Picture this: It is the early 11th century, somewhere in the English countryside. A young Benedictine monk straps a pair of crude wings made from willow wood and cloth to his body, climbs a 150-foot tower, and jumps. He soars through the air for roughly 600 feet, clears the city wall, and crashes into a valley near the Avon River. Both legs are broken. He survives, but he’s crippled for life.
That’s the legend of Eilmer of Malmesbury, and honestly, it’s the kind of story that makes you wonder what medieval people were actually thinking. But here’s where it gets interesting. The flight itself may have happened at a completely different time than we thought, and a historian from the University of Leicester is now arguing that Eilmer might have confused two different comets for the same one.
We’ve known for a while that Eilmer also witnessed what was almost certainly Halley’s Comet in 1066. When he saw that fiery tail stretching across the sky, he reportedly said, “It is long since I saw you.” That line has been interpreted for years as evidence that Eilmer had seen Halley’s Comet before, specifically on an earlier pass in 989. If he was at least five years old in 989, he’d have been born no later than 984, making him in his eighties during the 1066 appearance. His ill-fated flight would have happened sometime between 1000 and 1010, when he was, as the account puts it, “in his first youth.”
Here’s the problem: all of that is built on a mountain of assumptions. James Aitcheson from the University of Leicester has published a paper in Notes and Queries that throws a wrench into the whole timeline. He suggests Eilmer’s earlier comet sighting wasn’t Halley’s Comet at all. It might have been the comet of 1018.
Think about what that changes. If Eilmer saw a different comet in 1018, he could have been born much later, perhaps in the early 1010s. That would make him over fifty in 1066, which still qualifies as being “advanced in years” without requiring him to be nearly ninety. The flight would have happened in the 1020s or 1040s, well after the year 1000.
Aitcheson notes that the comet of 1018 would have been visible in the British Isles for about two weeks in the fall. It’s entirely plausible that Eilmer, decades later, simply assumed the 1066 comet was the same one he’d seen in his youth. He did, after all, crouch in terror at the “gleaming star” in 1066, which suggests the experience was memorable and perhaps a bit terrifying.
This matters because there’s been some speculation that Eilmer understood the periodicity of comets centuries before Edmund Halley figured it out in the late 17th century. That would have been a remarkable achievement for a medieval monk. But Aitcheson isn’t buying it. He points out that we have no evidence Eilmer was an amateur astronomer, and it’s genuinely unclear whether early medieval sky-watchers could even distinguish one comet from another. The only source we have is William of Malmesbury, writing around 1125, and he never mentions Eilmer studying the heavens.
What’s particularly intriguing is that a later birth date for Eilmer makes it just possible he lived long enough to meet William of Malmesbury in person and tell him the story firsthand. That adds a layer of authenticity to the account, even as it reshapes how we understand the timeline.
So should we rename Halley’s Comet to Eilmer’s Comet? Probably not. But the story reminds us that history is full of gaps, and sometimes the simplest explanation, like an old man confusing two bright comets in the night sky, is more plausible than attributing proto-scientific insight to a medieval monk who just wanted to fly.
History has a way of humbling our heroes, doesn’t it?
