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CHAPTER 2

Policing Vernacular Belief

Adde we to these, the parts and representations of Satyres, Silvanes, Muses, Nymphes, Furies, Hobgoblins, Fairies, Fates, with such other heathen vanities, which Christians should not name, much lesse resemble.

—William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (1633)

While most scholars would have little difficulty treating a belief in fairies as an aspect of medieval ‘popular culture,’ many would find it harder to agree on what precisely they mean by this term. The European Middle Ages, as is well known, conceived of society as a static threefold structure—its estates divided among churchmen, knights, and peasants—but modern historiography is more likely to apply a binary, and dynamic, model to medieval culture: either high/low (churchmen and knights vs. peasants) or learned/lay (churchmen vs. knights and peasants).¹ Thus, as Aron Gurevich puts it, “the very concept of ‘popular culture’ as applied to the high Middle Ages remains to a great extent undefined. Was it only the culture of the lower, oppressed classes of society? Or was it the culture of all illiterati, as opposed to that of educated people?”² In what follows, I take vernacular culture to represent the culture of the laity as a whole, knights as well as peasants, while conceding that la culture savante must always be understood to have included some educated members of the laity, and la culture populaire, some of the less literate members of the clergy. More specifically, I adopt here the model proposed by Peter Burke for early modern Europe when he speaks of the “‘great tradition’ of the educated few and the ‘little tradition’ of the rest,”³ always remembering his important proviso that the term ‘little tradition’ must take account of “upper class participation in popular culture” (p. 24). Though Burke is an early modernist, his model can arguably be applied to the late Middle Ages and perhaps even earlier.⁴ Such a model must always be heuristic, of course: the existence of a credulous bishop or a skeptical peasant no more invalidates it than the existence of a reactionary member of a socialist party or a progressive member of a conservative one invalidates the standard ideological model of modern Western democracy.

For many, the notion that la culture populaire should be understood to include members of the secular elite will be counterintuitive, particularly since there is a common perception that the primary thrust of the French annalistes has been, in John Van Engen’s words, “to dredge up from the bottom, as it were, the residues of peasant religious ‘folklore.’”⁵ Whether or not such an assessment is altogether just,⁶ and whether indeed the very term ‘folklore’ can properly be used in such a reductive sense,⁷ my adoption of Peter Burke’s model in this context obviously requires justification. To be clear, I do not claim merely that medieval aristocrats occasionally drew upon aspects of peasant belief, which appears to be Le Goff’s position: “this whole world of the marvelous came to enrich the cultural armory of the knights.”⁸ Still less do I claim that they were merely playing at being peasants: to read an event such as Charles VI’s bal des sauvages, for instance, as if it were the medieval equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s playing at shepherdesses in the Hameau de la reine would, in my view, be gravely anachronistic; to a near contemporary, after all, it had very much the appearance of “a dance for conjuring a demon” [una corea procurante demone].⁹ Charges of sorcery were rife in the late medieval courts of England and France, and while it is all too easy to dismiss them as merely a cynical political ploy,¹⁰ they could hardly have been leveled at all if the substance of such charges had been widely discredited among the courtiers themselves. Moreover, the claim that while folk beliefs may have circulated among the nobility they must have originated much further down the social scale seems to me a quite unprovable projection back from nineteenth-and twentieth-century experience; the fact that a brutal and ignorant Irish laborer named Michael Cleary murdered his wife in 1895 in the apparently sincere belief that she was really a fairy changeling¹¹ tells us nothing at all about the propagators of such beliefs five hundred years earlier.

When the Limbourg brothers painted the castle of Lusignan in the March scene of the Duc de Berri’s luxurious Trés Riche Heures, they assumed that the duke would wish them to include an image of Melusine. The main focus of their page, however, is a plowman, who “turns away quite leisurely” from the apparition of Melusine flying above the castle’s turrets, with all the studied indifference of his counterpart in Breughel’s Fall of Icarus. While it would certainly be wrong to take his pose as emblematic of the limited scope of such so-called popular beliefs, I believe it would be equally wrong to confine these beliefs, as has often been done, to some hypothetical primitive folk culture. In my view, medieval aristocrats were perfectly capable of entering into the belief system of the little tradition as fully participating members. As we have already seen, Jean d’Arras may well have drawn upon a memorate from the Duc de Berri when, around 1393, he came to describe John Cresswell’s terrifying encounter with Melusine in his bedroom, but such clear examples of direct aristocratic engagement with folkloric beliefs are relatively rare. On the other hand, had we come across this story in a preacher’s exemplum collection or even an anonymous popular romance, we would probably have been tempted to dismiss it as an obvious example of peasant superstition. In the Otia Imperialia at a point where Gervase of Tilbury is paraphrasing an account of “Silvans and Pans” from the well-known passage in Augustine’s City of God on incubi,¹² a recent edition’s facing-page translation renders the phrase creberrima fama (literally, ‘a very frequent rumor’) as “a widespread folk-belief.”¹³ This may seem a small point, but such mistranslation typifies the unreflective assumption that such beliefs must always have originated at the lower levels of society. The two medieval translations, by contrast, make no such assumption: one reads, aucuns racontent et dient [some say], and the other, maintes gens ont oÿ [many have heard].¹⁴ Gervase after all was writing not for peasants but for a German emperor (Otto IV), and a copy of one of the translations of his book found its way into the French royal library. Furthermore many of the stories Gervase tells (including a precursor of the Melusine story) concern the nobility.

One of these stories in particular is worth singling out for the glimpse it offers us into a possible social context for such storytelling. Gervase tells us about a mysterious knight who occupied a deserted earthwork on Wandlebury Hill near Cambridge and would fight anyone prepared to ride up there on a moonlit night and challenge him “to come out knight against knight [miles contra militem veniat].”¹⁵ By way of authenticating this story he reports that a knight named Osbert Fitz Hugh was staying in Cambridge, “and in the evening after dinner the household of his wealthy host gathered round the hearth and, as is the custom among the nobility [ut potentibus moris est], turned their attention to recounting the deeds of people of old.”¹⁶ One of the stories that Osbert hears that evening is the tale of the Wandlebury knight, and he immediately rides off to challenge, fight, and even, at least in the short term, triumph over him: “[He] emerged from the field victorious, while his adversary disappeared.” It hardly matters for present purposes whether what Osbert heard that night was a fairy legend or a ghost story; the fact remains that we can class it as a folk belief only as long as we are prepared to include these Anglo-Norman potentes among the ‘folk.’

As we have seen, Jean d’Arras implies that Jean de France—whose honors included the duchy of Berri and Auvergne and the county of Poitiers, who was the third son of King John II and brother to Charles V, Louis I of Anjou (King of Naples), and Philip the Bold (Duke of Burgundy)—was intrigued by fairy beliefs, but interestingly, the appearance of Melusine in John Cresswell’s bedroom in 1376 was not the first time the fairy world had given his opponent trouble. During the early 1370s Cresswell had been hounded throughout Poitou by Bertrand du Guesclin, constable of France,¹⁷ and du Guesclin, as was well known, was married to a fairy. The trouvère Cuvelier tells us that the young du Guesclin had married a handsome and well-educated young woman named Tiffany de Raguenel, whom he had met while he was defending Dinan against the English in 1359. Cuvelier does his best to make this marriage seem unexceptional, but others apparently felt there was something odd about it:

Encore disoit on que c’estoit une fee

Et que le sens de quoy elle estoit si fondee

Lui venoit proprement par parole de fee. (lines 2699–701)¹⁸

[Yet it was said that she was a fairy and that the sagacity with which she was so well supplied really came to her from a fairy spell.]

Du Guesclin had been born only a few miles north of Brocéliande, so perhaps such an association was inevitable. In any event, the fact that in the 1370s a prince of the French royal blood and the constable of France were both thought to have had close encounters with fairies makes it difficult to argue that fairy beliefs should be relegated to the peasant fringes of medieval society.

