by this contested ideology, offer us something quite different from “the beauty of a corpse.”
Such a contest can be detected even in a writer as thoroughly imbued with the ideology of the great tradition as Geoffrey Chaucer.44 When Chaucer turns to the discourse of fairyland to explore gender relations in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, it is not merely because fairies, as the Countess d’Aulnoy or Angela Carter might have said, are good to think with. It is because issues of female sovereignty are deeply rooted in this aspect of the little tradition: as Partonopeu de Blois says of his fairy mistress, “Cele est mes cuers, cele est ma vie; / Cele a de moi la segnorie” (or, as the English translation in Oxford, MS Rawlinson Poet. 14, puts it, “And as she lyste she may gyde me, / She hathe of me þe soueraynete”).45 For all that his clerical contemporaries would doubtless have found Chaucer’s views on fairies unexceptionable, and despite the fact that he prefaces his Loathly Lady’s actual transformation with a sermon steeped in the discourse of learned culture, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale derives much of its real power from this traditional discourse and its long-standing resistance to the crooked-rib propaganda of the great tradition. Beneath its androcentric quest for what women really want, then, lies a much older ideological level where masculine violation of natural harmony is subject to the discipline and correction of a magical universe—a pattern that may be sensed in Walter Map’s tale of Eadric the Wild, in the romance of Thomas of Erceldoune, and in the strange proto-grail romance L’Élucidation, where a rapist’s abuse of fairy hospitality is what brings about the scourge of the Wasteland:
Des puceles une esforcha,
Sor son pois le despucela,
………………‥
Li roiaumes si agasti
K’ains puis n’i ot arbre fuelli;
Li pre et les flor[s] essecierent
Et les aiges apeticierent. (lines 69–70, 95–98)
[He forced one of the maidens and took her virginity against her will…. The realm was so wasted that its trees never again flourished, meadow and flowers withered, and waters dwindled.]46
Whether or not we choose to read Chaucer’s Loathly Lady as the metaphorical equivalent of this Wasteland (and the hideous transformation of the violated fairy queen in Thomas of Erceldoune might offer support for such a reading), the presence of two conflicting levels of signification in the tale seems undeniable.47 As Alice of Bath implies, the expiation that Chaucer’s knight must suffer for his rape is diametrically opposed to the ideological discipline of the lubricious “lymytours and othere hooly freres” who lurk “in every busshe or under every tree”—though by putting his fairy romance in the mouth of a provincial vetula worthy of William of Auvergne, Chaucer the poet might appear to be disclaiming responsibility for the implications of this aspect of his own creation.
In such a context it is important to recognize that Alice’s amusing account of the friars’ banishment of elves from the English countryside at the beginning of The Wife of Bath’s Tale reflects a very real situation:
In th’olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
All was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
This was the olde opinion, as I rede;
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.
But now kan no man se none elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of lymytours and othere hooly freres,
That serchen every lond and every streem,
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes,
This maketh that ther been no fayeryes. (lines 863–78)48
Chaucer illustrates the typical mendicant understanding of fairy encounters when he has a summoner “under a forest syde” chance upon “a gay yeman” wearing “a courtepy of grene” in The Friar’s Tale (lines 1380–82); we might expect this shape-shifting yeoman (lines 1462–72) to be a fairy, but as the friar explains, he is really a fiend who dwells in hell (lines 1447–48).49 An anecdote in a mid-thirteenth-century Dominican exemplum collection has sometimes been cited to illustrate the mendicant war on fairy belief:50 two friars, sent to preach in the Scottish Isles, find fairies (“spiritus incubi”) abusing the young women there, but after being instructed in the faith, the women find themselves able to resist these demons (“quo facto, venerunt demones comminantes mulieribus et eis invadere more solito attemptantes, licet non poterant prevalere”), which are last heard of howling through the ether (“auditus est ulultatus et eiulatus magnus in aere”). Medieval people would generally have understood the term ‘incubi demons’ to refer to fairies, at least down to the fifteenth century (as we shall see in the next chapter), but in fact wherever we encounter accounts of friars triumphing over 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
