.png)
Pharisees, Ferishers, and the Fair Folk: Fairy Traditions of the British Isles
- Untruth Seekers
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
The British Isles cannot agree on what to call their fairies.
This is, in itself, informative.
What you call something is power. The beings who inhabit Britain’s hills, wells, and liminal spaces have, over several centuries, been approached with a range of careful diplomatic approximations: the fair folk, the good neighbours, the gentry, the people of peace. Each name a form of propitiation. Each name an acknowledgement that the real name – whatever the real name might be – was better left unused.
Even “fairy” itself is thought to derive from the Latin fata, meaning fate, which implies that early encounters with these beings were understood less as meetings with small winged creatures and more as confrontations with something that had a considerable say in how things went for you.
The regional names are more than dialect variations. They are windows into how different communities understood these creatures, and what they were careful to say and not say about them.
Sussex: the Pharisees
Sussex preserves its fairy tradition in the form of the Pharisees – a name that has nothing to do with the New Testament and everything to do with what happens to words across generations of oral transmission. “Faeries” became “vairées” in the Sussex dialect, and then, through a process of reduplicated plurals and folk etymology, “pharisees”: a linguistic accident that the words themselves seem not to have entirely objected to.
The Pharisees of Sussex were associated with the county’s prehistoric earthworks, hilltops, and old boundaries. Chanctonbury Ring, the Iron Age hill fort on the South Downs, carries a long-standing reputation for supernatural activity, and the fairy ring tradition – those circles of darker grass or clustered mushrooms where the fair folk were said to dance – is particularly well documented in Sussex. Charlotte Latham’s 1868 survey of West Sussex superstitions records fairy beliefs that were then still active in rural communities, though already, Latham noted, beginning to recede.
Sussex even has its fairies in the harvest songs. “We’ll drink and dance like the Pharisees” is not a theological statement. It is an acknowledgement, slipped into the rhythms of agricultural life, that the Pharisees were out there, and that dancing was their currency, and that the appropriate human response was perhaps a degree of sympathetic participation.
Rudyard Kipling, writing from Bateman’s in Burwash, set Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) in the Sussex landscape and gave Puck the character of one of the last of the “Old Things” – a being far older and more ambiguous than the fairy of popular imagination. Kipling’s Sussex is saturated with the sense of deep time: a landscape layered with presences that have not entirely departed. It is a distinctly Sussex way of understanding the world, and the Pharisees are part of that same texture.
East Anglia: frairies, feriers, and ferishers
East Anglia offers its own set of corruptions: frairies, feriers, ferishers – all descendants of the same word, all suggesting a similar process of name-softening at work. The East Anglian fairy tradition is less extensively documented than Sussex or Scotland, which may itself be significant: what is not written down is not necessarily not believed. The relative silence of the written record on East Anglian fairy lore may reflect the relative reticence of the communities who held it, rather than its absence.
Scotland: the Seelie and Unseelie courts
Scotland divides its fairy population with characteristic precision into the Seelie and Unseelie courts – a distinction that is frequently, and somewhat misleadingly, translated as good versus evil. The reality is more nuanced and considerably more interesting. Seelie means blessed or happy; Unseelie means wretched or unhappy. The Seelie court might help a mortal if the mood took them. The Unseelie court was actively malevolent, not out of wickedness exactly, but because wretchedness has to go somewhere.
Scottish fairy tradition also preserves the Daoine Sîth – the fairy people of the hills, who live inside the ancient mounds and emerge at night. The idea that fairy hills conceal entire underground kingdoms, with courts and politics and long memories for grievances, is persistent across Scottish folklore. The fairies of Scotland are not small. They are not winged. They are largely indistinguishable from humans, except for the quality of their attention and the fact that they have been there considerably longer than you have.
Wales: Y Tylwyth Teg, the Fair Family
Wales offers Y Tylwyth Teg – the Fair Family – subdivided with taxonomic enthusiasm into five distinct types. The Ellyllon are the standard fairy variety, small and capricious.
