Revenant

From the Old French *revenir*, to return. A category older than its name, recorded in twelfth- and thirteenth-century English and French chronicles. William of Newburgh and Walter Map both describe the recently dead leaving their graves to return to the houses of the living, often the houses of those they had loved or wronged. The remedy in the chronicles is direct. The body was disinterred and either burned or, in the older Anglo-Saxon counties, decapitated and the head placed between the legs. The name is broader than the practice. Any returner of unfinished business is, in the medieval voice, a revenant.

The English chronicler tradition of the twelfth century is the earliest densely recorded body of revenant accounts in any European language. The figures are not yet vampires in the later Slavic sense. They are persons known to the village, dead within recent memory, whose return is a problem to be solved with funerary technology rather than with theology.