By the second half of the Middle Ages, the island of Great Britain and the polities within were at the spiritual confluence of Christianity as enforced by the organized church of Rome, and the widespread traditional beliefs in supernatural beings and how to communicate with them, holistically referred to as fairy faiths. Particularly in the land of Wales and the Celtic culture it had preserved after Anglo-Saxon and subsequent Norman invasion, interactions with fairies were widely noted by the local clergy and lay people they looked after. At the same time, the ecstatic states of soothsaying achieved by lay people to commune with God, and the fictitious heroes born from these fairy faiths such as the Arthurian Merlin, made the church anxious in terms of their debatable orthodoxy and widespread popular reception amongst peasants and nobility alike. Alternatively, these unique qualities of the Britons and their culture might have been reappropriated entirely as instruments for the ecclesiastical hierarchy to extend their reach through the preexisting framework of belief in fairies, incubi, elves, and other supernatural phenomena.

From the late 1000s to early 1300s, the ways in which both lay people and clerics mediated, adopted, or subsumed the belief in fairy faiths and similar traditions provides a unique insight into these often ignored or forgotten cultures and their place in the greater scheme of the history of what is labeled heresy. By examining how fairies played into medieval anxieties about procreation and how the literary figure of Merlin came out of this and the Welsh prophesying tradition, the orthodoxy of fairy faiths can be understood as extremely dependent on how well it can be utilized by ecclesiastical powers to further their influence over the course of the eleventh to fourteenth century. Fairy faiths and the practices they entailed skirted the line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, yet ultimately survived into the modern day as the clergy were unable to separate these beliefs and practices from the Christianity present in Britain.

It may be tempting to wholeheartedly describe the religious practices of Great Britain prior to Protestantism as misguided and lacking, in the kindest terms possible. In particular, popular notions today when the word “fairy” is mentioned may indicate beliefs and magical practices, like soothsaying and prophecy, that lie entirely in opposition to late medieval Catholicism. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth, particularly in Britain; as Eamon Duffy argues, “within the diversity of medieval religious options there was a remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homogeneity across the social spectrum, a shared repertoire of symbols, prayers, and beliefs which crossed and bridge even the gulf between the literate and the illiterate”.^[1] What might be labeled “superstition” by intellectual thought following in the footsteps of Protestant thinking is actually the rich, lived beliefs of the people and parishioners of medieval Britain, ones that combine the continental and orthodox Christian beliefs as taught by the church and existence of supernatural creatures and phenomena in such an interwoven way it is nearly impossible to separate them. Nevertheless, there are many examples of specific delineations drawn, and even the differentiation of natural and supernatural by clerics, with some beliefs bordering on heresy amongst lay people.

There comes an issue when studying supposed vernacular beliefs in the Middle Ages, then, of how sparsely their specific details have been documented. Even the definition of “fairy” is tenuous, and just within the bounds of this project, encompasses everything from elves, to demons, to angel-spawn. Perhaps, then, it becomes most crucial to focus on and understand the rationale of fairy belief within the mind of British lay people, and the explanations these beliefs provided that the church anxiously encountered. Many of these supernatural beings -if supernatural is how a given cleric choses to describe them- inhabited a fairyland or elvenland, a location firmly understood as accessible by human beings with some legendary residents, such as the vaguely-attested heroes Onewynn and Wade.^[2] These individuals, like many other legendary figures, have lost much of their cultural context as so little information about their relation to fairies remains, a local significance lost in the sands of time.^[3] The otherworld, however, is well attested to, and while some inhabitants fit nicely into an orthodox worldview, others were quite alien, or even threatening to ecclesiastical authority.^[4]

Nevertheless, across the documents that attest to a fairyland’s inhabitants coming to the human realm, some commonalities can be found, particularly when mortality is involved. From the eleventh century onward, it was quite common to think of fairies across Europe -not just in Great Britain -in terms of their association with reproduction and child-rearing.^[5] Life and death were on a continuum with one another, and the explanation of a liminal fairyland that one could travel to only complicated these notions of the end of one life and beginning of another. This is one origin point for changeling belief amongst lay people for example, and how the existence of these creatures factored into medieval lay childcare. Typically, changelings had been understood through stories of parents making attempts to save their baby from illness or get their actual child back after the original had been swapped with a fairy child.^[6] The term “changeling” has been particularly associated with laypeople’s misunderstanding of their own child who may be sick or disabled, the inhibiting traits being seen as a result of their inherently nonhuman, demonic nature rather than whatever medical explanation for illness a trained doctor could provide.^[7]

