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CHAPTER 1

Believing in Fairies

One asking what hee thought of Fayries: hee answered, he thought they were spirits; but hee distinguished betweene them and other spirites, as commonly men distinguish betweene good witches and bad witches.

—Richard Greenham, Pastor of Drayton (1597)

Let us begin with some thoughts on the marvelous from what was intended to be the first chapter of a book that C. S. Lewis never lived to complete:

The reader who sees in all the (let us call them) “ferlies” [marvels] of medieval romance mere “sports of fancy” … utterly misunderstands the best specimens of the genre he is reading…. A satisfactory theory of ferlies and their effect is, I believe, still to seek. I suspect that it will not succeed unless it fulfils two conditions. In the first place, it will have to be sure that it has exhausted the possibilities of purely literary diagnosis before it looks further afield…. The second condition … is that the theory should deeply study the ferlies as things (in a sense) in the real world [my italics]. Probably such things did not occur. But if no one in real life had either seen, or thought he saw, or accepted on hearsay, or dreaded, or hoped for, any such things, the poet and romancer could do nothing with them. As anthropologists we may want to know how belief in them originated. But it will illuminate the literary problem more if we can imagine what it would feel like to witness, or think we had witnessed, or merely to believe in, the things. What it would feel like, and why.¹

Perhaps the innate elusiveness of all such ferlies must render any theory of them finally inadequate (“the medieval fantastic,” writes Francis Dubost, “is just as evanescent as its modern counterpart”),² but for whatever reason, more than fifty years later Lewis’s challenge is still to be met.

Progress, however, has been made on both fronts. In fulfillment of Lewis’s first condition, that of purely literary analysis, we can point to a number of fine studies. In England, Helen Cooper, Corinne Saunders, and James Wade have recently made important contributions,³ and in France literary study of le merveilleux is now regarded as mainstream.⁴ In the United States literary scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Geraldine Heng have concerned themselves with the more extreme manifestations of the marvelous, in particular associating the grotesque and the monstrous with issues of race, identity, and gender.⁵ Fulfillment of Lewis’s second condition, the study of ferlies as things, has been made much easier by the work of historians of medieval mentalités, particularly that of the annalistes Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt in France⁶ and in the English-speaking world by a number of premodernists following in the footsteps of Keith Thomas.⁷ Though it should now be much simpler than it would have been in 1966 to illuminate the ferlies of romance by imagining “what it would feel like … to believe in the things,” the dominant mode of critical analysis has remained stubbornly functionalist (“magic used as a literary tool”),⁸ at least in the Anglophone world.⁹ Even Fredric Jameson, for all that his recognition that magical narratives (that is, romances) belong to a world where nature remains “a mysterious and alien border around the still precarious and minute human activities of village and field,”¹⁰ treats magic as a literary device, a solution to the problem of apprehending unstable chivalric loyalties in a period of emergent class solidarity (p. 161). My own conviction is that we will make real progress only when we learn to treat magic, or at least its manifestations in medieval literature (those things that Lewis called ferlies), less as tenor and more as vehicle, to adapt I. A. Richards’s terminology; the first task is not to establish what such ferlies represent or exemplify or epitomize, but rather to ask what they are and what cultural work they are doing. From this perspective Lewis was putting the cart before the horse: literary diagnosis, I believe, should properly follow, not precede, the study of ferlies as things. Even with this proviso, however, I cannot pretend to be responding to Lewis’s general call to arms here; my aim in what follows is rather more modest: to elucidate not the whole territory of the medieval marvelous but merely one of its most prominent fiefdoms—that of fairyland.

For sixteenth-century England, it is a comparatively simple matter, in M. W. Latham’s words, “to reproduce the everyday belief of the Elizabethans concerning the fairies, to treat the fairies not as mythical personages or as fanciful creations of the literary imagination or of popular superstition, but to regard them, as did their human contemporaries of the 16^th century, as credible entities and as actual and existing beings.”¹¹ For the Middle Ages, however, the problem of trying to imagine what it would feel like to believe in fairies is compounded by the fact that much of what little evidence there is comes from texts written by members of a clerical elite who officially did not believe in them, at least not “as credible entities and as actual and existing beings,” and who felt obliged for the most part to show open hostility to all such beliefs. Nevertheless the attempts of such people to rationalize, negate, or dismiss fairy beliefs can tell us a great deal about both their vigor and their ubiquity.

One of the most concise and thorough descriptions of the kind of creature I am concerned with in this book appears in a treatise on the geography of Iceland written in the late sixteenth century probably by Oddur Einarsson, the Lutheran bishop of Skálholt; it will provide us with a useful point of departure:

But some [beings], who live in the hills close to men, are more amicable and not so dangerous unless they chance to have been harmed by some kind of injury and provoked to wickedness. They seem, indeed, to be endowed with bodies of incredible subtlety, since they are even thought to enter into mountains and hills. They are invisible to us unless they wish to appear of their own volition, yet the properties of certain men’s eyes are such that the presence of no spirit can ever escape their sight (as was Lynceus’s unhappy situation). They know a thousand devices and an infinite number of tricks with which they harass men in wretched ways, but their young people are said to have a similar stature, clothing, and even way of life to that of their human neighbors, and to take excessive pleasure in coupling with humans. Examples are not lacking of a number of the rogues who are said to have impregnated women beneath the earth and had access to them at fixed times or as many times as they wished. And from time to time the women of our land have been oppressed by these earth-dwellers and innocent boys and girls and the young people and adolescents of both sexes have very often been taken away, though quite a few are restored safe and sound after a number of days, or sometimes a number of weeks, but some are never seen again, and certain ones are found half-alive, etc. But it would be tedious to waste more of this study on them; for whether these things are brought about by the frauds, impostures, and illusions of the devil, which seems to be the view of almost all the more reasonable people, or whether they are some kind of mixed species created between spirits and animals, as some conjecture, yet it is certain that the appearance of these spirits has been common in many other regions, not only in Iceland, so that it is pointless to take this [their ubiquity in Iceland] as evidence that these curious creatures were fashioned in the underworld.¹²

Some European traditions locate fairies in castles deep in the woods or even in realms beneath the surface of lakes, rather than in underground kingdoms, but otherwise Oddur Einarsson’s description conforms closely to the common understanding of the vast majority of medieval people. Though several other kinds of interaction are certainly possible, fairies most often impinge on the human life world in two ways: by copulating with mortals or by abducting them. What is more interesting about Oddur’s account for our immediate purposes, however, is the attempt he makes to explain these creatures in terms of a standard Christian cosmology. The two possibilities he suggests—that they are either a trick of the devil (fraus Sathanae) or some kind of mixed species (genus mixtum) halfway between spirit and animal—are found elsewhere,¹³ though his apparent reluctance to concede that fairies may actually be devils (a third explanation that was widely entertained by other authorities) seems due to an understandable reluctance to endorse the common belief that the mouth of hell was situated in Iceland.¹⁴

Citing James I’s statement that the “spirites that are called vulgarlie called the Fayrie” are one of the four kinds of devil “conversing in the earth,” C. S. Lewis suggested that the idea that fairies were really devils became the “official view” only around the beginning of the seventeenth century.¹⁵ In actuality, however, it had been the orthodox position of the church for more than three hundred years. While traces of it can be detected much earlier,¹⁶ it was first set out systematically in William of Auvergne’s De Universo (written in the 1230s) and was frequently reiterated throughout the later Middle Ages. The popular late eleventh-century theological handbook the Elucidarium,¹⁷ composed in England by Honorius of Autun (or Augsberg),¹⁸ though it deals at length with good and bad angels, has nothing whatsoever to say about fairies. This silence is unsurprising since the earliest position taken by the church on the question of fairies seems to have been to deny their reality altogether: “Credidisti quod quidam credere solent,” asks Bishop Burchard of Worms in a penitential from around the year 1000, “quod sint agrestes feminae, quas sylvaticas vocant?” [Have you believed what some are accustomed to believe that there are rural women whom they call sylvans?] The bishop then makes quite clear the fatuity of such a belief: “Si credidisti, decem dies in pane et aqua poeniteas” [If you have believed it, do penance on bread and water for ten days].¹⁹ Things were very different, however, by the thirteenth century, when, in an adaptation of another of Burchard’s warnings against superstitious practices (this one against making gifts to “satyri vel pilosi” to obtain their goodwill), these creatures were changed to “diaboli … quos faunos vocant” [devils whom they call fauns], and the penance increased from ten days to fifteen.²⁰

