In the illuminated manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries, the margins are often decorated with images of armed knights fighting snails. “This has created a good deal of puzzlement amongst art historians and book historians, wondering just what do they mean?” University of York scholar Kenneth Clarke told the BBC.

“The basic idea is the overturning of existing or expected hierarchies,” suggested University of Chicago art historian Marian Bleeke. “It is supposed to be surprising and even funny — I think we get that implicitly today,” she says. Art historian Lilian Randall found 70 examples in 29 books, most printed between 1290 and 1310, commonly in France.

Perhaps the fight represents a struggle between classes, or illustrates cowardice. Possibly it’s political comment whose meaning has been lost. It may even represent the Resurrection. The meaning is still a matter of debate.

The British Library has a gallery.

(Thanks, Carsten.)

‘The tree from which these pieces were taken was recently cut down and broken up for firewood, when at six and a half inches below the bark the carving was found in the solid timber. About fifty or a hundred years ago the letters and other figures were cut in the bark, with the usual result in the death of a thin layer of the exposed wood, which became surrounded by brown colouring matter. In time the bark grew over this, and finally covered it with fresh wood.’ — Prof. Stewart, of the Royal College of Surgeons, has been good enough to supply us with this interesting photograph.

— Strand, July 1903

The swans in the moat at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, Somerset, pull a bell for their lunch. The tradition is believed to have started in the 1850s — in 1908 Helen Pratt wrote:

This bell-ringing call was taught to the bishop’s swans more than fifty years ago, by Miss Eden, the daughter of the Lord Auckland who was then Bishop of Wells and lived at the palace. It needed both ingenuity and patience to teach the lesson, but the young lady persevered until the swans learned it so successfully that they have never forgotten it and show no sign of forgetting so long as swans shall sail this moat.

The current pair of swans, Grace and Gabriel, teach each year’s cygnets how to ring the bell before they leave the moat to begin a life of their own.

Just before retiring in 2011, Swiss cartographer Paul Ehrlich hid a drawing of a marmot in a map of the Aletsch Glacier.

Hidden drawings are something of a tradition in Swiss maps.

In 1999, University of California psychologist Nicholas Christenfeld and his colleagues reviewed thousands of state death certificates and found that males with negative initials (D.I.E., P.I.G., R.A.T.) had died 2.80 years younger than matched controls. Males with positive initials (H.U.G., W.I.N., V.I.P.) had lived 4.48 years longer.

Why? “At present, the best available explanation for these findings is that they are due to the symbolic power of one’s name. It seems unlikely that a person with initials like A.S.S. or J.O.Y. could fail to notice the negative or positive connotations.” Suicide and accidents showed the strongest differences between the positive and negative groups.

But a later study by Pomona College economist Gary Smith found no such pattern.

(Nicholas Christenfeld, David P. Phillips, and Laura M. Glynn, “What’s in a Name: Mortality and the Power of Symbols,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 47:3 [September 1999], 241-254.)