A talk I gave for The Folklore Podcast last November, with some additions and revisions for this post.
This gruesome photo shows a genuine example of a Hand of Glory, currently in Whitby
Museum. Not long ago I was reading John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and came across a reference to one of his other works,
a compendium of folklore called (for some reason) The Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, published 1686. Never
having heard of it before I went to archive.org for a look and flicking through
the pages, suddenly stopped at a paragraph in which Aubrey describes ‘a story that
was generally believed when I was a Schooleboy (before the civill Warres) that
Thieves when they broke open a house, would putt a Candle into a Dead man’s
hand, and then the people in the Chamber would not awake. There is such a kind
of story somewhere amongst the magical writers’ (p103).
Of
course I knew the folk narrative known as ‘The Hand of Glory’. Katharine Briggs
provides several versions of it in her Dictionary
of British Folktales but they all date from the mid to late 19th
century: the earliest from Benjamin Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, 1851. She adds that ‘Aubrey has also a story of
the Hand of Glory’ but she does not cite it. The thing that most struck me
about Aubrey’s brief outline of a tale he’d heard as a schoolboy, is that it
predates the others by well over 200 years – he was ten years old in 1635. And
he was certainly right about the tale being found ‘amongst the magical writers’,
since an illustration of 1565 shows a Hand of Glory all alight: it's a detail from
‘The Elder St. Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes’ by Pieter van der
Heyden. See below.
I
suppose ‘The Hand of Glory’ is a folk tale rather than a fairy tale, although the
distinction is not always easy to make, but Aubrey’s account is a reminder of
the way certain stories survive like pebbles in the game of ducks and drakes – skimming
above the water and dipping under it to surface again – while others simply
sink, leaving a few transient ripples. And such a game of ducks and drakes is
the subject of this essay as I try to revive or revisit some of the lost and almost lost fairy tales of 16th
and 17th century England and Scotland.
In
1549 an anonymous tract called The
Complaynt of Scotland was printed in France as a piece of pro-Scots
propaganda against the Rough Wooing – the Scots name for the eight-year war
Henry VIII was waging against Scotland to force agreement to the marriage of the
infant Queen, Mary Stewart to his son and heir Prince Edward. So The Complaynt is a political work, but
in the 16th century this involved backing up the argument with a
host of stories, legends and allegories demonstrating Scotland’s intellectual
and general superiority to, and independence from, England. In Chapter 6, a
group of literate and thoughtful Scottish shepherds discuss philosophy, until
one of them suggests they might now all relax and tell stories. There follows
an exhilarating reading list, the titles of tales, romances and ballads. You
may well know it, but it bears repeating. Here is an anglicised and slightly
shortened version:
Some
were in prose and some in were in verse: some were stories and some were short
tales. These were the names of them as after follows: the Tales of Canterbury,
Robert le Diable Duke of Normandy, the tale of the well of the world’s end,
Ferrand earl of Flanders that married the devil, the tale of the Red Ettin with
the three heads, the tale how Perseus saved Andromeda from the cruel monster,
the prophecy of Merlin, the tale of the giants that eat live men, Wallace, the
Bruce, Hippomedon, the tale of the Three-Footed Dog of Norroway, the tale how
Hercules slew the serpent Hydra that had seven heads, the tale how the King of
Eastmoreland married the king’s daughter of Westmoreland, Skail Gillenderson
the king’s son of Skellye, the tale of the Four Sons of Aymon, the tale of the
Bridge of the Mantribil, the tale of Sir Ywain, Arthur’s knight, Ralf Collier,
Gawain and Gollogras, Lancelot du Lac, Arthur knight he rode at night with golden
spur and candlelight, the tale of Floremond of Albany that slew the dragon by
the sea, the tale of Sir Walter the bold Leslie, the tale of the Pure Tint,
Clariades and Maliades, Arthur of Little Britanny, Robin Hood and Little John,
the Marvels of Mandeville, the tale of the Young Tamlane and of the bold Braband,
Bevis of Southhampton, the Golden Targe, the Palace of Honour, the tale how
Acteon was transformed into a hart and then slain by his own dogs, the tale of
Pyramus and Thisbe, the tale of the amours of Leander and Hero, the tale how
Jupiter transformed his dear love into a cow, the tale how that Jason won the
Golden Fleece, Orpheus King of Portingal, the tale of the golden apple, the
tale of the Three Weird Sisters, the tale how that Daedalus made the Labyrinth
to keep the monster Minotaur, the tale how King Midas got two asses lugs [ears]
on his head because of his avarice.
How diverse
these stories are! Many are Scottish of course, tales of William Wallace, Robert
the Bruce, Young Tamlane, the bold Leslie – Classical, with Perseus and
Andromeda, the Minotaur, Midas – French romances like Arthur of Little Britain
and Lancelot du Lac – the English Canterbury Tales, Bevis of Southhampton,
Robin Hood, Mandeville’s Travels – and Scandinavian legend or saga with the now
lost story of Skail Gillenderson. But many of these tales, romances and songs
have survived, such as ‘The Red Etin of the Three Heads’ which I read as a
child, the Red Etin being a giant who steals King Malcolm’s daughter – and ‘The
Well of the World’s End’, of which more later.
John
Leyden, who in 1801 edited and republished The
Complaynt of Scotland seems sure that ‘The tale of the pure tynt’ is the
story of ‘Rashie-coat’, the Scots Cinderella. He says it is ‘probably the
groundwork of the Fairy tale of “the pure tint Rashie-coat”, a common nursery
tale.’ I assume he’s right, though I find it a bit odd that The Complaynt omits the girl’s name from the title, since the girl's coat of rushes is her main feature. And whatever
does ‘the pure tynt’ mean? I’ve tried my best to find out but I remain unsure: ‘the poor lost Rashie-coat’ may be the likeliest interpretation. Amongst
all those titles you may well have noticed ‘The Tale of the Three Weird
Sisters’ which I’ll discuss later, too.
