The Fairy Superstitions

Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.

From The Rural Life of England by William Howitt, 1841.

The Fairies, which gave in old times one of the most interesting and poetical features to the country, have all vanished clean away. Of those supernatural and airy beings who used to haunt the woodlands, hamlets and solitary houses of Old England, they were the first to depart. "They were of the old profession"—true Catholics; and with Catholicism they departed; and have only left their interest in the pages of our poets, who still cling with fondness to the fairy mythology.

Bogards, barguests, ghosts, and hobgoblins, still in many an obscure hamlet and the more primitive parts of the country, maintain much of their ancient power, and continue to quicken the steps of the clown in lonely places, of the schoolboy past the churchyard, and to add a fearful interest to the winter fireside stories in cottages and farms.

Witchcraft, spite of what Sir Walter Scott asserted in his Demonology, is far from having ceased to have stanch believers in numerous places. Are not many of the Methodists firmly persuaded of demoniacal possession? It is not long ago that Mr. Heaton, one of their ministers, published a volume in support of this doctrine, and detailed a very extraordinary case of possession of a boy who mounted on the surbase of the room, and danced there, on a space where he could not for a moment support himself when not under this influence. In this curious book, which I sent to Sir Walter Scott, and which he assured me he meant to make use of, but was, no doubt, prevented by his quickly succeeding decline, is a minute account of all the process of praying the spirit out of the lad, of the dogged resistance of the demon, and their final triumph over him.

John Wesley was strongly impressed with a belief of such things, as maybe seen in his "News from the Invisible World," and in the pages of the old series of the Wesleyan Magazine. And if recent demoniacal possession be a living faith of the nineteenth century, witchcraft has no lack of votaries. In Nottingham, a town of seventy thousand inhabitants, I knew a shoemaker who stood six feet in height, and "might dance in iron mail," who lately lived, and probably still lives, in constant dread of the evil arts of witches and wizards.

On the lintel and sill of his door, he had the ancient charm of reversed horse-shoes nailed; but he said, he found them of little use against the audacious malice of witchcraft. He had standing regularly by his fireside a sack-bag of salt, for he bought it by a sack at a time for the purpose, and of this he frequently, during the day, but more especially on dark and stormy nights, took a handful, with a few horsenail stumps, and crooked pins, and casting them into the fire together, prayed to the Lord to torment all witches and wizards in the neighbourhood, and he believed that they were tormented. As I stood by the man's fire while he related this, it was burning with the beautiful purple hue of salt. On all other subjects he appeared as grave and sober as his neighbours.

In the obscure alleys of large towns, as well as in solitary situations, fortunetellers still live, and to my own knowledge draw many customers, besides the gipsies, who haunt there in winter time, and are the regular professors of palmistry. Witches, spectres, gipsies, and cunning people, still remain to diversify common life, spite of all the spread of education; but the fairies, pleasant little people, are gone for ever, and have been gone long. Chaucer, indeed, says that they were gone in his day.

In olde dayes of the king Artour,

Of which that Bretons speke gret honour,

All was this land ful filled of faerie;

The elf-quene, with her joly compagnie

Danced full oft in many a grene mede.

This was the old opinion as I rede;

I speke of many hundred yeres ago;

But now can no man see non elves mo,

For now the grete charitee and prayeres

Of limitoures and other holy freeres

That serchen every land and every strerne,

As thikke as motes in the sonne beme,

Blissing halles, chambres, kitchenes, and boures,

Citees and burghes, castles high and toures,

Thropes and bernes, shepenes and dairies,

This maketh that ther ben no fairies;

For ther as wont to walken was an elf,

Ther walketh now the limitour himself.

And Dr. Corbet, bishop of Norwich, who died in 1635, wrote the following interesting—

Farewell to the Fairies

Farewell rewards and fairies!

Good housewives now may say;

For now foule sluts in dairies,

Doe fare as well as they;

And though they sweepe their hearths no less

Than mayds were wont to doe,

Yet who of late for cleanliness

Finds sixpence in her shoe?

Lament, lament old Abbies,

The Fairies' lost command;

They did but change priests' babies,

But some have changed your land:

And all your children stolen from thence

Are now growne Puritanes,

Who live as changelings ever since

For love of your demesnes.

At morning and at evening both

You merry were and glad,

So little care of sleepe and sloth

Those pretty ladies had.

When Tom came home from labour.

Or Ciss to milking rose,

Then merrily went their tabour,

And merrily went their toes.

Witness those rings and roundelayes

Of theirs which yet remain;

Were footed in Queen Mary's days

On many a grassy playne.

But since of late Elizabeth,

And later James came in,

They never danced on any heath

As when the time hath bin.

By which we note the fairies

Were of the old profession,

Their songs were Ave Maries,

Their dances were procession.

But now, alas! they all are dead,

Or gone beyond the seas,

Or farther for religion fled,

Or else they take their ease

A tell-tale in their company

They never could endure;

And whoso kept not secretly

Their mirth was punished sure.

It was a just and Christian deed

To pinch such black and blue;

O how the commonwealth doth need

Such justices as you.

Now they have left our quarters;

A Register they have,

Who can peruse their charters,

A man both wise and grave.

