CHAPTER 3

The Fairy Queen

The maternal earth goddess was, as shown, essentially a figure of high literary culture, although she eventually got into popular culture towards the end of the twentieth century in societies in which literacy had by then virtually become universal. The second being to be considered in this book spanned both ends of the cultural spectrum, apparently originating among the cultural elite but rapidly becoming well known at all levels of the social order. She was conceived of as being the queen of a parallel realm of human-like beings with superhuman powers, usually known as fairies. Unlike Mother Earth or Mother Nature, she did not appear until the later part of the Middle Ages, and was a distinctively British phenomenon, whose popularity ended with the early modern period.¹

The Elvish Anarchy

Early and high medieval Britain did not have fairies, because the term had not yet been imported, but the parts of it which spoke English and Scots had roughly equivalent beings called elves, who were later to be elided with the category of fairy. The best extant study of the belief in them in Anglo-Saxon England has (inadvertently) revealed how little actually we know of it.² It is very clear that they were regarded as a menace, being held responsible for the infliction of sudden and mysteriously originating illnesses, rashes and pains in humans and their animals. Early English medical texts had various remedies for these, and protections against elf attack. It is also possible, though much less certain, that they targeted particular individuals, perhaps because the latter were in some way transgressive of human social norms, and so were not a habitual menace to society as a whole. A few authors increasingly equated them with demons or monsters, but there are strong linguistic hints in other texts that they could be beautiful and seductive (if dangerous), especially in female form, and these also seem to get stronger as the Anglo-Saxon period went on. There may in addition be some association of them with diviners or prophets, but there is no unequivocal evidence that they taught skills to or shared their powers with favoured people. There are no extant stories about them in Anglo-Saxon, or references to any, and no sense of a coherent tradition of them seems to emerge from the evidence. They certainly seem to have been regarded as existing within no parallel political or social system of their own, being treated instead as individual and capricious operators.

It must be emphasized, however, that these reflections are based on a very sparse and patchy survival of texts, all of which were created by a small, learned, clerical, male elite, and this may badly have skewed our impressions. Moreover, because our knowledge of context is so cloudy, confusion and ambiguity remain concerning specific bits of linguistic evidence. One example which may be chosen here is the Anglo-Saxon personal name Aelfwine, ‘elf-friend’. Does it indicate that special people were expected to enjoy warm and mutually beneficial relationships with elves, by which the latter helped and aided them? Or was the name a gesture of propitiation to flatter and mollify elves, and so make the bearer less vulnerable than others to their attacks? We simply do not know, and that lack of knowledge is one illustration of our general ignorance concerning the ways in which these beings were regarded.

The probability that no coherent view of elves was held in early medieval England is increased by the evidence provided by famous texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which have become more or less canonical in studies of British fairy tradition: those of Gerald of Wales, Ralph of Coggleshall, Gervase of Tilbury, Walter Map and William of Newburgh.³ These dealt with alleged encounters of humans with non-humans in a human-like form who could not easily be fitted into conventional Christian concepts of angels or demons. Some of these occupied a parallel world to the human one, usually accessed through portals in hollows, mounds, lakes or hills, where they had a complete society, and were longer-lived and in other ways superior to humanity. Sometimes they were especially associated with the colour green, and some lived in or near people’s homes, which they could enter to disrupt the occupants with mischievous tricks or assist them by performing useful tasks. Some blessed individual people who treated them graciously and generously, but some were apparently hostile to all humans, and afflicted them especially by leading them astray at night into pits or bogs. In one of the anecdotes recounted by Gerald of Wales, a boy in the Gower Peninsula went underground into a beautiful realm populated by a blonde race of small human size who were ruled by a king.⁴ No real interest was shown in the tale, however, concerning this potentate, and the motif of a parallel kingdom was generally missing from the accounts furnished by these scholars.

Those accounts lack, indeed, any sense of a coherent belief system within which to contain and explain these stories. They cannot represent more than a portion of popular belief, because they entirely lack accounts of the infliction of injuries on people by such beings, without direct provocation, which are so prominent in the Anglo-Saxon sources and would be again later in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the anecdotes strongly suggest that the beliefs and anecdotes concerned were shared by different social classes. As a number of modern scholars have pointed out, the intellectuals who recorded them struggled to create both a meaningful category within which to group them and a language for the beings described, as the range of Latin terms available did not quite seem to match the latter. Collectively, they failed in both enterprises and often candidly admitted their puzzlement.⁵

There was, in addition, a tradition widely distributed across Western Europe, which like the Anglo-Saxon elves must derive from pre-Christian culture, of woodland beings which could take the form of beautiful people, of either gender, and have sexual intercourse with the humans whom they encountered and seduced. These seem to have been equivalent to the classical Greek and Roman nymphs and satyrs, and were variously described by clerical authors as silvani (wood beings), Pans, agrestes feminae (wild women), fauns or Dusii. The authors concerned naturally equated them with demons, and wrote to condemn the belief in them. Such authors spanned the fifth to the eleventh centuries and included such prominent ecclesiastics as Augustine of Hippo at the opening of that period and Burchard of Worms at its end.⁶ It is not clear whether this belief extended to Anglo-Saxon England. One eleventh-century medical English text prescribes a salve ‘against elf-kin and against a night-walker and against (or for) people who have sex with a (or the) devil’.⁷ Once more, however, our ignorance of context fogs an understanding of the sense. The sex concerned could be voluntary (and so involve such sylvan beings) or involuntary and so probably refer to erotic dreams leading to orgasm (which medieval churchmen usually ascribed to incubus or succubus demons), in which case the salve repels a succession of uncanny nocturnal menaces: elves, incubi (or succubi) and whatever ‘night-walkers’ were. If the belief in seductive woodland entities did include Britain, it would make a very good fit with the likely beautiful and alluring associations of Anglo-Saxon elves, but again these associations are not absolutely certain.

What is sure is that by the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries a tradition had crystallized in England of beautiful non-human women, and sometimes men, who appeared dancing at night in wild places, and with whom humans could mate. Walter Map, writing in the 1180s, told of a Welsh landowner who caught a woman in a group which emerged nightly from a lake to dance by moonlight, and had sons by her, until he hit her with a bridle (so transgressing a taboo) and she returned to the lake. He also provided a parallel story of an eleventh-century Shropshire lord who encountered a set of ladies, taller and nobler than humans, dancing in linen shifts in a house beside a forest at night. He seized one and married her, and she gave him a son before he broke the condition she had laid upon him for remaining – that he would not speak of her sisters, with whom he had found her – and she too vanished.⁸ At times these beings could be more aggressive or sexually predatory. An account of the miracles that occurred at the shrine of St Swithun in Winchester included the curing of a man who had been crippled by three dark, naked women whom he had encountered in a lonely place near a river one evening. They had attempted to speak to him and he had run away, so provoking their anger that one caught, struck and blighted him before they vanished into the water.⁹ Gerald of Wales heard of a Welsh sage who had lived into his own lifetime in Monmouthshire who had acquired powers of prophecy and lie detection, and power over demons. He had gained these after recovering from a bout of insanity, into which he had been plunged by making love with a beautiful girl one evening, who then turned into a shaggy, rough and ugly creature. Gerald also told of another Monmouthshire demon which made love with young women and revealed the future, and hidden secrets, to the local people.¹⁰

By the end of the thirteenth century, these figures had fused, at least in western England, into a composite image of beautiful beings who lived in the woods and on high hills and could be seen dancing and playing – and who lured humans to make love. The old name ‘elves’ was applied to them. This idea is found in a pair of texts produced in or near Worcester or Gloucester between 1270 and 1300, and the point made in these was that such beings were actually demons, former angels who had remained neutral during the rebellion of Satan and been punished with banishment to the earth (while the rebel angels went beneath it, to hell), and that people who coupled with them were usually afflicted with illness, and sometimes died.¹¹ Still, however, there was no sense that these were organized into a single society with a particular leader or leaders. That idea seems to have come from a very different source.

