For those who wished to regard fairies as minor devils, their ancient reputation for afflicting humans with illness and misfortune made a very good fit; not least because it persisted into the early modern period without any necessary assimilation to Christian theology. William Shakespeare’s ‘no fairy takes, nor witch has power to harm’, is only the most famous of a number of casual references to it in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.93 It also remained a live issue in everyday life, to which the persistence of charms against the ills which fairies were held to cause, and the mention of cunning folk who specialized in curing them, bear witness.94 Likewise, the apparently only recently imported belief that a human child could be stolen from its cradle and a changeling substituted is well attested in the English literature of the age.95 Autobiographical and legal records make clear that this had also become a genuine dread within English popular culture, although there is less evidence of one in Scotland or Ireland, even though it was to be very prevalent there in later periods.96
Thus far the fairy could be perceived as the object of a cultural consensus among literate English people, with mainstream authors demonizing the figure and magicians ignoring the exercise even as they ignored or discounted attempts to demonize the other beings they invoked. At this point, however, things begin to get more complex. Even people who were ready to class fairies as demonic often thought that they were somehow different from demons in general. The Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates described a witch as commanding ‘fiends and fayries’, while a comedy from the 1580s includes a conjuration of ‘Robin goodfellow, Hobgoblin, the devil and his dam’.97 In the 1610s a character in a comedy by John Fletcher asked the protection of Heaven against ‘Elves, Hobs and Fayries . . . fire-drakes and fiends, and such as the devil sends’.98 In each case it is not clear how far all the places or beings described are to be equated or distinguished, and indeed ten years after writing that passage, Fletcher penned another play which described ‘Faeries’ cautiously as ‘demi-devils’.99 Most curious in this respect is an Elizabethan play, Grim the Collier of Croydon, which features Robin Goodfellow as a minor demon, sent from Hell to torment humanity, who none the less only acts against sinners and villains, while aiding the virtuous in their work and ambitions. The hero hails him gratefully as ‘one of the honestest merry devils that ever I saw’.100
There was, moreover, a completely different tactic used in England during the same period for the condemnation of a belief in or an affection for fairies and related beings, and it was one which more or less ruled them out as features of witch trials: that they were non-existent, being the products of a deluded and foolish human imagination. It was given especial potency in that it featured mainly as a Protestant polemic against Roman Catholicism, as fostering fairy lore as part of its general encouragement of ignorance and superstition. In 1575 the annotator of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar called any literal belief in fairies a ‘rank opinion’ inculcated by ‘bald Friars and knavish shavelings’ to delude the common people.101 It was developed by a pamphleteer in 1625 with the assertion that householders were induced to leave out food and drink overnight for the fairy folk so that wandering friars could secretly consume it; and it recurred in other anti-Catholic polemics of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.102 Other Elizabethan and early Stuart authors declared, more generally, that belief in such beings should not persist in a land enlightened by the Gospel.103
Credulity was also undermined by authors of comedies that, while not disowning the fairy tradition in general, hinged plots on impersonations of fairies and similar beings, such as bugs and goblins, by human beings, or on pretended conjurations of them. Sometimes this action is undertaken by villains, and sometimes by heroes and heroines, but the aim is always to persuade gullible victims to part with their wealth or act against their natural inclinations. Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Jonson’s The Alchemist are the most famous of a series of these works.104 As scholars of them have long recognized, they were accompanied by well-publicized instances of real confidence trickery in which criminals attempted to part victims from possessions or sums of money on the pretence of introducing them to the fairy queen, and sometimes the king as well, who would allegedly grant them riches or other favours. There are three such cases listed in pamphlets and legal records between 1595 and 1614 alone.105 They must have further encouraged scepticism.
