The ‘Ecclesiastical History’ of Orderic Vitalis

Summary

Orderic Vitalis (1075–c.1142) was an Anglo-Norman monk whose thirteen-book Historia Ecclesiastica was an attempt to provide for the Norman people the equivalent of Bede's earlier history of the English. The work was written at the abbey of Saint-Evroul in Normandy, and its author would have been acutely conscious of recent pressures upon the abbey arising from the rivalry between successive bishops of Lisieux, in whose diocese Saint-Evroul was situated, and leading lay barons of the region. In Orderic's account of the reported vision of a local priest in the last decade of the eleventh century, many of the misdeeds which have led to the spirits of the dead being punished in the afterlife were committed in the context of local disorder. The priest Walchelin initially assumes that the ghostly army is a real troop of soldiers on their way to join the fearsome Robert of Bellême's campaign against another warlord of the region, while Orderic's monkish disapproval of the lifestyle of the local aristocratic families is apparent in the relish with which he describes the torments of the noblewomen who are being punished for their lasciviousness while alive. What makes this account different from other medieval examples of the morally instructive ghost story is the tacit acceptance on the part of the chronicler that the subject of his narrative was witnessing a troop of the dead, a ‘rabble’ or retinue gathered around a mysterious dark lord called Herlequin or Hellequin. This name may have derived from the Old French ‘hèle-chien’ – ‘hunting dog’ – or may have been a diminutive of ‘helle’, the German word for the underworld. In the first part of this book, there have been other references to spectral armies (see, for instance, Peter the Venerable's ‘Apparitions in Spain’, and Rodulfus Glaber's ‘Army of Wraiths’), but in the passage that follows the familiar monastic theme of purgatorial suffering for secular transgression is addressed in the context of a much older vernacular tradition of a Wild Hunt or troop of phantoms. This tradition is rooted in the folklore of Northern Europe, and derives perhaps from the popular concept of the pagan god Wotan as a wandering huntsman.