Faierie

In the course of the twelfth century a new genre of literature emerged in Western Europe, and especially in its French-speaking lands: the romance. It was produced by and for a newly established social class, of militarized feudal landholders – nobles and knights – and their families and households, and featured the exploits of members of that class in deeds of martial and moral prowess. Its main purpose was to uphold and expound the nature of gentility as professed by this class. A strong element of marvel and magic ran through it, and this was partly embodied in beings which featured in the stories concerned who were often called fays. These had human forms and sumptuous lifestyles which mirrored those of the contemporary noble and knightly elite, but they disposed of apparently superhuman powers. They formed relations with people in the tales, acting as lovers, counsellors and protectors for them, or sometimes being exploiters, rapists, seducers or seductresses. Whereas the scholarly texts mentioned above dealt with incidents which were supposed to have happened in the real world, the romances were uninhibited works of fiction and fantasy. Those written in French supplied the genesis of the word ‘fairy’ itself, associated with the term fai, fae or fay, applied to these beings.

The origins of these glamorous characters may lie in three different, though not mutually exclusive, sources, to none of which they may be attributed with certainty. The first, which was popular among literary scholars during the early and mid-twentieth century, is in ancient Celtic cultures.¹² It is certainly true that medieval Celtic literatures are populated by beings who seem remarkably similar to the fays, set in more primeval, early medieval societies. Those in the Irish stories are fairly clearly former pagan deities, reimagined as aristocratic superhumans inhabiting a parallel world located within hills or ancient burial mounds or on islands and making much the same relations with human beings as the fays. The stories concerned certainly much predate the romances, being recorded from the eighth or ninth centuries onward, though the composition of them continued though the Middle Ages; latterly the entities concerned were given the collective name of the Túatha dé Danann.¹³ The Welsh equivalents are also very similar to the fays, and may also be transformed ancient native goddesses and gods, though this is more speculative and none of the stories that feature them can themselves securely be dated before the twelfth century.¹⁴ The second possible source for the fays is in the predatory and seductive rural beings mentioned by early medieval churchmen, and the third consists of a projection of wish fulfilment by the high medieval Western European elite itself. Fays are after all glamorized versions of twelfth-century barons, knights and ladies, equipped with magical powers and greater knowledge.

In recent years scholars of medieval literature have generally abandoned the quest for origins as fruitless because no hypothesis is apparently susceptible of proof; interest in Celtic progenitors has been dismissed with especial force.¹⁵ Instead, experts have concentrated on the far more practicable goal of studying the roles of fays as vehicles for plot devices and as mirrors of contemporary social and cultural preoccupations.¹⁶ As such, they could be used as channels for prophecy, as they were neither bound by human limitations nor demonic. They could act as arbiters of justice when human forms of that failed and acknowledge virtue in a hero or encourage it to develop. Most often, they embodied, both for good and bad, power without responsibility, and represented classic sexual fantasy, shot through with allure and danger. They could indeed be used to express female physical desire and fulfilment with a frankness hard to employ when dealing with human ladies of the time, and to serve with equal facility as dream lovers or evil temptresses.

Recent scholars have also collectively emphasized the lack of an attempt in most of the stories to locate fays within a theological framework, or indeed to explain who they are at all or to explore their motivation: they are usually just assumed to be mysterious. Partly as a consequence, the romances often leave in doubt their status as human or non-human. At times it is explicitly stated that they are people who have learned magic and so gained extraordinary powers, but in most cases they are not consigned to any specific category of being. Nonetheless, they represent, as said, the linguistic root of the whole concept of fairies. The word fay or fai itself may possibly derive from the Latin fata, meaning the classical goddesses known in English as the Fates. This term was indeed to be used in Latin works to translate ‘fairies’, but it may have converged with them rather than given birth to them. ‘Fay’ actually functioned more often as a verb than a noun, in both Old French and the Middle English texts into which the French themes were transposed. It denotes the working of something magical or uncanny. Its derivation or parallel term, faierie, was used in both French and English to describe magical events, wonders and marvels, or a place where fays dwelt. Only in English, and not until the mid-fifteenth century, did it come to mean a type of human-like being who wielded magic, a ‘fairy’. Before then the expression ‘fairy knight’ did not indicate a knight who was a fairy, but a knight who came from fairyland.¹⁷

The male exemplars of this sort of character are masters of shape-shifting, deception and seduction. One romance, Yonec, features one attired as a wealthy knight who emerges from a hillside and changes into the form of a great bird to fly into a human lady’s bedchamber. In Tydorel, another of the same kind, handsome and richly dressed, comes out of a lake at midsummer to become the lover of a queen of Brittany, so siring the hero of the tale, who eventually returns to his father’s home in the lake. Tyolet features a stag who turns into a knight on horseback and instructs the hero. The addition to Guy of Warwick which features the adventures of that hero’s son has him at one point rescue a friend of Guy’s from the prison of a fairy knight ‘hard as marble’.¹⁸ During the thirteenth century the character who was to be the most famous and enduring of these magical males made his appearance in the romance of Huon de Bordeaux. This is Auberon or Oberon, whose story grew by instalments into one of an ageless hunchbacked dwarf ruler of a forest kingdom with a capital city of white marble, located vaguely in the Middle East, who is possessed of great powers as an enchanter as well as great wealth. The audience for the story is assured of his illustrious parentage, as the son of Julius Caesar and an immortal ‘Lady of the Secret Isle’, and also of his religious orthodoxy, as a devout Christian who is taken to heaven by angels when at last he chooses to die. He was given his magical powers by superhuman beings who attended his birth, while his one defect, his physical deformity, was the result of a curse bestowed upon him by another such being. Huon, the hero of the tale, eventually succeeds Oberon as the ruler of his realm, over which he will preside with a queen, Esclaramonde, until the end of the world: happily ever after, indeed.¹⁹

Generally, however, it is the female fays who are the most striking characters in the category of faierie, and who provide memorable examples of feminine personalities who take the initiative in their own and human affairs and wield considerable political and magical power with a full sense of personal autonomy and agency. Typical of these would be the ‘Maiden of the White Hands’ in Renaud de Beaujeu’s romance Le Bel Inconnu, who is mistress of ‘the Golden Isle’ and becomes the beloved and helper of the young hero of the tale, having seen his destiny beforehand. The hero is himself the son of the Arthurian knight Sir Gawain and a fay whom his father had met in a forest. Two fays in particular were to enjoy long careers in medieval literature. One was Morgen, later named Morgan or Morgaine and to be given the defining nickname ‘Le Fay’. She appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin poem The Life of Merlin, from around 1150, in which she features as the most beautiful of nine sisters who rule an earthly paradise of abundant natural crops called the Isle of Apples or the Fortunate Island; the description of this is taken from one of an archipelago by the early medieval scholar Isidore of Seville, which most probably refers to the Canaries.²⁰ She is skilled in healing, using herbal remedies, and in astrology, can change her shape, and flies around the world on ‘strange wings’ which may be her invention. People from Britain are taken to her to be cured of their ills, the most distinguished being the wounded King Arthur after his final battle.

The origin of Morgen’s name has been much debated, as there are many possibilities, but there is more consensus that the original inspiration for her as a figure comes from ancient Greece, and above all from Homer’s demi-goddess Circe and her enchanted island.²¹ Indeed, classical enchantresses like Circe and Medea exerted an influence on conceptions of medieval fays in general. From Geoffrey’s text she leaked out through Western European literature in haphazard fashion. Sometimes she retained her character and context but changed her name, such as in the reworking of Geoffrey’s version of British history into English verse by the Worcestershire priest Layamon in the late twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. There Morgen is called Queen Argante and her island is known as Avalon, and Layamon uses the English term ‘most beautiful of elves’ for her, though she is still a healer presiding over an enchanted isle where she takes Arthur into her care.²² At other times she retained her name and context but changed her nature, as she does in the first Arthurian romance in German, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, from the 1180s. Here she has the same home and function as in Geoffrey, but also enhanced magical powers and a streak of unpleasantness. With an extra dose of character from the classical Circe, she can change men into animals and back, and command animals, including fish, dragons and demons. Her power over demons is explained when it is revealed that she is aided by the Devil. At yet other times Morgen (more or less) kept her name but changed both character and context, as in the thirteenth-century French romance Claris et Laris, where, now under the name of Morgana, she has spent a period at Arthur’s court and then retired in middle age to set up her own realm in a Breton forest. There she maintains a sumptuous castle with a retinue of humans and spirits, walled in by spells, and imprisons and seduces handsome young men who enter her territory: she has become unequivocally wicked, and the Isle of Apples has turned into Sunset Boulevard.²³ Thereafter she was to have a career as a (mostly) villainous human enchantress in the Arthurian legend, which lasts until the present.

