The Faerie Queene contains a further band of characters who occupy the hinterland between the good and the bad. These might be called its sylvan characters. The poem is full of creatures who grow from the woods, and who have the unpredictable energy of the natural. A group of satyrs rescues Una from Sansloy in I. vi, and then falls down before her in idolatrous worship. A ‘saluage nation’ in VI. viii captures Serena, ties her up, and salivates hungrily over her lily flesh. In Book IV Arthegall, disguised as a salvage knight, bedecked with branches, wins the Tournament of Florimell's girdle. Wood-gods and wildmen have a long history as figures on the boundaries of civility, whose moral nature might either be subhuman, or a perfect antitype to the contaminating civility of courts. In the 1590s such figures had a particular energy. Puttenham gives a peculiar priority to satyrs and woody figures in his brief history of poetic genres, attributing to them the origins of satire, in which it is ‘as if the gods of the woods, whom they called Satyres or Silvanes, should appeare and recite those verses of rebuke’. Foresters and forest dwellers also play a powerful role in courtly entertainments of the 1570s and 1580s, in the period when Spenser was first planning his epic, and such creatures, emerging from bushes or brakes in entertainments put on by the Earl of Leicester, frequently do so to admonish or advise the Queen. The Faerie Queene feeds off the equivocal and admonitory powers of such beings. In I. vi, after Una is worshipped by the satyrs, Sir Satyrane appears. Born of a passionate woodland rape of a ‘ Lady myld’ by a satyr, and ‘noursled vp in life and manners wilde’ (I. vi. 23), his genealogy makes him look more likely to assault than to rescue Una. But ‘wilde’ for Spenser is not a synonym for ‘bad’: the sylvan figure of Sir Satyrane, poised on the uncertain boundary between the wild and the civil, rescues the heroine, and ‘learnd her discipline of faith and veritie’ (I. vi. 31).