The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings by Dan Jones

 

The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings

a medieval ghost story

by Dan Jones

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The name of Montague Rhodes James (1862 – 1936) is synonymous with the classic English ghost story.  He wrote most of his supernatural tales as Christmas Eve entertainments for friends and students, eventually building a prolific body of stories published in four collections between 1904 and 1925.  Jamesians will surely be aware that in his lifetime, James was better known as a medievalist scholar, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum (between 1893 and 1908) and Provost of Eton College (from 1918 until his death). 

There is a particular work of his, however, which straddles his scholarly and “ghostly” interests.   In the early 1920s, while leafing through a new catalogue of manuscripts at the British Museum, James noticed a reference to an item in the Museum’s “Royal” collection which was supposed to contain a dozen supernatural tales written or collected in the early 1400s by a monk at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire.  James sourced the manuscript, copied out all the stories, and transcribed and edited them for publication in the English Historical Review. 

The longest of these stories, adapted and expanded by historian Dan Jones, forms the basis of The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings.  Its protagonist of the tale is a tailor called Snowball who is visited by a panoply of tormented spirits in the shapes of a raven, a dog, a goat, a bull, a huntsman and a “dead king”.  These lost souls enjoin poor Snowball to help them seek deliverance.

Antique print of Byland Abbey

In his retelling, Jones opts for a style which sounds suitably archaic while being readable and flowing.  The story might seem rather tame to contemporary horror readers, but it provides the same sort of thrill as Jamesian tales. It is not difficult to sense why Monty was intrigued by the story as there are some interesting parallels between the Byland monk’s tale and James’ own stories.  James’ supernatural entities are rarely ethereal spirits, and tend to be surprisingly “physical”, much like the raven which topples Snowball from his horse.  There is also the concept of the hapless victim (albeit a tailor, in this case, rather than the ‘scholarly character’ favoured by James) who unwittingly ends up embroiled in otherworldly derring-do.  M.R. James would also likely have appreciated that, amongst the weirdness, the occult rituals and occasional profanity, the story ultimately reflects certain Christian concepts of the afterlife and expiation of sins.  

The story in this volume is complemented by an introduction by the author, in which he reminisces about his personal rapport with Jamesian ghost stories and their TV adaptations, a brief note on Byland Abbey, once one of the great ecclesiastical monasteries of the North and, most interestingly, the annotated Latin text of Snowball’s adventure as prepared by M.R. James. 

I read this volume as an ebook and enjoyed it, but it would probably be much better appreciated in its physical format, where the “concept” of this publication is more attractively served.

Kindle Edition, 96 pages

Expected publication: October 14th 2021 by Head of Zeus