[24] At Warboys the Samuels had been required to repeat: "If I be a witch and consenting to the death" of such and such a one. Alice Wilson, at Northampton in 1612, was threatened by the justice with execution, if she would not say after the minister "I forsake the Devil." She is said to have averred that she could not say this. See MS. account of the witches of Northampton.
[25] Well known is the practice ascribed to witches of making a waxen image, which was then pricked or melted before the fire, in the belief that the torments inflicted upon it would be suffered by the individual it represented.
[26] Potts, E 3 verso, F 4, G 2; also The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, ... (London, 1619), 21.
[27] See MS. account of the Northampton witches.
[28] Ibid. : "Sundry other witches appeared to him.... Hee heard many of them railing at Jane Lucas, laying the fault on her that they were thus accused."
[29] There was practically no spectral evidence in the Lancashire cases. Lister on his death-bed had cried out against Jennet Preston, and John Law was tormented with a vision of Alizon Device "both day and night"; Potts, Y 2 verso. But these were exceptional.
CHAPTER V.
70
[30] See The Most Cruell and Bloody Murther committed by ... Annis Dell.... With the Severall Witch-crafts ...
of one Johane Harrison and her Daughter (London, 1606).
[31] MS. account of the Northampton witches.
[32] See Potts, Z 2.
[33] The dramatist Dekker made use of this; see his Witch of Edmonton, act IV, scene I (Mermaid edition, London, 1904):
1st Countreyman.--This thatch is as good as a jury to prove she is a witch.
* * * * *
Justice.-- Come, come: firing her thatch? ridiculous! Take heed, sirs, what you do; unless your proofs Come better aimed, instead of turning her Into a witch, you'll prove yourselves stark fools.[34] See Potts, P 2.
[35] See ibid. , Q verso. This, however, was the second time that the judge had tried this ruse; see ibid. , P 2.
[36] See above, note 21.
[37] North Riding Record Soc., Quarter Sessions Records (London, 1883, etc.), III, 181.
[38] Two of them, however, were issued to the same woman, one in 1604 and one in 1610.
[39] Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137, 139-140, 144, 147-148.
[40] The term "spinster" was sometimes used of a married woman.
[41] Cal. St. P., Dom., 1619-1623, 125, Chamberlain to Carleton, February 26, 1620: "Peacock, a schoolmaster, committed to the Tower and tortured for practising sorcery upon the King, to infatuate him in Sir Thos. Lake's business." This is one of those rare cases in which we know certainly that torture was used.
[42] Sir Thomas Lake to Viscount Cranbourne, January 20, 1604, Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 6177, fol. 403.
[43] Cal. St. P., Dom., 1623-1625, 474, 485, 497.
[44] T. B. and T. J. Howell, State Trials (London, 1809-1818), II.
[45] See Potts, O 3 verso.
[46] See Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137, 139-140, 144, 147-148.
[47] See Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft ... (London, 1616), dedicated to the "Maior and Aldermen."
[48] M. A. Richardson, Table Book (London, 1841-1846), I, 245.
[49] North Riding Record Soc., Quarter Sessions Records, I, 58.
CHAPTER V.
71
[50] "... neither had they authoritie to compell her to goe without a Constable."
[51] Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,674, fol. 148. This is a brief description of "how to discover a witch." It recommends the water ordeal and cites the case of Mr. Enger and Mary Sutton.
[52] In the case of three of these four we know only that they were sentenced.
[53] Before the Flower case at Lincoln came the Willimot-Baker cases at Leicester. The Bedford trial resembled much the Northampton trial of the previous year.
CHAPTER VI.
72
CHAPTER VI.
NOTABLE JACOBEAN CASES.
It is possible to sift, to analyze, and to reconstruct the material derived from witch trials until some few conclusions about a given period can be ventured. A large proportion of cases can be proved to belong in this or that category, a certain percentage of the women can be shown to possess these or those traits in common.
Yet it is quite thinkable that one might be armed with a quiver full of generalizations, and fail, withal, to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have asked information on the subject from a Londoner of 1620, he would probably have heard little about witchcraft in general, but a very great deal about the Lancashire, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, and Fairfax trials. The Londoner might have been able to tell the stories complete of all those famous cases. He would have been but poorly informed could he not have related some of them, and the listener would have caught the surface drift of those stories. But a witch panic is a subtle thing, not to be understood by those who do not follow all its deeper sequences. The springs of the movement, the interaction of cause and effect, the operation of personal traits, these are factors that must be evaluated, and they are not factors that can be fitted into a general scheme, labelled and classified.
