Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
to the question “Wheþer in thatt oþer world may be Any hous, toun, or citee?” Sidrak describes the three paths to be taken by the soul after death (to heaven, hell, and purgatory) and then adds (in the English version) the otherwise otiose remark, “Wonyng stedes be there no moo / That man or woman shall goo to.”73 (We shall return in Chapter 5 to the difficult question of fairyland as an abode of departed souls.)
Clearly fairy beliefs occupied an anomalous status in the official culture of the later Middle Ages. While scholastic theology may have regarded them as demonic, at the pastoral level they were far too deeply entrenched in the vernacular consciousness to be easily extirpated, and an uneasy truce was maintained. Is it, then, possible to delve further into this vernacular consciousness, to discover any direct evidence for the nature and extent of these beliefs?
Jacques Le Goff has written of “the near impossibility of transporting to the past the methods of observation, investigation, and enumeration, applied by sociologists to contemporary societies,”74 and while there is no reason to suppose that popular belief was any more homogeneous in the Middle Ages than it is now (“ther ben many folk that beleeven because it happeneth so often tyme to fallen after here fantasyes,” writes Sir John Mandeville, “and also there ben men ynowe that han no beleve in hem”),75 its nuances are far more difficult to penetrate. Certainly the nearest thing to a statistical sample we possess—the thirty-four people from Domrémy and the surrounding area who were questioned about a fairy tree (“arbor Fatalium, gallice des fees”) in 1452 as part of the process to nullify Joan of Arc’s condemnation twenty years earlier—yields very modest results, at least statistically.76 In 1431 Joan herself had informed her inquisitors that she had never seen fairies at the tree “as far as she knew” [dixit quod nunquam vidit predictas Fatales apud arborem, quod ipsa sciat]—though she did concede that one of her godmothers claimed to have seen them—and she stoutly denied that the gatherings at the fairy tree that she had attended as a young girl were anything other than innocent springtime picnics.77 Of the thirty-four later witnesses questioned about the arbre des dames, ten knew, or affected to know, nothing at all about it (though hardly any of these were from the immediate area of Domrémy) and only nine admitted to having heard that in the old days fairies were to be seen there; no one admitted to believing in fairies personally, though a forty-four-year-old laborer named Michel Buin did say that he did not know where they had gone, because they no longer visited the tree. The Domrémy villagers were under no particular threat from the commission (indeed the commissioners were eager for reassurance that Joan’s youthful activities were entirely innocent), yet even so their responses were warily noncommittal. In view of the fact that Bernard Gui’s famous inquisitors’ manual requires further investigation of anyone who believes in “fairy women, whom they call the good things” [de fatis mulieribus quas vocant bonas res],78 perhaps we can hardly blame them.
In default of statistics we must resort to anecdotal evidence to see what inferences can be drawn about the extent of fairy beliefs in the Middle Ages. One of the most fascinating test cases is provided by Jean d’Arras’s romance Mélusine (ca. 1393), which traces the origins of the great crusading family of the Lusignans back to its founder’s ill-fated marriage to a fairy bride. Mélusine was one of the most popular stories in fifteenth-century Europe: alongside Jean d’Arras’s prose version, there is another in verse (ca. 1401) by a man called Coudrette, and altogether thirty manuscripts survive of these two renderings. In one or other form it was translated into almost every major European language (with English translations of both texts). Coudrette may well have been a cleric, and he seems to have been somewhat wary about raising the question of his story’s factual status (indeed one might detect a certain defensiveness in his insistence that he was writing only at the behest of Guillaume Larchevêque, Lord of Parthenay, and in the elaborate prayers for the soul of his patron with which he concludes). Jean d’Arras, in contrast, was fully prepared to tackle the problems of factual corroboration head on, and with a patron as powerful as Jean de France, Duc de Berri, he need hardly have worried about any consequences. He