To give one final illustration: we have seen that in the spring of 1420 the French courtier Antoine de la Sale traveled to Montemonaco in the central Apennines to see for himself the famous paradise of Queen Sibyl, a magic realm that medieval popular imagination had clearly modeled on descriptions of fairyland. Almost as interesting as his report of the visit itself, however, is la Sale’s account of its early readership. It was written in the first instance, he tells us, as an ironic travel guide for his former pupil John of Calabria (the son of Duke René d’Anjou) and his new wife, Marie de Bourbon, but a second copy was promised to John’s mother-in-law, Agnès de Bourgogne, and her husband, the Duke de Bourbon, “si le plaisir de mondit seigneur et le vostre feust d’y aler, ainsi que souventffois après disner ou soupper avez acoustumé de vous esbatre” [in case my lord and you should be pleased to go there, an idea you have often amused yourselves with after dinner or supper].¹⁹ Such people were among the grandest magnates in France, and coupled with the Duke de Berri’s interest in Melusine, their evident fascination with Queen Sybil’s paradise confirms that the discourse of fairyland was far from being the exclusive preserve of the laboring classes.

When the higher nobility could evince such an interest in the existence of fairyland, we should not be surprised to discover that the lower aristocracy shared their concerns. We have already seen that the lords of Montfort were thought to invoke fairy aid to make it rain in Comper, and that some people believed that Bertrand du Guesclin, who despite his rise to the constableship came from the minor nobility, had married a fairy. Joan of Arc’s nullification proceedings offer two further examples of the ‘folklore’ of such petite aristocratie. Sir Albert d’Ourches, who met Joan in Vaucouleurs, was not a local (Ourches-sur-Meuse is some twenty miles to the north of Domrémy), and yet he was prepared to testify to having heard that in the old days fairies used to be seen beneath the Fairy Tree (“subtus illam arborem antiquitus fées solebant ire”), and then adds, by way of exonerating Joan, that this was twenty or thirty years before she was even heard of (or, in other words, fifty years earlier, when he was a young boy).²⁰ Perhaps he had learned of the fairy tree on a visit to the de Bourlémont family (the lords of Domrémy), a family that with the death of Pierre de Bourlémont in 1412 had become extinct. Another deponent, the widow Jeanette de Veau, however, recalled hearing stories about the de Bourlémonts: the tree was called the Ladies Tree, she said, “because in the old days a certain lord, called Sir Peter Gravier, knight, lord of Bourlémont, and a lady who was called Fée would meet each other under that tree and speak together. And she said she heard these things read in a romance (‘hec in uno romano legi audivit’)” (pp. 264–65). Unless Jeanette was simply confused,²¹ we may possibly be dealing here with some local counterpart of the Melusine legend,²² but in any case four other witnesses specifically attested to an association between the de Bourlémont family and the Fairy Tree,²³ and several more mentioned domini et domine temporales in connection with it. Taken as a whole, these testimonies convey a clear impression that fairy ‘folklore’ was far from being restricted to the laboring classes. There is no reason to suppose that things were any different in England nor that such attitudes were restricted to the late Middle Ages.²⁴ Perhaps then, with Ferlampin-Acher, we should speak “rather of lore than folklore, or at least give to the term people a very wide interpretation.”²⁵

A second important issue raised by the notion of popular culture concerns periodization. Obviously, vernacular culture did not remain static and unchanging across a thousand years of medieval history, and yet the bestknown attempt to supply a chronology for it, that of Jacques Le Goff, remains problematic. In an introductory sketch to the study of the marvelous in his Imaginaire médiéval Le Goff offers us a three-stage process:

1. The Dark Ages and the repression of the marvelous.

2. The explosion of the marvelous: twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

3. The aestheticization of the marvelous: fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.²⁶

A few pages later he fills in this bare schema with a little more detail:

The very rough periodization which I have proposed applies essentially to learned marvels. In the first period, it seems to me that learned culture succeeded for the most part in occluding the marvelous element in popular culture, which certainly existed and which can be detected between the lines and in other texts. By contrast, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries learned culture is much more receptive to the popular marvelous [le merveilleux populaire], with the clear object of either reclaiming or distorting it. Finally, it seems to me that there is a kind of turn to aestheticization, where the dialogue (or the struggle) between the learned and the popular versions of the marvelous is no longer of the first importance. (p. 38)

While acknowledging the significance of Le Goff’s ground-clearing work here and recognizing the essential open-endedness of such terms as le merveilleux savant and le merveilleux populaire, I still have difficulty with this chronology. In fact it seems to me to suffer from precisely the weaknesses that Le Goff himself detects in the kind of study of popular culture that privileges cultural objects over cultural participants;²⁷ when viewed from below, insofar as such a thing is possible, a somewhat different pattern emerges.

In the Dark Ages the church certainly repressed, in the sense of sought to eradicate, such aspects of popular culture as a belief in fairies, but in the British Isles, at least, good evidence for such beliefs, much of it in the vernacular, survives nonetheless.²⁸ It is worth pointing out that this evidence derives almost entirely from the culture savante, since written material of clear lay provenance is virtually non existent.²⁹ A survey of the pastoral literature of the period, however, leaves a strong impression that church discipline seems to have been relatively light-handed: local superstitions were as likely to be mocked for their folly as castigated for their wickedness. Furthermore, in Bernadette Filotas’s words, “Pastoral literature does not support the view that popular culture was a matter of class. References to social standing are rare, but when they appear, they reinforce the idea of a common culture.”³⁰

This observation calls into question Le Goff’s contention that the explosion (irruption) of the marvelous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries reflects the “growth of lay popular culture, rushing into the breach opened during the eleventh and twelfth centuries by a lay aristocratic culture thoroughly imbued with the one available culture-system distinct from the clergy’s, namely the tradition of folklore.”³¹ Rather, I believe that the twelfth century witnessed the emergence of a bicultural system arising from a laity increasingly comfortable with the medium of letters and a clerisy “increasingly dependent on, and concerned with, the goodwill and co-operation of the whole population.”³² While it is tempting to locate the actual tipping point a little later, in the years immediately following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the founding of the Dominican order (1216)—the period of Caesarius of Heisterbach, William of Auvergne, and Étienne of Bourbon—this can be done only by excluding such important figures as Gervase of Tilbury (whose writing is contemporary with the Fourth Lateran Council), and both Gerald of Wales and Walter Map (who were at work a generation earlier). Certainly writers such as William of Auvergne and Étienne of Bourbon convey the strong impression that fairy beliefs circulated primarily among the poor and ignorant: William, for instance, speaks of the old women who call demons of this kind ‘ladies’ (“huiusmodi demones, quas dominas vocant vetulae”), of the witlessness of old women who, amazingly enough, spread the belief that fairies steal children (“vetularum autem nostrarum desipientia opinionem istam mirabiliter disseminavit”), and of the debased language of the old crones who speak of ‘changelings’ (“quos vulgus cambiones nominant, de quibus vulgarissimi sunt sermones aniles”).³³ The same is true of Étienne de Bourbon, who tells of a pauper vetula who tricked people into believing she was a prophetess; of a quidam rusticus, possibly a thief,³⁴ who encountered Arthur’s house hold while prowling about at night; and of the group of homines rusticani who originated the cult of Saint Guinefort.³⁵ On the other hand, both Walter Map and Gervase of Tilbury were writing for aristocratic audiences, and many of their stories concern noblemen and noblewomen; and even Caesarius of Heisterbach’s fairies/demons move primarily in knightly circles. No doubt the third estate offered some churchmen an easier target than the second, and what Filotas observes of the Dark Ages (“the authorities were quicker to detect paganism and superstition in the customs of subordinate groups than in those of their betters”³⁶) remained true of this later period.

