By the fifteenth century, the literary construct of the fairy kingdom was both fully formed and truly pan-British. The famous Scottish romance Thomas of Erceldoune, dating from somewhere between 1401 and 1430, tells of how its genteel human hero became the lover of a lady from ‘the wild fee’. She takes him to her own land (entered through the side of a hill), where she turns out to be the wife of its king, and returns him to the mortal world with gifts, of truth telling and knowledge of the future: the tradition associated with so many later service magicians was already established in Scotland. By the end of the century the concept of this kingdom was a recurrent motif of Scottish poetry, and firmly linked to the label ‘fairy’. Over the same period, Welsh literature absorbed the motif as well. Buchedd Collen, which is late medieval and represents a saint’s life written in the style of a romance, has its hero encounter Gwyn ap Nudd, the traditional lord of Annwn, the medieval Welsh underworld or otherworld. Gwyn has now become ‘King of the Fairies’ as well as of Annwn, and when the saint sprinkles him and his sumptuous court with holy water, all vanish leaving green mounds behind. By the mid-fifteenth century, also, English records survive which provide direct insights into popular culture, and the concept of the fairy realm had got there as well. From the 1440s and 1450s come reports of a vagrant claiming to be ‘Queen of the Fayre’ in Kent and Essex; a gang of disguised poachers in Kent calling themselves ‘servants of the queen of the fairies’; and of course the female service magician in Somerset, who claimed to have obtained magical powers from ‘spirits of the air which the common people call feyry’.69 The imported French word had already come to signify among English commoners, apparently in general, the beings that were known in their own language as elves.
During the late medieval period, also, further additions seem to have been made to British beliefs concerning the sort of beings who were now getting this name. There seems to be no certain record in any British medieval text, for example, of the tradition well attested in France and Germany during the high Middle Ages, that terrestrial spirits not only stole human children but substituted sickly or difficult offspring of their own (‘changelings’) for them. This belief does, however, appear unequivocally in a school handbook of model Latin translations published in 1519, and becomes a regular feature of first English and then British fairy lore thereafter. Another innovation was the appearance of ‘Robin Goodfellow’ as a particular name for a fairy-like being. This is first recorded as used by one of the correspondents of the Paston family in 1489, and in 1531 William Tyndale allotted this character a role, of leading nocturnal travellers astray as the puck had been said to do since Anglo-Saxon times and the goblin since the later medieval period. Reginald Scot, writing in 1584, aligned him with another long-established type of magical being, the household spirit who performs helpful practical tasks in exchange for reward: in his case bread and milk. Scot also, however, referred to Robin Goodfellow in another place as a ‘great bullbeggar’, who was once ‘much feared’, suggesting a more hostile nature for him: the attributes of such characters had not yet become precisely fixed.
It may be argued, therefore, that the concept of fairies which prevailed in early modern Britain formed between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the fourteenth representing the decisive period in its gestation. By 1400 it had become a stock component of most types of literature, across the island, and was also an established feature of popular belief, certainly in England and probably elsewhere. Although it drew on older images and ideas, its appearance was a distinctively late medieval phenomenon. There is a slight possibility that it had existed earlier in popular culture, while not making an impact on literature, but the tales about contacts between humans and magical beings recorded by writers between 1100 and 1250 seem to have reflected traditions and experiences which spanned the whole of contemporary society. The absence in those stories of such a generally shared construct, of a supernatural kingdom with recognized rulers and characteristics, is striking, and the evolution of one seems to be visible, through successive stages, in the succeeding period. The French word ‘fairy’ was transmitted to Britain through the medium of romances, and attached to the idea of a kingdom, before either word or concept appeared in popular belief, and the two were firmly linked by the time that such an appearance occurred. The idea of the kingdom itself was based firmly on distinctively elite forms such as chivalric romance and classical mythology. This sequence of development would explain, incidentally, why it came to be found throughout the parts of Britain penetrated by French literary forms – England, Wales and Lowland Scotland – but not the Gaelic cultural province. The Highlands and Western Isles had a widespread belief in beings very similar to fairies or elves – the sithean – but never gave them monarchs.70 It would also explain why nothing like the early modern British fairies is found in ancient European mythologies, and why they seem so different from the indigenous spirits of wood, water or the home also found in British folklore from the early modern and modern periods.
If these suggestions are correct, then the fairy kingdom was as much a late medieval development as the concept of the satanic conspiracy of witches, and may (almost certainly) join the wandering nocturnal hosts of the dead and (possibly) the nocturnal retinue of the Lady, as products of the Middle Ages rather than survivals from the ancient world. In this case, Carlo Ginzburg’s idea that the British fairy queen and the Continental Lady and wandering dead were all surviving fragments of the same prehistoric ‘substratum’ of pagan shamanism is no longer tenable. Emma Wilby’s emphasis on British fairy belief as a remnant of an ancient animist cosmos is still ultimately sound, as the Anglo-Saxon elves must surely have derived from that, but it misses out the vital component of development in beliefs concerning such beings during the medieval period.