A hundred of their merry pranks

By one that I could name

Are kept in store; con twenty marks

To William for the same.

To William Churne of Staffordshire

Give laud and praises due,

Who every meal can mend your cheer

With tales both old and true:

To William all give audience,

And pray ye for his noddle;

For all the fairies' evidence

Were lost if it were addle,

Possibly the fairies may yet linger in the dales of Ettrick Forest, where poor Hogg used to see them, and sung so many beautiful lays in their honour that he may be styled the Poet Laureate of the Fairies. But he is gone now—gone after many another great and shining light of the age, having made the shepherd's plaid almost as glorious as the prophet's mantle—and they may not choose to reveal themselves to another.

They may possibly yet pay an occasional visit to Staffordshire, the county of William Churne; and we have, indeed, heard of them doing some pleasant Miracles on Midsummer-eve on Calden-Low. If we are to believe the report of a certain little damsel, as given in Tait's Magazine, of June, 1835—

Some they played with the water,

And rolled it down the hill;

And this, they said, shall merrily turn

The poor old miller's mill.

For there has been no water

Ever since the first of May,

And a blithe man shall the miller be

By the dawning of the day.

O, the miller, how he will laugh

As he sees the mill-dam rise—

The jolly old miller how he will laugh

Till the tears fill both his eyes.

And some they seized the little winds,

That sounded over the hill,

And each put a horn into his mouth,

And blew so sharp and shrill.

"And there," said one, " the merry winds go

Away from every horn,

And these shall clear the mildew dank

From the blind old widow's corn."

O! the poor blind widow—

Though she has mourned so long,

She'll be merry enough when the mildew's gone,

And the corn stands stiff and strong.

And some they brought the brown lintseed,

And flung it down from the Low;

"And this," said they," by the sunrise,

In the weaver's croft shall grow."

O! the poor, lame weaver,

How he will laugh outright,

When he sees his dwindling flax-field

All full of flowers by night.

Then up and spoke a brownie,

With a long beard on his chin,

"And I have spun the tow," said he,

"And I want some more to spin.

"I've spun a piece of hempen cloth,

And I want to spin another;

A little sheet for Mary's bed,

And an apron for her mother."

And with that I could not help but laugh,

And I laughed out loud and free,

And then on the top of the Calden-Low

There was no one left but me.

And all on the top of the Calden-Low

The mists were cold and gray,

And nothing I saw but the mossy stones,

That round about me lay.

This deponent saith, that coming down from the Low, she saw all their benevolent intentions already realized. It is to be hoped that such visits may be again paid to Calden-Low, but we have our doubts.

The Pixies may possibly still haunt those caves and dells in Devonshire where Coleridge and Carrington saw them; but with those exceptions—and they received on the faith of poets, who take license—we believe they have all emigrated. In the lays of Shakspeare and Milton, they are made immortal denizens of our soil; and we shall never see moonlight, or come upon the verrings that still mark our plains and downs, without feeling and poetically believing that the fairies have been there.

In Wales, however, the common people still declare that they abide. Scotland may have given up the brownies, and kelpies, and urisks; and we may no longer have hobthrushes dwelling amongst our rocks, or Robin Goodfellow, alias Puck, alias Hobgoblin, playing his pranks, as in this confession:

Whene'er night-wanderers I meet,

As from their night-sports they trudge home,

With counterfeiting voice I greete,

And call them on with me to roame,

Through woods, through lakes,

Through bogs, through brakes;

Or else unseen with them I go,

All in the nicke,

To play some tricke,

And frolicke it with ho, ho, ho!

Sometimes I meet them like a man;

Sometimes an ox, sometimes a hound;

And to a horse I turn me can,

To trip and trot about them round.

But if to ride

My backe they stride,

More swift than wind away I go,

O'er hedge and lands,

Through pools and ponds,

I winny, laughing ho, ho, ho!

He may not come to play those pranks, nor as Milton has described his visits to the farm:

To earn the cream-bowl duly set.

The thrashing-machine has thrown the lubber-fiend out of employment; but the Welsh still declare themselves honoured by the continuance of these night-wanderers. They have still the corpse-candles; and hear Gabriel's hounds hunting over the hills by night, and stoutly avow that the fairies are as numerous there as ever.

There is a waterfall at Aberpergum, called the Fairies' Waterfall, where they are, almost any night, to be heard singing; and I have heard a very grave Friend declare that he has seen them dancing in a green meadow, as he rode home at night. How long, indeed, this may continue, one cannot tell; for old Morgan Lewis, who for fifty years has acted as guide to the beautiful waterfalls of Neath Valley, and is a most firm believer in all the Fairy faith, especially of their luring children away by assuming the form of their deceased relatives, and offering them fairy-bread to eat, which changes their natures, and they are compelled to join the Elfin troop—declares that they are now gone from that neighbourhood; that "the spirit of man is become too strong for them."

A fair friend has sketched for me the old man in the attitude of describing to a party the exact spot on which his father saw their very last appearance. Behind him rises the Dinas Rock, from time immemorial the sanctum sanctorum of Welsh fairyland; and old Morgan is exclaiming, "They are gone! they are gone! and we'll never see them more!"

Howitt, William. The Rural Life of England. Carey and Hart, 1841.

William Howitt

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