Of Le Goff’s three stages in the development of the medieval marvelous, I have most difficulty in accepting the third: his characterization of le merveilleux in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—he is probably thinking here of Mélusine—as having become somehow ‘aestheticized.’³⁷ What he means by this term is made clearer in a later essay, where he employs an essentially high/low version of the bicultural model: “The approach of opposing the two cultures tends to make of ‘popular’ culture, a culture essentially dominated, manipulated, and exploited by the ‘superior’ culture. Learned culture [la culture savante], from this perspective, either destroys, perverts, or occludes popular culture, forcing upon it an acculturation from above drawn from ecclesiastical, aristocratic—later bourgeois—models, or it rehabilitates it aesthetically, when it has lost its power to resist and retains only ‘the beauty of a corpse.’”³⁸ In my view, vernacular culture (that is to say, the culture of the little tradition) was far from having lost its power to resist in the late Middle Ages despite the church’s having stepped up its campaign against it.³⁹ Writers such as Jean Gerson, Johannes Nider, and Heinrich Kramer give no sign of believing that the battle against popular beliefs had been won; indeed by shifting their casus belli from mere superstition to actual heresy they put the conduct of the war on a dangerous new footing.⁴⁰

If anything, the official attitude seems to have hardened throughout the Middle Ages, and on the eve of the early modern period things were very much darker than they had been earlier. By the end of the fifteenth century Burchard of Worms’s penance of ten days on bread and water for those who believed that corporeal “sylvans” took pleasure with their lovers⁴¹ would have seemed remarkably mild. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, themselves perfectly ready to believe in such sylvans (or rather in their own demonic reimagination of them as succubi), no longer regarded penance alone as sufficient to counter the danger of heterodox beliefs; they were quite prepared to condemn to death those who held such views: “the only possible way for these and similar practices to be remedied is for the judges who are responsible for the sorceresses to get rid of them or at least punish them as an example for all posterity.”⁴²

The state of hostility, or at least deep suspicion, existing between representatives of the great tradition and those espousing such aspects of the little tradition as a belief in fairies is one of the major themes of this book. For me, its presence permeates medieval romance and helps us to disambiguate what James Wade has termed “the ambiguous supernatural” of medieval fairyland.⁴³ While Le Goff’s characterization might possibly apply to later works such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, most fourteenth-and fifteenth-century romances, still energized by this contested ideology, offer us something quite different from “the beauty of a corpse.”

Such a contest can be detected even in a writer as thoroughly imbued with the ideology of the great tradition as Geoffrey Chaucer.⁴⁴ When Chaucer turns to the discourse of fairyland to explore gender relations in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, it is not merely because fairies, as the Countess d’Aulnoy or Angela Carter might have said, are good to think with. It is because issues of female sovereignty are deeply rooted in this aspect of the little tradition: as Partonopeu de Blois says of his fairy mistress, “Cele est mes cuers, cele est ma vie; / Cele a de moi la segnorie” (or, as the English translation in Oxford, MS Rawlinson Poet. 14, puts it, “And as she lyste she may gyde me, / She hathe of me þe soueraynete”).⁴⁵ For all that his clerical contemporaries would doubtless have found Chaucer’s views on fairies unexceptionable, and despite the fact that he prefaces his Loathly Lady’s actual transformation with a sermon steeped in the discourse of learned culture, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale derives much of its real power from this traditional discourse and its long-standing resistance to the crooked-rib propaganda of the great tradition. Beneath its androcentric quest for what women really want, then, lies a much older ideological level where masculine violation of natural harmony is subject to the discipline and correction of a magical universe—a pattern that may be sensed in Walter Map’s tale of Eadric the Wild, in the romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, and in the strange proto-grail romance L’Élucidation, where a rapist’s abuse of fairy hospitality is what brings about the scourge of the Wasteland:

Des puceles une esforcha,

Sor son pois le despucela,

………………‥

Li roiaumes si agasti

K’ains puis n’i ot arbre fuelli;

Li pre et les flor[s] essecierent

Et les aiges apeticierent. (lines 69–70, 95–98)

[He forced one of the maidens and took her virginity against her will…. The realm was so wasted that its trees never again flourished, meadow and flowers withered, and waters dwindled.]⁴⁶

Whether or not we choose to read Chaucer’s Loathly Lady as the metaphorical equivalent of this Wasteland (and the hideous transformation of the violated fairy queen in Thomas of Erceldoune might offer support for such a reading), the presence of two conflicting levels of signification in the tale seems undeniable.⁴⁷ As Alice of Bath implies, the expiation that Chaucer’s knight must suffer for his rape is diametrically opposed to the ideological discipline of the lubricious “lymytours and othere hooly freres” who lurk “in every busshe or under every tree”—though by putting his fairy romance in the mouth of a provincial vetula worthy of William of Auvergne, Chaucer the poet might appear to be disclaiming responsibility for the implications of this aspect of his own creation.

In such a context it is important to recognize that Alice’s amusing account of the friars’ banishment of elves from the English countryside at the beginning of The Wife of Bath’s Tale reflects a very real situation:

In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,

Of which that Britons speken greet honour,

All was this land fulfild of fayerye.

The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,

Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.

This was the olde opinion, as I rede;

I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.

But now kan no man se none elves mo,

For now the grete charitee and prayeres

Of lymytours and othere hooly freres,

That serchen every lond and every streem,

As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,

Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,

Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,

Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes,

This maketh that ther been no fayeryes. (lines 863–78)⁴⁸

Chaucer illustrates the typical mendicant understanding of fairy encounters when he has a summoner “under a forest syde” chance upon “a gay yeman” wearing “a courtepy of grene” in The Friar’s Tale (lines 1380–82); we might expect this shape-shifting yeoman (lines 1462–72) to be a fairy, but as the friar explains, he is really a fiend who dwells in hell (lines 1447–48).⁴⁹ An anecdote in a mid-thirteenth-century Dominican exemplum collection has sometimes been cited to illustrate the mendicant war on fairy belief:⁵⁰ two friars, sent to preach in the Scottish Isles, find fairies (“spiritus incubi”) abusing the young women there, but after being instructed in the faith, the women find themselves able to resist these demons (“quo facto, venerunt demones comminantes mulieribus et eis invadere more solito attemptantes, licet non poterant prevalere”), which are last heard of howling through the ether (“auditus est ulultatus et eiulatus magnus in aere”). Medieval people would generally have understood the term ‘incubi demons’ to refer to fairies, at least down to the fifteenth century (as we shall see in the next chapter), but in fact wherever we encounter accounts of friars triumphing over demones who inhabit woods and groves or ride about in mounted bands, it is reasonable to suppose that we are witnessing a skirmish in their campaign against traditional fairy beliefs.

A story in the early fourteenth-century Scala Coeli, for instance, shows Dominicans wrestling with a different aspect of fairy possession: two friars, lost in the mountains of Ireland, encounter a small man, who, they discover, had been in the service of demons for thirty years and who bore their mark on his hands; these demons visit him in various forms, and he is forced to do what ever they command (“triginta annis demonibus hic servivi, homagium eis feci, et sigillum in meis manibus porto, visitant mei in diversis figuris, et quicquid precipiunt facio semper”); as soon as he has been confessed by the friars, however, the mark disappears, and he can be left alone in a grove to survive unscathed an encounter with a mounted fairy host (“cum magnis equitaturis … venisset demon”).⁵¹ Even more interesting is the Franciscan Thomas O’Quinn’s account of a plague in mid-thirteenth-century Clonfert, Ireland:⁵² carters and men working the fields or walking in the woods, he says, were accustomed to seeing armies of demons passing by and sometimes fighting among themselves (“videre solebant … exercitus demoniorum transeuncium et alioquociens inter se compugnancium”), a sight that caused many of them to fall sick and die. This seems to be a rare expression of a popular belief, reflected in Titania’s speech at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that human misfortunes may be caused by disruptions in the fairy world: “And this same progeny of evils comes / From our debate, from our dissension” (2. i). Similar fairy hosts are encountered elsewhere: William of Auvergne devotes part of a chapter to the topic;⁵³ Gerald of Wales’s Expugnatio Hibernica describes “Speris and sparris rutlynge to-giddyr, wyth cryynge so grymly, that none ende was Of elf fare”;⁵⁴ and John Capgrave reports that in 1402 in Bedford and Biggleswade there “appered certeyn men of dyuers colouris, renninge oute of wodes and fytyng horibily. This was seyne on morownyngis and at mydday, and whan men folowid to loke what it was, thei coude se rite nawt.”⁵⁵ However, I know of none that is claimed to have the same direct human repercussions. In this case O’Quinn’s remedy is to preach a sermon in which he construes the plague as God’s punishment for the villagers’ imperfect Christian faith and challenges the demons to come out and take him on (“Veniant, inquit, demones si audent, et omnes veniant! Quare non veniunt? Quid faciunt? Ubi sunt?”). Their inevitable failure to appear wins the friars yet another victory in their ongoing campaign against the fairy world: “Et ecce ab illa hora evanuerunt demones, ita quod nunquam postea in terra illa apparuerunt” [and, lo, from that moment the demons vanished, so that never again did they appear in that region].⁵⁶