The other fay of the early romances who was to have notable staying power was the one who features in Marie de France’s Lanval, composed – perhaps for the Plantagenet royal court – in the late twelfth century. She is a beautiful young woman, or woman-like being, of great wealth and magical prowess, who somehow comes to perceive and fall in love with a young knight at King Arthur’s court, a Breton, who suffers neglect and penury through no fault of his own. She waylays him with her attendants, makes him her lover and turns his luck around, her one stipulation being that he keeps her identity a secret. He manages both to break this promise and to offend Arthur’s queen, by insisting that his beloved is more beautiful than her or any other lady at court. As a result of the latter blunder, he is falsely accused and put on trial, and is saved when his fay lover arrives at court with an entourage to vindicate him, before carrying him off behind her on her horse to live with her in Avalon.

All of these works were composed between the mid-twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries, showing how luxuriant a growth the concept of the fay proved in Western Europe at that time. For the purposes of the present chapter, it may be pointed out that the Maiden of the White Hands, Argante and Morgana are all literally fairy queens, in the sense that they both work faierie and dwell in it. On the other hand, they are all disparate characters, alongside the other fays of early romance, with no common otherworldly allegiance or homeland. The appearance of those factors was going to be the next development in the concept of fairies.

The Coming of the Kingdom

It is in the years around, or just after, 1300 that a sense begins to develop of a single established fairy realm which interacts with the human world; and it does so in two romances written at that time. Both were marked by a further injection of ideas from classical Graeco-Roman literature which helped form that sense. One was the English Sir Orfeo, which retold the ancient story of the attempted rescue by the heroic musician Orpheus of his wife Eurydice from the pagan underworld realm of the dead, putting the tale into medieval dress.²⁴ In this version, he has to retrieve his wife from the land of a nameless ‘King of Fayre’ or ‘Fare’ or ‘Fairy’ (the spelling varies between versions) who takes the role of the Roman god Pluto as ruler of a kingdom of the dead, although in this case they are those who have met untimely ends: a preoccupation with the fate of such people had been a mark of Western European thought in the previous two hundred years.²⁵ It is not, however, a ghostly underworld but a pleasant green land, where the king reigns from a huge castle with his queen and sometimes leads a retinue on white horses into the human world to hunt animals and abduct chosen people, including Orfeo’s wife – who is, unlike her ancient predecessor, successfully rescued. In addition to the Roman foundation, the cultural materials that may have been used to create the work were very diverse, including Old Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Old French, Breton and medieval Latin and Italian works.²⁶ The result is a complete picture of a fairyland with a presiding royal court.

The other romance is the French Artus de Bretagne, which displays another potential of an identification of a land of fays with the classical Graeco-Roman underworld. Instead of emphasizing its king, it foregrounds its queen, the ancient goddess Proserpine, and makes her a sovereign of faierie. She first appears to one of the heroes of the tale around midnight, predictably beautiful, crowned with gold and attended by bright torchlight, to tell him how to accomplish a quest, and then vanishes. Later he meets her again at the entrance to a fair forest, with two pretty attendants, and she offers him her love, which he refuses. Understandably, she now abandons him, leaving him to lose his way.²⁷ Not surprisingly, with all this cross-referencing between the realms of fays and of the dead, a preacher’s manual from the early fourteenth century, Fasciculus Morum, could condemn a current belief that elves could carry off humans to their own land, where heroes of the past dwelt.²⁸ This may have been an old aspect of native belief, or a product of the equation between fairyland and the ancient underworld, or a result of the developing legend of the Isle of Apples or Avalon.

These works made possible the major leap taken by the end of the century, when Chaucer could speak, famously, of how in the days of King Arthur, Britain was ‘fulfilled of fayerye’ and of how ‘the elf queen, with her jolly company, danced full oft in many a green mead’.²⁹ He had taken the classic image of a royal fay, blended her with the tradition of nocturnal revels of beautiful female beings and – in a vital step – given her the definite article. This turned her into a personality in her own right, on the way to becoming a standardized archetype. This process, however, was incomplete and the result uneven, because in another tale, in a more satirical mood, in which he was prepared to parody the whole stereotype of the fay and the knight, he makes the hero decide that he must win the love of ‘an elf-queen’. He subsequently enters the land ‘of Fairye so wild’ and encounters ‘the queen of Faierye, with harp and pipe and symphony’.³⁰ In yet another story Chaucer embraces the classicizing tradition to make Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld and dead, ‘King of Faierye’, with Proserpine as his queen. Together and accompanied by attendants, they enter the human world to view the affairs of its inhabitants and intervene in those using their divine powers, which equate to magic. Proserpine acts independently of her spouse and according to her own morals and impulses, thereby counteracting the effects of his decisions.³¹ Thus concepts remained fluid, but a set of associations was starting to form and settle around the notion of elf and fairy monarchs and realms which defined an increasingly familiar pair of characters, who might operate independently and of whom the queen was a being of genuine might and agency in her own right.

The same process can be seen at work in the case of an old friend to this chapter, the generous and anonymous fay who was the heroine of Lanval. Around 1300 the romance of Marie de France was translated into Middle English as Sir Landevale, with no significant alteration to her as a character. Near the end of the century, however, the story was told again by Thomas Chestre, as Sir Launfal, and by now she has undergone a makeover. Her disposition and actions have remained the same, but she has acquired a name, the emblematic one of Dame Tryamour, and a point of origin, as daughter of ‘the King of Faërie, of occiente fair and nigh, A man of mickle might’. As part of this association, she now dresses in the increasingly distinctive fairy colour of green, whereas in the twelfth-century version she was clad in white, and sometimes in ermine and purple to emphasize her royal status, while her attendants wore purple liveries. When she and the hero depart at the end, it is ‘into the faërie’ whence she came (also still glossed as the ‘Isle of Olyroun’, which seems to be Avalon).³²

During the early fifteenth century, the idea of a single fairy kingdom spread with remarkable rapidity, not just through English society but across Britain. By the middle of the century, it was well enough known in south-eastern England to be a worthwhile guise for confidence tricksters or maniacs. In 1450 ‘one calling himself Queen of the Fayre’ was recorded as touring Essex and Kent, ‘but did no harm’.³³ The next year a gang of poachers around a hundred strong, armed and attired in armour, fake beards and blacked-up faces, raided the deer park of the duke of Buckingham in Kent. They called themselves ‘servants of the queen of the fairies’, presumably as a mocking expression to indicate that they were outside of human law.³⁴ The French word derived ultimately from the fays of chivalric romance had become thoroughly naturalized among the English and freighted with a set of royal associations not given before to the native ‘elves’, whom it had largely replaced. The same period saw the appearance of the romance as a Scottish literary form, and the fairy kingdom immediately manifested with it. The earliest and most famous such story was that of Thomas of Erceldoune, composed somewhere between 1400 and 1430. It tells of a Scottish laird who encounters and becomes the lover of a lady of ‘the wild fee’. She takes him back with her to her land, where she turns out to be the wife of its king. He eventually returns to his own world with gifts of prophecy and of the detection and telling of truth.³⁵

The portrait of her and her country is richly drawn. He meets her in a wood when she rides up to him wearing rich silk clothes and carrying a horn and a lyre, on a grey horse harnessed with gold, crystal and precious stones. A pack of eleven hunting dogs follows her. He persuades her to have sex with him on promise of everlasting fidelity, but the bargain is bad for both, because lovemaking transforms her into an aged and unattractive being in poor clothes, and he is now bound to leave ‘Middle Earth’ for her realm and remain a year. They pass through the side of a hill and journey three days through darkness to a green landscape full of fruit trees and birds, where her fine looks and raiment are restored. There she and her husband dwell in a stately castle with a retinue of knights and damsels, given up to music, dances and games. Thomas joins it (keeping the secret of her infidelity with him) until three days have apparently passed. She then informs him that this period has represented seven years in his world, and that he must leave as the following day a fiend would come from Hell to choose a victim to take back there as a regular tribute, and that as a handsome stranger he would be the obvious one. She leaves him in the place where they had met, equipped with his uncanny new powers.

