Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

Before the Puritans arrived en masse in North America and changed this continent forever, an Elizabethan called Thomas Morton, who hailed from pixie-haunted Devon in South West England, landed on the shore near present-day Quincy. There, in 1624, he established a trading settlement called Merrymount,¹ which would go down in history as representing a short-lived attempt to introduce Merry Old England to the seventeenth-century landscape of North America. (Although Morton came to New England under King James I, he was born under Queen Elizabeth I and in many ways embodied the values of that age—its tolerance, literariness, chivalry, and humanity).

While Merrymount flourished under Morton, the austere Puritan religion was confined to Plymouth and Virginia, for the colonists in those early days hadn’t yet headed north into Massachusetts Bay. Nevertheless, Calvinism’s influence cast a long shadow, and Morton was able to cause much scandal in a short time: Not only did he erect a maypole carved from an eighty-foot-high pine tree on a hill overlooking present-day Quincy Bay, he encouraged his men (alongside members of the Massachusett tribe, particularly the women) to make merry with rum and dancing.

To the Puritans further down the coast, it was as if the Devil’s Kingdom (which they thought they’d escaped after leaving England) had followed them to the New World. A great deal of tongue and finger wagging ensued when Morton and his men, in the spring of 1627, declared May Day a holiday and celebrated its festivities with flowers and garlands.

A seventeenth-century depiction of the goddess Flora by Luca Giordano.

The Puritan authorities hated Morton immediately, and Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony (where maypoles had been banned) wrote of him and his men:

They set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or rather furies, and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.

This quote, to the best of my knowledge, is the first and possibly only reference to fairies from a seventeenth-century New England Puritan, and it teaches us a lot about how the very early Americans viewed them (the fairies). Like the classical references mentioned here (the Furies, the Bacchantes, and the feasts of the Floralia), the fairies appear to have represented the degeneracy of a classical pagan past and the heathen-like secularism of a culture too influenced by that past.

Men such as Bradford viewed much of what we associate with Elizabethan England (its elevated literature, sacred monarchy, and medieval-style chivalry) as too pagan. Indeed, the literature of the age was full of deities, nymphs, and fauns, not to mention fairies. Although these figures often served as aids to Christian allegory, they had the effect of keeping non-Christian beings alive and, according to author Francis Young, served to repopulate English folklore with fairylike beings. It was the over-indulgent Church of England, moreover, that allowed such a situation to develop, and Puritans like Bradford longed to separate from both the culture and the Church.

Morton confirmed his reputation for pagan debauchery when he wrote a poem about his time in North America containing the following immortal lines:

Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys;
Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s joys;
Iô to Hymen, now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take rum.

Later, when John Endecott, another staunch Calvinist, became the governor of the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony, he came to Merrymount to cut down Morton’s maypole on the hill. In this, he acted like a seventeenth-century St. Boniface felling Thor’s oak (a holy site for German pagans in the eighth century), although it’s unlikely he’d have relished comparison to an English Catholic saint. With this, he extinguished New England’s nascent fairyland forever.

Puritans and fairies: The feelings are mutual

It’s often said the Puritans of Colonial New England had no time for the Fair Folk. This is true: belief in fairies was hardly compatible with a strictly Calvinist culture, and as a result, fairy folklore is found only sporadically throughout the region.

But it would be equally true to say that the fairies must have loathed the Puritans. Evidence suggests the fairies disliked austere religiosity as much as Thomas Morton did. Like him, they preferred merriment and feasting, or, according to one example, the sight of men gathered around a hearth drinking ale.

The example is from Wirt Sikes’ British Goblins (1880), in which the author describes a Welsh bwbach, a type of hobgoblin or household spirit, who lived in a house in Cardiganshire and who found the abstinence and solitary prayer of a dissenting (i.e., non-Church of England) preacher to be particularly offensive. This is because the fairy had a “weakness in favour of people who sat around the hearth with their mugs of good ale and their pipes.”

Sikes reported:

[The bwbach] took to pestering the preacher. One night it jerked the stool from under the good man’s elbows, as he knelt pouring forth prayer, so that he fell down flat on his face. Another time it interrupted the devotions by jangling the fire-irons on the hearth; and it was continually making the dogs fall a-howling during prayers, or frightening the farm-boy by grinning at him through the window, or throwing the maid into fits. At last it had the audacity to attack the preacher as he was crossing a field.

The implication seems to be that the fairy viewed the preacher’s piety as antisocial, especially compared to the behavior of the men imbibing ale. Interestingly, Sikes claimed that the fairy’s loathing was reserved for dissenting ministers rather than Anglican priests. This suggests it wasn’t so much the preacher’s religiosity that offended the fairy but rather the antisocial and otherwordly expression of that religiosity. This anecdote certainly requires more reflection, for here we have a supposedly otherwordly being, the bwbach, becoming so attached to worldly merriment that it felt compelled to chastise a minister engaged in otherwordly prayer. While the bwbach may be otherworldly, it’s allied primarily, as a household spirit, with the home and its residents. Interestingly, the fellowship between the bwbach and its human cohabitants is stronger than any association existing between ordinary men and otherworldly preachers.

It’s not difficult to imagine that any fairies who came on the Mayflower would have found the Puritans particularly offensive for the same reason, especially when they scolded (and later arrested) the non-dissenting Thomas Morton. Morton, besides loving rum and women, had religious services said according to the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. Perhaps if Morton had had his way, the fairies wouldn’t have loathed New England quite so much. Perhaps they’d even have formed a kind of fellowship with the ale-drinking, maypole-dancing English, as they did sometimes back home. What if, in the absence of Puritans, as the liberal Merrymount prospered (bonded in friendship with the Wampanoag), New England’s Fairyland had grown?

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

An 1881 depiction of May Day at Merrymount.

1. According to historian Ed Simon, the name Merrymount referred to the settlement’s position by the sea (merry is from Latin mare, meaning sea), but it may also refer to Mary, the Mother of God, and to merriment. The latter two associations may have exacerbated the Puritans’ irritation. ↩︎