Oddlet: Margery Kempe · 1 min read
Aug 2, 2026
The Ping-Pong Ball
What are the odds the first autobiography in English survived because a colonel hunting a ping-pong ball was talked out of burning it?
Margery Kempe of Bishop's Lynn, daughter of a five-times mayor, wife of John Kempe, mother of fourteen children, founder of one failed brewery and one failed horse-mill, dictated the first autobiography in the English language. She could not read or write a word of it.
She was also, by every contemporary account, exhausting.
Her pilgrim companions to Jerusalem in 1414 got so sick of her weeping at meals that they confiscated her bedding, took her money, and made her wear a white canvas smock so everyone would know she was the group fool. She ate alone for six weeks. On Mount Calvary she fell to the ground, threw her arms wide, and screamed as though her heart would burst, which became the symptom she carried across Europe for decades. In Rome that November, God the Father proposed marriage to her at the church of Santi Apostoli. She protested that she was more comfortable with the manhood of Christ. God married her anyway. She mislaid the wedding ring somewhere in her boarding house.
The manuscript, 124 folio pages copied by a scribe called Salthows, vanished for 433 years.
It turned up in 1934 in a cupboard at the Butler-Bowdon house in Derbyshire, when the colonel went rummaging for a fresh ping-pong ball, found the papers in his way, and announced he was going to burn the lot. A guest talked him out of it.
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- Wikipedia - Margery Kempe — Comprehensive biographical entry covering birth, family, failed businesses, mental breakdown, visions, pilgrimages, heresy trials, and dictation of her book.
- World History Encyclopedia - Margery Kempe — Detailed biography including Christ's vision quote, dictation dates, husband's death c. 1431, son as first scribe, 1934 rediscovery, and 1940 authentication.
- Wikipedia - The Book of Margery Kempe — Details on the manuscript: 6,047 lines, copied by Salthows, rediscovered early 1930s in Derbyshire, identified by Hope Emily Allen in 1934, Wynkyn de Worde 1501 and Pepwell 1521 excerpts, British Library acquisition June 1980.
- Britannica - Margery Kempe biography — Encyclopedia entry confirming dates, daughter of mayor of Lynn, marriage 1393, 14 children, pilgrimages, 'boystous' crying spells, and publication 1936/1940.
- Britannica - The Book of Margery Kempe — Encyclopedia overview of the book's significance as the first autobiography in English.
- UC Davis Medieval - Margery Kempe, Chapter 28
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