THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

CHANGELING AND WITCH 149
that scho be nocht tane away with thame agane; for the teynd of
thame gais ewerie 3eir to
It would seem, from this account, that mortals were used
by the fairies to pay their tribute to the devil, an assump-
tion which is warranted also by a passage in The Ro-
mance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune:
Forsoth, Thomas, I wolle the tell,
thou hast been her iij yere and More;
And here pou may no lenger dwell,
I shall the tell A skele wherefore;
To morowe, a fowle fend of hell,
A Mongis this folke shall chese his fe,
And for thou arte long man and hende,
I lewe wele, he wyll haue j7e,3
and by a similar statement in the ballad of Young
Tamlane:
Then would I never tire, Janet,
In Elfish land to dwell,
But aye, at every seven years,
They pay the teind to hell;
And I am sae fat and fair of flesh,
I fear 't will be mysell.*
Pitcairn, Crirn. Trials, Vol. I, pt. 2, p. 164.
E. E. T. S. ed., 1875, Lansdowne MS. (dated before I~OO), p. 17.
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Child ed., 1882-1898,
Vol. I, p. 354, No. 39, "The Young Tamlane," Stanza 32. This, as
Sir Walter Scott states, in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,
1803, Vol. 11, p. 237, was "the popular reason assigned for the desire
of the fairies to abstract young children, as substitutes for themselves
in this dreadful tribute." Cf. also E. S. Hartland, The Science
of Fairy Tales, 1891, Chap. V; Grimm, Teutonic Mythology,
Stallybrass trans., 1883, Vol. 11, p. 468; and The English and Scottish
11