Odd this day

4 min readMay 19, 2023

Ah! 19 May — the feast day of St Dunstan, of course, famous for grasping Satan by the nose with a pair of hot tongs.

19th century illustration showing a man dressed as a bishop standing next to a forge holding a pair of tongs with which he has grasped the nose of a devil figure with a pointed tail, horns, and wings

That joyous illustration is from William Hone’s The Every-Day Book (1825), which also reproduced a folk rhyme about the incident:

St. Dunstan, as the story goes, / Once pull’d the devil by the nose / With red-hot tongs, which made him roar. / That he was heard three miles or more.

But why — as I’m sure you’re asking — was Satan manifesting himself to some random monk? Well, thanks to Eleanor Parker, I can tell you. Initially, you see, he wasn’t any old man of the cloth. He was favoured by King Æthelstan.

Sadly, this provoked jealousy, and an earlier story about him — that his harp had mysteriously played itself while he was designing a stole — got distorted to suggest he’d cast a spell on the harp, so he left the court.

You’d think seeing the back of him would be enough for his enemies, but they ambushed him and

threw him from his horse and inflicted many injuries upon him; they severely whipped and shackled him and they cast him headlong into horrible filth and left him

…according to Eadmer of Canterbury’s 11th century work, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald, that is. They’d bitten off more than they could chew, though:

through the grace of God which preserved him for his own people afterwards, a huge pack of dogs confronted them, rushing out of nowhere towards them with terrifying barking

Having escaped all that, Dunstan decided to get away from it all for a bit and holed up in a hermit’s cell in Glastonbury, where he kept himself busy with metalwork. Then, one day, an old man happened by and asked him to make a chalice.

As he was working, though, his guest — WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT? — started to transmogrify. One minute young, the next female in an attempt to lead Dunstan into temptation. Yes, of course: it was SATAN! Dunstan leapt into action…

Illustrated manuscript showing Dunstan gripping the devil’s nose with tongs. The devil is looking in at his window, and Dunstan is sitting by a roaring fire

There are lots of splendid medieval illustrations of the event.

Illustrated manuscript showing Dunstan gripping the devil’s nose with tongs. In this image, Dunstan is in the centre in a monk’s habit, with a boy to the left puffing the fire with bellows. The devil is in the form of a cow or bull with bat’s wings, and still looks most unhappy to have been nipped in this manner

I think this might be my favourite:

Illustrated manuscript showing Dunstan gripping the devil’s nose with tongs. In this one, the devil is hairy and wolflike, with a second monstrous face in his belly, and Dunstan is wearing ecclesiastical vestments, and his tongs are gold

Apparently, he once also pushed a wonky church until it was “aligned with the rising of the sun at the equinox” using only his shoulder.

It’s the grabbing Satan by the schnozz that’s best known, of course, finding its way into Dickens’ A Christmas Carol…

Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit’s nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then, indeed, he would have roared to lusty purpose.

…and into cleric and poet Richard Barham’s A Lay of St. Dunstan:

St Dunstan stood in his ivied Tower, / Alembic, crucible, all were there; / When in came Nick to play him a trick, / In guise of a damsel passing fair. / Every one knows / How the story goes: / He took up the tongs and caught hold of his nose.

You may also enjoy (I know I did) this picture from Wallace Tripp’s 50-year-old-this-month book A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up and Tied His Horse to Me

A 1970s illustration from a children’s book of Dunstan — this time an old, bearded man in white robes with yellow trim, and standing in front of a stone that says ‘Glastonbury, 2 miles’ — wielding tongs which are red-hot at the business end to grasp the snout of a comical, rotund, hairy, animal-like but rather benevolent and unfortunate-looking devil, surrounded by distressed-looking mini-demons

The most recent cultural tie-in I found in my research was Sussex Hop Gin from Mayfield Gin which has (apparently) been “dragged by its nostrils to St. Dunstan’s copper pot”. I have not independently verified this claim — but the woodcuts(?) are excellent:

A bottle of Mayfield Sussex Hop Gin with a label depicting a disgruntled-looking devil with golden tongs pinching his nose. Inset is a woodcut of St Dunstan and the Devil

Woodcut (possibly lino cut) of Dunstan in a bishop’s mitre and robes holding tongs that look like pliers and grabbing the nose of the devil who has cloven hooves, a pointed tail, wings, horns, and an angry look on his face. There are also clouds of smoke or steam, presumably rising from Satan’s sizzling schnozz

Woodcut (possibly lino cut): a disgruntled-looking devil face on. In front of him, two human hands hold tongs which are pinching his nose

Odd this day

Written by Coates

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