Month: October 2025

Early Accounts of British Faeries

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I’ve recently been asked to submit a contribution to a planned book looking at different aspects of the alternative history of ‘Albion.’ I chose to write about two of the earliest attempts at fulling describing and cataloguing the nature of British faeries: those by the Reverend Robert Kirk– the famous Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, which was written in the 1670s- which I contrasted to the books by the Reverend Edmund Jones from the late eighteenth century, in which he gave one of the first comprehensive surveys of Welsh faery belief. Readers may note here that both men were Christian ministers; in my recent post on vanishing faeries, I observed how the spread of Protestantism was antithetical to folklore belief. To this I should add the observation that many of the folklore researchers of the Victoran period were vicars, preachers and priests- a fact that may have further inhibited their interviewees in confessing to ongoing ‘superstition’ and is very likely to have encouraged them to push back faery accounts to an earlier generation, allowing them to retain a connection through grandparents but yet to deny actual contemporary credence. Kirk and Jones were quite different in that they shared so much of the parishioners’ belief in the supernatural and so were able more faithfully and frankly record local traditions.

Thinking about what to feature in the new book, though, I considered other possible British texts. Kirk was describing the Scottish sith folk, as they were known on the southern edges of the Highlands, west of Stirling. Another Scots source could perhaps have been Daemonologie (1597) by King James VI of Scotland (and later the 1st of England). As the title may indicate, this was written from the perspective of exposing witchcraft as a satanic cult, which means that much of what he wrote about faeries in relation to the alleged witches was tainted by his preconceptions. Nonetheless, he disclosed that the popular opinion was that the ‘Pharies’ would carry people away and that they lived under hills. They had a king and queen, with a “jolly court and train” and “were thought to be sonsiest [healthiest] and of best life.” Part of the reason they lived so well, the king wrote, was because the Good Neighbours “had teynd [tithe] and dutie, as it were” eating and drinking foodstuffs produced by humans. All of these elements are core features of British faery belief and are obviously authentic.

I also considered several texts from England, the first being Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Although written over a decade before James’ book, Scot took a starkly different stance and regarded witchcraft and faerylore as uniformly nonsense. Superstition, in his opinion, was just silly: “certainlie, some knave in a white sheet hath cousened and abused manie thousands…” he reported dismissively. Even though ghosts, bullbeggars, hobgoblins and Robin Goodfellow were foolish delusions only fit for children, Scot nonetheless helpfully gave quite a lot of detail about all the things he reckoned weren’t worth paying attention to. People danced with faeries and made offerings to them to have chores done, he reported:

“In deede your grandam’s maides were woont to set a boll of milke before [the incubus] and his cousine Robin good-fellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight: and you have also heard that he would chafe exceedingly, if the maid or good-wife of the house, having compassion of his nakednes, laid anie clothes for him, beesides his messe of white bread and milke, which was his standing fee. For in that case he saith; What have we here? Hemton hamten, here will I never more tread nor stampen.” (Book IV, chapter 10)

Regular readers will be very familiar with the idea that faeries and brownies will do household work in exchange for food and warmth, but will be driven off by gifts of clothes.

Witches were alleged to feast with the devil and the faery queen (“the ladie of the fairies”) but after the banquetting was done, although they had “eaten up a fat oxe, and emptied a butt of malmesie, and a binne of bread at some noble man’s house, in the dead of the night, nothing is missed of all this in the morning. For the ladie Sibylla, Minerva, or Diana with a golden rod striketh the vessell and the binne, and they are fullie replenished againe. Yea, she causeth the bullock’s bones to be brought and laid togither upon the hide, and lappeth the foure ends thereof togither, laying her golden rod thereon; and then riseth up the bullocke againe in his former estate and condition.” (Book III, c.2) The very same tales were later told of the Dartmoor pixies, for example, some three hundred years later. Lastly, Scot mentioned in passing three surprising aspects of Elizabethan faery belief: one is that they might be realted to witches’ familiars and that their names could be highly suggestive– he refers to “Tittie and Tiffin, Suckin and Pidgin,” for instance. Thirdly, there’s a clear indication that contemporary thought accepted that the faeries might look quite alien to our present notions: Scot speaks of “white spirits and blacke spirits, graie spirits and red spirits…” (A Discourse upon divels and spirits, chapter 33)

In 1635, Thomas Heywood published his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, which- as the name says- is a survey of the different ranks of angel in Judaeo-Christian belief. In its ninth book, Heywood gives us a couple of excellent verse snapshots of everyday British faery belief, first of all describing Puck and other domestic spirits:

“Pugs and Hob-goblins call. Their dwellings bee
In corners of old houses least frequented,
Or beneath stacks of wood: and these convented [gathered together],
Make fearefull noise in Buttries and in Dairies; Robin good-fellowes some, some call them Fairies.
In solitarie roomes These uprores keepe,
And beat at dores to wake men from their sleepe,
Seeming to force locks, be they ne’re so strong,
And keeping Christmasse gambols all night long.
Pots, glasses, trenchers, dishes, pannes, and kettles
They will make dance about the shelves and settles,
As if about the Kitchen tost and cast,
Yet in the morning nothing found misplac’t.”

