An Encyclopedia of Fairies_ Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures ( PDFDrive.com )

Jacobean fairies 238

From Oberon, in fairyland,
The king of ghosts and shadows there,

Mad Robin, I at his command.

Am sent to view the night-sports here

What revel-rout

Is kept about
In every corner where I go,

I will o'ersee.

And merry be.
And make good sport, with ho, ho, ho!

More swift than lightning can I fly
About this airy welkin soon,

And, in a minute's space, descry
Each thing that's done below the moon:
There's not a hag.
Nor ghost shall wag,
Nor cry, ware Goblin ! where I go
But Robin I
Their feats will spy,

And fear them home, with ho, ho, ho

If any wanderers I meet.
That from their night-sport do trudge home,

With counterfeiting voice I greet.

And cause them on with me to roam;

Through woods, through lakes,
Through bogs, through brakes.
O'er brush and brier, with them I go,
I call upon

Them to come on.
And wend me laughing, ho, ho, ho

In the course of the thirteen verses, all the Puckish activities are covered.

As for the DIMINUTIVE FAIRIES, the descent to triviality is well seen
in Drayton's Nimphidia. The fairies in a midsummer night's dream

are small, but they are still formidable. Their dissensions affect the

seasons, they have power over the unborn offspring of mortals ; they can

bless and ban. Though they are small, they can assume human size and

Wethey have the power of rapid motion. have only to compare this with

Drayton's flustered, frustrated oberon and the little ladies of mab's

court, bustling about tearing their tiny ruffs and dropping their little

gloves. The whole pleasure in them is in their littleness. It is a court

intrigue through a minifying-glass. herrick's fairies are in the same

vein, with a hint of scurrility about them which reminds us that the

fairies were fertility spirits.

239 Jeflferies, Anne

Towards the end of the 17th century, we reach the nadir of the
fairies' powers with the Duchess of Newcastle's fairies, who are no bigger
than microbes. After that, we have to wait for the Romantic revival and

the rebirth of folklore.

Jeannie of Biggersdale. An evil spirit of the North Riding of Yorkshire
who lived at the head of the Mulgrave Woods in Biggersdale. She was
much dreaded, but one night a bold young farmer, rather flown with
wine, betted that he would rouse her from her haunt. He rode up to
Mulgrave Wood and called to her to come out. She answered angrily:
*rm coming.' He made for the stream with her hard on his heels. Just as
he got to the water she smote at his horse and cut it clean in two. He

shot over the horse's head and landed safe on the far side, but the hind-
quarters of the poor beast fell on Jeannie's side of the stream.

Jefferies, Anne. The affair of Anne Jefferies of St Teath in Cornwall

and the fairies caused almost as great a stir, even in the troubled times

of the English Civil War, as the notorious case of the Demon Drummer
of Tedworth. It is better documented than many other cases, which

appeared only in pamphlets. There was even a letter about her in the
Clarendon Manuscripts as early as March 1647, and in 1696, while Anne
was still alive, Moses Pitt, the son of Anne's old master and mistress,
wrote a printed letter to the Bishop of Gloucester in which he gives an
account of Anne Jefferies's later life and of his early memories. Moses
Pitt was only a boy when Anne, at the age of nineteen, came into service
to his parents. In 1645 she fell into a fit, and was ill after it for some time,
but when she recovered she declared that she had been carried away by
the fairies, and in proof of this she showed strange powers of clairvoyance

and could heal by touch. The first she healed was her mistress. After a
time, Anne told some of her fairy experiences, and these are retold by

HUNT in Popular Romances of the West of England (pp. 127-9), who also

summarizes and gives extracts from Moses Pitt's letter in an appendix

(pp. 470-71).

Anne was a clever girl, full of enterprise and curiosity, though she
never learned to read. Her curiosity was chiefly excited by the stories she
had heard of the fairies, and she was always searching for them. It was
the tiny fairies of the West Country that she was looking for, and she
was often out after sunset turning up the fern leaves and looking into the

foxglove bells, singing,

* Fairy fair and fairy bright;

Come and be my chosen sprite.'

And on fine moonlight nights she would roam down the valley, singing,

'Moon shines bright, waters run clear,

I am here, but where's my fairy dear } '

Jefferies, Anne 240

The fairies afterwards told her they heard her well enough, and would

run from frond to frond of the fern as she was searching. In the end they
decided to show themselves.

