CHAPTER 4

The Lady of the Night

The third figure to be considered makes a contrast with the last two, while having things in common with them. Unlike the fairy queen, she had a geographical range which covered most of Western Europe, and a temporal one which not only continued to the modern age but extended back to the early Middle Ages. Both those characteristics were shared by Nature and Mother Earth, but the being to be discussed now was quite unlike the latter in one very important respect: she was the focus of a genuinely popular belief system. She only entered the writings of the learned elite when its members were commenting on or investigating (usually with feelings ranging from disapproval to horror) the traditions of the common people. Her origins are far more mysterious than those of the preceding two superhuman females and her forms more diverse. She was conceived of as a mighty feminine being who travelled the night with a retinue of spirits, and sometimes included favoured human beings in it. In some accounts her company just roamed the earth, in others it stopped for feasts and revels, and in yet others it visited the houses of selected people to bless them.

Three aspects of her tradition seem consistent. The first is that it was, as said, held and propagated by commoners, and especially by poor women, though sometimes by men of the same class as well. Those who claimed to travel with the Lady thereby gained a status in their communities which normally they would not have possessed. The activities in which they engaged as part of her entourage were classic pieces of wish fulfilment for an underclass: to become favoured members of a supernatural royal court, which might admit them to feasts and games, and to gain free entry to the houses of wealthier neighbours. The second aspect of the tradition is that the women who claimed to rove with the Lady were often or mostly the service magicians of their communities. Like those in Britain who attributed their skills to the tuition of fairies, they frequently stated that they had learned their magic from her and her companions. The third aspect is that this belief system nowhere seems to have involved any actual group activity. The travels of the humans who claimed to join these phantasms were experienced in their minds, while their bodies remained static.

The Frankish Heartland

The concept first appears in one of the most famous of early medieval ecclesiastical decrees, the so-called canon ‘Episcopi’. The original document of this is lost, and its earliest appearance is in a collection of canon law texts made soon after the year 900 for the archbishop of the western German city of Trier by Regino, the abbot of Prüm in the central Rhineland. It has always been thought most likely to have originated at some point in the previous century in the lands of the Frankish rulers who between them controlled most of what is now France and Germany. The author and his place of residence, however, seem likely to remain forever unknown. He asserted that ‘certain wicked women, who have been perverted by Satan and seduced by illusions of devils and by phantoms, believe and profess that during the night they ride on certain beasts with the goddess Diana and an uncountable host of women; that they pass across many great lands in the silence of the dead of night; that they obey her directions as those of a mistress; and that on particular nights they are summoned to her service’. He added that this belief was held by ‘an innumerable multitude’, and that priests should preach against it as a diabolical illusion, and so expel ‘fortune telling and the magical art’ from their parishes.¹

So what are we to make of this text? There is a strong implication in its last directive that the women who held the belief concerned and claimed to ride with Diana were the service magicians of their communities. It is more or less certain, also, that the tradition of these rides was well established by the time that the document was composed, or it would not have claimed a huge number of believers for it; although just as we do not know where it was written, so we do not know how wide an area those believers occupied at the time, or how much exaggeration it made of their number. As for the name given for the goddess whom the women claimed to follow, at first sight the Roman deity Diana, as portrayed in ancient texts, would be a very suitable leader for the cavalcades concerned. She was associated with wild animals, and the night and the moon, and so with witchcraft, was supposed to care for women in particular, and had a retinue of nymphs. Furthermore, she appears to have continued to enjoy a widespread cult in the early Middle Ages, spanning the area that the Romans called Gaul, most of which was to develop into France, and extending into what became Germany. The life of Caesarius of Arles, the foremost churchman of Gaul in the early sixth century, claimed that he exorcized from a slave girl in his diocese ‘a demon, whom the peasants call Diana’, which had been beating her every night. The late-sixth-century Gallic bishop Gregory of Tours described how a missionary saint whom he had met himself, Vulfolaic, had destroyed a statue of the same goddess worshipped by country people in the Ardennes region in the far north-east of Gaul. The life of another such missionary, St Killan, recorded that he had been martyred in the seventh century when he tried to convert some of the East Franks, who became the Germans, from the cult of Diana.²

On closer inspection, what seems to be a compelling body of evidence crumbles away. Whoever the goddess was whose devotees despatched Killan, it could not have been Diana, because the region in which he served and died, Franconia, was far beyond the bounds of the Roman world. There is not even evidence for a widespread popular cult of her in the Roman provinces north of the Alps, including Gaul, which would linger into subsequent centuries. It is just possible that there had been one in the far south, around Arles in Provence, but very difficult to credit one as far north as the Ardennes. Conversely, none of the early medieval ecclesiastical decrees or law codes from the Mediterranean basin, including Italy – which was Diana’s ancient stronghold – refer to nocturnal rides led by her of the sort recorded in the Rhineland. Indeed, there is no ancient reference to Diana which portrays her as leading human devotees in this way. What seems to have been happening is that early medieval churchmen were applying her name to local rustic goddesses in general. This may have been because of their classical education, which would make them associate any female deity of the countryside with the Roman one. This solution to the problem was proposed by Carlo Ginzburg, probably the leading Italian historian of his generation, subsequently one of the luminaries of American academe and the author who dealt most inspiringly and influentially with the subject of the lady and her followers in the late twentieth century. He showed convincingly that in the later Middle Ages, when the records are full enough to contain such insights, inquisitors did indeed impose the name Diana on this figure, while those who venerated her called her by another, particular and local, one.³ To this important suggestion may perhaps be added another: that Diana is also the only pagan deity to be named in the whole of the New Testament, and as such might readily have become a natural shorthand for a goddess in general among many medieval Christians.

The night-roaming lady next appears in another collection of canon law issued in the early eleventh century, by Burchard, bishop of Worms. Worms is, again, in the central Rhineland, but Buchard gathered his material from all over Western Europe to assemble a general body of work for the use of the Latin Church. This is as true of its nineteenth section as the others, this being a manual for the use of priests hearing confessions and prescribing penances for specific sins. As part of its remit, it listed a number of popular beliefs which Burchard’s church deemed to be erroneous and harmful and to merit atonement, and after which confessors were directed to enquire. One of these passages repeats the canon ‘Episcopi’ but adds the name Herodias to that of Diana as the leader of the nocturnal rides: this version of the text was to be repeated through the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. Another reads ‘Have you believed that there is any woman who can do that which some, deceived by the Devil, insist that they must do of necessity or because he commands, that is with a host of demons transformed into the shapes of women (which the deluded populace calls Holda), ride on certain animals during particular nights . . .?’ Burchard included two more traditions by which women – and it was always women – were believed to leave their beds in spirit form at night and gather for different purposes, covering great distances and seemingly flying through the air: the night was, at least in imagination, a busy place for Western European females at the turn of the first millennium. The two quoted were, however, those who, clearly or possibly, named a superhuman leader for these.⁴

The bishop therefore gives us two more names, one definite and one possible, for that leader: Herodias and Holda (or in some versions Hulda). Each needs to be considered in turn. There is no apparent difficulty in identifying the origins of Herodias, who occurs in the New Testament as the woman who brings about the death of John the Baptist by prevailing on her royal husband to have him beheaded.⁵ As such, she makes a very neat fit with Diana, as the wickedest woman in the Christian Bible is neatly paired with the only pagan deity in it. She does, however, seem to have been a focus for genuinely popular belief during the period now considered, to judge from a statement by Ratherius, bishop of Verona on the Plain of Lombardy in northern Italy during the early tenth century. He complained that many people, ‘to the peril of their souls’, claimed Herodias ‘as a queen, even as a goddess’, and said ‘that a third of the world is her realm’.⁶

