Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
inventing browney
A challenge: could you invent a supernatural being and actually get people to believe in it? Well, here’s an example of someone who managed this rare feat. In 1824, one Samuel Drew wrote about a bugaboo that he termed ‘Browney’. Now this was not Brownie, the northern British domestic spook: note the different spelling. This was a Cornish fairy who specialised in bees. Drew knew three things about Browney. First, the ancient Cornish sacrificed to him at a prehistoric stone. Second, Browney was called upon to settle swarms leaving the hive. And, third, Browney looked like a shaggy bear with short legs. Drew himself admits that the first point was pure speculation: it was the result, in any case, of confusion with an Orkney bogey. But what about the bees? Well, there was a custom in Cornwall (and though Drew did not know it) elsewhere in southern England, of summoning bees by calling them ‘browneys’ and banging on a tin. Drew described this ritual and airily noted that the Cornish beekeeper believed that ‘browney’ meant ‘bee’, whereas Drew had decided that it referred to an ancient Cornish honey god.
The Cornish beekeeper was, as it happens, correct and Drew was wrong: check your dialect dictionaries. And the shaggy ‘bear’ with short legs? Incredibly this was taken from life. As a young man Drew had been a lookout on a poaching expedition when he had seen a paranormal animal he described as, you’ve guessed it, a shaggy bear-like creature with short legs. Drew decided that this was Brownie, who he’d read about in various traditional books and this evidently became the Cornish ‘Browney’ in Drew’s all too plastic mind. The lesson? Mix together some gratuitous antiquarianism, a misunderstood beekeeper’s ritual, and marry a bizarre witness account to a still more bizarre witness opinion and you have a new entity. Few people ever read Drew, but many did read the great southwestern folklorist Robert Hunt. Hunt, who should have known better, picked up the bee-calming Cornish Browney in 1865, from Drew, though Hunt gave no reference. And from the authoritative Hunt, Browney made his way into a hundred books and, more recently, has surfed across a thousand Internet sites. In fact, honey-loving Browney is now firmly established in the pantheon of British fairies: discussed, for instance, by Katharine Briggs. You can buy on Ebay, meanwhile, a nine-centimetre (3.5in) jar with a shaggy beelike fairy within. “The Browney”, the seller’s description states, “is a Cornish guardian of the bees. It is said that when the housewife would beat a can and call ‘Browney! Browney!’ they’d become invisible to round up any swarming bees”. Make no mistake: invented Browney is here to stay… Simon Young writes on folklore and history and runs www.fairyist.com
you can buy on ebay, meanwhile, a nine-centimetre jar with a shaggy bee-like fairy within.