Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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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