He was absolutely specific that the figure in question was the Biblical villainess responsible for the death of St John, and that both women and men made this claim for her. Tantalizingly, he does not mention any connection between her and night rides. Generally, his text was designed to chastise his fellow prelates of Italy, so it may be thought that the tradition he was recounting came from there. However, as a much-travelled churchman who himself came from Liège in the Netherlands, he might have picked up his information elsewhere. It remains inside the margin of possibility that the name Herodias was originally applied to a popular figure who had a different one, or none, by a churchman, in disdain and calumny, and then got spread into general culture by preachers. If the association did originate among the populace of some region, it is hard to imagine what would have persuaded a large number of commoners to take such a transgressive step of belief as to turn a Biblical villainess into a patroness – or at least to decide that others had done so. It may be that some garbling of the scriptural story had taken place: by the twelfth century, certainly, an apocryphal legend was reported that Herodias had been the daughter and not the wife of the king, and fell in love with John, who rejected her. It described how when, stricken by his death, she tried to bestow tears and kisses on his severed head, it blew her up into the sky, where she has wandered ever since, coming down to earth at night.⁷ This account repeated the claim that she had the allegiance of a third of humanity, and would provide a back story to account for her position as a leader of nocturnal ridings, though this connection is not explicitly made.

If the source of the name Herodias is problematic in this context, then the name, or expression, Holda is even more so. In the translation of Burchard’s Latin provided above, the word seems to be used to mean the cavalcade itself. It appears to be related to a set of terms in medieval Germanic languages with connotations of devotion, protection and affection, all positive associations which orbit around the idea of the roaming host as some kind of ‘good company’.⁸ It is not surprising that such apparent approbation was too much for one clerical copyist, who altered the term to ‘Unholda’ in his manuscript, to deliver the opposite message.⁹ Thus far, it looks as if this is a spectral cavalcade of the same kind as that described in the canon ‘Episcopi’, but either lacking a special leader or with the same one. The real problem is that Burchard’s text has a number of variant recensions, and one minority tradition of these has a different wording in the passage: ‘a host of demons transformed into the shapes of women (she whom the deluded populace calls the striga Holda)’. This, therefore (if rather clumsily) gives the host an apparent leader, called Holda.

The term striga would have had an unpleasant resonance for medieval churchmen. Its original meaning was of a non-human nocturnal being, the strix, whom ancient Roman culture represented as sharing physical characteristics with an owl or a bat and credited with sucking the life from young children, causing their decline and death. The name was then transferred by Latin-writing clerks, adapted into stria or striga, to a different kind of nocturnal horror imagined by the Germanic tribes which brought down the Western Roman Empire, and is recorded in their first law codes. This was a human woman who preyed at night upon adult men, using magic to remove fat or internal organs from their bodies and then consuming it in cannibal feasts with others of their kind.¹⁰ To conceive of Holda as a being and to apply such a term to her was to besmirch the night rides indeed and extend this to those who believed in them. Frustratingly, it does not seem possible at present securely to date the different versions of the text in relation to each other. It could be that the term Holda was first applied to the rides themselves, and that later somebody thought it more logical that it was applied to their leader and tidied up the text accordingly; or it might be that the word originally signified a superhuman woman who led the troops of beast-riders and that this was subsequently garbled into making it seem to apply to the latter. The latest thought seems to be that the earliest known manuscripts of the work are those in which the name refers to the rides.¹¹ It was the other usage of it, for a being, which was, however, to become dominant.

It may complicate matters still further that the name Holda is actually found much earlier, in a poem written by the scholarly monk Walahfrid Strabo, who lived on an island in Lake Constance on the border of Germany and Switzerland, in the first half of the ninth century. It was in praise of Judith, the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious, leader of the Franks, and compares her both to the great archaic Greek poetess Sappho and to ‘Holda’. Here the reference must surely be to the pious Old Testament prophetess Huldah, thus neatly pairing a classical with a Biblical cultural heroine; and the suggestion is strengthened by the fact that in the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, Huldah’s name is rendered as Olda.¹² It would be easy to dismiss any connection between the Holda of the poem and she of the night rides as a coincidence of names, but if a Biblical villainess such as Herodias could be taken into popular culture as a benevolent patroness, then it is possible that a Biblical heroine could have been.¹³

All this is both exciting and deeply frustrating. It seems that by the ninth century a popular tradition that ordinary women rode on animals at night in the retinue of a mighty female figure was well established, but we do not really know where, let alone how or why. To judge solely from the provenance of the texts in which it is first recorded, and the silence of those elsewhere, it seems to have been a feature of the Frankish cultural zone, covering modern France and Germany, with possibly an epicentre, like the texts, in the Rhineland. It was spoken of not as a feature of societies recently reclaimed from paganism, but of those securely within the Church’s embrace, with a full structure of serving priests. More cannot be said, partly because of the fortuitous effect of the survival of some sources and not others, and partly because the churchmen who wrote those sources were not interested in the matter. They had no incentive to enquire further into the origin or the details of the belief concerned because they were unanimous in dismissing it as a demonically inspired illusion. As a result, the being at its centre remains faceless and formless, and her followers anonymous and unlocated, merged into an undifferentiated mass of female commoners. To those who recorded it, it was not even an especially serious or menacing belief: a superstition held by silly and ignorant women and not a heresy or a feature of resurgent paganism. Those who admitted to it were therefore awarded relatively mild penances. The one certainty in the whole matter is that the condemnations made of it were ineffective, because it was to flourish and spread out during the next few centuries.

The Widening Source Base

During the twelfth century the condemnation recorded by Burchard continued to be repeated in further codifications of canon law and penitentials.¹⁴ Other clerical authors expanded the information available on the night rides. One was the Englishman John of Salisbury, writing in the 1150s: he had been educated in France and became a bishop there, and travelled to Italy as well, and drew on all three countries for information. He inveighed against the ability of the Devil to make people believe that they were doing things in actuality which they were only imagining, and took as an example the claim by some that:

a nocticula (female night-spirit) or Herodias or the ‘mistress of the night’ convokes nocturnal councils and assemblies at which they feast and revel; where some are punished and others are rewarded according to their merits. Moreover, infants are exposed to lamiae (child-killing demons) and some appear to be cut to pieces and greedily devoured, before by the mercy of the mistress, they are restored to their cribs . . . Indeed it is obvious from this that it is merely poor old women and the simpler kind of men who enter into these beliefs.¹⁵

In this account the night rides on animals seem to have been replaced by the holding of entertainments at a formal royal court, with the interpolation of a child-killing theme from the Roman tradition of the strix.

He was followed in the early thirteenth century by another French bishop, this time a native: Guillaume d’Auvergne, who held the see of Paris and a chair at its university. He introduces us (once again with a maddening lack of geographical specificity) to another kind of nocturnal female potentate:

the spirit who, in the shape of a woman, visits homes and storehouses at night. She is called Satia, from satiation, also Lady Abundia, because of the abundance she bestows on the said houses that she visits. She is the same kind of demon as those whom old women call ‘the ladies’ and in regard to whom they maintain this error, to which they alone give belief, in delusions and dreams. They say that these ladies consume the food and drink that they find in homes without devouring them completely, or even reducing their quantity, especially if the dishes holding food are left uncovered, and the containers holding drink are left unstoppered for the night. But, if they find these containers covered or closed or stoppered, they will not touch any of the contents, and that is the reason why the ladies abandon these houses to grief and bad luck without bestowing either satiety or abundance upon them.

1. The rude virility of this hill figure, presumed for most of modern times to be an ancient representation of a pagan deity, was long a powerful prop of the case that an active paganism had long survived in Christian Britain.

2. The frontispiece to Fludd’s seventeenth-century book of science and occultism depicts the concept of a female world soul linking heaven and earth.

