol of fertility, white rabbits appear on a wing of the high altar in Freiburg Minster. They are playing at the feet of two pregnant women, Mary and Elizabeth. Martin Schongauer's engraving Jesus after the Temptation (1470) with nine (three times three) rabbits at the feet of Jesus Christ can seen as a sign of exuberant vitality. In contrast, the tiny squashed rabbits at the base of the columns in Jan van Eyck's Rolin Madonna symbolize "Lust", as part of a set of references in the painting to all the Seven Deadly Sins.

Here's the van Eyck Madonna, but I can't for the life of me spot the squashed rabbits: they must be very tiny indeed. It's a superb picture.

The poor wee rabbits are peeking out from below the left hand column. You can see their little faces here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Virgin_with_Chancellor_Rolin-Detail.jpg

To return to the snail, I see that some suggest that it's also a symbol of rumpy-pumpy because he's, quite literally, horny.

You need the eyes of a hawk alright ... the poor bastards have been squashed by the pillar.

ferval wrote:

To return to the snail, I see that some suggest that it's also a symbol of rumpy-pumpy because he's, quite literally, horny.

Certainly makes sense. Especially as the snail was chosen to adorn the above book of love songs.

And in the context of the depictions of knights in eternal battle with snails, perhaps it is meant to symbolise purity of mind and/or body?

The funny looking arrow is apparently the approved tool for hare hunting, the end being a massive lump of lead designed to stun the animal without piercing the skin.

ferval wrote:

To return to the snail, I see that some suggest that it's also a symbol of rumpy-pumpy because he's, quite literally, horny.

Well yes indeed, but remember that the symbol of the horns also denotes the cuckold ...  so one then has to ask: who is actually getting the rumpy-pumpy?

I wonder, re the lady using a blunted arrow, as well as it being the approved way of shooting "small game" ie game suitable for ladies to shoot at ... but is it also symbolically to show that she isn't a bunny killer and that she does not have blood/death on her hands. ...  ie she is innocent, unstained, pure etc.

OK, enough inter-twined symbolism.

Although of course these hare/snail/rabbit/knight  images may indeed have originally been intended to operate at many subtle and over-lying levels of meaning. Why do they have to "mean" just one thing? Cannot they represent many interweaving ideas (which would have been understood by the original readership)  .... the inevitability of death, death defeated by resurrection, the desperation of love, true love v lust, humility v pride, etc etc.... ?

Just saying ...

By the way I've just seen that the Snail v Knight conundrum has also very recently cropped up on the Historum message board.

I don't wish to blow our own trumpet so to speak ... I'll leave that for the ambidextrous mediaeval bottom buglers ... but I do think so far we've given it a  much more considered, more eloquent, more intelligent, shot.

Meles meles wrote:

Although of course these hare/snail/rabbit/knight  images may indeed have originally been intended to operate at many subtle and over-lying levels of meaning. Why do they have to "mean" just one thing? Cannot they represent many interweaving ideas (which would have been understood by the original readership)  .... the inevitability of death, death defeated by resurrection, the desperation of love, true love v lust, humility v pride, etc etc.... ?

Just saying ...

I'm sure you are right in "just saying" that, MM.

And, although I accept what nordmann has suggested about this type of artwork being carefully monitored, I still wonder if there were many intelligent and angry monks - men who did have a genuine vocation to help and serve the poor - who enjoyed taking a swipe at the system. Young men who, rather than being just bored, used visual ambiguity subtly to convey all kinds of subversive messages? Chaucer did this with his irony, and Shakespeare - pitted against the Lord Chamberlain - made verbal ambiguity an art form. The clever and the witty have always enjoyed doing this, I think? It's a dangerous but exhilarating game.

So we get here the conventional and quite safe motif of Virtue and Temperance (represented by the knight) valiantly resisting and conquering the evils of Lust and Concupiscence (snail and /or hare); but with the subtext of aristocratic Arrogance and Power attacking the Humble and Meek, the alternative interpretation of the valiant little creatures - both snail and hare -  as symbols of Christ's resurrection fitting in nicely with this, reinforcing the message that one day the mighty will be put down from their seats. The meek shall inherit the earth and all that?

Such a reading, if challenged, could always be denied of course.

PS Who was it who said the meek shall inherit nothing?

