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

By Chris Livemore

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' - you can scroll or days and days!

When I started writing this blog, I was fairly confident the answer was going to be simple. Perhaps there had been an unfortunate period of giant snail activity across medieval Europe. Perhaps medieval snails were just built different. And perhaps we are very, very, very, very lucky with how they have evolved. Similar to the T-Rex and the chicken.

Turns out that the truth is considerably stranger than that.

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. Not occasionally. Not as a one-off doodle from someone who was a little bit bored.

Everywhere.

Sometimes the knight is mounted, sometimes not. Sometimes the snail is monstrous, sometimes tiny. Sometimes the snail has a head o 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 laser beams are shooting out of the snails menacing eyes. Ok, the last one was a lie, but seriously Google this.

It is 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 cathedral. Carved in stone. 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 — because this matters.

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. They were everywhere!

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 and 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 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. At all. 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: The snail was a surprisingly scary symbol. Snails were recognised in medieval times for their unusual strength, they were able to carry their home on their back (great time to tell the children an all time classic snail joke...Qn.Why are snails the strongest 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.

So, why snails?

The image of the knight and the snail could have had multiple meanings. That is really key to understanding what marginalia is all about.

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 that, somehow, makes it 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 isn't like they had copies of the Beano lying around to flick through!

It was the '6' '7' of the medieval period. No one knows why it became popular. It just was.

What would Jack make of this?

I told my five-year-old about the snail problem. She listened carefully and then went outside to look for snails with her brother. Maybe with a little more caution than usual.

Later she came back in and confidently informed me that "The snail would win." She'd put a lot of thought into this, something about the knight's sword not being enough to damage a snail's shell, unless their was a very big bird the snail was all but invincible.

I asked her if Fire Pud would help.

"Fire Pud would try to make friends with the snail," she said. "And then accidentally sit on it." It does beg the question as to how a gigantic snail, let's call him Gregory, would fare if he rocked up at the GOOD KNIGHT'S castle. Only one way to find out!

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."

You're welcome.