Medieval manuscripts often feature quirky marginalia, doodles and illustrations in the borders of pages, depicting knights battling giant snails. These images, common in 13th- and 14th-century European manuscripts, particularly in France and England, have puzzled historians for centuries. Despite their frequency, no single explanation fully accounts for their meaning, and scholars offer several theories, each with its own logic and gaps. Here's a rundown of the leading interpretations:

1.Symbol of Cowardice or Satire of Chivalry: One theory suggests these snails represent cowardice, poking fun at knights who, despite their shiny armor and heroic bravado, cower before a slow, slimy foe. Art historian Lilian Randall proposed the snails might symbolise the Lombards, a group maligned in the Middle Ages for usury and "non-chivalric" behaviour. The idea is that the knight's struggle against a seemingly weak opponent mocks either specific groups or the knightly class itself, exposing the fragility of their hyper-masculine ideals. Imagine a scribe chuckling as he draws a burly knight trembling before a snail, whispering, "Take that, Sir Brags-a-Lot!"

2.Metaphor for Death or Resurrection: Medievalist Lisa Spangenberg links the snail to Psalm 58, which describes the wicked as "like a snail which melts away as it goes." The snail, with its slow, inevitable crawl toward dissolution, could symbolise death's inescapability, even for mighty warriors. Alternatively, in 1850, Comte de Bastard noted snails appearing near images of the Raising of Lazarus, suggesting a connection to resurrection. This theory paints the knight's battle as a profound existential struggle, less "slay the dragon," more "stare down your mortality while a snail taunts you." Deep, but a bit of a stretch for every doodle.

3.Class Struggle or Social Commentary: Some scholars see the snail as a stand-in for social climbers or the lower classes, slowly but steadily encroaching on the elite. The knight's futile battle could reflect aristocratic anxiety about losing status to persistent "pests." Or, as one theory goes, the snail might represent women, with the knight's defeat poking fun at gender dynamics. Picture a medieval artist giggling, "Look at this noble lord, bested by a mollusc, sounds like my last argument with the missus!" This idea, though, assumes a level of social critique that might not fit every context.

4.Garden Pests and Monastic Frustration: A more grounded theory points to the monks who often created these manuscripts. As gardeners, they loathed snails for devouring crops. Drawing knights battling these "villains" could be a humorous outlet for their agricultural woes. "Take that, you lettuce-munching menace!" a monk might mutter, penning a snail with sword-like antennae. This explanation, while relatable, doesn't fully explain why the motif spread so widely beyond monastic scriptoria.

5.Just a Meme, Medieval Style: Perhaps the simplest explanation is that these drawings were the medieval equivalent of internet memes, silly, absurd, and shared for laughs. Scribes, bored with copying dry texts, might have doodled knights versus snails as an in-joke, copied across manuscripts like a viral TikTok trend. The British Library notes that marginalia often had no direct link to the text, serving as comic relief. Why snails? They're easy to draw, and the absurdity of a knight fearing one is inherently funny.

No single theory holds up universally. The motif's consistency across Europe, knights, often worried or losing, facing snails in various sizes, suggests a shared cultural joke or symbol, but its meaning likely shifted by context. Some manuscripts show snails fighting nuns or being ridden by rabbits, hinting at playful absurdity over deep allegory. Art historian Kenneth Clarke argues that expecting one tidy explanation is futile; these images were likely "multivalent," meaning different things to different artists and audiences.

These snail battles, whether mocking knights, lamenting pests, or just goofing off, reveal a medieval world far less stuffy than we imagine. Scribes had a sense of humour, and their doodles remind us that even in the "Dark Ages," people loved a good laugh, especially at the expense of a knight who can't handle a snail. As one scholar put it, these images show that "gender, class, and even heroism have always been contested."

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-the-mystery-of-the-medieval-fighting-snails

"The pages of medieval books are stalked by a ferocious monster: the fighting snail.

The knight pulls his arm back, poised to strike. He's dressed in the typical armour of the 14th Century, with a chainmail suit, belted tunic and bucket-style helmet. Standing within a small grassy clearing, he's holding up a shield which, inexplicably, has its own face. He also wields a club, which brushes the bottom of a swathe of religious text on the yellowed page of the medieval book he's drawn onto.

But even within the pages of antique tomes, knights must face mortal perils. This one's chivalric opponent is a particularly slippery beast – a foe often found slinking along in their margins and engaging noblemen in deadly combat. Sometimes the creatures appear to be hovering, attacking knights in mid-air. Occasionally there is more than one. This is the uniquely medieval phenomenon of the fighting snail – and to this day, why they were depicted remains utterly mysterious.

