ts of
the wicked dead, or, at most, of the dead who had no claims to
extraordinary goodness. They did not believe in any other creatures
which could be identified with these mysterious elves. It is no wonder,
therefore, if they were occasionally perplexed, occasionally
inconsistent, sometimes denouncing them as devils, at other times
dismissing them as ghosts.[242]

This is what seems to have happened to Map. In the two chapters
immediately preceding, he has given two legends illustrating each horn
of the dilemma. One of these relates the marriage of Henno
With-the-Teeth, who found a lovely maiden in a grove on the coast of
Normandy. She was sitting alone, apparelled in royal silk, and weeping.
Her beauty and her tears attracted the gallant knight, to whom, in
response to his questions, she told a cock-and-bull story about her
father having brought her, all unwilling as she was, by sea to be
married to the King of France; but having been driven by a storm on the
shore, she said she had landed, and then her father had taken advantage
of a sudden change of wind to sail away, leaving her to her fate. Henno
was an easy conquest: he took her home and married her. Unluckily,
however, he had a mother who had her suspicions. She noticed that her
fair daughter-in-law, though she went often to church, always upon some
trumpery excuse came late, so as to avoid being sprinkled with holy
water, and as regularly left before the consecration of the elements. So
this virtuous old vixen determined to watch one Sunday morning; and she
discovered that after Henno had gone to church, his wife, transformed
into a serpent, entered a bath, and in a little while, issuing upon a
cloth which her maid had spread out for her, she tore it into pieces
with her teeth before resuming human form. The maid afterwards went
through the like performance, her mistress waiting upon her. All this
was in due course confided to Henno, who, in company with a priest,
unexpectedly burst in the next time upon his wife and her servant, and
sprinkled them with holy water. Mistress and maid thereupon with a great
yell bounded out through the roof and disappeared.

Clearly these ladies were devils: no other creatures with self-respect
would be guilty of such transformations and such constant disregard of
the proprieties at church. Ghosts get their turn in Map's other
narrative. It concerns a man whose wife had died. After sorrowing long
for her death, he found her on