The vampires of Burton-on-Trent

According to a late Anglo-Saxon chronicle, two peasants who had recently died were seen wandering down the village’s main street with their coffins on their backs. They would hammer on the doors of the living, calling on them by name, and those whose names were called soon sickened – and some of them died.

The villagers opened up the graves of the two revenants to see what was going on, and found the corpses there strangely undecayed, and the cloths over their faces stained with fresh blood. The folk knew just what to do: they cut off the corpses’ heads and laid them between their legs, and cut out their hearts and burned them. Two black birds were seen flying up from the fire; after that there was no more walking again, and those who had fallen ill sick recovered.

Medieval chronicles feature many tales of the undead; in one such tale, an undead man tries to get into bed with his widow and nearly crushes her to death; in another a zombie priest gouges out his mistress’s eye. Meanwhile, in another tale a vampire at Alnwick in Northumberland was found in his grave all “bloated with blood”. Writing in the 1190s, William of Newburgh, the chronicler who records the other cases mentioned above, observes that the walking dead are so commonplace these days that they are almost too tedious to catalogue.

The history: The Anglo-Saxon historian John Blair has investigated these early tales of English vampires as recorded in various chronicles: he suggests that the huge upheaval in English society brought about by the Norman Conquest and its aftermath led people to feel that nothing was certain anymore: that the very boundaries between life and death were no longer as rigid as they once were. Certainly, fewer stories of the undead are recorded after 1200, by which time the changes wrought by the Normans had become the new status quo.