However, it may be more accurate- and humanizing- to view these concerns over whether one’s child was their own or a fairy-devil as coming from the difficulty of balancing child care with medieval anxieties at the time, both physical and theological.^[8] The rare infanticide that was enacted under the understanding that this child was a fairy substitute and not their own baby is quite gruesome to imagine. However, one could have solved the theological problem beliefs in changelings posed alongside extinguishing their impostor baby, such as what creatures even have the ability to procreate such as these devil-fairies, or who is considered a legitimate father in the medieval mind.^[9] The theological implications of changelings as demon children fell in line with the widespread fascination with demon procreation in the later Middle Ages amongst clerics,^[10] even the sort of inverted creature to the conceiving incubus discussed later on. This belief and practice is noted as existing mostly amongst lay peasants by clerical officials, a seeming jab at their rationalization of their child’s illness reliant on fairy faith rather than medicinal explanations.^[11] Changelings, therefore, lay out a groundwork of anxiety for the medieval church to reckon with when enforcing their doctrine in Britain.

Further combination of theological fears amongst traditional beliefs can be found concerning the color green, which in some places was associated almost entirely with fairies; to dress your infant in green would spell doom for them before their Christening.^[12] Green as the color of fairies and other supernatural beings is most widely known through stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, wherein the titular Green Knight is positioned in opposition to the pious and chivalrous Christian Sir Gawain, but discussion of Arthurian romance will occur later in this analysis. While the explanations provided by medieval scholars as to why fairies targeted babies in the first place is unsatisfactory,^[13] this color association may indicate concern to do with growing fears that these children were abducted and replaced before the age of baptism, thus denied entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. This would point to growing influence and diffusion of Christian fears about the afterlife with the preexisting beliefs about protecting one's children. Medieval notions of death were certainly quite different from notions of mortality today, but for fairies to be so intrinsically entwined with the graveness of life and death suggests their significance in these beliefs extend much further than strictly orthodox, ecclesiastical beliefs and teachings could account for.

All of these practices left clerics and chroniclers of all sorts at an impasse; They were taught that these fairy beliefs were the rabble of the common folk, and yet were so widespread and commonly-held that ignoring them would not be conducive to effective preaching. These creatures, sometimes rationalized as demonic in nature and tied so closely to life and death, were certainly of some orthodox concern to the church. It became necessary for these scholars to delineate natural from supernatural, the preexisting Christian framework for which applied to the fairy beliefs and their own rationale.^[14] Part of these supernatural occurrences includes miracles, events without natural explanation that many lay people sought the clergy to explain for them. At the start of the thirteenth century, the Augustonian notion of miracles- which defined miraculous occurrences as naturally good, and the product of God’s work- was abound throughout medieval Europe.^[15] In this way, magics and phenomena deemed natural fit into an orthodox cosmology, subservient to God and just another manifestation of his will. However, in the same breath, those who spent too much time pondering and attempting to observe the miraculous may take on “unspeakable” professions, such as “divination and fortune-telling”,^[16] with the particularly Welsh example of the awenyddion discussed later on in this paper. Once again, the tension between these traditional, “natural” ways of understanding the world and its inhabitants were at once orthodox under God, but walking the line of the church’s boundaries around magic and so-called demons. In many attempts, the supernatural may be defined only as what lies outside of the natural (Godly) order of the world, much like heresy, but because God is in all things, it became difficult for medieval theologists to be consistent with their definition of these heretical beliefs.^[17]

The marvels or mirabilia that lay people concerned themselves with certainly were an explanation for the natural phenomena of the world around them, and while much of it could be easily shifted to fall under ecclesiastical doctrine, documentation by the clergy themselves makes one question how they were not accused of heresy. Documents concerning fairy intercession and clergy attesting to witnessing mirabilia were often seen as the exception to the rule, as these sparse instances of unorthodox processing were written and shared by clerics who were otherwise considered completely orthodox.^[18] These wonder stories about encounters concerning lay people, which gained popularity throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, still maintained a level of distance from the subject on the part of the clerical documenters, and were birthed out of the preexisting historia writing tradition. Notable historia-turned-wonder stories from this period written by the likes of Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntington are noteworthy for their tameness, that “they affirmed, rather than defied, established theological categorisations of the supernatural and thus reinforced accepted verities about the cosmological order”.^[19] Orderic Vitalis, for example, describes to the reader a priest having a ghastly encounter with an army of the dead, flanked by dwarfs and demons alike.^[20] After a brief and terrifying conversation with many of the beings, the priest is met with a knight carrying a grotesque mass of congealed blood, revealed to be the Mont-Saint-Michel. The undead knight exclaims, “ I am rightfully forced to carry this enormous weight on my heels, because I once wore shining pointed spurs in my eagerness to spill blood… Those who are still alive should always remember such things, and should take care not to risk such awful punishment for their sins”.^[21] There is zero doubt in the presentation of this story that these events transpired according to Vitalis, and as the story ends on the woeful request for his soul to be prayed for, even the supernatural knight conforms to the will of orthodox practice.

