Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft

radiance as to dispel at once those clouds of superstition which continued to obscure the understanding of hasty and ill-instructed converts, there can be no doubt that its immediate operation went to modify the erroneous and extravagant articles of credulity which lingered behind the old pagan faith, and which gave way before it, in proportion as its light became more pure and refined from the devices of men.

The poet Chaucer, indeed, pays the Church of Rome, with its monks and preaching friars, the compliment of having, at an early period, expelled from the land all spirits of an inferior and less holy character. The verses are curious as well as picturesque, and may go some length to establish the existence of doubts concerning the general belief in fairies among the well-instructed in the time of Edward III.

The fairies of whom the bard of Woodstock talks are, it will be observed, the ancient Celtic breed, and he seems to refer for the authorities of his tale to Bretagne, or Armorica, a genuine Celtic colony:—

'In old time of the King Artour, 
Of which that Bretons speken great honour, 
All was this land fulfilled of faerie; 
The Elf queen, with her joly company,

Danced full oft in many a grene mead. 
This was the old opinion, as I rede— 
I speake of many hundred years ago, 
But now can no man see no elves mo.

For now the great charity and prayers 
Of limitours,[39] and other holy freres, 
That searchen every land and every stream, 
As thick as motes in the sunne-beam,

Blessing halls, chambers, kitchenes, and boures, 
Cities and burghes, castles high and towers, 
Thropes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies, 
This maketh that there ben no fairies.

For there as wont to walken was an elf, 
There walketh now the limitour himself, 
In under nichtes and in morwenings, 
And saith his mattins and his holy things,

As he goeth in his limitation. 
Women may now go safely up and doun; 
In every bush, and under every tree, 
There is no other incubus than he, 
And he ne will don them no dishonour.'[40]

When we see the opinion which Chaucer has expressed of the regular clergy of his time, in some of his other tales, we are tempted to suspect some mixture of irony in the compliment which ascribes the exile of the fairies, with whih the land was 'fulfilled' in King Arthur's time, to the warmth and zeal of the devotion of the limitary friars. Individual instances of scepticism there might exist among scholars, but a more modern poet, with a vein of humour not unworthy of Geoffrey himself, has with greater probability delayed the final banishment of the fairies from England, that is, from popular faith, till the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and has represented their expulsion as a consequence of the change of religion. Two or three verses of this lively satire may be very well worth the reader's notice, who must, at the same time, be informed that the author, Dr. Corbett, was nothing less than the Bishop of Oxford and Norwich in the beginning of the seventeenth century. The poem is named 'A proper new Ballad, entitled the Fairies' Farewell, to be sung or whistled to the tune of the Meadow Brow by the learned; by the unlearned to the tune of Fortune:'—

     'Farewell, rewards and fairies, 
       Good housewives now may say, 
     For now foul sluts in dairies 
       Do fare as well as they;

     And though they sweep their hearths no less 
       Than maids were wont to do, 
     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 sprung from hence 
       Are now grown Puritans, 
     Who live as changelings ever since 
       For love of your domains.

     'At morning and at evening both, 
       You merry were and glad, 
     So little care of sleep and sloth 
       Those pretty ladies had.

     When Tom came home from labour. 
       Or Cis to milking rose, 
     Then merrily, merrily went their tabor, 
       And merrily went their toes.