Fairies and Witches in Scotland and England
A pair of unanswered questions remains concerning the role played by fairies in early modern British witch trials, centred upon the differences between the two kingdoms: why did fairies feature more often in witch trials in Scotland and why were they so much more strongly associated with dead humans there? It may be suggested at once that there is no easy answer to either; but a consideration of both may throw up some interesting viewpoints on early modern British cultures. The second is more swiftly treated. It is plain from the confessions that the people who were described as being with the fairies had suffered untimely, and often violent, deaths, making them Scottish equivalents of some versions of the Germanic ‘furious army’. Three possible reasons may be proposed for this. The first is that the tradition of the ‘furious army’ crossed the North Sea to Britain. This is possible, but there is no actual evidence for it, and the two traditions are not very alike and may have different points of origin. The second is that an association between elves and the dead was a feature of prehistoric northern Britain, and carried through into the early modern period. This is also possible, and might be given some greater plausibility in that both Scottish and Irish folk tales collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show a common belief that people who had died prematurely had been taken by the fairies.71 We may be looking here at a primeval Gaelic myth. On the other hand, the people taken in these later stories are almost always young women, and a seventeenth-century source from the southern Highlands states that young mothers were abducted in particular to act as nurses in fairyland.72 The idea that the fairies played host to a much larger cross-section of the untimely dead was found, as shown, across the early modern Lowlands and, as will now be demonstrated, before then in England as well.
The third possibility is that the association between the fairies and the dead was rooted in the same medieval romances from which the word ‘fairy’ and the concept of a fairy kingdom developed. Its earliest manifestation there was in the belief that after his last battle King Arthur had been taken to the land of the fays, which developed out of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history in the 1140s. By the time of Sir Orfeo and Arthur of Litt
le Britain, the fairy kingdom was (as has been said) identified with that of Pluto and Proserpine, classical rulers of the dead. This may have been partly because of the Arthurian tradition of the fays as hostesses to dead or lost heroes, and partly because of the idea, already apparent in the high medieval texts, that the home of fairy-like beings was underground, like Pluto’s realm. At the other end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer could likewise make Pluto and Proserpine monarchs of ‘faierye’.73 By contrast, the earliest Scottish texts to speak of fairyland, such as Thomas of Erceldoune, do not place any dead humans or Graeco-Roman deities there. That connection was only apparently made in the late fifteenth century, when once again the Orpheus legend enabled the identification of the fairy king and queen with Pluto and Proserpine, in the version of the story composed by the Dunfermline notary and schoolmaster Robert Henryson.74 His contemporary and fellow poet William Dunbar could likewise make Pluto ‘the elrich incubus / In cloak of green’.75 The association was firmly established by the early sixteenth century, when elite poetry could portray the court of the fairy monarchs as a desirable destination on death, where heroes and great medieval poets now resided.76
There is, therefore, a sustainable argument that the common source of the linkage between fairyland and the human dead lay in high medieval romance, and that it was transmitted across Britain, through that medium, in the course of the late Middle Ages. It took longer to reach Scotland, but having done so it not only became a literary motif but put down deep roots into popular culture, and may have lingered there in subsequent centuries in the reduced form of the idea that fairies abducted young women by making them seem to die, which spread to Ireland. In England, by contrast (according to this theory), it never became more than a literary concept, unlike that of the fairy kingdom, and vanished before the end of the medieval period. At least so the argument would run; but it is no more capable of proof than the other two, and by no means incompatible with them. It is possible, for example, that the Gaelic cultural province had a different and native tradition that the sithean carried off young women; or that Continental images of the hosts of penitent dead influenced the portrait of Pluto’s kingdom in Sir Orfeo. There is ultimately no decisive solution to the puzzle.
The other issue, of why fairies feature more in Scottish than in English witch trials, requires more extended consideration. A simple answer to it would be that Scots making accusations of witchcraft tended to think of demons as fairies and English equivalents tended to think of them as animals; but things are not quite as straightforward as that and, even if they were, the question would still be begged of why that was so. It will be confronted in the last chapter of this book. Another superficially easy solution might be that fairies were associated especially with service magicians, and the Scots tended to prosecute such magicians more frequently for witchcraft. It is not, however, clear that that was the case, and, if it were, the difference would seem to be one of slight rather than dramatic dimensions. A third prima facie answer is that the local Scottish political and social elites who controlled the nature of criminal trials came to regard fairies or elves differently from English equivalents. This can be tested from good evidence, and a conclusion reached upon it, and that exercise will now be undertaken.
