Murder, Mystery and Ghosts in the MIddle Ages

Chaucer's Tale of Spiritual Turmoil and Peasant Unrest

Feb 4, 2009

Chaucer's Clerk herein tells his story of mediaeval mayhem and madness, where the veil between life and death is parted, where love is lost, but hope is born.

Set in late fourteenth century England, A Haunt of Murder is the tale told by the Clerk of Oxford, from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Clerk begins his tale when the group of pilgrims camps for the night near haunted Ravenscroft, because it is here, he says, that the truth will be told and he can ask for his sins to be forgiven.

The Plot

The Clerk opens his story from the viewpoint of Beatrice Arrowner, who is heading for a picnic at Ravenscroft with the love of her life and soon-to-be husband, Ralph, along with Sir John and his wife and other friends from the castle. It is during this picnic that Ralph talks about his closeness to finding the Cross of Brythnoth, a lost treasure. Later, during a lull in the festivities, when Beatrice is walking along the turret to meet Ralph, she is pushed to her death. 'Recovering' from her fall, Beatrice realises she is dead, yet not gone, that she can see and hear, but not touch. She has become a 'haunt', an incorporeal who can not yet go on because of unfinished business.

In her desire to be with Ralph, Beatrice meets other incorporeals who seem to be doomed to repeat ghastly scenes from their lives, like Black Malkyn, who tortures and kills those he captures and his wife, who is forced to continually endure death by starvation after losing her mind when discovering she has eaten the flesh of her lover. But this world is also populated by others who are more deliberately evil, those minions of Satan who prey on the weak, the selfish, the greedy.

Interlude

When the Clerk takes a moment from his tale to quench his thirst, the pilgrims gather closely around and drink heavily in their efforts to protect themselves from the unquiet spirits they sense in the encroaching shadows.

The Problem

Ravenscroft is at the centre of an approaching onslaught, being attacked on the one hand by bands of peasants, revolting because of their disgust with rising taxes and the greed of the landlords, and on the other, by a vortex of evil, led by the Merry Minstrel, Satan's Captain at arms. Ralph's inability to sleep because of his sorrow leads him to sending up the alarm in time for the keep to fend off its attackers and the strengh of his belief in God helps Father Aylred complete the Mass, which in turn exorcises Evil.

It is Ralph's bosom friend and fellow clerk, Adam and his wife, Marissa, who, in their greed for the Cross of Brythnoth, kill Beatrice and others in the keep, and it is this evil which attracts Satan. As Sir John says to Ralph, quoting from the Scriptures, "the love of gold is the root of all evil". But God's love is without limits and if we turn our faces towards Him, deliberately making that choice, no matter the evil we have done, we will be bathed in Eternal LIght and Peace. If we turn our faces away, even though our sins be small, we are doomed to exist in that shadowy world between life and death.

Paul Doherty's A Haunt of Murder is an engrossing tale taking us into the lives, beliefs and customs of the Middle Ages, a world that, for all its distance, is very little different from our world, where greed and the lust for power contribute to so much suffering and act as barriers to peace and harmony, in this world.... and the next.

The copyright of the article Murder, Mystery and Ghosts in the MIddle Ages in Murder Mysteries is owned by Christine Moore. Permission to republish Murder, Mystery and Ghosts in the MIddle Ages in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.