Farisees & Frairies- in search of the English faery tribes

Arthur Rackham, Dymchurch- the Sussex farisees prepare to leave England

I have written a great deal about the faeries of the British Isles and several of my books have concentrated upon regional families, such as the pixies of the South West and the tylwyth teg of Wales.  The English faeries have not received my specific, separate attention, although their traits have been discussed many times in the wider context of British Faery.  Here, though, I want to narrow the focus to try to isolate the uniquely English traits of these peoples.

We must begin with names.  A range of related terms, all derived from ‘fairy,’ were used in the southern and eastern parts of England to denote the Good Neighbours.  In East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) we will encounter frairies, feriers and ferishers.  In Kent, there are the fairisies whilst in Suffolk, Sussex and Surrey we hear of the farisees/ farisies, sometimes spelled (doubtless under Biblical influence) as pharisees.  This appeared as feeresses in Berkshire and appears to have been known in one form or another up into the Midlands as far as Worcestershire and even Herefordshire.  The use of farisees strikes us now as odd, and in Victorian times learned men were convinced that the simple rural folk had confused Bible figures with fairies “in a most hopeless manner.”  They hadn’t: farisees is simply a double plural of fairies, a dialect trait.  Nonetheless, I wonder if some of the words used did have an unconscious influence upon pronunciation.  What’s more- as one Sussex author noted- the fact that the faeries/ pharisees were mentioned in the Bible was just another reason to believe in them- a perfectly logical sounding argument that ran directly counter to many of the principles of Protestantism– that these beings could only be delusions of the devil because they were not otherwise capable of being accommodated within biblical categories.

Frary is an older English word meaning a brotherhood or fraternity, and you could imagine how this might shape understanding of ‘fairy.’  Equally, to feer meant to scare and supernatural beings, such as the inhabitants of Beedon Barrow in Berkshire, definitely had this effect upon local people.

Clearly, there was a faery population identifiable across most of lowland England, of which eighteenth and nineteenth century folklorists found and recorded the surviving traces.  These beings were not brownies nor were they Puck or Robin Goodfellow; they were understood to be different, not solitary but communal in nature and with a distinct set of habits and characteristics.

The Singing Barrow by Delphine Jones

I have discussed the key features of English faeries numerous times in separate postings, but I’ll identify them here based on a very rough survey of the recorded folklore.  Their main traits are as follows:

• They dance in rings to music, which is often heard by humans.  A good example of this is found in Round About Our Coal Fire, of 1734.  The ‘faries,’ the author tells us, were “very little creatures cloathed in green and [they] danced upon our green.”  They “would do good to industrious, cleanly People but they pinch the Sluts.”  They generally came out of molehills and always had music, dancing on moonlit nights and leaving mushroom rings behind them.  This description summarises many of the key aspects of the English faery and gives particular emphasis to their love of dancing, which is perhaps their most constant activity. In Sussex, there was a song associated with harvest celebrations that went “We’ll drink and dance like the Pharisees.” From the same county we have a report that these beings were “liddle folks not more than a foot high [who] used to be uncommon fond of dancing. They ‘jound’ [joined] hands and danced upon the grass until it became three times as green as it was anywhere else. That’s how these here rings come upon the hills;”
• The farisees live under hills (as we’ve just seen- and to the extent that they’re called the ‘hill-folk’ in Lancashire) and their music is often heard coming from those hills and barrows. Nevertheless, the faeries will also enter human houses and other buildings such as barns and mills.  As Reginald Scot said in 1584, they live “inhabit the mountains and caverns of the earth” but they will enter country houses at night to play and make noise.” They often cause a nuisance and disturbance in homes whilst they will make use of other human buildings for threshing or grinding;
• They have a great liking for dairy products and will steal these from humans if they can.  Faeries themselves are sometimes caught by humans- perhaps accidentally, sometimes when they’re in the act of stealing from us;
• The pharisees will abduct individual humans.  Adults are just kidnapped, babies and young children are swapped for aged faeries, whom we call ‘changelings.’  Their own childbirth often needs the help of a human midwife and she is often required to anoint the new-born with a special ointment which invests it with its faery powers of glamour;
• They are generally small and often dressed in green;
• They are often associated with wells and pools.  They may bathe in the latter, whereas the former often have healing properties. For example, the faeries used to swim at night in Fairy Pools at Brington in Northamptonshire whereas the ‘Fairy Well’ at Wooler in Northumberland had curative powers: children were dipped in it and bread, cheese and pins were left as offerings;
• They will injure humans and kill and steal cattle using bows and arrows– the ‘elf-shot’ we sometimes find;
• They don’t like churches and often move them as they’re being built to new sites- or, rarely, will remove themselves to escape them (especially the din of their bells).
• They often need human help mending their tools. Such deeds of kindness are often rewarded with gifts of food, whilst those people whose conduct meets with faery approval may receive regular gifts of money as a token of their favour.  For example, a Lancashire milkmaid received sixpence from the faeries because she would fill a milk jug and leave it out for them- but when she told her boyfriend what she was doing, she forfeited the coins.  The farisees like clean and tidy people, and lucky individuals will have chores completed for them or will have wishes granted. They don’t like people who spy upon or steal from them; these individuals are likely to suffer the “de cuss of de Pharisees” as it was called in Sussex, suffering blight of their health and loss of their prosperity and good fortune.

The characteristics and activities listed here will be very familiar to many readers and rightly so, as they clearly lie at the core of (English) faery identity. All the same, it was instructive to go through the folklore records concerned solely with those faeries called ‘farisees’ and ‘frairies’ to see which particular traits were the most common amongst them. Dancing in rings and a taste for milk, butter and cream were out in front by a very long way. Theirs is a life dedicated to pleasure and feasting!