This does not mean that the cases should be examined in chronological sequence. That is not necessary; for the half-dozen cases that we shall run over had little or no cause-and-effect connection with one another. It is convenient, indeed, to make some classification, and the simplest is that by probable origin, especially as it will enable us to emphasize that important feature of the trials. Now, by this method the six or more trials of note may be grouped under three headings: cases that seem to have originated in the actual practice of magic, cases where the victims of convulsions and fits started the furor, and cases that were simply the last stage of bitter quarrels or the result of grudges.
To the first group belongs the Lancastrian case of 1612, which, however, may also be classed under the last heading. No case in the course of the superstition in England gained such wide fame. Upon it Shadwell founded in part a well-known play, The Lancashire Witches, while poets and writers of prose have referred to it until the two words have been linked in a phrase that has given them lasting association. It was in the lonely forest of Pendle among the wild hills of eastern Lancashire that there lived two hostile families headed by Elizabeth Southerns, or "Old Demdike," and by Anne Chattox. The latter was a wool carder, "a very old, withered, spent, and decreped creature," "her lippes ever chattering"; the former a blind beggar of four-score years, "a generall agent for the Devell in all these partes," and a "wicked fire-brand of mischiefe," who had brought up her children and grandchildren to be witches. Both families professed supernatural practices. Both families no doubt traded on the fear they inspired. Indeed Dame Chattox was said to have sold her guarantee to do no harm in return for a fixed annual payment of "one aghen-dole of meale."
That there was a feud between the two clans was to be expected. They were at once neighbors and competitors, and were engaged in a career in which they must plot each against the other, and suspect each other. There are hints of other difficulties. Years before there had been a quarrel over stolen property.
Demdike's daughter had missed clothes and food to the value of 20 shillings, and had later found some of the clothing in the possession of Chattox's daughter. A more serious difficulty involved a third family: a member of the Nutter family, well-to-do people in Lancashire, had sought to seduce old Chattox's married daughter, and, when repelled, had warned her that when he inherited the property where she lived she should be evicted.
Chattox had retaliated by seeking to kill Nutter by witchcraft, and had been further incited thereto by three women, who wished to be rid of Nutter, in order that "the women, their coosens, might have the land." As a consequence Nutter had died within three months. The quarrel, indeed, was three-cornered. It was said that Demdike's daughter had fashioned a clay picture of a Nutter woman.[1]
We have all the elements here of a mountain feud; but, in place of the revolvers and Kentucky moonshine of to-day, we have clay images and Satanic banquets. The battles were to be fought out with imps of Hell as participants and with ammunition supplied by the Evil One himself. It was this connection with a reservoir of CHAPTER VI.
73
untouched demoniacal powers that made the quarrel of the miserable mountaineers the most celebrated incident in Lancashire story. Here were charmers and "inchanters," experienced dealers in magic, struggling against one another. Small wonder that the community became alarmed and that Roger Nowell, justice of the peace, suddenly swooped down upon the Pendle families. It was but a short time before he had four women cooped up in Lancaster castle. In a few days more he was able to get confessions out of them. They admitted acquaintance with the Devil and implicated one another.
Now comes the strange part of the story. According to confessions made later, Elizabeth Device, not yet shut up, but likely to be at any time, called a meeting on Good Friday of all the witches in Pendle forest. They were to come to her home at Malking Tower to plot the delivery of the imprisoned women by the blowing up of Lancaster castle.[2] The affair took the form of a dinner; and beef, bacon, and roasted mutton were served.
"All the witches went out of the said House in their owne shapes and likenesses. And they all, by that they were forth of the dores, gotten on Horsebacke, like unto Foales, some of one colour, some of another; and Preston's wife was the last; and, when shee got on Horsebacke, they all presently vanished out of ... sight."