The Coblyau are mine spirits, haunting the underground workings of the Welsh valleys, tapping to indicate good ore or warn of danger depending on their disposition.
The Gwragedd Annwn are lake maidens, beautiful and perilous, occasionally willing to marry mortals and occasionally not.
The Bwbach we have met already in the context of household spirits.
The Plant Rhys Dwfn are an entirely separate people who inhabit an invisible island and conduct trade with those humans fortunate enough to locate them.
Welsh fairy tradition is notable for its specificity. Each type knows its place, literally and socially. The mine fairy is underground. The lake maiden is at the lake. There is very little of the wandering malevolence that characterises some other traditions: Welsh fairies, broadly speaking, stay where they belong and trouble you mainly if you intrude on their territory or fail to observe the correct courtesies.
Ireland: the Aos Sí and the gods gone underground
Ireland’s Aos Sí are not quite fairies at all, which is perhaps why they are frequently the most arresting of these traditions. They are the courtly remnants of the Tuatha Dé Danann – the ancient gods of Ireland, who retreated underground after the arrival of Christianity.
The fairy mounds of Ireland, the sídhe, are not modest hills with small creatures inside. They are the dwelling places of former gods, now reduced in circumstance but emphatically not in power.
This gives Irish fairy tradition a quality that the others, even Scotland’s most imposing varieties, do not quite match. When an Irish fairy takes offence, it is not a creature of folklore being capricious. It is, depending on how seriously you take the mythology, the inheritance of a divine grudge. The changeling tradition – fairy children substituted for human ones, human children taken underground – is particularly associated with Ireland, and in the context of the Aos Sí, the taking of a child reads less like mischief and more like the assertion of a prior claim on the world.
What they share
What is remarkable, beneath the naming chaos and the regional variation, is the consistency. They all dance in rings – fairy rings of mushrooms or darkened grass, found from Sussex to Orkney, mark the places where they have been. They all reward the industrious and punish the lazy, suggesting that the moral imagination of every region had similar things to say about the relationship between work and reward. They all despise being spied upon with a particular intensity, as though observation carries a specific kind of threat that direct confrontation does not.
They all inhabit liminal spaces. Burial mounds, caves, wells, the edges of things: places that are neither fully one world nor another. The fairy tradition, looked at in this light, is less a collection of folk beliefs about small magical creatures and more a sustained meditation on the places where the ordinary world becomes permeable. Where the ground is older than memory. Where what you thought you knew about the boundaries of things turns out to have been optimistic.
Iron repels them, across every tradition without exception – which suggests that these beliefs predate the Iron Age, or at least that the arrival of iron was understood as a significant disruption to a prior arrangement. They can steal time: a night in a fairy hill emerges as years in the world outside. They can steal names, which is why you use the careful diplomatic approximations rather than the thing itself.
Sussex Roots
The Pharisees feature in Sussex Roots, alongside the wider cast of Sussex folklore – the giants, the dragons, the household spirits, and the other inhabitants of the county’s imagination.
The book takes its fairies seriously: not as whimsy, but as what they actually were in the communities that told these stories. Creatures deserving of careful handling, careful naming, and the occasional bowl of cream left by the fire.
The Sussex harvest song put it as well as anything: “We’ll drink and dance like the Pharisees.” Whether you call them fairies, pharisees, frairies, Tylwyth Teg, or Aos Sí, they’re still there. Dancing. Watching. Waiting for you to leave out the cream.
Or to steal your name.
About the Untruth Seekers
Nobody knows quite how the Untruth Seekers came to accumulate quite so many confidential files. What is known is that they have spent considerable time in the archives, the churchyards, and the slightly odd corners of Sussex, documenting the legends, hauntings, and historical curiosities that the official record tends to overlook. Their discoveries are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for those willing to keep an open mind.
Comments