In addition, moreover, even the cultural elite among the post-Reformation English were capable of discussing fairies in positive and even admiring ways. To do so they drew on the medieval literary tradition of royal and aristocratic fays, who acted as protectors and advisors to heroic knights and lovers to noblewomen. This was kept very much alive by the enduring popularity of medieval romances in the post-Reformation period: indeed, the impact of these may have been enhanced by their publication in printed versions. Beyond doubt the most influential of these was Lord Berners’ translation of Huon de Bordeaux, which introduced many English people to the magician king Auberon, Anglicized as Oberon.106 By 1593 or 1594 this story had been made into a play, and in 1594 Oberon ‘King of Fayries’ became a gentle, kind and wise commentator upon the action in a new dramatic work by Robert Greene.107 Almost immediately, Shakespeare took him to much more enduring glory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and thereafter he appeared in the work of Ben Jonson and the poet Robert Herrick, as well as that of lesser authors, keeping the same admirable character.108 The Elizabethans produced at least one brand new romance in the medieval tradition, Christopher Middleton’s Chinon of England, where the fairy king and his followers act as hosts, guides and helpers to the chivalric hero.109 More often they transplanted the spirit of the romances into new forms of literature, most famously in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Shakespeare redeployed the medieval tradition of combining the fays of romance with classical deities, to produce his king and queen, Oberon and Titania. As many have noted, he also made his fairies explicitly noble in nature, having Oberon clearly distinguish them from ‘damned spirits’ and they intervene to aid mortals despite the misbehaviour of the latter. The stealing of a human child is turned into an act of compassion for its dead mother, and, famously, Robin Goodfellow, crossed with the puck, is turned into a courtier of Oberon, whose tricks amount to no more than harmless mischief, used against those who do not treat him with respect.110
There was much about the fairies of the romance tradition that early modern elites could find attractive. They were, after all, natural monarchists and aristocrats, who led lives of opulence, leisure and frivolity unqualified by the ills that afflict mortals.111 As such, their appeal could indeed extend well beyond the elite: one did not need to be rich, beautiful and leisured to dream of a land in which all inhabitants were. Thus fairies could play a benevolent role in a popular chapbook like Tom Thumbe, which features a tiny human champion, brought up in poverty, who has the ‘Fayry Queene’ as his godmother and patroness.112 These traits could also make them obvious counterparts in allegory to real royalty, above all Elizabeth I. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, from the 1590s, is of course the best-known work in this genre, at once flattering Elizabeth by making her the implied sovereign of his fairy land and keeping her from centre stage in the story, to avoid any close comparisons. Thomas Dekker could allow himself to be more precise in the next reign, in a Protestant allegory in which Henry VIII is Oberon and Elizabeth his successor Titania, fighting and defeating the hosts of the (Catholic) Whore of Babylon.113 Elizabeth herself regularly encountered people costumed as fairy monarchs (usually queens) and their retinues during her progresses during the 1590s, provided by aristocratic hosts to praise and entertain her with songs and dances. At other times she was saluted in poetry with a fairy theme. Spenser’s work may have encouraged this device, but it had first been employed long before, in 1575, and probably simply reflected the high profile of fairies at the time and the dramatic potential of having a supposedly superhuman monarch flatter a genuine one.114
Ben
