71.Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, 96–107, is especially good on these.
72.Robert Kirk, in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, 81.
73.Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, lines 2225–2318.
74.Robert Henryson, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, anthologized in various editions.
75.William Dunbar, ‘The Goldyn Targe’, lines 125–6.
76.For example, Sir David Lyndsay, ‘The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo’, lines 1132–5; and Anon., ‘The Manner of the Crying of ane Playe’, in W. A. Craigie (ed.), The Asluan Manuscript, Edinburgh, 1925, vol. 2, 149.
77.Source references are provided in my Historical Journal article cited above.
78.This poem occurs in the Bannatyne Manuscript and is published in the various editions of that, sometimes catalogued under the first line, ‘Syn of Lyntoun’.
79.See the discussion of his poetry in Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 155–6.
80.Compare Lindsay’s ‘The Testament, and Complaynt’, as above, with his ‘Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estates’, lines 732, 1245–6, 1536–7, 4188–9; literary scholars spell him ‘Lyndsay’.
81.‘Ane Flytting or Invective be Capitane Alexander Montgomerie aganis the Laird of Pollart’, Book 2, lines 14–26.
82.James VI, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597, 73–4.
83.Philotus, eventually published in Edinburgh in 1603, stanza 132. I am grateful to Julian Goodare for pointing out the 1567 date for its performance.
84.The context of this is considered in my Historical Journal article, but I can go into the details of early modern English portrayals of fairies further here. Previous work into the subject has concentrated mainly on the literary manifestations of those portrayals, but with some regard for the social context: Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck; Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 124–85; Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Taken by the Fairies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 277–311; Marjorie Swann, ‘The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 449–73; Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in The Faerie Queene, Aldershot, 2005; Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, Selinsgrove, 2006; Peter Marshall, ‘Protestants and Fairies in Early Modern England’, in L. Scott Dixon (ed.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, Farnham, 2009, 139–61. The last of these provides the best overview of attitudes to date, but a more comprehensive and integrated one, with the cross-British comparison, can be given here.
85.In two editions of Albions England, London, 1602, 85, and London 1612, c. 91.
86.John Florio, A Worlde of Words, London, 1598, 401–2; Thomas Jackson, A Treatise Concerning the Original of Unbeliefe, London, 1625, 178; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas Faulkner et al., Oxford, 1989, 185–8; Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, London, 1635, 567–8; William Vaughan, The Souls Exercise, London, 1641, 113; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 4, c. 47; Henry Smith, Christian Religions Appeal, London, 1675, 45.
87.The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll, London, c. 1600.
88.The Divell is an Asse, London, 1616, esp. Act 1, Scene 1.
89.The Sad Shepherd, London, 1640, Acts 2 and 3.
90.British Library, Sloane MS 1727, pp. 23, 28; and MS 3851, fos 106v, 115v, 129; Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1406, fos 50–55; and MS e. MUS 173, fo. 72r; Folger Library MS V626, pp. 80, 185; Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book 15, cc. 8–9.
91.Edward Fenton (ed.), The Diaries of John Dee, Charlbury, 1998, 25; Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1491, fo. 1362v.
92.The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philip Flower, London, 1618, sig. E3.
93.William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, line 162; John Day, Works (London, 1881), vol. 2, 70; Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage (London, 1594), Act 5, Scene 1, lines 212–15; Gammer Gurton’s Nedle (London, 1575), Act 1, Scene 2, lines 67–9; The Merry Devil of Edmonton (London, 1608), Act 3, Scene 3; John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act 1, Scene 1, lines 114–17, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1906–12), vol. 2.
94.For an example of a charm from the Elizabethan period, see Bodleian Library, Add. MS B1, fo. 20r. For English service magicians acting against fairy-caused ills, see Bouch, Prelates and People, 230; and Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 184.
95.Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 150–61, collected the references.
96.George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, London, 1589, c. 15; John Aubrey, Three Prose Works, ed. John Buchanan Brown, Fontwell, 1972, 203; R. Willis, Mount Tabor, London, 1639, 92–3; Hertfordshire Record Office, HAT/SR 2/100. For the later history of the changeling tradition in the British Isles, see Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 236–45; and Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, 108–22. Julian Goodare tells me that there is evidence for the changeling belief in early modern Scotland as well.
