Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Page 15

  Although the influence of the Christian religion was not introduced to the nations of Europe with such radiance as to dispel at once those clouds of superstition which continued to obscure the understanding of hasty and ill-instructed converts, there can be no doubt that its immediate operation went to modify the erroneous and extravagant articles of credulity which lingered behind the old pagan faith, and which gave way before it, in proportion as its light became more pure and refined from the devices of men.

  The poet Chaucer, indeed, pays the Church of Rome, with its monks and preaching friars, the compliment of having, at an early period, expelled from the land all spirits of an inferior and less holy character. The verses are curious as well as picturesque, and may go some length to establish the existence of doubts concerning the general belief in fairies among the well-instructed in the time of Edward III.

  The fairies of whom the bard of Woodstock talks are, it will be observed, the ancient Celtic breed, and he seems to refer for the authorities of his tale to Bretagne, or Armorica, a genuine Celtic colony:—

  "In old time of the King Artour,

  Of which that Bretons speken great honour,

  All was this land fulfilled of faerie;

  The Elf queen, with her joly company,

  Danced full oft in many a grene mead.

  This was the old opinion, as I rede—

  I speake of many hundred years ago,

  But now can no man see no elves mo.

  For now the great charity and prayers

  Of limitours,[39] and other holy freres,

  That searchen every land and every stream,

  As thick as motes in the sunne-beam,

  Blessing halls, chambers, kitchenes, and boures,

  Cities and burghes, castles high and towers,

  Thropes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies,

  This maketh that there ben no fairies.

  For there as wont to walken was an elf,

  There walketh now the limitour himself,

  In under nichtes and in morwenings,

  And saith his mattins and his holy things,

  As he goeth in his limitation.

  Women may now go safely up and doun;

  In every bush, and under every tree,

  There is no other incubus than he,

  And he ne will don them no dishonour."[40]

  When we see the opinion which Chaucer has expressed of the regular clergy of his time, in some of his other tales, we are tempted to suspect some mixture of irony in the compliment which ascribes the exile of the fairies, with whih the land was "fulfilled" in King Arthur's time, to the warmth and zeal of the devotion of the limitary friars. Individual instances of scepticism there might exist among scholars, but a more modern poet, with a vein of humour not unworthy of Geoffrey himself, has with greater probability delayed the final banishment of the fairies from England, that is, from popular faith, till the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and has represented their expulsion as a consequence of the change of religion. Two or three verses of this lively satire may be very well worth the reader's notice, who must, at the same time, be informed that the author, Dr. Corbett, was nothing less than the Bishop of Oxford and Norwich in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The poem is named "A proper new Ballad, entitled the Fairies' Farewell, to be sung or whistled to the tune of the Meadow Brow by the learned; by the unlearned to the tune of Fortune:"—

  "Farewell, rewards and fairies,

  Good housewives now may say,

  For now foul sluts in dairies

  Do fare as well as they;

  And though they sweep their hearths no less

  Than maids were wont to do,

  Yet who of late for cleanliness

  Finds sixpence in her shoe?

  "Lament, lament, old abbies,

  The fairies' lost command;

  They did but change priests' babies,

  But some have changed your land;

  And all your children sprung from hence

  Are now grown Puritans,

  Who live as changelings ever since

  For love of your domains.

  "At morning and at evening both,

  You merry were and glad,

  So little care of sleep and sloth

  Those pretty ladies had.

  When Tom came home from labour.

  Or Cis to milking rose,

  Then merrily, merrily went their tabor,

  And merrily went their toes.

  "Witness those rings and roundelays

  Of theirs, which yet remain,

  Were footed, in Queen Mary's days,

  On many a grassy plain;

  But since of late Elizabeth,

  And later James came in,

  They never danced on any heath

  As when the time hath bin.

  "By which we note, the fairies

  Were of the old profession,

  Their songs were Ave Maries,

  Their dances were procession.

  But now, alas! they all are dead,

  Or gone beyond the seas;

  Or farther for religion fled,

  Or else they take their ease."

  The remaining part of the poem is dedicated to the praise and glory of old William Chourne of Staffordshire, who remained a true and stanch evidence in behalf of the departed elves, and kept, much it would seem to the amusement of the witty bishop, an inexhaustible record of their pranks and feats, whence the concluding verse—

  "To William all give audience,

  And pray ye for his noddle,

  For all the fairies' evidence

  Were lost if that were addle."[41]

  This William Chourne appears to have attended Dr. Corbett's party on the iter septentrionale, "two of which were, and two desired to be, doctors;" but whether William was guide, friend, or domestic seems uncertain. The travellers lose themselves in the mazes of Chorley Forest on their way to Bosworth, and their route becomes so confused that they return on their steps and labour—

  "As in a conjuror's circle—William found

  A mean for our deliverance,—'Turn your cloaks,'

  Quoth he, 'for Puck is busy in these oaks;

  If ever you at Bosworth would be found,

  Then turn your cloaks, for this is fairy ground.'