3. Here we have a classic late medieval illustration of a Wild Man, dressed in leaves, of a kind which could transmute easily into the figure of the Green Man in pageants.

4. This is an absolutely classic late medieval foliate head, of the kind which was the primary inspiration for the modern figure of the Green Man. The figure is unusual, however, in being armed.

5. This fifteenth-century drawing testifies to the late medieval belief in Wild Women as well as Wild Men, and there may just be a faint echo in it of the belief in human women who rode at night in the entourage of a superhuman female.

6. The Green Knight, who features as the adversary and then friend of Sir Gawain in a famous fourteenth-century English poem, was often regarded in the twentieth century as a nature spirit also represented by the foliate heads in churches.

7. Morgan le Fay, originally Morgen, was the absolutely classic medieval ‘fay’, a human-like being possessed of magical powers, and is majestically represented in this late medieval illustration to an Arthurian romance.

8. The Arthurian wizard Merlin and the fairy queen of British literature and popular belief never met in story, but they do here in this painting, which is one of the best modern visual representations of the queen.

9. The Elizabethan author Spenser made one of the most successful and influential transmutations of the medieval romance tradition into early modern literature, and also one of the most famous literary personifications of the fairy monarch.

10. Fuseli’s ghostly eighteenth-century art provided a very effective medium for the visual depiction of the fairy monarch of late medieval and early modern romance.

11. Blake’s visionary artistic style created an especially memorable illustration of the fairy court of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

12. Shakespeare’s miniature fairy monarch, Queen Mab, is modernised into this sensual evocation of feminine beauty by Chalon in the early nineteenth century.

13. The German figure of Holle survived the Middle Ages to become one of the strongest modern aspects of the belief in a superhuman female being leading a nocturnal procession of spirts, and shown well in this nineteenth-century illustration.

14. Here Holle, under another of her popular names as Hulda, appears in a different guise, as a divine spinner. It is appropriately from an English version of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, of whom Jacob was the one who combined different medieval and modern traditions into the composite concept of the Wild Hunt.

15. A fine representation of the Cailleach Bheara, as the mighty Scottish spirit of winter imagined in modern folklore.

16. This famous modern painting portrays the Gaelic folk tradition of seasonal cavalcades made up of the beings known as sidhe or sithean and equivalent to the Lowland Scottish and English fairies.

17. Harrison was a distinguished Cambridge classicist of the Edwardian period, who became one of the most influential early British promoters of the idea of the prehistoric veneration of a single great goddess.

18. Frazer, another leading Cambridge classicist of the very early twentieth century, produced a very influential theory that all ancient human religion had been focused at least partly on the cult of a dying and returning vegetation spirit.

19. Lady Raglan, a member of the British Folklore Society, was the originator of the name and concept of the Green Man as an ancient vegetation deity which linked the medieval foliate heads, the folk figure of the Jack-in-the-Green and the forester figure of pub signs.

20. This picture is an excellent early depiction of the entertainment provided by chimney sweeps in south-eastern English towns and cities, in which the foliage-covered Jack-in-the-Green featured with other costumed characters.

21. The Wicker Man, released by Lion Films, is the classic example of the folk horror cinematic genre, but also one version of a much older British fictional trope, of the dire consequences of reviving or preserving paganism in a modern community.

He went on to claim that, although this belief was held by both sexes, it was mostly one of old women; after all, it was the females of the household who mostly maintained the home.¹⁶

A few decades later in the thirteenth century, a Franciscan friar, Bertold of Regensburg, whose preaching tours took him across most of German-speaking Europe, revealed the number of different activities in which nocturnal spirits were by then believed to engage. In one sermon he claimed that ‘the foolish peasant women indeed believe that the ladies of the night and night-roaming spirits visit their homes, and they set a table for them’. In another he told his audience that ‘you should not believe at all in the night-roamers (nachtwaren) and their fellows, no more than the hulden and the unhulden, in pixies (pilwitzen), in nightmares of both sexes (maren, truten) in the night-women (nachtvrouwen), in nocturnal spirits, or those who travel by riding this or that: they are all demons. Nor should you prepare the table anymore for the blessed ladies (felices dominae).’¹⁷ So it looks as if the tradition of the rides was still extant as well as that of the house visits and, given Bertold’s cultural range and use of vernacular terms, that both were found in the German lands. Also, one of the names given to the night rides by Burchard, Holde or Hulde, and one of names given to the alleged leader of them in a recension of his work, Unholde, had seemingly become attached to troops of benevolent and malevolent sprites, the hulden and unhulden.

In the second half of the thirteenth century, accounts multiply, in accordance with the better survival of sources. One such is the manual for fellow preachers written in the 1250s by the Dominican friar Etienne de Bourbon, who worked all over eastern and southern France. He told the story of a man in the southern mountain area of the Cevennes who claimed to spend nights with the benevolent women whom common people called ‘the good things’. To convince his priest of their existence, he got him to rise from his bed and straddle a piece of wood, which transported him to a place where he saw many women singing by torchlight and candlelight, and tables covered in food. The man advised the priest not to make the sign of the cross. Naturally, this happened, and the ladies all vanished (so making Etienne’s point, which was to emphasise their unholy nature).¹⁸

There is no mention here of a leader for the ladies, but she features prominently a couple of decades later in another French work which has been cited before: Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun. This condemned the folly of old women who claimed to wander at night with ‘Lady Habonde’ (Abundance) and her ‘good ladies’, saying that this gift was granted to the third child in every family. These fortunate individuals journeyed with their mistress three times a week, leaving their bodies behind in bed and travelling in spirit, so that they could enter locked houses through chinks and holes to make merry there.¹⁹ In 1280 the bishop of Couserans, in the French Pyrenees, renewed the canon ‘Episcopi’ in Burchard’s form at a council of his clergy, but added Bensozia (possibly meaning ‘the good companion’) to Diana and Herodias as the name of the leader of the rides.²⁰ In the early years of the following century, one of the best known of the new breed of heresy-hunting inquisitors, the Dominican friar Bernard Gui, enquired after belief in the night-wandering fairy women called the ‘good things’. Gui was from southern France and spent most of his career in different parts of it.²¹ Jacques Fournier, another famous inquisitor of the same kind and the same period, working in the same mountains which contained Couserans, examined a folk magician who claimed to have gained his knowledge by travelling with ‘the good ladies’.²²

By the late thirteenth century, the tradition of the house-blessing female spirits was also becoming the subject of multiplying cautionary tales designed to warn people off the belief. A collection of saint’s lives from the late thirteenth century, made in northern Italy but drawing material from far beyond, told of St Germanus that he had seen a friend lay a table at the end of an evening for ‘the good women who enter at night’. The latter duly arrived, with males as well, and Germanus’s host recognized neighbours among them – showing that it was believed that humans could join this company. The saint, however, used his powers to make the visitors confess that they were actually disguised demons.²³ A continuation of an encyclopaedia of information and advice told of how youths robbed a rich peasant by coming into his house dressed as the ‘good women’, dancing and informing him that they would restore a hundredfold all that they took away.²⁴

There are some obvious problems and questions in all this material which do not admit of clear solutions and answers. One is how much these references are rooted in the areas in which the documents concerned were issued. We can be fairly (though not absolutely) certain that Bertold’s night-wanderers were from the German-speaking area, and that Etienne’s ‘good things’ were actually reported in the Cevennes. Was Bernard, however, talking about a Pyrenean belief, or just repeating Etienne, and did the bishop of Couserans hear of Bensozia in his diocese or elsewhere? Too much of the context is missing to suggest a confident reply. The same lack leaves researchers equally baffled when considering whether the ladies who visited houses, with or without a leader, were another version of those who rode out with Diana or Herodias (or whomever), or whether they had an entirely independent origin. It is equally possible that they did indeed represent different branches of a diverging and spreading tradition, or else converging belief systems from different areas which were associated in the minds of the often highly mobile, educated and supranational churchmen and literary figures who recorded them. The amount of information which is missing makes any further understanding of the beliefs concerned virtually impossible to achieve.²⁵