Jonson carried on the tradition into the next reign, composing a similar entertainment to greet James VI’s queen and eldest son when they visited Althorp House on arrival in England. He subsequently went further, to have Henry, Prince of Wales, himself personify Oberon in a court masque, with a retinue of Arthurian knights who have been ‘preserved in Faery land’.115 At all levels of English literature between 1550 and 1640, the inhabitants of that land could function as embodiments of hedonism, leading lives of joy unaffected by mortal cares, and summed up by their addiction to song and dance. As such they were a gift to poets writing English equivalents to classical pastoral lyrics, and in fact when translations of actual Greek and Roman texts were made in the period, nymphs and equivalent beings such as naiads and dryads were routinely rendered into English as ‘fairies’.116 They were also welcome to playwrights who wanted to introduce a musical interlude to relieve a plot.117 A subset of this tradition among authors of the period was to treat a belief in fairies and similar spirits, or indeed the actual existence of such beings, as a feature of a vanished and better time of honesty, simplicity and innocence: in this manner they had become by the year 1600 inhabitants of the recalled or imagined world of Merry England.118 John Selden summed up such a feeling with the comment that ‘there never was a merry world since the Fairies left dancing’.119
Yet another positive view of them expressed in England during the period developed from the older tradition of the household helper spirit, who, usually in return for a reward such as food and drink, would perform useful tasks overnight for the human inhabitants of a home. This particular refinement held that fairies rewarded people who performed their own household tasks neatly and punctually but punished the dirty and the lazy, often by pinching them while they slept so that they awoke bruised. This could certainly be a means of encouraging servants to better performance, but was a general incentive to cleanliness and diligence among those who carried out housework. It has a clear relationship with the Continental tradition, discussed in an earlier chapter, of troops of spirits who visited clean and orderly houses at night to bless them, but like the changeling motif it seems to appear late in Britain. It had done so by 1600, and rapidly became a fairly frequent literary motif.120 It also, however, came to represent a genuinely popular belief, remembered by John Aubrey in the Wiltshire countryside of his youth in the 1630s. It included the detail that fairies would leave coins overnight in the shoes of those who performed especially diligent housework, which sounds like an actual custom carried out by employers or members of families.121 One of the spirits who allegedly helped out with household jobs was Robin Goodfellow, who became from the 1590s a figure of morality, inspecting and commenting on the follies of the human race.122 By the 1620s he had developed into an ethical hero, son of King Oberon, who went about using his superhuman powers to aid people who had suffered wrong, and punish the wrongdoers.123
All these images illustrate how richly diverse were the ways in which the English regarded fairies in the late Tudor and Stuart periods, and especially between 1570 and 1640. Even in the case of individual authors the consequences could be complex and even contradictory: Shakespeare made them imposing and benevolent in one play, ridiculous in another, a vehicle for human fraud in another, and a danger comparable with witches in a fourth. None the less, this very diversity of attitude prevented the development of any consensus that they were either demons in themselves or delusions conjured by demons; and so of any clear role for them in witch trials of the Scottish sort. This was despite a common association of fairies with service magicians in both kingdoms. The contrasting attitudes of monarchs are significant: in Scotland King James condemned belief in them as submission to demonic tricks, while in England Queen Elizabeth was happy to be compared with their queen and to be saluted by players in their guise. Even more striking is the transformation wrought in James himself on inheriting Elizabeth’s crown: within a few years he could preside with apparent equanimity over an English court entertainment in which his son personified a fairy as a noble and admirable being. Nothing could sum up so dramatically the different impact made by the respective national post-Reformation cultures on what had been a relatively coherent late medieval construct of the fairy kingdom.
