In a ballad, entitled “The Fairy Queen,” in Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Nichols’s edition, vol. iii., p. 172, are stanzas similar to the Welsh verse given above, which also partially embody the Welsh opinions of Fairy visits to their houses. Thus chants the “Fairy Queen”:—
When mortals are at rest,
And snoring in their nest,
Unheard, and un-espy’d,
Through key-holes we do glide;
Over tables, stools, and shelves,
We trip it with our Fairy elves.
And, if the house be foul
With platter, dish, or bowl,
Upstairs we nimbly creep,
And find the sluts asleep:
There we pinch their arms and thighs;
None escapes, nor none espies.
But if the house be swept
And from uncleanness kept,
We praise the household maid,
And duely she is paid:
For we use before we goe
To drop a tester in her shoe.
It was not for the sake of mirth only that the Fairies entered human abodes, but for the performance of more
mundane duties, such as making oatmeal cakes. The Rev. R. Jones, Rector of Llanycil, told me a story, current in his native parish, Llanfrothen, Merionethshire, to the effect that a Fairy woman who had spent the night in baking cakes in a farm house forgot on leaving to take with her the wooden utensil used in turning the cakes on the bake stone; so she returned, and failing to discover the lost article bewailed her loss in these words, “Mi gollais fy mhig,” “I have lost my shovel.” The people got up and searched for the lost implement, and found it, and gave it to the Fairy, who departed with it in her possession.
Another reason why the Fairies frequented human abodes was to wash and tidy their children. In the Gors Goch legend, already given, is recorded this cause of their visits. Many like stories are extant. It is said that the nightly visitors expected water to be provided for them, and if this were not the case they resented the slight thus shown them and punished those who neglected paying attention to their wants. But tradition says the house-wives were ever careful of the Fairy wants; and, as it was believed that Fairy mothers preferred using the same water in which human children had been washed, the human mother left this water in the bowl for their special use.
In Scotland, also, Fairies were propitiated by attention being paid to their wants. Thus in Allan Cunningham’s Traditional Tales, p. 11, it is said of Ezra Peden:—“He rebuked a venerable dame, during three successive Sundays for placing a cream bowl and new-baked cake in the paths of the nocturnal elves, who, she imagined, had plotted to steal her grandson from the mother’s bosom.”
But in the traditions of the Isle of Man we obtain the exact counterpart of Welsh legends respecting the Fairies visiting houses to wash themselves. I will give the
following quotation from Brand, vol. ii., p. 494, on this point:—
“The Manks confidently assert that the first inhabitants of their island were Fairies, and that these little people have still their residence among them. They call them the good people, and say they live in wilds and forests, and on mountains, and shun great cities because of the wickedness acted therein. All the houses are blessed where they visit for they fly vice. A person would be thought impudently profane who should suffer his family to go to bed without having first set a tub, or pail full of clean water for the guests to bathe themselves in, which the natives aver they constantly do, as soon as the eyes of the family are closed, wherever they vouchsafe to come.”
Several instances have already been given of the intercourse of Fairies with mortals. In some parts of Wales it is or was thought that they were even so familiar as to borrow from men. I will give one such tale, taken from the North Wales Chronicle of March 19th, 1887.