Apogee and Contraction

In the course of the later Middle Ages and the early modern period, the tradition of night-roaming female spirits seems to have reached its furthest geographical extent and undergone a set of further developments. One was the appearance of a new character, known as Percht, Perchta, Berchte or Berchta. She was part of the Germanic linguistic zone, and first seems to appear in the thirteenth century, in a bare reference to ‘Lady Perchten’.²⁶ She starts to come into focus, however, in a pair of texts from the mid-fourteenth century.²⁷ One is a handbook of piety, the name of which translates as The Mirror of Souls. The passage concerned can be read as ‘they sin also who on the night of Epiphany leave food and drink on their table so that all shall go well with them in the coming year and they shall be fortunate in all things . . . Therefore sinners also are they who offer food to Percht and red shoes to the “shrieker” or to the nightmare.’ She thus takes her place in a set of Germanic spirits to whom offerings were left out by householders, and the first example seems to associate these with the medieval Christian feast of Epiphany, Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas holiday and a winter date seen by people as especially numinous. Another pious work from the same period seems to give her a menacing or comic character, terming her ‘Berchten with the long nose’. This is sustained in a Tyrolese poem from the opening of the fifteenth century, which states that women from the region claimed to have ridden out at night in companies of at least twenty, on calves, goats, cows, pigs, stools and cabinets, in the entourage of Herodias, Diana or ‘Percht with the iron nose’.²⁸ The old tradition of riding on animals had thus become both domesticated and associated with the relatively new character. One recent scholar has suggested on linguistic grounds that Percht was in fact a personification of the Epiphany festival, and as such fits into a general late medieval tendency to personify feasts as characters.²⁹

This picture is filled out slightly by a fifteenth-century Austrian academic, Thomas Ebendorfer, who identified Percht, as the spirit active at nights around Epiphany, with two other figures whom we have already encountered as visiting human houses and expecting food and drink in exchange for blessings: ‘Habundia’ and Satia.³⁰ In the same century, editions of the sermons of the German Dominican preacher Johan Herolt, like the Tyrolese poet, brought Percht into the rides of the canon ‘Episcopi’. One of 1474 stated that ‘Diana, commonly called in the vernacular Unholde, that is the beatific woman, goes about at night with her army, travelling across vast spaces’. It added that she did so specifically during the twelve days of Christmas. Four years later, another edition added ‘Lady Berthe’ to Diana and Unholde.³¹ A medical textbook, Thesaurus pauperum, went into explicit detail about how ‘Lady Percht’ or ‘Perchtum’, like the ladies Abundia and Satia, was believed to visit homes with her retinue. Those who left out food and drink for them were expected to earn wealth for their households, and Percht was abroad on nights between Christmas and Epiphany. Acceptable dishes were bread, cheese, milk, eggs, wine and water, and crockery and cutlery were also expected, for polite dining.³² The tropes of the night rides and house visits were being combined into a distinctive German seasonal tradition. Its association with midwinter was also found in northern Italy at this period: in 1423 the famous Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena inveighed at Padua against old women who worked as service magicians and said that they travelled ‘in the ride of Herodias on the night of Epiphany’. This combined the canon ‘Episcopi’ tradition with the new seasonality of the German references.³³

Another development of the late medieval period was a growing belief in, and fear of, devil-worshipping magicians who met together at night to pay homage to Satan or one of his minions, and feast and plan misdeeds. This was to flower from the 1420s into the stereotype of a satanic witch conspiracy which produced the notorious trials for witchcraft that were a feature of the late medieval and early modern ages. The now venerable belief system of the night rides and revels of female spirits could easily be transmuted into this far more menacing construct, which resulted in proportionately more savage punishment of those who claimed or were claimed to participate in the activities concerned. The western Alps and northern Italy formed the geographical crucible in which this lethal transmutation occurred, and a beneficial result of it for historians, though not for the actual people involved, is that it generated records of what the people who actually believed in the nocturnal spirits concerned testified about it. One of the earliest such cases is also now one of the most famous, a linked pair of trials at Milan in 1384 and 1390. They were of two women who stated that they had attended the ‘society’ or ‘game’ of ‘Lady Oriente’ weekly for many years and paid homage to her. They said that people did so in the form of humans, living or dead (including executed criminals, who appeared ashamed), and of every kind of animal except the donkey (who had carried Christ) and the fox. They feasted off livestock that were then restored to life, and visited tidy homes to eat and drink there and bless them. Oriente’s act of restoring the animals consisted of striking their bones and skin with a wand or staff. She also instructed her human followers in the arts of herb lore, divination, healing, the removal of bewitchment and the finding of stolen goods: all this was the standard trade of the service magician, which the defendants practised. One of the women declared that Oriente ‘would be like Christ, ruler of the world’, the other that the name of the Christian God could never be uttered in the presence of the lady. In the changing mood of the times, this counted as heresy, and things were hardly helped when one of the women (perhaps under duress) confessed to taking a demon as her lover. Having been sentenced to penance at the first trial, after the second they were burned at the stake.³⁴

The major and very dangerous alteration that occurred in the region and in the neighbouring Alps during the early fifteenth century was that such individual cases began to be regarded as parts of a much wider diabolical conspiracy to seduce wicked humans to follow Satan and use them to blight good people. In 1438, 1456 and 1480 witch trials of this new style in the central Italian Alps involved references to the ‘good society’ or ‘the lady of the revel’. In 1492 two preachers of the heretical Christian Waldensian sect, tried in a valley near the western end of the same mountains, were induced to confess to worshipping a list of diabolical entities including ‘Sibilla and the fairies’. Ultimately, this ‘Sibilla’ was almost certainly the ancient Roman prophetess the Sibyl of Cumae. The nocturnal lady (under various names) and her travels, feasts and games were to continue to feature regularly in north Italian witch trials into the early sixteenth century, and sporadically thereafter into the seventeenth.³⁵ Sometimes the records furnish vivid detail of the sort found at Milan in 1390. Two old women tried in the Val de Fassa, in the Dolomite mountains of north-eastern Italy, in 1457 confessed to belonging to the society led by a ‘the good mistress Richella’. She came to them by night, well dressed and riding in a cart, and, once they had renounced the Christian faith, led them to a gathering of people where they could feast, dance and make merry, and where (in apparent contradiction of the requirement to repudiate Christianity) hairy men ate those who had not been baptized. They claimed to have attended these for several years, during the Ember Days, which were three consecutive days which the Western Christian calendar set aside in each of the four seasons for fasting and prayer; they had acquired the reputation for being times at which spirits were especially active. The women made offerings to Richella and she stroked their cheeks with hands that were covered in hair; but they could not see her face because it was hidden by huge semi-circular and protruding ornaments in her ears. Their attendance at her parties was abruptly terminated, they explained, when they made the sign of the cross.³⁶

Other images of the lady emerge from subsequent north Italian trials. At the city of Mantua on the Plain of Lombardy in 1489, a weaver operating as a service magician was accused of getting children to gaze into a vase of water and report what they saw. They saw first a crowd of people, some on foot, others on horses and some without hands, and then an isolated figure, ‘the mistress of the game’, dressed in black with her head deeply lowered. She said that she could teach ‘the power of the herbs and the nature of animals’. At another of the cities of the region, Ferrara, in the early sixteenth century, women accused of witchcraft described how they had followed ‘the wise Sibilla’, but needed to avoid looking her in the face, which would have meant their death. In the Val di Fiemme in the eastern Italian Alps during the same period, a woman stated that ‘the mistress of the good game’ had a stone on each side of her eyes, which served to open or close them according to her will. Another said that the ‘mistress’ had a black band around her head from which hung patches to cover her eyes and ears so she could not see or hear, as everything she did see or hear ‘she makes her own, if she can’. Another explained that the ‘mistress’ travelled through the air, and that patches on either side of her eyes kept her from seeing everything, lest her gaze harm it. The group was equally in accord concerning the rest of the lady’s appearance. One described her as large and ugly, with a huge head; another as ‘an ugly black woman with a black smock and a black kerchief, tied around her head in a strange way’; while a third spoke of her as ‘an ugly brazen black woman, with a black kerchief wrapped around her head in a German manner’.³⁷ These members of the same community had clearly been trading ideas, or drawing on an existing fund in the neighbourhood.

