One final piece of evidence is the most surprising of all. It comes from a sober legal text, the Coutumier of the forest of Brocéliande, written down in the fifteenth century but probably based on a thirteenth-century original. At the end of a lengthy exposition of the assorted hunting, logging, and pasturage rights of the various secular and ecclesiastical lords having domain in the forest, we find the following: “Item, next to the said spring there is a great rock, called the rock of Bellenton, and every time the Lord of Montfort comes to the said spring and sprinkles its water and moistens the said rock, however hot it may be, [with] the weather clear of rain, and in whatever direction the wind might lie, and however much people might say that the weather is not looking at all like rain, very soon (sometimes shortly before the said lord is able to return to his castle of Comper and sometimes shortly after) and in any case before the end of that same day, it rains in the region so plentifully that the land and its crops are watered by it much to their benefit.”106 It is unclear whether this entry is intended to confirm the Lord of Montfort’s exclusive right to sprinkle water on the rock or merely to prove that he has jurisdiction over this particular area, but in either case the passage confirms the existence of a local belief and one that, to judge by its presence in the Coutumier, must have been shared by the landholding class. Moreover the author of the Coutumier clearly recognizes that some will find the phenomenon incredible and goes to some lengths to assert its actuality. After reading such a passage we might understand why Roger Loomis should have asked so indignantly, “Can anyone seriously believe that it was Chrétien’s poem which gave rise to this popular custom of seeking relief from drought at the fountain?”107
Not only in Brocéliande was the question of the credibility of fairy beliefs an issue. The Yorkshireman William of Newburgh tells the story of a local peasant (“ex hoc vico rusticus”) who, having stumbled upon a fairy feast taking place inside a hillock that lay on his way home, rashly steals a cup from the fairies. William notes that he was personally familiar with the hillock in question (“tumulo quem saepius vidi”) and goes to some lengths to detail the subsequent history of the cup: “Eventually this cup of unknown material, unusual colour, and strange shape was offered as a splendid gift to the elder Henry, king of England. Subsequently it was passed on to the queen’s brother, David king of Scots, and kept for many years among the treasures of Scotland. Some years ago, as I learned from a reliable account, Henry II wished to see it, and it was surrendered to him by William king of Scots.”108 No doubt William of Newburgh names these royal witnesses for the same reason that Walter Map had stressed that the fairy bride of a man named Eadric the Wild was examined in person by William the Conqueror,109 as a way of lending unimpeachable authority to his strange tale. Yet William of Newburgh was far from being a credulous reporter;110 his skepticism about the reliability of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Arthur, for instance, is well known.111 Nor for that matter was Walter Map, who dryly remarks of the story that Triunein, reputedly the son of a Welsh fairy, survived defeat in battle to live with his mother at the bottom of a lake, “a delusion like this might have been invented about a man whose body was never found” [de non inuento fingi potuit error huiusmodi].112
The quasi-objective stance of men such as William of Newburgh and Walter Map closely resembles that of a modern ghost-story teller seeking to exploit the frisson that comes with an audience’s readiness to entertain the possibility that it is listening to a true account. The fifteenth-century French courtier Antoine de la Sale professed himself a skeptic on the fairy question, and at the end of his account of the paradise of Queen Sibyl (which he describes as a fairy realm of magical gardens and palaces, populated by elegant knights and beautiful ladies, and ruled over by a gracious sovereign), he wrote, “I pray God to guard every good Christian from such false belief, and from exposing himself to such danger.”113 But when he describes how he himself had sought to visit this magic realm (entered through a cave high in the Apennines) in 1420, he recounts an unnerving experience that proves that even such a sophisticated outsider was not wholly impervious to the queen’s power. He claims that the local authorities prevented him from passing beyond the cave’s first chamber, and yet even there, “[my companions] and I heard from within a sharp voice, like the sound of a peacock crying out, as if from a long way off. They said that it was an utterance from the Sibyl’s Paradise, but for my part I don’t believe it; I rather think that it was my horses who were at the foot of the mountain, although they were a long way below me” [Iceulx et moy oysmes leans une haulte voix criant ainsi que ce feust le cry du paon, qui sembloit estre moult loings. Si dirent les gens que c’estoit une voix de paradis de la Sibille. Mais, quant a moy, je n’en croy riens; ainsi croy que feussent mes chevaulx qui au pié du mont estoient, combien que’ilz feussent moult bas et loings de moy (p. 15)]. For all his bravado, la Sale’s “although” here betrays an underlying uneasiness; he sounds rather like the hotel guest who, while disclaiming any belief in ghosts, would still rather not sleep in a room reputed to be haunted. But there is a significant difference. Ghost stories in the modern world carry with them only limited ideological baggage; the proselytizing atheist might regard them as dangerous nonsense, but most people would treat them as harmless entertainment. This was not true of fairies in the Middle Ages.
It is a relatively simple matter to show that some people during the Middle Ages believed in fairies, but we have still not gone very far in understanding the general attitude toward such beliefs. While there may be a strong temptation to explain them in terms of modern phenomena, like a belief in ghosts, such analogies have only limited value. This is true even in the case of a more commonly invoked parallel, the modern belief in alien abductions—a belief that actually bears a strong formal resemblance to some medieval tales of people stolen by the fairies;114 Diane Purkiss has even gone so far as to claim that “aliens are our fairies, and they behave just like the fairies of our ancestors.”115 In one sense this is quite true—both might be argued to fill a similar, even identical, social or psychological niche—but ideologically their roles are very different, and the cultural work performed by each is quite distinct.
For one thing, modern belief in alien abduction, however widespread (in 2012 about a third of Americans were reported to believe in UFOs), remains a minority cult, indulged in by a fringe population. Its adherents may relish the support of the Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack (just as medieval fairy believers were glad to have the learned Gervase of Tilbury on their side), but by and large they have made few inroads into civil society. However, fairy beliefs were very far from being a fringe phenomenon in the Middle Ages (as we shall see). A second way in which medieval fairy beliefs differed from modern theories of alien abduction is yet more significant. Champions of alien abduction, for all their love of conspiracy theories, pose little threat to established society; no one in power apparently feels any great need to censor, silence, or persecute them. As our opening discussion of the church’s representation of fairies as devils and of fairy beliefs as potentially heretical demonstrates, however, medieval stories of fairyland were far from ideologically neutral. It is to the ideological significance of medieval fairy stories that we will now turn.
CHAPTER 2
Policing Vernacular Belief
Adde we to these, the parts and representations of Satyres, Silvanes, Muses, Nymphes, Furies, Hobgoblins, Fairies, Fates, with such other heathen vanities, which Christians should not name, much lesse resemble.
—William Prynne, Histrio-mastix (1633)
While