In England, attitudes to such beings in the late medieval and early Tudor period took two forms, neither of which dominated the other. One, most prevalent in literary fiction, treated them as imaginary figures, representing varying mixtures of hedonistic pleasure, ideal beauty and menace. Those texts that dealt with apparent reality sometimes considered the possibility that the beings concerned could be demonic, but the overall tendency was to question their existence or to admit to doubt as to how they should be classified.77 Pre-Reformation Scottish attitudes were very similar. The first recorded, in Thomas of Erceldoune, suggested that the land of the ‘wild fee’ was subject to the Devil, who seized anybody who ate the fruit of a certain tree there and sent a fiend every seven years to carry off an inhabitant to Hell as tribute. It was made clear, however, that the ‘fee’ were not fiends themselves and that they had no affection for their satanic overlord.
In Scottish poetry of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, fairies were viewed in various different ways. ‘King Berdok’ made them creatures of whimsy, having a tiny hero who lives in a cabbage stalk or cockle shell, and woos the daughter of the ‘king of fary’.78 William Dunbar associated ‘ane farie queyne’ with ‘sossery’ (sorcery), but also explored images of fairy-like beings with a mixture of anxiety and attraction.79 Sir David Lindsay likewise repeatedly made his characters refer to the fairy queen or king in passing, with sentiments either of affection or fear; so attitudes to them varied even in the work of one writer, or indeed within a single poem.80 The Scottish Reformation does seem to have altered this situation decisively, towards a negative view. In a now famous poem by Alexander Montgomerie, from about 1580, the host of the ‘King of Pharie’ and the ‘elf queen’ includes overtly demonic figures such as incubi.81 Montgomerie’s monarch and patron was James VI, a formidable writer himself, who in the next decade condemned all apparent manifestations of the fairy realm as devilish delusions designed to ensnare souls: a perfect theoretical justification for the identification of fairies with demons that had been made, and would be made, in witch trials.82 After that it had to be more or less official orthodoxy to make that identification in Scotland. It cannot be concluded with certainty that views might have been more variable had better media for them existed there: had not Scots poetry apparently declined in the early seventeenth century or had a flourishing theatrical tradition developed in the period. None the less, the indications are not promising. In 1567, for example, a comic play was performed at the Scottish royal court, and it already made ‘the Farie’ an alternative destination to Hell.83 Post-Reformation Scottish culture does not seem friendly to fairies, and the hostility crossed confessional divides, as Montgomerie was a Catholic and so was the monarch for whom the play was performed in 1567, Mary Queen of Scots.
In England, by contrast, the Reformation provoked an intense new interest in fairy mythology, expressed in a great range of source genres. It was one aspect of a general increase among the English in interest in the nature and operation of superhuman entities during the period from 1560 to 1700, also manifesting – for example – in a new level of interest in demonology and angelology. It is especially significant for present purposes that this did not result in any consensus, let alone orthodoxy, concerning the nature of fairies or even their existence, but in a wide variety of attitudes expressed with more or less equal freedom.84 It is easy to find English writers between 1598 and 1675 who agreed with the Protestant Scots that fairies were demons pure and simple. William Warner included ‘elves and fairies’ among the spirits of Hell.85 John Florio, Thomas Jackson, Robert Burton, Thomas Heywood, William Vaughan and Henry Smith all likewise summed them up unequivocally as demons, or (more rarely) as deceiving phantasms produced by demons.86 A comedy staged in about 1600 included an evil enchanter who conjured them as servitor spirits.87 Subsequently a much greater writer of comic drama, Ben Jonson, twice turned to demonic fairy-like figures for material. In The Divell is an Asse, he made the puck, the tormenting trickster figure of traditional folklore, into one of Satan’s lesser demons; though he also cast doubt on some charges of witchcraft by saying that women hanged for it took the blame falsely for the puck’s own misdeeds.88 In The Sad Shepherd, however, he brought on a thoroughly evil and malicious human witch, with true magical powers and servitor demons such as ‘Puck-hairy’, who also associates with ‘white Faies’ and ‘span-long elves’.89 It seems difficult to position these authors in any particular religious or cultural group: demonic fairies were certainly not specifically a belief of godly Protestants in England.
The evil conjuror in the comedy raises the question of how far fairy-like beings actually did feature in ceremonial magic in the late Tudor and Stuart periods, and it admits of a clear answer:
while they were associated with service magicians working for a popular clientele from the early fifteenth century, they did not have the same position in elite ritual magic. The latter long remained true to its ancient and early medieval roots, calling on spirits who were in origin pagan deities and spirits or Judaeo-Christian angels. However, five manuscripts of this kind of magic, from the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, do include directions for the invocation and control of fairies, treating them as a distinct sub-class of spirits, while a published treatise includes extracts from a sixth.90 The purposes for which their services are to be obtained are generally whatever the magician wills, in common with other invoked spirits. This inclusion of fairies as such is new in texts of ritual magic, and must reflect the new intensity of interest in them in English society at large, something borne out by the records of individual learned magicians. John Dee recorded in his diary for 1582 that a ‘learned man’ had offered to ‘further my knowledge in magic . . . with fairies’, while Simon Forman subsequently noted down data concerning the powers of the fairy king.91 A woman accused of malefic witchcraft in 1618 claimed that her teacher of magic had offered ‘to blow into her a fairy which should do her good’.92
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