But
many other of the titles listed are now mysterious or unknown such as ‘The Tale
How the King of Eastmoreland Married the King’s Daughter of Westmoreland’ and
Three-Footed Dog of Norroway’. Leyden suggests this last could be a variant of
‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, itself a version of the Cupid and Psyche story.
It's possible but I suspect Leyden took a wild guess based on the occurrence
of the word ‘Norway’ in both titles; he offers no further evidence so we’ll
never know. The tale of ‘Ferrand Earl of Flanders that Married the Devil’ no
longer exists, but may have been similar to a story preserved in Gervase of
Tilbury’s early 13th century ‘Otia
Imperialia’ (‘Recreation for an
Emperor’, dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto VI) about a lord whose wife
‘for several years, always left the chapel before mass was concluded’. Noticing
this, her husband ordered his guards to detain her, with the result that
‘unable to support the elevation of the host, she retreated through the air,
carrying with her one side of the chapel’. Leyden thought ‘The tale of the
giants that ate live men’ could have been a version of ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ but
I suspect it’s more likely to have been one of the several tales about giants
in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s immensely popular 12th century History of the Kings of Britain – one of
which tells how King Arthur slew the man-eating giant of Mont-Saint-Michel.
And speaking of Arthur, one of the most haunting of these
obscure titles is the one that names him. You have to try and say it in the
Scottish way to get the real lilt and the internal rhymes: ‘Arthour knycht he
rade on nycht/With gyltin spur and candil lycht’. Leyden says of it:
This
romance, of which these lines seem to have formed the introduction, is unknown,
but I have often heard them repeated in a nursery tale, of which I only
recollect the following ridiculous verses:
Chick
my naggie, chick my naggie!
How
mony miles to Aberdeagie?
Tis
eight and eight, and other eight,
We’ll
no win there wi candle light.
It sounds very much
like a version of ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ In his 1841 Popular Rhymes of Scotland, Robert Chambers describes a game in
which ‘two boys, remarkable as good runners’ are picked to be the ‘king and
queen of Cantelon’: they stand between two ‘doons
or places of safety, at which a flock of other boys pitch themselves.’ These
are considered to be knights. Then following dialogue occurs between the King
and one of the ‘knights’ , which Robert Chambers rightly describes as ‘romantic
and remarkable’:
Knight:
King and Queen of Cantelon
How many miles to
Babylon?
King:
Eight and eight and other
eight.
Knight: Will I get there by
candlelight?
King:
If your horse be good and
your spurs be bright.
Knight:
How mony men have ye?
King: Mair nor ye daur come and see.
At this all the
knights rush for the opposite ‘doon’ or safe place, while the King and Queen
chase and try to catch them. Anyone caught is said to be ‘taned’ or taken, and
is ‘out’. The game is repeated until all are out. The Knight’s query about
getting there by candlelight, and the King’s response, ‘If your horse be good
and your spurs be bright’ are not dissimilar to ‘The Complaynt’s’ candle-lit
vision of Arthur galloping through the night, his golden spurs flashing. Was
this never more than a schoolyard game, or might there once have been a story
attached to it? Again we’ll never know.
Let’s
leave for a while the tantalising glimpses of old tales listed in The Complaynt of Scotland, and ask why
the fairy tales best known to British people today are not English or Scottish,
but French and German – from the late 17th century Conte de ma mere l’oye or Mother Goose Tales of Charles Perrault, first
translated into English in 1729, and the early to mid-19th century Household Tales of the Brothers Grimm,
of which the first English edition was published in 1823 with illustrations by
Cruikshank. It’s fair to say that during this period the English were better at
translating other people’s fairy tales than we were at collecting our own. The 19th
century Europe-wide impulse to record traditional tales was sparked by the Romantic
movement and nascent nationalism, but I suspect Victorian English gentlemen
didn’t feel they had very much to prove. This gave Perrault and the Grimms’s
versions a massive head-start.
It
took the Australian and Jewish Joseph Jacobs to notice this and do something
about it. ‘Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?’ he
asks in the introduction to his 1890 collection English Fairy Tales:
The present
volume contains only a selection out of some 140 of which I have found traces
in this country. It is probable than many more exist. [...] The only
reason, I imagine, why such tales have not hitherto been brought to light, is
the lamentable gap between the governing and recording classes and dumb working
classes of this country – dumb to others but eloquent among themselves.
The Industrial
Revolution and the agricultural slump of the mid 1800s, with the consequent break-up
of rural communities, contributed to the disappearance of traditional tales as
people migrated into cities or overseas to find work. The fairy tales told
aloud by mothers and nurses were replaced by tales printed in books – and generations
of middle class children grew up familiar with Rumpelstilskin and Cinderella
and ignorant of Tom Tit Tot and Rashie-Coat.
Now to return to 16th
century Britain, a time when fairy tales were certainly being told (was there
ever a time when they weren’t?) along with legends and ballads and the kinds of
tale which Philip Sidney describes in An
Apologie for Poetry as holding ‘children from play and old men from the
chimney corner’. If there is little direct evidence for them, there are many hints and
inferences. For example, the old nursery rhyme of the frog who goes a-wooing dates - again - to the 1549 Complaynt of Scotland where it is listed among 'songs' as 'The frog came to the mill door' and the books of the Stationers’ Company (a
guild of bookbinders, printers and publishers) licensed the
publication of ‘A moste strange weddinge of the frogge and the mouse’ in 1580. Of course it's still with us: my
children learned to sing ‘Frog Went A-Courting And He Did Ride’ at school in
the mid 1990s.
In 1592 the pamphleteer Thomas Nashe
mentioned the tale of ‘Tom Thumb’ in Pierce
Penniless as he sourly complained that ‘…every gross-brained idiot is
suffered to come into print, who if he set forth a pamphlet of the praise of
pudding-pricks [skewers], or write a
treatise of Tom Thumb … it is bought up, thick and threefold, when better
things lie dead.’ It seems literary jealousy was as rife then as now, and
equally clearly the story of ‘Tom Thumb’ was well-known, yet no printed trace
of it turns up until thirty years later when it was published as a chapbook in
1621.
One
16th century fairy tale was rescued for children in the late 1800s by
Joseph Jacobs. It is the English story, ‘Mr Fox’: a variant of the tale type
‘The Robber Bridegroom’ to which ‘Bluebeard’ also belongs. It tells of a young
woman named Lady Mary who becomes curious, maybe even suspicious, when her
fiancé the suave Mr Fox is strangely reluctant to let her visit his castle.
When just prior to their wedding he announces that he must go away for a day or
two, she sets off alone into the woods to find it for herself. It’s a beautiful
castle: but above the gateway a strange motto is carved into the stone: ‘Be
bold, be bold’. Passing through, she enters a deserted courtyard with not a soul
about, and crossing the yard to the doorway of the keep, she sees the same
motto, longer this time. ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’.
On she went till she came into the hall, and went up
the broad stairs till she came to a door in the gallery, over which was
written:
Be
bold, be bold, but not too bold
Lest that your
heart’s blood should run cold.
But
Lady Mary was a brave one, she was, and she opened the door, and what do you
think she saw? Why bodies and skeletons of beautiful young ladies all stained
with blood. So Lady Mary thought it was high time to get out...
Hurrying downstairs,
she spies Mr Fox himself arriving at the head of a band of robbers, dragging behind
him a lovely young woman who has fainted. Lady Mary hides behind a cask and
watches Mr Fox trying to pull a diamond ring from his victim's hand.
It
was too tight … so Mr Fox drew his sword and brought it down upon the hand of
the poor lady. The hand leapt into the air, and fell of all places into Lady
Mary’s lap. Mr Fox looked here and there but did not think of searching behind
the cask, so at last he went on dragging the young lady up the stairs into the
Bloody Chamber.
Lady Mary runs home; but
next day this self-possessed and steely heroine meets her fiancé at a splendid
family breakfast where their marriage contract is to be signed.
‘How
pale you are this morning, my dear,’ exclaimed Mr Fox.
‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I had horrible
dreams last night.’
‘Dreams go by contraries,’ said Mr
Fox; ‘but tell us your dream, and your sweet voice will make the time pass till
the happy hour comes.’
‘I dreamed,’ said Lady Mary, ‘that
I went yestermorn to your castle, and I found it in the woods, with high walls
and a deep moat, and over the gateway was written: Be bold, be bold.’
‘But
it is not so, nor it was not so,’ said Mr Fox.
As Lady Mary continues
the tale, and the mottoes intensify their warnings, Mr Fox’s denials grow
stronger: ‘It is not so and it was not so. And God forbid it should be so’ –
till at last, after describing the moment when he cuts off the hand, Lady Mary
springs to her feet, crying, ‘It is so and it was so. Here’s hand and ring I
have to show,’ and she pulls out the hand from her dress and points it straight
at Mr Fox –
And
with that, her brothers and her friends
drew their swords and cut Mr Fox into a thousand pieces.
It is a great story, beautifully
structured: I’ve told it aloud many times to children and they always love it.
But how did Joseph Jacobs find it? Well, in Act I, Sc 1 of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, which dates to
1598, Benedick says to Claudio: ‘Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor
‘twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.’ And in an addendum to
Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of the complete works of Shakespeare (‘Malones’s
Variorum Shakespeare’), a certain Mr John Blakeway contributed an explanatory
note:
I
believe none of the commentators have understood this; it is an allusion, as
the speaker says, to an old tale,
which may perhaps still be extant in some collections of such things, or which
Shakspeare may have heard, as I have, related by a great aunt, in his
childhood.
Blakeway relates the
entire story and concludes,
Such
is the old tale to which Shakspeare
evidently alludes, and which has often ‘froze
my young blood’ when I was a child. I will not apologize for repeating it,
since it is manifest that such old wives’
tales often prove the best elucidation of this writer’s meaning.
Not only Shakespeare but
Edmund Spenser too quotes from ‘Mr Fox’ in his long narrative poem ‘The Faerie
Queene’. In Book 3, Canto XI, the gallant ‘warlike Maid’ Britomart
(allegorically Chastity) passes the fiery portal of the house of the magician
Busirane – the House of Lust – to find and rescue Busirane’s tormented victim
Amoret. As she wanders through room after richly decorated room, she notices
something.
Over the door thus written she did spy
Be bold:
she oft and oft it over-read…
Like Lady Mary,
Britomart is not dismayed, ‘But forward with bold steps into the next room
went’. Just as in ‘Mr Fox’, the castle is silent and empty: ‘Strange thing it
seemed’! Eventually,
…as she looked about, she did behold
How over that same door was likewise writ
Be bold, be bold,
and everywhere Be bold,
That much she mazed, and could not construe it
By any riddling skill or common wit.
