Legends of the North: The Guidman O' Inglismill and The Fairy Bride

by Patrick Buchan

"But aye, at ilka seven years,
They pay the teind to hell;
And I'm sae fat and fair of flesh,
I fear 'twill be mysel'!"

And so the brave Janet, actuated by that greatest of all feelings—a true woman's love—took her lover from the procession on Hallow-e'en, by "pulling him down" from the "milk-white steed" on which he rode, and holding him fast in spite of all the "horrible and awfu'" changes he underwent in her hands, discovering, when he returns to his true likeness, that he is her old boyish love, son of Randolph, Earl of Murray, whom the fairies had, years before, stolen away.

There were, as in all communities, a good and a bad section, known as the "seelie" and the "unseelie court." The seelie court were kind, courteous, and charitable to the aged, the poor, and the afflicted, to whom they gave gifts suited to their necessities, as in the rhyme—

"Meddle and mell
Wi' the fiends o' hell,
And a weirdless wicht ye'll be;
But tak' and len'
Wi' the fairy men,
Ye'll thrive until ye dee."

The unseelie court, on the other hand, from those who offended them, stole their goods and killed their cattle by elf-shot, occasionally found on the moors or turned up in the fields now-a-days, but which science ruthlessly asserts to be the arrow-heads of our prehistoric ancestors. They entertained a particular dislike against those who wore clothing of a green colour. To this cause the Highlanders ascribed the death of Viscount Dundee at Killiecrankie. But their most wicked prank of all was the carrying away of handsome unbaptized children from the side of the lying-in mother, substituting their own loathsome and sickly progeny in their stead. To prevent this misfortune, it was customary in the Highlands to perform the Dessil—that is, carrying fire in the right hand, and in the direction from right to left, morning and evening, round the house in which lay the mother and child, until the baptism and churching had taken place. "This was," says Martin, in his "History of the West Highlands," "considered an effectual means to preserve both the mother and infant from the power of evil spirits, who are ready at such times to do mischief, and sometimes carry away the infants and return poor, meagre skeletons; and these infants have voracious appetites. In this case, it was usual for those who believed that their children were thus taken away to dig a grave in the fields on quarter-day, and there to lay the fairy skeleton till next morning, at which time the parents went to the place, where they doubted not to find their own child instead of the skeleton." They had also, in other localities, recourse to the barbarous charm of burning, with a live coal, the toes of the suffering infant, the supposed changeling. They were not content with abstracting handsome children—beautiful maidens and wives sometimes disappeared, and, of course, the fairies were the abductors. The Miller of Menstrie,[A] in Fife, who possessed a charming spouse, had given offence to the "unseelie" court, and was, in consequence, deprived of his fair helpmate. His distress was aggravated by hearing his wife singing in the air—

"Oh! Alva woods are bonnie,
Tillicoultry hills are fair;
But, when I think o' the bonnie braes o' Menstrie,
It mak's my heart aye sair."

After many attempts to procure her restoration, the Miller chanced one day, in riddling some stuff at the mill door, to use a posture of enchantment, when the spell was dissolved and the matron fell into his arms. The wife of the Blacksmith of Tullibody was carried up the chimney, the fairies, as they bore her off, singing—

"Deidle linkum doddie;
We've gotten drucken Davie's wife,
The Smith o' Tullibody."

Those snatched to Fairyland might be recovered within a year and a day, but the spell for the recovery was only potent when the fairies made, on Hallow-eve, their annual procession. Sir Walter Scott relates the following:—"The wife of a Lothian farmer had been snatched by the fairies. During the year of probation, she had repeatedly appeared on Sundays in the midst of her children, combing their hair. On one of these occasions she was accosted by her husband, when she instructed him how to rescue her at the next Hallow-eve procession. The farmer conned his lesson carefully, and, on the appointed day, proceeded to a plot of furze to await the arrival of the procession. It came, but the ringing of the fairy bridles so confused him that the train passed ere he could sufficiently recover himself to use the intended spell. The unearthly laughter of the abductors, and the passionate lamentations of his wife, informed him she was lost to him for ever." A woman who had been conveyed to Fairyland was warned, by one she had formerly known as a mortal, to avoid eating or drinking with her new friends for a certain period. She obeyed; and, when the time expired, she found herself on earth, restored to the society of mankind. A matron was carried to Fairyland to nurse her new-born child, which had previously been abducted. She had not been long in her enchanted dwelling when she furtively anointed an eye with the contents of a boiling cauldron. She now discovered that what had previously seemed a gorgeous palace was, in reality, a gloomy cavern. She was dismissed; but one of the wicked wights, when she demanded her child, spat in her eye and extinguished its light for ever. About the middle of last century, a clergyman at Kirkmichael, Perthshire, whose faith was more regulated by the scepticism of philosophy than the credulity of superstition, would not be prevailed upon to yield his assent to the opinion of the times. At length, however, he felt, from experience, that he doubted what he ought to have believed. One night, as he was returning home, at a late hour, from a meeting of presbytery, and the customary dinner which followed, he was seized by the fairies and carried aloft into the air. Through fields of ether and fleecy clouds he journeyed many a mile, descrying, like Sancho Panza on his clavileno, the earth far distant below him, and no bigger than a nut-shell. Being thus sufficiently convinced of the reality of their existence, they let him down at the door of his own house, where he afterwards often recited, to the wondering circle, the marvellous tale of his adventure. Some people will believe that spirits of a different sort had a little to do with the worthy minister's conviction, and that his "ain gude grey mare" had more to do with bringing him to his own door than the fairies. Toshack, the last chief of clan Mackintosh, occupied a castle or keep on the margin of the river Turret, in Perthshire. He held nocturnal interviews with a fairy whom he had brought with him from abroad. The mode of his reaching the place of meeting, and the nature of his companion, were long a mystery. His wife, at length, became jealous of the frequent departures of her lord; and, being unable to discover whither he proceeded, resorted to the scheme of attaching a piece of worsted to his button. Thus guided, she followed him down a subterraneous passage under the bed of the river, where, after various windings, she discovered him in conversation with a beautiful lady. The discovery so enraged the matron that she insisted on the immediate destruction of the stranger, who fled, and the sun of Toshack set to rise no more.

With all the passions and wants of human beings, fairies are represented as great lovers of cleanliness and propriety, for the observance of which they were said frequently to reward good servants by dropping money into their shoes; and, on the other hand, punishing the sluts and slovenly by pinching them black and blue—