The concept of such a realm also appeared in Wales around the same time, and, just as the French and English drew on classical sources to frame it, so the Welsh had an older figure, and otherworld, of their own as ready-made materials. The figure was Gwyn ap Nudd. He first appears in what seem to be two twelfth-century texts, the prose tale Culhwch ac Olwen, ‘Culhwch and Olwen’, and the poem ‘Taru Trin Anuidin Blaut’, ‘A Bull of Battle Was He’, as one of Arthur’s warriors, and a great fighter. He has magical gifts in the tale, to be sure, but so has almost everybody else in Arthur’s retinue as depicted in it. By the fourteenth century, and the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, he had been detached from the Arthurian legend and located in the present, as the pre-eminent spirit of darkness, enchantment and deception, abroad by night.³⁶ The owl is his favourite bird, the mist is conjured up by him and he sports in marshes. He is associated with Annwn or Annwfn, a realm known earlier in Welsh literature, especially in the prose tale Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, ‘Pwyll Prince of Dyfed’, as a parallel world with its own king and queen and magically gifted people. By the time of Dafydd, however, it was very clearly an underworld with creepy, if not diabolic, associations like those acquired by Gwyn. Those associations fitted the latter perfectly for the part he played in Buchedd Collen, ‘The Life of St Collen’, a late medieval Welsh hagiography written in the style of a romance. In this, Gwyn has become ‘King of the Fairies’ as well as of Annwn, with a beautiful castle crowning a hill and filled with courtiers, musicians, maidens, servants in his livery of red and blue, and fine tables covered in provisions. There he presides from a golden chair. However, all this is an illusion of the classic demonic kind which vanishes when the saint sprinkles it with holy water. It leaves behind only green mounds of the sort associated with fairy-like beings as meeting places and portals.³⁷

The idea of a fairy kingdom did not, however, put down roots in Wales, and no more is heard there of one, aside from in this one text, in either an elite literary context or a popular one. Fairy-like beings are recorded as widely believed in by ordinary people there during the early modern period, but without monarchs, and there is no apparent reference to a queen.³⁸ Likewise, she does not feature in the whole late medieval and early modern Gaelic world, embracing most of Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides and the Isle of Man. It is possible that the existing mythology there, of the Túatha dé Danann, filled the conceptual space available for fairy monarchs. It may likewise be suspected that something similar happened in Wales, where the mythology of Annwn and its beings could have been ample and well established enough to render the newcomers from faierie superfluous.

Things were very different in Lowland Scotland and at the Scottish royal court, which was situated in that region, and between 1450 and 1550 the fairy kingdom was a regular subject for treatment, or at least reference, by poets there. One was a notary, Robert Henryson, who flourished in the late fifteenth century and was associated with Dunfermline. He made another treatment of the Orpheus legend in the dress of medieval romance, in which Proserpine features simultaneously as the ‘goddess infernal’ and the ‘queen of fary’. So Orpheus’s wife Eurydice is ‘with the fary taken’, though the realm to which she is carried is a classical underworld.³⁹ Henryson was also credited with an extraordinary piece of whimsy called ‘King Berdok’, i.e. burdock, in which fairy-like beings are miniaturized, an idea which was a one-off for the time and place. The tiny king concerned, whose realm is improbably given as Babylon, is said to live in summer in a cabbage stalk and in winter in a cockle shell. He woos the daughter of the ‘king of fary’, and, when the latter discovers his suit and drives him away, the classical god Mercury saves him by hiding him in a bracken bush.⁴⁰

In his masterpiece from 1535, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits (A Satire of the Three Estates), the great court poet Sir David Lyndsay played repeatedly with the idea of fairy monarchs, and usually did so with fear or aversion. One character expostulates ‘We will have no more deal with thee / Than with the Queen of Farie’. A demon declares ‘I pray the alrich [uncanny] Queen of Farie to be your protection’, and at another point occurs the taunt ‘I will recommend you to the Queen of Farie’. A sinner admits that ‘I must pass to the King of Farie, / Or else, the right to Hell’.⁴¹ In another of his satires, The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (The Testament and Complaint of our Sovereign Lord’s Parrot), from 1530, the bird is made to declare: ‘But when my spirit must from my body go, / I recommend it to the queen of Fary, / Eternally in her court to tarry / In wilderness among the lonely dens.’⁴² Once more, the sense of fairyland as a place of the dead, or at least special kinds of dead (heroic or untimely), which was either engendered by or reflected in the input from the classical underworld and Avalon, is sustained. A leading poet of the previous generation, William Dunbar, had kept up the disturbing associations, by reviling a fellow courtier as the offspring of a giant and ‘a farie queen, gotten by sorcery’.⁴³ In a tableaux of classical deities he described Pluto, god of the underworld, as ‘the elrich incubus, / In cloak of green’.⁴⁴

There is therefore a distinctly darker hue to the fairy monarchs in sixteenth-century Scots verse than there had been during the previous century, and the Reformation seems to have confirmed the association of fairies with the diabolic in elite Scottish culture. In a satirical poem by Alexander Montgomerie from around 1580, the host of the ‘King of Pharie’ and the ‘elf queen’ includes overtly demonic figures such as incubi.⁴⁵ Montgomerie’s patron was King James VI, Scotland’s first Protestant monarch and himself an author, who in the next decade condemned all apparent manifestations of the fairy kingdom as demonic illusions intended to ensnare souls and formerly encouraged under Roman Catholicism – excoriating beliefs ‘that there was a King and Queen of Phairie, of such a jolly court and train as they had, how they naturally rode and went, ate and drank, and did all other actions like natural men and women’.⁴⁶ This sectarian hostility was compounded by the absence of media in which other views might have been explored in Scotland, with the decline of Scots poetry after 1600 owing to the removal of the court to England and the increasing influence of English print, and the lack of a vibrant theatre. It built, however, on a strong existing trend, which was not denominational: the wariness of the fairy sovereigns of pre-Reformation poets has been noted and Montgomerie was himself a Catholic. In 1567 James’s Catholic mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been entertained by a comic play in which ‘the Farie’ was again an alternative destination to Hell.⁴⁷

One of the most remarkable aspects of this outright formal hostility on the part of the Scottish elite was that it did not wholly translate into an equivalent attitude on the part of ordinary Scots, many of whom retained a belief not merely in the fairy realm but in its essential benevolence. King James himself complained of some who had asserted that they had been transported by ‘Phairie’ to a hill, and seen it open and found therein ‘a fair Queen’ who gave them ‘a stone which has sundry virtues’.⁴⁸ The court records of his reign and those following amply bear him out, by recording the cases of folk magicians who claimed to have had this sort of experience and ended up accused of dealing with devils as a result. A succession of such cases has become famous in the annals of Scottish witchcraft beliefs, especially over the past thirty years. The earliest and one of the less known is that of Jonet (sic) Boyman in 1572, whose trial was indeed the first for witchcraft in Scotland for which a detailed indictment has survived. An Edinburgh magical healer, she allegedly confessed to invoking spirits to aid her in her work, at a well with an uncanny reputation on the side of the volcanic outcrop outside the city called Arthur’s Seat. She did so in the names of her own personal pantheon, ‘Father, Son, King Arthur and Queen Elspeth’, the last apparently being her name for the fairy monarch. Subsequently, a host of fairy-like beings appeared to aid her.⁴⁹

