A newsletter entirely about fairies and other similar sprites this week, as much of it comes from interesting bits and bobs I encountered while researching my most recent article about the cunning (but criminal) japes of Judith Phillips in Elizabethan England. It’s frustrating that so little is known about her life beyond her crimes — the specifics of which are themselves vague — and so the most accurate narrative has to come from a Frankensteinish plundering of various printed accounts (hardly famous for their reliability…) and the scant details included by sergeant-at-law Thomas Fleming in his interrogation of the woman in January 1595.
History is nothing if not the compounding of facts, each new bit of information bringing with it a dozen avenues of inquiry. And so even though the publisher of The Brideling (1595), which is the most useful surviving print record of Phillips’ crimes, is mentioned only in passing in the article, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole learning about his life. I also learned that Ben Jonson is thought to have written a ballad about a particularly famous fairy.
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Featured Woodcut
The woodcut illustration below is from Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests (1639). It was printed by Thomas Cotes and sold by Francis Grove, from his shop on Snow Hill in London. This woodcut, and a few very similar ones clearly based on it, were to become a popular representation of the titular sprite, a mischievous but usually quite harmless character whose deeds ranged from spooking those wandering the streets at night to helping with domestic tasks in return for a bowl of cream.
Fairies are usually thought of as teeny-tiny, friendly, humanoid beings today. Not quite so back in the early modern period; before 1700, people often conceived of sprites as being the same size as, or larger than, humans. And in the image above, Robin Goodfellow has the ears, horns, and legs of a goat. He holds a candle in one hand, a broom in the other, and a horn hangs from a baldric worn over his shoulder. And, yes, the figure is ithyphallic.
Around him a circle of sprites prance, while one off to the right plays music from a woodwind instrument of some kind. A flask at the bottom-right indicates the scene is one of merriment. I assume the two birds visible are supposed to be ravens, which were often associated with night-time and nocturnal activities, even though ravens are actually diurnal.
I think it’s fairly widely-known that Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (written c. 1595) is based on Goodfellow. But did you know that Ben Jonson is thought to have written a ballad about the fairy?
Its title is The mad-merry prankes of Robbin Good-fellow (c. 1625). I’m not sure what the exact evidence of his authorship is but reading the verses, it’s obvious that a far superior pen is at play here compared with the mountain of soppy, clichéd, and clumsily-written stanzas which usually comprised ballads. It may have originated as a song included in one of his masques, before being published in its own right. It was evidently popular, since it appeared in at least seven print editions between about 1625 and 1700. Here’s a part of the ballad which describes the kind of scene being depicted in the woodcut, and reminds us that fairies could be quite wicked:
By Wels and Gils in medowes greene
we nightly dance our heyday guise,
And to our fairy king and queene
we chant our Moone-light harmonies
When Larkes gin sing
Away we fling,
And babes new borne steale as we goe
An elfe in bed
We leave in stead,
And wend us laughing ho ho ho.
More about William Barley, draper and bookseller
The publisher of The Brideling (1595) — the most comprehensive surviving contemporary account of Judith Phillips’ crimes — was a man named William Barley. Though he’s not mentioned by name in the article, it was presumably he who decided to commission both the title-page woodcut of Phillips riding the Hampshire farmer and the illustration of the con-woman standing beside the wealthy London widow who she not only defrauded but from whom she was rumoured to have cut off some pubic hair (the idea being that this would be part of a magical process by which the ideal suitor could be found). Curiously, though the visual reference is obvious (Phillips clasps a pair of scissors while the widow points towards her crotch), the text makes no reference to the event.
Barley was a relatively inexperienced bookseller specialising in catchpenny news pamphlets who was already a controversial figure in London’s print market. He was not a freeman of the Stationers’ Company, the livery company with a monopoly over the city’s book trade, but nonetheless sold books from a shop in Newgate Market, exploiting an ambiguity in commercial law which allowed members of any company (he was a draper) to undertake the trade of another.
The little historians know of Barley’s personal life and early business activities comes from legal documents recording his prosecution and convictions, chiefly for publishing books without a license. He was imprisoned in 1591 for selling unauthorised books, coughed up a 40 shilling fine in 1595 for the same offence, and was co-defendant three years later in a Star Chamber lawsuit which finally determined that tradesmen active in print ought to be members of the Stationers’ Company.
Yet even a publisher as brazenly transgressive as William Barley dared not include the allegations of pubic trimming which popular gossip, coarse ballads, and slanderous jigs had spread across London.
Barley would later distinguish himself as a distributor of music books — though even this was not without controversy. His first two musical publications, The Pathway to Music and A New Booke of Tabliture, both printed in 1596, were criticised for their numerous errors. Barley was made an assignee of the composer Thomas Morley — who obtained a printing monopoly over musical works — which was a peculiar turn of events, given that Morley was one of a number of musicians who had lambasted Barley’s low-quality books.
Barley became a member of the Stationers’ Company in 1606, on the same day a lawsuit between him and a fellow music publisher had been decided (in his favour). It may be, as J. A. Lavin speculated in 1969, that his transfer from the Drapers’ Company was part of the settlement.
A terrifying hobgoblin in Stuart London?
When I was researching my undergraduate dissertation about ghosts in political pamphlets of the Civil War and Interregnum periods, I recall coming across a really interesting ballad, from some time near the end of the 17th century, which was apparently written by a night watchman. It relays a very interesting, and incredibly tall, tale.
Apparently while standing watch one night, the author caught sight of a “frightful creature” with “four sprawling Feet,/on which it crawl’d along the Street,/And towards me at length it came,/Breathing as ’twere, a burning-flame”. He thought it was some “Fiend of Hell” — a hag, ghost, hobgoblin, or other supernatural being.
The beast was truly horrific — having a “broad Face, but ne’r a Nose,/Nor any Eyes” — and terrified the watchman, who cried out that Satan was active in London. A group of 20 men assembled and hunted the monster down… only to find that it was a notorious local woman: “Old drunken Joan of Finsbury”.
As part of a bet, the said Joan had wagered that she could cross London on all fours, with her clothing over her head, while moving backwards, and with a lit candlestick placed in what the balladeer calls “her brawny Fundament”. The ballad concludes thusly:
Home [Joan] return’d without delay,
There was good laughing the next day
At the poor Watchman, who declar’d
He ne’r before had been so scar’d.Upon her Hands and Feet she come,
Exposing of her naked Bum,
In which there stuck a Candle lighted,
This would the hardest Man affrighted.
