A (NEW, TRUE) MEDIEVAL GHOST STORY

Strange goings-on in a remote French castle haunted one fourteenth century chronicler all his life

In the autumn of 1388 the great chronicler-historian Jean Froissart visited the town of Orthéz, in the far south of France.

He went there to research the third book of his great chronicle of the Hundred Years War (as we know it today), because he reckoned Orthéz was a good place to hang out and catch the gossip on the southern theatre of the war, which was being fought in Spain and Portugal.

And indeed it was. But while he was there, Froissart got rather more than he bargained for. When he arrived in Orthéz he checked into a pub called The Hostelry of the Moon. Within hours of arriving, he was summoned to the castle that loomed over the town, where he was welcomed by the local lord: Gaston III ‘Phoebus’, count of Foix.

The count was an extraordinary character. Like Froissart, he was in his fifties, and, also like Froissart, he had lived an adventurous and active life. Froissart found him generous, pious, cheerful and handsome: fond of animals and always open-handed with beggars and the needy.

But the count had some peculiar habits. Some were merely idiosyncratic. He liked to sleep all afternoon and take his dinner at midnight, when he would devour chicken wings by torchlight for two hours and listen to minstrels sing. He kept a staff of secretaries to help him read his correspondence and send out letters, but he seemed to know none of their names. When he wanted them, he would simply bellow ‘You Shocking Servant!’ and expect one of them to come running.

Other aspects of his character were downright odd. In particular, the count seemed preternaturally well informed about everything. No one, it was said, could misplace a spoon in his house, without him knowing about it instantly.

Then there was the dark history of the family. Count Gaston had once had a son, also called Gaston. But almost a decade earlier, in the summer of 1380, the younger Gaston had become foolishly embroiled in a plot to poison his father. He was betrayed and imprisoned, his personal servants were tortured to death and Gaston junior died soon after in his cell. It was whispered that Gaston senior had cut his throat with the knife he used to pare his nails. The boy was just 18.

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Despite all this, Froissart found that the count was such a wonderful source of information about deeds of war that he could put up with the oddities of his castle. So he stayed with the count for twelve weeks.

During that time, he heard from the count and his entourage some of the most thrilling - and bizarre - stories he had ever come across. Some of them were hair-raising war stories, others of love-rivalries that ended in tragic cycles of violence.

One story told of the count’s bastard brother, Sir Peter of Béarn, who was tormented by a curse that had been laid on him after he hunted and killed a gigantic bear. Sir Peter was doomed to sleepwalk around his chamber every night with his sword in his hand, fighting an invisible enemy, making ‘such a raring and a roaring that it sounded as if all the devils of hell were in there with him.’ His wife and children had grown tired of this and abandoned him.

But the strangest story of all involved the count of Foix himself and his apparently inexplicable ability to know everything about everything. It was so weird, Froissart later wrote, that ‘I have thought about it a hundred times and shall remember it as long as I live.’

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It was a squire who told Froissart about it.

Three years ago, the squire said, on 14th August 1385, there had been a great battle fought at Aljubarrota, in Portugal. The Castilians had smashed the Portuguese. This was a minor disaster for the people of the area over which the count ruled, many of whom had gone south to fight in the battle, ignoring the count’s advice not to do so. Almost all of them had been killed.

So far, so Hundred Years War. But what was weird - inexplicable, even - was that the very day after the battle was fought, the count seemed to know its outcome. The fighting had taken place 1,000km away, far on the other side of the Pyrenées. There was no way for anyone in Orthéz to have heard about it, let alone its outcome, for at least a week.

Yet on Sunday 15th August, the count had fallen into a deep gloom and would not leave his bedroom. Eventually one of his brothers (not the nocturnal bear-baiter) managed to drag out of him what was up.

‘It is a hundred years,’ said the count, since their region had lost so many men ‘in a single day as have died this time in Portugal.’

Ten days later, the official reports of the battle arrived. It was exactly as the count had said. But how?

Froissart was at a loss. The squire decided to let him in on a secret.

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Once upon a time there was another lord in that part of France, whose lands neighboured the count of Foix’s. He was known as Raymond, lord of Corresse, and one way or another he ended up falling out with a cleric, who laid a hex on him, promising to send him a ‘champion who will frighten you more than I do.’

Raymond found this very amusing until a few months later, as he lay in bed with his wife, there came ‘invisible messengers’ who charged around his castle smashing crockery, throwing pots and pans around and thumping as hard as they could on Raymond’s bedroom door.

The servants were terrified. Raymond’s wife was scared out of her wits. But Raymond was made of sterner stuff. He told the staff and his wife to relax. It was nothing to worry about - a dream, most probably. They needed to all get a grip.

The next night, the ‘invisible messengers’ came again This time, however, Raymond was ready, and when the commotion started, he sat up in bed and demanded to know who was causing all the rumpus. ‘It’s me, it’s me,’ said a voice.

‘Who?’ replied Raymond. And the voice explained that they were a ghost called Orton, who had been sent by the disgruntled priest to raise a bit of hell as payback for Raymond’s misdeeds.