At last she spied at that room’s upper end,
Another iron door, on which was writ,
Be not too bold…
The first three
books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ were
published in 1596, and this is the earliest known reference to the ‘old tale’
of ‘Mr Fox’ – which must have been well known at the time. It predates Charles
Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ by at least a century. But if John Blakemore hadn’t decided
to explain Benedick’s lines in Much Ado
About Nothing, it would have disappeared. His is the only source for this wonderful
English fairy tale – but there is something very interesting in the church of
St Mary, of Painswick in Gloucestershire. The words ‘Be bold, be bold’ have
been cut into one of the pillars:
TH.
WHO. MAD
THIS. RICH
ARD FORT
BE BOLD BE BOLD
BUT NOT TO
BOLD AND WHE
In modern spelling:
‘THOU WHO MADE THIS RICHARD FORT BE BOLD BE BOLD BUT NOT TOO BOLD...’ Someone
named Richard Fort is addressing God who ‘made’ him and adding – an appeal? a
prayer? a command? a warning? – to God or perhaps to himself, to ‘be bold, be
bold, but not too bold.’ Local tradition says it was carved by one of a group
of Parliamentarian soldiers besieged in the church during the English Civil
War, and that the words are a quotation from The Faerie Queene. According to Brian Hoggard, a learned friend
with an interest in such things, the carved letters appear to be 17th
century or earlier, though the intricate ‘A’s are more in the style of the 16th
century. (He adds that ‘dating graffitti is a fraught area’.) I can’t help
wondering if Richard Fort, besieged in the church, found two things come
together in his head – the adjuration to ‘be bold’, and the enclosed stone trap
of the church with the enemy about to burst in. He may have been an educated
man who had read ‘The Faerie Queene’ and remembered the armed figure of
Chastity, Britomart, waiting for her enemy, afraid to lay her weapons aside
–
for
fear
Of secret
danger, nor let sleep oppress
Her heavy eyes
with nature’s burden dear,
But drew herself
aside in sikernesse [assurety]
And
her wellpointed weapons did about her dress.
Or maybe he
simply remembered the story of ‘Mr Fox’ told to him in childhood by his mother
or nurse and saw its relevance, and began cutting those words to distract
himself. The lettering trails off with the words ‘AND WHE’ – but is unfinished.
The historical account of the siege says the Royalists soldiers outside set
fire to the church door and threw in ‘granadoes’ – grenades. I hope he survived.
The combination of Shakespeare’s plays, fairy tales and war
brings me to ‘The Tale of the Three Weird Sisters’ listed in the 1549 Complaynt of Scotland. In 1801 the editor
John Leyland assumed this tale was a lost ‘romance’, by which he would have meant
a supernatural tale, as it self-evidently is. He equates the Weird Sisters with
the Parcae or Fates, and references a lengthy versified history of Britain, The Continuance of Albion’s England
written by William Warner and published in 1606. In Book 15, Banquo’s son
Fleance tells his sweetheart, the daughter of King Gruffyth of Wales, the story
of ‘The three Faeries, or Weird Elves’. I looked this up.
I pray thee, Fleance, tell, quoth
she, what I have heard in part,
The story of the Fairies that foretold thy Fathers fate.
Fleance explains how Macbeth
and Banquo were strolling together, when:
Three Fairies in a private walk to
them appeared, who
Saluted Macbeth King and gave him
other titles too,
To whom my father, laughing, said
they dealt unequal dole
Behighting nought thereof to him but to his Friend the whole.
When of the Weird-Elfes one of them,
replying, said that he
Should not be king, but of his
strain a many Kings should be.
For us, long used to
Macbeth’s three witches, it feels
strange to see them described as fairies – weird-elves, seers, considerably
more stately than Shakespeare’s crones, as we see in this woodcut from
Holinshed who simply calls them ‘three women’.
The earliest account of their
meeting with Banquo and Macbeth comes in Andrew of Wyntoun’s Oryginale Cronikle of Scotland, 1420. In Book 6, Chapter 118 (this too is
very long!) Macbeth experiences a prophetic dream rather than a physical
encounter. He dreams he was sitting near the King at a hunting lodge and:
... saw thre women by gangand [going
by]
And they thre women than thocht he
Thre werd sisteris like to be.
The first he herd say gangand by
‘Lo, yonder the thayne of Cromarty!’
The tother sister said agayne:
‘Off Murray yonder I see the
thayne,’
The thrid said, ‘Yonder I see the
king.’
All this herd he in his dremying.
Karen
Bek-Pederson to whose paper Macbeth and
‘The Weird Sisters’ – On Fates and Witches I owe this quotation, remarks:
‘This is clearly a portrayal of fate, albeit fate experienced in a dream.
Interestingly, the “weird sisters” are given no introduction at all, so the
reader must be expected to know who they are.’ Given this, ‘The Tale of the
Three Weird Sisters’ in The Complaynt of
Scotland’ is almost certainly the story of their encounter with Macbeth,not
some unknown ‘romance’ or fairy tale as I had at first fancied. Scottish
accounts of the ‘three weird sisters’ consistently characterise them as the
Fates or messengers of fate, while English versions like Holinshed’s explain
them as Elves or Fairies. It seems to have been Shakespeare himself who
transformed them into cauldron-stirring, sieve-sailing witches with cat and
toad familiars – perhaps because the subject of witchcraft was one of King
James the 1st and 6th’s hobby-horses.
A reference to another almost-lost fairy tale appears in
Act 3, Sc. 4 of Shakespeare’s King Lear
(1605), when Edgar, disguised as a Bedlam beggar, mentions the fairy story or
ballad of ‘Childe Rowland’ –
Child Rowland to the dark tower
came,
His word was still, “Fie, foh and
fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.”
Once again this must
have been a fairy tale easily recognisable in the 16th and 17th
centuries. We are lucky that it has survived in a single, imperfectly
remembered version recorded by the Scottish Robert Jamieson in his 1814 book Illustrations of Northern Antiquities.
It had been told to him in boyhood by a journeyman tailor whom he remembered
reciting it ‘in a sort of formal, drowsy, mannered, monotonous recitative,
mixing prose and verse, in the manner of the Icelandic sagas and as is still
the manner … among the Lowlanders in the north of Scotland, and among the
Highlanders and Irish.’ It’s an elaborate, haunting tale, in which Childe
Rowland goes to rescue his sister Burd Ellen from an Elf-King who lives in a
hall under a green hill. Just like a giant, the Elf-king bounds out, crying:
‘With fee, fi, fo and
fum!
I smell the blood of a
Christian man!
Be he dead, be he
living, wi’ my brand
I’ll clash his harns [brains] frae his harn-pan!’
‘Fee Fi Fo Fum?’
Well now! Thomas Nashe preserves perhaps the earliest version of this ‘giant’s
chant’ in his 1596 pamphlet Have With You
to Saffron Waldenin which he gleefully accuses his enemy the writer and
schoolman Gabriel Harvey of being a time-wasting pedant, ‘who will find matter
enough to dilate a whole day of the first invention of Fy, fah and fum, I smell the blood of an English-man.’ (And as this
is pretty much exactly what I’m doing right now, I hope you don’t mind my
wasting your time in this way.)
A
similar rhyme is preserved in ‘The Red Etin’, another tale cited in The Complaynt of Scotland. While
sniffing out the hero who’s hiding in his castle, the Etin chants:
‘Snouk but and snouk
ben,
I find the smell of an
earthly man;
Be he living or be he
dead
His heart this night shal kitchen my bread.’
This is from an early
19th century version of the tale, but ‘The Red Etin’ is at least as
old as Sir Robert Lyndsay’s 1528 poem The
Dreme, in which Lyndsay reminds the 16 year-old King James V of Scotland of
stories he told him as a child – which include:
The propheceis of
Rymour, Beid and Marlyng,
And of mony uther
pleasand storye
Of the Reid Etin, and
the Gyir Carlyng…
The
prophecies of [Thomas the] Rhymer, Bede and Merlin,
And
of many other pleasing stories,
Of the Red Etin, and
...
Who or what is
the Gyir Carlyng? ‘Gyir’ is derived from an Old Norse word meaning giant,
troll, or ogress; ‘carline’ means ‘old woman’. In 1808 Robert Jamieson
explained her to be ‘the Scottish Hecate or mother-witch’ – while RH Cromek in
his 1810 Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway
Song says, ‘the Gyre Carline ... is reckoned the mother of glamour [magic] and near-kin to Satan himself.
She is believed to preside over the Hallowmass Rade, and mothers frequently
frighten their children by threatening to give them to [her]. She is described
as wearing a long grey mantle and carrying a wand, which ... could convert
water into rocks and sea into dry land.’ And he relates how an inlet of the sea
was transformed by the angry Carline into a bog, after its waves had swept away
many of her steeds.
This
may have been the story Lyndsay told
the young James V, but more likely that was an anonymous comic poem, probably
15th century in origin, in which this ogress-queen is courted by a
neighbour called Blasour. When she rejects him, Blasour employs an army of
moles to undermine her tower, upon which she whacks him with a cudgel. He bleeds
‘a quart of milk pottage inwart’ which makes her laugh so hard she farts out
the hill known as North Berwick Law. Then the faery king assails her with his
elves and ‘all the dogs from Dunbar to Dunblane’, but she changes into a sow
and goes ‘gruntling o’er the Greek sea’. It’s easy to imagine young King James
laughing over this story – and equally easy to imagine such a story with its physical
sense of humour, dropping out of sight in ‘polite’ centuries. Indeed, this may
well be the reason why one sixteenth century fairy tale which is still extant,
has sunk from sight.
This
is ‘The Friar and the Boy’, an undated chapbook printed by Wynkyn de Worde (who
died circa 1534). It’s written in verse: ‘A Mery Geste of the Frere and the
Boye’ and it goes like this:
Once
there was a boy called little Jack, whose stepmother disliked him. She sent him
out to tend cattle and gave him poor food to eat. One day Jack shared his food
with a poor old man, who in return gave the boy three wishes – a bow that would always hit the mark, a pipe
that would make everyone who heard it dance, and finally that whenever his
stepmother looked spitefully at him, she should ‘a rap let go’. (Fart.) That
evening the cattle followed the sound of Jack’s pipe home, and his father gave
him a capon’s wing for supper, at which his stepmother scowled – and ‘let go a
blast’. When everyone laughed she scowled even more and the same thing happened,
so next day she asked a Friar to come and beat the boy. Jack shot down a bird
for the Friar with his magic bow; the bird fell into some brambles and as the
Friar went to fetch it, Jack piped up and made him dance until he was covered
in scratches. His stepmother complained to Jack’s father, who asked Jack to
demonstrate his pipe-playing. The moment he began, father, stepmother and all
the neighbours rushed from their homes and danced in the street till they were
exhausted. Jack was summoned before a Archdeacon’s court, where he made the
prisoners and officials and even judges dance like madmen – and at last the
Archdeacon promised Jack forgiveness if he ceased to play.
