As promised at least a couple of weeks ago to MDVL310D students, and in answer to a question by my colleague Prof. Bill Winder re. this here thing earlier this afternoon.

It is always nice to see knight vs snail as a repeating constant in the news: here is a thread (including ever-returning classic puns beloved of #medievaltwitter) from February 2017:

7 July 2009: A canonical post by Got Medieval 

26 September 2013: the classic post by the British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog:

24 October 2013: … picked up by and recirculated by The Guardian:

14 October 2013: drawing on both the Got Medieval and British Library posts, we have the Smithsonian magazine:

25 November 2015: the Reddit blog, “The Marginalized Art of Snail-Fighting in Medieval Europe”

29 March 2017: Lilian Randall, In the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1966; as mentined in the Got Medieval post) returns via the video below from Vox based on her worm

1 June 2017: the video recirculated online via Colossal, “Why Knights Fought Snails In The Margins Of Medieval Books” 

See also: Hunting for Snails – snails in art blog

One of the finest collections of medieval snails online is at Discarding Images. A selection:

… and finally, because there’s more to life than fighting: