The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings: A medieval ghost story

By Dan Jones

A chilling medieval ghost story, retold by bestselling historian Dan Jones. Published in a beautiful small-format hardback, perfect as a Halloween read or a Christmas gift.

One winter, in the dark days of King Richard II, a tailor was riding home on the road from Gilling to Ampleforth. It was dank, wet and gloomy; he couldn't wait to get home and sit in front of a blazing fire.

Then, out of nowhere, the tailor is knocked off his horse by a raven, who then transforms into a hideous dog, his mouth writhing with its own innards. The dog issues the tailor with a warning: he must go to a priest and ask for absolution and return to the road, or else there will be consequences...

First recorded in the early fifteenth century by an unknown monk, The Tale of the Tailor and the Three Dead Kings was transcribed from the Latin by the great medievalist M.R. James in 1922. Building on that tradition, now bestselling historian Dan Jones retells this medieval ghost story in crisp and creepy prose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781801101301

Dan Jones

Dan Jones took a first in History from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 2002. He is an award-winning journalist and a pioneer of the resurgence of interest in medieval history. He lives in London.

Book preview

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First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Dan Jones, 2021

The moral right of Dan Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781801101295

ISBN (E): 9781801101301

Illustrations by David Wardle

Frames and drop caps courtesy of Shutterstock

Image on page 84 courtesy of the British Library: Text page of ghost story from Byland, Yorkshire, England, N. (Yorkshire?), Royal 15 A XX f. 141

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

THE TALE OF THE TAILOR AND THE THREE DEAD KINGS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

A note on Byland Abbey

The Latin text

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

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INTRODUCTION

In the early 1920s the great Eton and Cambridge scholar M. R. James was leafing through a new catalogue of manuscripts in the British Museum when an unusual entry caught his eye. It concerned a five-hundred-year-old volume in the museum’s ‘Royal’ collection. This was the name given to a set of about two thousand manuscripts, acquired slowly over the centuries by generations of English kings and queens. The texts in this collection covered all manner of topics, ranging from classical philosophy and French romance to doggerel poetry and herbal medicine. But a reference to one particular book made James sit up, for, according to the catalogue, it contained a dozen medieval ghost stories.

James had heard about these stories before. A much older list of royal manuscripts, compiled in the eighteenth century, had made fleeting mention of a volume containing ‘examples of ghostly apparitions’.¹ But the new catalogue spelled out what that meant. Somewhere in the museum, under the shelf-mark ‘Royal 15 A. XX’, lay twelve tales of the supernatural, written down in (or shortly after) the year AD 1400 by a monk at Byland Abbey in Yorkshire. They sounded very peculiar. One concerned the ghost of a labourer who appeared ‘in the shape of a horse and afterwards of a haycock’ and who helped ‘to carry beans’. Another told of a dead churchman from Kirkby who rose from his grave ‘and blew out the eye of his concubine’. A third related how a spectre had followed a man for twenty-four miles before tossing him over a hedge.² The longest of the