With
its wicked stepmother and useless father, the boy’s gift of food to the old
man, the granting of three wishes and the magical objects like the pipe and bow
– this is clearly a fairy tale. It’s reminiscent of the Grimms’ tale ‘The
Golden Goose’, in which a simple lad shares his
food with ‘a little old grey man’ who gives him a goose with gold feathers: if
anyone covetously touches the bird, they stick to it and to one another, so
that a whole series of people must run after the lad wherever he goes. There's no farting in ‘The Golden Goose’... but
‘The Friar and the Boy’ was popular enough to appear in several 16th
century chapbooks. W. C. Hazlitt (grandson of the essayist) suggested the story
had been ‘transplanted into our nursery literature under a slightly different
form’ as ‘Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son’, a relevant stanza of which is:
Tom with his pipe did play with such skill
That those who heard him could never keep still;
Whenever they heard, they began for to dance,
Even
pigs on their hind legs would after him prance.
To take stock:
so far we’ve clocked up ‘Tom Thumb’, ‘The Well of the World’s End’,
‘Rashie-coat’, ‘Mr Fox’, ‘The Three Weird Sisters’ as representations of Fate,
‘Childe Roland’, ‘The Red Etin’, ‘The Gyir Carline’ and ‘The Friar and His
Boy’. And there are more, much more.
The Old Wives Tale, by
Shakespeare’s contemporary the poet George Peele, is a one-act play of magic
and adventure published in 1595 a year before the author’s death: the
title-page declares it to have been performed by ‘the Queene’s Majesties’
Players’. It’s charming, and fascinating because it contains so many
fairy tale motifs and references. It opens like this:
Three
servants lost in a dark wood take shelter in a blacksmith’s cottage. There’s
only one bed and the blacksmith needs his sleep, so his old wife Madge suggests
that one of the three young fellows should share it with him, while the other
two sit up with her. To pass the time, she agrees to tell ‘an old wife’s winter
tale’, an offer met with enthusiasm. ‘A tale of an hour long were as good as an
hour’s sleep,’ exclaims one, and the other, ‘Look you, gammer, of the giant and
the king’s daughter…’ They want to hear a fairy
tale, and in a rambling, forgetful manner, the old woman begins telling
one.
‘Once upon a time there was a king, or a lord, or a
duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was, as white as snow and
as red as blood; and once upon a time, his daughter was stolen away […]
There was a conjuror, and this
conjuror could do anything, and he turned himself into a great dragon, and
carried the king’s daughter away in his mouth to a castle that he made of
stone, and there he kept her I know not how long, till at last all the king’s
men went out so long that her two brothers went to seek her. Oh, I forgot! He [the conjuror] turned a proper young man
to a bear in the night and an old man by day, and he made his lady run mad… God’s
me bones! Who comes here?’
She breaks off
in surprise: the kidnapped lady’s two brothers have suddenly appeared on stage
to seek their lost sister. Seeing the Old Man (aka the enchanted youth Erestus)
picking ‘hips and haws and sticks and straws’ at a wayside cross, they give him
alms; he in return gives them mysterious advice from ‘the White Bear of
England’s Wood’ – which itself sounds like the title of another lost fairy
tale, similar perhaps to the Norwegian story ‘White Bear King Valemon’ in which
the Bear is of course an enchanted king. We hear no more of it, but Madge’s
story has come to life and the play unfolds before her startled eyes.
The
villain is Sacrapant the Conjuror. Previously he was besotted with Venelia,
betrothed to young Erestus. After turning Erestus into an Old Man by day and a
White Bear by night, Sacrapant enspelled Venelia to run mute and distracted
through the woods. More recently he has abducted Delia, daughter of the king of
Thessaly, and caused her to forget her true identity – so when she encounters
her brothers, she won’t know them. Sacrapant is old, but by his art is able to
look like a ‘fair young man’; his power is stored in a little glass vial with a
flame in it, which he keeps buried. Besides her brothers, Delia’s lover the
Wandering Knight Eumenides is also searching for her.
‘The
Old Wives Tale’ is stuffed with fairy tale references which George Peele
clearly expected everyone in the audience to recognise; and we still do. ‘As
white as snow and as red as blood’, says old Madge. Peele may or may not have
known a version of ‘Snow White’, but ‘white as snow, red as blood, black as a
ravens wing’ is a common fairy tale description. And that’s only the beginning.
About a third of the way through the play, Sacrapant asks Delia what she would
like to eat and drink, and she playfully demands ‘the best meat from the king
of England’s table and the best wine in all France, brought in by the veriest
knave in all Spain.’ He responds:
‘Well, sit thee down.
Spread,
table, spread; meat, drink and bread.
Ever
may I have what I ever crave.’
These words
demonstrate that Sacrapant possesses a Magic
Table which supplies food and drink, the well-known fairy tale motif (Aarne
Thompson Index D1472.1.7).
In
the Grimms tale ‘The Wishing Table, the Gold-Ass and the Cudgel in the Sack’ (KHM
36), a youth is given a little wooden table. It doesn’t look much, but he only
has to say, ‘Little table, spread yourself’ and it covers itself at once with
‘a clean little cloth, a plate, knife and fork, dishes with boiled and roasted
meats … and a great glass of red wine that shone so as to make his heart glad.’
Sacrapant uses the same form of words: ‘Spread, table, spread.’
So
stories about Wishing Tables were being told in England during the 16th
century. Clearly, Peele expects his audience to recognise this one as a
standard magical prop that needs no explanation. Staging the magic would of
course be difficult, so the get-out is Delia’s demand that the food be served
by ‘the veriest knave in all Spain’ and the magic duly conjures up a Spanish
Friar (Spanish! Friar! Hiss! Boo!) to bring the food to the table.