The phenomenon was so ubiquitous that any single explanation seems unlikely to give a reliable account for the fashion (Credit: The British Library)

"This has created a good deal of puzzlement amongst art historians and book historians, wondering just what do they mean?" says Kenneth Clarke, a senior lecturer in medieval literature at the University of York in the UK.

"Marginalia" artworks are those found in the margins of books. In the Middle Ages, once the text of a manuscript had been finished, the most exclusive might receive a final flourish – intricate borders of curly foliage, fantastical creatures and other assorted drawings. Sometimes these were added immediately, and sometimes many decades later, but they were no casual undertaking – often painted with precious pigments like lapis lazuli or highlighted in gold.

"These were very, very, very expensive books, with very small numbers of readers," says Clarke.

The embellishments are found in a wide variety of religious works, including psalters (for songs), books of hours (for prayers), breviaries (for daily prayers), pontificals (for the rituals performed by bishops), and decretals (papal letters). They could be bizarre, playful, grotesque, and even rude – with bare bottoms, penises, medical conditions, and a surprisingly large number of bloodthirsty rabbits gracing the pages of otherwise sober devotional texts. Often, marginalia seem to have little connection to the text they're found next to.

But for a brief period in the late 13th Century, illuminators – those who decorated books – across Europe embraced a new obsession: fighting snails. For a comprehensive study of these warring gastropods, the art historian Lilian Randall counted 70 examples, in 29 different books – most of which were printed in the two decades between 1290 and 1310. The illustrations are found across Europe, but particularly in France, where there was a thriving manuscript-production industry at the time, says Clarke.

The specific scenarios that warring snails found themselves in varied, but broadly followed the same format of a snail-assailant standing off against a knight. Often, the molluscs have their antenna – technically their upper tentacles, or ommatophores – pointed aggressively forwards, as though they were swords. In one, a snail is shown fighting a nude woman. In a few they're not depicted as regular molluscs at all, but hybrids between snails and men – who are being ridden by rabbits, naturally.

Eventually, the warring snail meme even started to spill over into other places in the medieval world, such as cathedrals, where they were carved into facades or, in one case, hidden behind a kind of folding seat.

So why were they there?

"The snail-knight fight is an example of the world turned upside down, a broader phenomenon that produced a lot of different medieval images," says Marian Bleeke, a professor of medieval art at the University of Chicago. "The basic idea is the overturning of existing or expected hierarchies. It is supposed to be surprising and even funny – I think we get that implicitly today," she says.

However, whether these drawings had deeper symbolic meanings beyond this status-flipping remains extremely murky. "The knight ought to be brave and strong, able to defeat all enemies, but here he cowers in fear in front of a snail or is even defeated by one. Where we might disagree is where to go from there," she says.

Many interpretations have been put forward – including the idea that the snail fights represent the struggle between the upper and lower classes, or even the resurrection.

One leading idea is that the knights portrayed tackling snails represented cowardice – and their addition to religious texts may have been satirical. As Randall pointed out, many snail scenes involve a knight kneeling in prayer in front of his slimy attacker, or dropping his sword, with some showing a woman begging the gallant fighter not to engage such a deadly enemy.

Building on the theme of the gutless knight, Randall suggested that the snail motif may have been a political commentary – with the knights representing the Lombards, a Germanic people who ran the Lombard Kingdom in modern-day Italy until the late 8th Century. "[The Lombards were shown] as this group who were collecting taxes, but also involved in usury," says Clarke.

In medieval France – where most of the snail drawings were made – the Lombards were smeared in various ways, such as with suggestions they were unhygienic and cowardly. Randall noted that by the 12th Century, they had become synonymous with non-chivalrous behaviour in general. In one popular legend, a Lombard peasant encountered a heavily armoured snail, which the gods encourage him to fight – while his wife pleads with him not to be so reckless.

Clarke is sceptical of this particular idea, considering how common snail wars are in medieval books. Bleeke explains that today historians are less likely to expect marginal images to have such narrow meanings. "I just don't think that's how images work," she says. "I would want to look at how the snail was represented, what it looked like, and where it was located, in order to think about the meaning being made in a specific instance."

But whether Randall was right or not, Bleeke thinks they can teach us something important about how masculinity was viewed in the medieval world. "The brave, strong knight is an ideal or idealised version of masculinity, and the snail fight undermines that," she says. "To me these images show us that gender has never been as stable or secure as some people might want to think. It has always been a site of contestation."