As Wednesday Weirdness rolls round again, I am very pleased to welcome Dr. Simon Young to The Witch, The Weird, and The Wonderful with Irish fairies, food, and the sensational trial of Mary Doheny.
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In
1864 one Mary Doheny – ‘the wife of a blind man… with a
reputation for preternatural powers’ (Anon 1067) – was brought to
trial at Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland on a charge of
swindling. The Crown alleged that, over the course of four months,
Doheny had taken food from several townspeople on false pretences.
This may at first seem a sordid and unremarkable episode; and so,
indeed, in some senses it was. But this forgotten case – it has
been completely overlooked by scholars – reveals some unusual Irish
beliefs concerning food and fairies. Many studies in the last
generation have looked at the folklore of
food (see for overview Camp): this nineteenth-century Irish trial
allows us to delve into food in
folklore, a rather different but no less interesting and instructive
proposition.
There
are many hundreds of words given over to the Doheny trial in the
Irish, and to a lesser extent, the British press of the day. However,
for present purposes an account of the Doheny trial in the British
periodical The
Spectator
will serve our needs, as it condenses without simplifying. The
reader should be warned, some of these details are surprising, a
consequence of the British legal system and Irish folk convictions
colliding (Hickey 106-130).
The
charge against [Mary Doheny] was of cheating certain persons… out
of subsidies not in money but in food, on the false pretence that
they were for the support of deceased relatives of the contributors
recently restored to life – or sufficiently so to need food. The
scene in the Court-house of Carrick-on-Suir was a very curious one.
People of all ranks thronged from all sides to hear the examination,
and even the most educated persons present were, it is said, in parts
of the evidence visibly awestruck and confounded by the simple faith
and earnest testimony of more than one witness… (Anon 1067).
The
anonymous Spectator
writer explains how it was believed that several ‘dead’ family
members were coming back to life. By bringing food to the dead Mary
Doheny claimed she could sustain these individuals and then return
them to the world of the living. This was made all the more
remarkable by the fact that a number of witnesses claimed to have
seen their dead relatives while in Mrs Doheny’s presence! For
example, Doheny showed Joseph Reeves, his dead father-in-law, William
Mullins: a fact that, notwithstanding ridicule and laughter, Reeves –
a policeman – swore to in court.
We
remained looking at [my dead father-in-law, William Mullins] for a
time; he was standing in the field with a stick in his hand; his
side-face was turned toward me… I don’t think that William
Mullins is dead now; but he was dead. I have been sending him food
for the last four months since he came to life. I sent bread, butter,
and tea once in each of the twenty-four hours, sometimes by the
defendant and sometimes by my wife’s niece. Defendant, asked in my
presence for the food, and as it was after I had seen William Mullins
alive, I consented (Anon 1067).
Reeves
sent bread, butter and tea. Another witness brought tea, milk,
butter, and bread to her dead uncle, Tom Sheehan. However, the diet
of the dead or semi-dead was not always the same. The departed Father
Mullins ‘smokes, and can manage new potatoes and eggs’. A dead
child, on the other hand, was not strong enough for ‘potatoes and
eggs’ and after an abortive attempt to send this kind of food ‘[the
mother] changed the diet the next night’. Then the dead also proved
choosy. ‘Some tea was sent back as not good enough… two months
ago, and fresh tea of a better quality was substituted’ (Anon
1068). The food here amounts to a fair list of nineteenth-century
Irish staples: available to, depending on the date, the rural poor
and the lower middle classes (Diner 84-112).
Now
what, on earth, is going on in this account? The newspapers that
wrote about Doheny described her as a ‘witch’, but it would be
closer to the truth to call her a ‘fairy woman’ or a ‘fairy
doctor’: the nineteenth-century media, particularly in Britain,
constantly misunderstood Irish fairy superstitions, confusing the
same with witchcraft (Bourke 128-129). And it is important, for
present purposes, to note that, in nineteenth-century Ireland,
certain men and women lay claim to being the intimates of the
fairies, deriving their power from close relations with the world of
fairy (Bourke, 24-38); some even claimed to be
fairies
come to live among humanity (Young). Fairy doctors, of whom the most
famous was Biddy Early (Lenihan), worked cures, intervened to solicit
protection from fairies and, as here, communicated with the dead.