In
a sub-plot that runs through the play, a poor man called Lampriscus has two
daughters, the beautiful but shrewish Zantippa, and Celanta, ugly but kind. This
is a deliberate reversal of the tale type The
Kind and Unkind Girls (AT tale type 480): usually the beautiful sister is
kind; the unkind one, ugly. Lampriscus sends the two to find their fortunes by drawing
water from the Well of Life. When Zantippa brings her pitcher to the well, a
Head rises from the water chanting or singing,
‘Gently
dip, but not too deep,
For
fear you make the golden beard to weep.
Fair maiden, white and red,
Comb me smooth and stroke my head
And thou shalt have some cockle-bread.’
Pretty Zantippa
takes offence at this request and smashes her pitcher over the Head. Maybe she
simply objects to combing and smoothing the Head, but the editor of the Mermaid
edition of the play, Charles Whitworth, believed that cockle-bread ‘may have
been’ made with seeds of the weed corn-cockle, thought to be an aphrodisiac. John
Aubrey recordes a ‘wanton sport’ called ‘moulding of cockle-bread’ which
involved young maids climbing on to a table with skirts and knees raised and
then ‘wabbl[ing] to and fro with their Buttocks as if they were kneading of
dough with their Ayrses.’ It’s a great glimpse of 17th century
kitchen-life; you can hear the shrieks of laughter – but I doubt if corn-cockle
would ever have been deliberately introduced into bread, as it seems to have
had a bad taste. John Gerard in The
Herball or Generalle Historie of Plantes (1597) writes: ‘the spoil unto
bread, as well as colour, taste and unholesomnes, is better known than
desired’.
Whatever
the implication of the song, Zantippa is angered and departs without any water.
Then ugly but kind Celanto arrives. She obligingly strokes and combs the Head,
which sinks into the well to rise again with gold for her to comb into her lap,
singing:
‘Fair maiden, white and red,
Stroke me smooth and comb my head,
And every hair a sheaf shall be,
And every sheaf a golden tree.’
This same motif occurs
in the ‘Tale of the Well at the World’s End’ listed in The Complaynt of Scotland: a young girl is sent by her cruel
stepmother to fetch water from the eponymous well. After crossing ‘a moor of
hecklepins’ – sharp pins packed together and used for teasing out wool – she
finds the well too deep to reach with her bottle, but sees ‘three scaud men’s
heads’ looking up at her. ‘Scaud’ means scalded or burned and may mean the
heads are bald or blackened. These heads say together,
‘Wash
me, wash me, my bonnie May
And
dry me wi’ yer clean linen apron.’
When the girl
does this they fill her bottle with water and give her three gifts: to be ten
times bonnier than before, for jewels to fall from her mouth every time she
speaks, and to be able to comb gold and silver out of her hair. Of course her
lazy stepsister fares badly.
Returning
to the play’s main story-line, you remember how the conjuror Sacrapant hides
his magical power in a buried, light-filled vial? This resembles the many fairy
tales around the world in which a giant, ogre or magician keeps his heart,
soul, or power separately hidden: a motif known as The Ogre’s Heart in the Egg (AT tale type 302). The Russian story
‘Koshchei the Deathless’ figures a monstrous magician who carries off not only
a king’s daughter, but also the mother of the hero Prince Ivan. Ivan’s mother
wheedles from Koshchei the secret of his hidden death. ‘There stands an oak,’
he tells her, ‘and under the oak is a casket, and in the casket is a hare, and
in the hare is a duck, and in the duck is an egg, and in the egg is my death.’
Of course in the end, Prince Ivan succeeds in finding and smashing the egg, and
Koshchei the Deathless dies. Sacrapant boasts of his vial:
‘With this enchantment do I
anything,
And till this fade, my skill shall
still endure,
And never none shall break this
little glass.
But she that’s neither wife, widow
nor maid.
Then cheer thyself; this is thy
destiny
Never
to die but by a dead man’s hand.’
There are two points
here. First, Sacrapant’s confidence that no one can break the glass is based on
his belief that there is no such thing as a woman who is neither wife, widow or maid. This apparently reassuring prophecy is
like that of the witches who tell Macbeth to ‘Laugh to scorn/The power of man,
for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth’. Though true their words are
deceptive, as Macbeth finds while fighting Macduff.
Macbeth: I bear a charmèd life, which must not
yield
To one of woman born.
Macduff: Despair
thy charm,
And let the angel whom
thou still has served
Tell thee Macduff was
from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripped.
Like Macbeth,
Sacrapant fails to read the small print. A 16th century betrothal
was a binding contract, after which sexual intercourse might legitimately take
place prior to the expected wedding. (Mariana in Measure for Measure is betrothed to Lord Angelo who abandons her
after intercourse, which is much to his discredit.) Betrothed to Erestus, no
longer a maid but as yet unmarried, Venelia will be able to break Sacrapant’s glass. Second, Sacrapant’s confidence
in his invulnerability is bolstered by the belief that he is destined ‘never to
die, but at a dead man’s hand’, an apparent impossibility. The example best
known today must surely be the Lord of the Nazgûl’s certainty that ‘no living
man’ can slay him. Cue Eowyn...
And cue the Grateful Dead Man, a
tale type in which the hero pays for the burial of a dead pauper and shortly
after acquires a faithful companion who assists him in his quest. (AT tale type
E341) The best known version is Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Travelling
Companion’: in this illustration the invisible Companion uses swans wings to
pursue the wicked princess to the hall of her troll lover and learn the answers
to the riddles she has set his master.
Delia’s
lover Eumenides is told by the Old Man: ‘Bestow thy alms, give more than
all/Till dead men’s bones come at thy call.’
