Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green

ce fust une fee, et que tot cis bos en enclarci” [a maid was here, the most beautiful thing in the world, so that we thought she was a fairy, and she illuminated the whole wood].⁶⁶ When the emperor of Rome encounters the foundling William of Palerne in the woods, his first thought is that he must be from fairyland because he is so handsome: “þemperour wend witerly, for wonder of þat child, / þat feiȝþely it were of feyrye for fairenes þat it welt”⁶⁷ The beauty of fairies seems to have been proverbial: in the Anglo-Norman Lai du Cor, for instance, Caradoc’s wife is described as “resembling a fairy” because of her beauty;⁶⁸ The Wars of Alexander describes Candace as being “so faire & so fresche as … an elfe oute of an-othire erde”;⁶⁹ and even John Gower describes his lady as possessing “la bealté plus qe faie.”⁷⁰ Interestingly, when Guillaume de Lorris describes Venus as being so elegant that she resembled a fairy, the Chaucerian translation alters this to

      Bi hir atyr so bright and shen

      Men myght perceyve …

      She was not of religioun [that is, she was no nun!].⁷¹

      Of course fairies are shape-shifters by nature (Yonec’s father in Marie de France’s lai turns himself into a hawk in order to visit his human lover),⁷² so it was a simple matter for the great tradition to represent their beauty as mere outward show. Not that we should necessarily assume that whenever a fairy in romance takes on a frightening new form (Melusine’s transformation into a dragon, for instance, or the dramatic moment when Thomas of Erceldoune’s fairy mistress “fadyde þus in þe face, / Þat schane by fore als þe sonne so bryght”)⁷³ there has necessarily been interference from the great tradition. Gerald of Wales tells of a man called Meilerius whose experience is reminiscent of Thomas’s; after he had sexually assaulted a fairy, “in place of a beautiful girl, he found a vile, rough, hairy, and grotesquely deformed shape” [loco puellae formosae, formam quandam villosam, hispidam, et hirsutam, adeoque enormiter deformem invenit].⁷⁴ Fairies may be beautiful, but they can also be dangerous, particularly when their prohibitions are ignored or (as is the case with both Thomas and Meilerius) when their persons are violated, so the little tradition was quite capable of imagining such violent metamorphoses without any outside help.⁷⁵ Be that as it may, the fact remains that despite the insistence of the great tradition that fairies were in reality hideous demons, the little tradition stubbornly maintained the default position that they were creatures of surpassing beauty.⁷⁶

      While many other elements in the popular conception of fairy nature (such as youthfulness, courtliness, and conspicuous wealth) must have galled representatives of the great tradition, four things caused them particular difficulties: the overt sexuality of fairies; their fecundity; their mortality; and their prescience. None of these qualities is easy to reconcile with the notion that fairies were really demons, and as a result medieval demonologists spilled a great deal of ink trying to find ways to rationalize them.

      Fairies are evidently highly sexed, and their relations with humans are often frankly voluptuous. The English translator of Partonope of Blois, for example, lingers sensuously over his hero’s first physical encounter with his fairy mistress.⁷⁷ It takes him four hundred lines to get Melior from the bedroom door to the moment of her final surrender, and the description of the climax (which, despite the fact that the whole encounter has been stage managed by Melior herself, comes uncomfortably close to rape) is as graphic as anything in the fabliau:

      Hys arme ffreshely he ouer her caste,

      And she hyt suffered pasyentlye.

      Than sayde sho to hym full mekely:

      “For þe loue of Gode, I praye yowe lette be.”

      And wyth þat worde a-none ganne he

      In hys armes her faste to hym brase.

      And fulle softely þen sho sayde: “Allas!”

      And her legges sho gan to knytte,

      And wyth hys knees he gan hem on-shote.

      And þer-wyth-all she sayde: “Syr, mercy!”

      He wolde not lefe ne be þer-by;

      For of her wordes toke he no hede;

      But þys a-way her maydenhede

      Haþe he þen rafte, and geffe her hys. (lines 1558–71)⁷⁸

      This particular scene evidently expresses a brand of male wish-fulfillment, but there are others in which masculine fairy lovers are embraced by human women with equal ardor:

      La dame l’a molt esgardé,

      e son semblant e sa biauté,

      angoisseusement l’aama

      [The lady gazed at him intently, at his bearing and his beauty, and she loved him cruelly].⁷⁹

      The author of the non-cyclic prose Lancelot, though keen to rationalize fairies as demons, apparently has no difficulty imagining them as hot and lustful (“il sont chaut et luxurieus”),⁸⁰ but clerics such as William of Auvergne are more circumspect. William is happy to explain the corporeal presence of demon lovers, and even their mechanical ability to simulate sexual organs, but such evident self-serving sensuality in creatures who have been consigned to eternal torment is clearly a different matter. William feels it incumbent upon him to insist “that undoubtedly they do those things which they do with men and women not from a love of copulating nor from a desire for that kind of pleasure, but rather they pollute them and seduce them to the foulness of lechery out of a zeal for malice” [indubitanter, quia non amore concubitus, neque desiderio voluptatis huiusmodi faciunt quae faciunt viris et muleribus, sed potius studio malignitatis polluunt eos et eas et ad spurcitiam inducunt luxuriae].⁸¹

      The fecundity of fairies and their ability to interbreed with human beings (a feature that will be explored more fully in the next chapter) is another commonplace of the little tradition that worried the clerics. As the South English Legendary puts it:

      Þe ssrewen wolleþ ek oþerwile mankunne to bitraie

      Aliȝte adoun in monnes forme biniȝte & bidaie

      And liggeþ ofte bi wymmen as hi were of fleiss & blode

      Ac þe engendrure þat hi makeþ ne comþ neuere to gode

      (lines 239–42)⁸²

      [The devils wish to betray mankind at other times and light down in man’s shape by night and by day and often lie with women as if they were made of flesh and blood, but the offspring that they beget never come to good].

      Walter Map too tells us that the products of unions between humans and fairies are rarely successful but records one notable exception: a man called Alnoth, who lived an exemplary life and survived to an advanced age.⁸³ Melusine is said to have borne her husband Raymondin ten sons, and though the sixth, Geoffrey of the Big Tooth, was notably cruel, and the tenth, Horrible, was as unprepossessing as his name, the rest, despite minor physical blemishes, seem to have turned out well enough; indeed one, Fromond, became a monk. Fairy parentage is common enough in romance (Yonec, for instance, has a fairy father and Le bel inconnu, a fairy mother), while in Tydorel the hero’s ability to go without sleep is specifically said to be a mark of his fairy paternity.⁸⁴ The existence of Middle English surnames such as Elfeg, Fayrey, and Wudewuse implies that this belief was not restricted to the pages of romance, however, and one remarkable document, a deposition in the trial of Bishop Guichard of Troyes in 1308, confirms this; among other things it was claimed that Guichard was the son of a fairy (a neton), because his mother was famous for her beautiful tresses and fairies were known to consort with women with fine hair (“quod netoni libenter frequentare consueverunt cum mulieribus que habent pulcras trecias capillorum”).⁸⁵ This is all the more remarkable because by the fourteenth century the church (as we shall see in the next chapter) had already fully confronted the obvious difficulty of attributing generative powers to demons; Thomas Aquinas, for one, saved appearances by articulating the ingenious theory that devils are able to make