PS I was absolutely horrified by those poor little squashed bunnies. I've gone right off van Eyck.

Temp wrote:

So we get here the conventional and quite safe motif of Virtue and Temperance (represented by the knight) valiantly resisting and conquering the evils of Lust and Concupiscence (snail and /or hare); but with the subtext of aristocratic Arrogance and Power attacking the Humble and Meek

But in none of them is he seen conquering, simply "resisting". And in some he actually gets conquered himself. Sorry - I just can't believe in a sub-strata of junior Shakespeares working for monasteries all around Europe over half a millennium using exactly the same subtle allusion that their bosses never copped.

I now feel like one of the squashed bunnies.

Seriously - do we perhaps underestimate the degree of anger felt by those in the Church who had a genuine vocation? Not all priests were corrupt and worldly. The antics of the Mafia type aristocratic elite  - who flourished all over Europe (for centuries) - must have infuriated and sickened many in the monasteries, especially when this lot paraded their blood-lust and greed as Christian virutes.

Just saying, Gov...

Just saying, ma'am, that once we make an assumption regarding the mindset of the artists and infer some uniform character to their intentions, then we are implying that a subversive attitude was commonly and uniformly expressed across several lands and over several centuries in a manner that defeated detection by the various bosses and of which no other verifiable proof has ever been found to support the claim, or at least shed some light on its origins, nature, duration and reason for demise.

Meles meles's appeal to drop the uniformity bit and accept it as meaning different things to different people is equally problematic for me however in that I'm left wondering therefore why such diverse intentions often quite exclusive of each other in meaning and symbolism ended up with almost exactly the same graphic representing them.

I'm sticking with the "puzzling - and by no means solved" stance, myself. But I really wish I knew!

They tell you that great art is best judged from a distance - with Van Eyck you can see why.

nordmann wrote:

Just saying, ma'am, that once we make an assumption regarding the mindset of the artists and infer some uniform character to their intentions, then we are implying that a subversive attitude was commonly and uniformly expressed across several lands and over several centuries in a manner that defeated detection by the various bosses and of which no other verifiable proof has ever been found to support the claim, or at least shed some light on its origins, nature, duration and reason for demise.

But the "several lands" surely made up one united Christendom which had its own language of signs and symbols which were understood to have various meanings. Weren't many messages - and warnings - conveyed "commonly and uniformly across several lands and over several centuries" through religious art?

Re making assumptions about the mindset of the artists, I still wonder about anger directed against the so-called great and good of the ruling classes. Rebellion was ready to erupt at all times; and didn't the church "bosses" themselves - even the top man in Rome - sometimes have an uneasy relationship with the secular elite? The names of knights such as Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracey, Hugh de Morville and Richard le Breton - and their ilk - would surely be known - and hated -  in abbeys and monasteries all over Europe.

Perhaps in English monasteries at least a martyred Archbishop of Canterbury was sometimes remembered, and the subtle mockery of the class that had murdered him was occasionally ignored - was perhaps even encouraged?

Temp wrote:

Weren't many messages - and warnings - conveyed "commonly and uniformly across several lands and over several centuries" through religious art?

Indeed they were. Where we come unstuck here though is when we consider which "uniform" meaning to assign to the uniform graphic. As even this short discussion has indicated there are several known meanings attributable to one symbol, as well as several others that can be conjectured with some justification. Meles meles's solution is to say that maybe any or all of these meanings were actually intended - a sort of super in-joke with many layers that people got or didn't get depending on their own sophistication in these matters.

But that still supposes that all these artists were thinking along the same lines, acting as "guardians of the subversion/superjoke" over many hundreds of years pretty much in tune all with each other. And while such things did (and do) go on, it is rare indeed that we have not been left with a single clue, it seems, as to how such a coterie might have been formed, how or if it communicated between its members to keep everyone on board (as they say these days), why they thought the joke necessary to communicate, and how or why it eventually all fizzled out. Was it with a bang - as in due to some tumultuous development within the church - or with a whimper, as in a dumbing down of their intended readership so that in the end no one got the joke in any form any more? We certainly don't, that's for sure.

