Someone posted this link to a story on facebook about Aethelmaer (Eilmer), a very interesting monk who lived at Malmesbury Abbey before the Norman Conquest who performed a very singular exercise in crafting a set of wings to put forth in flight from the tower at the Abbey. The remarkable thing about this written account is that for many years historians have credited Leonardo DaVinci as being the first to attempt to design an apparatus for human flight and yet DaVinci's study came some 500 years after the events described at Malmesbury.
Wikipedia had very much similar information, but it did make reference to a source:
"William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum / The history of the English kings", ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (1998–9)
The Gesta Regum Anglorum (the History of the English Kings) was compiled around the year 1205 consisting of earlier sources as well as some contemporary history by the author. I was able to find a fairly recent translation of this on archive.org and found the following on pages 414-415 marked 225.6. The section about Aethelmaer was written by William of Malmesbury (1095-1143), another monk at the Abbey who has come down to us as one of the great historians of that age. The text is given in the original Latin with an accompanying English translation on the facing page:
"By the standards of those days he was a good scholar, advanced in years by now, though in his first youth he had taken a terrible risk: by some art, I know not what, he had fixed wings to his hands and feet, hoping to fly like Daedalus, whose fable he took to be true. Catching the breeze from the top of a tower, he flew for the space of a stade and more; but what with the violence of the wind and the eddies, and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of his attempt, he faltered and fell, and ever thereafter he was an invalid and his legs were crippled. He himself used to give as a reason for his fall, that he forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts."
A stade is reckoned to be about 170 yards (510 feet)! One of the largest Abbeys in England in that period is the Norman Tower of Bury St Edmunds which stands an impressive 86 feet in height. If the tale of Eilmer's flight is true it would have been from a tower of something less than that height and so clearly wasn't just a vertical drop but must have been of a fairly impressive gliding distance.
Smithsonian Magazine put out a short video about the monk's exploits some years ago which is worth a watch.
Although it may be apocrophal, also recorded by William was the statement that Eilmer had witnessed Halley's Comet twice in his life and the 2nd time Eilmer took as portent of the coming of the Normans (1066).
The image above is a colorized version of an engraving from 1927 by an unknown artist which originally appeared in "Aller Lapja" a Hungarian weekly which featured pictures of fiction and education, puzzles and figures for children.
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