The puzzled Eumenides sleeps on this and is woken by an altercation
between a Churchwarden and Sexton who are refusing to bury a the body of a poor
man, Jack, who left no money for the funeral. Eumenides pays for the burial and
is soon after overtaken by a young lad who offers to serve him. ‘Are you not
the man, sir – deny it if you can, sir – that gave all the money you had to the
burying of a poor man, and but one three-ha’pence left in your purse? Content
you, sir, I’ll serve you – that is flat.’ He too is called Jack, so common a
name that Eumenides does not associate him with the dead man. After all why
should he? Arranging a fee of half of whatever his master wins, Jack assists
and protects Eumenides. Invisible, he steals away Sacrapant’s magical sword and
wreath, and probably runs him through with the sword, too – there is no stage
direction – as the conjuror cries,
‘My blood is pierced, my breath
fleeting away
And
now my timeless date is come to end’.
Slain by the dead man,
Sacrapant dies and goes to hell, but his magic is still contained in the vial.
Jack summons Venelia to break the glass, the wicked enchantments are undone and
Delia and Eumenides are reunited. But by the terms of Jack’s agreement with
Eumenides, he was to share 50 percent of all that Eumenides gained. Testing his
master’s faith, he asks Eumenides to cut Delia in half. (You can get away with
this in fairy tales, they’re all about action not characterisation.) Eumenides
reluctantly agrees, and Delia exclaims ‘Farewell, world!’ but then –
Jack: ‘Stay, master! It is sufficient that I have tried your
constancy. Do you now remember since you paid for the burying of a poor
fellow?’
Eumenides: Ay, very well, Jack.
Jack: Then, master, thank that good deed for this good turn.
And so, God be with you all.
Jack leaps down in the ground.
Down through the
trapdoor in the stage, no doubt. Something about this play makes me wonder when
‘Jack the Giant Killer’ was first told. The first we know of it is a chapbook, ‘The
History of Jack and the Giants’ printed in Newcastle in 1711 in two parts, of
which only the second still exists. But according to the Opies in Classic Fairy Tales, the title-page
set out a full account of Jack’s
deeds:
Victorious
conquests over the North Country Giants, destroying the inchanted Castle kept
by Galligantus, dispers’d the fiery Griffins, put the Conjuror to flight, and released not only many Knights and
Ladies, but likewise a Duke’s Daughter
to whom he was honourably married.
My italics: there
we have elements of The Old Wives Tale:
the bold lad Jack, a conjuror, and the rescue of a duke’s daughter. The world-wide
web of story is vast; who knows?
One
theory about The Old Wives Tale is
that it was written for a company of child actors, which would explain why it’s
so short. You can imagine the intelligentsia permitting themselves to enjoy the
charming sight of children acting out a rustic fairy tale – and given Thomas
Nashe’s contempt for ‘Tom Thumb’ and ‘Fee fi foh fum’, perhaps they needed the
excuse. The play is not naïve: there’s more than a hint of tongue-in-cheek fun
about it, but it’s kindly fun. There’s no derision. Perhaps it is more a masque
than a play, and Milton borrowed this story of brothers seeking a sister
imprisoned by a magician for his masque ‘Comus’ which was presented at Ludlow
Castle on Michaelmas night, 1634. But Milton subdued the folksy elements,
giving the role of the Dead Man to the ethereal Attendant Spirit, and replacing
the watery Heads in the Well with Sabrina, goddess of the River Severn sitting
‘under the glassy, cool, translucent wave’. How different she is from the friendly,
ugly Heads! Milton further dignified his work with many classical references –
his magician Comus is the son of Circe.
The Old Wives Tale is
not ashamed of its humble fairy and folk-tale sources: it uses them with
genuine delight. I will stick my neck out and suggest that no educated people would treat common fairy tales
quite like this again for the next two hundred years, or think them worth writing
down. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was
published in 1596, only a year after The
Old Wives Tale, and though it too delights in the tropes of romances and
fairy tales – and as we’ve seen, even quotes from them – it makes them
respectable by using them as allegories: the Red-Cross Knight slaying the
Dragon represents Holiness conquering Sin.
About eighty years later John
Bunyan does the same thing in The
Pilgrim’s Progress. The chapter in which Christian
fights and vanquishes Apollyon reads
just like a fairy tale, brilliantly combining the stuff of salvation with the
now unfashionable yet still exciting romance. The humble old wives’ tales were
still popular at street-level in chapbooks and ballads, but could not be taken
seriously without this extra dimension. Even after the revival of interest
triggered by the Grimm brothers in the first decades of the 19th
century, it took the English a long time to turn their attention to their
native tales, of which many must have been lost. The Scots did rather better. However as I hope I’ve shown, clear traces of many once-loved fairy tales are still visible in 16th and 17th century literature.
Picture credits:
Hand of Glory, Whitby Museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_of_Glory
Hand of Glory, detail from 'The Elder Saint Jacob visiting the Magician Hermogenes' by Pieter van der Heyden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_of_Glory
'The Complaynt of Scotland' https://archive.org/details/complayntofscotl00leyd/page/n7/mode/2up
Cap o' Rushes (the English version of Rashie-coat) by John D Batten:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap-o%27-Rushes
The Frog's Wooing by Walter Crane:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Baby%27s_Opera_A_book_of_old_Rhymes_and_The_Music_by_the_Earliest_Masters_Book_Cover_18.png
Lady Mary hurls the hand at Mr Fox by John D Batten, from Joseph Jacobs' 'English Fairy Tales'
Britomart enters the House of Busyrane by Walter Crane, Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene'
Three Heads in the Well by HJ Ford, illustration to 'The Bushy Bride' in 'The Red Fairy Book'
Koschei the Deathless by Zvorykin,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Koschei_the_Deathless
The Travelling Companion by Gordon Browne https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/90212798762272314/
Christian fights Apollyon - 18th century print
.jpg)