This was the story, and the various witnesses agreed remarkably well as to its main details. Those who believed in the "sabbath" of witches must have felt their opinions confirmed by the testimony of the witnesses at Lancaster. Even the modern reader, with his skepticism, is somewhat daunted by the cumulative force of what purports to be the evidence and would fain rationalize it by supposing that some sort of a meeting actually did take place at Malking Tower and that some Pendle men and women who had delved in magic arts till they believed in them did formulate plans for revenge. But this is not a probable supposition. The concurring evidence in the Malking Tower story is of no more compelling character than that to be found in a multitude of Continental stories of witch gatherings which have been shown to be the outcome of physical or mental pressure and of leading questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a substratum of fact.[3]
Probably one of the accused women invented the story of the witch feast after the model of others of which she had heard, or developed it under the stimulus of suggestive questions from a justice. Such a narrative, once started, would spread like wildfire and the witnesses and the accused who were persuaded to confess might tell approximately the same story. A careful re-reading of all this evidence suggests that the various testimonies may indeed have been echoes of the first narrative. They seem to lack those characteristic differences which would stamp them as independent accounts. Moreover, when the story was once started, it is not improbable that the justices and the judges would assist the witnesses by framing questions based upon the narrative already given. It cannot be said that the evidence exists upon which to establish this hypothesis.
There is little to show that the witnesses were adroitly led into their narratives. But we know from other trials that the method was so often adopted that it is not a far cry to suspect that it was used at Lancaster.
It is not worth while to trace out the wearisome details that were elicited by confession. Those already in prison made confessions that implicated others, until the busy justices of the peace had shut up sixteen women and four men to be tried at the assizes. Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham, who were then on the northern circuit, reached Lancaster on the sixteenth of August. In the meantime, "Old Demdike," after a confession of most awful crimes, had died in prison. All the others were put on trial. Thomas Potts compiled a very careful abstract of all the testimony taken, perhaps the most detailed account of a witch trial written in the English language, with the possible exception of the St. Oses affair. The evidence was in truth of a somewhat similar type. Secret interviews with the Evil One, promises of worldly riches, a contract sealed with blood, little shapes of dogs, cats, and hares, clay pictures that had been dried and had crumpled, threats and consequent "languishing" and death, these were the trappings of the stories. The tales were old. Only the Malking Tower incident was new. But its very novelty gave a plausibility to the stories that were woven around it. There was not a single person to interpose a doubt. The cross-examinations were nothing more than feeble attempts to bring out further charges.
Though there is in the record little suggestion of the use of pressure to obtain the confessions, the fact that three were retracted leads to a suspicion that they had not been given quite freely. There was doubtless something contagious about the impulse to confess. It is, nevertheless, a curious circumstance that five members of the two rival Pendle families made confession, while all the others whom their confessions had CHAPTER VI.
74
involved stuck to it that they were innocent.[4] Among those who persisted in denying their guilt Alice Nutter merits special note. We have already mentioned her in the last chapter as an example of a well-to-do and well connected woman who fell a victim to the Lancashire excitement.[5] The evidence against the woman was perhaps the flimsiest ever offered to a court. Elizabeth Device, daughter of "Old Demdike," and her two children were the chief accusers. Elizabeth had seen her present at the Malking Tower meeting. Moreover, she stated that Alice had helped her mother ("Old Demdike") bewitch a man to death. Her son had heard his grandmother Demdike narrate the incident. This testimony and his sister's definite statement that Alice Nutter attended the Malking Tower meeting established Mistress Nutter's guilt.[6] The judge, indeed, was "very suspitious of the accusation of this yong wench, Jennet Device," and, as we have already seen, caused her to be sent out of the court room till the accused lady could be placed among other prisoners, when the girl was recalled and required before the great audience present to pick out the witch, as, of course, she easily did, and as easily escaped another transparent trap.[7]
The two children figured prominently from this on. The nine-year-old girl gave evidence as to events of three years before, while the young man, who could hardly have been out of his teens,[8] recounted what had happened twelve years earlier. It was their testimony against their mother that roused most interest. Although of a circumstantial character, it fitted in most remarkable fashion into the evidence already presented.[9] The mother, says the nonchalant pamphleteer, indignantly "cryed out against the child," cursing her so outrageously that she was removed from the room while the child kept the stand. It is useless to waste sympathy upon a mother who was getting at the hands of her children the same treatment she had given her own mother Demdike. The Chattox family held together better. Mistress Redfearne had been carefully shielded in the testimony of her mother Chattox, but she fell a victim to the accusations of the opposing family. The course of her trial was remarkable. Denying her guilt with great emphasis, she had by some wonder been acquitted. But this verdict displeased the people in attendance upon the trial. Induced by the cries of the people, the court was persuaded to try her again. The charge against her was exactly the same, that eighteen years before she had participated in killing Christopher Nutter with a clay figure. "Old Demdike" had seen her in the act of making the image, and there was offered also the testimony of the sister and brother of the dead man, who recalled that Robert Nutter on his death-bed had accused Anne of his bewitchment.[10] It does not seem to have occurred to the court that the principle that a person could not twice be put in jeopardy for the same offence was already an old principle in English law.[11] The judges were more concerned with appeasing the people than with recalling old precedents, and sent the woman to the gallows.