By the time of an early fourteenth-century French Dominican redaction and translation of the Elucidarium known as the Second Lucidaire,²¹ the faithful are left in no doubt not only that fairies exist, but also that they are quite simply devils: “And vnto the regarde of þe feyryes the which man sayth were wonte to be in tymes past, they were not men ne women naturalles but were deuylles þe whiche shewed themselfe vnto þe people of þat tyme, for they were paynyms, ydolatres and without fayth.”²² Things are a little more complicated than this, however, for the Lucydarye has a second explanation of fairy phenomena; they can also be devilish illusions (what Oddur Einarsson calls fraudes Sathanae), rather than actual devils: “And theyr vysyons ben semblables vnto theym of a man the whiche is dronke, vnto whome it semeth that the house turneth vnder his fete, by þe whiche he falleth, and al the house ne the erthe remeueth not. In lyke wyse the deuyl them sheweth these vysyons in theyr entendemente” (p. 51). This distinction, which goes back at least to William of Auvergne, may seem like hairsplitting, but it was evidently important to medieval churchmen as a way of accounting for different kinds of fairy phenomena, particularly the ability of fairies to impersonate humans. Thus Étienne de Bourbon retells the old story of how Saint Germain, “recognizing that it was the trickery of demons” [cognoscens autem esse demonum ludificationem], exposed the true nature of what appeared to be a group of local people attending a feast set out for the fairies (“bone res”) by proving that their human counter parts were actually still sleeping soundly in their beds.²³

The recognition that in the discourse of the late medieval church fairies are demons (or demonic illusions) has important consequences for the study of vernacular belief. If fairies are demons, it follows that demons, or at least some demons, are fairies, and this insight opens up a world of still largely unexplored ecclesiastical material for investigation. Understandably, writers on medieval fairy beliefs have hitherto concentrated mainly on vernacular writing, chiefly romances, where fairyland is generally treated with something like transparency, though they have often supplemented these sources with the commentary of learned writers such as Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, and William of Newburgh. However, when we turn to pastoral manuals, saints’ lives, sermons, exempla, and miracle tales, we encounter a host of fairies masquerading as devils. Admittedly they are generally more shadowy figures than their counter parts in vernacular romance, but they offer the great advantage of highlighting the attitudes of the representatives of official culture toward them. It is this interplay of learned and vernacular culture in the Middle Ages that constitutes the main theme of this book.

Strictly speaking, if fairies are devils, then it must also follow that any belief in fairies as non-devils is potentially heretical. Surprisingly, such an uncompromising line is rarely openly expressed in medieval ecclesiastical discourse, at least before the fifteenth century, but it is certainly implicit in a remarkable story told by the thirteenth-century Belgian Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus. Augustine in his City of God briefly discusses creatures he calls dusii, which he represents as the Gaulish equivalents of those “Silvans and Pans, commonly called incubi” [silvanos et panes, quos vulgo incubos vocant] who were said to seduce women—in other words, creatures that a later age would call ‘fairies.’²⁴ Thomas gives this dramatic account of how such “dusii-demons inhabit the mountains and corrupt and derange their dupes”:

In 1231 when Master Conrad was preaching against the heretics in Germany and died a blessed death at their hands,²⁵ a certain heretic who had been corrupted by demons solicited a Dominican friar to join his heresy (as I heard many years ago from Brother Conrad, the Dominican Provincial in Germany).²⁶ When he saw the friar immediately recoil, he said to him: “You are very firm in your faith yet you have seen no more credible evidence of it than what is found in certain books. But if you should wish to believe my words I might show you Christ and his mother and the saints in plain sight.” The friar at once suspected a demonic illusion, but wishing to put it to the test, said, “Not without cause would I then believe, were you to put your promises into effect.” The joyful heretic set a date for the friar. The friar however secretly took along a pix containing Christ’s holy body concealed under his cloak. The heretic then led the friar into a very spacious palace in a cave in a mountain, which shone with a wonderful brightness. They came directly to the lower part of the palace, where they saw thrones placed, as if made of the purest gold, and on them a king, surrounded with glittering splendor, and next to him a most beautiful queen with a radiant face, and on either side benches on which were older men like patriarchs or prophets with a great multitude of angels sitting around, and they were all glittering with starlight (though they might be judged to be nothing less than demons). As soon as he saw them, the heretic adored them lying down before them. But the friar stood motionless, deeply stunned by such a spectacle, and the heretic turned to him at once and said, “Why do you not adore the son of God when you see him? Go and prostrate yourself; worship him whom you see and you will receive the secrets of our faith from his mouth.”²⁷

At this point Brother Conrad finally displays his concealed host, the illusion vanishes, and the crestfallen heretic is returned to the true faith.

I give this story at such length because there can be little doubt that Conrad’s heresy has been built up from a number of elements of traditional fairy lore. We have only to ask ourselves why demons should be portrayed as living in a palace (and this is not the only place where a Dominican preacher describes demons in this way)²⁸ to recognize that Thomas’s demonology has been infiltrated by vernacular conceptions of fairyland. The “very spacious palace in a cave in a mountain, which shone with a wonderful brightness” is an extremely common fairy locale; in English romance, for instance, it occurs in Sir Orfeo, Thomas of Erceldoune, and Reinbrun.²⁹ The king, surrounded with glittering splendor, and his beautiful queen with her radiant face are as likely to remind us of a fairy king and queen as of Christ and his mother. Once again, Sir Orfeo offers an example:

Þer-in her maister king sete,

& her quen, fair & swete:

Her crounes, her cloþes schine so briȝt

Þat vnneþe bihold he hem miȝt. (lines 413–16)

In the popular mind fairy lore might have been reconciled with Christian teaching in ways that would have scandalized the more educated members of the clergy. Finally, the shape-shifting ability of these ‘demons’ (evident in Thomas of Erceldoune, among others) is also a fairy commonplace. What is particularly striking about this story, however, is Thomas of Cantimpré’s translation of such fairy lore into an actual heresy (in fact, a potential target for the notorious inquisitor Conrad of Marburg), with the suggestion that it constitutes an organized doctrinal system: “you will receive the secrets of our faith from his mouth.” Fairy beliefs hover at the edge of consciousness for some medieval inquisitors,³⁰ but (except where the imagery of fairyland becomes entwined with the discourse of witchcraft, as was certainly to happen in the early-modern period) it is unusual to find them cast as a full-fledged heresy in this way.

No doubt Margaret Murray, had she known of this account, would have regarded it as conclusive evidence for her imaginative theories about the survival of the ‘old religion,’³¹ but as with the later Scottish witchcraft trials on which she drew so heavily, whatever coherent structure these beliefs appear to possess seems largely a projection of their adversaries’ own fantastic obsessions rather than a reflection of their holders’ esoteric knowledge.³² As important as the substance of such charges, however, is their tone. From our perspective Thomas of Cantimpré’s response seems out of all proportion to the seriousness of the threat, but there is no mistaking its antagonism. By linking it with Conrad of Marburg’s German crusade, indeed, he is setting it on a par with the far better documented heresy of the Cathars.³³ (Conrad was not alone in making such an association, however (as we shall see with Huon de Méri’s poem the Tornoiement de l’antichrist).

