THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

150 CHANGELING AND WITCH
Beyond these few references, no reason for the fairies'
abductions of mortals in the 16th century, as far as can
be ascertained, is to be found.
The origins assigned them, however, might account for
the belief in their seizure of human beings. As fallen
angels, they would entice mortals to sin and to ruin. As
ghosts of the dead, they would endeavor to take away
the living. As wicked spirits, and as familiar spirits of
the devil, they would seek to fill Hell with human souls.
And as the British equivalents of nymphs, lamiae, and
strygia, they had inherited the tradition of devouring and
destroying youths and young children.
The changeling, in particular, seems to have been
peculiar to the 16th-century fairies in England. Before
1500 they had bewitched babies and had caused them to
become diseased or to die, which is a practice they con-
tinued as long as they exi~ted.~ But, as far as I can
discover there are no records in England until the middle
of the 16th century, of the exchange of fairy children for
mortal offspring which resulted in the disappearance of
the human infant and the appearance of a strange and
supernatural baby in its stead.
Popular Ballads, Child ed., Vol. I, p. 344, 'I Young Tom Line," Glen-
riddell MS., Vol. XI, No. 17, 1791:
"The Queen of Fairies she came by,
Took me wi her to dwell,
Evn where she has a pleasant land
For those that in it dwell,
But at the end o seven years,
They pay their teind to hell."
6 Witness the fictitious child of Mak and his wife in the Secunda
Pastorum of the Townele~ Cycle, whose true sheep form and figure
were accounted for by attribution to fore-speaking by an elf; or the
children who were bewitched and " elf grippit" in England and Scot-
land in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Bewitchment is very differ-
ent, however, from being exchanged as a changeling.