97.A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, Cambridge, 1938, 435; Anthony Munday, Fidele and Fortunio, London, 1584, line 566.
98.Monsieur Thomas, London, 1639, Act 5, Scene 1.
99.The Pilgrim, London 1647, Act 5, Scene 4.
100.Grim the Collier of Croydon, London 1662, passim.
101.See the gloss for ‘June’, in line 25.
102.The Friers Chronicle, London, 1625, sig. B3v; see also Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft, Cambridge, 1590, 8; Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of egregious popish Impostures, London, 1603, 135–6; Richard Flecknoe, Aenigmatical Characters, London, 1665, 17; Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, 175–6; Thomas Heyrick, The New Atlantis, London, 1687, 15–16.
103.George Chapman, An Humerous Dayes Mirth, London, 1599, 209–11; A Discourse of Witchcraft, London, 1621, 17; Thomas Heywood, If You Know Not Me, You Know No Body, London, 1605, vol. 1, pp. 3–23 in the 1874 version of his Dramatic Works. See also Reginald Scot’s declaration that fairies were the inventions of maids to frighten or entertain children: Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book 4, c. 10.
104.William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 4 and Act 5, Scene 5; Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, London, 1616, Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 5; The Buggbears, London, c. 1564–5, passim; The Valiant Welshman, London, 1663, Act 2, Scene 5; Wily Beguilde, London, 1606, passim; Munday, Fidele and Fortunio, passim.
105.The Brideling, Saddling and Ryding, of a rich Churle in Hampshire, London, 1595; The Several Notorious and lewd Cousnages of Iohn West, and Alice West, falsely called the King and Queene of the Fayries, London, 1613; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Hatfield House MSS, vol. 5 (1894), 81–3; C. J. Sisson, ‘A Topical Reference in “The Alchemist”’, in James G. McManaway et al. (eds), Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies, Washington, DC, 1948, 739–41.
106.Berners’ translation is now best known in the 1882 Early English Text Society edition by S. L. Lee.
107.See Lee’s comments in ibid., xxiv–li; and Robert Greene, The Scottish Historie of James IV, London, 1598.
108.Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Fairy, London, 1616; Robert Herrick, ‘Oberon’s Feast’ and ‘Oberon’s Palace’ in Hesperides, London, 1648, much anthologized since; Christopher Middleton, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England, London, 1597. See also Thomas Randolph, The Jealous Lovers, London, 1643, Act 3, Scene 7; The Midnight’s Watch, London, 1643 and Amyntas, London, 1638; [? Thomas Dekker], Lust’s Dominion, London, 1657, lines 1583–605.
109.See n.108.
110.On this see Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 176–218; Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 176–80; Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, 58–82; Lamb, ‘Taken by the Fairies’, 300–311.
111.In ‘The Politics of Fairylore’, Marjorie Swann has argued that the emphasis on conspicuous consumption in early modern English literature on fairies reflected the emergence of a consumer society. The problem here is that medieval aristocrats were no strangers to such consumpt
ion, and gorgeous lifestyles had always been associated with fays.
112.London, 1630. Following Shakespeare, fairies themselves were often treated in English literary works as diminutive beings, allowing writers to explore the imaginative implications of a world populated by such midgets. This genre has been well studied by literary scholars, including Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 176–218; Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 44–70; and Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 181–3. Its (self-consciously) ridiculous nature may have made it still harder to take fairies seriously, and so as characters in witch trials, but devils could also be small: some of Alexander Montgomerie’s demonic fairies rode on beans and stalks.
113.Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, London, 1607.
114.Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I, Woodbridge, 1980, 99–118, 122, 126–42; Thomas Churchyarde, A Handful of Gladsome Verses, Given to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke, Oxford, 1593, Sig. B4; Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 143–4.
115.Ben Jonson, The Entertainment at Althorp, London, 1616; and Oberon, the Fairy Prince, London, 1616.