Another chronicler of such wonder tales was Walter Map, a court cleric who vividly describes creatures from a parallel world crossing over into the human realm. In the tale of Gwestin of Ffestiniog, he describes (although with a degree of separation, as this is a “Welshmen”’s tale rather than his own^[22]) how the titular Gwestin captures an otherworldly maiden beside the lake by moonlight as his bride. Gwestin, “saw, on three successive moonlit nights, bands of dancing women in his fields of oats, and he followed them until they sank in the water of the lake. On the fourth night, he detained one of these maidens. He was able to do so… [When] he had heard them murmuring below the surface, saying: ‘If he had done this or that he would have been able to catch one of us’”.^[23] He follows the logic of these elven maidens- or perhaps succubi^[24]- that he overhears, and his wife sets forth her own logic to follow that she will be faithful until the day he strikes her with his bridle-rein.^[25] For the purposes of Map, this story and its supposed authenticity could serve to educate the audience about the wiles which demonic entities could entice them with, were they to encounter such beings in the countryside and become ensnared.^[26] The veracity of such a tale should alarm the pious reader to be cautious of their surroundings, because such ungodly creatures follow their own rationale if you attempt to play their games. Not unlike the changeling reflecting folk fears around child-rearing, succubi and other such demon-fairies could serve as a cautionary example for what befalls those with unchecked lust. As a result, these observations and stories could be understood as quirks of the world and context they specifically occurred in, not posing any threat to the orthodoxy of the people described or the pious men documenting them. Instead, many of them explicitly use the supernatural subject matter to inform and caution the audience, without much consideration given to whether these were based on preexisting legends or had become adaptations under orthodox authority.

Thus, one can see how the breadth of these written accounts were slowly being turned into a tool for the church to use to further their influence, taking the preexisting knowledge of such local fairies and encounters and turning them into cautionary tales for the greater spirituality of Britain. Besides the changeling, ghost, or succubus, however, one particularly common fairy in wonder tales and the wider medieval imagination as a whole that disrupted orthodox delineation and control was that of the incubus, and their unions with human mothers. Even etymologically, these beings were more widespread than one might think; with basis in Augustine’s description of Silvans and Pans, the word incubi or incubus could have been just as synonymous with fairy to medieval people, although the connotation of demon (or even angel) could have been present as well.^[27] It is in this demonic connotation that the most apparent heterodox portrayals can be found; the incubus not only reflects fears amongst men that they couldn’t control themselves during sleep, and that the wanton, consensual indulgence with an incubi by a woman “anticipates the witch”.^[28] Because of this, numerous examples of modern-day night terrors and improbable births are attributed to intervention by incubi.

However, none are as renowned as the fictional account of the birth of Merlin, sorcerer and advisor to King Arthur. His best-known origin story is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth, although Geoffrey was certainly working with numerous Merlinic prototypes and folk tales. His account explains that Merlin’s father is an incubus, a being described as, “part human, part angel, and [who can] take on human form at will and sleep with women”.^[29] This pseudo-angelic nature is as well-attested to as a defining characteristic of incubi as their demonic connotation, and demons that sexually target humans in general; they were beings that,  “lacked bodies and thus could not experience pleasure. They also, necessarily, lacked gender… Hence, they only assumed appropriately sexed bodies in order to seduce and corrupt humans”.^[30] This immateriality is simultaneously angelic and demonic, but explicitly not of the human realm. Similarly to changelings, these loopholes that incubi could go through to conceive a child with a human had terrifying implications for the clergy, who would have to either dispel or retell these rumors into those which discouraged mingling with demons. As a result, it leaves the exact positioning of incubi within the demonology of orthodox Christianity dependent on a given situation, only further complicated by preexisting supernatural belief and phenomena such as Merlin’s legendary origins.