Unsurprisingly, in the eyes of the mendicants the church’s main weapon against the fairies was preaching, but there can be no doubt that routine work proceeded less dramatically at a parochial level. The pastoral manuals that proliferated throughout Europe after the Fourth Lateran Council generally include such popular superstitions as witchcraft, sorcery, nigromancy, and sortilegium in their treatment of the First Commandment, and though explicit fairy beliefs are only occasionally listed in such a context, it is clear that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” provided the justification for the church’s routine offensive against them.⁵⁷ Jean d’Outremeuse, in his fanciful Myreur des histors (written toward the end of the fourteenth century), describes the fairy castle of Plaisant, built by Morgan, and concludes, “Asseis regnoit, jusqu’à tant que li pape defendit, sour paine de excommunication, que nuls n’estudiast [ni]gremanche; fut faite et chantee adont I ympne à complie pour gardeir des fantasiez, c’on appelle Te lucis ante terminum, car les feez regnoient adont mult publement” [she ruled for a long time, until the pope forbade, on pain of excommunication, anyone to study nigromancy; at that time the hymn called Te lucis ante terminum was written and sung at Compline to guard us against phantoms, for at that time fairies ruled quite openly].⁵⁸ To judge from John the Carpenter’s attempt to crouch Nicholas “from elves and fro wightes” in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, this well-known Latin hymn, or at least its substance, had been thoroughly assimilated into popular culture by the end of the fourteenth century:

Therwith the nyght-spel seyde he anon-rightes

On foure halves of the hous aboute,

And on the thresshfold of the dore withoute:

“Jhesu Crist and Seinte Benedight,

Blesse this hous from every wikked wight,

For nyghtes verye, the white pater-noster!” (lines 3480–85)⁵⁹

Whatever precisely nyghtes verye means, the phrase is evidently, pace Donaldson,⁶⁰ a homespun counterpart to the great Latin hymn’s noctium phantasmata.

Once again Joan of Arc’s nullification proceedings offer us a glimpse of the work of this Kulturkampf at ground level. Jean Morel, a laborer, recalls hearing that women and fairies (“persone fatales, que vocabantur fées”) used to dance beneath the tree in the old days but says that after St. John’s Gospel was read aloud they do not go there anymore (“postquam evangelium beati Johannis legitur et dicitur, amplius not vadunt”).⁶¹ Beatrice Estellin, a laborer’s widow, says that she well remembers the time (on the eve of the Ascension) when the priest carried crosses through the fields, went beneath the tree, and read the Gospel (pp. 258–59). This lesson was not lost on another laborer, Simonin Musnier: he has heard that fairies used to go there in the old days, he says, not that he himself has ever seen any sign of any ‘evil spirits’ (“quamvis nunquam vidit aliqua signa de aliquibus malignis spiritibus”) (p. 281). Interestingly, the local priest, Jean Colin, is the only inhabitant of Domrémy and the nearby village of Greux who claims to know nothing whatsoever about any Fairy Tree (“dixit se nichil scire”).⁶²

No doubt the church found the obduracy of peasant belief frustrating, but the extent to which aristocratic romance was pervaded by the marvelous in the later Middle Ages must have provided the great tradition with a rather different kind of challenge. In the next chapter we will be exploring in greater detail its systematic demonization of fairy beliefs, but for now I wish to examine the way the romances themselves reflect this hostile campaign and express their resistance to it. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that all demons in the Middle Ages should be reread from the viewpoint of vernacular culture as fairies (though such a transposition can account for a surprisingly large corner of the field of medieval demonology),⁶³ but we should notice that wherever there was an obvious semantic overlap it generated a fascinating kind of cultural schizophrenia in the romances.

Consider descriptions of the physical appearance of these creatures, for instance. Imagined as demons (so long as they are not out to deceive us with specious beauty), they naturally appear hideous. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells us of a knight who did not believe in demons (“daemones esse dubitaret”) until shown one by a nigromancer: “Finally, he observed in a nearby grove, a foul human form, like a shadow, towering over the top of the trees…. He was like a huge man, the hugest and blackest imaginable, dressed in a smoky garment, and so misshapen that the knight couldn’t bear to look at him” [Novissime vero contemplabatur in nemore vicino quasi umbram humanum tetram, summitatem arborum excedentem…. Erat autem quasi magnus vir, imo maximus et nigerrimus, vesteque subnigra indutus, et tantae deformitatis, ut in eum miles respicere non posset].⁶⁴ By contrast, when the little tradition reports encounters with fairies, they are invariably beautiful. Here is how Sir Launfal’s fairy mistress Triamour is described, for instance:

Sche was as whyt as lylye yn May,

Or snow that sneweþ yn wynterys day—

He seygh neuer non so pert.

Þe rede rose, whan sche ys newe,

Aȝens her rode nes nauȝt of hewe,

J dar well say, yn sert.

Her here schon as gold wyre;

May no man rede here atyre,

Ne nauȝt wel þenke yn hert. (lines 289–300)⁶⁵

In the same spirit, Aucassin searching for Nicolette in the forest hears of her from some shepherds: “une pucele vint ci, li plus bele riens du monde, si que nos quidames que ce fust une fee, et que tot cis bos en enclarci” [a maid was here, the most beautiful thing in the world, so that we thought she was a fairy, and she illuminated the whole wood].⁶⁶ When the emperor of Rome encounters the foundling William of Palerne in the woods, his first thought is that he must be from fairyland because he is so handsome: “þemperour wend witerly, for wonder of þat child, / þat feiȝþely it were of feyrye for fairenes þat it welt”⁶⁷ The beauty of fairies seems to have been proverbial: in the Anglo-Norman Lai du Cor, for instance, Caradoc’s wife is described as “resembling a fairy” because of her beauty;⁶⁸ The Wars of Alexander describes Candace as being “so faire & so fresche as … an elfe oute of an-othire erde”;⁶⁹ and even John Gower describes his lady as possessing “la bealté plus qe faie.”⁷⁰ Interestingly, when Guillaume de Lorris describes Venus as being so elegant that she resembled a fairy, the Chaucerian translation alters this to

Bi hir atyr so bright and shen

Men myght perceyve …

She was not of religioun [that is, she was no nun!].⁷¹

Of course fairies are shape-shifters by nature (Yonec’s father in Marie de France’s lai turns himself into a hawk in order to visit his human lover),⁷² so it was a simple matter for the great tradition to represent their beauty as mere outward show. Not that we should necessarily assume that whenever a fairy in romance takes on a frightening new form (Melusine’s transformation into a dragon, for instance, or the dramatic moment when Thomas of Erceldoune’s fairy mistress “fadyde þus in þe face, / Þat schane by fore als þe sonne so bryght”)⁷³ there has necessarily been interference from the great tradition. Gerald of Wales tells of a man called Meilerius whose experience is reminiscent of Thomas’s; after he had sexually assaulted a fairy, “in place of a beautiful girl, he found a vile, rough, hairy, and grotesquely deformed shape” [loco puellae formosae, formam quandam villosam, hispidam, et hirsutam, adeoque enormiter deformem invenit].⁷⁴ Fairies may be beautiful, but they can also be dangerous, particularly when their prohibitions are ignored or (as is the case with both Thomas and Meilerius) when their persons are violated, so the little tradition was quite capable of imagining such violent metamorphoses without any outside help.⁷⁵ Be that as it may, the fact remains that despite the insistence of the great tradition that fairies were in reality hideous demons, the little tradition stubbornly maintained the default position that they were creatures of surpassing beauty.⁷⁶

While many other elements in the popular conception of fairy nature (such as youthfulness, courtliness, and conspicuous wealth) must have galled representatives of the great tradition, four things caused them particular difficulties: the overt sexuality of fairies; their fecundity; their mortality; and their prescience. None of these qualities is easy to reconcile with the notion that fairies were really demons, and as a result medieval demonologists spilled a great deal of ink trying to find ways to rationalize them.