Raymond considered this for a moment, and then made Orton an audacious offer. Listen, he said, you don’t want to be working for some idiot priest. 'You’ll have endless trouble if you believe everything he tells you,’ he argued. Then he asked Orton to come and work for him. He promised that he would appreciate Orton more than the priest ever had, provided he didn’t hurt anyone in the castle.

As it turns out, that’s all Orton really wanted: a bit of love. He agreed to jump ship, and told Raymond that he would certainly not hurt anyone in the castle, since his ghostly powers were really only limited to making a lot of noise.

And so was born a fruitful partnership between ghost and man, which profited them both - and eventually came to profit the old lord of Foix as well.

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Once the invisible ghost Orton had agreed to come and work for Raymond, a sort of nightly routine started up. Most evenings the ghost would come banging around the castle. Raymond’s wife would freak out and hide under the covers, and while she shivered there, Raymond and Orton would have a chat about the latest goings-on around Europe.

Orton, being a ghost of (presumably) no mass, had the superpower of near-instantaneous travel about the globe, so he could report to Raymond whatever had happened that day in England, Germany, Hungary and so on. Raymond would then be able to pass on these tidbits as good gossip to his mates and associates. One of these was our friend Gaston, count of Foix.

And so the story comes together. The count of Foix found Raymond’s newfound ability to break the news irresistible, and eventually managed to winkle out of him where he was getting all this juicy intel.

‘I wish I had a messenger like that,’ said the count, one day. He told Raymond to take good care of Orton. But he also sowed in Raymond’s mind a dangerous idea.

What did Orton look like, the count asked?

Raymond realised he had no idea. He also realised he had to know.

A few nights later, Raymond was lying in bed, when Orton blundered in as usual, and woke him up to tell him that the Holy Roman Emperor was dead. He had just come from Prague, he said, which was sixty days’ ride away from southern France.

Raymond asked Orton how he got around so quickly. What was his secret? Did he have wings? What, in fact, did he look like?

Orton tried to deflect him, but Raymond persisted. ‘I should love you much better if I had seen you,’ he said.

Okay, said Orton. I’ll come tomorrow and show you.

Then he left.

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The next morning Raymond waited around for Orton to appear. His wife was scared out of her wits, and begged him not to look. Raymond hushed her, and sat around all day expecting to get a glimpse of his ghostly correspondent. Yet no one came, and by the evening, when Orton arrived, invisible as usual, to tell a few more stories, Raymond was fed up. Why, he asked, had Orton wasted his time?

Oh, said Orton, so you didn’t spot me! He had been there, he said, in the form of a couple of straws blowing around on the floor.

Raymond was having none of this. Come back tomorrow, he said, and let’s do this damned thing properly. A pair of straws indeed!

Orton huffed. He would do it, he said, but really, Raymond was asking a lot and if he wasn’t careful, he would get bored of working for such an annoying master. He would come tomorrow, and he would be the first thing Raymond saw when he left his room. But after that, it would be best if they could get back to business as usual.

In the morning, Raymond woke up, put on his clothes and hurried out of his room, into the castle’s courtyard, looking around for Orton. When he got there he was annoyed to see that somehow or other, one of the old pigs on his estate had wandered into the castle: a saggy, wretched old she-pig, with saggy teats and no meat on her.

Furious that this should have happened when he was waiting for Orton, Raymond called for the master of hounds to set the castle’s dogs on the pig. Soon enough, the kennels had been thrown open and the dogs raced out, whereupon they started to attack the poor pig, which let out a loud squeal, stared straight at Raymond - and then disappeared.

Raymond realised immediately what he’d done. The pig, needless to say, was Orton, and Orton, having had quite enough of Raymond, never returned to his castle. The news petered out, and so did Raymond’s health. By the end of the year he was dead.

But here, the squire told Froissart, was a peculiar thing. Although Raymond was long gone, his old confidant, Gaston count of Foix, master of the castle in Orthéz, still seemed to be as well and instantly acquainted with European news as he had been when Raymond was feeding him Orton’s bulletins.

Could it be, Froissart asked, as they huddled in the corner of the castle, that the count had an Orton of his own? Could it even be that Orton himself now served the count of Foix, and was the one who had brought him the ill tidings of the battlefield catastrophe down in Portugal?

All I know, said the squire, is that the count knows everything. ‘Nothing is done in this country - and outside it too - in which he is really interested, but he knows about it at once, however closely the secret is guarded.’

Then they parted ways, and Froissart enjoyed the rest of the evening relaxing in other company. A few weeks later, he left the castle. But he never forgot what he was told, and, as I have said, he thought about it over and over again for as long as he lived.

Even better than that, Froissart wrote down everything he had been told about Raymond and Orton and the count of Foix faithfully in his chronicle, so that future generations could puzzle over exactly what had happened down there in the south of France.

What or who was Orton? Is he still around today? I don’t know. But I do know that it is one of the weirdest tales I’ve ever come across in the Middle Ages, which is why I am telling it to you now, more than six hundred years after the event, on Hallowe’en.