Oh, the ’90s! When people wore strange clothes, listened to terrible music, and Edward I served as arbitrator to John Balliol’s claim to the Scottish throne after presumptive heiress Margaret (to whom Edward’s son was affianced) died tragically at sea.

Yes, as any European wool merchant will tell you, the 1290s were a crazy decade. But the strangest ’90s trend of all (next to the wool subsidies of ’94) has to be the artistic craze for drawing knights battling snails in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

Spinning and fighting – Knight defending himself and his wife with a distaff against a giant snail (KB78D40,14th c.) pic.twitter.com/PyOL6tFZy6 — Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) November 11, 2015

Reddit user Telochi brought this fad to the attention of Reddit’s Ask Historians community, writing “… there’s a weird number of people battling snails from medieval times … Why is this?”

Scholars have their theories. But first, it’s worth dwelling on what this trend actually was.

Fighting Tooth and Snail

According to “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare” by Lilian Randall, the whole snail mail vs. chainmail trope was most popular between 1290 and 1325. The doodles—which appeared in the margins of texts that had nothing to do with snails—depicted a knight battling a gallant gastropod.

Like so:

Giant Snail Attacking a Knight, c. 1400. pic.twitter.com/IC8U41xgoe — History In Pictures (@historyepics) October 27, 2015

Randall notes that this bizarre trend was pretty widespread, popping up in French, English, and Flemish manuscripts. The works ranged from “psalters” and “breviaries” to “pontificals” and “decretals” (which, we recently learned, are all real words).

Randall explains that most snail-combat illustrations were pretty run-of-the-mill, showing a knight and a snail dueling mano-a-mollusk:

“In composition the motif varies little from country to country. The most common form of representation shows a knight armed with mace or sword confronting a snail whose horns are extended and often pointed like arrows …”

Of course, many artists put their own unique twists on the motif.

Sometimes, the snail-battlers were naked. “In one instance,” Randall elaborates, “a nude woman opposes the snail with spear and shield.”

Another delightful variation on this classic theme depicts the knight as only partly human, with the snails charging in pairs:

Snail versus winged dragon knight @BLMedieval Royal MS 2 B VII, 148r pic.twitter.com/OfhithUpgt — Medievalisms (@AllMedievals) August 18, 2015

Randall claims that mutating the knights into half-human hybrids was a popular little trend-with-a-trend, which some artists took to its logical extreme: replacing the human knights entirely with animals.

On this topic, our snail art historian’s list of examples is superb: “an ape armed with sword or crossbow or on horseback with a spear; a cat stalking a snail with the head of a mouse; [and] a dog, dragon, ram, or even a hare in fierce opposition.”

Or an ass:

But user Telochi didn’t ask how many incarnations of the trend are out there in the archives. Telochi wanted to know why the snail battles existed in the first place.

In the top comment on the original post, user sunagainstgold replies, “We don’t know. Seriously. There are as many explanations as there are scholars.”

(This might say more about the number of medieval snail scholars than the number of explanations out there, but still, the point stands.)

Actually, almost all modern scholarly accounts of the snail battles rely heavily on Randall’s 1962 essay—so let’s turn back to the mother of snail-art scholarship to see what her best guess is.

Ignavia Or the Unexpected Artistry of Cowardice

According to Randall, the “principal connotation” of the motif is satire.

Since human knights are often seen trembling before—or, indeed, losing to—the harmless, slow-moving snails, it makes sense that the image is a way to emphasize cowardice.

Even when the knight looks dashing and brave, the snail is meant to undermine his bravado.

As Elizabeth Moore Hunt explains in Illuminating the Borders of Northern French and Flemish Manuscripts, 1270-1310 (a book just begging to be cited in discussions like this one), “… the natural baseness of the animal makes it unworthy prey for splendid jousting gear and thus a humorous parody of the knight in arms.”

(Incidentally, some land snails have built-in jousting gear, with terrifying penial stylets known as “love darts“—but people probably didn’t know about those in 13th century Europe.)

Hunt explains another theory:

“Also suggested as a possible meaning for the threatening snail is ‘social-climbing.’ The growth of the urban bourgeois and patrician classes resulted in struggles between the count and the towns; meanwhile the nobility was experiencing social anxieties in the face of increased monarchial power.”

This would account for some of the nonviolent snail drawings Randall lists—including “two snails with monstrous heads atop a series of steps” and “three snails ascending a ladder.”

Slimy social climbers, indeed.

Ultimately, however, Randall focuses on a more regionally specific identity for the snails.

De Lombardo et Lumac

Randall believes the snails serve as a popular insult to the Lombards, a group lambasted in poems and stories for their surrender to King Charlemagne in 772.

“At what date the snail became part of this legend is difficult to determine,” Randall admits, “although the association of Lombards and snails doubtless existed in oral tradition some time before its transcription towards the middle of the twelfth century.”

(Lombard also happens to be the surname of a philosophy professor who wrote about the symbology of snail-shells—in his 1974 essay “Quotations and Quotation Marks”—but that is, quite literally, semantics.)

Harvard classics professor Jan Ziolkowski estimates—in his book Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150—that a poem titled “The Lombard and Snail” dates back to the 12th century. According to Ziolkowski, the poem is a “downscaled epic” describing a Lombard “read[ying] himself to do battle with a snail.” (You can read it in Latin here.)

Randall argues that by the 13th century, Lombards became a widely despised group in northern Europe, as they “monopolized” jobs like pawnbroker and usurer.

“They did not hold full rights of citizenship, including the right to bear arms, a restriction which may have abetted the notion of their military ineffectuality.”

So those cute little snails could be xenophobic stand-ins for an oppressed Germanic group—pushed to the literal margins of the page.

But Randall isn’t exactly sure. She concludes her essay on a note of scholarly doubt, settling somewhere between the Lombard theory and general knightly satire.

It’s hard to pin down a definitive answer, especially given that the earliest theory on the trend comes from the Comte de Bastard, a man known for taking ill-advised attempts to “explain the inexplicable.” He believed the snail symbolized resurrection, an idea on which Randall (paraphrasing here) calls bullshit.

We may never have a satisfactory answer for why medieval scribes so loved their precious dueling snails. But that may be because zeroing in on the battles is the wrong approach.

As it turns out, bellicose snails aren’t even the most absurd creatures in the margins of medieval manuscripts.

The Beastly Beyond

Here’s one theory Randall doesn’t mention: Perhaps the mollusks-at-arms are wielding swords and spears because other creatures keep stealing their shells.

These are just a few of the horrible, exoskeleton-evicting animals—compiled from the British Library’s archives by Tumblr user Discarding Images:

Cats!

And Stags!

And Humans (Oh My!)

In addition to proving that LSD was invented long before 1938, these illustrations show that there were other silly snail trends in medieval manuscripts.

(For more on this motif, check out the Hunting for Snails blog and Dr. Karl Shuker’s post on the subject—with accompanying images of more snail-cats and snail-men, as well as a snail-pig, snail-bird, snail-fox, and a butt-licking snail-goat.)

Perhaps the point isn’t to seek a precise starting point—or even a reason—for the medieval molluscomania.

Maybe we should just look back and celebrate the trend, as one of the biggest reasons We Love the 1290s.