It is hard to tell whether this widespread idea (within the northern Italian region) that the face of the superhuman mistress could not be seen was based on a sense that a being of such potency needed to be concealed from profane view or had a visage that would harm mere mortals, or was instead a means of escape from having to describe her more precisely. In general, the evaluation of the detail that actually is provided in such stray pieces of evidence suffers yet again from a crippling lack of known context. The crucial element of missing knowledge here is whether those details of the lady, her followers and activities were part of wider local traditions, or just generated by the particular individuals concerned, using their own imaginations (or dreams, or visions) to elaborate on a belief system which was only vaguely delineated in popular representation.³⁸

It is clear also that other mythical elements could be imported and integrated into the concept of the lady and her following, even at the end of the Middle Ages. One example of this is the concept of the Venusberg, a mountain inhabited by the classical Roman goddess Venus. That deity had become a common figure in medieval romance literature, with a range of connotations relating to her ancient role as patroness of love, from the sleazy, worldly and carnal to the noble and virtuous. It was also an international trope, by the fourteenth century, to locate her court within a mountain. By the fifteenth century, German authors tended to demonize her as an embodiment of sensuality, tempting humans away from salvation, and her palace under the Venusberg as a sink of corrupting pleasures. In that century this theme became blended with the figure of the medieval poet Tannhäuser to produce one of the great German legends, of the poet’s reception into her court, and his eventual repudiation of her and acceptance as fit for the Christian heaven.³⁹ The court of Venus and the entourage of the ‘good mistress’ had obvious similarities which set them on a convergence course.

One of these collisions was represented by the testimony of a service magician to judges in the Val de Fiemme at the opening of the sixteenth century that he had gone with a friar to the ‘Sibilla’s mountain’ in the central Italian Apennine range, also known as the ‘mountain of Venus where lived Lady Herodias’, to be initiated as a witch. Arriving at a lake, they met ‘a huge friar dressed in black, and he was a black’, who demanded that they renounce the Christian faith before they crossed the water, and that they accept the Devil. They found the door into the mountain guarded by a serpent, but got in and were met by an old man, ‘the faithful Ekhart’, possibly referencing the famous German mystic of the early fourteenth century Meister Eckhart, who was tried for heresy at the end of his life. He warned them that if they stayed more than a year they would never return. In the mountain they met ‘Lady Venus’ and her court, which included an old sleeping man, ‘the Tonhauser’. They then accompanied Venus to a witches’ sabbath, where they also found ‘the woman of the good game’. Subsequently, they went with Venus and her company on a Thursday night of the Ember Days of winter, riding black horses through the air, and circled the entire world in five hours.⁴⁰ The range of international cultural reference points in this narrative is considerable.

A different kind of melange, made from the same starting point, was provided by a Tyrolese woman, tried in 1525, who said that, on an Ember Day two years before, a woman had appeared to her leading a host of followers. She had declared herself to be Lady Selga, sister of Lady Venus, and ordered the woman to accompany her in the processions of human souls from purgatory and hell which she led in the parish. She added that the people to whom this invitation was made were those who lived virtuous lives, and that refusal meant death. The woman discovered that in the Ember Days this host would gaze into a basin and see those who would die in the parish in the next year. Lady Selga also claimed to know places where treasure was buried, which could be revealed to the devout.⁴¹ Where ordinary people like these could achieve it, there is no surprise that more learned individuals could make similar ventures of syncretism. In 1508 in Strasbourg cathedral in the Rhine valley, a famous German preacher asked in a sermon just after the spring Ember Days if his audience believed in women who travelled at night to ‘Lady Venusberg’. Into his portrait of this he mixed the rides of the canon ‘Episcopi’, the ‘furious army’ of the ‘Unholden’ (which here he seemed to take to mean the untimely human dead) and the legend of St Germanus, recounted earlier.⁴²

This richer source material also allows a better sense of the developing geographical range of traditions surrounding the night-roving lady or ladies. As shown, for the first few centuries in which one is recorded, it is found in the Frankish lands north of the Alps, represented by what became subsequently France and Germany, with an apparent epicentre, at least for accounts of it, in the Rhine valley. By the thirteenth century, this is still the location of the references, stretching from seemingly deep into Germany across southern France to the Pyrenees. By the fourteenth century, the belief system seemingly had a grip on northern Italy which reached into popular culture. In 1354 a Tuscan Dominican friar delivered a sermon in which he asserted that:

demons taking on the likeness of men and women who are alive, and of horses and beasts of burden, go by night in company through certain regions, where they are seen by the people, who mistake them for those persons whose likenesses they bear; and in some countries [i.e. regions] this is called the tregenda . . . There are some people, especially women, who say that they go at night in company with such a tregenda, and name many men and women in their company; and they say that the mistresses of the throng, who lead the other, are Herodias, who had St John the Baptist killed, and the ancient Diana, goddess of the Greeks.⁴³

The final part of this passage is framed in the familiar terms of the canon ‘Episcopi’, but the use of an Italian vernacular term, and the additional detail, indicates that the tradition had put down popular roots in the peninsula.

Thereafter, as seen, it became very widespread and well established in at least the northern third of the modern country, both in the mountains and on the plain. How much further south it spread on the Italian mainland is less certain: the Terra d’Otranto, the heel of the peninsula, has good records for early modern local belief which have been well studied and show no sign of the lady.⁴⁴ On the other hand, there is a reference in a sixteenth-century work of theology to women in an unspecified part of the south who believed in spirits called fatae (usually translated as fairies) for whom they prepared banquets and kept clean houses, in the hope that they would visit and bless the children.⁴⁵ Moreover, there is abundant evidence of an equivalent folklore further south still, in the island of Sicily. There a set of inquisitorial records kept between 1579 and 1651 testifies to a major belief in the ‘ladies from outside’, small groups of beautiful fairy-like women dressed in black or white, often with animal hands or feet, who had a leader variously known as ‘the queen of the fairies’, ‘the mistress’, ‘the teacher’, ‘the Greek lady’ (Greeks being exotic to the Sicilians), ‘the graceful lady’, ‘Lady Inguanta’, ‘Lady Zabella’ or ‘the Wise Sibyl’: there seems to have been no standard local name for her. Sometimes she had a male consort, or a male musician played lute or guitar as the ladies danced. Knowledge of them was claimed by the local service magicians, usually female (again), some of whom said that they went forth at night in spirit to join these companies and learned skills from them. The chief of those skills, logically enough, was to cure ailments caused by offended fairies. Sometimes one of these informants said that she had been elected queen for the night herself. At times the ladies visited houses to bless them, and at others held feasts or dances, or both. All those who claimed acquaintance with them were commoners, often poor and/or old.

