Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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of time raises further problems. By, say, 1390 Lusignan was firmly in French hands and the story had lost whatever propaganda value it might once have had; could it be that the duke, Lusignan’s new castellan, was now wondering whether he might not be next on Melusine’s visiting list? Certainly the cultural work being done by the prose Mélusine at this point seems to have changed radically. Cresswell’s story is being invoked here not to dishearten an English garrison but to establish the actual existence of a fairy apparition.
As told in the French original, the story contains a number of circumstantial details left out of the English translation. We learn, for instance, that all the doors to the bedroom Cresswell was sharing with Alexandrine were locked and that there was a good fire burning in the grate (so that Melusine could not have come down the chimney): “Et ne sçot oncques par ou elle entra, et estoient tous les huiz ferméz et barréz et le feu ardoit grant en la cheminee.”90 Moreover, others are said to have seen her. The English translation does mention a man named Godard who swore on the Evangelists that he had often encountered her without ever coming to harm (pp. 369–70), but it leaves out the vivid detail that it was near an old chicken coop next to the castle well (“il a un lieu a Lusegnen empréz le puis ou on a du temps passé nourry pollaille”) as well as the important fact that the man himself was still alive (“un homme qui encores demeure en la forteresse”) (p. 814). Similarly, a Welshman called Evan is mentioned as a further witness,91 but not the fact that he saw Melusine twice. Finally, the English translation makes no mention whatsoever of a Poitevin called Perceval de Couloigne, the chamberlain of Peter I of Cyprus (a descendant of the Lusignans), who swore that his master claimed to have seen Melusine three days before he was murdered on 7 January 1369 (p. 814)—a notorious crime, recorded in Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. All this wealth of circumstantial detail makes it hard to accept that, whatever its origins, Jean d’Arras is telling the story of John Cresswell for any other reason than to prove the factual basis of the apparition, and that the Duc de Berri had related it to him out of a genuine concern with establishing the facts.
Jean d’Arras may be unusual in the lengths he goes to to authenticate his remarkable tale, but there is nothing surprising about finding the issue of fairy belief raised by a writer of romance. Fairies, it seems, like ghosts, have their favorite haunts, and of all the European locations where one might hope to encounter a fairy, perhaps the most auspicious was the forest of Brocéliande near Rennes in Brittany. A description of Brocéliande in the mid-thirteenth-century romance of Claris and Laris (1268) makes it sound rather like a fairy theme park (complete with a golden arch):
Dusqu’a midi ont chevauchie
Lors ont .i. grant bois aprouchie,
Qu’on apele Broceliande;
Trop est la forest fiere et grande
Et plaine de trop grant merveille;
………………………
Les fees ont lor estage,
En .i.des biaus leis du boscage
Est lor maison et lor repaire
Si riches, con le porroit faire
Cil, qui le sorent compasser.
………………….
A l’entrer de la riche lande,
Qu’on apele Broceliande,
Sont li baron arresteu;
Atant ont .i. arvout veu,
Haut et bien fet de grant richece;
Bien avoit .x. piez de largece;
Dedenz avoit letres escrites
D’or, qui n’estoient pas petites;
Toutes les choses devisoient,
Qui dedenz la forest estoient. (lines 3289–334)92
[They [Claris and Laris] rode until midday, when they arrived at a great wood which is called Brocéliande. It is a very large and noble forest, full of many great wonders…. The fairies have set up residence there; their dwelling and their resort is in one of the fair clearings in the forest. It is as rich as the builders, who knew their business, could make it…. At the entrance to this rich woodland they call Brocéliande the knights halted. Then they saw a high arch, well made at great expense, at least ten feet tall. Within were sizable gold letters written; they listed all the things that were to be seen in the forest.]
Most modern readers will take this passage as pure fantasy and will regard its fairy paraphernalia as a mere plot device—the function of Brocéliande is simply to provide an elaborate chivalric proving ground for the two young heroes. As Jeff Rider puts it, medieval otherworlds “serve as narrative engines whose representatives, messages, or gifts intervene to set a story going, keep it going, or change its direction.”93 In Helen Cooper’s words, “magic is above all a narrative issue, a way of telling a story.”94 To take the fairy machinery of medieval romance as nothing more than a convenient narrative device, however, is to ignore the fact that people in the Middle Ages were themselves far from indifferent to truth claims about fairies. As Arthur Brown showed long ago, the torrent of disparaging epithets—nugae, fallaces, fabulae, figmenta—hurled against Arthurian romances by twelfth-century clerics arose from their very real indignation that such things as “disappearing castles, magic fountains, and enchanted forests” should have been represented as credible.95 If the question mattered to them, perhaps it should also matter to us.
Let us then return to the Forest of Brocéliande. In the Roman de Rou, written at least a hundred years before Claris and Laris, the Norman poet Wace inserts the following amusing aside into an account of the forces gathered by William for his invasion of England:
e cil devers Brecheliant
donc Breton vont sovent fablant,
une forest mult longue e lee
qui en Bretaigne est mult loee.
La fontaine de Berenton
sort d’une part lez le perron;
aler i solent veneor
a Berenton par grant chalor,
et a lor cors l’eve espuisier
e le perron desus moillier;
por ço soleient pluie aveir.
Issi soleit jadis ploveir
en la forest e environ,
mais jo ne sai par quel raison.
La seut l’en des fees veeir
se li Breton nos dient veir
e altres mereveilles plusors;
………………‥
La alai jo merveilles querre,
vi la forest e vi la terre,
merveilles quis, mais nes trouvai,
fol m’en revinc, fol i alai;
fol i alai, fol m’en revinc,
folie quis, por fol me tinc. (3:6374–98)96
[and some [came] from near Brocéliande which the Bretons often tell stories about, a forest, long and broad, which is greatly prized in Brittany. The spring of Barenton flows on one side, beside the great stone. Huntsmen were accustomed to go to Barenton when it was very hot and pour water from their horns and splash it over the great stone; this way they would make it rain. This is the way it rained in the old days in the forest and the surrounding area, but I don’t know what the reason was. People were accustomed to seeing fairies and many other wonders there, if the Bretons are telling us the truth…. I went there to see wonders, I saw the forest and I saw the region; I searched for wonders but I didn’t find any; I came back a fool—I went there a fool; I went there a fool—I came back a fool; I looked for folly—I found