stode vpe in þat stede,
and he by helde þat lady gaye;
Hir hare it hange all ouer hir hede,
Hir eghe semede owte, þat are were graye,
and alle þe riche clothynge was a waye. (lines 129–33)
At this point the Lansdowne manuscript adds a passage that balances the earlier one in which Thomas had mistaken her for the Virgin:
Sche woxe so grym and so stowte
The dewyll he wende she had be,
In the Name of the trynite,
he coniuryde here anon ryght
That she shulde not come hym nere,
But wende away of his sight.
She said, “thomas, this is no nede,
ffor fende of hell am I none.” (lines 143–50)
In a later passage, when Thomas asks her about her transformation, she explains that it had been a ruse to deceive her jealous husband and that otherwise, “Me had been as good to goo / To the brynnyng fyre of hell” (lines 247–48). If all this were not enough, four of the manuscripts (the fifth, B.L., MS Sloane 2578, is defective at this point) preserve a remarkable passage (lines 201–20) in which the path to fairyland is contrasted with four other paths: those leading to heaven, to the earthly paradise, to purgatory, and to hell. In the traditional ballad derived from this medieval romance these five paths have been reduced to three:
O see not ye yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
And see not ye that braid braid road,
That lies across yon lillie leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.72
These passages provide clear evidence that some people felt that fairyland lay beyond the boundaries of a conventional Christian cosmology, and a curious aside in the popular vade mecum Sidrak and Bokkus seems to imply that such an attitude was widespread; in response to the question “Wheþer in thatt oþer world may be Any hous, toun, or citee?” Sidrak describes the three paths to be taken by the soul after death (to heaven, hell, and purgatory) and then adds (in the English version) the otherwise otiose remark, “Wonyng stedes be there no moo / That man or woman shall goo to.”73 (We shall return in Chapter 5 to the difficult question of fairyland as an abode of departed souls.)
Clearly fairy beliefs occupied an anomalous status in the official culture of the later Middle Ages. While scholastic theology may have regarded them as demonic, at the pastoral level they were far too deeply entrenched in the vernacular consciousness to be easily extirpated, and an uneasy truce was maintained. Is it, then, possible to delve further into this vernacular consciousness, to discover any direct evidence for the nature and extent of these beliefs?
Jacques Le Goff has written of “the near impossibility of transporting to the past the methods of observation, investigation, and enumeration, applied by sociologists to contemporary societies,”74 and while there is no reason to suppose that popular belief was any more homogeneous in the Middle Ages than it is now (“ther ben many folk that beleeven because it happeneth so often tyme to fallen after here fantasyes,” writes Sir John Mandeville, “and also there ben men ynowe that han no beleve in hem”),75 its nuances are far more difficult to penetrate. Certainly the nearest thing to a statistical sample we possess—the thirty-four people from Domrémy and the surrounding area who were questioned about a fairy tree (“arbor Fatalium, gallice des fees”) in 1452 as part of the process to nullify Joan of Arc’s condemnation twenty years earlier—yields very modest results, at least statistically.76 In 1431 Joan herself had informed her inquisitors that she had never seen fairies at the tree “as far as she knew” [dixit quod nunquam vidit predictas Fatales apud arborem, quod ipsa sciat]—though she did concede that one of her godmothers claimed to have seen them—and she stoutly denied that the gatherings at the fairy tree that she had attended as a young girl were anything other than innocent springtime picnics.77 Of the thirty-four later witnesses questioned about the arbre des dames, ten knew, or affected to know, nothing at all about it (though hardly any of these were from the immediate area of Domrémy) and only nine admitted to having heard that in the old days fairies were to be seen there; no one admitted to believing in fairies personally, though a forty-four-year-old laborer named Michel Buin did say that he did not know where they had gone, because they no longer visited the tree. The Domrémy villagers were under no particular threat from the commission (indeed the commissioners were eager for reassurance that Joan’s youthful activities were entirely innocent), yet even so their responses were warily noncommittal. In view of the fact that Bernard Gui’s famous inquisitors’ manual requires further investigation of anyone who believes in “fairy women, whom they call the good things” [de fatis mulieribus quas vocant bonas res],78 perhaps we can hardly blame them.
In default of statistics we must resort to anecdotal evidence to see what inferences can be drawn about the extent of fairy beliefs in the Middle Ages. One of the most fascinating test cases is provided by Jean d’Arras’s romance Mélusine (ca. 1393), which traces the origins of the great crusading family of the Lusignans back to its founder’s ill-fated marriage to a fairy bride. Mélusine was one of the most popular stories in fifteenth-century Europe: alongside Jean d’Arras’s prose version, there is another in verse (ca. 1401) by a man called Coudrette, and altogether thirty manuscripts survive of these two renderings. In one or other form it was translated into almost every major European language (with English translations of both texts). Coudrette may well have been a cleric, and he seems to have been somewhat wary about raising the question of his story’s factual status (indeed one might detect a certain defensiveness in his insistence that he was writing only at the behest of Guillaume Larchevêque, Lord of Parthenay, and in the elaborate prayers for the soul of his patron with which he concludes). Jean d’Arras, in contrast, was fully prepared to tackle the problems of factual corroboration head on, and with a patron as powerful as Jean de France, Duc de Berri, he need hardly have worried about any consequences. He begins by telling us that “in many partes of the sayd lande of Poytow haue ben shewed vnto many oon right famylerly many manyeres of thinges the whiche somme called Gobelyns [Fr. luitons] the other ffayrees, and the other “bonnes dames” or good ladyes,”79 and then he invokes the authority of Gervase of Tilbury, “a man worshipfull & of credence,” for the belief that their activities “be permytted & doon for som mysdedes that were doon ayenst the playsure of god wherfore he punysshed them so secretly & so wounderly wherof none hath parfytte knowlege but alonely he and they may be therefore called the secrets of god, abysmes without ryuage and without bottom.”80 Two French vernacular translations of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia survive from the Middle Ages,81 and though there is no record of the Duc de Berri’s owning a copy, his brother Charles V certainly did.82 D’Arras concludes his