Fairies are evidently highly sexed, and their relations with humans are often frankly voluptuous. The English translator of Partonope of Blois, for example, lingers sensuously over his hero’s first physical encounter with his fairy mistress.⁷⁷ It takes him four hundred lines to get Melior from the bedroom door to the moment of her final surrender, and the description of the climax (which, despite the fact that the whole encounter has been stage managed by Melior herself, comes uncomfortably close to rape) is as graphic as anything in the fabliau:

Hys arme ffreshely he ouer her caste,

And she hyt suffered pasyentlye.

Than sayde sho to hym full mekely:

“For þe loue of Gode, I praye yowe lette be.”

And wyth þat worde a-none ganne he

In hys armes her faste to hym brase.

And fulle softely þen sho sayde: “Allas!”

And her legges sho gan to knytte,

And wyth hys knees he gan hem on-shote.

And þer-wyth-all she sayde: “Syr, mercy!”

He wolde not lefe ne be þer-by;

For of her wordes toke he no hede;

But þys a-way her maydenhede

Haþe he þen rafte, and geffe her hys. (lines 1558–71)⁷⁸

This particular scene evidently expresses a brand of male wish-fulfillment, but there are others in which masculine fairy lovers are embraced by human women with equal ardor:

La dame l’a molt esgardé,

e son semblant e sa biauté,

angoisseusement l’aama

[The lady gazed at him intently, at his bearing and his beauty, and she loved him cruelly].⁷⁹

The author of the non-cyclic prose Lancelot, though keen to rationalize fairies as demons, apparently has no difficulty imagining them as hot and lustful (“il sont chaut et luxurieus”),⁸⁰ but clerics such as William of Auvergne are more circumspect. William is happy to explain the corporeal presence of demon lovers, and even their mechanical ability to simulate sexual organs, but such evident self-serving sensuality in creatures who have been consigned to eternal torment is clearly a different matter. William feels it incumbent upon him to insist “that undoubtedly they do those things which they do with men and women not from a love of copulating nor from a desire for that kind of pleasure, but rather they pollute them and seduce them to the foulness of lechery out of a zeal for malice” [indubitanter, quia non amore concubitus, neque desiderio voluptatis huiusmodi faciunt quae faciunt viris et muleribus, sed potius studio malignitatis polluunt eos et eas et ad spurcitiam inducunt luxuriae].⁸¹

The fecundity of fairies and their ability to interbreed with human beings (a feature that will be explored more fully in the next chapter) is another commonplace of the little tradition that worried the clerics. As the South English Legendary puts it:

Þe ssrewen wolleþ ek oþerwile mankunne to bitraie

Aliȝte adoun in monnes forme biniȝte & bidaie

And liggeþ ofte bi wymmen as hi were of fleiss & blode

Ac þe engendrure þat hi makeþ ne comþ neuere to gode

(lines 239–42)⁸²

[The devils wish to betray mankind at other times and light down in man’s shape by night and by day and often lie with women as if they were made of flesh and blood, but the offspring that they beget never come to good].

Walter Map too tells us that the products of unions between humans and fairies are rarely successful but records one notable exception: a man called Alnoth, who lived an exemplary life and survived to an advanced age.⁸³ Melusine is said to have borne her husband Raymondin ten sons, and though the sixth, Geoffrey of the Big Tooth, was notably cruel, and the tenth, Horrible, was as unprepossessing as his name, the rest, despite minor physical blemishes, seem to have turned out well enough; indeed one, Fromond, became a monk. Fairy parentage is common enough in romance (Yonec, for instance, has a fairy father and Le bel inconnu, a fairy mother), while in Tydorel the hero’s ability to go without sleep is specifically said to be a mark of his fairy paternity.⁸⁴ The existence of Middle English surnames such as Elfeg, Fayrey, and Wudewuse implies that this belief was not restricted to the pages of romance, however, and one remarkable document, a deposition in the trial of Bishop Guichard of Troyes in 1308, confirms this; among other things it was claimed that Guichard was the son of a fairy (a neton), because his mother was famous for her beautiful tresses and fairies were known to consort with women with fine hair (“quod netoni libenter frequentare consueverunt cum mulieribus que habent pulcras trecias capillorum”).⁸⁵ This is all the more remarkable because by the fourteenth century the church (as we shall see in the next chapter) had already fully confronted the obvious difficulty of attributing generative powers to demons; Thomas Aquinas, for one, saved appearances by articulating the ingenious theory that devils are able to make use of collected human semen for the purposes of demonic artificial insemination, a theory that was to undergo bizarre refinements in the early modern period.⁸⁶ That Guichard’s accusers were able to ignore this theological caveat suggests the power of its popular appeal, though of course even a Thomist construction would still have made the poor bishop illegitimate and therefore in theory unfit for holy office.

Devils, of course, cannot die, so another difficulty faced by those who wished to demonize fairies was the fact that although popular tradition certainly regarded them as long lived, it did not regard them as immortal.⁸⁷ Martianus Capella calls pans, fauns, satyrs, silvans, and nymphs the ‘longaevi’ and reports that after long ages they die just like men (“hi omnes post prolixum aeuum moriuntur ut homines”); and Bernardus Silvestris writes of such creatures that “sero tamen obeunt in tempore dissolvendi” [at length they pass away when the time comes for their dissolution].⁸⁸ Matthew Paris reports that in 1249 a Welsh incuba died giving birth to a son,⁸⁹ and romance presents us with a number of mortal fairies. Thus the father of Yonec in Marie de France’s lai dies at the hands of a jealous husband, and in an early version of the Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, the hero’s mother, the fée Elioxe, dies in childbed: “Morte est bele Elioxe, l’espris s’en est alés” (line 1272).⁹⁰ In Huon of Bordeaux, Oberon (to English ears, the archetypal fairy king) foretells his own death: “‘Huon,’ quod Oberon, ‘know for trouth I shal not abyde longe in this worlde, for so is the pleasure of god. it behoueth me to go in to paradyce, wher as my place is apparelled; in y^e fayrye I shal byde no lenger.”⁹¹ The contrary position is taken by William of Auvergne, who disputes a report “that in the time of the Emperor Anastasius a certain faun was killed by arrows in a certain battle, since he might not be conquered otherwise” [quia tempore Anastasii Imperatoris faunus quidam in proelio quodam interfectus fuit sagittis, cum aliter non possit vinci]; this creature cannot really have been a faun, says William, since all spirits of this kind are indubitably immortal (“cum omnes huiusmodi spiritus indubitanter immortales sint”). Interestingly, one of his alternative explanations is that the faun might have been “one of those warriors who are commonly said to be ‘fairied’” [unus ex militibus qui vulgo fatati dicuntur],⁹² though what precisely he means by this is unclear.⁹³ In a later discussion he argues that any fairy who appears to engage in human activities such as warfare, jousting, or feasting can only be a demonic illusion since immortal spirits cannot be harmed by weapons and have no need of food.⁹⁴ In the same vein, John Trevisa uses Merlin’s mortality as proof that he could not have had a fairy (demonic) father:

There myȝte childe non suche deye.

Clergie makeþ mynde

Deeþ sleeþ nouȝt fendes kynde;

But deth slowe Merlyn,

Merlyn was ergo no gobelyn.⁹⁵

Oberon (like Merlin and indeed Melusine), a fairy half caste, is particularly interesting from this viewpoint, for the English translation of Huon of Bordeaux, based on a fifteenth-century prose version, feels compelled to have him explain that his mortality derives from his human father (Julius Caesar) even though other fairies (his own mother for example) are immortal: “ye knowe that euery mortall thynge cannot alwayes endure / I speke it for my owne selfe who am sone to a mortall man, and was engendered on the ladye of the preuye Ile who can neuer dye, bycause she is one of the fairy engendered of a man of the fayrey and doughter to a woman of the fayrey.”⁹⁶ There is nothing of this in the thirteenthcentury verse original, however,⁹⁷ and though Harf-Lancner takes such romance references to fairy immortality at face value,⁹⁸ I suspect they are really concessions to the theological objections of men such as William of Auvergne.