The Pendle cases were interrupted on the third day by the trial of three women from Salmesbury, who pleaded not guilty and put themselves "upon God and their Countrey." The case against them rested upon the testimony of a single young woman, Grace Sowerbutts, who declared that for the three years past she had been vexed by the women in question, who "did violently draw her by the haire of the head, and layd her on the toppe of a Hay-mowe." This delightfully absurd charge was coupled with some testimony about the appearances of the accused in animal form. Three men attempted to bolster up the story; but no "matter of witchcraft" was proved, says the for once incredulous Mr. Potts. The women seized the decisive moment.
They kneeled before the judge and requested him to examine Grace Sowerbutts as to who set her on. The judge--who had seemingly not thought of this before--followed the suggestion. The girl changed countenance and acknowledged that she had been taught her story. At the order of the judge she was questioned by a clergyman and two justices of the peace, who found that she had been coached to tell her story by a Master Thompson, alias Southworth, a "seminarie priest." So ended the charges against the Salmesbury witches.
One would suppose that this verdict might have turned the tide in the other cases. But the evidence, as Potts is careful to show, lest the reader should draw a wrong conclusion, was of very different character in the other trials. They were all finished on the third day of court and turned over to the jury. Five of the accused, exclusive of those at Salmesbury, were acquitted, one condemned to a year's imprisonment, and ten sentenced to death. To this number should be added Jennet Preston, who had in the preceding month been tried at York for the killing of a Mr. Lister, and who was named by the Lancaster witnesses as one of the gang at Malking Tower.
CHAPTER VI.
75
So ended the Lancashire trials of 1612. The most remarkable event of the sort in James's reign, they were clearly the outcome of his writings and policy. Potts asks pointedly: "What hath the King's Maiestie written and published in his Dæmonologie by way of premonition and prevention, which hath not here by the first or last beene executed, put in practice, or discovered?"
Our second group of cases includes those where convulsive and "possessed" persons had started the alarm.
The Northampton, Leicester, and Lichfield cases were all instances in point. The last two, however, may be omitted here because they will come up in another connection. The affair at Northampton in 1612, just a month earlier than the Lancashire affair, merits notice. Elizabeth Belcher and her brother, "Master Avery,"
were the disturbing agents. Mistress Belcher had long been suffering with an illness that baffled diagnosis. It was suggested to her that the cause was witchcraft. A list of women reputed to be witches was repeated to her.
The name of Joan Brown seemed to impress her. "Hath shee done it?" she asked.[12] The name was repeated to her and from that time she held Joan guilty.[13] Joan and her mother were shut up. Meantime Master Avery began to take fits and to aid his sister in making accusation. Between them they soon had accused six women for their afflictions. The stir brought to the surface the hidden suspicions of others. There was a witch panic and the justices of the peace[14] scurried hither and thither till they had fourteen witches locked up in Northampton. When the trial came off at Northampton, Master Avery was the hero. He re-enacted the rôle of the Throckmorton children at Warboys with great success. When he came to court--he came in a "coch"--he was at once stricken with convulsions. His torments in court were very convincing. It is pleasant to know that when he came out of his seizure he would talk very "discreetly, christianly, and charitably." Master Avery was versatile, however. His evidence against the women rested by no means alone on his seizures. He had countless apparitions in which he saw the accused;[15] he had been mysteriously thrown from a horse; strangest of all, he had foretold at a certain time that if any one should go down to the gaol and listen to the voices of the witches, he could not understand a word. Whereupon a Master of Arts of Trinity College, Oxford, went off to the prison at the uncanny hour of two in the morning and "heard a confused noise of much chattering and chiding, but could not discover a ready word."
