Sighting record / 1254
Redbourn, Hertfordshire. The night of the Feast of the Circumcision, 1254. Monks of St Albans, staying at the cell of St Amphibalus for the festival, were looking out about midnight. They were reading the stars to judge the hour for matins. The moon was eight days old. The air was completely calm. Then they saw it. The form of a large ship, well-shaped, of remarkable design and colour, hanging in the sky as if it were painted and really built with planks. They called together all their friends and followers in the house. For a long time it stayed. Then, by degrees, it dissolved and disappeared. Matthew Paris wrote it into his great chronicle.
St Albans Abbey, Hertfordshire, in the middle of the thirteenth century. Among its Benedictine monks was Matthew Paris, chronicler, artist and cartographer, and a tireless collector of wonders. In his great history, the Chronica Majora, he recorded visions of vessels traversing the sky, reversed rivers and sea monsters. He read them as signs leading toward the end of the world he predicted for 1250. In 1254 he noted the first crossbill irruption into England.