All this raises questions that are not often asked in such a context. Can we learn anything significant about the actual nature of such beliefs, and is it possible to discover how seriously they were taken by those who held them? After all, it might plausibly be claimed that we are witnessing nothing more than the paranoid projections of a dominant class seeking to impose its own values on an indifferent and inarticulate subject class. Even if some laypeople might actually have been prepared to rationalize and defend their traditional beliefs, where might we look for evidence of this recalcitrance? Latin sources, whether openly hostile or rather more accommodating, have little interest in contextualizing such radically unorthodox views, and even vernacular materials can be frustratingly circumspect.
However rarely, we may still sometimes glimpse signs of actual resistance to the ecclesiastical proscription of vernacular belief. In the mid-fourteenth century John Bromyard reported that attempts to prohibit rituals for recovering stolen property (a standard activity for cunning men and women) might be met with defiance: “they say it is not the work of the devil but of the fair folk [that is, the fairies], for we haven’t learnt it from the devil, nor do we believe in him, but from the fair folk” [sed dicunt non per diabolum, sed pulchrum populum, nec a diabolo didicimus nec ei credimus sed pulchro populo].46 Occasionally, indeed, acts of civil disobedience might invoke fairy protection, apparently reflecting an instinctive association of fairies with other targets of oppressive regulation. In January 1450 Thomas Cheyne led a rebellion in Kent (a harbinger of the much more serious uprising of Jack Cade later in the same year), and among the pseudonyms adopted by its leaders were those of the King of Fairyland and the Queen of Fairyland (Regem de ffeyre and Reginam de ffeyre).47 Popular sentiment was clearly in favor of the rebels, but the “oon calling hym self Queen of the feyre” seems to have been particularly charismatic—a contemporary London chronicler remarking that he “did noon oppression nor hurt to any persone.”48 Though the full significance of this impersonation is now impossible to recover, evidently the discourse of fairyland offered the rebels a shared language that they felt they could use against their oppressors: a slightly later indictment accuses a group of poachers of disguising themselves with long beards and blackened faces and proclaiming themselves “the servants of the Queen of Fairyland, intending that they should identify [themselves] by the name” [nuncupantes se esse servientes Regine del Faire ea intencione ut ipsi a nomine cognoscerent].49 A similar rising, “popular in origin … and plebeian in character,”50 occurred in the north of England in 1489; William Paston III recounts the rebels’ call to arms and then adds sarcastically, “And thys is in the name of Mayster Hobbe Hyrste, Robyn God-felaws brodyr he is, as I trow.”51 Robin Goodfellow is of course a wellknown fairy name, but Hob Hurst is much more obscure, surviving only in a Derbyshire place-name for a prehistoric tumulus, Hob Hurst’s House.52 Like Cheyne’s Queen of Fairyland, Robin Goodfellow’s brother here looks very much like an early instance of the common people turning to fairy impersonation in defense of their traditional rights. Hobbe was to have many descendants, however, his line reaching down to the nineteenth century.53
We may infer that the crude characterization of fairies as simply devils, or devilish illusions, did not go unchallenged, for pastoral (as opposed to scholastic) theology seems early to have evolved a rather more palatable variation (more palatable, that is, to those who were apparently ready to regard fairies as potentially benevolent creatures). By this account, fairies, while still devils, were only minor devils, less culpable than those who had been thrown into the pit of hell with Satan. Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia (ca. 1215) suggests that fairies who roam the earth can hardly be equated with the fallen angels who were thrust down to the dungeons of nether darkness to remain there till Doomsday (2 Pet. 2:4): “it must be, then, that those who sided with the devil but whose pride was less grievous were reserved to provide phantoms of this nature to punish humankind.”54 In Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus Miraculorum, when the novice observes that some devils are better than others [non omnes daemones aequaliter mali sunt], his master replies that “certain ones, it is said, while others were raising themselves up against God with Lucifer, merely consented, and these indeed fell with the others, but are less evil and harm men less than the others” [quidam, ut dicitur, aliis cum Lucifero contra Deum se extollentibus simpliciter consenserunt, et hi quidem cum ceteris ruerunt, sed ceteris minus mali sunt, hominesque minus laedunt].55 He then goes on to illustrate this point with the example of a handsome young servant who helped his knightly master escape from his enemies and healed his mistress from a serious disease and then revealed himself to have been a demon (and even after this offered to pay for a bell in the local church!); it seems likely that Caesarius is here recalling some popular tale about a figure such as Gyfre, the fairy servant in the Middle English version of Marie de France’s Lanval, who accompanies the hero on his adventures and gives him money and martial assistance.56
The idea that there were two classes of devil (the hardcore supporters of Lucifer and some less-committed fellow travelers) is an old one, at least as old as Origen in the third century,57 and it was employed to solve a number of theological difficulties. We will probably never know at what point these ‘neutral’ or ‘craven’ angels came to be associated with the fairies of vernacular belief,58 but clearly the idea was generally current from at least the beginning of the thirteenth century. In England we find it in the late fourteenth-century Vernon Manuscript’s Life of Adam and Eve: “And after that while [the Fall of Lucifer] heo beon pynet, summe more and summe lasse … heo fullen out as thikke as the drift of the snough; summe astunte in the eyr and summe in the eorthe. Yf eny mon is elve-inome other elf-iblowe, he hit hath of the angelus that fellen out of hevene” [and after that time they were tortured, some more, some less…. They fell down as thick as snow drifts. Some stopped in the air, some on the ground. If any man is elf-taken or elf-blown (that is, falls sick) he receives it from the angels that fell from heaven].59 A hundred years earlier The South English Legendary had provided an even more radical account,60 not only pairing these lesser devils with fairies but even suggesting that they might merit pardon at Doomsday:
Oþer were þat for hom somdel . in misþoȝt were
Ac naþeles hi hulde bet mid God . ac vnneþe hi forbere
Þulke wende out of heuene ek . and aboue þe oþere beoþ
Anhei vnder þe firmament . and Godes wille iseoþ
And so ssolleþ be[o] somdel in pine . forte þe worles ende
Ac hi ssolleþ a Domesday . aȝen to heuene wende (lines 201–6)
[There were others who, because their thoughts strayed somewhat (even though they were more inclined to God, they barely held themselves back) also departed from heaven, and they are above the others, raised up below the heavens, and recognize God’s will; and so they must be punished somewhat until the end of the world, but they shall return again to heaven at Doomsday]
and again, “Þat beoþ of þe wrecche gostes . þat of heuene were inome / And mony of hom a Domesday . ssolleþ ȝute to reste come” (lines 257–58) [They are the wretched spirits who were taken from heaven, and many of them shall yet find peace at Doomsday]. This idea turns up elsewhere and may even be responsible for Dante locating his neutral angels in the vestibule of hell (Inferno 3:37–39). The fairy Melusine, for example, tells her husband that her natural lot is to remain in “greuouse and obscure penytence … vnto the day of domme,”61 and that this view had penetrated vernacular consciousness is proved by the testimony of a suspected Cathar dragged before the inquisition in the early fourteenth century: “but all the spirits who did not expressly consent or believe in the devil, but were only swept up in the disturbance created by the devil and sinned, as it were, unknowingly, spirits of this kind are human [?mortal] and all shall at length be saved on the Day of Judgment” [set omnes spiritus qui non expresse consenserunt vel crediderunt dyabolo, set solum accesserunt ad turbationem quam dyabolys fecit, et quasi inscii peccaverunt, cuiusmodi sunt spiritus humani, omnes finaliter in die iudicii salvarentur].62