Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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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