A final popular attribute of fairies that caused difficulties for theologians was their association with arcane knowledge, particularly the knowledge of future events. The little tradition seems often to have associated exceptional psychic powers with fairies and those who consorted with them: the non-cyclic prose Lancelot explains that Niniene was said to be a fairy because “in those days anyone who knew about magic and charms was called a fairy” [a celuitens estoient apelees fees totes iceles qui savioent d’anchantement et de chaies].⁹⁹ We have seen that Du Guesclin’s wife was rumored to be a fairy because of her cleverness, and even John of Salisbury reports that some people thought that Aristotle was the son of an incubus demon because of “the clarity of his mind.”¹⁰⁰ From here it is only a short step to associating fairies with prescience.

Merlin, the most celebrated of medieval seers, was the son of a fairy/incubus, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s attribution of prophetic powers to him was a particular source of irritation for William of Newburgh: “They [demonic incubi] are often deceived and deceive by their guesses, though they are quite sophisticated, but by means of trickery in their predictions they lay claim amongst naive people to a foreknowledge of the future which they do not at all possess.”¹⁰¹ Merlin’s Scottish counterpart, Thomas of Erceldoune, acquired the gift of prophesy on his return from a visit to fairyland: “Thomas, þou sall neuer lesynges lye, / Whare euer þou fare by frythe or felle.”¹⁰² It is sometimes forgotten that the narrative portion of Thomas of Erceldoune (the visit to fairyland) is merely a prologue to an extended set of actual prophesies. Similarly, the account of a strange fairy encounter (“ay litel man y mette withalle”) that is appended to an early fourteenth-century manuscript of Langtoft’s Chronicle serves to introduce a rival set of political prophesies.¹⁰³ We have seen that when the French courtier Antoine de la Sale visited the reputed cave of the prophetic Sybil in the Italian province of Marche in 1420, he naturally conceived of it in terms of a visit to fairyland.¹⁰⁴ A fifteenth-century recension of the Second Lucidaire (itself an early fourteenth-century version of the popular theological handbook the Elucidarium) proves that the association between fairies and fortune-telling was commonplace:

Þe sayd feyryes sayd þat þe people were destenyed þe one vnto good þat other to yll after þe course of heuen and of nature, as a chylde borne in suche an houre & at suche a course he was destenyed to be hanged or drowned, or þat he sholde be ryche or poore, or þat he sholde wedde suche a woman, þe whiche thynges ben false. For the man hath in hymselfe lyberall arbytre and fre wyll to do good or ylle in suche wyse þat yf he wyll, he shall do nothynge wherfore he sholde be hanged, ne yet put hym in þe daunger to be drowned; nor also he shall not marye a woman, but yf he wyll, and so [hir] destynacyons shall be false. By these reasons a man sholde put to no fayth.¹⁰⁵

One might have thought that such official condemnation would have been universal, but in an age that took astrology particularly seriously, an appetite for prophesy must have been difficult to stamp out, and even a pious churchman like John of Bridlington might be credited with prophetic powers.¹⁰⁶ If we add to this the fact that no less an authority than Augustine allowed that demons might enjoy a certain limited degree of foresight,¹⁰⁷ we may come to understand how even William of Auvergne could attribute prescience to “someone from Great Britain [evidently Merlin] who was reputed to be the son of an incubus demon” [qui in majori Britannia filius dæmonis incubi fuisse dicitur]: “Now this man was held to be a seer in that land, in that he seemed to have prophetically foretold many future things; not without merit might it be believed that he received this from his upbringing or paternal instruction, for it is certain that demons know many things about the future and other hidden matters, and sometimes reveal them to others, especially their sons” [autem propheta in eadem regione habitus est, eo quod multa de futuris vaticinatus fuisse visus est prophetice; ex instructione, vel doctrina paterna hoc accepisse non immerito credi potest, multa enim de futuris, et aliis absconditis, certum est nosse dæmones, et interdum aliis, nedum filiis, revelare].¹⁰⁸

Such points of tension between the clerical and the popular views of fairies had some important consequences for the way fairies came to be portrayed in romance. A few authors take the bull by the horns and assert unflinchingly that the fairy realm is fully compatible with Christianity. For instance, in a description of the death of Oberon (based on an early continuation of Huon of Bordeaux) we might almost imagine that we are reading the apotheosis of a Christian martyr rather than the last moments of a fairy king: “king Oberon drewe faste to his laste end, who lay in a ryche cowche in the myddes of his palayes makyng his prayers to our lorde Iesu cryste, and holdynge Huon by the hande, and at laste sayde, ‘my dere frende Huon, pray for me’ / & then he made the synge of y^e cros recommendyng his sowle to god, the which incontynent was borne in to paradyce by a greate multytude of angelles sent fro our lord Iesu cryst, who at ther depertynge made such shynynge and clerenes in y^e palays that ther was neuer none suche sene before / and there with there was so swete a smell that euery man thought they had bene rauysshed in to paradyse, wherby they knewe suerly that kynge Oberons sowle was saued.”¹⁰⁹ Though Melusine’s spirit, by contrast, must suffer “greuouse and obscure penytence” until Doomsday, this is due less to her fairy nature than to her husband’s bad faith; had he not broken his word, she suggests, she too might have made a good end: “[I] shuld haue had al my ryghtes, & hadd lyued the cours natural as another woman; & shuld haue be buryed, aftir my lyf naturel expired, within the chirche of our lady of Lusynen, where myn obsequye & afterward my annyuersary shuld haue be honourably & deuoutely don.”¹¹⁰

Jean d’Arras had a powerful patron and evidently felt comfortable discussing fairy phenomena quite openly, but some writers and copiers of popular romances display rather more circumspection. I recall once teaching Sir Degarré and remarking on the hero’s fairy paternity, only to have my students complain that there was nothing in the text to support this. The source of our disagreement became clear as soon as I realized that I had been citing the poem from an edition based on the early fourteenth-century Auchinleck Manuscript (Advocates Library of Scotland, MS 19.2.1),¹¹¹ while the text the students had been reading was based on the much later Bodley, MS Rawlinson Poet. 34.¹¹² When Degarré’s father encounters his mother-to-be deep in the woods, his first speech to her, according to the Auchinleck Manuscript, is,

Damaisele, welcome mote þou be!

Be þou afered of none wihȝte;

Iich am comen here a fairi knyȝte.

Mi kynde is armes for to were,

On horse to ride wiþ scheld and spere;

Forþi afered be þou nowt[.] (lines 98–103)

However, the same passage in the Rawlinson manuscript reads,

Madame, God the see;

Be noughtt adrad, thou swete wyght,

Y am come to the as a knyght;

My kynd ys armys for to bere,

On horss to ryde wyth scheld and spere,

Be dradd of me ryght noughtt[.] (lines 88–93)

A similar suppression occurs in another fifteen-century manuscript of the poem (Cambridge University, MS Ff. II. 38).¹¹³ There can be little doubt that the Rawlinson scribe (or an intermediate scribe in the textual tradition) has deliberately bowdlerized this passage: not only is the reference to fairyland suppressed, but in addition the knight now greets the lady in God’s name. Lest we should be tempted to ascribe this to a simple scribal slip, a few lines later, when the lady abandons her newborn child, she furnishes him with a suitable identification token; in the Auchinleck MS it is “a paire of gloues / Þat here lemman here sent of fairi londe” (lines 191–92),¹¹⁴ but in Rawlinson this becomes simply “a peyr of glovys / Hur lemman to hur for to sonde” (lines 178–79).

