THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

equally as explicit :
CHANGELING AND WITCH
For well I wote, thou springst from ancient race
Of Saxon kinges, that have with mightie hand
And many bloody battailes fought in place
High reard their royal1 throne in Britane land,
And vanquisht them, unable to withstand:
From thence a Faery thee unweeting reft,
There as thou slepst in tender swadling band,
And her base Elfin brood there for thee left:
Such men do chaungelings call, so chaungd by Faeries theft.
The idea of the exchange of a fairy child for a mortal
child, as Puttenham reminded his readers, was not the
invention of the literary imagination, but was an article
of faith, common to the English folk of the period, and
one which prevailed until the 18th century and, in some
parts of Great Britain, well into the 19th."
Reginald Scot enumerates changelings among the
terrors of the night in 1584,~~ and Edward Fairfax, in
I 62 I, inveighs against the " strange follies, rooted in the
opinion of the vulgar, concerning . . . the changing of
infants in their cradles." l3 Hobbes's Leviathan, of
I 65 I, mentions as a particular characteristic of the fairies
that they " are said to take young Children out of their
l1 Hartland, in The Science of Fairy Tales, p. 121, cites the case of
two women who were reported as having been arrested May, 1884, at
Clonmel, charged with cruelly ill-treating a child three years old, who
had not the use of his limbs. They fancied that the child was a
changeling and during its mother's absence placed the naked child on
a hot shovel under the impression that this would break the charm.
In Tiree, in 1878, a child was exposed on the shore for several
hours by its mother, who thought it was a changeling. J. Sands,
Curious Superstitions in Tiree, The Celtic Magazine, Inverness, VIII
(18831, P. 253.
l2 Disc. of Witch., 1651 ed., p. 113.
l3 Disc. of Witch., Preface to Reader, p. 17.