Not all medieval churchmen shared Thomas’s paranoia, for a curious Middle English poem called the Disputation Between a Christian and a Jew, presents a similar set of motifs in a rather more even tone.³⁴ It is found in a famous anthology of religious verse, the Vernon Manuscript, compiled in the west of England in the late fourteenth century. Despite its title, the Disputation Between a Christian and a Jew has little to do with any kind of genuine intellectual exchange between the representatives of Christianity and those of Judaism. The author’s grasp of even the most basic tenets of the Jewish faith is clearly shaky, but in his eagerness to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity to other religions, he appears to have constructed an entirely factitious old law out of such scraps of fairy belief as he was able to gather. The central episode closely resembles Thomas of Cantimpré’s anecdote in that the true believer is taken by the Jew to a wonderful land where he is shown a simulacrum of Christ on the cross surrounded by Mary and the disciples, but when he exhibits a mass wafer, the whole illusion vanishes.³⁵ The machinery of fairyland, however, is even more precisely elaborated. The two men, described rather surprisingly as clerks of divinity in Paris, enter a cleft in the earth and follow a paved road leading to a handsome manor adorned with purple and gold; there, in a natural landscape of luxuriant richness, time is felt to pass more swiftly than in the human world (“Hose lenge wolde long, / fful luitel him þouht” [lines 163–64]),³⁶ and it is particularly striking that they should encounter King Arthur and “al þe rounde table good” (line 185) among the residents. The visitors pass on to a nunnery, where “a ladi so fre,” who seems to be a cross between an abbess and a fairy queen, welcomes them “wiþ rial rehet” (line 224);³⁷ it is in her splendid hall that the Christian unmasks the illusory crucifixion scene, the building ‘bursts,’ the lights go out, and the two men find themselves standing “o þe hulle / Þer þey furst were” (lines 271–72).

Accounts such as these might seem to reflect the delusions of clerics out of touch with vernacular culture, but (as we shall see in the next chapter) it would be a mistake to overstate the gulf between clergy and laity in such matters or underestimate the complexity of vernacular beliefs. The testimony of a Suffolk woman named Marion Clerk, examined in the course of an archiepiscopal visitation in 1499, suggests that these accounts may well have had some basis in reality. It is worth quoting at length:

Marion Clerk, daughter of John and Agnes Clerk, was noted for the use of superstitious art … in that, it was asserted, she had the art of healing people of various diseases, of prophesying future events and declaring what misfortunes would befall those who came to her, and revealing the whereabouts of certain hidden treasures. To this charge she replied that she did have this ability. The judge asked her where and from whom she had learnt this art, and she replied that she had it from God and the Blessed Virgin and the gracious fairies. The judge asked her what they might be, and Marion replied that they were little people who gave her information whenever she wanted it. The judge asked her whether these little people believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and she replied that they believed only in the Father Almighty. He asked her if she had ever been in heaven, and she said that she had. He asked her if she had seen God in heaven, and she said that she had, and He was wearing a golden mantle. She also said that by the power of the gracious fairies she had talked with the Archangel Gabriel and St Stephen.³⁸

Evidently the judge was sufficiently intrigued by this account of fairy transportation to set a trap for her: he “asked if she had been to Canterbury through the power of the fairies and she said yes, and asked where was the tomb of the blessed martyr Thomas, she said [wrongly, of course] it was in the churchyard” (p. 215). Unsurprisingly, a later court in Norwich Cathedral declared “all such arts to be superstitious and to lead to suspicion of heretical pravity” (p. 216), and Marion was forced to recant. As with Thomas of Cantimpré’s story, what is so striking about Marion’s testimony is less her belief that she had visited some kind of fairy locus amoenus (John Bromyard had written of certain deluded women who believed themselves taken off by a certain race and led to certain beautiful and unknown places [quae dicunt se rapi a quodam populo, & duci ad loca quaedam pulchra, & ignota])³⁹ than the way in which (like a later cunning man from Sussex who claimed to be aided by the archangel Uriel, “a great prince of the Fayries”)⁴⁰ her account has become entangled with Christian machinery. The celebrated Cambridge song “Heriger, urbis Maguntiacensis,” which tells of an otherworld deep in the woods visited by a ‘prophet’ who says he saw Christ, John the Baptist, and Saint Peter sitting at a feast, offers a much earlier instance of this phenomenon.⁴¹

We are accustomed to thinking of popular superstitions as falling well outside the boundaries of heresy because they can have posed no coherent intellectual challenge to orthodox dogma, but by the fifteenth century the English church’s attitude to them was clearly hardening, and there is evidence that in pastoral, if not in scholastic, circles such beliefs may have regularly been felt to be heretical. A remarkable passage in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine, for instance, speaks of witches and elves in the same breath as Lollards; the Virgin Mary is here instructing the hermit who is to convert the saint:

So sayd my Sone to His aposteles twelve,

“Whan ye stand,” He seyd, “befor the dome

Of many tyrauntys, and ye alone youreselve,

Thow thei yow calle Lollard, whych, or elve,

Beth not dysmayd—I schall gyve yow answere.” (3:324–28)⁴²

This is evidently based on an apocalyptic passage that appears in three of the four gospels,⁴³ but none of them alludes to anything that remotely suggests fairies. Peter Idley in the mid-fifteenth century insisted that even white magic was heretical:

And thoughe by thi Pater noster þou coniure

And by hooly wordis doo mervelous werkis,

It is playn Eresye—I referre me to clerkis.⁴⁴

In a similar vein, the articles of excommunication recorded in the register of Godstow Abbey at about the same time condemn “Alle þat knoweth heresy, wicchecrafte, enchauntement, Nigromancy, coniurisones, or any fals beleve aȝens the feyth of holichurch, but ȝif þei distroye hit be þer power.”⁴⁵ Interestingly, not everyone seems to have been quite so obdurate, for the article also includes, “And al þat ben ordened to enquere þer-on, ȝif þei leue the sute þer-of”; some, apparently, were reluctant to inquire too closely into the unorthodox beliefs of their flock. No matter where on the spectrum their opinions lay, however, all medieval clerics seem to have been prepared to accept that fairy belief was a potentially serious issue.

All this raises questions that are not often asked in such a context. Can we learn anything significant about the actual nature of such beliefs, and is it possible to discover how seriously they were taken by those who held them? After all, it might plausibly be claimed that we are witnessing nothing more than the paranoid projections of a dominant class seeking to impose its own values on an indifferent and inarticulate subject class. Even if some laypeople might actually have been prepared to rationalize and defend their traditional beliefs, where might we look for evidence of this recalcitrance? Latin sources, whether openly hostile or rather more accommodating, have little interest in contextualizing such radically unorthodox views, and even vernacular materials can be frustratingly circumspect.

However rarely, we may still sometimes glimpse signs of actual resistance to the ecclesiastical proscription of vernacular belief. In the mid-fourteenth century John Bromyard reported that attempts to prohibit rituals for recovering stolen property (a standard activity for cunning men and women) might be met with defiance: “they say it is not the work of the devil but of the fair folk [that is, the fairies], for we haven’t learnt it from the devil, nor do we believe in him, but from the fair folk” [sed dicunt non per diabolum, sed pulchrum populum, nec a diabolo didicimus nec ei credimus sed pulchro populo].⁴⁶ Occasionally, indeed, acts of civil disobedience might invoke fairy protection, apparently reflecting an instinctive association of fairies with other targets of oppressive regulation. In January 1450 Thomas Cheyne led a rebellion in Kent (a harbinger of the much more serious uprising of Jack Cade later in the same year), and among the pseudonyms adopted by its leaders were those of the King of Fairyland and the Queen of Fairyland (Regem de ffeyre and Reginam de ffeyre).⁴⁷ Popular sentiment was clearly in favor of the rebels, but the “oon calling hym self Queen of the feyre” seems to have been particularly charismatic—a contemporary London chronicler remarking that he “did noon oppression nor hurt to any persone.”⁴⁸ Though the full significance of this impersonation is now impossible to recover, evidently the discourse of fairyland offered the rebels a shared language that they felt they could use against their oppressors: a slightly later indictment accuses a group of poachers of disguising themselves with long beards and blackened faces and proclaiming themselves “the servants of the Queen of Fairyland, intending that they should identify [themselves] by the name” [nuncupantes se esse servientes Regine del Faire ea intencione ut ipsi a nomine cognoscerent].⁴⁹ A similar rising, “popular in origin … and plebeian in character,”⁵⁰ occurred in the north of England in 1489; William Paston III recounts the rebels’ call to arms and then adds sarcastically, “And thys is in the name of Mayster Hobbe Hyrste, Robyn God-felaws brodyr he is, as I trow.”⁵¹ Robin Goodfellow is of course a wellknown fairy name, but Hob Hurst is much more obscure, surviving only in a Derbyshire place-name for a prehistoric tumulus, Hob Hurst’s House.⁵² Like Cheyne’s Queen of Fairyland, Robin Goodfellow’s brother here looks very much like an early instance of the common people turning to fairy impersonation in defense of their traditional rights. Hobbe was to have many descendants, however, his line reaching down to the nineteenth century.⁵³

