The Written World: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis

Haunted Landscapes

C H A P T E R 5 Haunted Landscapes “I reckon,” Orderic Vitalis reflected in the mid-1130s, “that I must not neglect or keep silent about something that happened to a certain presbyter from the diocese of Lisieux on 1 January” in 1091. The story that follows is one of the most famous passages in the entire Historia Ecclesiastica.1 “There was a priest named Walchelin,” Orderic began, “in the town of Bonneval,” known today as SaintAubin -de-Bonneval, about eighteen kilometers north of the abbey of Ouche, well within Orderic’s local and familiar landscape. “In the year of Our Lord 1091, on 1 January, this man was summoned by night, as his vocation demanded, to visit a certain ill person at the furthest limits of his parish. As he was returning alone, and passing through a remote place far from human habitation, he heard a great noise that he took to be that of a huge army moving through the countryside.”2 Well-aware, as were all of his neighbors, of the violence that shook Normandy under the rule of Duke Robert Curthose, Walchelin assumed this to be the knights that Robert of Bellême was known to be bringing to besiege the nearby town of Courcy.3 “Indeed,” Orderic went on to explain, “the eighth moon shone brightly in the sign of Aries at that time, and the road was shown clearly to travelers,” making it possible for a troop to move at night and for a priest to see what was coming.4 But it wasn’t an army, at least not in the way that Walchelin had expected. On an average winter night, while traveling down a nondescript road that passed through Normandy’s deserted winter fields, Walchelin encountered those who suffered for the sins of their lives in the purgatorial ride of 92 the dead. He would recognize many of the roaming shades as his friends and neighbors and kin in life, and he would live to tell the tale. Some years later Orderic heard the story of Walchelin’s very local encounter with this ghostly army from the shaken priest himself and in turn included the tale in his Historia Ecclesiastica as just one of many examples of the intimacy between the worlds of the living and the dead.5 Orderic, as might be expected, interpreted Walchelin’s experience as a lesson given by the dead to the living. “I have written these things down for the edification the reader,” he explained, “so that the just might persevere in good, and the perverse may turn away from evil.”6 By means of this journey of souls, Orderic explained, “every base impurity committed in the flesh is melted away in purgatorial fire and will be purified through various purgations just as the eternal Judge determines.”7 Walchelin ’s experience, as related by Orderic, touches upon the medieval tradition of visions of the Otherworld. The most famous of these include Dryhthelm’s journey through heaven and hell and two levels in between as told by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, the Carolingian accounts of Wetti and Charles the Fat, the twelfth-century Irish visions recounted in the Visio Tnugdali and the Purgatorium Sancti Patricii, and Dante Alighieri’s famous reveries.8 In these accounts the protagonists, in a sleeping dream or a waking vision, in life or in a shortterm death, travel to and through the world beyond, seeing the eternal suffering of those in hell, the unending joy of the saints in heaven, and, sometimes, the temporary torments of those whose confessed but unexpiated sins were still being burned away in the purgatorial fire. But the vision reported by Orderic, though related to these, had an important difference: Walchelin did not go anywhere, not even in his mind. He remained at the side of a Norman road, fully awake, fully alert, while the purgatorial ride passed through the very physical landscape in which he lived his daily life. Orderic’s account of Walchelin’s vision shows how intensely local, and intensely physical, the geography of death was in the Norman world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The young priest did not need to travel anywhere, even in dreams, to catch a glimpse of the Otherworld.9 It was right there, sharing the space of the living, occasionally breaking through into the here and now.10 Throughout the Historia Ecclesiastica Haunted Landscapes 93 [18.224.32.86] Project MUSE (2024...