Some of the testimonies were vivid, such as that of a service magician at Alcamo in 1627 who said that her local company was ‘the wise Sibyl’s people who came from a cave that was in the tower of Babylon and that the Sibyl was King Solomon’s sister’ and also the educator of the Blessed Virgin Mary who had wanted to be Queen of Heaven instead of her pupil. This woman had told people that she toured her town three nights a week with them, led by ‘the Matron’ who carried a torch which members alone could see. They had fine clothes and entered every house, danced and made music there, and blessed it with prosperity. An eleven-year-old girl reported that she had been visited six or seven times by apparitions of seven women in beautiful red and white clothes and Greek-style headdresses who came in dancing to a tambourine. One told the girl that she was Gracia, sister of the Queen of the Fairies, and her followers were called ‘the Company of Palermo’ (the island’s capital) and gave people riches. Sometimes both sexes were said to travel with these spirits, and also to be represented among them. One Palermo woman said that the ‘ladies’ went around ‘like a wind’, dressed up in the best clothes they found in chests in the houses they entered and made sweet music. She added that her son went out with them too and was locally popular as a result, as her late husband’s father had been. The ladies had beaten her for being unwilling to go with them herself and left her with an injured arm. She estimated that the group consisted of twelve women and eighteen men, and said that they were invisible to the occupants of the houses they invaded. This belief system was already present in the island by the late Middle Ages, which we know because the offence of claiming to travel with the ‘ladies’ was mentioned in a penitential written there in the late fifteenth century.⁴⁶

As said earlier, similar traditions were recorded in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the heart of the Pyrenees, and it would be strange if they had not extended across the southern side of those mountains into Spain. Indeed, there is a reference from late medieval Catalonia to ‘good ladies’ who visited houses and with whom women were sometimes said to go.⁴⁷ During the late Middle Ages, however, less is heard of this sort of belief in France, where it was attested so well earlier, and by the sixteenth century it seems to have more or less vanished from it. In Germany, by contrast, it was still flourishing then, though seemingly dividing into distinctive regional traditions that focused on different figures as its leader. One was Percht, who features in texts which, when they can be geographically localized, can be found to derive from southern Germany and Austria. The other was Holda, now emerging as a much more fully realized character than before. Indeed, she seems by the early sixteenth century to have become a figure who appeared in folk rituals, probably seasonal, to judge by references left by two figures of the early German Reformation. One was the poet Erasmus Alberus, who spoke of ‘Lady Hulda’ leading her company with a sickle in her hand, and the other Martin Luther himself, who described ‘Lady Hulda with the snout’ as entering dressed in straw and rags to the music of a fiddle.⁴⁸ This last portrait suggests that, like Percht, Hulda had come to assume a comic-menacing aspect, with a particular costume and appearance including a long nose. What seems to be the case is that, in sharp contrast to what was being described in Italy at the same time, neither lady was now thought to include living humans in her entourage, but only to visit them or their homes. This would explain why neither seems to have featured in the exceptionally numerous and intense German witch hunts of the early modern period.⁴⁹

On the other hand, living people were definitely swept up by the benign night-roaming spirits in the German-speaking Alpine region, and these experiences did sometimes feature in the trials there – not least because, as before and elsewhere, they were believed in some places especially to favour and instruct service magicians. By the sixteenth century their bands were thought to be of different kinds, even in the same district, some benevolent to humans and some frightening and menacing. These ‘night companies’, however, do not seem to have had a leader, save in those parts of Tyrol, as described, which bordered on the Italian-speaking region.⁵⁰ What had seemed to be a fairly homogenous cluster of customs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which had spread across the Alps and Pyrenees from its Frankish homeland and from the south-western edge of the French-speaking lands to a large part of the German-speaking region, was thus contracting and fragmenting into three regional variations: a German one in which the spirits travelled with a leader and visited but did not sweep up humans; a German Alpine one in which they apparently lacked a leader but incorporated humans in their travels as well as visiting them; and an Italian one in which they did both things with humans and usually possessed a leader.

They do not seem to have ever reached northern France, the Netherlands, northern Germany, Scandinavia or the British Isles. In the British case, that apparent absence can be obscured by two different factors. One is that erudite and cosmopolitan early modern British scholars quoted the work of their medieval and contemporary Continental counterparts, and sometimes referred to the night-roaming lady in the process. Thus, the seventeenth-century Oxford don Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, named Habundia as queen of the fairies as one of a list of spirits in which humans had believed or still believed.⁵¹ Since the Middle Ages, English authors had repeated the canon ‘Episcopi’ as an authority on popular belief, and assimilated it to native ideas: thus, Fasciculus Morum, a preacher’s manual from the early fourteenth century, had combined the nocturnal rides following Diana, in that text, with the indigenous tradition of beautiful elves who danced at night in wild places and carried heroes off to Avalon.⁵² James VI and I made a similar combination, by referring to ‘the wandering court of she whom the Pagans call Diana, among us called the Phairie or our good neighbours’.⁵³ Sometimes a British writer would repeat Continental texts without any attempt to mix in insular material, such as the author of the early fifteenth-century English moralizing tract Dives and Pauper, which condemned ‘observances in the new moon or in the new year, as setting of meat and drink by night on the bench to feed All-holde’, and then quoted the canon ‘Episcopi’.⁵⁴

The other factor that can obscure the absence of the ‘lady’ of the night travels from Britain is that in early modern Lowland Scotland the fairies were sometimes said to hold nocturnal rides of a similar kind. At the court of the young James VI, the poet Alexander Montgomerie provided a vivid portrait of them doing just that, with their king and queen, at Halloween.⁵⁵ This was not, however, a stock feature of British fairies, and it was even rarer for them to take humans along with them when they rode out: an exception was (allegedly) the magical healer Alison Peirson, who was satirized as being taken by the fairy queen in her entourage on its wild career across the eastern Highlands at Halloween.⁵⁶ The real relevance of the British queen of the fairies, in this context, seems rather that she made the importation of the Continental lady of the night journeys unnecessary. She provided just the sort of benevolent patroness, offering instruction, companionship and (sometimes) access to feasts and revels, personified by the lady on the Continent.⁵⁷ Her point of origin, as described, seems, however, to have been entirely different.

Origins

Until the present time, reasonably enough, those who have studied the medieval European night-riding tradition have assumed that it must have come down from pagan antiquity, and that the female leader must have once been a goddess.⁵⁸ There has, however, been little systematic attempt made by any to find one, or a set of them, honoured across a great expanse of western and central Europe in ancient times who could have retained the loyalty of enough people to generate the medieval myth.⁵⁹ The candidature of Diana has already been considered above, and the difficulties with it pointed out. Another classical Mediterranean goddess proposed for the role has been the Greek Hecate or Hekate, who was certainly well known to Roman authors and associated with the night, magic and the dead.⁶⁰ She suffers, however, from both of the factors which limited the candidature of Diana as a progenitor of the medieval figure(s): that she seems to have had no widespread and popular cult in the western half of the Roman Empire, and that she was never credited with visiting homes or including living humans in her entourage.

What Hecate did was guide the souls of the recently deceased down to the land of the dead and, conversely, those of new-born babies into bodily life. This being so, she could also find and gather lost and exiled souls and protect the living from them – or else inflict the living with them. She did not so much wander this world as between worlds, and as such was also a guardian of highways, gates and doorways, and the attendant and guide to Persephone, or Kore, as that goddess journeyed between the terrestrial realm and Hades at the change of the seasons. There seems to be no iconographic evidence of her leading a retinue of earthbound spirits (as opposed to a pack of dogs). Nor does she hold revels or ride. She is portrayed as a young woman running with torches in her hands or having serpentine hair crowned with oak leaves, or else with her back to a pillar and three faces, looking different ways to signal her special quality as a deity of crossroads and to symbolize the three realms of heaven, earth and underworld between which she travels. At times Hecate was regarded as an illuminatrix of darkness and finder of lost things and in a late antique mystery tradition she became a saviour figure, manifesting as a formless speaking fire to devotees. Cakes were offered to her at the full moon.⁶¹ None of these associations match the medieval construct, which, as shown, also rarely involves the dead (though there was a separate major medieval tradition of penitential nocturnal processions of deceased sinners and those who had died violently or before natural time, which lacked a female leader). Only two ancient references do at first sight have any similarity, and these have alternative readings. The late antique Orphic Hymn to Hecate hails her as ‘mystery-raving with the souls of the dead’, which seems to indicate her role of leading them to the underworld.⁶² A fragment of much older Greek tragedy has the line ‘if a night-time vision should frighten you, or you have received a visit from chthonic [underworld] Hecate’s troop’.⁶³ This seems to have been a joking reference to ghosts in general, and to mean that the person to whom it is addressed may be in danger of suffering nightmares or hauntings.

