remainder of the poem. But even here, in an allegorical poem that makes no claims to verisimilitude, the poet feels obliged to authenticate his account of the spring with its storm-raising properties. Not only does he give a circumstantial account of how he came to be in the area (an account so detailed, in fact, that it allows us to date the poem), but he even remarks in the course of his description of the violence of the tempest that he has no wish to lie about it: “ne talent n’en ai de mentir” (line 117).
We have seen that Chrétien was influenced by Wace and Huon de Méri was influenced by Chrétien, so there is a natural enough temptation to take this to mean that we are dealing not with actual beliefs at all but with a succession of writers who are using the Forest of Brocéliande as a literary shorthand, a stock location with as little connection to the real world as Shakespeare’s Illyria. The final three pieces of evidence I wish to adduce, however, are nonliterary and should make it quite clear that if Wace, Chrétien, and de Méri were worried that describing a fairy spring made them look like fools or liars, there were others who seem to have had few doubts that they were dealing with a genuine meteorological event.
Jacques de Vitry, for instance, in his Historia Orientalis seu Hierosolymitana (begun in 1219) includes the Spring of Barenton among a group of marvels he judges it safe to believe in since they are contrary to neither faith nor good morals (“ea tamen credere que contra fidem non sunt vel bonos mores, nullum periculum aestimamus”): “in Brittany there is said to be a certain spring and if its waters are sprinkled over a nearby rock they are said to produce rain and thunder” [in minori Britannia fons quidam esse refertur, cuius aque supra propinquum lapidem proiecte pluvias & tonitrua provocare dicuntur].99 A generation later the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus went to great lengths to make this phenomenon seem credible:
I have heard Friar Henry the German, at one time a Dominican Reader in Cologne,100 a man of conspicuous learning and piety of whom I have written above, tell, with friars as witnesses, what I will now relate. When a certain well-born and wealthy friar from the region of Brittany entered the Dominican order he lived with the French friars in Lyon. As the time of his vows approached he sought permission from his prior to return to his own land in order that he might dispose of his possessions; the prior agreed and undertook the journey with him. When they had arrived in the wastes of Brittany, the novice said to his prior, “Would you like to see the ancient wonder of Brittany?” The prior asked what it was, and the friar, leading him to a sparkling clear spring above which was placed a stone on marble columns in the manner of an altar, immediately poured water over [it]. At once the skies darkened, the clouds began to gather, thunder to rumble, rain to pelt down, lightning to flash, and it instantly caused so great a flood that the surrounding land seemed to be covered to the distance of a league. The prior was amazed by the sight and talked about it in the hearing of brother Henry, Bishop John of blessed memory, master of the order,101 and many other friars. Forty years ago I heard this same thing from my father, who had campaigned in those parts with King Richard of England. When brother Henry told me, and many others, these things, I asked how they could have come about. He replied, by a magic art, now unknown to humans, and by the working of demons, who are able to stir and whip up the air into storms and rain-showers when they wish, though only by permission of the hidden decree of God.102
At this point it is probably worth pointing out something that underlies the traditions surrounding the Spring of Barenton and that may not be immediately obvious to the modern reader: the popular understanding that there was a connection between fairies and bad weather. Chaucer seems to be alluding to such a connection when he mentions the “ayerissh bestes” that engender “Cloudes, mystes, and tempestes, / Snowes, hayles, reynes, wyndes” in The House of Fame (lines 964–69),103 but even clearer evidence is found in, of all places, an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite sermon: “And summe dremen of þes feendis [of the loweste rank] þat summe ben elues and summe gobelynes, and haue not but litil power to tempte men in harme of soule; but siþ we kunne not proue þis ne disproue þis spedili, holde we vs in þe boundis þat God telliþ vs in his lawe. But it is licli þat þes feendis haue power to make boþe wynd and reyn, þundir and lyȝttyng and oþir wedrus; for whan þei moeuen partis of þis e[y]re and bryngyn hem nyyȝ togidere, þes partis moten nedeli bi kynde make siche wedir as clerkis knowen.”104 Another, hardly less surprising, source is a set of Latin exercises composed for use in Exeter Grammar School around 1450, one of which reads, “A general rumour is spreading among the people that the spirits of the air, invoked by necromantic art … have appeared in bodily form, stirring up great tempests in the air which are not yet calmed, it is believed, nor allayed.”105 When Wace, Chrétien, and Huon de Méri wrote of a magic stone with the power to summon up storms, then, they would have expected their readers to assume a fairy agency. It is quite clear that daemones in the passage from Thomas of Cantimpré is a Dominican code word for the vernacular term fées and that Thomas is thus echoing a popular association of the spring with fairies. What is far more striking, however, is the absolute credence that Thomas, a pupil of Albertus Magnus, places in this story of the spring; he gives circumstantial evidence, cites reliable witnesses, and even tries to offer a credible explanation for it. As with the anonymous Wycliffite preacher (and Jean d’Arras), the question is not whether fairies (or daemones/feendis) exist but how they work their magic and what the limits of their powers are.
One final piece of evidence is the most surprising of all. It comes from a sober legal text, the Coutumier of the forest of Brocéliande, written down in the fifteenth century but probably based on a thirteenth-century original. At the end of a lengthy exposition of the assorted hunting, logging, and pasturage rights of the various secular and ecclesiastical lords having domain in the forest, we find the following: “Item, next to the said spring there is a great rock, called the rock of Bellenton, and every time the Lord of Montfort comes to the said spring and sprinkles its water and moistens the said rock, however hot it may be, [with] the weather clear of rain, and in whatever direction the wind might lie, and however much people might say that the weather is not looking at all like rain, very soon (sometimes shortly before the said lord is able to return to his castle of Comper and sometimes shortly after) and in any case before the end of that same day, it rains in the region so plentifully that the land and its crops are watered by it much to their benefit.”106 It is unclear whether this entry is intended to confirm the Lord of Montfort’s exclusive right to sprinkle water on the rock or merely to prove that he has jurisdiction over this particular area, but in either case the passage confirms the existence of a local belief and one that, to judge by its presence in the Coutumier, must have been shared by the landholding class. Moreover the author of the Coutumier clearly recognizes that some will find the phenomenon incredible and goes to some lengths to assert its actuality. After reading such a passage we might understand why Roger Loomis should have asked so indignantly, “Can anyone seriously believe that it was Chrétien’s poem which gave rise to this popular custom of seeking relief from drought at the fountain?”107
Not only in Brocéliande was the question of the credibility of fairy beliefs an issue. The Yorkshireman William of Newburgh tells the story of a local peasant (“ex hoc vico rusticus”) who, having stumbled upon a fairy feast taking place inside a hillock that lay on his way home, rashly steals a cup from the fairies. William notes that he was personally familiar with the hillock in question (“tumulo quem saepius vidi”) and goes to some lengths to detail the subsequent history of the cup: “Eventually this cup of unknown material, unusual colour, and strange shape was offered as a splendid gift to the elder Henry, king of England. Subsequently it was passed on to the queen’s brother, David king of Scots, and kept for many years among the treasures of Scotland. Some years ago, as I learned from a reliable account, Henry II wished to see it, and it was surrendered to him by William king of Scots.”108 No doubt William of Newburgh names these royal witnesses for the same reason that Walter Map had stressed that the fairy bride of a man named Eadric the Wild was examined in person by William the Conqueror,109 as a way of lending unimpeachable authority to his strange tale. Yet William of Newburgh was far from being a credulous reporter;110 his skepticism about the reliability
