“... Are you not he
That frights the maidens of the villagery,
Misleads night-wanderers laughing at their harm?”
Milton alludes to this deceptive gleam in the following lines—
“... A wandering fire,
Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads th’ amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond and pool.”
(Paradise Lost, Bk. 9).
He elsewhere calls him “the frier’s lantern.”—(L’ Allegro).
This facetious spirit only misleads the benighted traveller (generally an honest farmer, in his way from the market, in a state of intoxication) for the joke’s sake, as one very seldom, if ever, hears any of his deluded followers (who take it to be the torch of Hero in some hospitable mansion, affording “provision for man and horse”) perishing in these ponds or pools, through which they dance or plunge after him so merrily.
“There go as manie tales,” says Reginald Scot, “upon Hudgin, in some parts of Germanie, as there did in England of Robin Good-fellow.... Frier Rush was for all the world such another fellow as this Hudgin, and brought up even in the same schoole—to wit, in a kitchen, inasmuch as the selfe-same tale is written of the one as of the other, concerning the skullian, who is said to have beene slaine, etc., for the reading whereof I referre you to frier Rush his storie, or else to John Wierus, De Præstigiis Dæmonum.”
In the old play of Gammer Gurton’s Needle, printed in 1575, Hodge, describing a “great black devil” which had been raised by Diccon, the bedlam, and being asked by Gammer—