THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

CHANGELING AND WITCH 163
The fairies' abduction of witches 51 was neither so
universal nor so familiar a phenomenon in England as
changelings, nor was the association of witches and fair-
ies an idea original to the 16th century." The Eliza-
bethans, however, not only believed that the fairies in-
vested wise women, witches and sorcerers with their
supernatural power, but the fairies' practice of seizing
mortals and making them their own by turning them into
was an effectual means to preserve both the mother and the infant
from the power of evil spirits, who are ready at such times to do
mischief, and sometimes carry away the infant; and when they get
them once in their possession, return them poor meagre skeletons: and
these infants are said to have voracious appetites, constantly craving
for meat."
This discussion of the connection between witches and fairies is
undertaken only to show that the fairies in the 16th and 17th cen-
turies were believed to take away mortals by converting them into
witches, and the examples given are selected solely as proof of that
belief. There is no attempt to give a complete or exhaustive treat-
ment of the connection between witches and fairies.
For further discussion of the points of similarity between witches
and fairies, see Hustings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Article
on Fairy by J. A. MacCulloch, Vol. V, pp. 678-689; " Organisations
of Witches in Great Britain," M. A. Murray, Folk Lore, Vol. 28,
No. 3, 1917; The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, M. A. Murray,
Oxford University Press, 1921; " The Mingling of Fairy and Witch
Beliefs in the 16th & 17th Centuries in Scotland," J. A. MacCulloch,
Folk Lore, Vol. 32, No. 4, 1921; and Witchcraft in Old and New
England, George Lyman Kittredge, Harvard University Press, 1929.
The work of Professor Kittredge appeared after this chapter had been
written.
62 Wright contends that this idea came in the 15th century: " One
new circumstance was brought in with the witchcraft of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries- the power of fairies to enter into people,
and 'possess' them. It is not difficult to see whence and how this
notion came, and we might point out a hundred instances of it . . ."
Thomas Wright, 'I Essay on the National Fairy Mythology of Eng-
land," Vol. I, Essays, p. 278.