The medieval recipe for flying

The medieval recipe for flying sounds like it should involve a bubbling cauldron, a witch’s curse, a thunderous chant in Latin, and at least three new saints being hastily canonised just in case things got messy. Instead, it turned out to be a rather chaotic cocktail of hope, hubris, a worrying number of goose feathers, poorly thought-out diagrams scrawled in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, and some extremely questionable sewing projects. Picture it: a world blissfully free of engines, blueprints, or anything even vaguely resembling an understanding of aerodynamics — and yet, against all common sense and survival instincts, there they were, earnest and wide-eyed, stitching wings onto their tunics, fastening feathered contraptions to their arms, and psyching themselves up to heroically launch off the nearest tower, bridge, hill, or moderately high haystack, preferably before anyone had the chance to tell them it was a terrible idea.

Take Brother Eilmer of Malmesbury, for example, a monk who clearly believed that the only thing standing between him and a new career as a celestial being was a bit of basic craftsmanship, a solid gust of wind, and a lot of raw enthusiasm. Around the year 1000, inspired by the myth of Daedalus and Icarus (because when planning life-threatening stunts, it’s always wise to model yourself after stories that end in catastrophic failure and a messy funeral), Brother Eilmer built himself a pair of wings, strapped them on with what was surely medieval optimism stitched into every seam, and hurled himself from the top of his abbey tower. Incredibly, by some miracle of luck, divine humour, or sheer stubbornness, he managed to glide for a few hundred feet before gravity, like an impatient librarian slamming a book shut, yanked him unceremoniously back to earth. The resulting crash broke both his legs and whatever lingering faith he had in medieval aeronautical engineering. Later, perhaps while chewing miserably on dry monastery bread and reflecting on his life choices, he admitted he’d forgotten to add a tail. Small detail. Only the bit that stops you from spinning wildly like a panicked pigeon or crash-landing into Sister Margaret’s herb garden.

But Brother Eilmer wasn’t the only one with big ideas and an even bigger appetite for public humiliation. Across medieval Europe and the wider Islamic world, plenty of dreamers harboured bright ideas about how to cheat the ground and the grim finality of gravity. From dusty villages to cloistered monasteries, inventors crafted bizarre flying machines that would make a pantomime costume designer weep openly into their ale. Among the more spectacular concepts were “winged trousers,” because obviously when aiming for the skies, you want to lead with your trousers. Details are, understandably, scarce and mostly whispered like cautionary fairy tales over flickering candlelight, but one can vividly imagine someone frantically sewing wings onto their breeches, sprinting full pelt at a rickety wooden ramp, and soaring approximately two heroic feet before colliding headfirst with a startled goat, an unsuspecting friar, or the abbess’s prized beehive.

Meanwhile, over in 9th-century Andalusia, Abbas Ibn Firnas had his own crack at this whole ‘defying death’ business. Wrapping himself in silk and bird feathers, he constructed an early glider that looked more festival costume than flying machine and launched himself off a hilltop with an optimism that can only be described as weaponised. To his eternal credit, he did manage a relatively graceful flight, a slow, almost majestic descent that probably had the locals gawking, gasping, and scribes desperately reaching for their inkwells to immortalise the spectacle. Inevitably though, the earth, ever-patient and vengeful, reclaimed him with an unforgiving thud. Like Brother Eilmer, Ibn Firnas realised too late that a tail would have saved him from an embarrassingly abrupt landing. For all their religious devotion, scientific curiosity, and admirable levels of sheer lunacy, medieval flying pioneers seemed to suffer from chronic birdwatching blindness — not one of them thought to take serious notes from the creatures they were so desperate to imitate.

It’s important to remember that a medieval recipe for flying needed more than feathers, silk, or dangerously ambitious tailoring. It needed a heady mix of blind faith, stubborn defiance of natural laws, a total disregard for personal safety, an almost mystical belief that good intentions would somehow counteract basic physics, and a fantastically relaxed attitude towards broken bones, lost teeth, and minor concussions. This was an age when a tumble from a horse could be a death sentence, yet these bold souls thought nothing of flinging themselves from high places armed with little more than hope, a few stitches, and a prayer muttered between clenched teeth. Courageous? Absolutely. Wise? Not even remotely. But in their minds, the potential glory of soaring above the rooftops like a holy goose vastly outweighed the very real possibility of splattering on the church courtyard in front of a scandalised, giggling crowd.

Modern flyers, reclining smugly in their tail-equipped planes while sipping overpriced coffee at 30,000 feet, owe an unspoken debt to these medieval daredevils. Without their absurd, beautiful, ridiculous experiments — each one ending in a crash, a groan, a shattered ankle, and probably some light heresy — human flight might have taken even longer to get off the ground. We like to think we evolved into the skies through scientific method and careful calculation, but if you scratch just a little beneath the surface of every successful flight, you’ll find the flapping ghosts of Brother Eilmer, Ibn Firnas, and a legion of nameless dreamers, still crashing about with heroic optimism and trousers full of feathers.

So next time you buckle into a plane seat and moan about the legroom, the stale sandwiches, or the in-flight entertainment that won’t load, spare a thought for Brother Eilmer and his broken legs, Abbas Ibn Firnas and his feather-strewn tumble, and all the anonymous inventors who believed, for just a shining, mad moment, that they could outrun gravity armed only with trousers, goose feathers, blind faith, and pure, unfiltered gall.

Because when it comes down to it, the real medieval recipe for flying wasn’t feathers or wings or even a decent tail — it was pure, undiluted, breathtaking foolishness. It was faith stitched onto silk, prayers sewn into linen, dreams scribbled into the margins of forgotten scrolls, and a reckless, wonderful human refusal to stay earthbound. And honestly, wasn’t it marvellous?