challenge to orthodox dogma, but by the fifteenth century the English church’s attitude to them was clearly hardening, and there is evidence that in pastoral, if not in scholastic, circles such beliefs may have regularly been felt to be heretical. A remarkable passage in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine, for instance, speaks of witches and elves in the same breath as Lollards; the Virgin Mary is here instructing the hermit who is to convert the saint:
So sayd my Sone to His aposteles twelve,
“Whan ye stand,” He seyd, “befor the dome
Of many tyrauntys, and ye alone youreselve,
Thow thei yow calle Lollard, whych, or elve,
Beth not dysmayd—I schall gyve yow answere.” (3:324–28)42
This is evidently based on an apocalyptic passage that appears in three of the four gospels,43 but none of them alludes to anything that remotely suggests fairies. Peter Idley in the mid-fifteenth century insisted that even white magic was heretical:
And thoughe by thi Pater noster þou coniure
And by hooly wordis doo mervelous werkis,
It is playn Eresye—I referre me to clerkis.44
In a similar vein, the articles of excommunication recorded in the register of Godstow Abbey at about the same time condemn “Alle þat knoweth heresy, wicchecrafte, enchauntement, Nigromancy, coniurisones, or any fals beleve aȝens the feyth of holichurch, but ȝif þei distroye hit be þer power.”45 Interestingly, not everyone seems to have been quite so obdurate, for the article also includes, “And al þat ben ordened to enquere þer-on, ȝif þei leue the sute þer-of”; some, apparently, were reluctant to inquire too closely into the unorthodox beliefs of their flock. No matter where on the spectrum their opinions lay, however, all medieval clerics seem to have been prepared to accept that fairy belief was a potentially serious issue.
All this raises questions that are not often asked in such a context. Can we learn anything significant about the actual nature of such beliefs, and is it possible to discover how seriously they were taken by those who held them? After all, it might plausibly be claimed that we are witnessing nothing more than the paranoid projections of a dominant class seeking to impose its own values on an indifferent and inarticulate subject class. Even if some laypeople might actually have been prepared to rationalize and defend their traditional beliefs, where might we look for evidence of this recalcitrance? Latin sources, whether openly hostile or rather more accommodating, have little interest in contextualizing such radically unorthodox views, and even vernacular materials can be frustratingly circumspect.
However rarely, we may still sometimes glimpse signs of actual resistance to the ecclesiastical proscription of vernacular belief. In the mid-fourteenth century John Bromyard reported that attempts to prohibit rituals for recovering stolen property (a standard activity for cunning men and women) might be met with defiance: “they say it is not the work of the devil but of the fair folk [that is, the fairies], for we haven’t learnt it from the devil, nor do we believe in him, but from the fair folk” [sed dicunt non per diabolum, sed pulchrum populum, nec a diabolo didicimus nec ei credimus sed pulchro populo].46 Occasionally, indeed, acts of civil disobedience might invoke fairy protection, apparently reflecting an instinctive association of fairies with other targets of oppressive regulation. In January 1450 Thomas Cheyne led a rebellion in Kent (a harbinger of the much more serious uprising of Jack Cade later in the same year), and among the pseudonyms adopted by its leaders were those of the King of Fairyland and the Queen of Fairyland (Regem de ffeyre and Reginam de ffeyre).47 Popular sentiment was clearly in favor of the rebels, but the “oon calling hym self Queen of the feyre” seems to have been particularly charismatic—a contemporary London chronicler remarking that he “did noon oppression nor hurt to any persone.”48 Though the full significance of this impersonation is now impossible to recover, evidently the discourse of fairyland offered the rebels a shared language that they felt they could use against their oppressors: a slightly later indictment accuses a group of poachers of disguising themselves with long beards and blackened faces and proclaiming themselves “the servants of the Queen of Fairyland, intending that they should identify [themselves] by the name” [nuncupantes se esse servientes Regine del Faire ea intencione ut ipsi a nomine cognoscerent].49 A similar rising, “popular in origin … and plebeian in character,”50 occurred in the north of England in 1489; William Paston III recounts the rebels’ call to arms and then adds sarcastically, “And thys is in the name of Mayster Hobbe Hyrste, Robyn God-felaws brodyr he is, as I trow.”51 Robin Goodfellow is of course a wellknown fairy name, but Hob Hurst is much more obscure, surviving only in a Derbyshire place-name for a prehistoric tumulus, Hob Hurst’s House.52 Like Cheyne’s Queen of Fairyland, Robin Goodfellow’s brother here looks very much like an early instance of the common people turning to fairy impersonation in defense of their traditional rights. Hobbe was to have many descendants, however, his line reaching down to the nineteenth century.53
We may infer that the crude characterization of fairies as simply devils, or devilish illusions, did not go unchallenged, for pastoral (as opposed to scholastic) theology seems early to have evolved a rather more palatable variation (more palatable, that is, to those who were apparently ready to regard fairies as potentially benevolent creatures). By this account, fairies, while still devils, were only minor devils, less culpable than those who had been thrown into the pit of hell with Satan. Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia (ca. 1215) suggests that fairies who roam the earth can hardly be equated with the fallen angels who were thrust down to the dungeons of nether darkness to remain there till Doomsday (2 Pet. 2:4): “it must be, then, that those who sided with the devil but whose pride was less grievous were reserved to provide phantoms of this nature to punish humankind.”54 In Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, when the novice observes that some devils are better than others [non omnes daemones aequaliter mali sunt], his master replies that “certain ones, it is said, while others were raising themselves up against God with Lucifer, merely consented, and these indeed fell with the others, but are less evil and harm men less than the others” [quidam, ut dicitur, aliis cum Lucifero contra Deum se extollentibus simpliciter consenserunt, et hi quidem cum ceteris ruerunt, sed ceteris minus mali sunt, hominesque minus laedunt].55 He then goes on to illustrate this point with the example of a handsome young servant who helped his knightly master escape from his enemies and healed his mistress from a serious disease and then revealed himself to have been a demon (and even after this offered to pay for a bell in the local church!); it seems likely that Caesarius is here recalling some popular tale about a figure such as Gyfre, the fairy servant in the Middle English version of Marie de France’s Lanval, who accompanies the hero on his adventures and gives him money and martial assistance.56
The idea that there were two classes of devil (the hardcore supporters of Lucifer and some less-committed fellow travelers) is an old one, at least as old as Origen in the third century,57 and it was employed to solve a number of theological difficulties. We will probably never know at what point these ‘neutral’ or ‘craven’ angels came to be associated with the fairies of vernacular belief,58 but clearly the idea was generally current from at least the beginning of the thirteenth century. In England we find it in the late fourteenth-century Vernon Manuscript’s Life of Adam and Eve: “And after that while [the Fall of Lucifer] heo beon pynet, summe more and summe lasse … heo fullen out as thikke as the drift of the snough; summe astunte in the eyr and summe in the eorthe. Yf eny mon is elve-inome other elf-iblowe, he hit hath of the angelus that fellen out of hevene” [and after that time they were tortured, some more, some less…. They fell down as thick as snow drifts. Some stopped in the air, some on the ground. If any man is elf-taken or elf-blown (that is, falls sick) he receives it from the angels that fell from heaven].59 A hundred years earlier The South English Legendary had provided an
