AINEWS
A medieval monk's 600-foot glide and the 'twice' a 12th-century chronicle can't confirm
Eilmer of Malmesbury reportedly launched himself from a 150 foot tower on willow and cloth wings and lived to see Halley's Comet pass overhead in 1066.
Eilmer of Malmesbury reportedly launched himself from a 150 foot tower on willow and cloth wings and lived to see Halley's Comet pass overhead in 1066.
The 'twice' in every headline about Eilmer of Malmesbury is the question, not the answer. Eilmer, an 11th-century Benedictine monk, allegedly launched himself from a 150-foot tower on wings stitched from willow and cloth, glided roughly 600 feet, and crash-landed hard enough to break both legs. He is also supposed to have seen Halley's Comet in 1066 and to have muttered, "It is long since I saw you." That line, written by a 12th-century English chronicler, is the entire basis for the claim that Eilmer spotted the comet twice. Modern historians still disagree over whether "long since" means the monk remembered a prior flyby in 989 or whether William of Malmesbury was reaching for a literary flourish common in monastic narrative.
The flight and the comet line live in the same passage of the Gesta Regum Anglorum, written by William of Malmesbury around 1125, roughly sixty years after the events he describes. Ars Technica's June 2026 explainer walks through the two threads: Eilmer's tower flight, attested only by William and never independently corroborated by a contemporary source, and the comet remark, which is the only dated episode in Eilmer's life that scholars can place on a calendar.
That dating problem is where the "twice" comes from. Halley's Comet returns roughly every 75 to 76 years, so a prior apparition in 989 is astronomically possible for a man who lived into his late sixties or seventies. William of Malmesbury, however, does not give the date of the flight. The 1066 comet reference is the only fixed point in the monk's biography. Without a second fixed date, any inference about a 989 sighting is an inference, not a record. The "It is long since" line could plausibly mean Eilmer remembered a childhood comet, a bright sky event in his twenties, or simply a chronicler borrowing a phrase that gave the borrowed anecdote more resonance.
The framing matters because Eilmer has become a fixture of "weird medieval history" lists, and the comet connection is what makes him stick. A monk who built wings and broke his legs is a good story. A monk who built wings, broke his legs, and outlived one apparition of the most famous periodic comet only to greet the next is a better story, and the shape of that better story is what every "Eilmer saw Halley's twice" headline depends on. If the "twice" is a flourish, the monk becomes a 12th-century footnote about human flight and pride. If the "twice" is a memory, he becomes a six-hundred-year gap compressed into one man's lifetime.
What the surviving record actually shows is narrower. William wrote that Eilmer flew, broke his legs, and never flew again because he believed God had punished his presumption. William also wrote that Eilmer, on seeing the 1066 comet, said he had seen it before. William was working in a monastic tradition that routinely mixed eyewitness report with moralizing anecdote, and the Ars Technica analysis notes that peer-reviewed work on the Eilmer comet-identification question remains thin — though University of Leicester historian James Aitcheson addressed the 989-vs.-1066 identification problem in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries, raising the alternative of a 1018 comet sighting instead. Some historians treat the double-sighting as plausible oral history passed down a generation. Others treat it as the chronicler reaching for a classical or biblical echo of a star seen long ago.
That uncertainty is the story. Eilmer almost certainly flew, in the sense that the chronicle's account of wings, tower, glide, and broken legs is the only narrative we have and has not been contradicted by later evidence. He almost certainly saw the 1066 comet, because the chronicler who knew him placed the remark in that year. Whether he saw the comet before, and whether the "long since" remark is genuine memory or monastic rhetoric, is not something the surviving record can decide. The honest version of the story tells the reader that, and lets them weigh the difference between a 12th-century literary device and a genuine sighting from 989.
One small piece of physical evidence is worth noting. Malmesbury Abbey has a stained-glass window honoring Brother Eilmer. The window commemorates the flight, not the comet. Locally, the monk who is remembered is the monk who flew. The monk who saw a comet twice is a construction built from one ambiguous line in a Latin chronicle, a plausible astronomical interval, and a few centuries of retelling.
For now, the cleanest summary is the one the Ars Technica headline reaches: it is complicated. Eilmer of Malmesbury probably did fly, and he probably did see Halley's Comet in 1066. The claim that he saw it twice is the part the evidence does not, and arguably cannot, settle.