from Chapter 19 ‘Ghosts and Fairies’ in Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) Fairies Today's children are brought up to think of fairies as
diminutive beings of a benevolent disposition, but the fairies of the Middle
Ages were neither small nor particularly kindly. Goblins, elves and fairies
were part of that great army of good and bad spirits with which the world was
thought to be infested, and they conformed to no single set of characteristics.
A modern student of folklore has suggested that most medieval fairies belonged to one of four categories:
'trooping fairies', who passed their time feasting and dancing; hob goblins or
guardian spirits like Puck alias Robin Goodfellow, who performed domestic
chores for mortals; mermaids and water spirits; and giants and monsters. But it is doubtful whether such hard and fast divisions
can be made. Popular beliefs varied in different parts of the country and were an amalgam of many
different traditions. Ancestral spirits, ghosts, sleeping heroes, fertility
spirits and pagan gods can all be discerned in the heterogeneous fairy lore of
medieval England, and modern inquiries into fairy origins can never be more
than speculative. It is clear, however, that elves, goblins and fairies were
frequently thought of as highly malevolent. The very word 'fairy' was itself used, as we have already
seen, to convey the idea of a malignant disease of spiritual origin which could be cured only by charming or exorcism.
The Anglo-Saxons had described persons smitten with a supernatural malady
as 'elf-shot', and the term was applied to sick animals in Celtic areas until modern times. In
1677 John Webster wrote that the inhabitants of Yorkshire used 'fairy-taken' as a way of describing someone
who has been blasted, haunted or bewitched. Supernatural maladies of this kind were usually thought to
require a supernatural remedy. The
fifteenth-century witch of Eye, Margery Jourdemain, was reputed to have been
able to charm 'fiends and fairies'; and many
cunning folk were prepared
to diagnose and treat such cases
by charming and incantation." Popular formulae for use against fairies
survive in contemporary charmbooks along with recipes against theft, illness
and evil spirits.° Catholic formulae were also used. One
sixteenth-century wizard stated that the fairies had power only over those
lacking religious faith. Others commended the use of
St John's Gospel or holy water. For many persons fairies thus remained spirits against which
they had to guard themselves by some ritual
precaution. It is true that the more sophisticated Elizabethans
tended to speak as if fairy beliefs were
a thing of the past; Reginald Scot, for example, wrote in 1584that Robin Goodfellow was no longer as widely feared as he had been a hundred years previous. As he saw it, the fear of goblins had been
replaced by the fear of witches. Yet in the late seventeenth century Sir
William Temple could assume that fairy beliefs had only declined in the
previous thirty years or so. John Aubrey also put them in the fairly recent past: 'When I was a boy, our country people would talk much of
them.' Indeed it seems that commentators have always attributed them to
the past. Even Chaucer's Wife of Bath
had dated the reign of the elf-queen to 'many hundred years ago', remarking sardonically that the fairies had been driven away by the prayers
and charity of the holy friars. The fact that fairy-beliefs seem to have had childhood
associations for most commentators makes it harder to assess their vitality at
any particular period. By the
Elizabethan age fairy lore was primarily a store of mythology
rather than a corpus of living beliefs, but it was sometimes still accepted
literally at a popular level. John Penry, for example, writing three years
after Scot, remarked that the Welsh peasantry held fairies in an 'astonishing
reverence' and dared not 'name them without honour'. A hundred years later the
common people of England were still said to believe in them. The fairy
tradition is said to have been neglected in the eighteenth century, but
abundant evidence of
living fairy-beliefs was to be assembled by nineteenth-century
collectors of English country folklore. So far as
literary references are concerned, the peak age of fairy allusions appears to
be the end of the
sixteenth century and
the beginning of the seventeenth.
But as a recent scholar has pointed out, this indicates the growth of a
literature with popular roots rather than an increase in fairy-beliefs as such.
