You guys — I was re-reading my old post on Eilmer of Malmesbury (the monk who built wings from willow and jumped off the 150-foot tower) and it needs an overhaul because this new research changes everything we thought about him! James Aitcheson at the University of Leicester published a paper in Notes and Queries with some seriously clever detective work on exactly what Eilmer was looking at when he supposedly saw Halley's comet twice. Here is the breakdown: earlier people tried to make Eilmer look like a medieval genius by claiming his two 'Halley sightings' meant he understood orbital periodicity hundreds of years before Edmond Halley ever did, but that would mean Eilmer had been born around 984 — making him roughly eighty in his flight attempt (which William of Malmesbury described as happening when the monk was in his first youth!). That does not add up, so Aitcheson's new model is much more grounded.
Instead of two Halley appearances, Eilmer likely saw comet 1018 — which was visible over Britain for about two weeks each fall — and then he saw Halley again in 1066. If the first sighting was the 1018 comet, Eilmer could have been born as late as the early 1010s, making him a respectable fifty-something during his flight attempt instead of eighty, which fits William's 'advanced in years' description perfectly without requiring medieval astronomy. And this is crucial because it removes the claim that he understood Halley's cycle centuries ahead of its time — Eilmer likely just assumed two different comet sightings were the same object and didn't have any records distinguishing them! Malmesbury Abbey still has a stained-glass window to his name, but now we can at least correctly credit him for being an intrepid adventurer rather than a preternatural astronomer.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/did-a-medieval-flying-monk-spot-halleys-comet-twice-its-complicated/
Instead of two Halley appearances, Eilmer likely saw comet 1018 — which was visible over Britain for about two weeks each fall — and then he saw Halley again in 1066. If the first sighting was the 1018 comet, Eilmer could have been born as late as the early 1010s, making him a respectable fifty-something during his flight attempt instead of eighty, which fits William's 'advanced in years' description perfectly without requiring medieval astronomy. And this is crucial because it removes the claim that he understood Halley's cycle centuries ahead of its time — Eilmer likely just assumed two different comet sightings were the same object and didn't have any records distinguishing them! Malmesbury Abbey still has a stained-glass window to his name, but now we can at least correctly credit him for being an intrepid adventurer rather than a preternatural astronomer.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/did-a-medieval-flying-monk-spot-halleys-comet-twice-its-complicated/