Much more celebrated is the trial of Bessie Dunlop, from Ayrshire at the western end of the Central Lowlands, in 1576. She allegedly confessed that she had been helped in her career as a folk magician, serving clients, by a spirit guide in the form of the ghost of a man who had been killed at a famous battle in the 1540s. He turned out to be one of the servants of ‘the Queen of Elfame’ (Elf Home), who eventually came to visit Bessie herself at home when the latter was ‘in child bed’ (preparing to give birth or just having done so), being described rather prosaically as a ‘stout woman’ who asked for a drink and then informed her that her sick husband would survive but the baby die, which proved true.⁵⁰ A dozen years later a Fife healer, Alison Peirson, was recorded as confessing to having frequently visited the court of the ‘Queen of Elfhame’ and learned her skill there: she claimed to have relatives at that court who were in high favour with the queen.⁵¹ At least one of the factors that got her into trouble with the authorities had been her treatment of an archbishop of St Andrews, who had made political enemies, and a poem satirizing him had great fun with these alleged exploits of hers, including the detail that she rode across the Highlands at Halloween with ‘the Queen of Phareis’ and her entourage. Again, the detail is added that the fairy court included certain dead humans.⁵²

Still more intimate was the relationship claimed by Andro Man, a wandering healer who had worked all over north-east Scotland and was tried at Aberdeen in 1597. He allegedly testified that he had first visited the ‘Queen of Elphen’ as a boy, sixty years before, when she had come to his family home to be delivered of a child. He brought her water and she promised that he would ‘know all things’, have healing powers and be well looked after, though he would still have some hard times. He subsequently became her lover and fathered several children on her, and yet the interaction between them remained uneasy and capricious: at one point she killed one of his cattle on a mound called ‘Elphillock’ (presumably a portal to her realm onto which the beast had strayed) but told him good things would happen to him after that. In Man’s personal mythology she shared her power with an angel in white clothes called Christsonday. Again, their retinue included famous dead people such as Thomas of Erceldoune and King James IV of Scots, who had been killed in battle over eighty years before. Christsonday sometimes appeared in the form of a stag or horse, while the queen always resembled a human and rode on white steeds with her followers; he added that like Satan in contemporary mythology, she required homage to be paid to her by kissing her anus. Her courtiers looked and dressed like ordinary people but had more vitality and loved dancing and games. She was attractive, could look young or old as she desired, could make anybody she chose king of Scotland, and had sex with whomever she pleased.⁵³ This was the most detailed portrait of the fairy monarch to emerge from any of the trials.

After Andro Man, most testimonies of interaction with fairy monarchs seem anticlimactic, but the continuing succession of them far into the seventeenth century, and from all over the Lowlands, testifies to the vitality of their reputation. A servant called Jonet Anderson was questioned in 1617 for having tried to cure a sick woman at Falkirk, apparently by threatening the fairy monarchs to get them to rescind a blight they had put on her patient. Her charm asked in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost that the ‘earthless king and earthless queen’ should have no rest until they restored the woman to health.⁵⁴ John Stewart, an itinerant juggler and fortune-teller tried at Irvine in the following year, claimed to have acquired the ability to see the future when he met the fairy king in Ireland one Halloween. The king had touched his forehead with a white wand, which had the side-effect of making him dumb and blind in one eye, but they had met again in Dublin three years later and then Stewart had been healed. Thereafter he met the fairies weekly, celebrated Halloween with them on special hills and learned more magical skills at their court; once again, the latter was also attended by humans who had suffered untimely deaths.⁵⁵ To Margaret Alexander, interrogated at Livingston, west of Edinburgh, in 1647, the king had behaved more like a conventional early modern devil, having sex with her and getting her to renounce her Christian baptism.⁵⁶

As a storyteller, the equal to or superior of Andro Man was Isobel Gowdie, of Auldearn on the coastal plain beside the Moray Firth, whose confession taken in 1662 is the longest, most spectacular and most famous from any Scottish witch prosecution. She claimed acquaintance with both ‘fearie’ monarchs, who had entertained her at their palace inside local hills with good and ample food, although the ‘elf bulls’ bellowing and stamping in the place scared her. It was the queen who provided her with the food and who was ‘brawlie [bravely] clothed in white linen and in white and brown clothes etc’, while the king was ‘a braw man well favoured and broad faced etc’.⁵⁷ No lasting relationship or gifts resulted from the visit, however, and it was an incidental episode in an account which concentrated more on her dealings with the Devil and her coven, and her various acts of magic. She seems to have included it because of a feeling that contact with the fairy court was the kind of thing that a true witch ought to have in her portfolio of achievements.

All of these testimonies come to us mediated through the legal records, and we cannot tell how much the clerks who wrote them omitted (the one who took down Isobel Gowdie’s made clear that much more was left out) or reshaped. Nonetheless, they are individual and idiosyncratic enough to make it reasonably certain that the accused in each case was drawing upon her or his own experiences and imagination and not being fed stereotypical images and actions. What emerges from the collective sample is a clear impression that ordinary Lowland Scots of the age had a general belief in the existence of the fairy kingdom, without any common sense of its components or nature, or of the appearance, trappings and personalities of its rulers. Put on the spot – as a legal interrogation would do with more brutal efficiency than virtually any other situation – they supplied those elements for themselves.

The English Apogee

In England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many writers who shared the official view of the Scottish elite that fairies were actually devils and their royal court a demonic illusion. There, however, this was not an orthodoxy ratified from the top of the state, but a single opinion among several others aired in print. The most common of the latter were that a belief in fairies was a contemptible falsehood propagated under the old, Roman Catholic, religious regime; that it was a harmless and amusing superstition of common folk; and that it was a valuable and long-established literary theme which could be a powerful stimulus to the imagination and a useful means to entertainment. As a result, the fairy queen and her spouse were represented and reimagined in a great range of different ways, as one aspect of that great European reconsideration of the world which took place under the various pressures of the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance and the Reformation, in the context of an unusually vibrant English literary and theatrical culture.⁵⁸

Part of the impetus behind this more favourable and diverse attitude to fairies consisted of the continuing popularity of medieval romances in Tudor England as texts of them were put into the new medium of print, and sometimes translated into English for the first time in the process. A classic example of the chain reaction of creativity which could be set off by this process is that of the reception of the romance Huon de Bordeaux. Its final, and most developed, medieval version was translated and published in print in the 1530s by a noble enthusiast for romances, John Bourchier, Lord Berners.⁵⁹ It was very popular, going through a number of reprints before 1601 and introducing the Tudor English to its charming and virtuous fay hero Oberon.⁶⁰ By 1593 it had been dramatized and a new comedy written as well in which a ‘King Egereon’ enters to music with his court, followed by ‘three antic fairies dancing one after another’ to rescue two characters from execution.⁶¹ In the following year a minor Elizabethan dramatist, Robert Greene, purloined the character of Oberon for a play of his on Scottish history. This commences with the entry of ‘Aster Oberon, King of Fayries, and Antiques who dance about a tomb’. This king is clearly small, exists in a realm apart from the human one, is gentle, kind and wise, and loves dancing. His role is to hold the play together, providing a commentary on the nature of human affairs.⁶²

That was apparently a cue for a far from minor playwright of the period, William Shakespeare, to appropriate him for a work which has passed into the world literary canon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here Oberon, master of a nocturnal woodland realm set in ancient Greece, has travelled very far from the medieval hunchbacked dwarf to become an obviously imposing figure, intelligent, authoritative and capable of anger, duplicity and generosity by turns, while remaining essentially benevolent towards his own kind and humanity. He is, of course, given a queen worthy of him, strong-willed and independent and with her own fairy retinue, and sharing most of his qualities of character (even though the play punishes her for arguing with her husband). Tellingly, Shakespeare innovates by calling her Titania, a name not used for any fay or fairy hitherto but known from the ancient poet Ovid as one for Diana, the major Roman goddess of woods and moonlight. Indeed, she and her husband resemble classical nature deities more than any other sort of being, and this Oberon is more like Ovid’s orchard god Vertumnus than any of the male fays of medieval literature.⁶³ As such, they act as patrons to human royalty, and Shakespeare takes a swipe at the diabolic interpretation of fairies by making Oberon emphasize that, unlike ghosts and ‘damned spirits’, he and his court can endure sunlight.