Degarré belongs to a group of romances that employ the ‘fair unknown’ motif.¹¹⁵ That the hero’s noble pedigree should be obscured by his fairy parentage—either a father (as in Degarré) or a mother (as in Le Bel Inconnu)—conforms closely to Jameson’s hypothesis about the role of magic in romance, since this meme (to use Cooper’s term) functions primarily to reinforce class solidarity (despite his obscure upbringing, and sometimes deliberate countermeasures on the part of his mother, the hero always adapts ‘naturally’ to the demands of the chivalric life). Pressure from the great tradition meant that such connections were always liable to be suppressed. Lybeaus Desconus,¹¹⁶ the English adaptation of Renaut de Beaujeu’s early thirteenth-century Le Bel Inconnu, offers a particularly good example. In the French original the hero, Guinglain, the product of a liaison between Gawain and the fairy Blancemal (line 3237), is torn between his attraction for two women: a fairy seductress, the Pucele as Blances Mains; and a human queen (whom Guinglain rescues from enchantment), the Blonde Esmeree.¹¹⁷ In this battle between the competing sides of his nature, Li Biaus Descouneüs finally submits to the dynastic imperative and, with Arthur’s encouragement, marries Esmeree. In contrast, the fifteenth-century Middle English adaptation of this romance removes all the fairy allusions: there is no hint that the mother who begets Gyngelayne “vnder a forest syde” is anything other than Gawain’s human mistress.¹¹⁸ Similarly, the Pucele as Blances Mains (here called the Dame d’Amour) offers Gyngelayne nothing more than a brief distraction on his quest to rescue the Blonde Esmeree (here called the Lady of Synadowne); the only suggestion that she has any otherworldly associations is the remark that she

Cowthe more of sorcerye

Than other suche fyve;

………………

Whan he sawe hir face

Hym thought that he was

Jn paradice on lyve;

With false lies and fayre

Th[u]s she blered his eye:

Evill mote she thryue!¹¹⁹

The accusation of sorcery (as we shall see later with Partonope of Blois) was a way of rationalizing and repressing fairy discourse, and that this passage has undergone bowdlerization is suggested by the fact that the line “With false lies and fayre” appears in another manuscript (B.L., MS Cotton Caligula A. II) as “Wyth fantasme and feyrye.”¹²⁰

The disenchantment of the fairy world we encounter in Lybeaus Desconus may be seen as part of a larger pattern,¹²¹ for while the deliberate suppression of fairy elements is not often exposed to view as clearly as in the Rawlinson manuscript of Degarré,¹²² a similar process may be suspected in several romances that lack a definite source. The couplet version of Generides offers an especially clear example.¹²³ In the opening scene King Aufreus, following a mysterious hart while out hunting, is led to a palace deep in the woods, where he meets a beautiful lady. In early romances women encountered in such mysterious silvan settings (Melusine, for example) are often explicitly identified as fairies, and here the fairy atmosphere is enhanced by the absence of a visible house hold in the palace (as happens in Guingamor, Tydorel, Partonopeu of Blois, and others):¹²⁴ the lady is accompanied by only a single maid and an old man, “and elles he saw no moo meigney” (214). Even more telling is the pillow Aufreus finds when he is led to a bedchamber:

In noo lond marchaunt ther nys

That devise it couth I-wis.

An hundreth sith in day and night

Chaunge it wil his colour bright;

Oft it was white, and oft grene.

Oft reid, and oft blew, I wene,

To all coloures it would chaunge;

That was to the king ful straun[ge]. (lines 292–99)

The general association of rich cloth with fairy work was a romance commonplace,¹²⁵ but this particular type of chromatic instability was specifically associated with fairies. When the narrator encounters the protean figure of “Prevy Thought” in the late fifteenth-century allegory The Court of Love, he is immediately reminded of fairyland:

“Yon is,” thought [I], “som spirit or som elf,

His sotill image is so curious:

How is,” quod I “that he is shaded thus

With yonder cloth, I not of what colour?” (lines 1270–73)¹²⁶

Petitcriu, the dog from Elfland that Tristram sends as a present to Ysolt, is similarly elusively polychrome: no one “could relate or record its shape or appearance, for however one looked at the dog it displayed so many colors that no one could discern or fix them.”¹²⁷ In Malory the ring that Lyones lends to Sir Gareth for the tournament at the Castel Peryllous magically endows him with a similar quality: “at one tyme he semed grene, and another tyme at his gayne-commyng hym semed blewe. And thus at every course that he rode too and fro he chonged whyght to rede and blak, that there myght neyther kynge nother knyghte have no redy cognysshauns of hym.”¹²⁸ Predictably, King Aufreus is joined in the bed by the lady of the castle, who with fairy prescience predicts that the issue of their union will be the great knight Generides. Everything in this opening scene, in other words, suggests that we are dealing with a fairy encounter, yet pointedly the words ‘fairy’ and ‘elf’ are never used.

The fashion, associated in English scholarship particularly with Roger Sherman Loomis, for uncovering hidden Celtic motifs in medieval romance has long passed,¹²⁹ and while I have no desire to resurrect it here, the fact remains that earlier scholars often made a plausible case for suppressed fairy elements, not only in fair-unknown romances (the English Sir Percyvell of Gales, for example)¹³⁰ but also in the world of medieval romance in general. When Lancelot in the Chevalier de la charete crosses the sword bridge into Melegeance’s kingdom of Gorre, is he not really passing into a fairy realm, and when Yvain marries Laudine, the Lady of the Fountain, in the Chevalier au lion, is he not marrying into a fairy lineage? Admittedly such readings are unprovable, particularly with a writer whose “uneasiness with folkloric beings” is as patent as Chrétien’s,¹³¹ but the campaign of cultural repression I have been trying to sketch offers at the very least a plausible context for them. Similarly, one need not accept Jessie Weston’s far-fetched theories of displaced pre-Christian rituals in order to recognize that medieval grail romances sometimes reveal clear evidence of a substratum of fairy lore: the black knights with flaming lances who appear in the Perlesvaus, for instance,¹³² look very like the arzei (feu-follets?) described by Étienne de Bourbon;¹³³ and at least one text, the enigmatic Elucidation, attributes the scourge of the Wasteland to human violation of fairy hospitality.¹³⁴

Suppression is only one of the ways in which medieval writers display their “uneasiness with folkloric beings.” Another is displacement, both temporal and geographical. Keith Thomas, discussing the views of early modern writers such as Reginald Scot, Sir William Temple, and John Aubrey, remarks that “it seems that commentators have always attributed [fairies] to the past,” a move he traces back as far as the opening lines of The Wife of Bath’s Tale.¹³⁵ The villagers of Domrémy used just such a tactic for deflecting the curiosity of inquisitors away from issues of current belief, and at an early date it had clearly hardened into a widely deployed defense mechanism. Similarly, the way its magical domain is always displaced to a distant past appears symptomatic of the pressure exerted on popular romance by clerical disapproval: “In Bretayne bi hold time / Þis layes were wrouȝt so seiþ þis rime.”¹³⁶ Thus fairy romances generally employ a once-upon-a-time (jadis) setting that helps insulate them from contemporary censure: “En Bretaigne ot .I. roi jadis” (Guingamor, line 5); “Un vavasur i out jadis” (Désiré, line 13); “Jadis au tens qu’Artur regna” (Tyolet, line 1).¹³⁷ The far-off time of King Arthur, of course, serves this purpose particularly well, but in Sir Orfeo the classical world provides a similarly safe haven for fairy encounters (a tactic parodied by Chaucer at the end of The Merchant’s Tale). In much the same vein, Oberon in the Huon of Bordeaux cycle is said to be the son of Julius Caesar, though he lives long enough to encounter both Arthur and Charlemagne. So too fairies are often displaced in space as well as time: Huon of Bordeaux first encounters Oberon in Arabia; Melior, the fairy mistress of Partonopeu de Blois, comes from Byzantium and abducts her lover while he is hunting in Ardern (the Ardennes); and the Ardennes is the site of another fairy abduction in Reinbrun, a continuation of Guy of Warwick. Interestingly, other genres do not exhibit a similar tendency to displacement: the fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons and Adam de la Halle’s farce Jeu de la feuillée, both of which employ fairy agency, show no such aversion to a contemporary setting or a recognizable location. No doubt humor, as in the case of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, served to defuse difficult questions of orthodoxy and belief.

