He turned round, and perceived a large sack standing at the end of the field, and on opening it he found it to be full of the most excellent seed-oats. Without hesitation he sowed them; the sample was admirable, and the harvest no less luxuriant. The man carefully preserved the sack, and as soon as possible filled it full of the best grain that his field produced, and set it down on the spot on which he had received the fairy oats. A voice called to him—
“Turn roun’ your back,
Whill I get my sack.”
The farmer averted his face, and then immediately looked round, but all was gone. Things ever after prospered with him; for, according to the popular belief—
“Meddle and mell
Wi’ the fien’s o’ hell,
An’ a weirdless wicht ye’ll be;
But tak’ and len’,
Wi’ the fairy men,
Ye’ll thrive ay whill ye dee.”
In the same dearth, and in the same parish, an old woman who was nearly perishing of hunger, having tasted no food for two or three days, was one morning astonished to find one of her pans full of oatmeal. This seasonable supply she attributed to some of her benevolent neighbours, who she imagined had been wishing to give her a little surprise. Notwithstanding the care, however, with which she husbanded her meal, it by-and-by was expended, and she was again almost reduced to starvation. After passing another day without food her pan was again replenished, which was regularly done whenever the supply was exhausted, always allowing her to remain one day without food. Her store was replenished so regularly that at last she became careless, and presumed on the generosity of her invisible benefactors. One day, on receiving her new supply, she baked the whole of it into cakes, and having by some means obtained a little meat, invited all her acquaintances to a treat. The guests were just going to fall to when, to their astonishment, they beheld the cakes turn into withered leaves. After this the store was never renewed.
The origin of the belief in fairies is lost in the mists of time. Some supposed them to be the spirits of those who had inhabited the land before the birth of the Saviour, shut out until the final judgment from the joys of Paradise, yet undeserving of a place amongst the lost souls in Hades. Others tell us that they are the Druids thus transformed because they would not give up their idolatrous rites, and that they are continually growing smaller and smaller, until they eventually turn into ants.[24] They may be divided into four classes. 1. The white or good fairies who live above ground, the joyous dancers, the ethereal beings the poets delight to portray. 2. The dark or underground spirits, trolds and brownies, a more irritable race, working in mines and smithies, and doing good or evil offices in a somewhat arbitrary and uncertain fashion. 3. The fairy of the homestead, of whom Puck and Robin Goodfellow are good examples, fond of cleanliness and order, rewarding and helping the industrious and punishing the idle and careless. 4. The water-fairies, the more sombre spirits of the woods and mountains, the Kelpies and Nixies, luring men to destruction. We nevertheless find that the fairies of the sylvan shades interest themselves at times in the affairs of men, and though it is easy to define four very distinct classes, we at the same time find that these classes are blended together a good deal. The whole thing is so purely a creation of the imagination, not of one mind but of thousands, that it is impossible to reduce the subject to mathematical exactness.
The fairies of the poets are ordinarily those of the woodland, while those of the legends of the countryside are at least equally often the fairies of the homestead in their association with the daily life, the trivial round, the common task.
The earliest account of the fairies of England will be found in the writings of Gervase, in the thirteenth century, and after that date allusion to them may frequently be found; grave chroniclers like Reginald Scot, poets like Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, all make mention of them. The first of these, Scot, in his “Discoverie of Witchcraft,” tells us that “the faeries do principally inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth, whose nature is to make strange apparitions on the earth, in meadows or in mountains, being like men and women, soldiers, kings, and ladies, children, and horsemen clothed in green.” Many unfortunate women were persecuted as witches during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their connection with the fairies was often one of the leading charges against them, as we may see in the indictment of Alison Pearson; she was convicted of associating with the fairies, the definite charge against her being “for haunting and reparing with the Queene of Elfland.” Another woman was found guilty of “taking employment from a woman to speak in her behalf to the Queene of Faerie;” and many other such cases might be brought forward.
Fairies have ordinarily been invisible, and though they have at times permitted mortals to be present at their revels, more frequently they would appear to have resented any intrusion. In Poole’s “English Parnassus” the most circumstantial details are given: the robes are of snowy cobweb and silver gossamer; the lamps are the mystic lights of glowworms; the minstrelry is the music of the nightingale or the chirp of the cricket. Their emperor was Oberon, and his royal consort and empress was the sweet but mischievous Mab:—