Shakespeare did not use him or Titania again, and his treatment of fairies remained extremely varied. In Romeo and Juliet, as will be discussed, he turned them into figures of whimsy, while in Hamlet they are destructive beings equated with witches, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor the ‘fairy queen and her retinue’, now anonymized, are one entry in a list of nocturnal beings which includes a satyr and a hobgoblin. Here the queen is said to dress in white and has become a folk figure who directs her followers to pinch and bruise sleeping maids who have made a bad job of housekeeping – a popular belief (at least among people who kept servants) which was being propagated at this period. Her king has disappeared, but she retains her function of blessing homes, especially those of royalty.⁶⁴

Oberon was, however, now assured of an honourable and benevolent role in the work of English writers. In 1597 Christopher Middleton published a new Arthurian romance, The Famous Historie of Chinon of England, in which ‘King Oberam’ acts as patron to the hero, testing his courage by assuming a monstrous shape on first meeting and then presenting him with rich armour, a magic sword and a dwarf assistant. Oberam rules an underground realm full of elves and leads a fairy troop on sallies into the human world. A few years later, towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, a new play had Oberon enter with ‘Fairyes dancing before him and music with them’ to tell a maiden her fate, sympathetically, and assure her that there will be a place for her in fairyland after her death. She wonders if they are disguised devils, but their predictions come true.⁶⁵ Thereafter Oberon’s good character was to continue into the new century, as will be described.

During the Elizabethan era, the fairy queen enjoyed one unusual and considerable advantage among the English elite: the presence of an actual female monarch, ruling in her own right, Elizabeth I. This gave hosts who met and entertained the latter on her progresses a limited range of role models and precedents which could be summoned up from history and legend to apostrophize her; and the queen of fairies was a handy one. As in Shakespeare, she could be elided with the goddess Diana, whose chastity made her an obvious divine point of comparison for the unmarried Elizabeth. The latter therefore became accustomed on arriving at the rural seats of gentry and nobility to have her fairy counterpart emerge from woods or lakes, suitably costumed and accompanied, to salute her and make gifts to her.⁶⁶ Fairly typical was her experience at the appropriately named seat of the earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591, when she was seated at a gallery window overlooking a garden, into which the fairy queen came dancing with a retinue of maidens, carrying a garland in the shape of the crown. That queen gave her name as Aureola (so identifying herself with a classical dawn goddess) and claimed to have an underground realm where nightly she called Elizabeth’s name ‘in rings of painted flowers’. She explained that her garland had been made for Elizabeth by her royal husband, Auberon, and then sang and danced about the garden in praise of her with her maids. The real queen was so delighted that she wanted the performance repeated twice and bestowed a rich reward of money on the players.⁶⁷

This loyal idiom was sometimes transferred to the realm of literature, with inevitably varied success. At one end of the scale was Thomas Dekker’s laboured dramatic allegory The Whore of Babylon, which features Elizabeth as the ‘Farie’ queen of England (here called Titania after Shakespeare) vanquishing the Whore and her supporters (the Roman Catholic Church and its adherents).⁶⁸ Less predictably, ‘good King Oberon’ is her father, Henry VIII, a conceit taken from a work at the opposite end of the spectrum of merit and indeed the only one of this kind to enter the international canon: Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romance The Faerie Queene. Published between 1590 and 1596, it sustained on a huge scale the idea of Britain as a fairy realm ruled by an Elizabeth-figure, though she herself stays mostly in the background of the long and complex action.⁶⁹

The death of Elizabeth and the accession of the officially fairy-disowning James VI of Scotland as James I of England raised the question of whether this allegorical posturing could be sustained; but that was soon resolved. As James’s wife Anne of Denmark was travelling south from Scotland to take up residence in her new English home and court, bringing their eldest son Henry, they were entertained at Althorp in Northamptonshire, seat of the Spencer family (as it still is). Ben Jonson, whose name stands only second to Shakespeare’s among the dramatists of the time, devised a pageant to receive them in which a queen of the fairies led in her retinue to dance before the royal duo. Jonson then cleverly cast the good character of this queen into doubt, having a hostile satyr call her a petty-minded deceiver who robbed dairies of cream and sometimes immobilized butter churns out of mischief, so acknowledging a more hostile contemporary attitude to fairies. An elf, however, then defended her, saying that she punished lazy maids with pinching (as has been noted) and rewarded good servants and children by leaving them gifts. The satyr was duly punished, leaving the fairy sovereign to praise the real queen and present her with a jewel, before dancing away.⁷⁰ Anne and Henry were clearly pleased, because about seven years later Jonson designed a court masque in which the prince himself was represented with a retinue of young gentlemen as Prince Oberon and his knights. They emerged from a sumptuous palace carrying torches and singing, with Oberon riding in a chariot drawn by white bears and guarded by wood nymphs. The knights are described as former human heroes, ‘preserved in Faery land’. The whole company danced and praised their leader, and – in a backward glance to Althorp – distinguished itself from the coarse country fairies who haunted hearths and dairies.⁷¹ The king was clearly not inclined to dispute the distinction, or to disapprove in any way.

Thereafter for the rest of the early Stuart period, elite literary culture and popular print alike made respectful representations of the fairy monarchs. A sub-genre of fairy mythology, embodied in simple chapbooks, dealt with the adventures of Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck, who had appeared in the fifteenth century as a lone prankster spirit wholly independent of the fairy kingdom. Shakespeare, however, famously brought him into it as a henchman of Oberon’s, and he subsequently retained that role in cheap print (with the king as a benevolent background figure).⁷² A similar fate subsequently befell another essentially independent folk hero, the diminutive Tom Thumb, whom another pamphlet made into the godson of ‘the Fayry Queene’, who attends his christening with a train of ‘goblins grim’ and receives him into her realm on his death with a retinue of ‘dancing nymphs in green’ and musicians.⁷³ In more highbrow culture, the musician Thomas Campion published a song in which Proserpine makes a reappearance as the queen, holding revels by moonshine ‘in myrtle arbours on the downs’, but also, in folksy English fashion, sending her minions to ‘pinch black and blue’ human transgressors.⁷⁴ The queen and Oberon together continued to preside over their courts in dramatic performances, represented in lyric verse.⁷⁵ By 1635 an anthology of such references, from both elite and popular sources, could be put together in a manner designed to appeal to both audiences, and illustrated with woodcuts.⁷⁶

The fairy monarchs, and especially the queen, could take their place in popular print works the more easily in that they remained major figures in the imagination of the English common people, just as in Scotland. As there, too, a strong connection was perceived between fairies and the service magicians – usually called cunning or wise folk – who provided spells and charms for clients at the popular level.⁷⁷ This connection features much more seldom in trials south of the border, because English law focused more on alleged magical injury and much less on transactions with spirits than Scottish, and so service magicians tended to be accused of witchcraft less often and their relations with fairies were less a subject of interest to authorities. Nonetheless, there was an occasional exception, and one of the best recorded is the trial of Susan Swapper at the Sussex coastal port of Rye in 1607. She claimed to have had a series of visits from fairies who came to her by night in her home, starting when she was ill in bed; they began by telling her a means by which she could be healed, but later the focus of their proffered services extended to revealing buried treasure. Eventually, at noon one day, a tall male figure led her to a valley where she saw a man in black and a woman in green meeting. Her guide informed her that the woman was the fairy queen, and that if Susan knelt to her ‘she would make a living’. Instead, Susan went home. She subsequently claimed to have seen a total of eighteen fairies at different times, making a regular contact of the tall male, but the queen was not mentioned or seen again (and of course no treasure was found, and she got arrested as a witch instead).⁷⁸ In Scotland she would probably have been publicly executed, by strangling, after which her body would have been burnt: such was the fate of Jonet Boyman, Bessie Dunlop, Alison Peirson, Andro Man, Margaret Alexander and probably Isobel Gowdie, while John Stewart committed suicide in prison. Susan was indeed sentenced to hang, but pardoned after four years, because in English eyes it mattered crucially that she was not apparently guilty of harming anybody.

