Even the strictest historical games should not ignore that fact that medieval people believed in creatures and events a modern, scientific mind would dismiss as fantasy; the creatures may not appear in a campaign, but stories about them should.
In most games, however, the supernatural is all too real, and there is always the potential for player characters to encounter it first-hand.
Most fantasy roleplaying games draw their bestiaries of supernatural creatures from many different time periods and many different cultures. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but several 12th-century writers preserved accounts of contemporary supernatural tales which allow a much more specific collection of encounters to be developed. (If you want a culture-specific bestiary, I'd recommend the Chivalry & Sorcery European Folklore Bestiary.)
These writers were predominantly educated clerics who wrote about events that took place a generation or three earlier. They did not doubt the veracity of the stories - indeed, most claim to have seen evidence or heard testimony which would satisfy any sceptic; Gerald of Wales would only go so far as to say such stories should neither be forcefully asserted as truth, nor denied outright.
One of the concerns of these educated theologians was to fit these supernatural creatures into the Christian worldview. They failed. The closest they came was to describe what these creatures were not, rather than what they were. They were not men, nor beasts, nor angels or demons. Their origins and their place in the world were a mystery.
Faeries
The largest body of supernatural lore concerns what we would call faeries. The contemprary writers had no name for them - the term faerie is not used before the 14th century. Yet they recognised that in some way the green children, the elfs and the creatures under the hills were related.
Much of our modern faerie lore is derived from the beliefs of Elizabethan and and post-Elizabethan times. There are huge differences between these beliefs and 12th-century ones. The most notable difference is that the faeries of the 12th-century show no hostility or susceptibility to Christianity or its trappings. In some cases they are indifferent to Christianity, in others they are attracted to it and, in one tale, the denizens of an underground faerie realm are Christians themselves. The green children of Woolpit were drawn from their underground realm by the sound of church bells, where later faerie lore dictates that faeries are repelled the sound. One of the children was even baptised with no ill effects.
There is no mention of a division of faeries into the Seelie or Unseelie courts, nor of any vulnerability to iron. The Moving Days and the Faerie Rade are likewise unrecorded. Perhaps these things did not exist among the faeries of the day, or perhaps the contemporary writers were simply unaware of them at this early stage of faerie lore. Perhaps such things were known to commoners, who left no written record, but not to the monkish chroniclers, brought up in isolated cloisters.
But on the issue of Christianity, the chroniclers are clear: there is no aversion. Why should this be the case for 12th-century faeries, when later faeries were deeply repelled by it? One possibility is that the 'allergy' had not yet developed. Several of the new, reforming monastic orders - most notably the Cistercians - actively sought out unsettled 'wildernesses', their object being to bring God to these untamed lands. At the time of the Anarchy these orders were only just beginning to establish themselves, so up until this point there was plenty of 'wild' land for the fay. Perhaps they had no aversion to Christianity because their contact with it was minimal. If this is the case, then the aversion may well develop during the course of the Anarchy - an interesting theme for more fantastic campaigns.
Whatever the origins of the fae, the chroniclers were at least clear where they lived. They lived in realms above the clouds, below the sea, and beneath the surface of the Earth. There are records of visitors from all three places, and although mortals had no way of visited the sky or the bottom of the ocean, there are three recorded instances of a mortal visiting the fae beneath the Earth.
Sometimes I'll draw upon more modern legends, when they seem appropriate: there are no medieval tales of fae at
Jenet's Foss or
Ebolton Hill in Cravenshire, for instance, but the 17th-19th century stories are a good fit for the mood I wish to convey.
Shape-changers
A second common class of supernatural tales concerns shapeshifters, the most common of which was the werewolf. The term derives from the Anglo-Saxon for man (wer) and wolf (wulf). The beast was known to the Normans as the Garrulf, and to the Bretons as the Bisclavret.