This
ability to communicate with the dead was not as alien to the fairy
faith as one might at first think. There was still, in
nineteenth-century Ireland, a belief that the dead (or at least some
of the dead) were ‘taken’ by the fairies and that they went to
dwell in the happy fairy realms under fairy raths or forts. So
powerful was this belief that certain scholars have even used it as
proof that the fairies were originally themselves the spirits of the
dead (Spence). This is questionable and need, in any case, not detain
us here. But it is important to understand that Doheny’s authority
was based on her ability to reach these dead relatives trapped among
‘the good folk’ and to return them to life.
But
why food? Here we must deal with this question at the vulgar level of
practicalities and at the more elevated level of folklore. First, the
practicalities. Fairy men and women may or may not have had ‘powers’.
Bt they had a well-deserved reputation for charlatanism. I have
documented many cases of this kind of dishonesty in
nineteenth-century Ireland; and there are even three dramatic cases –
one of which ended in court – where individuals arrived at Irish
homes claiming to be recently dead family members, returned from
among the fairies (Young 2012). These fairy swindlers depended on
sleight of hand, ham-acting and pyrotechnics and they were quite able
to have someone stand in for a dead relative to convince a grieving
family of their authority. Consider this account from the writings
of Lady Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s mother).
A
young man died suddenly on May Eve [a fairy feast] while he was lying
asleep under a hay-rick, and the parents and friends knew immediately
that he had been carried off to the fairy palace in the great moat of
Granard. So a renowned fairy man was sent for, who promised to have
him back in nine days. Meanwhile [the
fairy man]
desired
that food and drink of the best should be left daily for the young
man at a certain place on the moat. This was done, and the food
always disappeared, by which they knew the young man was living, and
came out of the moat nightly for the provisions left for him by his
people. Now on the ninth day a great crowd assembled to see the young
man brought back from Fairyland. And in time stood the fairy doctor
performing his incantations by means of fire and a powder which he
threw into the flames that caused a dense grey smoke to arise. Then,
taking off his hat, and holding a key in his hand, he called out
three times in a loud voice, ‘Come forth, come forth, come forth!’
On which a shrouded figure slowly rose up in the midst of the smoke,
and a voice was heard answering, ‘Leave me in peace; I am happy
with my fairy bride, and my parents need not weep for me, for I shall
bring them good luck, and guard them from evil evermore.’ Then the
figure vanished and the smoke cleared, and the parents were content,
for they believed the vision, and having loaded the fairy-man with
presents, they sent him away home (Wilde 200 and, for comments,
Briggs 150-151).
The
reader will notice the repetition of food here. In instances like
this and the Doheny case food was presumably a necessity for the
swindlers – who had to eat – and so food proved convenient. It
did not arouse the suspicion of relatives and community in the way
that requests for money might have; though money was also frequently
demanded. And there was the hope that at the end, as here, the fairy
doctor would be rewarded.
However,
there are also folklore reasons for asking for food. In myths from
around the world, there is the idea, familiar to most of us in the
tale of Persephone, that visitors to the underworld should not
consume the food of the ‘spirits’ (to be as generic as possible).
In 1891, in one of the pioneer works on British folklore, Hartland
tied this belief, in a short and still important chapter, to fairy
belief and the legend of the fairy midwife (37-58). Those, he argued,
who go to the fairy world risk being eternally trapped there should
they be so foolish as to eat the fairies’ food. And even a glancing
familiarity with British or Irish or for that matter German or
Mediterranean fairy lore confirms his thesis (Silver 1999, 171 and
Silver 2005, 105). Jeremy Harte, indeed, sums it up in his wonderful
survey of the fairy world writing: ‘[t]he simplest rule, and the
one which appears in almost all narratives of a journey to the
Otherworld, is easily remembered, don’t eat’ (Harte 81).