We may infer that the crude characterization of fairies as simply devils, or devilish illusions, did not go unchallenged, for pastoral (as opposed to scholastic) theology seems early to have evolved a rather more palatable variation (more palatable, that is, to those who were apparently ready to regard fairies as potentially benevolent creatures). By this account, fairies, while still devils, were only minor devils, less culpable than those who had been thrown into the pit of hell with Satan. Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia (ca. 1215) suggests that fairies who roam the earth can hardly be equated with the fallen angels who were thrust down to the dungeons of nether darkness to remain there till Doomsday (2 Pet. 2:4): “it must be, then, that those who sided with the devil but whose pride was less grievous were reserved to provide phantoms of this nature to punish humankind.”⁵⁴ In Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, when the novice observes that some devils are better than others [non omnes daemones aequaliter mali sunt], his master replies that “certain ones, it is said, while others were raising themselves up against God with Lucifer, merely consented, and these indeed fell with the others, but are less evil and harm men less than the others” [quidam, ut dicitur, aliis cum Lucifero contra Deum se extollentibus simpliciter consenserunt, et hi quidem cum ceteris ruerunt, sed ceteris minus mali sunt, hominesque minus laedunt].⁵⁵ He then goes on to illustrate this point with the example of a handsome young servant who helped his knightly master escape from his enemies and healed his mistress from a serious disease and then revealed himself to have been a demon (and even after this offered to pay for a bell in the local church!); it seems likely that Caesarius is here recalling some popular tale about a figure such as Gyfre, the fairy servant in the Middle English version of Marie de France’s Lanval, who accompanies the hero on his adventures and gives him money and martial assistance.⁵⁶

The idea that there were two classes of devil (the hardcore supporters of Lucifer and some less-committed fellow travelers) is an old one, at least as old as Origen in the third century,⁵⁷ and it was employed to solve a number of theological difficulties. We will probably never know at what point these ‘neutral’ or ‘craven’ angels came to be associated with the fairies of vernacular belief,⁵⁸ but clearly the idea was generally current from at least the beginning of the thirteenth century. In England we find it in the late fourteenth-century Vernon Manuscript’s Life of Adam and Eve: “And after that while [the Fall of Lucifer] heo beon pynet, summe more and summe lasse … heo fullen out as thikke as the drift of the snough; summe astunte in the eyr and summe in the eorthe. Yf eny mon is elve-inome other elf-iblowe, he hit hath of the angelus that fellen out of hevene” [and after that time they were tortured, some more, some less…. They fell down as thick as snow drifts. Some stopped in the air, some on the ground. If any man is elf-taken or elf-blown (that is, falls sick) he receives it from the angels that fell from heaven].⁵⁹ A hundred years earlier The South English Legendary had provided an even more radical account,⁶⁰ not only pairing these lesser devils with fairies but even suggesting that they might merit pardon at Doomsday:

Oþer were þat for hom somdel . in misþoȝt were

Ac naþeles hi hulde bet mid God . ac vnneþe hi forbere

Þulke wende out of heuene ek . and aboue þe oþere beoþ

Anhei vnder þe firmament . and Godes wille iseoþ

And so ssolleþ be[o] somdel in pine . forte þe worles ende

Ac hi ssolleþ a Domesday . aȝen to heuene wende (lines 201–6)

[There were others who, because their thoughts strayed somewhat (even though they were more inclined to God, they barely held themselves back) also departed from heaven, and they are above the others, raised up below the heavens, and recognize God’s will; and so they must be punished somewhat until the end of the world, but they shall return again to heaven at Doomsday]

and again, “Þat beoþ of þe wrecche gostes . þat of heuene were inome / And mony of hom a Domesday . ssolleþ ȝute to reste come” (lines 257–58) [They are the wretched spirits who were taken from heaven, and many of them shall yet find peace at Doomsday]. This idea turns up elsewhere and may even be responsible for Dante locating his neutral angels in the vestibule of hell (Inferno 3:37–39). The fairy Melusine, for example, tells her husband that her natural lot is to remain in “greuouse and obscure penytence … vnto the day of domme,”⁶¹ and that this view had penetrated vernacular consciousness is proved by the testimony of a suspected Cathar dragged before the inquisition in the early fourteenth century: “but all the spirits who did not expressly consent or believe in the devil, but were only swept up in the disturbance created by the devil and sinned, as it were, unknowingly, spirits of this kind are human [?mortal] and all shall at length be saved on the Day of Judgment” [set omnes spiritus qui non expresse consenserunt vel crediderunt dyabolo, set solum accesserunt ad turbationem quam dyabolys fecit, et quasi inscii peccaverunt, cuiusmodi sunt spiritus humani, omnes finaliter in die iudicii salvarentur].⁶²

This attempt to offer an acceptably anodyne version of the demon/fairy conjunction ultimately satisfied no one. Scholastic theology could not accept the idea that there were degrees of guilt among the followers of Satan,⁶³ while the notion that some devils were actually redeemable lay even further beyond the pale. Walter Map tells two Faust-like tales of men who put themselves in the power of demons, and both are lulled into a sense of false security when their Mephistopheles figures (in one case a female called, significantly, Meridiana) claim to be harmless fairies. “You fear perhaps an illusion,” says Meridiana, “and are meaning to evade the subtlety of a succubus in my person. You are mistaken”;⁶⁴ and the other tells his victim, a young knight called Eudo, “We can do anything that makes for laughter and nothing that makes for tears. Now I am one of those exiles from heaven who, without abetting or consenting to the crime of Lucifer, were foolishly and unthinkingly carried away in the train of his accomplices” (p. 321). “Deceived by these and similar stories,” says Map, “Eudo cheerfully assented to the pact” (p. 329). Clearly some clerics felt that the fable of the neutral angels was fraught with spiritual danger, while the notion of redeemable demons was, if anything, even worse. “That some demons are good, others well-intentioned, others omniscient, others neither saved nor damned. Error!” [quod aliqui demones boni sint, alii benigni, alii omniscientes, alii nec salvi nec damnati. Error] was the unequivocal pronouncement of the Paris theological faculty in 1398.⁶⁵

Vernacular tradition too seems to have balked at the idea of fairies as neutral angels. For instance, the French romance of Esclarmonde (a continuation of Huon of Bourdeaux) is careful to distinguish neutral angels from genuine fairies. Having narrowly escaped from a shipwreck as he is hastening to arrive at the deathbed of his fairy mentor, Oberon, Huon comes upon a monastery, where he attends a strangely truncated form of the mass; by producing a holy object (a stole) he forces one of the monks to reveal his true nature to him, and he and his fellows turn out to be neutral angels.⁶⁶ The whole point of this episode seems to be to differentiate these neutral angels from the actual fairies (whose chief is Oberon). Though the Middle English translation draws no clear distinction between neutral and fallen angels (“al we that be here were chasyd out of paradyse with lucyfer”),⁶⁷ it portrays these spirits as holding out a hope of salvation: “but we that be here yet we hope to come to saluacyon” (p. 593). The French original, though, makes it quite plain that they do in fact belong to the third party of angels, those who sided with neither God nor Lucifer: “La tierce pars ne se sot v tenir / Ou a celui [Lucifer] ou au vrai Jesuscrist” (lines 2717–18). The Middle English translation does distinguish these beings from both humans and fairies—“[we] be conuersant amonge the people, & as well as they of the fayery” (p. 593)—but implies that they exercise some power over the fairies: “we be tho that hathe the conducte of al the fayery of the world” (p. 594). The French original by contrast makes the storm in which Huon is almost drowned the work of these demon monks but attributes his delivery to fairy power:

“Sire,” dist il, “jou t’ai dit verité:

De faerie oïs onques parler.”

“Oïl,” dist Hües, “j’en ai oï assés;

Si m’a ëu grant mestier en la mer

Il m’ont aidié ma vie a respiter.”