Now established as distinctly nonhuman and extremely magical, Geoffrey’s depiction of Merlin’s father seems to draw on much earlier descriptions of Merlin’s mythological predecessors, such as the prophetic Ambrosius of Nennius and Gildas. Ambrosius is described as a child without a father by Nennius, his sacrificed blood said to lift the curse upon Vortigern’s castle. Instead of bloodshed, the young Ambrosius points to the red and white dragons- Britain and the Saxons respectively- fighting beneath the castle as the cause of the disturbances instead, and that it shall soon end once the red dragon defeats the white.^[31] The red dragon, y Ddraig Goch, has since become one of the most common symbols of Welsh identity. This is also the earliest description of Merlin or Ambrosius prophesying, specifically that the Britons will overthrow their Saxon conquerors.

Gildas continues to elaborate on Ambrosius’ life as an adult, him being, “a modest man, who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period by chance left alive. His parents… had been slain in these same broils”.^[32] Merlin’s magical prowess and how this is tied to nationalism will be discussed later, but it could very well be that his significance as a British legendary figure prevented his total erasure as he became popularized as demon spawn. The commonality to be found here is a missing human father, one that Geoffrey would need to explain somehow. His father’s status, ranging from angelic as a fallen angel from the Book of Enoch,^[33] to demonic as some illusion of black magic^[34], could just as well be fairy-like; with later texts expounding upon Geoffrey’s portrayal by having his father come from the woodland realms, dancing and playing before descending upon his mother.^[35] This story, coupled with Merlin’s preponderance for prophecy, made him a prime cultural target in the Geoffrey-based context to be rewritten, because of the heretical associations in believing the veracity of a prophet born from such supernatural, nonhuman origins.^[36] Many centuries later, the prophecies of Ambrosius and the related Merlin Caledonius/Silvester accounted for by Gerald of Wales would continue to expound as a facet of British and Welsh national identity, a form of soothsaying discussed later that worked in tandem with orthodox teachings rather than against them as heresy.

Much of these early condemnations of Merlin took the form of labeling his mother a base whore and leaving the identity of his father vague, despite how their initial union was both consensual and preserved her piety. In Geoffrey’s account, she describes how the incubus, “Visited me in this way for a long time and often made love to me in the form of a man, leaving me with a child in my womb… You should know, my lord, that in no other way have I known a man who could have been this youth’s father”.^[37] This consensual union is distinct from stories of succubi targeting men while they were asleep (as an explanation for nocturnal emission), closer to making a pact with a demon as a sorcerer with no room for denying her own agency.^[38] Here, the woman is held accountable for her own union with the supernatural incubi, and her child’s usefulness to the court of Vortigern, much like in the Nennius account, is what saves him from death. It could be argued that the demonization of Merlin’s father and rewritten histories of his life were as much trying to conform to orthodox belief about angels, demons, and fairies as they were trying to erase the agency and self-description of Merlin’s mother, whose story of piety preserved by having sex only with the immaterial incubi was a common tale amongst clerical and lay women alike, if extensively ridiculed.^[39] Geoffrey’s characterization of Merlin’s origins nevertheless became the standard throughout British Arthuriana, and while his father is no longer considered a fairy per se, the fact that his demonic nature remains suggests that the church was unable to suppress or shift the predominant depiction of this supernatural figure, nor erase his British folk origins as a prophet.

In creating the Arthurian Merlin for aristocratic audiences, Geoffrey combined the lay beliefs in the magical folk heroes of the Britons into a figure that just barely was permitted in orthodox spheres. However, the traditions of prophecy found in Wales that these prototypes rose up from were far from such exemptions of ecclesiastical scrutiny. In terms of specific prophecies, Gerald of Wales’ observations of the natural world and pre-existing culture in late twelfth century Wales describes the nation’s unique cultural facets unencumbered. His description of the prophesying group known as awenyddion unabashedly shows the faith lay people placed in these soothsayers who are not formally recognized by the church as religious authorities, a group described as, “[behaving] as if they are possessed by devils”.^[40] Despite this disparaging description, Gerald speaks to their recognition within lay communities, even going so far as to praise them for the spectacular state of ecstasy these individuals enter while prophesying.^[41] He seems unsure of what to make of these individuals, supposing that, “It is possible that they are speaking through demons which possess them, spirits which are ignorant and yet in some way inspired”.^[42] It is with the specifics of their proclamations that their orthodoxy, or at the very least their Christendom, is affirmed; Each trance beginning by, “[invoking] the true and living God, and the Holy Trinity, and they pray that they may not be prevented by their sins from revealing the truth”.^[43] Herein lies an example of the grating tension between the veracity of awenydd visions and orthodox Christian belief, leaving the religious revelations up to the common people rather than a clerical intercessor.