Anne was knitting one day in a little arbour just outside the garden
gate when she heard a rustling among the branches as if someone was
peeping at her. She thought it was her sweetheart and took no notice.
There was silence for a while, except for the click of her needles; then
the branches rustled again and there was a suppressed laugh. Anne said
rather crossly, 'You may stay there till the cuney grows on the gate ere
ril come to 'ee. ' Immediately there was a tinkling sound and a ringing,
musical laugh. Anne was frightened, for she knew it was not her sweet-
heart's, but she stayed where she was, and presently she heard the garden
gate open and shut gently, and six little men appeared in the arbour.
They were very beautiful, all dressed in green and with the brightest of
eyes. The grandest of them had a red feather in his cap and spoke to her
lovingly. She put her hand down to him. He jumped on to her palm and
she lifted him up on to her lap and he clambered up to her bosom and
began kissing her neck. She was perfectly charmed with the little gentle-

man's love-making and sat there in ecstasy until he called his five
companions and they swarmed up her skirts and dress and began to kiss
her chin and cheeks and lips, and one put his hands over her eyes. She

felt a sharp pricking and everything was dark. Then she was lifted into
the air and carried she knew not where, until she felt herself set down,
and someone said, 'Tear! tear!' Her eyes were opened again and she

found herself in a gorgeous fairyland.
She was surrounded by temples and palaces of gold and silver; there

were trees covered with fruit and flowers, lakes full of golden and silver
fish and bright-coloured birds singing all around. Hundreds of splendidly
dressed people were walking in the gardens or dancing and sporting or

reposing themselves in flowery arbours. Anne herself was dressed as
finely as any of them. To her surprise they seemed no longer small, but
of human size. Anne could have stayed forever in that happy place. She
was surrounded and courted by her six friends, but the finest of them
still made her his prime favourite, and presently they managed to steal
away together and were in the height of happiness when there was a
clamour, and her five followers broke in on them, followed by an angry
crowd. Her lover drew his sword to protect her, but he was wounded and
fell at her feet. The fairy who had first blinded her put his hands over her
eyes again. She was whirled up into the air with a great humming, and
at length regained her sight to find herself lying on the floor of the arbour
surrounded by anxious friends.

Anne never revisited Fairyland, but the fairies did not withdraw their
favours. They were with her constantly (though no one else could see
them), and nourished her with fairy food. Moses Pitt says in his

letter:

241 Jeflferies, Anne

She forsook eating our victuals, and was fed by these fairies from that
harvest time to the next Christmas-day; upon which day she came to
our table and said, because it was that day, she would eat some roast
beef with us, the which she did - I myself being then at the table.

He adds later that Anne 'gave me a piece of her bread, which I did eat,

and I think it was the most delicious bread that ever I did eat, either

before or since'.

After her illness, Anne became very fervent in her devotions, though

it was the church Prayer Book that she wished to hear, for she was a

fervent Episcopalian and all her prophecies were of ultimate victory to

the king. People resorted to her for cures from Lands End to London,

and her prophecies had great vogue. It was these even more than her

dealings with the fairies which caused her to be prosecuted. She was

arrested in 1646 at the suit of John Tregeagle, who was to attain a post-
humous supernatural reputation as the Demon Tregeagle, some stories
of whom Hunt also tells. He committed her to prison and gave orders

that she was not to be fed, but she made no complaints and continued in

good health. In 1647, the Clarendon Correspondence notes, she is

detained in the house of the Mayor of Bodmin and is still not fed. In the

end she was released, went into service with a widowed aunt of Moses

Pitt and married a labourer named William Warren.

Moses Pitt was a printer in London when he published the letter to

the Bishop of Gloucester, and since he could not himself visit Anne

MrJefFeries, he sent an old friend, Humphrey Martin, to whose little

daughter Anne had once given a silver cup from the fairies, to confirm

her account of her fairy experience. She would tell him nothing. He

wrote:

As for Anne JefFeries, I have been with her the greater part of one
day, and did read to her all that you wrote to me; but she would not
own anything of it, as concerning the fairies, neither of any of the cures
that she did. She answered, that if her own father were now alive, she
would not discover to him those things which did happen then to her.
I asked her the reason why she would not do it; she replied, that if she
should discover it to you, that you would make books or ballads of it;
and she said she would not have her name spread about the country
in books or ballads of such things, if she might have five hundred
pounds for it.

Poor Anne had no desire to suffer again the things she had suffered at

Justice Tregeagle's hands.

The subject-matter of Anne's delusion, the type of fairies that occurred

to her, are of great interest. In this remote part of Cornwall, not fifty

years after the first performance ofa midsummer night's dream, we

have an illiterate country girl building up a courtly Fairyland of

Jenny Greenteeth 242

DIMINUTIVE FAIRIES With all the minutcness and amorousness of the
fairies in Shakespeare, Drayton and herrick. It is clear that the poets

built on a real country tradition.
[Motifs: F235.3; F236.1.6; F239.4.3; F282; F301; F320; F329.2;
F343I9;f37o]

Jenny Greenteeth. There are many nursery bogies, invented by

mothers and nurses to inculcate good behaviour or to keep children from

Adanger. good many of these last are designed to keep children from

rivers and ponds. The Lancashire version of these is Jenny Greenteeth,
who is supposed to seize children in her long, green fangs and drag them
down into stagnant pools at the river's edge. Her counterpart in the
river Tees is peg powler.

[Motifs: F420.1.4.8; F420.5.2]

Jenny Permuen. The heroine of hunt's story, *The fairy widower',
a rather less detailed and interesting version of 'cherry of zennor'.

