THE ELIZABETHAN FAIRIES

CHANGELING AND WITCH
Curst in their cradles, or there chang'd by elves,
So to be sure you do enjoy, your~elves.~~
What appearance the fairy changeling made under the
combined curse of emaciation and ugliness can be seen
from the following description in The Devil's Law-Case:
CONTIL. The midwife straight howls out, there was no hope
Of the infant's life; swaddles it in a flay'd lambskin,
As a bird hatch'd too early; makes it up
With three quarters of a face, that made it look
Like a changeling; cries out to Romelio
To have it christen'd, lest it should depart
Without that it came
The form and figure of the changeling was as unpre-
possessing as its face. That member of the race seen by
Waldron,
tho' between five and six years old, and seemingly healthy, . . .
was so far from being able to walk, or stand, that he could not so
much as move any one joint: his limbs were vastly long for his age,
but smaller than an infant's of six months.25
The same infirmity was characteristic of the changeling of
A Pleasant Treatise of Witches, 1673, for, (( after some
years, it could neither speak nor go," and its mother
ii was feign to carry it, with much trouble, in her arms." 26
Finally, changelings were distinguished by their lack
of brains, being (( Natural1 Fools," 27 " deformes &
stupidos," (( commonly half out of their wits, and given
23 Gifford ed., 1846, LX: An Elegy, p. 706.
24 John Webster, Dyce ed., 1859, IV, 2.
Isle of Man, p. 29.
z6 Hazlitt rpt., pp. 407-408.
Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 545.
28 Skinner, Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae (under Elf) : " . . .
infantes lepidos & formosos i: unis surripiunt, iisque foedos, deformes
& stupidos substituunt, nobis ob eam rationem changelings."