With this tradition established as one common to the Welsh and British as a whole, Gerald’s elaboration with the mythical Merlin Caledonius/Silvester and Ambrosius seems to follow in this same tradition. The prophesying of these legendary men was an intrinsic trait of their -and the Arthurian Merlin’s -character by this point, and in the case of Caledonius/Silvester, Gerald acknowledges that the man likely had not been a devout Christian, if he were a Christian at all; his supposed prophecies could just as easily be understood as sorcery. For Merlin Caledonius/Silvester and his fellow awenydd prophets, “if they were guided by the spirit of God, they would add ‘Thus spake the Lord God’, or some such words… no such method of prophesying is found in Merlin, so that what he said is merely sorcery. He may well have been a true believer, but, you will say, there is no mention of his sanctity or devout-ness”.^[44] This alarmingly heterodox labeling of Merlin Caledonius/Silvester is qualmed by Gerald immediately after, with him providing the explanation that, “the spirit of prophecy was given not only to the holy, but sometimes to the unbelievers and Gentiles… and even to the wicked”.^[45] He continues to only list their prophecies and ecstatic state when the contents concern Christian subjects,^[46] leaving the matter of whether Merlin Caledonius/Silvester ever prophesied about secular topics for the lay people, or if Gerald and his clerical peers only made note of the religious subject matter, unknown.

Despite this tenuous matter of prophecy, Gerald had found a way to repurpose a nationalistic figure for the Welsh, one that walked the thin line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, natural and supernatural, human and fairy. Gerald feels no need to conceal his connection to these Merlinic prophecies unlike previous clerics had when distancing their involvement in wonder tales, having compiled this information for the conquering Norman court himself, a partial Welshman.^[47] As he collected his observations of Wales after rallying soldiers for the Third Crusade in 1189, the reinforcement and use of Merlin as a cultural figure whose very origin story -first described by Nennius then Geoffrey -portrayed the eventual triumph of the British over their Saxon conquerors, possibly with the help of the Normans. However, this isn’t to say that Gerald concluded in a way that favored the Britons; quite the opposite actually, as he believed that this Merlinic prophecy was entirely wrong.^[48] The backwards misdeeds of the Welsh, predominantly homosexuality as an example, was not gone amongst their population in Gerald’s day because of moral improvement, but that their treatment as a people had deteriorated so much so that such “luxurious” living was no longer possible.^[49] This criticism of the Welsh lay people may imply that Norman involvement could help civilize the Welsh people, rather than subsume them and their beliefs entirely. After all, these were lay people who would supposedly kill their “changeling” children and commune with demons in unholy conception. A potential Norman reformation would kill two birds with one stone; ensure that the Welsh lay people were following orthodox Christian practice, and supposedly drive out the influence the Saxons had throughout Britain as Merlin foretold.

Ultimately though, Gerald’s accounts from the late twelfth century about the Welsh Merlinic prototypes and their prophecies are inconsistent in his personal tone. Gerald discusses one more Merlinic figure, a seer named Meilyr, who could see spirits clear as day and recognize lies by the demons dancing on a liar’s tongue.^[50] He would call to these “unclean” spirits to aid in his prophesying, which despite his attempts to call out false monks and warn an abbot about the doom about to befall him,^[51] seemed to damn him to a tragic death much too early.^[52] Gerald concludes the story of Meilyr as one which, “Wales knows only too well how… through a blind lust for conquest and through a rupture of all the ties of common blood and family connection, evil example has spread far and wide throughout the land, and good faith has disappeared, to be replaced by shameful perfidy”.^[53] He seems to imply that demons, existing in the world around humans with greater senses and experience, were still fallible and ultimately condemned, unlike God and his followers.^[54]