9
WITCHES AND CELTICITY
IT WAS NOTED in the first chapter of this book that, across the world, there have been instances of peoples who either have not believed in witches or have not feared them much. One of the obvious questions to be asked of the European witch-hunts, in this context, is therefore whether such peoples existed in early modern Europe, and, if they did, whether their presence exerted an influence on the incidence of witch trials there. In another chapter, the possible presence of earlier beliefs that mitigated a fear of witchcraft was considered as an explanation for the striking rarity of lethal witch-hunting across the Mediterranean basin in much of the early modern period. In that case, such beliefs were not accorded decisive importance as an explanatory factor; but the British Isles may represent a more promising hunting ground. When one of the leading recent historians of the early modern witch trials, Robin Briggs, published a map of Europe showing the local incidence of prosecution, it depicted a striking line bisecting the archipelago. To the south and east of it were England, Lowland Scotland and the fringe of the Scottish Highlands, areas that had seen a significant number of trials, and in places a very large number. To the north and west, the map was blank. There lay most of the Scottish Highlands, the Western Isles, the Isle of Man, Wales and Ireland: the regions commonly known as the main Celtic areas of the British Isles.1
The word ‘Celtic’ has already made an appearance in this book, in the last chapter where Carlo Ginzburg was quoted as suggesting that the ‘shamanistic’ cult of nocturnal goddesses, which he identified as underlying the early modern construct of the witches’ sabbath, had been a Celtic tradition. The term will, however, be used here in a different sense from that which he intended, and between the two usages lies a major shift in scholarly conventions. Until the 1990s, the Celts were generally regarded as having been an ancient family of peoples, united by a common language group, culture and art as well as ethnic ties, which had extended across the whole area between Ireland and Asia Minor, and Scotland and northern Italy and Spain, in the last century BC. They were thought to have spread outwards across it from an original homeland in Central Europe. This academic convention underpinned Ginzburg’s putative cult, because it suggested strongly that phenomena recorded in northern Italy and northern Scotland drew on the same ancient cultural roots. It was, however, a relatively recent one, which had developed fully only in the early twentieth century, and at the end of the century it collapsed almost completely among British experts in the Iron Age, joined by some colleagues in other nations. It was now recognized that the convention concerned depended upon using the term ‘Celtic’ simultaneously for a group of peoples, a group of languages and a style of art, and that the three of them did not in fact correspond exactly in ancient times.2
The result has been that most British scholars, and some elsewhere, have abandoned the term when referring to ancient history. Those who still try to find a place for it there have likewise rejected the idea that it refers to a racial or cultural group, and argue instead that it could be applied to a set of languages and values, embraced by different ethnic groups, which spread peacefully from the Atlantic seaboard across much of Europe during late prehistory. The debate over the matter is still continuing, but no party to it would have time for the idea of a single ethnic and cultural ancient Celtic province of the sort which had been envisioned when Carlo Ginzburg wrote. Instead, there is an apparently complete consensus that the term ‘Celtic’ can still be legitimately and precisely applied to a group of languages, and so by extension to the ethnic and cultural identities developed around those languages since the Middle Ages, by the Bretons, Cornish, Welsh and Manx, Irish and Scottish Gaels.3 The last four peoples all appear to have been characterized by a remarkabl
y low level of witch-hunting in the early modern period, and therefore the question is worth posing of whether there was anything inherent in their cultures that predisposed them to such a characteristic.
The Debate over Witch Trials in Celtic Societies
From the 1970s, historians began to notice the apparent scarcity of witch trials in areas with Celtic languages, but most preferred explanations for it that disregarded any common factors. In Ireland it was ascribed to reluctance on the part of the native population, who remained overwhelmingly Catholic, to denounce their own people for crimes that would be tried by a legal system dominated by British conquerors who professed a rival, Protestant, religion. It was suggested that these tensions between the two ethnic and religious groups replaced those within communities of the kind that generated accusations of witchcraft.4 Experts in early modern Wales were also inclined to adopt local, and functional, explanations, that Welsh communities were more cohesive and less fractured by economic tensions than those in England, and so neighbours less likely to accuse each other of being witches.5 It was also noted that they held to a customary law that emphasized compensation of victims rather than punishment of criminals, and so was less likely to lead to the execution of people for witchcraft.6 Historians of the Scottish witch trials tended to deny that there was anything to explain. Some pointed out that a couple of Lowland counties also produced few prosecutions, especially in relation to population, making the Highlands seem less exceptional.7 Another came up with a quite large figure for Highland witch trials, by including in it all those in the fringe of the Highland area where indeed many took place.8 They were especially found in the islands and peninsulas at the mouth of the Firth of Clyde and the coastal region of the Moray Firth and the inlets north of that. It was the Moray Firth coast that had produced Isobel Gowdie. These regions were relatively easy of access from the Lowlands and the north-eastern one contained a string of towns characterized by a hybrid Lowland-Gaelic culture.
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