The Five Jars

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), who published under the byline M. R. James, was a noted medieval scholar and provost of King's College, Cambridge (1905-1918) and of Eton College (1918-1936), best remembered today for his ghost stories in the classic Victorian Yuletide vein. He is most widely known for his ghost stories, but as a medieval scholar his output was phenomenal and remains highly respected in scholarly circles. His discovery of a manuscript fragment led to excavations in the ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, West Suffolk, in 1902, in which the graves of several twelfth-century abbots described by Jocelyn de Brakelond (a contemporary chronicler) were rediscovered, having been lost since the Dissolution. James's ghost stories were published in a series of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). Other works include Old Testament Legends (1913), Abbeys (1925), and Collected Ghost Stories (1931).