It is clear that Lilian Randall's own preference is for the link with the Lombards. "Four-and-twenty tailors went out to kill a snail". She even notes a possible connection a modern version of the Mother Goose rhyme: ![]() These interpretations range from the idea of simply fighting the snail as a pest (considering the damage that snails could do to vineyards), to linking the snail with a nickname given to the Lombards (who were frequently disparaged in the early Middle Ages). Lilian Randall's paper suggests a range of possibilities for interpreting the designs. This motif emerged in Northern France in the late 13th century, and spread from there to English and Flemish marginalia. However, for the specific group you are interested in, the paper The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare by Lilian Randall may be helpful. In general, the meanings that should be attributed to the images that appear in marginalia is unclear, and you will find volumes of speculation on the subject. (Available to view as a digitised document on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's BNF Gallica website) 294rĪnother famous example is the nun picking penises from a phallus tree in the Roman de la Rose manuscript owned by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (MS. Breviary of Renaud and Marguerite de Bar, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 8, f.One fairly well-known group that I'm personally particularly fond of is the so-called animals at war which includes images like this: Sometimes the marginalia relates to the context of the subject of that page of the manuscript, but often it appears to have been quite random. These oddities of illumination deserve no less.This is an example of decorative marginalia, which is quite common on medieval manuscripts. The reason I'm presenting all this as possibilities is that I think any time you have a giant snail in a game, it should be unique. And both can be powerful magical ingredients in real world magical thinking, snails are associated with divination and love magic. For instance the slime might bring on hallucinatory visions (something I think is under-utilized in fantasy games) or the shell might be immune to some form of attack such as lightning. Some snails might have magical properties to their slime, or in their shells. Alternatively it might be poisonous, with the precise effect depending upon the individual referee's rules for poison. For straight-up damage it could be acidic, working like the attack of an ochre jelly: destroys wood, leather or cloth, and does 1d6 or 2d6 damage per turn if the victim fails a saving throw. It's a bit on the nose, but one possibility is that the slime causes opponents to act as if under a slow spell. ![]() This has plenty of real-world uses but if we're making a D&D monster it should be something with some mechanical impact. The interesting question is their slime trails. Their movement rate would naturally be very slow, and they'd attack with their pseudopod-like bodies. ![]() These are probably no more than 3 HD, although they should have very good AC (maybe the range of 4 to 2) to represent the protection of their shells. But I see some potential for using snails of about the size in the manuscripts, an implied 2' to 3' tall and fighting against armored humans, as monsters. No one's really sure.ĪD&D, of course, had the flail snail, a multi-headed monstrosity of a giant snail. Pragmatically the monks were often gardeners, so this may have been a bit of satire based on their own experience and the uselessness of professional knights. Symbolically the snail stood for the deadly sin of sloth a monk might decide to illustrate them on that basis. There are various explanations for why monks laboriously copying books would draw a confrontation between a knight and a deadly snail. ![]() There is a whole genre of illustrations of knights fighting snails in illuminated medieval manuscripts.
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