Take
this episode from one of the most famous English fairy stories,
written down some ten years after the Doheny trial. Mr Noy has
stumbled, quite unwittingly, into Fairyland and is observing an
extraordinary fairy revel.
[Mr
Noy] noticed that the damsel [among the fairies] who played the music
was more like ordinary folks for stature, and he took her to be the
master’s daughter, as, when one dance was ended, she gave the crowd
to a little old fellow that stood near her, entered the house,
fetched there from a black-jack, went round the tables and filled the
cups and tankards that those seated, and others, handed to be
replenished… [Then she] went towards the orchard signaling to Mr.
Noy to follow her, which he did. When out of the candle-glare and in
a clear spot where moonlight shone, she waited for him. He approached
and was surprised to see that the damsel was no other than a farmer’s
daughter of Selena [the local village], one Grace Hutchens, who had
been his sweetheart for a long while, until she died, three or four
years agone; at least he had mourned her as dead, and she had been
buried in Buryan Churchyard as such. When Mr. Noy came within a yard
or so, turning towards him, she said, ‘thank the stars, my dear
William, that I was on the look-out to stop ye, or you would this
minute be changed into the small people’s state like I am, woe is
me.’ He was about to kiss her, ‘Oh, beware!’ she exclaimed,
‘embrace me not, nor touch flower nor fruit; for eating a tempting
plum in this enchanted orchard was my undoing’ (Bottrell II, 94-102
at 97-98 )
Doheny
and the nameless fairy doctor in Wilde’s account are acting not
just according to their own interests, but according to the demands
of folklore. By giving staples to the prisoners of the fairies, they
are preventing them from ingesting fairy food, food that would trap
them in the fairy world for ever. The
Spectator
describes Doheny’s logic in the following terms.
The
witnesses called against Mrs Doheny certainly testified to the
continuous stream of subsidies with which they had supplied her for
their rather uncomfortably situated relatives, who appear to have
half got back from the grave, but still to be, if we may so term it,
spiritual invalids living on earth, but in mysterious seclusion
amongst ‘the good people’, and preparing on a mild diet of tea
and other food generally known to the medical profession as ‘slops’
for their more active return to life; but while they gave this
evidence, they not only imputed no falsehood to Mrs Doheny, but were
even eager in their simple faith that the subsidies had actually been
needed and consumed by their half-reanimated kinsmen, whom they had,
they said, seen with their own eyes (Anon 1067).
There
are cases from elsewhere in Europe where, in folklore, the dead avoid
eating fairy food and depend on rations from outside. But the only
examples I have found from the nineteenth century where individuals
actually act
on
these beliefs are from Ireland. How can we explain this fact? Is it
just the perseverance of pre-Christian or, better, non-Christian
beliefs or are we dealing with something more? Perhaps the answer
lies in that grievous nineteenth-century Irish experience:
starvation. The potato famines, which blighted the Irish nineteenth
century, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and leading hundreds
of thousands to emigrate, mattered in another way (Diner 113-116).
They created – as in other periods of famine (Pleij, 100-117;
Dickie 100-117) – a strong sense of solidarity between the
starving or semi-starved, where food and access to food were
mythologised. It was the recent memory of hunger, as much as
traditional belief, that, we suspect, made relatives, a decade or so
after an
Gorta Mór,
so attentive to the needs of their famished dead.
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Dr Simon Young is a
history lecturer at the International Studies Institute in Florence.
He has written, in the last years, on witch and fairy belief in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland in several
reviews including Folklore, Studia Hibernica and Nomina.
To read more, visit https://umbra.academia.edu/simonyoung
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‘The Tipperary Witch’ The
Spectator
(1864), 1067-1068
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Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London,
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(Routledge, London 2011)
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An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art
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The epic history of Italians and their food (London,
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Migration
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(London, Walter Scott Publishing 1891)
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