Heywood also mentions the “Subterren Spirits”- what we’d now call Knockers– who “chiefely that in Mines and Mettals trade.” They work alongside miners, digging for ore, but also causing nuisances by putting out lamps, breaking ladders and stealing tools.

Heywood, Hierarchie

Thomas Hobbe’s famous political tract, Leviathan (1651), was written from a perspective equally as sceptical as Reginald Scot’s: in the author’s opinion, faeries were the product of ignorance, superstition and the lies of the Catholic church. It’s probably connected to this last reason that he also claims that the faeries speak Latin; like the faes singing in Latin in Thomas Randolph’s play Amyntas (1632), this is surely far more to do with both men’s education than with the actual nature of British faery folk . Hobbes firmly declared that the idea of “a whole kingdom of fairies and bugbears” that “walketh (as some think, invisibly)… in the dark” was just the “matter of old wives’ tales.” Yet, just like Scot, in dismissing all these fables, the writer also recorded them for the future. So it is that we learn that:

“The Fairies in what Nation soever they converse, have but one Universall King, which some Poets of ours call King Oberon… [they] inhabite Darknesse, Solitudes, and Graves. The Fairies also have their enchanted Castles, and certain Gigantique Ghosts, that domineer over the Regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on and brought to answer for the hurt they do… [they] are said to take young Children out of their Cradles, and to change them into Naturall Fools, which Common people do therefore call Elves, and are apt to mischief… When the Fairies are displeased with any body, they are said to send their Elves, to pinch them.

The Fairies marry not; but there be amongst them Incubi, that have copulation with flesh and bloud… It is in the Fable of Fairies, that they enter into the Dairies, and Feast upon the Cream, which they skim from the Milk.” (Leviathan, Part 4, chapter 47)

The key features of faery nature listed by Hobbes- the taking of changelings and the leaving of ‘oafs’ (elves), physical punishments of humans who vex them, the theft of our dairy produce and sexual relationships between humans and faeries- are all, still, central elements of British faerylore.

Lastly, in 1665, a second edition of Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft was published, to which an unknown author appended “A discourse concerning the nature and substance of devils and spirits.” This added considerable extra material to our overview of faeries as they were understood in the seventeenth century. The writer’s description of the status of the spirits may suggest that contemporray views had moderated somewhat from the time of Scot and James VI: he stated that “their nature is middle between Heaven and Hell and that they reign in a third Kingdom from both, having no other judgment or doom to expect for ever.” This seems to reflect the belief of some that faeries were fallen angels, trapped forever between heaven and hell- not fully demons and anxious, even, about their ultimate fate.

The Discourse continued, seeking to describe the physical nature of faeries and their habitations:

“To speak more nearly unto their natures, they … have their degrees of continuance, whereof some live hundreds, some thousands of years: Their food is the Gas of the Water, and the Blas [emanation] of the Air: And in their Aspects, or countenances, they differ as to vigour and cheerfulness: They occupy various places of this world; as Woods, Mountains, Waters, Air… Mines, and… also antient Buildings, and places of the slain. Some again are familiar in Houses, and do frequently converse with, and appear unto mortals.

They are capable of hunger, grief, passion, and vexation… when they are worn out, they return into their proper essence or primary quality again; as Ice when it is resolved into Water: They meet in mighty Troops, and wage warr one with another: They do also procreate one another; and have power sometimes to make great commotions in the Air, and in the Clowds, and also to cloath themselves with visible bodies, out of the four Elements, appearing in Companies upon Hills and Mountains, and do often deceive and delude the observers of Apparitions, who take such for portents of great alterations, which are nothing but the sports and pastime of these frolick Spirits: as Armies in the Air, Troops marching on the Land, noises and slaughter, Tempest and Lightning…” (Book II, c.1)

According to this writer, then, the faeries were close to humans in many respects, albeit of an insubstantial, spiritual nature, All the same, they could age, sicken and die- and could fight and kill each other.