begins by telling us that “in many partes of the sayd lande of Poytow haue ben shewed vnto many oon right famylerly many manyeres of thinges the whiche somme called Gobelyns [Fr. luitons] the other ffayrees, and the other “bonnes dames” or good ladyes,”79 and then he invokes the authority of Gervase of Tilbury, “a man worshipfull & of credence,” for the belief that their activities “be permytted & doon for som mysdedes that were doon ayenst the playsure of god wherfore he punysshed them so secretly & so wounderly wherof none hath parfytte knowlege but alonely he and they may be therefore called the secrets of god, abysmes without ryuage and without bottom.”80 Two French vernacular translations of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia survive from the Middle Ages,81 and though there is no record of the Duc de Berri’s owning a copy, his brother Charles V certainly did.82 D’Arras concludes his history of Melusine with another extended discussion of the existence of fairies and (at least in the French original) another reference to Gervase:
Therfore yf I haue wryton or shewed ony thing that to som semeth neyther possible to be nor credible, I beseche them to pardonne me. For as I fele & vnderstand by the Auctours of gramaire & phylosophye [Fr. des anciens autteurs tant de Gervaise comme d’autres anciens autteurs et philosophes] they repute and hold this present hystorye for a true Cronykle & thinges of the fayry. And who that saith the contrary / I say the secret jugements of god and his punysshments are inuysible & impossible to be vnderstand or knowe by the humanyte of man. / For the vnderstanding of humayne Creature is to rude to vnderstande the spyce espirytuel, & may not wel comprehend what it is / but as ferre as the wylle of god wyl suffre hym [Fr. et la puissance de Dieu y puet adjouster qu’ il lui plaist]. For there is found in many hystoryes Fayries that haue be maryed & had many children / but how this may be the humayn creature may not conceyue.83
But it is not just written authority that Jean d’Arras invokes. When, at a critical point in the story, Melusine, learning that her husband has disregarded a solemn prohibition, flies off in the shape of a dragon from an upper window, Jean offers us marmoreal proof of this marvel: “And wete it wel that on the basse stone of the wyndowe apereth at this day themprynte of her foote serpentous [Fr. Et sachiéz que la pierre sur quoy elle passa a la fenestre y est encores, et y est la fourme du pié toute escripte].”84 Predictably, Coudrette omits this detail, but even he felt the need to reassure his audience at this point: “Which I writte is trouth, therof ly no thyng [Fr. Il est voir tout que je escry; / Je m’en daigneroye mentir].”85
This is not quite all there is to it, however, for Jean d’Arras, or at least his patron, might well be thought to have had a political motive for publicly endorsing the legend of Melusine. Among the many stories connected with Melusine was one that she would appear on the ramparts of Lusignan whenever control of the fortress was about to change hands. In the summer and fall of 1376, with Lusignan, the last remaining major English stronghold in Poitou, under siege by the forces of Jean, Duc de Berri, what better way might have been found of encouraging the attackers than to report that Melusine had put in an appearance? Predictably, then, Jean d’Arras says that he had learned from the duke himself that John Cresswell, the English castellan who was defending the castle, had been visited by Melusine three days before its surrender—at the time he was in bed with a woman named Alexandrine, and “he was neuer in his dayes so afered.”86 Cresswell, a grizzled old routier,87 was certainly not a man to be easily frightened—a fact not lost on his sarcastic bedfellow: “Ha, valyaunt Sersuel how ofte haue I sene your mortal enemyes tofore your presence that neuer ye were aferd, and now for a serpent of femenyne nature ye shake for fere.” It is easy, then, to dismiss this story as mere propaganda, especially since some of its details can be shown to be inaccurate: for instance, d’Arras says that the apparition occurred three days before Cresswell surrendered the castle, but in fact when Lusignan finally fell into French hands, on 1 October, Cresswell had actually been languishing in a French dungeon for over three months;88 moreover Lusignan did not exactly ‘fall’ to the besiegers; the English handed it over to the duke by way of discharging the ransom of Sir Thomas Percy.89 To be fair, the Duc