Why do the Fae wear red hats?

Redcaps, Brownies, Gnomes & Kaboutermannekin

This article is part of a collaboration with L Binnie 🩸 for her series on archetypes in folklore and how they manifest around the world. (The first article explored ‘The Hag’ archetype, to read my piece on the subject click here → The Watery Hags of East Anglia). The second archetype is ‘Red Capped Entities’ they seem to pop up all over the world in different forms, but why are they wearing red hats?

By Brian Froud

There is actually a fairy type being that is named ‘Redcap’. They are said to inhabit the ruined towers and castles on the borders of Scotland and England where bloody battles and evil doings have occurred. According to William Henderson in ‘Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties’ he is depicted as:

A short thickset old man, with long prominent teeth, skinny fingers armed with talons like eagles, large eyes of a fiery red colour, grisly hair streaming down his shoulders, iron boots, a pikestaff in his left hand, and a red cap on his head.

And should you find yourself lost in Border country on a cold, lonely night it’s best to avoid sheltering in abandoned castles as the Redcap is inclined to chuck huge stones or bricks at unaware humans in order to ‘off’ them and re-dye his beloved hat with their blood.

There’s a rather marvellous song about Redcap’s recorded by a Mr Wilkie that was sung in Scotland once upon a time:

Now Redcap he was there,
And he was there indeed;
And grimly he girned and glowed,
Wi’ his red cowl on his head.

Then Redcap gave a yell, 
It was a yell indeed;
That the flesh neath my oxter grew cauld,
It grew as cauld as lead.

Auld Bluidie-cowl ga’ed a girn,
To was a girn indeed;
Syne my flesh it grew mizzled for fear,
And I stood like a thing that is dead.

Last Redcowl gave a laugh,
It was a laugh indeed;
‘Twas mair like a hoarse, hoarse scrough,
Syne a tooth fell out o’ his head.

Apparently there is but one way to repel these dreaded creatures: quoting scripture while holding up a cross towards them. If this occurs the Redcap will, as quoted above in the song, make an awful noise, vanish (sometimes into a flame of fire) and leave upon the spot he stood a large tooth!

Katherine Briggs, author of ‘An Encyclopaedia of Fairies’ classes the Redcap as a kind of Goblin. A Goblin, she explains is: “a general name for evil and malicious spirits, usually small and grotesque in appearance.” Which, I think you’ll agree, definitely seems apt for the aforementioned Redcap’s. However there are other kinds of fairy being that are said to wear red caps. Katherine Briggs and William Henderson mention the Dutch Redcaps known as Kaboutermannekin, these are said (by Briggs) to be “of the true Brownie nature” which is to say:

They make themselves responsible for the farm or house in which they live…A brownie will often become attached to one member of the family. In return he has a right to a bowl of cream or best milk…

It was indeed very easy to offend a brownie, and either drive him away or turn him from a brownie to a boggart…

It was a common thing for a brownie to be attached to a stream or a pool, and outside his home he was often feared. However benevolent he might be, he was afraid of Christian symbols.

According to Henderson the Dutch Redcaps:

Light fires during the night, which are invisible save to themselves, but warm the house…They are clad in red from head to foot, and have green hands and faces

The Kaboutermannekin then are handy little fellows to have around the house or farmstead, just like the Brownies that dwell in England and Scotland, and like their Brownie neighbours they are easily offended. Offering a Brownie or a Kaboutermannekin clothing is a sure way to get them to leave and never return.

The Brownie’s disdain for Christian symbols interests me, similar to the terrifying Redcap’s inability to hear scripture without disappearing and losing a tooth! Of course, this may be remnant of the Puritanical tirade against all things ‘other’ (which I have spoken about previously in my ‘Missing Fairies of Norfolk’ series) intending to tar the popular belief in fae with an anti-Christian brush in order to put a stop to it.

