Revenant, from the French revenir, "to return", is the standard English term for the walking corpse of medieval and early modern European tradition, attested extensively in chronicles rather than only folk tale, which sets it apart from many other entries in this class. English monastic writers of the twelfth century, including William of Newburgh and Walter Map, recorded what they presented as contemporary, local reports of the dead leaving their graves at night to attack livestock, spread disease or terrorise former neighbours, usually attributing the phenomenon to a person who died excommunicate, unshriven, or under some unresolved sin or grievance.
The remedies described in these same chronicles are strikingly consistent across regions and later folklore: exhuming the body, which was sometimes found unnaturally undecayed or swollen with blood, then decapitating it, staking it, burning it, or reburying it face down or at a crossroads to disorient it. These practices, verified through documented Deliberate exhumations found in the archaeological record across medieval Europe, form the direct ancestor of the later vampire tradition, and folklorists generally treat the vampire as a regionally specialised, blood-drinking descendant of the broader medieval revenant rather than an unrelated invention.