“Hües,” dist il, “vous dites verité.” (lines 2740–45)

[“Sir,” he said, “I have told you the truth: have you never heard tell of fairy magic.” “Yes,” said Huon, “I have heard enough about it: when I was in great need in the sea, they helped me to save my life.” “Huon,” he said, “you speak the truth.”]

Harf-Lancner suggests that we are dealing here with an amalgam of two conceptions of fairyland, one learned and the other folkloric,⁶⁸ but I think rather that the author is drawing a deliberate distinction between the real world of the fairies (that represented by Oberon and his followers) and a demonic substitute (the monkish neutral angels), devised by learned culture as a way of rendering vernacular beliefs less dangerous. This point is illustrated even more clearly in the Scottish romance of Thomas of Erceldoune. When Thomas first encounters the fairy queen, he mistakes her for the Virgin Mary,⁶⁹ but he is quickly disabused:

Qwene of heuen ne am I noghte,

ffor I tuke neuer so heghe degre.

But I ame of ane oþer countree (lines 91–93).⁷⁰

It is made equally clear, however, that this country is not the devil’s, for as she rides with Thomas to fairyland, she warns him against picking the fruit that borders their path: “Thomas, þou late þame stande, / Or ells þe fende the will atteynt” (lines 197–98). Even more significant is the reason she gives a reluctant Thomas, after his seven-year sojourn in fairyland, for his return to the world:

Bot langere here þou may noghte duelle,

The skylle I sall þe telle whare fore:

To Morne, of helle þe foulle fende

Amange this folke will feche his fee;

And þou art mekill mane and hende,—

I trowe full wele he wole chese the. (lines 287–92)

If the fiend of hell regularly takes an inhabitant of fairyland as his “fee,” clearly the fairies are to be distinguished from devils, even lesser devils. This point is reiterated in two unique passages in one of the five manuscripts of the poem, B.L., MS Lansdowne 762. In the first section of the poem Thomas sexually assaults the fairy queen and then watches her beauty fade before his eyes:⁷¹

Thomas stode vpe in þat stede,

and he by helde þat lady gaye;

Hir hare it hange all ouer hir hede,

Hir eghe semede owte, þat are were graye,

and alle þe riche clothynge was a waye. (lines 129–33)

At this point the Lansdowne manuscript adds a passage that balances the earlier one in which Thomas had mistaken her for the Virgin:

Sche woxe so grym and so stowte

The dewyll he wende she had be,

In the Name of the trynite,

he coniuryde here anon ryght

That she shulde not come hym nere,

But wende away of his sight.

She said, “thomas, this is no nede,

ffor fende of hell am I none.” (lines 143–50)

In a later passage, when Thomas asks her about her transformation, she explains that it had been a ruse to deceive her jealous husband and that otherwise, “Me had been as good to goo / To the brynnyng fyre of hell” (lines 247–48). If all this were not enough, four of the manuscripts (the fifth, B.L., MS Sloane 2578, is defective at this point) preserve a remarkable passage (lines 201–20) in which the path to fairyland is contrasted with four other paths: those leading to heaven, to the earthly paradise, to purgatory, and to hell. In the traditional ballad derived from this medieval romance these five paths have been reduced to three:

O see not ye yon narrow road,

So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

That is the path of righteousness,

Tho after it but few enquires.

And see not ye that braid braid road,

That lies across yon lillie leven?

That is the path of wickedness,

Tho some call it the road to heaven.

And see not ye that bonny road,

Which winds about the fernie brae?

That is the road to fair Elfland,

Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.⁷²

These passages provide clear evidence that some people felt that fairyland lay beyond the boundaries of a conventional Christian cosmology, and a curious aside in the popular vade mecum Sidrak and Bokkus seems to imply that such an attitude was widespread; in response to the question “Wheþer in thatt oþer world may be Any hous, toun, or citee?” Sidrak describes the three paths to be taken by the soul after death (to heaven, hell, and purgatory) and then adds (in the English version) the otherwise otiose remark, “Wonyng stedes be there no moo / That man or woman shall goo to.”⁷³ (We shall return in Chapter 5 to the difficult question of fairyland as an abode of departed souls.)

Clearly fairy beliefs occupied an anomalous status in the official culture of the later Middle Ages. While scholastic theology may have regarded them as demonic, at the pastoral level they were far too deeply entrenched in the vernacular consciousness to be easily extirpated, and an uneasy truce was maintained. Is it, then, possible to delve further into this vernacular consciousness, to discover any direct evidence for the nature and extent of these beliefs?

Jacques Le Goff has written of “the near impossibility of transporting to the past the methods of observation, investigation, and enumeration, applied by sociologists to contemporary societies,”⁷⁴ and while there is no reason to suppose that popular belief was any more homogeneous in the Middle Ages than it is now (“ther ben many folk that beleeven because it happeneth so often tyme to fallen after here fantasyes,” writes Sir John Mandeville, “and also there ben men ynowe that han no beleve in hem”),⁷⁵ its nuances are far more difficult to penetrate. Certainly the nearest thing to a statistical sample we possess—the thirty-four people from Domrémy and the surrounding area who were questioned about a fairy tree (“arbor Fatalium, gallice des fees”) in 1452 as part of the process to nullify Joan of Arc’s condemnation twenty years earlier—yields very modest results, at least statistically.⁷⁶ In 1431 Joan herself had informed her inquisitors that she had never seen fairies at the tree “as far as she knew” [dixit quod nunquam vidit predictas Fatales apud arborem, quod ipsa sciat]—though she did concede that one of her godmothers claimed to have seen them—and she stoutly denied that the gatherings at the fairy tree that she had attended as a young girl were anything other than innocent springtime picnics.⁷⁷ Of the thirty-four later witnesses questioned about the arbre des dames, ten knew, or affected to know, nothing at all about it (though hardly any of these were from the immediate area of Domrémy) and only nine admitted to having heard that in the old days fairies were to be seen there; no one admitted to believing in fairies personally, though a forty-four-year-old laborer named Michel Buin did say that he did not know where they had gone, because they no longer visited the tree. The Domrémy villagers were under no particular threat from the commission (indeed the commissioners were eager for reassurance that Joan’s youthful activities were entirely innocent), yet even so their responses were warily noncommittal. In view of the fact that Bernard Gui’s famous inquisitors’ manual requires further investigation of anyone who believes in “fairy women, whom they call the good things” [de fatis mulieribus quas vocant bonas res],⁷⁸ perhaps we can hardly blame them.

In default of statistics we must resort to anecdotal evidence to see what inferences can be drawn about the extent of fairy beliefs in the Middle Ages. One of the most fascinating test cases is provided by Jean d’Arras’s romance Mélusine (ca. 1393), which traces the origins of the great crusading family of the Lusignans back to its founder’s ill-fated marriage to a fairy bride. Mélusine was one of the most popular stories in fifteenth-century Europe: alongside Jean d’Arras’s prose version, there is another in verse (ca. 1401) by a man called Coudrette, and altogether thirty manuscripts survive of these two renderings. In one or other form it was translated into almost every major European language (with English translations of both texts). Coudrette may well have been a cleric, and he seems to have been somewhat wary about raising the question of his story’s factual status (indeed one might detect a certain defensiveness in his insistence that he was writing only at the behest of Guillaume Larchevêque, Lord of Parthenay, and in the elaborate prayers for the soul of his patron with which he concludes). Jean d’Arras, in contrast, was fully prepared to tackle the problems of factual corroboration head on, and with a patron as powerful as Jean de France, Duc de Berri, he need hardly have worried about any consequences. He begins by telling us that “in many partes of the sayd lande of Poytow haue ben shewed vnto many oon right famylerly many manyeres of thinges the whiche somme called Gobelyns [Fr. luitons] the other ffayrees, and the other “bonnes dames” or good ladyes,”⁷⁹ and then he invokes the authority of Gervase of Tilbury, “a man worshipfull & of credence,” for the belief that their activities “be permytted & doon for som mysdedes that were doon ayenst the playsure of god wherfore he punysshed them so secretly & so wounderly wherof none hath parfytte knowlege but alonely he and they may be therefore called the secrets of god, abysmes without ryuage and without bottom.”⁸⁰ Two French vernacular translations of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia survive from the Middle Ages,⁸¹ and though there is no record of the Duc de Berri’s owning a copy, his brother Charles V certainly did.⁸² D’Arras concludes his history of Melusine with another extended discussion of the existence of fairies and (at least in the French original) another reference to Gervase:

