The scaraveens and the Ice Saints, whose reign of terror passed last weekend, are not the only supposed supernatural disrupters of weather in May.
Folklorists also insist we need to worry about St Dunstan, a 10th century English holy man, and a pact that according to legend he once made with the devil.
By the time of his death on May 19th, 988, Dunstan was the Archbishop of Canterbury. But as a young man in Glastonbury, he had brewed beer for a living.
And, seeking a competitive advantage once over his west country rivals – cider makers – he is said to have entered a diabolical business partnership by which, in return for his soul, late spring frosts would nip the local apple blossoms in the bud.
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Dunstan later extricated himself the deal, it seems. But the devil considered it more binding. A millennium later, he still sends the occasional frost around the saint’s feast day, for old times’ sake.
More reliable accounts of Dunstan’s life tell us that a bigger influence in his youth were Irish monks. Yes, long before CMAT or Kneecap, monks from this island headlined at Glastonbury as part of their English missions.
On becoming a monk himself, Dunstan worked in their scriptorium, illuminating manuscripts. He also became a skilled silversmith. Inevitably, this attracted renewed interest from his former fallen-angel investor.
According to the saint’s official biographer, Dunstan was visited nightly by the devil, who often took the form of serpents, bears and other animals. But one night the demon appeared as a woman, and, peering in the window of the silversmith’s forge, “began to tempt him with improper conversation”.
The young saint played along while his tongs heated in the fire. Then, identifying the temptress as Lucifer incarnate (let’s hope he was right), he clamped the red-hot tongs on her nose.
The incident is still commemorated by an English folk rhyme: “St Dunstan, as the story goes/Once pull’d the devil by the nose/With red-hot tongs, which made him roar/That he was heard three miles or more.”
On another occasion, Dunstan nailed a horseshoe to the devil’s foot, removing it only after the howling demon promised not to return. This may or may not be the source of the tradition whereby horseshoes are still nailed over doors for protection or good luck.
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Back in the realm of the historically plausible, Dunstan has been proposed as the author of a famous medieval poem, Solomon and Saturn, partly because of the text’s Hiberno-Latin, a dialect in which he was schooled.
Hiberno-Latin was a highly formal, literary version of the language, first used by Irish monks from the 6th century onwards and later spread throughout Europe by their influence.
It incorporated bits of Greek and Hebrew. And it’s thought the dialect’s curious formality arose because, learning Latin from books and not being native speakers of a romance language, the original scholars couldn’t differentiate between obscure and common vocabulary.
St Dunstan’s supposed early flirtation with the devil may have been propaganda spread by enemies ... As a young man of noble birth, he was appointed to the court of King Aethelstan, to whom he became a favourite
Anyway, it spread with their monasteries and gradually influenced the work of scholars in other countries too before dying out in the 12th century.
One of its last great literary flowerings was a religious saga from circa 1148: the Visio Tnugdali (translated into English as The Vision of Tundale), written by a Brother Marcus, Irish-born but based in a monastery in Regensburg, Germany.
Set in Cork, it described a knight’s journey into Heaven and Hell: a popular literary genre then that would influence, and reach its high point with, Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The introduction to an early English translation, written in verse couplets, gives a flavour of what made it such a page turner: “I woll yow tell what befell than/In Yrlond of a rych man/Tvndale was is ryght name/He was man of wykud fame/He was ryche ynow of ryches/But he was poor of all gudnesse.”
The knight’s conversion from “wykud” ways became a medieval blockbuster. Well, it was translated at least 43 times by the 15th century and into many languages including Belorussian, Icelandic and Old Norse. Of the original Latin version, 172 manuscripts have been found.
Getting back to St Dunstan, his supposed early flirtation with the devil may have been propaganda spread by enemies. As a young man of noble birth, he was appointed to the court of King Aethelstan, to whom he became a favourite.
Rivals worked to discredit him with diabolical associations and, when he was finally expelled, pressed home their advantage with another well-known medieval tactic: beating him up and throwing him into a cesspool.
Happily, he survived that and the subsequent, related outbreak of infections all over his body, before the experience somehow persuaded him that he had a religious vocation.
Whether St Dunstan is responsible for sudden frosts around May 19th is of course debatable. In any case, the danger has now passed for another year, along with the scaraveens and Ice Saints. And sure enough, on cue, weather forecasters are now predicting the imminent outbreak of summer.