You know, if the knight occasionally won one of these jousts our task might have been a lot easier. It might probably have allowed us to link the exception in graphic form to what might be deemed an exception in the text of the relevant document and proceed from there to guess at why the graphic was there at all. It's the damned uniformity of failure on the knight's part, or at least visible absence of success, that keeps getting me.

Nordmann you mentioned a uniformity "across several lands", but is that really so? My reading, admittedly just on-line, suggests that the knight v snail motif appears almost exclusively in documents that were produced in England, Northern France and, to a lesser degree in Flanders. Quite a limited area and culturally relatively uniform. Does this motif occur much outside of that area?

Also does anyone know what sort of documents these pictures ornament. You mentioned one was a commissioned history listing English kings (if I remember aright) but what of the others. Are they all secular or are some to be found say in Bibles, Books of Hours or other religious works?

The examples available to the British Library are all Anglo-Norman and French but according to Lilian Randall the motif was common also within the lands administered by the Holy Roman Empire. The oldest manuscript containing the snail under assault that she cites is from 9th century Kleve (as in Anne of Cleeves), though she also has one from Utrecht and one from Fiesole which apparently originated in Hungary. As to how many have been found where I haven't a clue, so wouldn't dare presume they were more common in one place over another.

The document types vary greatly, though one thing I notice is that they are almost all manuscripts or books intended for private ownership or viewing rather than ones that might have been used by a community, such as an abbey or church. The bulk of them are indeed religious, not secular, though that seems less material than the fact that in private documents there appeared to be a pretty standard convention regarding marginal decoration, period. It was expected to be ornate and was not necessarily tied to the accompanying text regarding what it represented. More "official" or communally referenced works were produced along much stricter lines.

Thanks for that. Of course Kleve and Utrecht, although part of the Holy Roman Empire, were not very far from Flanders/North France .... Hungary, though is a bit further off. I'd suspected that the documents were mostly privately commissioned Prayer Books, Devotions, Books of Hours etc, but I just couldn't find anything definitive.

Another thing one has to remember is that just because a manuscript is associated with a particular town or community does not at all mean that it was made there. It would be funny if we found out that all these belligerent molluscs dotted around European manuscripts had originated in one little monastic sweatshop somewhere deep in darkest Croydon!

I'm glad you mentioned the types of manuscripts in which the graphic appeared, I'd been wondering about that. That suggests that they were were consumed by the class which was represented by the knight so might it be possible to speculate that it was indeed a stricture against pride or hubris? It has occurred to me that the drawings seem to show some kind of equivalence between the fully armed knight and the little armoured beast and that wee beastie seems to have carried all sorts of fairly negative connotations except, perhaps, dogged persistence.

At a lower level, were any of the marginalia simply of favourite and popular themes which might have been just attractive space fillers for an unimaginative monk?

Yes and yes, I think, are the answers there. (Unless of course they were rhetorical questions in which case you just have to imagine me nodding conscientiously as you speak)

They were also produced under the editorship of an abbot who, traditionally, would also have been of the same class. So their status as an in-joke is rather indisputable, I feel. Just what the bloody joke might have been is what defeats me.

Hubris is a good guess, though I'm still leaning towards slow and inexorable death myself. But that might be just because of my own health issues ...

Druggy monks? This is a novel - and surely rather silly - idea from a poster at the British Library Medieval Blog site. Snail-watching and doodling when on the Datura stramonium?

One more theory is that artists of that time used plant Datura stramonium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_stramonium The plant was used as a remedy, but when taken in larger quantities it acted as a powerful hallucinogen. There were many examples of misusage of this plant through history. It was even used for ritual sacrifices. Images and examples of some poems made under influence of Datura stramonium are given in textbooks at Moscow State University. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/09/knight-v-snail.html?cid=6a00d8341c464853ef019affa9a492970c#sthash.LybUj31g.OKNA9lC2.dpuf

Why the poster mentions poems at Moscow State University I do not know, unless they include snail references.


EDIT: Are you really poorly, nordmann? Do hope you are not. You've got us all worried now.

Nothing that a drop of Datura Stramonium won't cure, I imagine.

