Recently a group of people working at the British Library went into their manuscripts store to have a look at some medieval genealogical rolls. They were examining an English roll from the last part of the 13th century which contains quite a lot of marginalia (scribbles, comments and illuminations in the margins of a book).
As anyone who is familiar with 13th and 14th century illuminated manuscripts can attest, images of armed knights fighting snails are common. Why is that? What do these images mean?
2 comment(s):
It's because snails are just slugs in shells and that's nasty! No wonder they fight with them. Yuck!
I think the snails represent the 'meek' as in 'the meek shall inherit the earth' and the knight represents the ones in power who are not winning the 'war'. It is a battle the Bible says only the meek shall win.
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