What of his successor Chrétien de Troyes? Chrétien had evidently read this passage in Wace, for Calogrenant is clearly echoing it in the opening scene of Yvain. Reporting his unsuccessful adventures in Brocéliande to King Arthur, Calogrenant concludes:
Ensi alai, ensi reving,
Au revenir por fol me ting;
Si vos ai conté come fos
Ce qu’onques mes conter ne vos. (lines 577–80)97
[Thus I went, thus I returned; on my return I found myself a fool; if I have told my story like a fool I wish that I may never tell it again.]
Calogrenant’s folly, however, is quite different from Wace’s; it is not the folly of a man who has been naive and gullible—pouring water over the stone has, after all, produced the promised effect—but of one who has overreached himself and been shamed in battle with the knight whom his actions conjured up. At the end of the romance, Yvain, desperate to get his indignant lady, Laudine, to see him, threatens to flood her out by exploiting the magical properties of the spring at Barenton:
Puis errerent tant que il virent
La fontainne et plovoir i firent.
Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante,
Que si fu fiere la tormante,
Que nus n’an conteroit le disme. (lines 6533–37)
[Then they [Yvain and his lion] traveled until they saw the spring and made it rain there. Don’t imagine that I’m lying to you: the tempest was so severe that no one could tell the tenth of it [my emphasis].]
What are we to make of Chrétien’s disclaimer, “Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante”? Is it an ironic joke? Is it a genuine appeal for credence? Is it merely a conventional tic designed to carry his audience along with him at an improbable moment? Whatever we make of it, however, it shows that Chrétien was no less aware than Wace of the contested nature of fairy belief.
There is one other early literary text whose setting is the Forest of Brocéliande, Huon de Méri’s Torneiment Anticrist (1235–40). This is not a true romance but rather an odd mixture of allegorical psychomachia and social satire: Anticrist’s followers, for instance, include not only a character called Pub Crawl [Guersois], whose gang consists of Scotsmen, English, and Normans, but also the gods Pluto and Proserpina, who bear a clear resemblance to Chaucer’s fairy king and queen in The Merchant’s Tale.98 Proserpina is Anticrist’s lover and supplies him with a pennon made from her chemise (lines 570–74), while Pluto bullies Anticrist into fighting the archangel Michael (lines 2918–19). Interestingly, among the butts of Huon de Méri’s satire are the Albigensians (lines 878–96 and 22767–95)—a further sign that fairy beliefs hovered at the edge of heresy. The Torneiment’s opening lines are clearly inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’s account of the visits of Calogrenant and Yvain to Brocéliande; the poet, seeking to discover the truth about the spring of Barenton and its properties (“Kar la verté volei e aprendre / De la perilluse fontaine” [lines 62–63]), finds it just as Chrétien had described (“cum l’a descrit Crestiens” [line 103]). But instead of suppressing its fairy elements like Chrétien, de Méri demonizes them. By pouring water over the stone (not once but twice), he summons both a tremendous storm and the terrifying figure of Bras de Fer, the chamberlain of Anticrist, who then conducts him to the tournament that occupies the remainder of the poem. But even here, in an allegorical poem that makes no claims to verisimilitude, the poet feels obliged to authenticate his account of the spring with its storm-raising properties. Not only does he give a circumstantial account of how he came to be in the area (an account so detailed, in fact, that it allows us to date the poem), but he even remarks in the course of his description of the violence of the tempest that he has no wish to lie about it: “ne talent n’en ai de mentir” (line 117).
We have seen that Chrétien was influenced by Wace and Huon de Méri was influenced by Chrétien, so there is a natural enough temptation to take this to mean that we are dealing not with actual beliefs at all but with a succession of writers who are using the Forest of Brocéliande as a literary shorthand, a stock location with as little connection to the real world as Shakespeare’s Illyria. The final three pieces of evidence I wish to adduce, however, are nonliterary and should make it quite clear that if Wace, Chrétien, and de Méri were worried that describing a fairy spring made them look like fools or liars, there were others who seem to have had few doubts that they were dealing with a genuine meteorological event.
Jacques de Vitry, for instance, in his Historia Orientalis seu Hierosolymitana (begun in 1219) includes the Spring of Barenton among a group of marvels he judges it safe to believe in since they are contrary to neither faith nor good morals (“ea tamen credere que contra fidem non sunt vel bonos mores, nullum periculum aestimamus”): “in Brittany there is said to be a certain spring and if its waters are sprinkled over a nearby rock they are said to produce rain and thunder” [in minori Britannia fons quidam esse refertur, cuius aque supra propinquum lapidem proiecte pluvias & tonitrua provocare dicuntur].99 A generation later the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus went to great lengths to make this phenomenon seem credible:
I have heard Friar Henry the German, at one time a Dominican Reader in Cologne,100 a man of conspicuous learning and piety of whom I have written above, tell, with friars as witnesses, what I will now relate. When a certain well-born and wealthy friar from the region of Brittany entered the Dominican order he lived with the French friars in Lyon. As the time of his vows approached he sought permission from his prior to return to his own land in order that he might dispose of his possessions; the prior agreed and undertook the journey with him. When they had arrived in the wastes of Brittany, the novice said to his prior, “Would you like to see the ancient wonder of Brittany?” The prior asked what it was, and the friar, leading him to a sparkling clear spring above which was placed a stone on marble columns in the manner of an altar, immediately poured water over [it]. At once the skies darkened, the clouds began to gather, thunder to rumble, rain to pelt down, lightning to flash, and it instantly caused so great a flood that the surrounding land seemed to be covered to the distance of a league. The prior was amazed by the sight and talked about it in the hearing of brother Henry, Bishop John of blessed memory, master of the order,101 and many other friars. Forty years ago I heard this same thing from my father, who had campaigned in those parts with King Richard of England. When brother Henry told me, and many others, these things, I asked how they could have come about. He replied, by a magic art, now unknown to humans, and by the working of demons, who are able to stir and whip up the air into storms and rain-showers when they wish, though only by permission of the hidden decree of God.102
At this point it is probably worth pointing out something that underlies the traditions surrounding the Spring of Barenton and that may not be immediately obvious to the modern reader: the popular understanding that there was a connection between fairies and bad weather. Chaucer seems to be alluding to such a connection when he mentions the “ayerissh bestes” that engender “Cloudes, mystes, and tempestes, / Snowes, hayles, reynes, wyndes” in The House of Fame (lines 964–69),103 but even clearer evidence is found in, of all places, an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite sermon: “And summe dremen of þes feendis [of the loweste rank] þat summe ben elues and summe gobelynes, and haue not but litil power to tempte men in harme of soule; but siþ we kunne not proue þis ne disproue þis spedili, holde we vs in þe boundis þat God telliþ vs in his lawe. But it is licli þat þes feendis haue power to make boþe wynd and reyn, þundir and lyȝttyng and oþir wedrus; for whan þei moeuen partis of þis e[y]re and bryngyn hem nyyȝ togidere, þes partis moten nedeli bi kynde make siche wedir as clerkis knowen.”104 Another, hardly less surprising, source is a set of Latin exercises composed for use in Exeter Grammar School around 1450, one of which reads, “A general rumour is spreading among the people that the spirits of the air, invoked by necromantic art … have appeared in bodily form, stirring up great tempests in the air which are not yet calmed, it is believed, nor allayed.”105 When