It really annoys me when anything from antiquity that is even half-way surrealistic or outside the limited ken of the average modern punter is put down to "drugs". For one thing it fails to explain artistic convention stretching over centuries, and for another it blithely ignores the very real consideration - if a drug is involved at all - of whether the art work in question was produced under the direct influence of the drug, under the influence of the after-effects of the drug, under the influence of a milieu which itself was formed through communal use of the drug, or indeed how much it might have been the artist's reaction against any or all of these influences. All these aspects to the creative process are readily demonstrable using examples of art throughout history, and are just as demonstrable today. "Drugs" do not in themselves preclude the artists' own sensibilities, skill or use of imagination. In fact there is ample evidence that drug use is as much an inhibitor of these faculties as an enabler.

Sorry - one of my hobby-horses. Cheap and stupid analysis posing as intelligent comment riles me.

Well, I hope you all noticed that the cheap and stupid contribution wasn't mine - I was just quoting some wretched poster from the British Library site.  

I did say I thought the drug idea was rather silly.

Sorry. I wasn't gunning for the messenger. It was the pseudo you referred to who was in my sights!

nordmann wrote:

They were also produced under the editorship of an abbot who, traditionally, would also have been of the same class. So their status as an in-joke is rather indisputable, I feel. Just what the bloody joke might have been is what defeats me.

Were abbots always "of the same class" as the ruling elite? I know important clergy like bishops were usually, but not always, noblemen, but was that true of all the top men in the abbeys and monasteries? Weren't abbots often elected to their positions by other monks rather than appointed by the monarch? And didn't the pope appoint every archbishop, bishop and archdeacon in Christendom, including the British Isles? The king would ask the pope to favour his nominated candidate of course, but the final decision was always the pope's, I think? The Great Schism must have caused some complications - wasn't there a succession of francophile popes, based at Avignon? Confusingly, from 1378 to the end of the 14th century there were two popes, one at Avignon and the other in Rome, and the English, not surprisingly, recognised only the latter. I wonder how all this affected the hierarchy within the English Church - if it did?

And I'm still thinking about lads from the lower orders "making it" via the Church. Didn't the Church act as a sort of medieval grammar school system - spotting the intelligent, educating them and helping them get to Oxford and Cambridge? Wolsey is the obvious example, but there must have been many, many others who were not from the ruling classes, and whose sympathies perhaps remained with their own kind? Wolsey was certainly never accepted by the noble elite at Henry VIII's court - he was always the "the butcher's cur" (Wolsey's father had been an Ipswich meat-dealer) - no doubt would still have been regarded as an upstart even had he managed to become pope - which he nearly did.  

PS Monks did travel about of course - I'm thinking of the wily monk from Chaucer's Sea Captain's Tale: he was given permission by his abbot to roam where he wanted on the pretext of doing monastic business. And, interestingly, Ian Mortimer, in his Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England writes: "Some travelling is undertaken by other monks to acquire things - including manuscripts to copy for the monastic library - or to acquire news." So there was constant communication, the exchange of ideas - and the sharing of in-jokes perhaps?

By the early 16th century the English monastic system had indeed become something of a "leg-up" club running itself almost independently of the state. However between the 9th and 14th centuries they were much more subject to patronage. The conquest's immediate aftermath saw a huge amount of such "appointments" by the new elite of their relatives in monasteries located strategically both within the new geo-political landscape and within the new power structure imposed on society. Abbotships/priorships in the patron-dependent system were anything but electable positions in the modern sense. The position, being an integral part of the local power structure as well as the national power structure in certain instances was too important to be left to mere monks to decide.

By Wolseley's time of course their ability through financial clout to manage internal successions according to self-serving criteria had been well established. But our snails seem to come from before that came about.

Going back to the humble snail in Medieval marginalia, I've come across this fellow's interesting hypothesis

Part 1
http://my-albion.blogspot.no/2013/09/the-humility-of-snails-part-1-problem.html

Part 2
http://my-albion.blogspot.no/2013/10/the-humility-of-snails-part-2-snail-and.html

May the Fourth today and guess who makes an appearance in this medieval manuscript.(the Smithfield Decretals)

Medieval Yodas

Amongst items found by metal-detectorists and recently made public in accordance with the Treasure Act's 2020 Report of those items declared during 2018 - is a cast, silver-gilt badge that was found in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, and which is thought to have been made sometime between 1200–1350. This metal badge depicts a knight, seemingly in the attitude of prayer although looking out directly at the viewer, whilst emerging from a snail's shell, itself being carried on the back of a ram. Clearly this is not the work of bored monks idly doodling in the margins of documents, but is rather an expensive and likely a commissioned piece ... which adds weight to the idea that the whole knights-and-snails thing was a well-established meme, no?



