Eilmer of Malmesbury

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

Eilmer was a monk of Malmesbury Abbey and is known to have written on astrology. All that is known of him is told in 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 himself when he was an old man.

Later scholars, such as the American historian of technology Lynn White, have attempted to estimate Eilmer's date of birth based on a quotation in William's Deeds in regard to Halley's Comet, which appeared in 1066. The difficulty lies in that William recorded what Eilmer said not to establish his age, but to show that his prophecy was fulfilled later that year when the Normans invaded England.

You've come, have you? – You've come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.

If Eilmer had seen Halley's comet seventy-six 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, 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.

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

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