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 close encounters with fairies makes it difficult to argue that fairy beliefs should be relegated to the peasant fringes of medieval society.
To give one final illustration: we have seen that in the spring of 1420 the French courtier Antoine de la Sale traveled to Montemonaco in the central Apennines to see for himself the famous paradise of Queen Sibyl, a magic realm that medieval popular imagination had clearly modeled on descriptions of fairyland. Almost as interesting as his report of the visit itself, however, is la Sale’s account of its early readership. It was written in the first instance, he tells us, as an ironic travel guide for his former pupil John of Calabria (the son of Duke René d’Anjou) and his new wife, Marie de Bourbon, but a second copy was promised to John’s mother-in-law, Agnès de Bourgogne, and her husband, the Duke de Bourbon, “si le plaisir de mondit seigneur et le vostre feust d’y aler, ainsi que souventffois après disner ou soupper avez acoustumé de vous esbatre” [in case my lord and you should be pleased to go there, an idea you have often amused yourselves with after dinner or supper].19 Such people were among the grandest magnates in France, and coupled with the Duke de Berri’s interest in Melusine, their evident fascination with Queen Sybil’s paradise confirms that the discourse of fairyland was far from being the exclusive preserve of the laboring classes.
When the higher nobility could evince such an interest in the existence of fairyland, we should not be surprised to discover that the lower aristocracy shared their concerns. We have already seen that the lords of Montfort were thought to invoke fairy aid to make it rain in Comper, and that some people believed that Bertrand du Guesclin, who despite his rise to the constableship came from the minor nobility, had married a fairy. Joan of Arc’s nullification proceedings offer two further examples of the ‘folklore’ of such petite aristocratie. Sir Albert d’Ourches, who met Joan in Vaucouleurs, was not a local (Ourches-sur-Meuse is some twenty miles to the north of Domrémy), and yet he was prepared to testify to having heard that in the old days fairies used to be seen beneath the Fairy Tree (“subtus illam arborem antiquitus fées solebant ire”), and then adds, by way of exonerating Joan, that this was twenty or thirty years before she was even heard of (or, in other words, fifty years earlier, when he was a young boy).20 Perhaps he had learned of the fairy tree on a visit to the de Bourlémont family (the lords of Domrémy), a family that with the death of Pierre de Bourlémont in 1412 had become extinct. Another deponent, the widow Jeanette de Veau, however, recalled hearing stories about the de Bourlémonts: the tree was called the Ladies Tree, she said, “because in the old days a certain lord, called Sir Peter Gravier, knight, lord of Bourlémont, and a lady who was called Fée would meet each other under that tree and speak together. And she said she heard these things read in a romance (‘hec in uno romano legi audivit’)” (pp. 264–65). Unless Jeanette was simply confused,21 we may possibly be dealing here with some local counterpart of the Melusine legend,22 but in any case four other witnesses specifically attested to an association between the de Bourlémont family and the Fairy Tree,23 and several more mentioned domini et domine temporales in connection with it. Taken as a whole, these testimonies convey a clear impression that fairy ‘folklore’ was far from being restricted