Jimmy Squarefoot. This curious apparition is described at some length
Aby Walter Gill in Manx Scrapbook (pp. 356-7). He haunted all round

the Grenaby district of Man, and in later times he appeared as a man

with a pig's head and two great tusks like a wild boar's. Formidable
though he looked, he does not seem to have done great damage. In
earlier times he was a giant pig, and was ridden over land and sea by a

FOAWR who lived on Cronk yn Irree Lhaa. Like most Foawr, he was

himself a stone-thrower, and he seems usually to have thrown his stones

at his wife, with whom he was on very bad terms. Gill suggests that she
may have been theCAiLLAGHNYGROAMAGH, who lived in exactly that

locality : one of the rocks was Greg yn Arran, and another, which was a
wide miss, fell at Cloughur in the south. The wife left him, and he him-

self presumably followed her, but they left their steed behind. After that
he assumed a semi-human form and roamed about the countryside, pos-

sibly as far as Glen Rushen, where aBUGGANE appeared which changed

its shape between that of a black pig and a man.

[Motifs: A963.5; F511.0.9; F531.4.11]

Joan the Wad. One of the local and obscure types of iGNis fatuus,

and, though she has lately been publicized as one of the Cornish

PISKIES, we owe our knowledge of her to Jonathan Couch's History of

Polperro. She has, however, the distinction of being invoked in a rhyme:

*Jacky Lantern, Joan the Wad . . .'. From her tickling habits it seems

likely, as Couch claimed, that she was a pisky, and the probability is that,

if properly invoked, she and jacky lantern would lead travellers

aright instead of misleading them.

[Motif: F491]

243 'Kate Crackemuts'
Joint-eater. The name given by kirk to what the Irish call 'Alp-
Luachra'; but, according to Kirk, this Joint-eater is a kind of fairy who
sits invisibly beside his victim and shares his food with him. In The
Secret Commonwealth (p. 71) he says:

They avouch that a Heluo, or Great-eater, hath a voracious Elve to
be his attender, called a Joint-eater or Just-halver, feeding on the Pith

or Quintessence of what the Man eats; and that therefoir he continues

Lean like a Hawke or Heron, notwithstanding his devouring Appetite.

In Ireland this phenomenon is accounted for by the man having
swallowed a newt when sleeping outside by a running stream. In Douglas
hyde's Beside the Fire, there is a detailed account of a man infested by

a pregnant Alp-Luachra, and the method by which he was cleared of the

thirteen Alp-Luachra by Mac Dermott the Prince of Coolavin. In all the

stories the method is the same: the patient is forced to eat a great quantity
of salt beef without drinking anything, and is made to lie down with his
mouth open above a stream, and after a long wait the Alp-Luachra will
come out and jump into the stream to quench their thirst. But this is
folk-medicine, not fairy-lore; it is Kirk who attributes the unnatural
hunger to an Elf (see elves).

*Kate Crackernuts'. An unusual Orcadian tale, collected by D. J.

Robertson and published in Folk-Lore (September 1890). It is a tale of
enchantment and disenchantment, and the fairy power to draw humans

into their hills and to wear out their lives with dancing.
Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, and they each had a

daughter called Kate. But the king's Kate was far bonnier than the
queen's Kate, and the queen was jealous of her stepdaughter's beauty and
determined to spoil it, but the two Kates loved each other dearly. So the
queen went to the hen-wife, her wicked crony, and took council with her.

* Send the bonny burd to me one morning, first thing,' said the hen-

wife, *and I'll spoil her beauty for her.'

So next day the queen sent the king's Kate down to the hen-wife to

fetch a basket of eggs for their breakfast. It happened that Kate was
hungry, and as she passed the kitchen she snatched up a bannock and
munched it on her way. She came to the hen-wife's, and asked for the
eggs. 'Go in hen and lift the lid of the pot while I get them,' said the

*Kate Crackernuts' 244

hen-wife. The king's Kate lifted the lid, and a great steam rose up, but

she was none the worse for that.

* Go home to your minnie,' said the hen-wife, * and tell her to keep her

larder door better snibbit.'
Next day the queen saw Kate as far as the palace door ; but on the way

to the hen-wife's she spoke to some reapers in the field, and they gave
her some ears of corn, which she ate as she went. Again she went home
scatheless, and the hen-wife said: *Tell your minnie that the pot winna

boil if the fire's away.'

The third day the queen went with her to the hen-wife's, and when

Kate lifted the lid of the pot, a sheep's head rose out of it and fastened

on her shoulders, covering her own pretty head.
The queen was delighted, but the queen's Kate was very angry. She

wrapped her sister's head in a linen cloth, and took her by the hand, and
they went out together to seek their fortunes. They walked until they got
to the next kingdom, and the queen's Kate went to the palace, and got
work as a kitchen-maid, and leave to keep her sick sister in the attic. The

eldest son of the king was very ill. No one knew what ailed him, and all
who watched by his bed at night disappeared. When the queen's Kate

heard this she offered to watch by his bed for a peck of silver. All was
quiet till midnight; then the prince rose and dressed like one in a daze,
and went out and mounted on his horse. Kate followed him, and jumped
up behind him. They rode through a close wood of hazels, and Kate
picked the nuts as she passed. Soon they came to a fairy mound, and the
prince said: *Let the prince in with his horse and hound,' and Kate said: