Did this medieval monk discover Halley’s comet centuries before Halley?

He also strapped wings to his hands and feet and glided for 200 meters.

Have you ever heard the story of the medieval monk who tried to fly?

His name was Eilmer of Malmesbury, and he was quite the guy. Around a thousand years ago, this Benedictine monk reportedly strapped wings to his hands and feet, climbed a tower, caught the wind, and launched himself into the air.

For a moment, it worked (according to historians).

According to the 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury, Eilmer glided for roughly 200 meters before crashing so badly that he broke his legs and remained crippled for the rest of his life. To this day,it remains one of the weirdest stories in medieval science. But that’s not the last history heard of Eilmer.

Decades later, William wrote, Eilmer saw the great comet of 1066. This is the same object we now call Halley’s Comet. But Eilmer had also seen it as a child and recognized it. Basically, according to William of Malmesbury, this medieval monk may have discovered one of the world’s most famous comets. But is this really the case? A new study by James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, investigated that.

A Monk With Wings

William of Malmesbury isn’t some unreliable myth-maker. He was a fellow monk at Malmesbury Abbey, writing in the early 12th century. By all accounts, he’s the foremost English historian of the 12th century. In fact, according to modern historians, he was a gifted and well-versed scholar.

His account is the main source for almost everything we know about Eilmer.

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William says Eilmer was learned “for those times.” Even this backhanded compliment was pretty remarkable from a guy like William. In his youth, Eilmer became fascinated by the classical story of Daedalus, who builds wings of wax. So he built wings and fixed them to his hands and feet. Then he climbed a tower at Malmesbury and jumped.

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For a medieval experiment, this was an astonishingly bold experiment. William says Eilmer flew for more than a furlong, or somewhere around 200 meters. He then lost control, fell, broke both legs, and never walked again.

William said that the monk blamed his crash on a missing tail. In other words, he had stumbled onto the problem of how to keep a glider balanced in the air centuries before anyone could test it properly.

That story alone is extraordinary, but Eilmer appears once more in William’s chronicle — not as a flyer this time, but as an old monk staring up at the sky.

Halley’s Comet: Origins

Long before astronomers understood cometary orbits, people treated them as warnings. They appeared without notice, burned for days or weeks, then vanished. In medieval Europe, they were often read as signs of famine, war, royal death, or divine anger.

The comet of 1066 became one of the most famous in European history. It appeared during the short reign of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, and shortly before the Norman Conquest that ultimately led to Britain as we know it today. The famous Bayeux Tapestry later included it among the scenes leading to Harold’s defeat.

Today, astronomers know that object as 1P/Halley. It returns roughly every 76 years, though the exact interval varies because of gravitational interactions with the planets. Edmond Halley linked comet sightings from 1531, 1607, and 1682 and argued that they were the same object returning again. He predicted its return in 1758, and the comet was later named in his honor.

But Halley did not discover the comet itself. People had seen it for many centuries. Chinese astronomers recorded the 1066 appearance for more than two months, and Europeans folded it into the story of conquest and catastrophe. Apparently, so did Eilmer.

William says that when Eilmer saw the comet in 1066, he reacted with fear and recognition. In William’s telling, Eilmer said it had been a long time since he had seen it before. This is plausible, as Halley’s previous passage in 989. If that’s what Eilmer remembered, he must have been a child.

But James Aitcheson, a researcher at the University of Leicester, argues in a new Notes and Queries article that Eilmer may have been remembering a different comet.

The Crossover

Some researchers have recently argued that Halley’s Comet has the wrong name. Their case is that Eilmer saw the comet in 989 and again in 1066, realized it was the same object, and therefore recognized its periodicity more than 600 years before Edmond Halley. Leiden University summarized that argument earlier this year, crediting Eilmer as the original discoverer.

But there was another notable comet that appeared over Britain and Ireland in 1018. If that was the comet Eilmer remembered in 1066, then he could have been born much later than scholars assumed.

The sources, and William of Malmesbury especially, note that Eilmer saw a comet, feared it, and remembered he had seen it before. But there’s no guarantee if this was the same comet or a different one, and there’s no evidence that Eilmer understood the periodic nature of the comet.

So the case for renaming Halley’s Comet remains thin. Eilmer may have noticed a return or he may have misremembered. Both readings remain possible, and the surviving record cannot settle the matter.

But none of this makes Eilmer any less interesting. He still built wings, climbed a tower, jumped, and paid for the experiment with his body. Even more remarkably, he seems to have understood something about why it failed.

Malmesbury still remembers him. The abbey has honored Brother Eilmer in stained glass, and local tradition links a nearby lane with his landing. A thousand years later, the flying monk remains suspended somewhere between legend and science — not because he conquered the sky, but because he dared to treat it as reachable.

The study was published in the journal Notes and Queries.