Also relatively fortunate was a northern English service magician, tried in the years around 1650, who had made a living by treating sick people with a white powder that he claimed to have been given by the fairies. He obtained it by meeting a female one on the road, who offered to help him out of poverty and took him to a little hill, which opened to her. Inside he came to a fine hall with a queen seated in state and many attendants about her. She welcomed him and bade the woman who had brought him to present him with the powder in a small wooden box. He subsequently knocked on the hill again when he needed a fresh supply, and was once more admitted and granted his wish, after another audience with the queen. Once again, it counted in his favour that he had harmed nobody, and indeed seemed to have cured many, so the jury acquitted him of calling on evil spirits. The judge, however, ordered him to be whipped as an imposter instead.⁷⁹

The world of popular magic shaded imperceptibly at its boundary into a different realm of magical operations, that of learned practitioners who carried out rituals for personal gain – material, intellectual or spiritual – and relied on written texts, clandestinely produced, in which the necessary operations were prescribed. These operations depended heavily on the conjuration of spirits, but fairies were seldom among those invoked, and their monarchs were mentioned in these texts even more rarely. In this respect, the world of the educated sorcerer was different from that of the common service magician. There seems to be one exception to this rule, in that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a spirit called Oberycom in the former period and Oberion in the latter was regularly mentioned as a desirable servitor for such magicians.⁸⁰ This is probably our old friend Oberon from Huon de Bordeaux, of whom the practitioners seem only to have known that he was reputedly a being of mighty magical powers. By the end of the sixteenth century Berners and Shakespeare had made Oberon so familiar as a fairy king that on his rare subsequent appearances in the context of ritual magic he was clearly identified as such: for example, the doctor and occultist Simon Forman, around 1600, recorded an opinion that Oberon’s realm extended to the centre of Europe, where he guarded precious metals in the rocks of Silesia from miners.⁸¹

Invocations by learned magicians of the fairy queen were even rarer, though one is recorded in an early modern English manuscript, while another such compilation has a call to ‘Oberyon’ as fairy king and another to ‘Micob, Queen of Fairies’, with a retinue of female sprites bearing classical Roman names. Oberyon is described in detail as wearing a royal crown and teaching humans healing, the properties of stones and herbs and the abilities to tell the future and locate buried treasure. This work even has a drawing of him in a turban, which may refer to his roots in Huon de Bordeaux as a Near Eastern potentate.⁸² The queen also made a promising early appearance in a verse tract on alchemy from fifteenth-century England, cast as a dialogue between a famous thirteenth-century scientist and the ‘queen of the elves’, called Elchyyell. She is ‘bright’, ‘fair and free’ and encountered under a tree, and teaches him the vital alchemical trick of turning lesser metals into gold.⁸³ Alleged attempts to contact her by would-be conjurors were reported into the seventeenth century: the famous astrologer William Lilly related in his memoirs how he had heard of a virtuous parson who went to a wood with a friend to invoke her, after which she appeared looking glorious.⁸⁴

One of the most striking proofs of the wide extent to which belief in the fairy monarchs existed among the Tudor and Stuart English populace is the occurrence of cases of fraud perpetrated or attempted by confidence tricksters on gullible victims whom they promised to introduce to these sovereigns. It can probably be presumed that the true number of such occurrences was higher, because some of those duped would have been too embarrassed to prosecute, or the criminals may have successfully disappeared, so that the incidence of such reports is telling. They commence in 1595, possibly in the aftermath of the new prominence given to the fairy kingdom in the metropolitan theatre, most successfully by Shakespeare. In that year a London gun-maker’s wife and fortune-teller called Judith Phillips, alias Doll Pope, was arrested for having obtained a turkey and a chicken from a wealthy widow, whom she had persuaded to offer these things to ‘the queen of the fairies’. Having thus gained that potentate’s favour, the widow was invited to put all her gold objects in one place in her home, after which the queen would draw to them money which had been hidden in the house by a previous occupant. The intended dupe, however, realized in time that her own possessions were likely to disappear.⁸⁵ Phillips was whipped through the city for this offence, and the investigation uncovered that she had already been punished for a similar scam in a Hampshire village. There she had set up as a service magician and convinced a rich inhabitant that she could summon the fairy queen to him by a rite in which he laid gold coins under five candlesticks in his largest room. Judith herself appeared attired as the queen in a white smock and headdress, carrying a wand, and engaged in ‘some dalliance’. She had then made off with the gold, the sticks and some linen.⁸⁶

In 1613 Alice and John West were flogged and pilloried in London for persuading a wealthy couple at Hammersmith to part with £120 as a gift for the king and queen of the fairies, who would then reveal a hidden treasure to them. The Wests staged a show in a vault at which the couple’s maid saw two people dressed like the fairy monarchs, ‘and by them little Elves and Goblings’. They were also charged with having persuaded a servant girl to sit naked in a garden through a night with a pot of earth in her lap which the queen would have turned into gold by dawn. As she did so, they made off with her money and clothes. Farmers had been talked into giving them more money, and livestock and farm produce, for promises to have the fairies at their service, and an old woman had handed over £80 to buy from the queen the secret of how to turn silver into gold. Alice practised as a service magician, and told fortunes to people on whom she had already obtained information, informing them that her apparently remarkable insights had been vouchsafed by the queen. She had cheated an apprentice out of four pieces of his master’s finest plate, which he had been instructed to place in the corners of a close as a ceremony to entice the queen to meet him.⁸⁷

Around these semi-professional repeat offenders were more isolated and opportunistic cases of a similar kind. In the winter of 1609–10 the Court of Chancery tried the case of a young Dorset squire who while in London encountered two more predatory gentlemen. These got an accomplice to offer to introduce him to the fairy queen and gain him her hand in marriage, if he handed over £516 in gold, to be distributed among her subject fairies, in the manner of a person seeking royal favour at the contemporary court of James I, who would be expected to deliver bribes to well-placed courtiers.⁸⁸ In the 1620s a writer upon religious scepticism and false belief recounted how he had met a man who had been persuaded by a magician to try to obtain some of the fabled seed of the fern plant, which allegedly conferred superhuman powers. He had been brought to believe that the seed was kept by ‘the King of the Fayries’. The author added that his informant had forgotten the king’s name, ‘till I remembered it unto him out of my reading in Huon of Bordeaux’.⁸⁹ It was, of course, Oberon, again.

These real-life stories made enough impression to inspire fictional imitations. Ben Jonson himself put into his play The Alchemist, launched in 1610, fraudsters who coax a man into giving them money to meet the ‘Queen of Faery’, whom they promised would make him rich. Again, the initial outlay of cash is to get courtiers of hers to arrange the introduction. The dupe is blindfolded and persuaded that he is surrounded by fairies.⁹⁰ A lesser play from the same period, The Valiant Welshman, is set in ancient Britain but still features a stupid knight in love with the fairy queen who seeks a service magician who can contact her. Of course, he finds a con man, who makes the knight creep on hands and knees to a woman dressed up as the queen, who then leads him into a ditch.⁹¹

The longest and most elaborate of such charades to appear in the actual records was also apparently the last, in the 1680s, and was the work of a London service magician called Mary Parish, who dealt in a variety of cures and charms. One of the clients to whom she sold a charm for success in gambling was the son of a lord, and when it failed she revealed that she had enjoyed contact with the fairy realm since the age of eight, and especially with its queen, whose stately palace she visited within a mound on Hounslow Heath, west of London. She and her royal husband presided there over a court populated by beings who were, like themselves, in human form but only about a yard high, though they could swell to normal human size at will. They gave her rings, money and jewels, and sometimes appeared to her in turn with their train and attendants in her room in the city. They were Christians who practised a form of Roman Catholicism. The king had shown less interest in her after she had refused to become his mistress and bear him children, in lieu of his barren wife, but the queen kept weekly contact for several years, until she died, after which the king married a sister of the fairy king of Portugal. In the real world this was the reign of Charles II, who had married a Portuguese princess who was herself barren, while Charles had many children by mistresses: Mary did not look far for her inspiration.

