Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
hem miȝt. (lines 413–16)
In the popular mind fairy lore might have been reconciled with Christian teaching in ways that would have scandalized the more educated members of the clergy. Finally, the shape-shifting ability of these ‘demons’ (evident in Thomas of Erceldoune, among others) is also a fairy commonplace. What is particularly striking about this story, however, is Thomas of Cantimpré’s translation of such fairy lore into an actual heresy (in fact, a potential target for the notorious inquisitor Conrad of Marburg), with the suggestion that it constitutes an organized doctrinal system: “you will receive the secrets of our faith from his mouth.” Fairy beliefs hover at the edge of consciousness for some medieval inquisitors,30 but (except where the imagery of fairyland becomes entwined with the discourse of witchcraft, as was certainly to happen in the early-modern period) it is unusual to find them cast as a full-fledged heresy in this way.
No doubt Margaret Murray, had she known of this account, would have regarded it as conclusive evidence for her imaginative theories about the survival of the ‘old religion,’31 but as with the later Scottish witchcraft trials on which she drew so heavily, whatever coherent structure these beliefs appear to possess seems largely a projection of their adversaries’ own fantastic obsessions rather than a reflection of their holders’ esoteric knowledge.32 As important as the substance of such charges, however, is their tone. From our perspective Thomas of Cantimpré’s response seems out of all proportion to the seriousness of the threat, but there is no mistaking its antagonism. By linking it with Conrad of Marburg’s German crusade, indeed, he is setting it on a par with the far better documented heresy of the Cathars.33 (Conrad was not alone in making such an association, however (as we shall see with Huon de Méri’s poem the Tornoiement de l’antichrist).
Not all medieval churchmen shared Thomas’s paranoia, for a curious Middle English poem called the Disputation Between a Christian and a Jew, presents a similar set of motifs in a rather more even tone.34 It is found in a famous anthology of religious verse, the Vernon Manuscript, compiled in the west of England in the late fourteenth century. Despite its title, the Disputation Between a Christian and a Jew has little to do with any kind of genuine intellectual exchange between the representatives of Christianity and those of Judaism. The author’s grasp of even the most basic tenets of the Jewish faith is clearly shaky, but in his eagerness to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity to other religions, he appears to have constructed an entirely factitious old law out of such scraps of fairy belief as he was able to gather. The central episode closely resembles Thomas of Cantimpré’s anecdote in that the true believer is taken by the Jew to a wonderful land where he is shown a simulacrum of Christ on the cross surrounded by Mary and the disciples, but when he exhibits a mass wafer, the whole illusion vanishes.35 The machinery of fairyland, however, is even more precisely elaborated. The two men, described rather surprisingly as clerks of divinity in Paris, enter a cleft in the earth and follow a paved road leading to a handsome manor adorned with purple and gold; there, in a natural landscape of luxuriant richness, time is felt to pass more swiftly than in the human world (“Hose lenge wolde long, / fful luitel him þouht” [lines 163–64]),36 and it is particularly striking that they should encounter King Arthur and “al þe rounde table good” (line 185) among the residents. The visitors pass on to a nunnery, where “a ladi so fre,” who seems to be a cross between an abbess and a fairy queen, welcomes them “wiþ rial rehet” (line 224);37 it is in her splendid hall that the Christian unmasks the illusory crucifixion scene, the building ‘bursts,’ the lights go out, and the two men find themselves standing “o þe hulle / Þer þey furst were” (lines 271–72).
Accounts such as these might seem to reflect the delusions of clerics out of touch with vernacular culture, but (as we shall see in the next chapter) it would be a mistake to overstate the gulf between clergy and laity in such matters or underestimate the complexity of vernacular beliefs. The testimony of a Suffolk woman named Marion Clerk, examined in the course of an archiepiscopal visitation in 1499, suggests that these accounts may well have had some basis in reality. It is worth quoting at length:
Marion Clerk, daughter of John and Agnes Clerk, was noted for the use of superstitious art … in that, it was asserted, she had the art of healing people of various diseases, of prophesying future events and declaring what misfortunes would befall those who came to her, and revealing the whereabouts of certain hidden treasures. To this charge she replied that she did have this ability. The judge asked her where and from whom she had learnt this art, and she replied that she had it from God and the Blessed Virgin and the gracious fairies. The judge asked her what they might be, and Marion replied that they were little people who gave her information whenever she wanted it. The judge asked her whether these little people believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and she replied that they believed only in the Father Almighty. He asked her if she had ever been in heaven, and she said that she had. He asked her if she had seen God in heaven, and she said that she had, and He was wearing a golden mantle. She also said that by the power of the gracious fairies she had talked with the Archangel Gabriel and St Stephen.38
Evidently the judge was sufficiently intrigued by this account of fairy transportation to set a trap for her: he “asked if she had been to Canterbury through the power of the fairies and she said yes, and asked where was the tomb of the blessed martyr Thomas, she said [wrongly, of course] it was in the churchyard” (p. 215). Unsurprisingly, a later court in Norwich Cathedral declared “all such arts to be superstitious and to lead to suspicion of heretical pravity” (p. 216), and Marion was forced to recant. As with Thomas of Cantimpré’s story, what is so striking about Marion’s testimony is less her belief that she had visited some kind of fairy locus amoenus (John Bromyard had written of certain deluded women who believed themselves taken off by a certain race and led to certain beautiful and unknown places [quae dicunt se rapi a quodam populo, & duci ad loca quaedam pulchra, & ignota])39 than the way in which (like a later cunning man from Sussex who claimed to be aided by the archangel Uriel, “a great prince of the Fayries”)40 her account has become entangled with Christian machinery. The celebrated Cambridge song “Heriger, urbis Maguntiacensis,” which tells of an otherworld deep in the woods visited by a ‘prophet’ who says he saw Christ, John the Baptist, and Saint Peter sitting at a feast, offers a much earlier instance of this phenomenon.41
We are accustomed to thinking of popular superstitions as falling well outside the boundaries of heresy because they can have posed no coherent intellectual challenge to orthodox dogma, but by the fifteenth century the English church’s attitude to them was clearly hardening, and there is evidence that in pastoral, if not in scholastic, circles such beliefs may have regularly been felt to be heretical. A remarkable passage in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine, for instance, speaks of witches and elves in the same breath as Lollards; the Virgin Mary is here instructing the hermit who is to convert the saint:
So sayd my Sone to His aposteles twelve,
“Whan ye stand,” He seyd, “befor the dome
Of many tyrauntys, and ye alone youreselve,
Thow thei yow calle Lollard, whych, or elve,
Beth not dysmayd—I schall gyve yow answere.” (3:324–28)42
This is evidently based on an apocalyptic passage that appears in three of the four gospels,43 but none of them alludes to anything that remotely suggests fairies. Peter Idley in the mid-fifteenth century insisted that even white magic was heretical:
And thoughe by thi Pater noster þou coniure
And by hooly wordis doo mervelous werkis,
It is playn Eresye—I referre me to clerkis.44
In a similar vein, the articles of excommunication recorded in the register of Godstow Abbey at about the same time condemn “Alle þat knoweth heresy, wicchecrafte, enchauntement, Nigromancy, coniurisones, or any fals beleve aȝens the feyth of holichurch, but ȝif þei distroye hit be þer power.”45 Interestingly, not everyone seems to have been quite so obdurate, for the article also includes, “And al þat ben ordened to enquere þer-on, ȝif þei