116.The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, London, 1595, Act 3, Scene 1, line 203; Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 100–105; A. H. Bullen (ed.), The Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889, 21–2; Michael Drayton, ‘The Quest of Cynthia’, in The Battaile of Agincourt, 1627; and ‘The Third Nimphall’, in The Muses Elizium, London, 1630; Selections from the Writings of Thomas Ravenscroft, Edinburgh, 1822, nos XXI–XXII; A. H. Bullen, Lyrics from the Song Books of the Elizabethan Age, London, 1889, 34–5. For translations of classical texts, see Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 59–73.
117.The Maydes Metamorphosis, London, 1600, Act 2, Scene 2, Sig. c4 and D1; Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 2, lines 9–25; John Lyly, Gallathea, London, 1592, Act 2, Scene 3; Walter W. Greg (ed.), Henslowe Papers, London, 1907, 135.
118.Samuel Rowlands, More Knaves Yet? The Knaves of Spades and Diamonds, London, 1600, Sig. F2; The Cobler of Canterburie, London, 1590, Epistle; Churchyarde, A Handeful of Gladsome Verses, Sig. B4.
119.John Selden, Table Talk, ed. Edward Arber, London, 1868, 82.
120.Rowlands, More Knaves Yet? The Knave of Spades, 40; John Marston, The Mountebanks Masque, printed in Peter Cunningham, Inigo Jones, London, 1898, 114; Jonson, The Entertainment at Althorp; Richard Corbet, Certain Elegant Poems, London, 1647, 47–9 and sources in n. 1.
121.Aubrey, Three Prose Works, 203.
122.He seems to appear as such in Tell-Trothes New Yeares Gift, London, 1593. Fairy monarchs sometimes shared this trait: the satirist Samuel Rowlands, Humors Antique Faces, London, 1605, prologue, claimed that ‘the Faerie King’ had charged him ‘to scourge the humours of this age’.
123.James Orchard Halliwell reprinted the three main pamphlets in this genre, in Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London, 1845, 120–54, 155–70. Only one, apparently the first in sequence, is dated, at 1628, but an earlier Victorian editor, J. Payne Collier, The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow, London, 1841, was convinced that it had been in existence since 1588, and was followed in this opinion by Robert Rentoul Reed, The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, Boston, 1965, 194–233. Their evidence, however, lay in references to Robin Goodfellow in general rather than to his actions in this tract in particular. His role as a champion of virtue had been presaged in Grim the Collier of Croydon, undated but seemingly Elizabethan in style, discussed above.
9 Witches and Celticity
1.Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996, xi.
2.This debate is summarized with full references in Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain, London, 2013, 166–71.
3.All this is, again, summarized with full references in Pagan Britain, as above.
4.Raymond Gillespie, ‘Women and Crime in Seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland, Edinburgh, 1991, 43–52; Elwyn C. Lapoint, ‘Irish Immunity to Witch-hunting, 1534–1711’, Éire-Ireland, 27 (1992), 76–92.
5.J. Gwynn Williams, ‘Witchcraft in Seventeenth-century Flintshire’, Flintshire Historical Society Publications, 26 (1973–4), 16–33, and 27 (1975–6), 5–35; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Popular Beliefs in Wales from the Restoration to Methodism’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 27 (1977), 440–62.
6.Sally Parkin, ‘Witchcraft, Women’s Honour and Customary Law in Early Modern Wales’, Social History, 31 (2006), 295–318.
7.Stuart MacDonald, The Witches of Fife, East Linton, 2002, 22–3; Lauren Martin, ‘Scottish Witch Panics Re-examined’, in Julian Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, Basingstoke, 2008, 125.
8.Lizanne Henderson, ‘Witch-hunting and Witch Belief in the Gàidhealtachd’, in Goodare et al. (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, 95–118.
9.Jane Dawson, ‘Calvinism and the Gàidhealtachd in Scotland’, in Andrew Pettegree et al. (eds), Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, Cambridge, 1994, 250–51.
10.Ronald Hutton, ‘The Global Context of the Scottish Witch-hunt’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context, Manchester, 2002, 31–2.
11.James Sharpe, ‘Witchcraft in the Early Modern Isle of Man’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 11–28. I am very grateful to him for the gift of a copy of this article.
12.Richard Suggett, ‘Witchcraft Dynamics in Early Modern Wales’, in Michael Roberts and Simone Clark (eds), Women and Gender in Early Modern Wales, Cardiff, 2003, 75–103; and A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, Stroud, 2008. I am very grateful for the gift by the author of a copy of the essay.