Therfore yf I haue wryton or shewed ony thing that to som semeth neyther possible to be nor credible, I beseche them to pardonne me. For as I fele & vnderstand by the Auctours of gramaire & phylosophye [Fr. des anciens autteurs tant de Gervaise comme d’autres anciens autteurs et philosophes] they repute and hold this present hystorye for a true Cronykle & thinges of the fayry. And who that saith the contrary / I say the secret jugements of god and his punysshments are inuysible & impossible to be vnderstand or knowe by the humanyte of man. / For the vnderstanding of humayne Creature is to rude to vnderstande the spyce espirytuel, & may not wel comprehend what it is / but as ferre as the wylle of god wyl suffre hym [Fr. et la puissance de Dieu y puet adjouster qu’ il lui plaist]. For there is found in many hystoryes Fayries that haue be maryed & had many children / but how this may be the humayn creature may not conceyue.⁸³

But it is not just written authority that Jean d’Arras invokes. When, at a critical point in the story, Melusine, learning that her husband has disregarded a solemn prohibition, flies off in the shape of a dragon from an upper window, Jean offers us marmoreal proof of this marvel: “And wete it wel that on the basse stone of the wyndowe apereth at this day themprynte of her foote serpentous [Fr. Et sachiéz que la pierre sur quoy elle passa a la fenestre y est encores, et y est la fourme du pié toute escripte].”⁸⁴ Predictably, Coudrette omits this detail, but even he felt the need to reassure his audience at this point: “Which I writte is trouth, therof ly no thyng [Fr. Il est voir tout que je escry; / Je m’en daigneroye mentir].”⁸⁵

This is not quite all there is to it, however, for Jean d’Arras, or at least his patron, might well be thought to have had a political motive for publicly endorsing the legend of Melusine. Among the many stories connected with Melusine was one that she would appear on the ramparts of Lusignan whenever control of the fortress was about to change hands. In the summer and fall of 1376, with Lusignan, the last remaining major English stronghold in Poitou, under siege by the forces of Jean, Duc de Berri, what better way might have been found of encouraging the attackers than to report that Melusine had put in an appearance? Predictably, then, Jean d’Arras says that he had learned from the duke himself that John Cresswell, the English castellan who was defending the castle, had been visited by Melusine three days before its surrender—at the time he was in bed with a woman named Alexandrine, and “he was neuer in his dayes so afered.”⁸⁶ Cresswell, a grizzled old routier,⁸⁷ was certainly not a man to be easily frightened—a fact not lost on his sarcastic bedfellow: “Ha, valyaunt Sersuel how ofte haue I sene your mortal enemyes tofore your presence that neuer ye were aferd, and now for a serpent of femenyne nature ye shake for fere.” It is easy, then, to dismiss this story as mere propaganda, especially since some of its details can be shown to be inaccurate: for instance, d’Arras says that the apparition occurred three days before Cresswell surrendered the castle, but in fact when Lusignan finally fell into French hands, on 1 October, Cresswell had actually been languishing in a French dungeon for over three months;⁸⁸ moreover Lusignan did not exactly ‘fall’ to the besiegers; the English handed it over to the duke by way of discharging the ransom of Sir Thomas Percy.⁸⁹ To be fair, the Duc de Berri was probably embroidering the details of a story, retold for Jean d’Arras’s benefit, after an interval of perhaps fifteen years, but this passage of time raises further problems. By, say, 1390 Lusignan was firmly in French hands and the story had lost whatever propaganda value it might once have had; could it be that the duke, Lusignan’s new castellan, was now wondering whether he might not be next on Melusine’s visiting list? Certainly the cultural work being done by the prose Mélusine at this point seems to have changed radically. Cresswell’s story is being invoked here not to dishearten an English garrison but to establish the actual existence of a fairy apparition.

As told in the French original, the story contains a number of circumstantial details left out of the English translation. We learn, for instance, that all the doors to the bedroom Cresswell was sharing with Alexandrine were locked and that there was a good fire burning in the grate (so that Melusine could not have come down the chimney): “Et ne sçot oncques par ou elle entra, et estoient tous les huiz ferméz et barréz et le feu ardoit grant en la cheminee.”⁹⁰ Moreover, others are said to have seen her. The English translation does mention a man named Godard who swore on the Evangelists that he had often encountered her without ever coming to harm (pp. 369–70), but it leaves out the vivid detail that it was near an old chicken coop next to the castle well (“il a un lieu a Lusegnen empréz le puis ou on a du temps passé nourry pollaille”) as well as the important fact that the man himself was still alive (“un homme qui encores demeure en la forteresse”) (p. 814). Similarly, a Welshman called Evan is mentioned as a further witness,⁹¹ but not the fact that he saw Melusine twice. Finally, the English translation makes no mention whatsoever of a Poitevin called Perceval de Couloigne, the chamberlain of Peter I of Cyprus (a descendant of the Lusignans), who swore that his master claimed to have seen Melusine three days before he was murdered on 7 January 1369 (p. 814)—a notorious crime, recorded in Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. All this wealth of circumstantial detail makes it hard to accept that, whatever its origins, Jean d’Arras is telling the story of John Cresswell for any other reason than to prove the factual basis of the apparition, and that the Duc de Berri had related it to him out of a genuine concern with establishing the facts.

Jean d’Arras may be unusual in the lengths he goes to to authenticate his remarkable tale, but there is nothing surprising about finding the issue of fairy belief raised by a writer of romance. Fairies, it seems, like ghosts, have their favorite haunts, and of all the European locations where one might hope to encounter a fairy, perhaps the most auspicious was the forest of Brocéliande near Rennes in Brittany. A description of Brocéliande in the mid-thirteenth-century romance of Claris and Laris (1268) makes it sound rather like a fairy theme park (complete with a golden arch):

Dusqu’a midi ont chevauchie

Lors ont .i. grant bois aprouchie,

Qu’on apele Broceliande;

Trop est la forest fiere et grande

Et plaine de trop grant merveille;

………………………

Les fees ont lor estage,

En .i.des biaus leis du boscage

Est lor maison et lor repaire

Si riches, con le porroit faire

Cil, qui le sorent compasser.

………………….

A l’entrer de la riche lande,

Qu’on apele Broceliande,

Sont li baron arresteu;

Atant ont .i. arvout veu,

Haut et bien fet de grant richece;

Bien avoit .x. piez de largece;

Dedenz avoit letres escrites

D’or, qui n’estoient pas petites;

Toutes les choses devisoient,

Qui dedenz la forest estoient. (lines 3289–334)⁹²

[They [Claris and Laris] rode until midday, when they arrived at a great wood which is called Brocéliande. It is a very large and noble forest, full of many great wonders…. The fairies have set up residence there; their dwelling and their resort is in one of the fair clearings in the forest. It is as rich as the builders, who knew their business, could make it…. At the entrance to this rich woodland they call Brocéliande the knights halted. Then they saw a high arch, well made at great expense, at least ten feet tall. Within were sizable gold letters written; they listed all the things that were to be seen in the forest.]

Most modern readers will take this passage as pure fantasy and will regard its fairy paraphernalia as a mere plot device—the function of Brocéliande is simply to provide an elaborate chivalric proving ground for the two young heroes. As Jeff Rider puts it, medieval otherworlds “serve as narrative engines whose representatives, messages, or gifts intervene to set a story going, keep it going, or change its direction.”⁹³ In Helen Cooper’s words, “magic is above all a narrative issue, a way of telling a story.”⁹⁴ To take the fairy machinery of medieval romance as nothing more than a convenient narrative device, however, is to ignore the fact that people in the Middle Ages were themselves far from indifferent to truth claims about fairies. As Arthur Brown showed long ago, the torrent of disparaging epithets—nugae, fallaces, fabulae, figmenta—hurled against Arthurian romances by twelfth-century clerics arose from their very real indignation that such things as “disappearing castles, magic fountains, and enchanted forests” should have been represented as credible.⁹⁵ If the question mattered to them, perhaps it should also matter to us.