  But ere this witchcraft was performed, we meet

  A very man who had no cloven feet.

  Though William, still of little faith, has doubt,

  'Tis Robin, or some sprite that walks about.

  'Strike him,' quoth he, 'and it will turn to air—

  Cross yourselves thrice and strike it.'—'Strike that dare,'

  Thought I, 'for sure this massy forester,

  In strokes will prove the better conjuror.'

  But 'twas a gentle keeper, one that knew

  Humanity and manners, where they grew,

  And rode along so far, till he could say,

  'See, yonder Bosworth stands, and this your way.'"[42]

  In this passage the bishop plainly shows the fairies maintained their influence in William's imagination, since the courteous keeper was mistaken by their associate champion for Puck or Robin Goodfellow. The spells resorted to to get rid of his supposed delusions are alternatively that of turning the cloak—(recommended in visions of the second-sight or similar illusions as a means of obtaining a certainty concerning the being which is before imperfectly seen[43])—and that of exorcising the spirit with a cudgel; which last, Corbett prudently thinks, ought not to be resorted to unless under an absolute conviction that the exorcist is the stronger party. Chaucer, therefore, could not be serious in averring that the fairy superstitions were obsolete in his day, since they were found current three centuries afterwards.

  It is not the less certain that, as knowledge and religion became more widely and brightly displayed over any country, the superstitious fancies of the people sunk gradually in esteem and influence; and in the time of Queen Elizabeth the unceasing labour of many and
popular preachers, who declaimed against the "splendid miracles" of the Church of Rome, produced also its natural effect upon the other stock of superstitions. "Certainly," said Reginald Scot, talking of times before his own, "some one knave in a white sheet hath cozened and abused many thousands, specially when Robin Goodfellow kept such a coil in the country. In our childhood our mothers' maids have so terrified us with an ugly devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail at his breech; eyes like a basin, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear, a skin like a negro, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and are afraid when we hear one cry, Boh! and they have so frayd us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, Pans, faunes, sylvans, Kitt-with-the-candlestick, tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, conjurers, nymphs, changelings, incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the hellwain, the fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless, and such other bugbears, that we are afraid of our own shadows, insomuch that some never fear the devil but on a dark night; and then a polled sheep is a perilous beast, and many times is taken for our father's soul, specially in a churchyard, where a right hardy man heretofore durst not to have passed by night but his hair would stand upright. Well, thanks be to God, this wretched and cowardly infidelity, since the preaching of the Gospel, is in part forgotten, and doubtless the rest of these illusions will in a short time, by God's grace, be detected and vanish away."[44]

  It would require a better demonologist than I am to explain the various obsolete superstitions which Reginald Scot has introduced as articles of the old English faith, into the preceding passage. I might indeed say the Phuca is a Celtic superstition, from which the word Pook or Puckle was doubtless derived; and I might conjecture that the man-in-the-oak was the same with the Erl-König of the Germans; and that the hellwain were a kind of wandering spirits, the descendants of a champion named Hellequin, who are introduced into the romance of Richard sans Peur. But most antiquaries will be at fault concerning the spoorn, Kitt-with-the-candlestick, Boneless, and some others. The catalogue, however, serves to show what progress the English have made in two centuries, in forgetting the very names of objects which had been the sources of terror to their ancestors of the Elizabethan age.

  Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in England we may remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was the case with their North British sisterhood.[45] The common nursery story cannot be forgotten, how, shortly after the death of what is called a nice tidy housewife, the Elfin band was shocked to see that a person of different character, with whom the widower had filled his deserted arms, instead of the nicely arranged little loaf of the whitest bread, and a basin of sweet cream, duly placed for their refreshment by the deceased, had substituted a brown loaf and a cobb of herrings. Incensed at such a coarse regale, the elves dragged the peccant housewife out of bed, and pulled her down the wooden stairs by the heels, repeating, at the same time, in scorn of her churlish hospitality—

  "Brown bread and herring cobb!

  Thy fat sides shall have many a bob!"

  But beyond such playful malice they had no desire to extend their resentment.

