THE GOD OF THE WITCHES - World eBook Library - World Public ...

informed that these were "from the Court of Elfame"; she had previously received a visit from the Queen of
Elfhame though without knowing at the time who her visitor was; she described the Queen as "a stout woman
who came in to her and sat down on the form beside her and asked a drink at her and she gave it." Alesoun
Peirsoun[6] in Fifeshire, was "convict for haunting and repairing with the good neighbours and Queen of
Elphane, and she had many good friends at that court which were of her own blood, who had good
acquaintance with the Queen of Elphane." In Leith, Christian Livingstone[7] affirmed "that her daughter was
taken away with the fairy-folk, and that all the [occult] knowledge she had was by her daughter who met with the
fairy". Aberdeen was full of people who were well acquainted with fairies. One woman[8] told the judges that
"what skill so ever she has she had it of her mother, and her mother learned it at an elf-man". Andro Man
appears to have been the husband of the "Queen of Elphen", with whom he had lived for thirty-two years and by
whom he had several children. The seventeenth century was equally prolific in friends of the fairy. Jonet
Drever[9] in Orkney was "convict and guilty of the fostering of a bairn in the hill of Westray to the fairyfolk, called
of her our good neighbours. And having conversation with the fairy twenty-six years bygone, in respect of her
own confession". The accused escaped with her life, but her sentence was, "To be scourged from the end of the
said town to the other. And thereafter to be banished the country. And never to return under pain of death". Jean
Weir,[10] sister of the celebrated witch, Major Weir, stated that "when she keeped a school at Dalkeith and
teached children, a tall woman came to the declarant's house when the children were there; and that she had, as
appeared to her, a child upon her back, and one or two at her foot; and that the said woman desired that the
declarant should employ her to speak for her to the Queen of the Fairy, and strike and battle in her behalf with
the said Queen (which was her own words)". The records of the Edinburgh Justiciary Court[11] gives an account
of this transaction in a shorter and more sinister manner: "Jean Weir took employment from a Woman to speak
in her behalf to the Queen of ffarie, meaning the Devil". In almost every case of so-called witchcraft, from Joan of
Arc in 1431 down to the middle or end of the seventeenth century, the most damning evidence against the
accused was acquaintance with the fairies; proof of such acquaintance meant, with very rare exceptions,
condemnation to the stake. These fairies were not the little gossamer-winged flower-elves of children's tales, but
creatures of flesh and blood, who inspired the utmost fear and horror among the comfortable burgher folk of the
towns, and filled the priests and ministers of the Christian Church with the desire to exterminate them.
The number of recorded marriages between "mortals" and fairies is another proof that fairies were the same
size as ordinary folk and that they were human. The Plantagenet kings had a fairy ancestry; Conn, King of Tara,
married a fairy as his second wife; Bertrand du Guesclin had a fairy wife, so also had that Sieur de Bourlemont
who owned the Fairy Tree round which Joan of Arc danced as a girl. When a "mortal" man married a fairy
woman the children appear to have belonged to the father and to have been in no way different from the children
of two "mortals". This was the case even when the fairy girl was carried off by force. Marriages between "mortal"
women and fairy men were also not infrequent; but unless the girl was captured and kept as a prisoner in the
home of the fairies, she remained comfortably in her own village, where she was visited by her fairy husband,
and the children were not to be distinguished from "mortal" children. This shows that the cross between mortals
and fairies was less distinguishable than one between members of a white and of a coloured race.
The accounts of fairies, when given by people who for various reasons were unaffected by the influence of
Shakespeare, show them as real human beings, smaller than those who made the records but not very
noticeably so. They lived in the wild uncultivated parts of the country, not necessarily because they were
dispossessed by immigrants but more probably because they were originally entirely pastoral and
unacquainted with agriculture. Though they might sometimes be found in woods they preferred open moors and
heaths which afforded pasturage for their cattle. Like some of the wild tribes in India they fled from a stranger,
were fleet of foot, and so highly skilled in the art of taking cover that they were seldom seen unless they so
desired. Their dwelling-places were built of stone, wattle or turf, and were in bee-hive form, and here whole
families lived together as in an Eskimo igloo. It is not impossible that the houses were in use in the winter only,
and the fairy people lived entirely out of doors in the summer. For similar conditions of life the people of the
Asiatic steppes afford the best parallel.
Like the people of the steppe the fairies appear to have lived chiefly on the milk of their herds, with an
occasional orgy of a meat feast. In this they differed completely from the agriculturists who inhabited the more
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