As an amatuer palaeontologist I also note that the said mollusc's shell is clearly not that of any common-or-garden snail, nor indeed of any type of true snail (gastropod) at all. It is obviously of an ammonite. Ammonites were a type of cephalopod - which with octopi, squid and nautili form a separate family within the overall mollusc phylum. The ammonites however all went extinct along with the dinosaurs at the close of the Cretaceous. So the shell depicted in the medieval badge is likely a very common fossil found in the rocks around Yorkshire. I don't immediately recognise it although I'm sure it's possible to exactly identify the species and probably even where it is most commonly found (as a fossil) ... but doubtless someone has already done so before me.

(Engage PEDANT mode)
Aaagh! Not "octopi" - it's originally Greek, plural if you assume it still is should be "octopodes". However, most references now consider it sufficiently Anglicised to have acquired "octopusses" as plural.
(Disengage PEDANT mode)

An interesting-looking badge Meles. I wonder if the smith was trying to suggest a great ramshorn snail with that piece. The swirls on a snail's shell, however, tend to be concave while those on the badge are convex which would be in keeping with your suggestion of an ammonite. Intriguing.

What a lovely piece of work - just imagine the excitement of finding that brooch. I wonder if that sort of shell was part of the knight's heraldic device? Shells were very popular in ecclesiastical heraldry, were they not? Perhaps this praying knight had been on a pilgrimage and this shell indicated where? Just a thought - I know the scallop shell was peculiar to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, and weren't cockle shells (and silver bells) a sign of a pious pilgrim? I suppose we must identify the fossil first - but perhaps the knight and the craftsman he employed to fashion the badge both simply liked the beautiful, swirling image of the shell shown in an intriguing fossil, even if they had no idea of the exact creature to which the shell had once been home!


PS This thread is one of the best ever on Res His. I'm so glad it has shown up again.

PS The shape is rather similar to a Ramshorn snail - I wonder if it was that pond creature, rather than an ancient fossil, that inspired the design? I've just been reading about Ramshorn snails and the people who are fascinated by them: they are apparently lovely little molluscs, described as "one of the most peaceful of all water creatures". They are never aggressive and are vegans - they defend themselves only by retreating into their shells. Perhaps the knight saw them as one of God's better creations. According to the internet info, people can get very fond of this gentle type of snail and keep them in aquariums as pets, seeing them as being affectionate little things. I have never thought of snails as being "affectionate". Perhaps our pious knight was a pond enthusiast who was fascinated by the Ramshorn sail - and identified with its finer qualities. 

I suppose it's easier sometimes to prefer snails to people.

As with knight-vs-snail depictions in manuscripts, the snail bit might represent the Resurrection or be a satirical reference to cowardly on non-chivalric behaviour, or whatever ... but if it was specifically intended to be a ramshorn snail, and sitting on a ram, then the ram element seems quite significant. To ancient societies male-goats and male-sheep (and there is often little distinction made between them) were usually associated with a burning sexuality, virility, even with lasciviousness and lust, and so were connected with the deities Venus and Bacchus and with mythological creatures like fauns and satyrs who were all viewed as representations of an unbridled sexuality. These associations seem to have persisted and been widespread in Medieval Christendom. Without a doubt one of the main Christian contributions to the symbolism of goats is the association between he-goats and the Devil, which is general throughout the Middle Ages. From then on the image of a he-goat as the centre of the coven and as the object of veneration for witches became rather a cliché in Western art.

On the other hand goats were often considered to be just whimsical, if rather unstable animals, somewhat like children, and young kid goats were often seen as the image of innocence. Another meaning assigned to he-goats (or are they really supposed to be he-sheep?) in biblical texts is as leader of the flock, and from it at the symbolic level the young male-goat, or male-sheep, could, in certain circumstances, refer to Christ (the lamb of God) as the sinless leader of his disciples. As so often with medieval symbolism one can go round and round in contradictory circles. Or, with a ramshorn snail perched on top of a ram, it could just denote the knight's family name of Ram, Rames, Ramston, Ramsbottom etc.