  The constant attendant upon the English Fairy court was the celebrated Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, who to the elves acted in some measure as the jester or clown of the company—(a character then to be found in the establishment of every person of quality)—or to use a more modern comparison, resembled the Pierrot of the pantomime. His jests were of the most simple and at the same time the broadest comic character—to mislead a clown on his path homeward, to disguise himself like a stool, in order to induce an old gossip to commit the egregious mistake of sitting down on the floor when she expected to repose on a chair, were his special enjoyments. If he condescended to do some work for the sleeping family, in which he had some resemblance to the Scottish household spirit called a Brownie, the selfish Puck was far from practising this labour on the disinterested principle of the northern goblin, who, if raiment or food was left in his way and for his use, departed from the family in displeasure. Robin Goodfellow, on the contrary, must have both his food and his rest, as Milton informs us, amid his other notices of country superstitions, in the poem of L'Allegro. And it is to be noticed that he represents these tales of the fairies, told round the cottage hearth, as of a cheerful rather than a serious cast; which illustrates what I have said concerning the milder character of the southern superstitions, as compared with those of the same class in Scotland—the stories of which are for the most part of a frightful and not seldom of a disgusting quality.

  Poor Robin, however, between whom and King Oberon Shakespeare contrives to keep a degree of distinct subordination, which for a moment deceives us by its appearance of reality, notwithstanding his turn for wit and humour, had been obscured by oblivion even in the days of Queen Bess. We have already seen, in a passage quoted from Reginald Scot, that the belief was fallen into abeyance; that which follows from the same author affirms more positively that Robin's date was over:—

  "Know ye this, by the way, that heretofore Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin were as terrible, and also as credible, to the people as hags and witches be now; and in time to come a witch will be as much derided and condemned, and as clearly perceived, as the illusion and knavery of Robin Goodfellow, upon whom there have gone as many and as credible tales as witchcraft, saving that it hath not pleased the translators of the Bible to call spirits by the name of Robin Goodfellow, as they have diviners, soothsayers, poisoners, and cozeners by the name of witches."[46] In the same tone Reginald Scot addresses the reader in the preface:—"To make a solemn suit to you that are partial readers to set aside partiality, to take in good part my writings, and with indifferent eyes to look upon my book, were labour lost and time ill-employed; for I should no more prevail herein than if, a hundred years since, I should have entreated your predecessors to believe that Robin Goodfellow, that great and ancient bull-beggar, had been but a cozening merchant, and no devil indeed. But Robin Goodfellow ceaseth now to be much feared, and Popery is sufficiently discovered; nevertheless, witches' charms and conjurers' cozenage are yet effectual." This passage seems clearly to prove that the belief in Robin Goodfellow and his fairy companions was now out of date; while that as to witchcraft, as was afterwards but too well shown, kept its ground against argument and controversy, and survived "to shed more blood."

  We are then to take leave of this fascinating article of the popular creed, having in it so much of interest to the imagination that we almost envy the credulity of those who, in the gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the advance of morn. These superstitions have already survived their best and most useful purpose, having been embalmed in the poetry of Milton and of Shakespeare, as well as writers only inferior to these great names. Of Spenser we must say nothing, because in his "Faery Queen" the title is the only circumstance which connects his splendid allegory with the popular superstition, and, as he uses it, means nothing more than an Utopia or nameless country.

  With the fairy popular creed fell, doubtless, many subordinate articles of credulity in England, but the belief in witches kep
t its ground. It was rooted in the minds of the common people, as well by the easy solution it afforded of much which they found otherwise hard to explain, as in reverence to the Holy Scriptures, in which the word witch, being used in several places, conveyed to those who did not trouble themselves about the nicety of the translation from the Eastern tongues, the inference that the same species of witches were meant as those against whom modern legislation had, in most European nations, directed the punishment of death. These two circumstances furnished the numerous believers in witchcraft with arguments in divinity and law which they conceived irrefragable. They might say to the theologist, Will you not believe in witches? the Scriptures aver their existence;—to the jurisconsult, Will you dispute the existence of a crime against which our own statute-book, and the code of almost all civilized countries, have attested, by laws upon which hundreds and thousands have been convicted, many or even most of whom have, by their judicial confessions, acknowledged their guilt and the justice of their punishment? It is a strange scepticism, they might add, which rejects the evidence of Scripture, of human legislature, and of the accused persons themselves.

  Notwithstanding these specious reasons, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods when the revival of learning, the invention of printing, the fearless investigations of the Reformers into subjects thought formerly too sacred for consideration of any save the clergy, had introduced a system of doubt, enquiry, disregard of authority, when unsupported by argument, and unhesitating exercise of the private judgment, on subjects which had occupied the bulls of popes and decrees of councils. In short, the spirit of the age was little disposed to spare error, however venerable, or countenance imposture, however sanctioned by length of time and universal acquiescence. Learned writers arose in different countries to challenge the very existence of this imaginary crime, to rescue the reputation of the great men whose knowledge, superior to that of their age, had caused them to be suspected of magic, and to put a stop to the horrid superstition whose victims were the aged, ignorant, and defenceless, and which could only be compared to that which sent victims of old through the fire to Moloch.