With the final example of Meilyr, Gerald acknowledges how Welsh belief in fairies, demons, and the supernatural in general was quite common to their society, but would have to submit entirely to God’s will in the end, instead of putting their faith in soothsayers communing with unholy creatures to foretell the future. Alternatively, what might be going on here is Gerald’s attempts to legitimize and treat Merlinic figures and awenyddion appropriately from the position of a clergyman, and by proxy, the supernatural beliefs native to Wales, in the eyes of the church so that they might not be subsumed by the colonizing Normans entirely. Once again, his attempts to create an objective historia of Wales by juxtaposing the same people and practices as both good and bad leaves the reader confused by these conflicting factors, but most of all speaks towards the inability for the clergy as a whole to fully separate and destroy fairy faiths in Britain entirely. As a result, Gerald becomes a part of the framework he was describing; a clerical official using vaguely heterodox folk belief and rhetoric to try and appeal to conquering sensibilities about the unique ways of communing with God in Britain, while those very same beliefs and mythological figures involved demonic associations of heterodox or non-Christian origins that should still be condemned if Wales seeks to be civilized by the Normans, and more urgently, the orthodox church.

With the failure of the clergy to erase Merlin and the fairy beliefs surrounding him from the minds and myths of medieval British people, they had to change their tactics when it came to orthodox enforcement. This spiritual frustration is most palpable in the fourteenth century priestly guidebook Fasciculus Morum, wherein the preacher asks, “What shall we say of those superstitious wretches who claim that at night they see the most beautiful queens and other girls dancing in the ring… who in our native tongue are called elves? And they believe that these can change both men and women into other beings and carry them with them to elvenland... All this is nothing but phantoms shown them by a mischievous spirit”.^[55] In the same breath, these very realistic visions of elves- that are supposedly so widespread they must be noted in a priestly guidebook- are chalked up to being caused by a “mischievous spirit”, or the devil himself, in the form of a human or angel.^[56] A later manuscript replaces this fairyland of sorts with King Arthur and his troops, lumping these folk heroes in with fairies quite bluntly.^[57] This perplexing duality between the visions of elves labeled heretical with the illusions of devils as lining up with orthodoxy harkens back to the confusion with the true nature of Merlin’s father. While the priests overseeing this guide likely were trying to account for the specific folk beliefs found in the British countryside, it fails to understand the greater historiographical debate of how similar those two categories really are. In this way, despite framing fairy belief as something much more recognizable as a seductive heresy in the fourteenth century, it was too entwined with the preexisting culture of Britain to be separated at this point.

When discussing medieval Christian ideas of heresy, sometimes it appears that as soon as categorizations are drawn by the church to differentiate between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, an entire milieu of problems arise in the shades of gray between, which seems to be the case for British fairy faiths. The Fasciculus Morum, like other Catholic texts, has an intense focus on the punishment and suffering of all Christians for the original sin, and chastises those who seek out remedies or soothsaying- much like those described so intensively in the eleventh century and by Gerald- for trying to “break and escape from jail”.^[58] These threats appear particularly targeted for British lands, with centuries now of gaining a reputation and practice for turning to such beliefs that the church has been forced to deal with. However, to say that the British only started to practice these traditions once Norman Christianity arrived, or that they were natively only Celtic, or even that they were unique to the island of Great Britain, ignores the absolutely gargantuan omnipresence of so many aspects of fairy faiths at this time. With just the examples of Merlin, incubi, succubi, and changelings through wonder tales, one can get a glimpse of just how entangled fairy faiths were with Medieval European Christianity, and despite the anxiety expressed in the Fasciculus Morum and through other ecclesiastical officials and doctrine, these beliefs remained in the minds and cultures of lay people and clergy alike.

It would be impossible to make a singular statement on the views of the orthodox church with regard to fairy faiths in late medieval Britain, since there are countless scenarios besides those as previously presented that were taken on a case-by-case basis. From the decidedly folk origins of fairy encounters told through wonder tales and mirabilia explained by local holy men in the eleventh century, to the accessibility of awenydd prophecy adapted into the popular culture threat posed by Merlin’s prophecies in the twelfth and thirteenth century, to the uneasy acceptance of fairies as an intrinsic part of British lay culture that the clergy would’ve had to acknowledge by the fourteenth century, no singular description of what constitutes a fairy or belief in them can be said for certain; perhaps besides the mischief they’ve caused on both the individual and societal level. The modern-day associations these beings have in Wales and throughout Great Britain as a whole cannot be understated, and their medieval origins as a cultural and religious amalgamation has morphed them into a fascinating and unique case of how traditional belief has not only survived, but thrived when so many other belief systems were completely muted, wiped out, or overwritten by the orthodox church in the Middle Ages.