The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  The early modern period appears therefore to have been a heyday, and perhaps the heyday, of the association, and it is now worth enquiring what was actually going on in it; especially in view of the concentration instigated by Carlo Ginzburg on ‘shamanistic’ practices. As absolutely none of the people accused of witchcraft or known as service magicians in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Britain carried out a rite technique like that of Siberian or Sámi shamans, the term used by Ginzburg must be taken in the broadest sense of the root word ‘shaman’: of somebody communicating with non-human beings, usually spirits, while in an altered state of consciousness. Excitingly, there are records from seventeenth-century Scotland that refer to such states in the terms still most commonly used for them. The presbytery of Alford, in the north-east, questioned a beggar reputed to be ‘a seducer under pretence of lying in a trance or having converse with familiar spirits’.58 A higher ecclesiastical body, the synod of nearby Aberdeen, received complaints ‘that some under pretence of trances or of spirits commonly called the fairies, hath spoken reproachfully on some persons’ (presumably by accusing them of offences).59 These sound very much like service magicians or seers hired to divine answers to clients’ questions, and it would be convenient had these sources made clear that to converse with spirits or fairies meant employing the method of trance, rather than making the two activities sound like alternative methods of divination; but they do not. Likewise, from the late seventeenth-century Hebridean Isle of Tiree came an account of a woman who lay as if dead for a whole night while her spirit (as she reported) visited the Christian heaven.60 This sounds like a classic ecstatic trance, of the shamanic kind, but she was not a shaman, or even a service magician, but a religious mystic. When the carefully collected accounts of Highland seers from the end of the century are studied, none of them shows the practitioners concerned as entering an ecstatic trance, or any kind of trance that an observer could notice. Instead their flashes of perception come spontaneously and unbidden.61 When an interviewer specifically asked the notorious seeress (and witch-finder) Janet Douglas, in 1678, if she underwent any alteration when the ‘sight’ came on her, she insisted that she was ‘in the same temper’ as before, ‘without any trouble, disorder or consternation of mind’, and remained so when the vision passed.62

  It therefore matters greatly in this context that absolutely none of the people who confessed to dealing with fairies in Scottish trials for witchcraft or English trials for witchcraft or magic spoke of doing so while in trance, or of engaging in spirit-flight. On the contrary, they seem very much in their own bodies, and the contact is often made by the fairies appearing to them while they are in bed, in a house or a garden, or walking out of doors, and (once awake) fully in possession of their faculties. Often also it happens at a special place out of doors such as a holy well or (mostly) a hollow hill. A few claimed to have been transported from their beds to fairy land, but they are taken in body not spirit and they walk back, or are left exhausted on the ground near home. This does not mean of course that they were not in some kind of altered mental state when they thought themselves to be having such experiences, but this seems impossible to prove, and there is a range of other explanations. Some may have been making up their stories to promote their reputations as magicians, while others, in Scottish witch trials, may have been submitted to mental or physical torture to extract satisfactory confessions; and both groups would have used local folklore to fill out what they said. If the possibility of altered consciousness is admitted (and it surely must be), then there are many other kinds of that which might have operated instead of shamanistic trances. Julian Goodare has made an excellent consideration of these, with respect to Scottish witch trials in general, and included sleep-walking, sleep paralysis, hallucination and fantasy.63 In addition, to be perfectly just, one might admit the final possibility that some of the people concerned actually met non-human beings.

  What emerges as certain from all this is that all across Britain, from Orkney to Cornwall, and throughout the early modern period, service magicians were often believed to gain their powers and knowledge from fairies, and claimed to do so. They reported a variety of means by which they did this, which probably reflected different personal dispositions and experiences, and of which ‘shamanistic’ trance was only one. This in itself works against the idea of a ‘cult’ among them that practised such methods, although small local groups which did, on the lines suggested by Emma Wilby, remain possible, if completely unproven. Julian Goodare was probably closer to the early modern reality when, having adopted Ginzburg’s term ‘cult’ for the ‘seely wights’, he considered Janet Boyman’s one of ‘craft’, as used by her for her kind, as an alternative, and then went on to look at that of ‘tradition’. He suggested that rather than being an organized group with a membership structure, the followers of his ‘wights’ had just a shared occupational identity: and that is exactly what service magicians in general did have, and they were certainly a ‘craft’ and a ‘tradition’.

  Nor do the resemblances between the Scottish fairies and the Continental followers of the ‘Lady’ seem close enough to establish a common descent rather than representing converging traditions of separate origin. Scottish fairies were certainly believed to ride together like the retinue of the ‘Lady’, and Bessie Dunlop, Janet Trall and Andrew Man claimed to have seen them do it; but Scottish service magicians did not claim to ride with them as Continental equivalents had allegedly done with Diana or Herodias. Scottish fairies had a dominant female figure, but she was usually paired with a king. A common means of locomotion for the Scottish beings seems to have been in the wind, which the confessions listed earlier repeatedly recorded as being used both to blight people and to carry them off; and this tradition spilled over the English border.64 Unlike the ‘Lady’, moreover, the British fairies operated both by day and by night. It may be suggested, therefore, that Carlo Ginzburg’s ideas have had a distorting effect on the study of perceived relationships between fairies and magicians in Britain, both by producing an overemphasis on ‘shamanistic’ states of consciousness in the making of the relationships and by encouraging historians to think in terms of ‘cults’. On the other hand, it can also be proposed that they have had an extremely beneficial effect in drawing renewed attention to the importance of those relationships, and that both Emma Wilby and Julian Goodare have compounded it with valuable work; and all three deserve acknowledgement for that.

