A young Benedictine monk at the beginning of the 11th century named Eilmer Wearing a pair of crude wings made of willow wood and cloth, he jumped from the 150-meter tower of his abbey in the small town of Malmesbury, England. Eilmer managed to slide 600 feet over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the River Avon. The fall crippled him by breaking both his legs. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained glass window in honor of Brother Aylmer.
This legendary experience in medieval aviation comes to us through a 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury In an account written around 1125, William neglected to give future historians an exact date for the feat. But William mentions another important episode in Aylmer’s life in which the monk “advances in years”: Aylmer witnessed Halley’s Comet in 1066 and commented, “I have not seen you for a long time.” Some historians interpreted This means that Aylmer saw Halley’s Comet fly by earlier, when he was a young man in 989.
Assuming that Aylmer was at least five years old in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would put Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempted flight in his “early youth”, probably between 1000 and 1010. Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argued paper An article published in the journal Notes and Queries suggests that Aylmer may have seen an entirely different comet in his youth – Comet 1018. If so, he would have been born very late, and his flight date would have been between 1020 and 1040.