Showing the influence of the revived classical learning of the Renaissance, the author of the Discourse classed together a range of native as well as Greek and Roman spirits:

“Terrestrial Spirits, which are of several degrees according to the places which they occupy, [such] as Woods, Mountains, Caves, Fens, Mines, Ruins, Desolate places, and Antient Buildings, call’d by the Antient Heathens after various names, as Nymphs, Satyrs, Lamii, Dryades, Sylvanes, Cobali, and more particularly the Faeries, who do principally inhabit the Mountains, and Caverns of the Earth, whose nature is to make strange Apparitions on the Earth in Meddows, or on Mountains being like Men, and Women, Souldiers, Kings, and Ladyes Children, and Horse-men cloathed in green, to which purpose they do in the night steal hempen stalks from the fields where they grow, to Convert them into Horses as the Story goes. Besides, it is credibly affirmed and beleev’d by many, that such as are real Changlings, or Lunaticks, have been brought by such Spirits and Hobgoblins, the true Child being taken away by them in the place whereof such are left, being commonly half out of their wits, and given to many Antick practices, and extravagant fancies, which passions do indeed proceed from the powerful influence of the Planet in their nativity, and not from such foolish conjectures.

Such jocund and facetious Spirits are sayd to sport themselvs in the night by tumbling and fooling with Servants and Shepherds in Country houses, pinching them black and blew, and leaving Bread, Butter, and Cheese sometimes with them, which if they refuse to eat, some mischief shall undoubtedly befall them by the means of these Faeries. And many such have been taken away by the sayd Spirits, for a fortnight, or a month together, being carryed with them in Chariots through the Air, over Hills, and Dales, Rocks and Precipices, till at last they have been found lying in some Meddow or Mountain bereaved of their sences, and commonly of one of their Members to boot.” (Discourse, Book II, chapter 4)

Once again, the mention of changelings, of being able to enchant items to use them in flight, their subterranean dwellings, abductions, and incursions into human homes, are all well-established faery traits. Whether this text may have been read by Kirk, with whose book it shares some similartities, is unknown.

In conclusion, there were quite a few English descriptions that I might have examined for the forthcoming Albion book, but none were as detailed or as lengthy as Kirk and Jones, which is why I gave them preference. Nevertheless, well before those late Victorian folklore collectors, there were writers seeking to set out what were generally agreed to be the nature and habits of British faeries in some sort of ‘encyclopaedic’ form. We owe then a great debt- as well as those individuals and orgnsations who have digitised these texts, so that you can read them all for yourself online if you choose.

Dickie Doyle- coded messages in faery illustrations

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A Water Fairy on a Mushroom Being Courted

In this post I’m going to look at the work of children’s illustrator Richard (Dicky) Doyle and what his representations of faeries might tell us about contemporary views towards them. Although his work appeared in simple story books, Doyle unconsciously betrayed many of the contemporary adult attitudes about the behaviour ofthe inhabitants of Faery.

Doyle (1824-83) was the son of a cartoonist and, in his turn, became one of the leading cartoonists of his onw generation, working for the satirical and humorous magazine Punch. As an illustrator, he also contributed to books by Dickens and Thackeray, as well as several of his own titles. In 1846, Doyle was commissioned to illustrate a new English translation of the Brothers Grimm tales, The Fairy Ring. This established him as a faery artist and he subsequently worked on numerous similar titles, including John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River in 1850. The illustrations used here come from In Fairyland, Pictures from Elf-World of 1870, which incorporated William Allingham’s poem, A Forest in Fairyland, along with Andrew Lang’s Princess Nobody.

Two detailed scenes from the Triumphal March of the Elf King

Numerous sources tell us what fairy hair looked like: in 1792 an account of the parish of Liberton near Edinburgh described how the local fairy women were “girls of diminutive size, dressed in green with dishevelled hair, who frequented sequestered places and at certain times conversed with men.”  Evidently those men weren’t at all put off by the untidy state of their hair (or their stature for that matter).  A contemporary report from Kirkmichael in Banffshire also described fairy women who appeared to travellers “with dishevelled hair floating over their shoulders and with faces more blooming than the vermeil blush of a summer morning”- evidently a dangerously enchanting combination.  A few decades later, in 1827, another Scottish witness portrayed young fairy women as “beautiful young girls, clad in green, with loose dishevelled hair, who frequent woods and valleys.  Men have often seen and spoken to them.”  It seems pretty clear that a major part of the attraction for those human males was the fresh, natural look of the faes, their unkemptness being suggestive of a wild or uninhibited nature that contrasted alluringly with that of the well-groomed (and well-chaperoned) girls of their everyday acquaintance.