I wonder if the Redcap’s of deserted castles and towers, once homes to prominent families and their servants, are merely Brownies who witnessed untold horrors that drove them quite mad! One can imagine that, to the Redcap’s, the humans capable of such atrocities are fair game if they should creep into their homes late at night (with the added bonus of re-dyeing their favourite hat).

The Redcap and Kaboutermannekin are just two examples of red hatted fae. There are many more including several recent reports of sightings of ‘little people’ with red hats. On the wonderful resource that is Simon Young’s Fairy Census I found seven reports in which red hats were mentioned. Five reports are from the UK and two from other countries (Argentina and Australia). The full reports are available on the fairy census website but I have taken the liberty of extracting the descriptions below:

§77) England (Lincolnshire) - ‘Male, red jacket, tallish red hat. Face aged about fifty-ish. And had a pipe.’

§93) England (North East) - ‘Like a tiny person. A red cap, red jacket, green leggings.’

§950B) Argentina - ‘Dwarfs with red caps, as if they were old men the size of a child, with long white beards, rustic hands, clear and sympathetic eyes.’

§536) England (Hertfordshire) - ‘there was a gnome, grey beard and pointy red hat tapping me. He was about three-foot tall, and the hat was another nine to ten inches’

§561) England (London) - ‘there, sitting on the stone step, was a tiny gnome, with a little red hat, dressed in green looking at me! He was a dear little thing, probably about eight to twelve inches tall. Our eyes held and he was full of good humour’ ‘A classic gnome: scarlet hat, green roughly-hewn jerkin and trousers’

§605) England (Wiltshire) - ‘two small people about the height of the bench seat, peeking out from behind the bench. One had on a red hat, the other a red scarf or vest. They were friendly and smiled broadly, almost laughing.’ ‘One seemed to be male [and] wore a red hat. The other I think was female and had on a red scarf or vest.’

§924B) Australia - ‘I saw a group of pixies or elves sitting in a circle wearing little red hats and red tops with white peaked collars. In my lounge room. They were laughing.’

A varied bunch of sightings with a prevalence ‘gnome’ like beings. Gnomes are a difficult category to classify, Briggs relates them to a historical scientific classification of the earth element which she states was “the hermetic and neo-platonic doctrine”. While interesting I do not feel this sufficiently describes what many people still summon up in their minds eye when the term gnome is mentioned:

I have no evidence to back this theory up but perhaps the well known appearance of what we now call a ‘garden gnome’ is what the folk of old would have called a Brownie?

But we still have not arrived at the crux of this article, why are all these beings wearing red hats? This question led me investigate the folkloric relevance of the colour red. According to the ‘Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore’:

In most contexts, red is associated with good luck, health and joy, presumably because it is the colour of blood, and hence of the living body as opposed to the corpse.

The Redcaps of the Borders may oppose the above statement! However it does ring true with the sightings of jolly red hatted ‘gnomes’ in the Fairy Census. Could it be that simple? Are the fae wearing red hats because they think it a joyful colour?

In pre-industrial Northern Europe bright red clothing was very hard to come by. In the medieval period (pre-imports from the America’s) there were two types of red-dye that were used: madder red was created using madder root (grown in France & Denmark) dying fabric a burnt red colour and a scarlet cloth dyed with kermes dye, made with the scales of shield-lice from the Mediterranean. Scarlet cloth was the more expensive of the two, but both types would have been out of reach of the general population. In that time period, seeing someone (or something) wearing red would have marked them out as different. There is an argument for the fae being associated with a pre-industrial way of life and therefore their clothing is likely to fall into line with the colours and fabrics associated with that time. Now, although I have given examples of ‘real life; sightings above, I am not so naive as to believe all descriptions of fairies are factual. Perhaps, in many cases, these descriptions are we human’s (pre-industrial) idea of the other.

For further reading check out the collaborative piece 👇

In Red Caps and Green Coats: The Many Faces of Europe’s Little Folk