In France the taste for fairy stories did not reach its peak until the very end
of the seventeenth century. But in
England it was the Shakespearean period which saw the widespread dissemination
of the concept of fairies as a
dwarf race of mischievous but fundamentally friendly temperament. It also saw the absorption into the fairy
kingdom of the household goblin Robin Goodfellow, who had previously been
thought of as quite separate from
fairies proper. The older concept of the fairy or goblin
as a malevolent spirit, however, was not entirely lost. Bunyan's
Pilgrim, we remember, was not daunted
by 'Hobgoblin or foul fiend'. To contemporary magicians fairies were a valuable source of
supernatural power. Many magical compilations of the period contained
instructions for conjuring them up in order to learn a variety of occult
secrets. Such rituals were much the same as those for conjuring spirits in
general. William Lilly took part in several attempts to get in touch with the
Queen of the Fairies, believing that she could teach anything one desired to
know. Village wizards also claimed to work with fairy aid. We have already
encountered the Somerset woman, Joan Tyrry, who knew in 1555 whether or not her
neighbors were bewitched because the fairies told her so. Other cunning folk
whom the fairies were thought to have helped to cure the sick, tell fortunes,
find treasure or otherwise perform their magical role included Mariona Clerk
(Suffolk, 1499), one Croxton's wife (London, 1549), John Walsh (Dorset, 1566),
Margaret Harper (Yorkshire, 1567), Susan Snapper (Sussex, 1607) and a sixteenth
century vicar of Warlingham, Surrey. In Elizabethan Wales there were said to be swarms of soothsayers
and enchanters who claimed to walk with the fairies on Tuesday and Thursday
nights. In Cornwall in 1648 Anne
Jefferies was believed to live on a diet of sweetmeats brought her by six
little people clothed in green. They taught her to prophesy and to carry out miraculous acts of healing. Spiritual creatures of this kind belong to the same genre as
the witch's familiars or the conjurer's demons. In at least one English
witch-trial (that of Joan Willimot in 1619) the accused person confessed to
having been given a fairy by the Devil. The name 'Oberon' or 'Oberion'
was borne by a demon who had been frequently conjured by fifteenth and sixteenth-century wizards,
long before the title became associated with the King of
the Fairies. During the seventeenth century fairy mythology settled down
into something approximating its modem form. The faries were said to be
little people, inhabiting woods or earthen barrows, and organized in a kingdom
of their own. Sometimes they came out to dance on grass fairy-rings and allowed
themselves to be seen by selected human beings. They were occasionally
predatory and might swoop down to snatch an unguarded infant child, leaving a
changeling in his place. They might also
nip, pinch or otherwise torment a careless housewife or untidy servant-maid.
The proper way of propitiating these beings was to sweep the house clean in the
evening, leaving out food for them to eat and water and towels with which they
might wash; for the fairies depended upon human beings for food, and were
fanatics for cleanliness. Thus treated, they might reward their benefactors by
leaving money in their shoes, or in the case of Robin Goodfellow, by helping
with domestic tasks in return for a bowl of cream. If neglected, they would
avenge themselves by washing their children in the beer, stealing milk from the
cows and corn from the fields, knocking over buckets, frustrating the
manufacture of butter and cheese, and generally making nuisances of themselves. This practice of setting out food and drink for the fairies
had been well known in the Middle Ages and was inevitably condemned by the
leaders of the Church, who naturally resented the propitiation of other
deities. To ecclesiastics it seemed that people who left out provision for the
fairies in the hope of getting rich or gaining good fortune were virtually practicing
a rival religion. Elves and fames were either devils or diabolical illusions,
declared a number of late medieval writers. This hostility was strengthened by
the Reformation, whose theologians took away the remaining possibility that fairies
might be ghosts of the dead. Fairies could only be good or evil spirits, and of
the two possibilities the latter was much more likely. The Puritan Richard Greenham
was said to have regarded the fairies as good spirits rather than bad ones. If
so, he was exceptional among theologians in so doing. It was pointless trying
to distinguish good fairies from bad ones, thought Thomas Jackson; the Devil
was be hind them all. This was the official doctrine of most Protestant
teachers, though like so many other official doctrines its influence upon the
people at large was only partial. On the other hand the Protestant myth that fairy-beliefs
were an invention of the Catholic Middle Ages may well have had some effect.
Fairies, like ghosts, were said to have been devised by Popish priests to cover
up their knaveries. They were 'conceits . . . whereby the Papists kept the
ignorant in awe'. This much-echoed view was grossly unfair, not only because
fairy-beliefs were older than Roman Catholicism, but because the medieval
Church had itself been hostile to fairy mythology. But it was much employed by
Protestant polemicists in the century after the Reformation, and found its most
attractive poetic expression in Bishop Corbett's The Faeryes Farewell. Most of those who remained sympathetic to
fairy-beliefs admitted the Roman Catholic character of the fairy kingdom.