Temp mentioned scallop shells being associated with St James of Compostella (in French a scallop is a coquille St Jacques) and fossil ammonites are particulalry associated with St Hilda (614-680), the Saxon Abbess of Whitby in Yorkshire, where the locally abundant fossil ammonites were popularly known as snakestones. Charged with founding the abbey, St Hilda first had to rid the region of an infestation of snakes (probably an allegorical reference to the widespread pagan beliefs and cultural influences in the region) and so according to legend Hilda cast a spell that turned all the snakes of Whitby to stone and then threw them from the cliff tops into the sea. The coastal cliffs between Whitby and Scarborough abound in fossil ammonites, which were seen as the petrified snakes, and, suitably modified with carved heads were often sold as charms to gullible pilgrims and tourists. A similar legend is associated with St Keyna to account for ammonite fossils around Keynsham in Somerset.

   

Two ammonite fossils from Whitby suitably modified to make them look like snakes, that at left is the species Hildoceras bifrons named in honour of St Hilda. Ammonites also feature on the arms of the town of Whitby and on those of St Hilda's College in Oxford. The name "ammonite" was inspired by the spiral shape which resembles tightly coiled rams' horns: Pliny the Elder called the fossils ammonis cornua, "horns of Ammon", because the Egyptian god Ammon or Amun, was typically depicted wearing ram's horns ... and so we're back with rams again.

MM wrote:

... and so we're back with rams again.

How strangely our minds and memories work. Your mention of the ram image triggered a memory of something I read as a teenager: an excellent historical novel by Anya Seton: "Katherine" - the story of Katherine Swynford, née Roet, who later became the wife of John of Gaunt. Katherine's first husband was Sir Hugh Swynford and various details about him, plus a spot of Wiki research regarding the Derby ram, have had me wondering if the owner of the silver badge was possibly of Saxon descent. The ram was a very important symbol to the Saxons, and, although the old Saxons aristocrats had had to bend the knee to the Norman newcomers, many of the old families, even by the 1300s, still retained a Saxon pride in the old, pre-Conquest images and customs. These quotations from the Seton novel are what made me wonder if all this could have something to do with your knight on the badge. But all this could be a load of codswallop, I know!


During the next two days at Windsor, Hugh Swynford afforded much amusement to certain of the Duke's men. Roger de Cheyne had hastened to share the joke with his friends that Swynford,whom they privily called the Saxon Battling Ram, had at last been touched by a softer passion than hunting or fighting...


...Hugh Swynford was of pure Saxon blood except for one Danish ancestor, the fierce invading Ketel wo sailed up the Trent in 870, pillaging and ravishing as he went...The Swynfords were all fighters. Hugh's forefathers had resisted the Norman invasion until the grown males of their clan had been exterminated and even now, three hundred years later, Hugh stubbornly rejected any tinge of Norman graces or romanticism. He went to Mass occasionally as a matter of course, but at heart he was pagan as the savages who had once danced around Beltane's fire om May Night, who worshiped the ancient oaks and painted themselves with blue woad - a plant which still grew on Hugh's manor , Kettlethorpe, in Lincolnshire.


From my googling about the Derby ram I found this:


The Anglo Saxon pagan midwinter ram-ritual, which was most prevalent in the Midlands and South Yorkshire, involved a singing and dancing procession of men accompanying a figure dressed as a sacred animal (often a goat or a ram) which represented a life-giving, seed-proliferating god. As the Christianisation of England took place, the religious aspect faded but the celebrations remained, as the procession became a means of raising beer-money.



A ram is still the mascot of the fighting men of the Sherwood Foresters regiment!



 I'm no doubt letting my imagination run away with me, but could our praying knight be, like Hugh Swynford, a man of proud Saxon descent, working for the Norman overlords now, but his badge a nod to his Saxon ancestors?


PS Sorry about Jeremy the Snail - if, MM, you think it not appropriate, do let me know and I'll willingly delete poor J.'s story - honestly, I won't have a huff. I do post very daft things at times, as you know.