Let us then return to the Forest of Brocéliande. In the Roman de Rou, written at least a hundred years before Claris and Laris, the Norman poet Wace inserts the following amusing aside into an account of the forces gathered by William for his invasion of England:

e cil devers Brecheliant

donc Breton vont sovent fablant,

une forest mult longue e lee

qui en Bretaigne est mult loee.

La fontaine de Berenton

sort d’une part lez le perron;

aler i solent veneor

a Berenton par grant chalor,

et a lor cors l’eve espuisier

e le perron desus moillier;

por ço soleient pluie aveir.

Issi soleit jadis ploveir

en la forest e environ,

mais jo ne sai par quel raison.

La seut l’en des fees veeir

se li Breton nos dient veir

e altres mereveilles plusors;

………………‥

La alai jo merveilles querre,

vi la forest e vi la terre,

merveilles quis, mais nes trouvai,

fol m’en revinc, fol i alai;

fol i alai, fol m’en revinc,

folie quis, por fol me tinc. (3:6374–98)⁹⁶

[and some [came] from near Brocéliande which the Bretons often tell stories about, a forest, long and broad, which is greatly prized in Brittany. The spring of Barenton flows on one side, beside the great stone. Huntsmen were accustomed to go to Barenton when it was very hot and pour water from their horns and splash it over the great stone; this way they would make it rain. This is the way it rained in the old days in the forest and the surrounding area, but I don’t know what the reason was. People were accustomed to seeing fairies and many other wonders there, if the Bretons are telling us the truth…. I went there to see wonders, I saw the forest and I saw the region; I searched for wonders but I didn’t find any; I came back a fool—I went there a fool; I went there a fool—I came back a fool; I looked for folly—I found myself the fool [my emphasis].]

Wace, then, was a skeptic; he had sought empirical evidence and found it lacking, but the real point is that he did seek it (or represents himself as having done so).

What of his successor Chrétien de Troyes? Chrétien had evidently read this passage in Wace, for Calogrenant is clearly echoing it in the opening scene of Yvain. Reporting his unsuccessful adventures in Brocéliande to King Arthur, Calogrenant concludes:

Ensi alai, ensi reving,

Au revenir por fol me ting;

Si vos ai conté come fos

Ce qu’onques mes conter ne vos. (lines 577–80)⁹⁷

[Thus I went, thus I returned; on my return I found myself a fool; if I have told my story like a fool I wish that I may never tell it again.]

Calogrenant’s folly, however, is quite different from Wace’s; it is not the folly of a man who has been naive and gullible—pouring water over the stone has, after all, produced the promised effect—but of one who has overreached himself and been shamed in battle with the knight whom his actions conjured up. At the end of the romance, Yvain, desperate to get his indignant lady, Laudine, to see him, threatens to flood her out by exploiting the magical properties of the spring at Barenton:

Puis errerent tant que il virent

La fontainne et plovoir i firent.

Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante,

Que si fu fiere la tormante,

Que nus n’an conteroit le disme. (lines 6533–37)

[Then they [Yvain and his lion] traveled until they saw the spring and made it rain there. Don’t imagine that I’m lying to you: the tempest was so severe that no one could tell the tenth of it [my emphasis].]

What are we to make of Chrétien’s disclaimer, “Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante”? Is it an ironic joke? Is it a genuine appeal for credence? Is it merely a conventional tic designed to carry his audience along with him at an improbable moment? Whatever we make of it, however, it shows that Chrétien was no less aware than Wace of the contested nature of fairy belief.

There is one other early literary text whose setting is the Forest of Brocéliande, Huon de Méri’s Torneiment Anticrist (1235–40). This is not a true romance but rather an odd mixture of allegorical psychomachia and social satire: Anticrist’s followers, for instance, include not only a character called Pub Crawl [Guersois], whose gang consists of Scotsmen, English, and Normans, but also the gods Pluto and Proserpina, who bear a clear resemblance to Chaucer’s fairy king and queen in The Merchant’s Tale.⁹⁸ Proserpina is Anticrist’s lover and supplies him with a pennon made from her chemise (lines 570–74), while Pluto bullies Anticrist into fighting the archangel Michael (lines 2918–19). Interestingly, among the butts of Huon de Méri’s satire are the Albigensians (lines 878–96 and 22767–95)—a further sign that fairy beliefs hovered at the edge of heresy. The Torneiment’s opening lines are clearly inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’s account of the visits of Calogrenant and Yvain to Brocéliande; the poet, seeking to discover the truth about the spring of Barenton and its properties (“Kar la verté volei e aprendre / De la perilluse fontaine” [lines 62–63]), finds it just as Chrétien had described (“cum l’a descrit Crestiens” [line 103]). But instead of suppressing its fairy elements like Chrétien, de Méri demonizes them. By pouring water over the stone (not once but twice), he summons both a tremendous storm and the terrifying figure of Bras de Fer, the chamberlain of Anticrist, who then conducts him to the tournament that occupies the remainder of the poem. But even here, in an allegorical poem that makes no claims to verisimilitude, the poet feels obliged to authenticate his account of the spring with its storm-raising properties. Not only does he give a circumstantial account of how he came to be in the area (an account so detailed, in fact, that it allows us to date the poem), but he even remarks in the course of his description of the violence of the tempest that he has no wish to lie about it: “ne talent n’en ai de mentir” (line 117).

We have seen that Chrétien was influenced by Wace and Huon de Méri was influenced by Chrétien, so there is a natural enough temptation to take this to mean that we are dealing not with actual beliefs at all but with a succession of writers who are using the Forest of Brocéliande as a literary shorthand, a stock location with as little connection to the real world as Shakespeare’s Illyria. The final three pieces of evidence I wish to adduce, however, are nonliterary and should make it quite clear that if Wace, Chrétien, and de Méri were worried that describing a fairy spring made them look like fools or liars, there were others who seem to have had few doubts that they were dealing with a genuine meteorological event.

Jacques de Vitry, for instance, in his Historia Orientalis seu Hierosolymitana (begun in 1219) includes the Spring of Barenton among a group of marvels he judges it safe to believe in since they are contrary to neither faith nor good morals (“ea tamen credere que contra fidem non sunt vel bonos mores, nullum periculum aestimamus”): “in Brittany there is said to be a certain spring and if its waters are sprinkled over a nearby rock they are said to produce rain and thunder” [in minori Britannia fons quidam esse refertur, cuius aque supra propinquum lapidem proiecte pluvias & tonitrua provocare dicuntur].⁹⁹ A generation later the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus went to great lengths to make this phenomenon seem credible:

I have heard Friar Henry the German, at one time a Dominican Reader in Cologne,¹⁰⁰ a man of conspicuous learning and piety of whom I have written above, tell, with friars as witnesses, what I will now relate. When a certain well-born and wealthy friar from the region of Brittany entered the Dominican order he lived with the French friars in Lyon. As the time of his vows approached he sought permission from his prior to return to his own land in order that he might dispose of his possessions; the prior agreed and undertook the journey with him. When they had arrived in the wastes of Brittany, the novice said to his prior, “Would you like to see the ancient wonder of Brittany?” The prior asked what it was, and the friar, leading him to a sparkling clear spring above which was placed a stone on marble columns in the manner of an altar, immediately poured water over [it]. At once the skies darkened, the clouds began to gather, thunder to rumble, rain to pelt down, lightning to flash, and it instantly caused so great a flood that the surrounding land seemed to be covered to the distance of a league. The prior was amazed by the sight and talked about it in the hearing of brother Henry, Bishop John of blessed memory, master of the order,¹⁰¹ and many other friars. Forty years ago I heard this same thing from my father, who had campaigned in those parts with King Richard of England. When brother Henry told me, and many others, these things, I asked how they could have come about. He replied, by a magic art, now unknown to humans, and by the working of demons, who are able to stir and whip up the air into storms and rain-showers when they wish, though only by permission of the hidden decree of God.¹⁰²