Gervase of Tilbury treated werewolves quite prosaicly. "In England," he wrote, "we have often seen men transformed into wolves with the changing of the moon." According to Gervase, wounds inflicted on one form carried over to the other, which provided one means of identifying a werewolf. But although the changing of the moon may have affected most werewolves, there were other causes. Gerald of Wales discusses the village of Ossory in Ireland, which was cursed by St Natal so that two villagers at a time must spend seven years in wolf form, and in Marie de France's Lai Bisclavret, the subject of the poem must spend three days a week in wolf form; before the change he hides his clothes, and is unable to change back if they are stolen. Nor were werewolves the only shape-changers known: the influential philospher Boethius, writing c1120-1140, stated that eating certain kinds of food might change men into asses, swine or other animals; and Lai Yonec, also written by Marie de France, features a knight who transforms into a hawk. One medieval story is about a
shape-shifting dragon.
As with faeries, theologians were keen to place shape-shifters within a Christian worldview. Their discussions centred around one particular question: was it a sin to slay a werewolf in its wolf form? The answer they came up with depends on the origin of the werewolf. Only God can change the essence of a thing; magicians may change its semblence, but not its essence. If the lycanthropy is of divine origin, therefore, it is not a sin to slay a werewolf in wolf form because it is truly a wolf. If the change is a result of a magician's enchantment then slaying the wolf breaks the sixth commandment because, although it appears to be a wolf to all senses, in its essence it remains human.
Revenants
A large number of stories concerned the walking dead. Some of these stories appear to be simple ghost stories, designed to produce a frisson of horror in times when the night was dark and full of terrors, but most of those preserved have a theological twist - perhaps not surprising when it was monks who wrote them down. The walking dead in moralistic stories may have died with a debt unpaid, unshriven, with a sin unforgiven, or they might be a victim of an accident or violence whose body has not been recopvered. A priest, or sometimes a necromancer, is called in to discover exactly what causes the dead to walk, and the solution is usually to right whatever wrong the dead person did (if any), and bury them again with proper funeral rites.
In some cases the revenants are more malevolent. They feed off corpses, or off the blood of the living. It's tempting for gamers to classify these as ghouls or vampires, though the analogy isn't exact. Although stories of such malevolent dead are rarer, some archeaological evidence suggests they may have been more common than the chronicles indicate: a decapitated body with a stone forced into its mouth excavated in the deserted village of Wharram Percy, on the Yorkshire WOlds, has been interpreted as a ritual to prevent a corpse rising to feed off the living.
Wild Men
Stories abound throughout Europe of wild men (and sometimes wild women) who lived in the wilderness far from civilised folk. The English called them woses or woodwoses from the late 13th century. To the French, ogre; to the Italians, orco.
The C&S supplement
Goblins, Orcs and Trolls, which I co-wrote, goes into much more detail on the historical background of these creatures. Suffice to say, coming from the histroical angle rather than the modern fantasy angle, wild man could be represented by woodwoses, goblins, orcs or ogres. Not all need be the same.
Cynocephali
The cynocephali, or dog-heads, were widely believed to exist in the Middle Ages, though their homeland was always somewhere over the horizon (and became ever more distant as explorers travelled further).
So wide was the belief in cynocephali that theologians debated whether or not missionaries should be sent to convert them to Christianity, which begged the question of whether or not they could be saved. The consensus among theologians was that they could - drawing on reasoning by St Augustine of Hippo, in the City of God, they determined that creatures which were rational and mortal must be human, descended from Adam, and capable of redemption.
In the Eastern Empire the legend developed that St Christopher was a dog-head, and he is depicted as such in several icons.
Monstrous Creatures
The Middle Ages inhereted a large nuymber of creatures from Greco-Latin, Celtic and Germanic myths. Giants, centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, dragons and more. Again, I'm not averse to including more modern stories if they fit: the barghest of
Trollers Gill, for instance.
Other realms
Our world - the mundane, visible world is not the only one to exist in the medieval imagination.
Obvious alternate world are Paradise and Inferno, or heaven and hell if you prefer. St Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) proposed a third Christian realm, Purgatory, where souls when to be purged of their sins, which gained increasing support among theologians and was established in Catholic orthodoxy by around 1150. Prior to this, purgatory was considered a process of cleansing, rather than the place whether the process occurred.
But there are other, less understood realms. The
Green Children of Woolpit said they came from St Martin's Land, and in one version of their story they went into a cave in their land to emerge in Woolpit. Similarly, a swineherd travelled through the Derbyshire cave known as the
Peak's Arse to enter another realm.
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