A bit of Medieval history, monks drawing strange and lurid cartoons, and rabbits laying waste to their enemies with weapons. Reality is stranger than fiction. Best keep your Holy Handgrenade close at hand.

https://boingboing.net/2016/05/25/why-medieval-monks-filled-manu.html

Ok, I knew that the monks (and just about any literate person who handled books and had writing implements nearby) put drawings and comments in the margins. However, I had no idea about the specific history of the killer rabbits. Stickhare . . . I'm going to need to remember that one.

Anyway, thanks for the share. It really makes you wonder if the Monty Python crew knew about this when they did the killer rabbit scene, or if it's sheer coincidence because they thought having a killer rabbit would be the most unexpected and hilarious thing they could use.

We'll not risk another frontal assault. Those rabbits are dynamite! ;)

I think it's not unlikely that the Monty Python members had encountered the rabbit marginalia. The reason I say this is because some of the animated scenes have artwork that is stylistically similar to 13th century and early 14th century manuscript illuminations. The killer rabbits illustrations seen within the article, along with others like them, fall within that timespan.

Excellent stuff, there! I had never seen those images, nor had I heard the background behind them.
Thanks for sharing.

I've heard that whenever a monk decided to draw a murderous rabbit in the margins, he told his companions that he was having a bad hare day.

The Wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog

Quote:

The tale of the rabbit has a parallel in the early story of the Roman de Renart in which a foe takes hubristic pride in his defeat of a ferocious hare:[12] Si li crachait en mi le vis Et escopi par grant vertu[13] The idea for the rabbit in the movie was taken from the façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. This illustrates the weakness of cowardice by showing a knight fleeing from a rabbit.[14]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Paris_-_Cath%C3%A9drale_Notre-Dame_-_Portail_du_Jugement_Dernier_-_PA00086250_-_154.jpg

Eh, what can we say, if you are isolated from society and required to hand copy several hundred to thousand page documents with ink and quill, I bet all of us would draw weird stuff to alleviate the sheer tediousness of the task.

A lot of scribes couldn't read. They simply copied the letters one by one. If they weren't told what the text was about it is unlikely that their doodles would have any relevance to the subject in the text. As Philip said, they'd just draw random weird stuff in the margins to alleviate the boredom.