  Where do Fairies Come From?

  There is, however, one further way in which Carlo Ginzburg’s ideas may be examined, and although both Wilby and Goodare understandably declined to adopt it, it is amenable to the methodology of the present book: to look at the apparent continuities between the ancient and early modern worlds, with respect to British fairy belief, and see how strong they are. It may be presumed that the prehistoric British would have believed in spirits, as defined at the opening of this book, because traditional cultures always do. Some would have been intrinsically associated with natural environments such as forests and bodies of water, and probably others with domestic spaces such as the hearth, to judge from the abundant evidence for this from the literate ancient world and indigenous peoples on other continents. It is probably safe to refer to the early modern British fairies as spirits, because they very frequently had an ability to appear and vanish, and transcend normal physical limitations. Contemporaries generally regarded them as such. On the other hand, in some accounts they seem to be physical beings who achieve by the use of magic feats impossible to humans.65 To refer to them as ‘nature spirits’ is more questionable, because they do not represent natural phenomena such as trees or water, and do not seem to live more ‘naturally’ than most pre-modern humans. They have instead a parallel, regal and aristocratic society, with industries and furnishings, which is based underground rather than on the surface of the earth.66 It can be argued that the (widely used) recent identification of fairies with the natural world reflects a modern literary image
of them in which they function as representatives of an older land being reshaped by urbanization and industrialization. If so, then such a perception may actually distort an understanding of medieval and pre-industrial attitudes. So, to restate the question, how far back can they be traced?67

  It is generally accepted that the term ‘fairy’ arrived in Britain from France only in the later Middle Ages; before then the beings to whom it was to be applied were known wherever English and Scots were spoken as ‘elves’. They retained this name thereafter, of course, as an alternative to fairies. The Anglo-Saxons certainly believed in elves, and certainly feared them for maliciously afflicting humans and their animals with physical ailments. A few texts attempted to demonize them, but there are hints in others that they were models of seductive female beauty. There is no unequivocal evidence that they were regarded as sources of knowledge for magicians – the earliest certain sign of that is from the fifteenth century – but a possible link with diviners or prophets. No clear sense of a coherent tradition emerges from the texts, which may be a reflection of reality or just a consequence of the patchy survival of evidence.

  The likelihood that no coherent view of elves was in fact held in Anglo-Saxon England is, however, increased by reference to authors from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries who describe encounters between humans and non-human beings which could not easily be fitted into conventional Christian concepts of angels and demons: above all Gerald of Wales, Ralph of Coggeshall, Gervase of Tilbury, Walter Map and William of Newburgh. These include several motifs (scattered across various anecdotes) that were to be enduring components of fairy lore. The first is a belief in a parallel world with human-like inhabitants who have their own ruler and society and are in some ways superior to people. The second is the ability of such beings to enter our own world, and sometimes to steal human children away from it, while humans could sometimes enter their realm. The third is that portals between this otherworld and our own exist in particular places such as lakes, woods, natural hills or prehistoric tumuli. The fourth is a belief in beautiful supernatural women, who dance in secluded areas at night, and who can be wooed or abducted by mortal men, but who almost always return to their own realm. The fifth is that such non-human beings are often associated with the colour green. The sixth is that they can give blessings to people who entertain them or otherwise treat them graciously, but also torment them, notably by leading them astray at night. Associated with this is the seventh, a tradition of human-like creatures who live in or come into homes, where they make themselves useful to the human occupants or play mischievous tricks on them.

  What is missing in these accounts is any sense of a coherent belief system to contain and explain the stories being repeated by the authors. There is nothing about any of them that suggests they were strictly the preserve of the social elite. The medieval intellectuals who collected them and grouped them together were struggling to create a category for them, specifically because none seemed to exist already either in Christian cosmology or established folk belief. A similar lack of definition exists in a parallel stream of literature from the same period between 1100 and 1250, chivalric romances featuring encounters between human characters and beings who have sumptuous lifestyles, mirroring those of the contemporary human social elite, and wield apparently superhuman powers. In particular, these beings function as lovers, advisers and protectors for the knights and ladies with whom they make relationships, and sometimes as predators upon, or seducers (and seductresses) of, them. By the twelfth century they were represented in literary works composed across north-western Europe from France to Ireland.68 Whereas the scholarly texts discussed above were dealing with encounters that were believed to have taken place, the romances were uninhibited works of fiction. Those written in French supplied the genesis of the word ‘fairy’ itself, associated with the term fai, fae or fay, applied to female representatives of the beings described above. Little attempt was made to define those beings within a theological framework, or indeed to explain who they were at all or to explore their motivation: they were usually just assumed to be mysterious. At times it was explicitly stated that they were human beings who had learned powerful magic, while at others they appeared essentially to be superhuman; but in most cases they were not assigned to either category, and the problem was not considered in the tale.