This isn't my thread Temp, so don't delete your posts on my account and indeed the sad tale of Jeremy the snail and his search for love, or at least his hunt for lust and little snailets, might not be irrelevant. I remember reading about Jeremy's problem a few years ago and thinking: what if, after all these efforts, Jeremy turns out to be gay? Only to remember that snails are hermaphroditic and that at coupling each inseminates the other ... although doubtless in these modern times even hermaphroditic snails are allowed to self-identify as being gender-fluid and to have their own specific preferences.

I once went for a walk up Box Hill in Surrey, where the river Mole cuts through the Chalk of the North Downs, and which is a classic site beloved of geologists, botanists, naturalists, ramblers ... plus bikers and doggers. It was a warm but very drizly wet day in early summer and the Chalk pastures, for which it is famous alongside the eponymous woods of box trees (Buxus sempervirens), were covered in many, many thousands of snails. And these weren't any common or garden snail species but all were huge Roman/Bourgundian escargots (Helix pomatia). I gathered up a few dozen in plastic bags which I later cooked and ate, although I have subsequently learned that in England, although not the rest of the UK, the Roman snail is a protected species under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, making it illegal to kill, injure, collect, or sell them .. I am truly sorry, although they didn't seem to be in any short supply at the time I was there). However I was particularly struck, whilst cooking and eating them, that about 5% were handed opposite to their, almost identical, companions. This situation, both from Jeremy's problem and my own experience, is far from what is usual for ordinary garden snails where almost all are handed exactly the same, largely because, as Jeremy found, you cannot mate with a differently-handed snail. I wonder if the ratio that I observed for the Box Hill snails is a function of Roman snails generally, or if it was a function of inbreeding and restricted only to the fairly isolated populations living along the North Downs. Here in southern France snails (being non-meat) are a popular and traditional dish for Good Friday and so alongside nets of ordinary garden snails (Helix aspersa/Cornu aspersum), the supermarkets are currently stocking up on big fat Bourgundian snails in preparation for Easter ... I might buy a few dozen and see if the lefty/righty ratio is as I remember it from Box Hill.

That some snails, rather like Flanders and Swan's song about 'The Honeysuckle and Bindweed', should "turn to the left while [others] turn to the right", would surely have been observed by medieval peasants. But did they realise that snails were actually hermaphrodites? I doubt it, and rather suspect they saw the right- and left-twisted snails as being indicative of the two sexes: and I'll bet they thought the right-turning, dexterous ones were the males, while the lefty, sinister ones were females.

But does this have any relevace to the snails-and-knights meme? Probably not.

Oops, posted twice ... but, since I've done it and cannot now delete it ... I may as well take the opportunity to add some random folklore. Such as that in Germany, ammonites, generally called something along the lines of 'dragonstones', when added to a milk pail, were used to ensure the return of milk to cows that had stopped producing. Similarly in some parts of Scotland fossil ammonites, there known as 'crampstones', were used, steeped in water, for treating cows' cramps following calving. Also doubtless following on from the widespread idea that fossil ammonites were petrified snakes, inevitably comes the idea that ammonites were somehow efficacious against poisonous bites and stings ... such as when Richard Carew of Cornwall (1555-1620) wrote: 'Beasts which are stung, being given to drink of the water wherein this snakestone has been soaked, will therethrough recover.'

Meles meles wrote:

This isn't my thread Temp, so don't delete your posts on my account and indeed the sad tale of Jeremy the snail and his search for love, or at least his hunt for lust and little snailets, might not be irrelevant. I remember reading about Jeremy's problem a few years ago and thinking: what if, after all these efforts, Jeremy turns out to be gay? Only to remember that snails are hermaphroditic and that at coupling each inseminates the other ... although doubtless in these modern times even hermaphroditic snails are allowed to self-identify as being gender-fluid and to have their own specific preferences...


...But does this have any relevance to the snails-and-knights meme? Probably not.

Ah - my error - I thought you had started this thread, MM, but I see it was actually nordmann who introduced this excellent topic in livelier and happier times. So, genuine apologies to the Boss for mentioning the Love Trials (or should that be Trails?) of Jeremy on a serious thread.

However, that said, and mindful of your comment above, I cannot resist:

Not a snail, but this is another fossil used in civic heraldry - the Dudley Bug (not to be confused with he Dudly Bug, a species of cyclecar) This one, Calymene blumenbachii , is a trilobite found in the Wenlock foundation rocks.
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