'Theirs is a mixt religion,' wrote Robert Herrick, 'part pagan, part papistical.'
Goodwin Wharton, who was tricked by Mrs. Parish into believing that he had
extensive relations with the fairies, or 'low landers', as she sometimes
called them, was told that they were 'Christians, servin.... God that way,
much in the manner of the Roman Catholics, believing [in] transubstantiation,
and having a Pope who resides here
in England.' Various theories have been put forward to account for the
persistence of these fairy-beliefs. Those seeking a psychological interpretation
point to the existence of Lilliputian delusions still familiar to
psychiatrists. Fairy hallucinations were associated with mental illness as early
as the seventeenth century. Adherents of the so called 'pygmy theory', on the
other hand, prefer to think that the belief in fairies
reflected folk memory of a dwarf race of human beings who once inhabited
Neolithic barrows. Speculations of this kind are fortunately irrelevant to our
purposes. We may accept that fairy-beliefs existed and were passed on by succeeding generations to their children at the nursery
stage. Our task is to determine the social consequences of this belief as it
was thus inherited. Modern social anthropologists, studying the survival of
fairy beliefs among the Irish
peasantry, have been able to show that such notions can discharge important social functions
and help to enforce a certain code of conduct. 'The fairy faith,' it has been
said, 'enforces definite behaviour on the countryman.’ In early twentieth century
Ireland it was believed that no fairy trouble would come
to those who kept their houses clean and tidy. The same was true in
seventeenth-century England : If ye will with Mab find grace, Wash your pails, and cleanse your dairies; Herrick's lines were both a programme for the careful housemaid and a warning of the sanctions
accompanying non-performance. The Queen
of the Fairies
was, as Ben Jonson
put it, She, that
pinches country wenches It could be a exaggeration to say that seventeenth-century
serving maid only did their work conscientiously because they were afraid of being
tormented by the fairies, but the direction in which fairy beliefs influenced
those who held them is obvious enough. (The same may also have been true of
witch-beliefs: stinking utensils and
living quarters were conventionally taken as evidence that animal familiars were present, and men were warned that it was dangerous to leave their excrement where
their enemies might find it.) Nor was domestic untidiness the only vice which the fairies punished. They also tormented servants who neglected their persons or failed to clean their master's horses. They had a great hatred of lust and lechery, and eagerly pinched and nipped those engaged in unchaste activities. They even upheld the virtues of neighborliness, by lending out household utensils, and insisting upon their prompt return; those who delayed bringing back the spits and pieces of pewter they had borrowed were never helped by the fairies again. The risk of being landed with a fairy changeling similarly reminded men of the need to look after a newborn child very carefully. A moment's neglect might be rewarded by the substitution of a fairy child, who would grow up thin, ugly and retarded. The early weeks of infancy were particularly crucial here, for the fairies were thought most likely to act before the child had been baptized or the mother churched. Contemporaries had obvious religious reasons for believing that this was the period at which the baby was most vulnerable, but the rule that a child should never be left alone at this time could also be justified on more practical grounds of infant care. The fear of baby-snatching was a real one in some country areas, and it can only have had beneficial effects. In such ways did
fairy-beliefs help to
reinforce some of the standards upon which the effective working of society depended. They could also operate
as a means of accounting for an otherwise unsatisfactory situation. A parent could disown responsibility for a retarded child by declaring that it was a changeling.
A quack doctor could cover up his ignorance in the same way. In 1590 it
was related at the Hatfield Sessions how Thomas Harding of Ickleford,
Hertfordshire, a reputed wizard, had told a woman whose four-year old child could neither walk nor talk that the brat was a changeling and that the only hope of
redress was to put him on a chair on a
dunghill for an hour on a sunny day, in the hope that the fairies would come back and
replace him by the child they had stolen. Other types of misfortune or misconduct could also be explained by fairy-beliefs.
The man who lost his way on the road might
plead that he had been led astray by a will-of-the-wisp; it was well
known that fairies specialized in misleading poor travellers. The negligent
servant would blame the fairies for interfering with his work : 'when the maids spilt the milkpans, or kept any
racket, they would lay it upon Robin'." When Goodwin Wharton found himself
sexually too exhausted to sustain his relationship with Mrs. Parish, he was able to surmise
that the Fairy Queen had been with him in his sleep and sucked out the very marrow from his bones in her voraciousness. |