Medieval scribes spent decades copying sacred texts by candlelight, and still found room in the margins for doodles: snails jousting with knights, cats with suspiciously guilty faces, and small complaints like “the parchment is hairy” and “oh, my hand.”

One Irish monk paused a ninth-century grammar text to write a poem about his white cat, Pangur Bán, who hunted mice while the monk hunted words. Both, he decided, were doing the same job.

Even in the most serious rooms in history, someone was drawing a snail.

A thousand years later, the jokes survived right alongside the scripture. Which tells you something lovely about what people actually keep.