Logically, the most likely origin point for the medieval lady or ladies would be in ancient goddesses worshipped widely in their early heartland of what became the Frankish cultural province, in the Alps and north of them east and west of the Rhine. Here there are two, at first sight very promising, possibilities.⁶⁴ One was Epona, a deity found in virtually every part of the Roman Empire but especially popular across most of the provinces north of the Alps, from France to Hungary in modern terms. The epicentre of her cult was in the Rhineland and adjacent parts of what are now France and Germany. It was spread largely by the cavalry units of the armies stationed along the northern frontier, for she was essentially a goddess of horses, and so patroness of their welfare, breeding and performance and guardian of stables. She was linked to a range of classical gods, including Hercules and Silvanus. She may in addition have had some wider associations with fertility or prosperity, because her icons sometimes show her holding a dish of corn or carrying ears of it, and more rarely fruit or a horn of plenty, but these may have been intended simply as fodder for the horses which she is almost always shown riding, or beside which she stands or sits. Likewise, she is sometimes shown in company with fertility goddesses, which may be further evidence for such a wider function, or just to refer to horse-breeding. Sometimes on horseback she carries a bird, perhaps a hawk, or she is shown with dogs. Given her connection with riding, and the location of her ancient popularity, there are obvious links with the medieval lady – but also clear discrepancies. Epona is never portrayed with a company of followers, and the medieval rides were initially not on horses but on wild beasts, with which she was never associated, and later with a variety of domestic animals, never having any special equine character.⁶⁵

The other superficially attractive candidate for an origin point is a set of goddesses known as the Matres or Matronae, the ‘Mothers’ or ‘Ladies’, who were even more popular in the Western Roman Empire than Epona, while having their centre of veneration in just the same area as hers, of eastern France and the Rhineland. They are known only from images and inscriptions. The former take a standard pattern, of a trio of stately women, usually identical and standing or (more usually) seated in a row. They often hold dishes or baskets of food, or bread, fruit or flowers: emblems of fertility and prosperity. Sometimes one of them, in the same form, appears alone. Like Epona, they were especially venerated by soldiers, who accounted for most of their cult, and for whom, perhaps, they represented general protectresses and bringers of luck. It is not clear that the same three goddesses were being represented, as the inscriptions to them often refer to them specifically as the Mothers of particular provinces, military units or institutions (such as the parade ground or the household). As apparent givers of blessings, of abundance and prosperity, they would make good originals for the superhuman ladies who came to bless medieval homes – save for the fact that, again, there are discrepancies. The Matres and Matronae were never shown in motion or with a retinue; indeed their only, occasional, association with other figures is with an enigmatic trio of hooded human-like beings wearing distinctive hooded cloaks. These are referred to in inscriptions as the genii cuculati, the hooded spirits, and seem to function as guardians for the goddesses when they are portrayed with these: mostly they appear by themselves, or singly, and attract a cult of their own, apparently as protective spirits. There are no equivalents to them in the medieval myth, and the medieval ladies did not travel in trios, while the ancient figures were not associated with animals, and are never shown riding.

No other deities or spirits in the abundant evidence for religious belief in the Roman Empire make any better fit with the ladies of the night journeys and visits.⁶⁶ There remains a possibility that the latter were somehow inspired by equivalent figures from the pagan Germanic lands outside it. Here, however, we hit a major problem of evidence: that the ancient Germans had no writing and made no images of their deities in durable materials, and so we have an almost complete lack of knowledge of their goddesses. For reasons given above, neither of the German names of the medieval lady – Holda and Percht – seem clearly to have an ancient religious origin. There were, indeed, no names at all attributed to her which can be shown to have any linguistic derivation from ancient Germanic languages; and this would make a fit with the distribution of the medieval night-riding mythology. This was located overwhelmingly within the former bounds of the Roman Empire, and in those Germanic lands closest to it. The northern and eastern areas of the Germanic linguistic zone, those least affected by Romanization, were also those in which the tradition of the rides does not seem to feature.

There is, however, another body of source material on which scholars have regularly drawn in an attempt to fill the void of ancient evidence when reconstructing a picture of Germanic and Scandinavian paganism, and that consists of medieval Nordic literature, almost all of it Icelandic, which deals with pagan times and deities.⁶⁷ That literature does have a tradition of women who ride around at night, on enchanted physical objects or animals, sometimes clearly in spirit form, while their bodies remain behind asleep. The favourite object is a staff, followed by a hurdle, fence or roof, and the favourite animal a wolf.⁶⁸ Those who did so, however, tended to go alone, or in pairs, not in companies or with a recognized leader. The single association made between them and a deity in a medieval text is adversarial: the chief Norse god, Oðinn, boasts contemptuously of his ability to see such people ‘play frenzied in the air’ and thwart them by rendering them incapable of finding their ‘home shapes’, ‘true homes’ or ‘own skins’ again.⁶⁹ There are some references in this literature to nocturnal assemblies, for revels, but these are not of humans, but of trolls – the human-like and often malevolent creatures famously thought to haunt wild places in Scandinavian mythology, often with homes underground – or similar beings. In Ketil’s Saga, the hero meets a female troll hurrying on her way to meet others of her kind on an island. The narrator comments that ‘there was no lack of gandr rides in that place that night’: the term could refer to a kind of spirit or an enchanted object used as a steed, such as a staff or hurdle.⁷⁰ In one of the Tales of Thorstein, that hero follows a boy from the native Sámi (Lapp) people in a ride upon a staff to an underworld, to join a festival of its non-human inhabitants.⁷¹ Night riders, human or not, could be dangerous: in Eyrbyggja Saga a woman is accused of injuring a boy in her community on his head and shoulders by abducting him as he walked home after dark and using him as her steed.⁷² There is therefore some overlap with the tradition of the lady, but only in the broad sense of humans able to go by night to join the revels of non-human beings, which is a very common and widespread mythological trope.

A different sort of superhuman rider, this time clearly female and traversing great distances, is found in the same literature: the Valkyries, warrior maidens who in some accounts attended Oðinn and brought slain warriors from battlefields to function as recruits to his personal army. They are sometimes described in Old Norse poetry as winged, but more often as riding on supernatural horses which could cross sea and sky. There are also the Disir, described in one (late and most unusual) text as horse troops of superhuman female warriors clad in white or black, who seek the favour of human fighters and sometimes destroy them.⁷³ None of these beings, however, progress at night in companies behind a leader, or invite selected humans to join them; Oðinn may be served by the Valkyries but does not, apparently, accompany them. His own mythology, by contrast, is of a solitary traveller.