Girls combing goats beards, 1870

Underlying these accounts were social assumptions and stereotypes that only got stronger as the nineteenth century passed. For Victorians, disorderly hair was associated with an unconstrained sexuality, loose-flowing tresses being a clear sign of what we’d now call the femme fatale. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote of “her loosened hair’s downfall” in Love-Sweetness and, according to one authority on the period, the saying “loosening one’s hair” implied moral looseness and rebellion. Of course, freeflowing hair didn’t have to be dishevelled and unkempt. The very act of combing could be erotic: all those mermaids sitting on rocks arranging their hair were deliberately and ostentatiously drawing attention to their lovely locks and, albeit in a slightly different way, were regarded as just as wanton and wild as the faeries who allowed it to blow tangled in the breeze.

The fact that Doyle was conveying these almost subliminal messages about faery conduct and morality seems to me to be confirmed by other scenes in his pictures. There are plenty of scenes showing faeries kissing- harmlessly and rather childlishly, certainly- but their affection, however tentative and shy it may be, says something about the freer morals of Faery. I can’t help think, for that matter, that the faery girls with their long loose hair, whom Doyle painted combing the beards of goats, not only conveys messages about the odd association often noticed between fae and caprine, but is at the same time a sly joke for grown-ups, hinting at ‘goaty’ natures.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith (1866-68)– archetypal femme fatale

Finally, the fact that most of the artist’s faeries tended to look rather like children or teenagers will probably have added extra layers to the complexity of the undertones at play here. Wearing the hair loose and long was the fashion for prepubescent girls in Victorian society and Doyle’s illustrations will inevitably have been read with these assumptions being made. Consequently, we are seeing a depiction of Faery that implies that its people are, to some degree or other, like children and yet are allowed far greater personal freedom than the offspring of a middle-class book buying public. The faery world was presented as one in which social and personal rules are radically laxer than ours; they are alien to us in much of their behaviour. Doyle’s faeries would have appeared endearing and amusing, but they would also have borne in their combination of juvenile appearance and adult behaviour a strange and non-human aura.

An Elfin Dance (detail)

A further aspect of Faery, one which further distanced its inhabitants from respectable Victorians, was the matter of dress (and, frequently, undress). The second of the close-up images from the Triumphal March of the Elf King above is a good example of the tendency for fae maidens to wear nothing but light, sleeveless slips- highly informal, very revealing. Two other images from In Fairyland further illustrate this stereotype: the fairies’ loose and casual attire could very well turn into no clothes at all. Doyle regularly depicted boy and girl faeries wearing nothing, other- perhaps- than a cape over the shoulders. The Victorians could just about tolerate bare arms (this style was briefly fashionable for women’s and girls’ formal evening wear during the 1880s), but bare legs or any greater exposure were decidely not proper. The indecency of the faeries- their seeming obliviousness to flaunting their flesh- conveyed strong messages about their wildness, their natural state. Like so-called ‘primitive’ peoples, their choice to go about uncovered indicated a lack of civilisation and- even worse- a want of morals. This trait was tolerable when the fae were portrayed as children, but it still fitted in with the other subliminal messages of the illustrations to proclaim that Doyle’s faery folk were not human; they were feral, amoral (if not actively wicked) and- it might be inferred- unpredictable like a wild animal. Pretty and endearing as they might seem- and, as such, suitable for children to look at in picture books- I think there was a subtle warning as well. Their naked otherness was a threat and we could only be thankful that- if Doyle was to be trusted- they were mostly no larger than sparrows.

A Fairy Concert

As concluding, general, observations, a couple of other aspects of Doyle’s illustrations may be noted. The first is the entirely rural surroundings of his faeries. This is not especially surprising, for the majority of painters of the period also set their faeries in natural world- for example Sir Noel Paton or John Simmonds. Nevertheless, the lack of human contact and the avoidance of mortal dwellings (unlike, for instance, in the work of John Anster Fitzgerald), help to stress their otherworldly character and their independence from us. I’ll also draw attention to their wings. The oddest thing is Doyle’s inconsistency: some of the faeries have them, but most don’t. The choice doesn’t appear to be determined by gender or status, making the artist’s reasons for adding them very hard to discern. Perhaps he simply felt awkward about the aesthetics and logic of the appendages- witness the faery girl conducting the birds, or the one kissing over the toadstool. Quite how their wings fit through the cape and dress the pair wear is anyone’s guess… Whatever the answer, it seems Doyle didn’t see them as essential fae features. Nevertheless, we must recognise that his famous pictures were very influential on the illustrators who followed him- so that Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies, fifty or so years later, were much more consistently winged and- very definitely- part of Nature.