  None the less, they are important to this investigation. For one thing, they represent, as said, the linguistic root of the whole concept of the fairy. The word fai or fay itself originally functioned more often as a verb than a noun, to denote the making of something magical and strange, in both Old French and the English texts into which the French themes were transposed. Its derivation or parallel development ‘faierie’ was evolved to refer to uncanny events and phenomena, rather than creatures, and only began to refer to a type of being in English in the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, it enabled the eventual creation of such a type. Furthermore, among the kinds of ‘fay’ found in the romances of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries are some who would later populate the category concerned: enchantresses who capture humans who wander into their hidden realms or abduct them to those, and Auberon, a king of a forest realm who is possessed of great magical powers. Such entities also feature in the priest Layamon’s reworking of the legendary history of Britain. He recounts how King Arthur was brought up by them, and endowed with magical qualities, and returned to their domain of Avalon, ruled by a queen, at the end of his reign. Layamon’s use of English for his history enabled him to cross the romance with the vernacular genres, by giving those beings the native name of elves.

  By the middle of the thirteenth century, therefore, the materials for a fairy tradition were present, in a popular tradition of elves, as blighting and perhaps as healing and seductive beings; an elite literary one of beautiful, wealthy and powerful fays; and a third category of diverse human-like creatures who overlapped with the first two types but did not really fit into either, and seemed to span elite and popular culture. What did not yet exist was an actual tradition that combined and systematized most, at least, of these forms. Throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, indeed, references continued to supernatural beings, inherent in the British landscape, which had vague, functional identities and no known relationship to each other. The ‘puck’ was known from Anglo-Saxon times as a name for a spirit who led nocturnal wayfarers into pitfalls, while the bug (a term with a variety of related words) featured from the later Middle Ages onwards as another entity of the night, distinguished by striking terror into people. In the fourteenth century the term ‘goblin’ arrived, probably from French, for a similarly unpleasant and hazily characterized nocturnal sprite, whose activities overlapped with both puck and bug. None the less, by the end of the thirteenth century moves were being made to put a systematic structure of belief around at least some such figures.

  Two closely related texts, the South English Legendary and the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, defined elves as spirits in the shape of beautiful women who danced and played in secluded places, and with whom humans could have sex, but at their peril. By the early fourteenth century, a preacher’s manual, Fasciculus Morum, could condemn as a devilish illusion a widespread belief in elves who took the form of beautiful women dancing at night with their queen or goddess, whom the author equated with the Roman Diana: the canon Episcopi tradition was starting to influence English views of nocturnal beings. The belief concerned, according to the manual, included the detail that these elves could carry off humans to their own land, where heroes of the past dwelt.

  Meanwhile, in the romances, classical influences were providing another framework for systematizing the fays. In a French one composed around 1300 and later translated into English as Arthur of Little Britain, the ancient goddess Proserpine was made ‘Queen of the Fayrye’ and featured as the helper and would-be lover of the hero. This was the classic role of a fay, underlined by the fact that she tended to appear at night and
on the edge of a forest. The Middle English Sir Orfeo, of about the same date, undertook a similar makeover in its retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this version Orfeo has to retrieve his wife, not from a pagan underworld as before but from the land of a nameless ‘King of Fayré’ (or ‘Fare’ or ‘Fairy’), who takes the role of the Roman god Pluto as ruler of a realm of the human dead, though in this case of those who have met untimely ends. Even so, it is a fair, green land, where the king reigns over splendid non-human beings in state with his queen and sometimes invades the human world with a retinue to hunt beasts or abduct people. It is a well-rounded picture of a fairyland. These steps made possible the leap taken by the end of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer could speak, famously, of how in the days of King Arthur ‘the elf-queen, with her jolly company, danced full oft in many a green mead’. He was taking a composite image of a fay, from the high medieval romances (and especially those of Arthur and his knights) and giving it the definite article that established her as an archetype that was becoming a personality in her own right. Thus concepts are still fluid, but a set of associations is crystallizing around the words ‘fairy’ and ‘elf’ which is defining an increasingly familiar place and set of characters. This process is equally visible in a contemporary English romance by Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal, a reworking of a twelfth-century Old French tale. It is a classic plot of how a mysterious and beautiful fay gives her love and aid to a true knight, but the contrast between the two versions is striking: in the earlier, the nature of the heroine is left undefined, and she dresses in royal purple, while in the latter, she is explicitly the daughter of ‘the King of Faërie’, and dressed in the distinctive fairy colour of green. At its close, the later version indeed has her take the hero back ‘into the faërie’ with her.