reference to Gervase:
Therfore yf I haue wryton or shewed ony thing that to som semeth neyther possible to be nor credible, I beseche them to pardonne me. For as I fele & vnderstand by the Auctours of gramaire & phylosophye [Fr. des anciens autteurs tant de Gervaise comme d’autres anciens autteurs et philosophes] they repute and hold this present hystorye for a true Cronykle & thinges of the fayry. And who that saith the contrary / I say the secret jugements of god and his punysshments are inuysible & impossible to be vnderstand or knowe by the humanyte of man. / For the vnderstanding of humayne Creature is to rude to vnderstande the spyce espirytuel, & may not wel comprehend what it is / but as ferre as the wylle of god wyl suffre hym [Fr. et la puissance de Dieu y puet adjouster qu’ il lui plaist]. For there is found in many hystoryes Fayries that haue be maryed & had many children / but how this may be the humayn creature may not conceyue.83
But it is not just written authority that Jean d’Arras invokes. When, at a critical point in the story, Melusine, learning that her husband has disregarded a solemn prohibition, flies off in the shape of a dragon from an upper window, Jean offers us marmoreal proof of this marvel: “And wete it wel that on the basse stone of the wyndowe apereth at this day themprynte of her foote serpentous [Fr. Et sachiéz que la pierre sur quoy elle passa a la fenestre y est encores, et y est la fourme du pié toute escripte].”84 Predictably, Coudrette omits this detail, but even he felt the need to reassure his audience at this point: “Which I writte is trouth, therof ly no thyng [Fr. Il est voir tout que je escry; / Je m’en daigneroye mentir].”85
This is not quite all there is to it, however, for Jean d’Arras, or at least his patron, might well be thought to have had a political motive for publicly endorsing the legend of Melusine. Among the many stories connected with Melusine was one that she would appear on the ramparts of Lusignan whenever control of the fortress was about to change hands. In the summer and fall of 1376, with Lusignan, the last remaining major English stronghold in Poitou, under siege by the forces of Jean, Duc de Berri, what better way might have been found of encouraging the attackers than to report that Melusine had put in an appearance? Predictably, then, Jean d’Arras says that he had learned from the duke himself that John Cresswell, the English castellan who was defending the castle, had been visited by Melusine three days before its surrender—at the time he was in bed with a woman named Alexandrine, and “he was neuer in his dayes so afered.”86 Cresswell, a grizzled old routier,87 was certainly not a man to be easily frightened—a fact not lost on his sarcastic bedfellow: “Ha, valyaunt Sersuel how ofte haue I sene your mortal enemyes tofore your presence that neuer ye were aferd, and now for a serpent of femenyne nature ye shake for fere.” It is easy, then, to dismiss this story as mere propaganda, especially since some of its details can be shown to be inaccurate: for instance, d’Arras says that the apparition occurred three days before Cresswell surrendered the castle, but in fact when Lusignan finally fell into French hands, on 1 October, Cresswell had actually been languishing in a French dungeon for over three months;88 moreover Lusignan did not exactly ‘fall’ to the besiegers; the English handed it over to the duke by way of discharging the ransom of Sir Thomas Percy.89 To be fair, the Duc de Berri was probably embroidering the details of a story, retold for Jean d’Arras’s benefit, after an interval of perhaps fifteen years, but this passage 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
