The slogan of the Medieval Death Bot is “real deaths from medieval coroner’s rolls,” and that’s precisely what the deliciously informative Twitter feed has been serving up for several years now.
It’s kind of like a Chaucerian version of the TV show Cops. Everywhere you turn there’s a guy receiving a fatal arrow wound because of a “quarrel” or having his brains “struck ... from his skull.”
The person behind the Medieval Death Bot informs us that “tweets are all (highly condensed) accounts of death from medieval coroner’s rolls.” Further, the reader is reminded that the death rolls do not cover what were considered “good deaths” that took place in a bed with a priest giving last rites, for instance. The rolls cover death by misadventure.
The Twitterer also provides some of the many reasons so many people died by drowning in rivers (rivers are cold; wool clothes get heavy when wet; buckets were very heavy).
In a way, the trick of the feed is the same as Twitter itself, which is that awful situations are best described with extreme & bland terseness. So it’s hard not to laugh when you read that Nicholas le Clerk perished at the age of 14 in 1432 because he was “dragged to death by a horse which had been startled by a bird.” No further information is given, and that image can imprint itself on your brain in any number of ways, and if you want you can go to your own grave wondering what the hell happened with that bird and that horse.
If you’re really lucky, someone will write a tweet about your death that’s as funny as that one.
Here are a few of the more interesting deaths:
Robert de Shordiche, stabbed under the right breast in 1300 by William le Wallere who had accused him of stealing his tunic.
— Medieval Death Bot (@DeathMedieval) October 20, 2015
Agnes Perone, half a year old, died 1396, killed by a sow, who ate her head even to the nose. The sow was arrested
— Medieval Death Bot (@DeathMedieval) December 29, 2016
Several more terrible deaths, after the jump…