A final way in which romance writers might respond to clerical disapproval was to collude with it. The most dramatic example is to be found in the works of Robert de Boron, but since Merlin’s fairy/demon paternity is discussed at length in the next chapter, I illustrate this point here by reference to Sir Gowther.¹³⁸ In the Breton lai of Tydorel a queen of Brittany, after ten years of childless marriage, is seduced by a handsome knight who lives in secret deep in the forest. It is made quite clear that this knight is a fairy, and their child, Tydorel, betrays his fairy paternity by his inability to sleep at night.¹³⁹ (Interestingly, the non-cyclic prose Lancelot applies this characteristic to devils: “car deiables ne puet dormir.”)¹⁴⁰ The popular romance of Robert the Devil, found throughout Europe and appearing in England as Sir Gowther, is clearly a sanitized retelling, if not of this specific romance, then of one very like it. Gowther, described at one point as “eyvon Marlyon halfe brodur” (line 95), is fathered by the devil upon a childless Duchess of Austria (interestingly, like Uther Pendragon, he assumes the appearance of her husband to accomplish this), but where Tydorel’s father is described as “the most handsome man in the world” [li plus biaus hon du mont] (line 43), Gowther’s soon reveals his true colors: “When he had is wylle all don, / A feltured fende he start up son” (lines 70–71). The offspring of these two unions lead very different lives. Tydorel grows up to be an ideal king of Brittany:

De Tydorel firent seignor.

Onques n’orent eü meillor,

tant preu, tant cortois, tant vaillant,

tant large, ne tant despendant,

ne miex tenist em pes la terre

nus ne li osa fere guerre.

De puceles ert molt amez

e de dames molt desirrez,

li sien l’amoient et servoient,

e li estrangé le cremoient. (lines 221–30)

[They made Tydorel their lord. They had never had a better, nor one so gallant, courteous, brave, generous, and open-handed, nor one who better kept the peace of the land so that no one dared make war upon him. Much loved by maidens and desired by ladies, his people loved and served him, and outsiders feared him.]

Gowther, in contrast, when he becomes Duke of Austria, immediately institutes a reign of terror; in addition to indiscriminate rape and murder, he takes particular pleasure in pushing friars off cliffs and setting fire to hermits:

All that ever on Cryst con lefe,

Yong and old, he con hem greve

In all that he myght doo.

Meydyns’ maryage wolde he spyll

And take wyffus ageyn hor wyll,

And sley hor husbandus too.

And make frerus to leype at kraggus

And persons forto heng on knaggus,

And odur presys sloo.

To bren armettys was is dyssyre:

A powre wedow to seyt on fyre,

And werke hom mykyll woo. (lines 190–201)

Both Tydorel and Gowther confront their mothers with the question of their paternity. When Tydorel learns who his father is, he sets off to join him in the forest. After Gowther discovers that he is the son of a fiend, he sets off for Rome to confess his sins to the pope. Only after a lengthy period of penance can Gowther return to his homeland, where he rules wisely and where after his death he receives a Christian burial.

Few fairy romances provide such a thoroughgoing illustration of cultural compromise formation as Sir Gowther (though, as we shall see, the French Robert le diable has been even more thoroughly sanitized), but it is not uncommon to encounter specific details that betray the author’s desire to demonstrate his orthodoxy. At times this is clearly a perfectly conscious strategy, but at others it looks more like the involuntary deference of the little tradition to hegemonic clerical models. Thus vernacular culture has no problem imagining Christian fairies: Partonope is reassured to hear his invisible lady, whose bed he happens to be sharing at the time, swear by the Virgin Mary, and in much the same vein, Oberon presents Huon of Bordeaux with a magic cup whose powers are activated by making the sign of the cross over it.¹⁴¹ Yonec’s father in Marie de France’s lai, despite living in an underground kingdom and being able to turn himself at will into a hawk, feels the need to protest to his lady that he is a true Christian, and Désiré’s fairy mistress is similarly insistent on her own religious orthodoxy; indeed both are prepared to display the soundness of their faith by receiving mass.¹⁴² By contrast, in Walter Map’s account of Henno cum dentibus (an analogue to the Melusine story) we encounter a fairy bride who whenever she attends church always finds an excuse to leave before the consecration of the host.¹⁴³ Similarly, when Richard I’s bride in the romance of Richard the Lionheart faints at the elevation of the host in their nuptial mass,¹⁴⁴ we are immediately ready to suspect her fairy origins, and our suspicions are confirmed when fifteen years later “an erl off gret pouste” who has noticed her avoiding the mass tries to force her to remain, with alarming consequences:

Sche took here douȝtyr in here hond,

And Johan her sone she wolde not wonde;

Out of the rofe she gan her dyght,

Openly before all theyr syght.

Johan fell frome her in that stounde,

And brak his thygh on the grounde.

And with her doughter she fled her waye,

That never after she was isey. (lines 227–34)

If the Plantagenets had once had a foundation myth similar to that of the Lusignans, their fairy ancestor has been worked over far more thoroughly than Melusine;¹⁴⁵ the author of this dramatic scene, at least, displays open collusion with the assumptions of the great tradition.

I have suggested a number of ways in which the great tradition’s Kulturkampf against fairy beliefs are reflected in vernacular romance, but the question of belief goes deeper than this. Most literary critics will share Helen Cooper’s relative lack of interest in whether romance audiences actually believed in fairies: “even in the pre-or early-modern period, the fairies of romance did not require belief, but they probably needed rather less suspension of disbelief. What they do require is a recognition on the part of readers and audiences that the real world cannot be reduced to the rational.”¹⁴⁶ But, we might counter, when belief in fairies could offer a reasonable explanation for many things that would otherwise have seemed inexplicable, rationality, in this sense, must be viewed as every bit as historically contingent as belief.¹⁴⁷ Setting aside the question of whether rationality/irrationality might not be a misleading binary to evoke in such contexts, implying as it does some version of Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical society,¹⁴⁸ we would do well to remember that all metaphysical beliefs, our own included, must be in some sense non-empiricist and thus open to a charge of irrationality. When we apply this term to medieval beliefs, then, we are not necessarily imputing a general failure of reason to medieval people; we are simply expressing our disagreement with a set of principles upon which they sometimes put reason to work. No one who has followed Albertus Magnus wrestling with the problems of demonic insemination would dream of challenging his logic; it is not the deductive process but the acceptability of his premises that disturbs us. In this sense, then, medieval people were no more irrational than we are. As R. G. Collingwood puts it, “the common characteristic of [fairy] tales is their magical character. To understand them means understanding magic: understanding why people behaved in the ways for which we use magic as a general term. Now if magical behavior is irrational behavior, this cannot be done.”¹⁴⁹ Neither of the usual literary explanations—the poetic (magic as a play of the imagination) nor the narratological (magic as a way of telling a story)—gets to grips with this problem, for both assume an irrationality that needs to be justified or explained away. The consequences for literary analysis, once we accept that the question of fairy belief might have been a perfectly serious matter in the Middle Ages, are threefold.

First, there is the question of genre. For Helen Cooper, folktale and romance belong to quite separate discursive realms: “the folklore history of fairies has been the subject of much scholarship and more speculation, but lies beyond the scope of this book. The question here is what kind of generic niche was occupied by the fairy, and the fairy lady in particular, after her arrival on the romance scene.”¹⁵⁰ In this context, however, we should perhaps think less of immutable literary genres provoking predictable responses in their readers and more of genres that are to some degree controlled or defined by reader response. As Hans-Robert Jauss puts it, “the history of genres in this perspective also presupposes reflection on that which can become visible only to the retrospective observer: … the historical as well as the aesthetic significance of masterworks, which itself may change with the history of their effects and later interpretations, and thereby may also differently illuminate the coherence of the history of their genre.”¹⁵¹ It is important to recognize that our perception of medieval romance itself, and not just its constitutive memes, is historically contingent and has been deeply affected by the changing history of fairies. Specifically, our generic horizon of expectation, as the rezeptionästhetiker would say, has been profoundly distorted by eighteenth-century attitudes to fairy stories: the very coinage ‘fairy tale’ (a calque on the French conte de fées) includes among its senses “an unreal or incredible story; a falsehood” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]). In other words, we have been conditioned by the age of enlightenment to construe any story containing fairies as a literary fantasy, and we tend unreflectively to project such conditioning back upon our medieval ancestors. As I have been at some pains to show, such an attitude would have found far fewer supporters in the Middle Ages than it does now. It is not that medieval fairy stories (in the sense of improbable Märchen) did not exist, but as with their modern descendants (in which, as Derek Brewer points out, “few actual fairies, of what ever kind, appear”),¹⁵² their narrative impulse seems generally to lie elsewhere.¹⁵³