All this, she explained to the thrilled nobleman, had taken place long before, and for eight or nine years she had had no contact with the fairy realm. He pressed her to renew her acquaintance with it and introduce him, and there ensued a process, itself lasting for years and in many ways richly comic, whereby she repeatedly arranged an audience for him and then informed him that it had been called off because of unforeseen developments. She seems all this time to have been living off his money, as his mistress. After almost a decade he settled down as a landed gentleman and apparently lost his interest in other worlds, while retaining an affection and respect for Mary. Our knowledge of their relationship comes from his autobiography.⁹²

The combination of the Scottish and English records leaves no doubt that a belief in the fairy kingdom formed a lively part of the culture of early modern commoners from the south coast of England to the Moray Firth. Both of its rulers were generally regarded as potential helpers of humanity, and both normally operated with equal agency, the queen having an independence of action and an effective power of will that would be unusual (or, in some representations of her, unheard of) in the wives of reigning human kings. As such, she was regarded as acting as an effective patroness in her own right of ordinary people who made a relationship with her, of a kind denied them with earthly rulers. What emerges most strongly from the aggregate of the accounts is her essential benevolence to devotees, despite all the centuries of tradition of blighting elves and of demons masquerading as beautiful and seductive beings. Her apparent origins, in the figure of the protective and inspiring fay, had served her well.

There is, therefore, the greater contrast between this widespread belief system among commoners, which extended (as shown) to the more gullible kind of gentry and aristocracy, and the attitude adopted by most creative writers, the poets and playwrights. These treated the fairy kingdom simply as a fictional resource that could be manipulated in various different ways for fun and profit, much as the original medieval composers of romances about fays seem to have done with their subject matter. One striking illustration of the flippancy with which they increasingly treated it was the fashion for miniaturizing it which set in from the 1590s. Once more, it was Shakespeare who set the fashion, at some point in the first half of the decade, when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, and as a comic monologue introduced the character of Queen Mab.⁹³ Despite her title, which is never explained, she is not a fairy sovereign but the ‘fairies midwife’, herself the size of an agate stone and travelling in a hazelnut shell drawn by ants, with wheel-spokes of spiders’ legs, furnishings of grasshopper wings and reins of spiders’ webs. Her driver is a gnat, wielding a whip of cricket bone. Her main role as described in the speech, however, is not to deliver babies but dreams, to sleeping humans over whose bodies she rides. She is also blamed for weaving horses’ manes into tangles in the night. The speaker himself, a madcap young noble, admits his description to be pure fantasy, and indeed both the figure and her name seem to have been Shakespeare’s own invention. No fairy or fay was called ‘Mab’ before he wrote, and the derivation is uncertain; the great queen of medieval Irish legend, Maeve, has no resemblance to the tiny fairy except the slight similarity of name, and it is not clear how or where Shakespeare would have encountered the Welsh mab, signifying childhood or youth.

Nonetheless, both the figure and the name were immensely influential. ‘Mab’ became used by poets and playwrights in the following few decades as one of the names of the fairy queen herself. At the same time the concept of tiny fairies rapidly became popular. In a play from around 1600, such beings have names like Penny, Cricket and Little-Little Prick, leap on flower tops, ride on flies, play under the skirts of unsuspecting girls and dance and sing in honour of their ‘brave queen’.⁹⁴ This image of them was not entirely unprecedented: the Scottish King Berdok may be remembered, and back in the twelfth century Gervase of Tilbury had told of a kind of English demon called Portunes, who were six inches high, roasted frogs for food and looked like old men wearing patched coats.⁹⁵ These, however, were one-offs, and neither Berdok nor the Portunes were actually identified as fairies.

During the early seventeenth century, the concept of a royal court of tiny fairies caught on among lyric poets, until it became something of a craze by the 1620s, driven by a competition to come up with yet more inspired and sophisticated uses of miniature materials as props and trappings. Michael Drayton conjured up a palace of King Oberon and Queen Mab, from which Oberon sallies in an acorn cup, to fight a wasp, a glow-worm and bees, and catches Mab and one of his knights, Pigwiggen, listening together to a bumble bee minstrel. Fleeing his king’s jealousy, Pigwiggen hides in a nutshell, and then arms himself with cockleshell, plant stalk and horse fly’s tongue to fight Oberon.⁹⁶ Thomas Randolph entertained the real King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria with descriptions of Oberon and Mab enjoying an anti-masque performed by flies and a jig danced by ants, hunting snails and living in a palace built of precious stones, nutmegs and ginger, with palisades of teeth.⁹⁷ Robert Herrick’s verses returned repeatedly to the conceit. His ‘Oberon’s Feast’ is served on a mushroom, and consists of a wheat grain, butterfly horns, cuckoo spit, fuzz ball, a bee sac, and so forth, consumed while insect minstrels play. ‘The Temple’ of fairies is made from a kingfisher’s nest, and the gods or saints worshipped within are a beetle, a cricket, a fly, a will-o’-the-wisp and so on, the most important being ‘The Lady of the Lobster’. The priest serves communion wine in half a nutshell and uses a psalter of trout-fly wings.⁹⁸ A miniature fairy royal court also featured in a masque by Inigo Jones and literary works by John Day and Sir Simon Steward.⁹⁹

Even in the hothouse atmosphere of early Stuart lyric poetry, there was only so much of this stuff that a reasonable person could stand, and by the middle of the century the fashion had waned. Its project of literally trivializing the fairy queen and her spouse seems to have destroyed interest in them altogether as personalities among poets and playwrights; and in the later Stuart period they virtually slipped out of English literature. Even more striking, and as a sign of how interdependent the two spheres could be, they seem to have ebbed out of the imagination of ordinary people as well, all over Britain. By the Georgian period they were gone. The rich folklore collections of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed little interest in them among commoners, and no service magicians between 1740 and 1940 seem to have claimed them as a source of knowledge; instead, it was books which were cited as the fount of skill and power for such practitioners, as for learned magicians through the ages.¹⁰⁰

The nineteenth century, by contrast, saw a considerable revival of interest in fairies as a subject for literature and art which persisted into the twentieth, and this was linked in part to a revival of admiration for Shakespeare which elevated him to the historical position of the greatest British author.¹⁰¹ However, the fairy queen and king did not share in this rebirth, with the exception of their incarnations as Titania and Oberon in paintings or poems based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As figures of creative and emotive power for poets, playwrights and novelists, they belonged to the increasingly remote past. When one of them did suddenly appear in a new work of fantasy fiction it was a striking one-off: Galadriel in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, written in the 1940s and published in the 1950s. She is a classic medieval royal fay, ruling a realm of loyal human-sized elves set in an enchanted forest, stately and wise and possessed of formidable powers of magic. She has a spouse and consort whom she treats with respect and formal equality, but she is clearly the more impressive, effective and respected figure. Tolkien himself, unsurprisingly, was a professional medievalist. An active belief in fairies persisted among English, Welsh and Scottish commoners until the twentieth century, as is clear from those extensive collections of folklore; but they seemed to have lost their monarchs.¹⁰² The recent recrudescence of enthusiasm for fairy encounters, across the English-speaking world and associated especially with a New Age and pagan milieu, seems mostly to have left the queen and king behind as well.¹⁰³ An exception is the character of Mab, from Shakespeare, who has in some renderings shed her diminutive stature and comic associations and become a goddess of the land, seemingly by strengthened association with the Irish Queen Maeve.¹⁰⁴

All these are mere echoes of the fairy queen’s late medieval and early modern glory. For about three hundred years she held a potent place in the English and Lowland Scottish imagination, which covered more or less the whole of both regions and spanned society from top to bottom. For elite writers she was a dynamic literary figure with potential to be represented in many different ways, sympathetic, admiring, mocking, hostile or ambivalent. She could be brought into a story alone or with her royal spouse (who had his own, almost as prominent and fertile, place in poetry and drama) and/or a retinue of followers of different kinds. By commoners she was more often represented as a patroness, teacher, helper, counsellor and (occasionally) lover, supplying roles that were apparently missing in human society for those who claimed her acquaintance. In Scotland some of those who made these claims died for her, in the literal sense that their revelations of their association with her led to a sentence of death. However, all classes, it seems, eventually tired of her and ceased to find her an effective companion of the imagination. No great changes in political, social or religious contexts had occurred to cause this – the decline had set in before the real monarchy of Britain lost any of its powers – so that it appears simply and purely that after a lengthy period people needed new figures to fulfil her roles.