An Elfin Dance at Night (1870)

Forever fading- the ever-present, ever-leaving faery

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Richard Doyle, The Triumphal March of the Elf King

I recently gave a talk at the Last Tuesday Society, held at premises in Hackney that house their absinthe parlour, gallery and the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities. My presentation was part of a programme of events linked to the launch of Viktor latest book of Dark Fairy Tales.

I spoke on a topic I have posted about in the past: the conundrum that is our perennial conviction that the faeries have ‘just’ disappeared- that they were something our grandparents believed in, but which can only be regarded as naive nonsense by ‘modern’ society. The irony is that people have been saying things like this at least since the time of Geoffrey Chaucer in the late fourteenth century. The ‘era of the faeries’ and the date of their last sighting is revealed to be a perpetually shifting point in time, always about one hundred years ago…

Very evidently, the concept of the vanishing faery is something entirely to do with us humans and nought to do with the Good Folk themselves. Over the centuries, a variety of popular explanations have been advanced for the flight of faeries from our company. These include:

  • Religion– the disappearance is a consequence of Protestant puritanism and a growing reliance on the Bible as the sole source of truth in Christianity. Presbyterian preachers have been blamed for driving the trows from Shetland to the Faeroes; then again, one Welsh bwbach drove away a Methodist minister because he was teetotal and didn’t relish good company and a pint of strong cwrw da (ale);
  • Modern agriculture– in the Scottish Borders it has been said that farming with iron tools (ploughs/ scythes and such like) is what repels the local fae. The interesting implication of this- it seems- is that they have no objection to an earlier, pre-Iron Age manner of cultivation, with wooden ploughs and flint bladed sickles. This in turn suggests that the faeries are attached in some way to the Neolithic- that they are ancient, perhaps ancestral;
  • Industry– the smoke and noise of our industrialised society– factories, mills, quarries, telephones and railways– have all been accused of making life intolerable for the local faeries (although we must recall that the faeries are themselves not averse to manufacture and mining);
  • State education has, of course, played a role in undermining people’s faith in traditional wisdom and stories, creating a gulf between the and older generations; and,
  • Modern media– from cinema, through radio and television, to the interweb, new technologies have all distracted us. It’s not so much that the faeries can’t abide TikTok and Instagram, though, but the problem that we’re so engrossed, or cut off by headphones, that we’re not alert to our surroundings and don’t look around us anymore.

On my recent Highland trip, I saw numerous abandoned farmsteads- stone cottages that had fallen into ruin over the last few decades. These are a more recent instance of our retreat from marginal, less easily cultivable land, a trend that was more brutally expressed in the Victorian Highland clearances. These derelict homesteads, whether the roofless walls of post-Victorian structures or the razed foundations of cleared villages, made me think of the Scottish tales of the departure of the sith. The best examples of this theme are:

  • ‘Farewell to Burrow Hill,’ in Robert Cromek’s Remains of Nithsdale Song, 1810: a procession of thousands of “little boys” was seen entering a hill in about 1790- the last ‘faery rade‘ in the Borders;
  • Hugh Miller’s ‘Departure of the Fairies’ in Old Red Sandstone (1841): they were seen by some children at Eathie on the Black Isle dressed in “antique” clothes, riding minute horses and declaring that “the people of peace shall never more be seen in Scotland;” and,
  • ‘The Gloaming Bucht,’ 1901: an account of the ‘last Scottish faery,’ “a wee little creature” searching for her companion Hewie Milburn in the Cheviot Hills.

Reflecting on these accounts, and the evidence of abandoned settlements in the far north, I began to wonder whether these stories are actually more to do with our feelings of disconnection from the landscape- a sense that we are leaving the faeries, rather than them deserting us. The clearances and the relinquishment of marginal land results in people being separated from the landscapes in which their cultures have developed. They are severed from their ancestors, a sense of continuity and from a context for finding meaning in family and community history. Viewed from this perspective, might not the factors that have ‘driven off’ the faeries better be understood as manifestations of our own guilt: we have shown a lack of faith in them? They are a part of our culture, environment and history and we have wilfully violated nature, and accelerated the material elements of our culture, to the point where the supernatural is all to frequently drowned out. The vanishing faery is, in fact, a symbol for our own guilty feelings of alienation and loss. The Good Folk are still there; it’s humans who divorced and deserted them.

Eathie- scene of the Highland faeries last appearance