Per the statement, medieval artists may have been painting the Lombards as “cowardly and malicious” by depicting them as slimy snails.Īlternative explanations for the knight versus snail motif describe it “as a representation of the struggles of the poor against an oppressive aristocracy, a straightforward statement of the snail’s troublesome reputation as a garden pest, a commentary on social climbers, or even as a … symbol of female sexuality,” according to the British Library. Another theory is that it’s a kind of visual insult directed at the Germanic Lombard people, who ruled a medieval kingdom in what is now Italy.
Some scholars suspect that the image represents an allusion to the biblical resurrection. Snails appear frequently in medieval manuscripts, often engaging in combat against armed knights, as the British Library noted in a 2013 blog post. The museum suggests that the ornament “may have been a form of a medieval meme.” Like today’s internet memes, it appears to take a visual motif from one context and transform it for comic effect. It may have decorated a leather belt or strap or been worn as a badge. Per BBC News, the object, which measures less than an inch long, dates to sometime between 12. The London museum revealed the artifact this month in its latest Treasure Act Annual Report.Ī 14th-century depiction of a knight battling a snail, as illustrated in the margins of the Gorleston Psalter The snail man was one of more than 47,000 archaeological finds made in England and Wales last year. Nenk adds, “The mount may be a satirical reference to cowardly or non-chivalric behavior of opponents in battle, or as a parody of the upper or knightly classes.” “ Snails are often depicted in the margins of medieval illuminated decorated manuscripts and are thought to symbolize cowardice, and this may be the intended meaning.” “The image … implies an element of parody or satire,” says Beverley Nenk, curator of later medieval collections at the British Museum, in a statement.
The tiny, carefully crafted silver-gilt mount shows a praying knight emerging from a snail shell, which is balanced on the back of a goat. That’s one interpretation, at least, of a small, medieval-era metal object discovered in West Yorkshire, England, last year, as Craig Simpson reports for the Telegraph. Slugs, snails, snakes, dragons, Kraken, animal-headed men, etc.Discoveries of objects from hundreds of years ago can help reveal how people worked, played and worshipped-and, perhaps, what they found funny. How does one draw that which defies description? With the closest real-world comparisons. It’s evidence of the ancient and deep-rooted war against the Old Ones.Because snails are even deadlier than killer rabbits.It’s allegorical: the knights fought boredom daily: no Internet, no TV, it was the old, olden times.Snails represent sloth, one of the 7 deadly sins.Earth was invaded by giant alien snails, and those pictures are the only surviving record of it.Those rebelling against them are doomed to fail. The snail’s shell is one of the creatures which exhibit the phenomenon of Phi, thus representing nature and God.The passage of inevitability is the foe every individual, no matter how strong, faces. Here is a selection of my favorite ones from the Vintage News’ Facebook page: Where historians have failed, the Internet has stepped in with some explanations ranging from the fanciful to the hilarious. She proposed that the snail was a symbol of the Lombards, a group vilified in the early middle ages for treasonous behavior, the sin of usury, and ‘non-chivalrous comportment in general.’ However, she could not explain why the knight was always supposed to lose the battle.
Lillian Randall proposed a further explanation that could account for the fact that snails so often antagonized the knights. We’re supposed to laugh at the idea of a knight being afraid of attacking such a ‘heavily armored’ opponent. In her book The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare, she presented one hypothesis to explain the reasoning behind these drawings: perhaps the joke is that snails, what with the shells they carry on their backs and can hide away in, are some sort of parody of a highly-armored chivalric foe. The first serious contemporary study of this odd phenomenon was written in the 1960s by Lillian Randall. So, what was the deal here? Historians have been unable to come to a unified answer. Photo: Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, c 1315-1325 via British Library
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