Why Knights Fought Snails in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a lit­tle slime will do a man no harm… whilst if you dance with drag­ons, you must expect to burn.

- George R. R. Mar­tin, The Mys­tery Knight

As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its down­sides. It isn’t all pow­er, glo­ry, advan­ta­geous mar­riages and gifts rang­ing from cas­tles to bags of gold.

Some­times you have to fight a tru­ly for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent.

We’re not talk­ing about bun­nies here, though there’s plen­ty of doc­u­men­ta­tion to sug­gest medieval rab­bits were tough cus­tomers.

As Vox Almanac’s Phil Edwards explains, above, the many snails lit­ter­ing the mar­gins of 13th-cen­tu­ry man­u­scripts were also fear­some foes.

Boars, lions, and bears we can under­stand, but … snails? Why?

The­o­ries abound.

Detail from Brunet­to Latini’s Li Livres dou Tre­sor

Edwards favors the one in medieval­ist Lil­ian M. C. Randall’s 1962 essay “The Snail in Goth­ic Mar­gin­al War­fare.”

Ran­dall, who found some 70 instances of man-on-snail com­bat in 29 man­u­scripts dat­ing from the late 1200s to ear­ly 1300s, believed that the tiny mol­lusks were stand ins for the Ger­man­ic Lom­bards who invad­ed Italy in the 8th cen­tu­ry.

After Charle­magne trounced the Lom­bards in 772, declar­ing him­self King of Lom­bardy, the van­quished turned to usury and pawn­broking, earn­ing the enmi­ty of the rest of the pop­u­lace, even those who required their ser­vices.

Their pro­fes­sion con­ferred pow­er of a sort, the kind that tends to get one labelled cow­ard­ly, greedy, mali­cious … and easy to put down.

Which rather begs the ques­tion why the knights going toe-to- …uh, fac­ing off against them in the mar­gins of these illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts look so damn intim­i­dat­ed.

(Con­verse­ly why was Rex Harrison’s Dr. Dolit­tle so unafraid of the Giant Pink Sea Snail?)

Detail from from MS. Roy­al 10 IV E (aka the Smith­field Dec­re­tals)

Let us remem­ber that the doo­dles in medieval mar­gin­a­lia are edi­to­r­i­al car­toons wrapped in enig­mas, much as today’s memes would seem, 800 years from now. What­ev­er point—or joke—the scribe was mak­ing, it’s been obscured by the mists of time.

And these things have a way of evolv­ing. The snail vs. knight motif dis­ap­peared in the 14th-cen­tu­ry, only to resur­face toward the end of the 15th, when any exist­ing sig­nif­i­cance would very like­ly have been tai­lored to fit the times.

Detail from The Mac­cles­field Psalter

Oth­er the­o­ries that schol­ars, art his­to­ri­ans, blog­gers, and arm­chair medieval­ists have float­ed with regard to the sym­bol­ism of these rough and ready snails haunt­ing the mar­gins:

The Res­ur­rec­tion

The high cler­gy, shrink­ing from prob­lems of the church

The slow­ness of time

The insu­la­tion of the rul­ing class

The aristocracy’s oppres­sion of the poor

A cri­tique of social climbers

Female sex­u­al­i­ty (isn’t every­thing?)

Vir­tu­ous humil­i­ty, as opposed to knight­ly pride

The snail’s reign of ter­ror in the gar­den (not so sym­bol­ic, per­haps…)

A prac­ti­cal-mind­ed Red­dit com­menter offers the fol­low­ing com­men­tary:

I like to imag­ine a monk draw­ing out his fan­tas­ti­cal day­dreams, the snail being his neme­sis, leav­ing unsight­ly trails across the page and him build­ing up in his head this great vic­to­ry where­in he van­quish­es them for­ev­er, nev­er again to be plagued by the beast­ly bug­gers while cre­at­ing his mas­ter­pieces.

Read­ers, any oth­er ideas?

Detail from The Gor­leston Psalter

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

A Rab­bit Rides a Char­i­ot Pulled by Geese in an Ancient Roman Mosa­ic (2nd cen­tu­ry AD)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er in New York City.