At this point it is probably worth pointing out something that underlies the traditions surrounding the Spring of Barenton and that may not be immediately obvious to the modern reader: the popular understanding that there was a connection between fairies and bad weather. Chaucer seems to be alluding to such a connection when he mentions the “ayerissh bestes” that engender “Cloudes, mystes, and tempestes, / Snowes, hayles, reynes, wyndes” in The House of Fame (lines 964–69),¹⁰³ but even clearer evidence is found in, of all places, an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite sermon: “And summe dremen of þes feendis [of the loweste rank] þat summe ben elues and summe gobelynes, and haue not but litil power to tempte men in harme of soule; but siþ we kunne not proue þis ne disproue þis spedili, holde we vs in þe boundis þat God telliþ vs in his lawe. But it is licli þat þes feendis haue power to make boþe wynd and reyn, þundir and lyȝttyng and oþir wedrus; for whan þei moeuen partis of þis e[y]re and bryngyn hem nyyȝ togidere, þes partis moten nedeli bi kynde make siche wedir as clerkis knowen.”¹⁰⁴ Another, hardly less surprising, source is a set of Latin exercises composed for use in Exeter Grammar School around 1450, one of which reads, “A general rumour is spreading among the people that the spirits of the air, invoked by necromantic art … have appeared in bodily form, stirring up great tempests in the air which are not yet calmed, it is believed, nor allayed.”¹⁰⁵ When Wace, Chrétien, and Huon de Méri wrote of a magic stone with the power to summon up storms, then, they would have expected their readers to assume a fairy agency. It is quite clear that daemones in the passage from Thomas of Cantimpré is a Dominican code word for the vernacular term fées and that Thomas is thus echoing a popular association of the spring with fairies. What is far more striking, however, is the absolute credence that Thomas, a pupil of Albertus Magnus, places in this story of the spring; he gives circumstantial evidence, cites reliable witnesses, and even tries to offer a credible explanation for it. As with the anonymous Wycliffite preacher (and Jean d’Arras), the question is not whether fairies (or daemones/feendis) exist but how they work their magic and what the limits of their powers are.

One final piece of evidence is the most surprising of all. It comes from a sober legal text, the Coutumier of the forest of Brocéliande, written down in the fifteenth century but probably based on a thirteenth-century original. At the end of a lengthy exposition of the assorted hunting, logging, and pasturage rights of the various secular and ecclesiastical lords having domain in the forest, we find the following: “Item, next to the said spring there is a great rock, called the rock of Bellenton, and every time the Lord of Montfort comes to the said spring and sprinkles its water and moistens the said rock, however hot it may be, [with] the weather clear of rain, and in whatever direction the wind might lie, and however much people might say that the weather is not looking at all like rain, very soon (sometimes shortly before the said lord is able to return to his castle of Comper and sometimes shortly after) and in any case before the end of that same day, it rains in the region so plentifully that the land and its crops are watered by it much to their benefit.”¹⁰⁶ It is unclear whether this entry is intended to confirm the Lord of Montfort’s exclusive right to sprinkle water on the rock or merely to prove that he has jurisdiction over this particular area, but in either case the passage confirms the existence of a local belief and one that, to judge by its presence in the Coutumier, must have been shared by the landholding class. Moreover the author of the Coutumier clearly recognizes that some will find the phenomenon incredible and goes to some lengths to assert its actuality. After reading such a passage we might understand why Roger Loomis should have asked so indignantly, “Can anyone seriously believe that it was Chrétien’s poem which gave rise to this popular custom of seeking relief from drought at the fountain?”¹⁰⁷

Not only in Brocéliande was the question of the credibility of fairy beliefs an issue. The Yorkshireman William of Newburgh tells the story of a local peasant (“ex hoc vico rusticus”) who, having stumbled upon a fairy feast taking place inside a hillock that lay on his way home, rashly steals a cup from the fairies. William notes that he was personally familiar with the hillock in question (“tumulo quem saepius vidi”) and goes to some lengths to detail the subsequent history of the cup: “Eventually this cup of unknown material, unusual colour, and strange shape was offered as a splendid gift to the elder Henry, king of England. Subsequently it was passed on to the queen’s brother, David king of Scots, and kept for many years among the treasures of Scotland. Some years ago, as I learned from a reliable account, Henry II wished to see it, and it was surrendered to him by William king of Scots.”¹⁰⁸ No doubt William of Newburgh names these royal witnesses for the same reason that Walter Map had stressed that the fairy bride of a man named Eadric the Wild was examined in person by William the Conqueror,¹⁰⁹ as a way of lending unimpeachable authority to his strange tale. Yet William of Newburgh was far from being a credulous reporter;¹¹⁰ his skepticism about the reliability of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Arthur, for instance, is well known.¹¹¹ Nor for that matter was Walter Map, who dryly remarks of the story that Triunein, reputedly the son of a Welsh fairy, survived defeat in battle to live with his mother at the bottom of a lake, “a delusion like this might have been invented about a man whose body was never found” [de non inuento fingi potuit error huiusmodi].¹¹²

The quasi-objective stance of men such as William of Newburgh and Walter Map closely resembles that of a modern ghost-story teller seeking to exploit the frisson that comes with an audience’s readiness to entertain the possibility that it is listening to a true account. The fifteenth-century French courtier Antoine de la Sale professed himself a skeptic on the fairy question, and at the end of his account of the paradise of Queen Sibyl (which he describes as a fairy realm of magical gardens and palaces, populated by elegant knights and beautiful ladies, and ruled over by a gracious sovereign), he wrote, “I pray God to guard every good Christian from such false belief, and from exposing himself to such danger.”¹¹³ But when he describes how he himself had sought to visit this magic realm (entered through a cave high in the Apennines) in 1420, he recounts an unnerving experience that proves that even such a sophisticated outsider was not wholly impervious to the queen’s power. He claims that the local authorities prevented him from passing beyond the cave’s first chamber, and yet even there, “[my companions] and I heard from within a sharp voice, like the sound of a peacock crying out, as if from a long way off. They said that it was an utterance from the Sibyl’s Paradise, but for my part I don’t believe it; I rather think that it was my horses who were at the foot of the mountain, although they were a long way below me” [Iceulx et moy oysmes leans une haulte voix criant ainsi que ce feust le cry du paon, qui sembloit estre moult loings. Si dirent les gens que c’estoit une voix de paradis de la Sibille. Mais, quant a moy, je n’en croy riens; ainsi croy que feussent mes chevaulx qui au pié du mont estoient, combien que’ilz feussent moult bas et loings de moy (p. 15)]. For all his bravado, la Sale’s “although” here betrays an underlying uneasiness; he sounds rather like the hotel guest who, while disclaiming any belief in ghosts, would still rather not sleep in a room reputed to be haunted. But there is a significant difference. Ghost stories in the modern world carry with them only limited ideological baggage; the proselytizing atheist might regard them as dangerous nonsense, but most people would treat them as harmless entertainment. This was not true of fairies in the Middle Ages.

It is a relatively simple matter to show that some people during the Middle Ages believed in fairies, but we have still not gone very far in understanding the general attitude toward such beliefs. While there may be a strong temptation to explain them in terms of modern phenomena, like a belief in ghosts, such analogies have only limited value. This is true even in the case of a more commonly invoked parallel, the modern belief in alien abductions—a belief that actually bears a strong formal resemblance to some medieval tales of people stolen by the fairies;¹¹⁴ Diane Purkiss has even gone so far as to claim that “aliens are our fairies, and they behave just like the fairies of our ancestors.”¹¹⁵ In one sense this is quite true—both might be argued to fill a similar, even identical, social or psychological niche—but ideologically their roles are very different, and the cultural work performed by each is quite distinct.

For one thing, modern belief in alien abduction, however widespread (in 2012 about a third of Americans were reported to believe in UFOs), remains a minority cult, indulged in by a fringe population. Its adherents may relish the support of the Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack (just as medieval fairy believers were glad to have the learned Gervase of Tilbury on their side), but by and large they have made few inroads into civil society. However, fairy beliefs were very far from being a fringe phenomenon in the Middle Ages (as we shall see). A second way in which medieval fairy beliefs differed from modern theories of alien abduction is yet more significant. Champions of alien abduction, for all their love of conspiracy theories, pose little threat to established society; no one in power apparently feels any great need to censor, silence, or persecute them. As our opening discussion of the church’s representation of fairies as devils and of fairy beliefs as potentially heretical demonstrates, however, medieval stories of fairyland were far from ideologically neutral. It is to the ideological significance of medieval fairy stories that we will now turn.