Eilmer of Malmesbury

Eilmer of Malmesbury (also known as Oliver due to a scribe's miscopying, or Elmer, or Æthelmær) was an 11th-century English Benedictine monk best known for his early attempt at a gliding flight using wings.

Life Eilmer was a monk of Malmesbury Abbey who wrote on astrology. All that is known of him is from the Gesta regum Anglorum (Deeds of the English Kings), written by the eminent medieval historian William of Malmesbury in about 1125. Being a fellow monk of the same abbey, William almost certainly obtained his account directly from people who knew Eilmer when he was an old man.

If Eilmer had seen Halley's Comet 76 years earlier in 989, he could have been born about 984, making him about five or six years old when he first saw the comet, and therefore old enough to remember it. However the periodicity of comets was probably unknown in Eilmer's time, and so his remark "It is long since I saw you" could have referred to a different, later comet. Since it is known that Eilmer was an "old man" in 1066, and that he had made the flight attempt "in his youth", the event is placed some time during the early 11th century, perhaps in its first decade.

Beyond those based on William's account, there are no other known sources documenting Eilmer's life.

The flight William records that, in Eilmer's youth, he had read and believed the Greek myth of Daedalus. Thus, Eilmer fixed wings to his hands and feet and launched himself from the top of a tower at Malmesbury Abbey:

Quote|He was a man learned for those times, of ripe old age, and in his early youth had hazarded a deed of remarkable boldness. He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze upon the summit of a tower, flew for more than a furlong [201 metres]. But agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air, as well as by the awareness of his rash attempt, he fell, broke both his legs and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of his failure, his forgetting to provide himself a tail. "Olivers Lane", off the present-day High Street and about from the abbey, is reputed locally to be the site where Eilmer landed. Eilmer said he had "forgotten to provide himself with a tail."

More recently, Maxwell Woosnam in 1986 examined in more detail the technical aspects such as materials, glider angles, and wind effects. Still, for the monk Eilmer the idea of flight must have had a spiritual significance as well: he would not have been ignorant of the need to guard and stabilize the soul for its flight in the afterlife; the differences between angelic and human bodies; the weight of sin and the unnaturalness of ascending mortal flesh.

Legacy The School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, has developed a Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation code named Eilmer4. The short film "Eilmer the Flying Monk" recounts Eilmer's attempt to emulate Icarus.