There is thus no known pagan goddess who can be identified as an obvious ancestress of the medieval lady or ladies. It remains entirely possible that elements of the ancient personae of Diana, Hera, Hecate, Epona, the Matres, the Valkyries or the Disir were employed to construct the concept of the latter. This is not, however, susceptible of any proof, and such a construction would still be a medieval one, in a form which has no precise or even close correspondence to what is known of ancient cultic belief and practice. It is equally possible that the medieval concept was generated as a new one in the centuries between the conversion of the regions concerned to Christianity and the composition of the canon ‘Episcopi’. Between the fifth and ninth centuries churchmen made many denunciations of popular beliefs, individually and in councils, and none contain any apparent references to night rides with the lady. Instead, the existing evidence suggests a very dynamic and successful popular belief system, which appears to history in the ninth century, spreads or incorporates related traditions through the rest of the Middle Ages, and then disappears from some regions and in others fractures into distinctive local variations. Its success was clearly related to the needs which it served among many medieval commoners, especially women, in enabling them to cope with established social and economic structures that worked to their disadvantage and give them some pride, reputation and imagined or envisioned wish fulfilment.

Aftermath

In the regions in which it still existed by the end of the Middle Ages, and in those distinctive forms, the tradition put down deep popular roots. Holda (also known as Hulda, Holle, Hulle or Holl) survived into modern times as a major figure in central German folklore, especially well known in Hesse and Thuringia but also found in southern Saxony and Franconia. She was essentially benevolent, bringing fertility to the land and blessing spinners: at times she appeared in the guise of a spinning wife. Her realm was mostly the sky and the air, and she was especially associated with winter, snowflakes being said to be feathers from her bed. Between Christmas and Twelfth Night she travelled about in a wagon to bless the fields, and she was also believed to bathe in lakes and fountains. However, there was also a darker aspect to her, for she could ride the winds clothed in terror, inflict ill fortune on untidy houses, appear as old and hideous, and lead a host which included malevolent spirits, witches and the souls of unbaptized babies.⁷⁴ In her more kindly aspect she is still a figure in German popular culture today, and so known to an international audience.

Much the same is true of Percht (also Perchta or Berchte) in her more southerly range, which in the nineteenth century comprised parts of Alsace, Swabia, Switzerland, Bavaria and Austria. Like Holda, she was abroad during the twelve days of Christmas, and was a patroness of neat homes and spinners. She was also, however, much more clearly and regularly menacing, punishing bad children and social transgressors, usually by cutting open their bellies. Sometimes she travelled with a company, often of children.⁷⁵ In Bavaria and Austria, at least, she remains a well-known folk figure. Likewise, between 1840 and 1940 roving nocturnal companies of spirits without an established leader were still a feature of the popular imagination in most of German-speaking Switzerland and had the same varied character as before: some were black-clad figures who processed through villages to warn of impending mortality, others were violent spirit armies or hunts, dead humans, flights of witches or human-like figures of unearthly beauty who danced and feasted and welcomed human observers.⁷⁶ Likewise, in Italy the medieval and early modern lady of the ‘good game’ probably gave rise to the popular figure of Befana, who had appeared by the early nineteenth century as an old woman who flew around on the eve of the feast of Epiphany giving presents to children: her name is often thought to derive, as that of Percht may have done, from a local name for the festival itself. Her identity with the earlier being is strongly suggested by the fact that some Italians in the earlier records called her Herod’s daughter, according to the medieval legend that mistook Herodias for that, rather than, as in the Bible, his wife.⁷⁷

Herodias was, moreover, to have some more surprising modern afterlives. One was in Romania, a distant eastern outlier to her European range, where she is fairly clearly the ‘Irodeasa’ who is known in the twentieth century as queen of the local fairies. Those appeared usually as beautiful white-clad maidens who could either heal or (more usually) blight humans, and who were especially powerful at the early summer feast of Pentecost – Whitsun, in English. They were linked in a close relationship, both imitative and adversarial, with the cǎlus, a small closed group of men who went from door to door in villages at that season, presenting dances and plays that were supposed to protect the fertility of the local farmlands, and sometimes to cure individuals with mysterious ailments. As such, they were the opponents of the fairies – who were a principal source of the danger to crops and the human ailments – but they were also said by some to have learned the dances from them, while in the region of Transylvania the performers were formerly said to have taken Irodeasa as their patron.⁷⁸ The other unexpected reappearance of the Herodias of the rides was in a unique text (cited earlier) published by the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland in 1899. He represented it as being the ‘gospel’ of a pagan witch-religion in central Italy which had survived there in secret since the Middle Ages. He claimed to have been given it by an Italian service magician, who had found the information in a mountain valley near Siena and copied it into a single book for him; it was not made clear whether she had taken it from a comparable single written source, verbatim, or collected it from several different sources, including oral testimony.

It was prefaced by a creation myth found nowhere else which brought together the Diana and Herodias of the Burchard version of the canon ‘Episcopi’ with a form of the Christian Devil in a family relationship. Thus, it had Diana, goddess of darkness, mate with her brother Lucifer, god of light, after his expulsion from heaven, so engendering a daughter, ‘Aradia’ (an Italian form of Herodias). When the latter was grown, Diana sent her to teach witchcraft and poisoning to humans who had taken to the mountains as bandits to resist the oppression of their feudal lords. Aradia duly did so, and instructed her pupils to meet naked in a wild place each full moon to adore Diana, as goddess of witches. They were to hold a sexual orgy and share crescent-shaped cakes baked and consecrated in the names of Diana and Cain. The secret witch cult thus formed was instructed by Aradia to endure until the last of the upper-class oppressors was dead; and then she returned to her mother, who thereafter granted magical powers to those who worshipped her as her daughter had urged. An appendix to this myth described how Diana had been the first created being, and divided into two to produce Lucifer. The rest of the book consisted of magical invocations and spells calling on the powers given by Diana, to which Leland had added other spells from different sources, and further traditions concerning Diana and other nocturnal spirits.⁷⁹ The portrait thus created is that of the nocturnal revels of the ‘lady’ and her followers, as diabolized in the early modern Italian witch trials, combined with outright class warfare. Leland himself noted its similarity to the medieval rebel witch religion created out of the imagination of the politically radical French historian Jules Michelet almost forty years before (which Leland took as historical). He shared Michelet’s political attitudes and suggested that the document given to him was either one holy text of that religion or the main one. Nothing like it has ever been discovered elsewhere, and no actual trace has been found of the Italian witch religion that it portrays. It therefore remains an enigma, but one which has played an important role in the development of the viable and successful modern pagan witch religion of Wicca.⁸⁰

Looking back at the figures of the night-roaming lady or ladies over the centuries, the most striking common feature of most of them is her or their essential goodness. There is no sense here that formulae like ‘the good women’ or ‘the good game’ are equivalent to the circumlocutory references to fairies, elves and similar beings as ‘the good neighbours’, attempts to propitiate and ward off potentially dangerous entities. The names that common people themselves gave the lady of the night overwhelmingly have connotations of abundance, satiation, wisdom, exotic opulence and benevolence. She was above all a generous and gracious patroness who provided for the needs of poor, malnourished and marginalized people. She was also extremely transgressive, roaming around at night when respectable people slept and frightening and threatening entities were abroad, riding on wild animals with her entourage, making her way uninvited into people’s homes and slaughtering the livestock of farmers to feed her followers before restoring it to life, even as she and her fellow spirits removed the traces of their depredations in cellars and larders. As part of this, she was utterly un-Christian, never being assimilated to female saints even in the most beneficent of her activities and never apparently rendering homage to the Christian God (and, in some later accounts, asking her new recruits actually to forsake Christianity). She effectively ignored established structures of politics and religion, and her very identity as a female leader with no apparent superior was in itself a violation of their norms. If the name taken for her from a Biblical villainess, Herodias, was indeed assimilated by commoners even while the character was given a redeeming new story, this would make a good fit with a personality who managed to be quite shockingly rebellious without also – most of the time – having any negative qualities. As such, she is one of the great counter-cultural figures of the human record.