Why Did Medieval Knights Keep Fighting Giant Snails? (A very serious investigation)

By Fire Pud the Dragon - Mythical Creatures and Part-Time Castle Historian

Well this blog sent me down a slivery trail of mucus / snail slime trail. But I've recently become a little obsessed with the gigantic snails that appear in manuscripts, texts and medieval art.

Seriously Google 'gigantic medieval snails' and you will be able to scroll for days and days! And turns out that they were an absolute menace! Turns out that there was around a 200 year period where these beasts caused knights all sorts of bother (maybe there was something that medieval villagers put in the vegetable patches that caused the rapid growth!).

The snails are everywhere

From the late 13th century through to the 15th century, images of knights fighting snails appear in all sorts of unlikely places within the medieval literary world. It was not a one-off doodle from someone who was a little bit bored and it was not the occasional sketch.

THEY WERE EVERYWHERE!!!!

Sometimes the knight is mounted, sometimes not. Sometimes the snail is monstrous, sometimes tiny. Sometimes the snail has a head of a dog. Sometimes its mouth is lined with razor sharp teeth. Sometimes the snail is all the way across the page. Sometimes right under the knight's foot. Sometimes they have the face of a man. Sometimes they are being ridden by a rabbit into battle. Sometimes laser beams are shooting out of the snails menacing eyes.

Ok, the last one was a lie but the rest have all been illustrated at some point.

It is actually 'shell-arious.'

Oh, and usually the knight looks worried, stunned, or shocked by the advancing shelled gastropod mollusc (saying advancing invertebrate wouldn't have sounded as good).

Decorative panels carved around 1310 on the main entrance of Lyon Cathedral in France showcase a knight confronting a snail and another man threatening a dog-headed giant snail with an axe. They made it into a cathedral. A blinking cathedral and carved it in stone. That is there for eternity.

Despite travelling across the continent, the knight versus snail motif varied very little from country to country, which suggests it may have had a deeper meaning. Nobody, it turns out, knows exactly what that meaning was.

What Were These Drawings, Exactly?

Before we get to the snails, a quick note on where they were found.

Medieval manuscripts were expensive, time-consuming works of art. Monks and scribes would spend months, sometimes years, carefully copying religious texts by hand, illuminating them with gold leaf and extraordinary illustrations. These were holy books, prayer books, encyclopedias.

And then, in the margins, they drew snails fighting knights.

These images were unrelated to the adjoining illustrations or textual passages.

Nobody asked for them. They appear to have been added by the scribes themselves, sometimes alongside other things you would absolutely not expect to find in a 13th century prayer book, including, but not limited to, rabbits executing humans and monks behaving in ways I will not be elaborating on here (100% not child friendly).

The academic term for these margin drawings is marginalia. The doodles in medieval marginalia are editorial cartoons wrapped in enigmas. Maybe the best way to think of these in today's terms is that they are the equivalent of an olden style meme.

So why snails? Exploring the theories

Scholars have been arguing about this since at least 1850, when a French bibliophile with the magnificent name of the Comte de Bastard (seriously let us take a moment to applaud the parents who named that child!) theorised that a particular marginal snail was intended to represent the Resurrection, having found it near miniatures of the Raising of Lazarus.

This theory did not fully catch on. Mainly because it was pretty rubbish, however, far better ones did:

Theory 1: It was a joke about cowardice. Rather than showing brave knights fighting an evil foe, the snail versus knight motif may be a humorous satire on the knightly class and the idea of chivalry. Often in the pictures, the knights are shown as losing or cowering in terror. The suggestion is that snails are obviously an unworthy foe, a "base" animal whose natural lowliness makes it a humorous parody of all the elaborate jousting gear facing it. It is a way of calling knights wimps.

Theory 2: It was political. Art historian Lilian Randall had the idea that the snail was a symbol of the Lombards (a group vilified in the early Middle Ages across Italy for treasonous behaviour, the sin of usury, and "non-chivalrous comportment in general.") The Lombards, had retreated famously in a confrontation with Charlemagne in the eighth century. The snail, slow, retreating into its shell under pressure, became a running visual joke at their expense. This interpretation does not explain, however, why the knight is often depicted on the losing end of the battle, or why the image became so popular in prayer books and Psalters rather than purely historical texts.

Theory 3: It was about death. Some have put forward that the armoured snail fighting the armoured knight is a reminder of the inevitability of death, captured in Psalm 58: "Like a snail that melteth away into slime, they shall be taken away; like a dead-born child, they shall not see the sun." The knight, for all his armour and strength, will end the same way as everything else. Slime. Nothing. This would certainly explain why the images appeared so often specifically in prayer books, where thoughts of mortality were entirely appropriate.

Let's look for a more positive theory...

Theory 4: A symbol of strength. Snails were recognised in medieval times for their unusual strength, they were able to carry their home on their back. This presents a great opportunity to tell my favourite snail joke....

Qn. Why are snails the strongest of all animals?

Ans. Because they carry a house on their back!

Some scholars have also pointed out that in several manuscript images, the snail occupies the high ground, making it appear less a symbol of cowardice and more a surprisingly effective military strategist, implying that the knights are not so much cowardly as they are simply incompetent.

Theory 5: It was just medieval internet. While the medieval mind was attuned to all sorts of symbolism, perhaps much marginalia was intended and received simply as amusing entertainment. The monks were bored. The texts were long. The monks got more bored. Someone drew a snail fighting a knight. Everyone thought it was extremely funny. It spread.

This is, essentially, the medieval equivalent of a meme going viral, and once it started, every illuminator across Northern Europe added their own version and what a chuckle they all must have had.

So, why snails?

The image of the knight and the snail could have had multiple meanings.

It was probably all of these things simultaneously. A political joke for some readers. A meditation on death for others. A bit of light relief from copying the same psalm for the forty-seventh time that month. A meme that had escaped its original context entirely and was now just the thing you drew.

The truth is we don't know and we never will. And that, somehow, makes it even better.

Personally, the last theory seems the best fit. People find certain things funny. Who wouldn't find a gigantic snail battling a knight funny? It was the '6' '7' of the medieval period. No one knows why it became popular. It just was and it would have been extremely annoying to lots and lots of people!

Join Jack's Shield Wall — the free Good Knight community — at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall. New members this month receive a free Guide to Medieval Insults. Which, given the above, now includes "thou retreat like a Lombard."