13.Ronald Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, Past and Present, 212 (2011), 43–71. What follows in the rest of this section may be found there, fully argued and referenced.
14.Here James Sharpe’s research is complemented and supported by my own: three years after he published it I followed it up with a piece of my own in the same journal: ‘The Changing Faces of Manx Witchcraft’, Cultural and Social History, 7 (2010), 153–70.
15.Here, as well as the work of Suggett and Parkin, cited earlier, there is important material in Lisa Mari Tallis, ‘The Conjuror, the Fairy, the Devil and the Preacher’, Swansea University PhD thesis, 2007. I am very grateful to Owen Davies for lending me a copy of this work.
16.Thomas Brochard, ‘Scottish Witchcraft in a Regional and Northern European Context’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 10 (2015), 41–74.
17.Andrew Sneddon, ‘Witchcraft Beliefs and Trials in Early Modern Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, 39 (2012), 1–25; and Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland, Basingstoke, 2015. In the former work he is wholly in agreement with me, while in the latter he tries to find minor differences, pointing to his emphasis that Catholic nobles, at least, feared witchcraft, and that the ‘evil eye’ could be regarded as intentional. In reality, there is no dispute between us, as I never denied the first point and stated quite firmly in my article that the ‘evil eye’ was not always treated as innocent of malice in Gaelic regions.
18.His word is vetulas, i.e. crones: Topgraphia Hibernica, c. 19. Not all translated editions include this passage.
19.Burchard, Decreta, Book 19.
20.Bodil Nildin and Jan Wall, ‘The Witch as Hare or the Witch’s Hare’, Folklore, 104 (1993), 67–76; Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages, Philadelphia, PA, 2011, 118, 138–45, 181–7.
21.Wanda Wyporska, Witchcraft in Early Modern Poland, Basingstoke, 2013, 1–2, 22, 32–3, 39, 48, 61, 93.
22.Jeremiah Curtin, Tales of Fairies and of the Ghost World Collected from Oral Tradition in South-west Munster, London, 1895, 23–8; Jane Francesca Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, London, 1890, 75–83; Robin Gwyndaf, ‘Fairylore: Memorates and Legends from Welsh Oral Tradition’, in Peter Narvaez (ed.), The Good People, New York, 1991, 159–70; W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Oxford, 1
911, 37–9; James MacDougall, Highland Fairy Legends, ed. George Calder, Cambridge, 1978, 80–81.
23.The folklore collections concerned are listed in Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 50–68. An especially good analysis of the implications of it in Ireland may be found in Richard P. Jenkins, ‘Witches and Fairies: Supernatural Aggression and Deviance amongst the Irish Peasantry’, in Narvaez (ed.), The Good People, 302–35.
24.This is a general feature of histories of Cornwall. Mark Stoyle has perhaps been the most prominent recent author to highlight Cornish exceptionalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in a series of publications culminating in Soldiers and Strangers, London, 2005. I am very grateful to him for sending me copies of these.
25.Janet A. Thompson, Wives, Widows, Witches and Bitches, New York, 1993, 106–7, provides all the figures. It may be noted that other southern English counties could also have few known trials: Hampshire’s figure is twelve, and Sussex’s thirteen.
26.Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 50–68.
27.Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, London, 1703, 115–16, 179–82 (references are to the Stirling reprint of 1934).
28.Most notably Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, in Scottish Fairy Belief, East Linton, 2001, who concluded that such belief changed little between the fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries. Emma Wilby has also employed the same approach in both of her books, discussed in the previous chapter. All three have in fact been rather less cautious in their application of modern folklore to early modern issues than the approach taken here.
29.Hutton, ‘Witch-hunting in Celtic Societies’, 64.
30.Alexander Thom (ed.), Ancient Laws of Ireland, 5 vols, Dublin, 1865–1901, vol. 1, 181, 203 and vol. 5, 295–7.
31.Cáin Adomnáin, no. 46.
32.Ludwig Bieler (ed.), The Irish Penitentials, Dublin, 1963, 78–81, 101.
33.This and what follows is a summary of the discussion, with full source references, in Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain, London, 2009, 30–44.
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