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 hears of her from some shepherds: “une pucele vint ci, li plus bele riens du monde, si que nos quidames que ce fust une fee, et que tot cis bos en enclarci” [a maid was here, the most beautiful thing in the world, so that we thought she was a fairy, and she illuminated the whole wood].66 When the emperor of Rome encounters the foundling William of Palerne in the woods, his first thought is that he must be from fairyland because he is so handsome: “þemperour wend witerly, for wonder of þat child, / þat feiȝþely it were of feyrye for fairenes þat it welt”67 The beauty of fairies seems to have been proverbial: in the Anglo-Norman Lai du Cor, for instance, Caradoc’s wife is described as “resembling a fairy” because of her beauty;68 The Wars of Alexander describes Candace as being “so faire & so fresche as … an elfe oute of an-othire erde”;69 and even John Gower describes his lady as possessing “la bealté plus qe faie.”70 Interestingly, when Guillaume de Lorris describes Venus as being so elegant that she resembled a fairy, the Chaucerian translation alters this to
Bi hir atyr so bright and shen
Men myght perceyve …
She was not of religioun [that is, she was no nun!].71
Of course fairies are shape-shifters by nature (Yonec’s father in Marie de France’s lai turns himself into a hawk in order to visit his human lover),72 so it was a simple matter for the great tradition to represent their beauty as mere outward show. Not that we should necessarily assume that whenever a fairy in romance takes on a frightening new form (Melusine’s transformation into a dragon, for instance, or the dramatic moment when Thomas of Erceldoune’s fairy mistress “fadyde þus in þe face, / Þat schane by fore als þe sonne so bryght”)73 there has necessarily been interference from the great tradition.