Master Avery had a great deal more to tell, but the jury seem not to have fully credited him.[16] They convicted Joan Brown and her mother, however, on the charges of Elizabeth and her brother. Three others were found guilty upon other counts. None of them, so far as the records go, and the records were careful on this point, admitted any guilt.[17] The one young man among those who were hanged bitterly resisted his conviction from the beginning and died declaring that authority had turned to tyranny. He might well feel so.
His father and mother had both been tortured by the water ordeal, and his mother had been worried till she committed suicide in prison.
This brings us to the third sort of cases, those that were the outcome of quarrels or grudges. It has already been observed that the Lancashire affair could very well be reckoned under this heading. It is no exaggeration to say that a goodly percentage of all other witch trials in the reign of James could be classified in the same way. Most notable among them was the famous trial of the Belvoir witches at Lincoln in 1618-1619. The trial has received wide notice because it concerned a leading family--perhaps the wealthiest in England--the great Catholic family of Manners, of which the Earl of Rutland was head. The effort to account for the mysterious illness of his young heir and for that which had a few years earlier carried off the boy's elder brother led to a charge of witchcraft against three humble women of the neighborhood. The Rutland affair shows how easily a suspicion of witchcraft might involve the fortunes of the lowly with those of the great. Joan Flower and her two daughters had been employed as charwomen in Belvoir Castle, the home of the Rutlands. One of the daughters, indeed, had been put in charge of "the poultrey abroad and the washhouse within dores." But this daughter seems not to have given satisfaction to the countess in her work, some other causes of disagreement arose which involved Mother Flower, and both Mother Flower and her daughter were sent away from the castle. This was the beginning of the trouble. Mother Flower "cursed them all that were the cause of this discontentment." Naturally little heed was paid to her grumblings. Such things were common enough and it did not even occur to any one, when the eldest son of the earl sickened and died, that the event was in any way connected with the malice of the Flowers. It was not until about five years later, when the younger son Francis CHAPTER VI.
76
fell sick of an illness to prove fatal, that suspicion seems to have lighted upon the three women.[18] The circumstances that led to their discharge were then recalled and along with them a mass of idle gossip and scandal against the women. It was remembered that Mother Joan was "a monstrous malicious woman, full of oathes, curses, and imprecations irreligious." Some of her neighbors "dared to affirme that she dealt with familiar spirits, and terrified them all with curses and threatning of revenge." At length, in February of 1618/19, on the return of the earl from attending His Majesty "both at Newmarket before Christmas and at Christmas at Whitehall," the women were fetched before justices of the peace, who bound them over to the assizes at Lincoln. Mother Flower died on the way to Lincoln, but the two daughters were tried there before Sir Edward Bromley, who had been judge at the Lancashire trials, and before Sir Henry Hobart. The women made a detailed confession of weird crimes. There were tales of gloves belonging to the two young sons of the earl, gloves that had been found in uncanny places and had been put in hot water and rubbed upon Rutterkin the cat--or spirit. There were worse stories that will not bear repetition. Needless to say, Margaret and Philippa Flower were convicted and hanged.[19]
The Rutland cases have been used to illustrate how the witch accusation might arise out of a grudge or quarrel. There were three or four other cases that illustrate this origin of the charge. The first is that of Johanna Harrison--she has been mentioned in the previous chapter--who had an "altercation" with a neighbor. Of course she threatened him, he fell ill, and he scratched her.[20] But here the commonplace tale takes a new turn. She had him arrested and was awarded five shillings damages and her costs of suit. No wonder the man fell sick again. Perhaps--but this cannot be certain--it was the same man who was drinking his ale one day with his fellows when she entered and stood "gloating" over him. He turned and said, "Doe you heare, Witch, looke tother waies." The woman berated him with angry words, and, feeling ill the next morning--he had been drinking heavily the night before--he dragged her off to the justice. A few weeks later she and her daughter were hanged at Hertford.[21]
The story of Mother Sutton and Master Enger has been referred to in several connections, but it will bear telling in narrative form. Mother Sutton was a poor tenant of Master Enger's, "a gentleman of worship," who often bestowed upon her "food and cloathes." On account of her want she had been chosen village
"hog-heard," and had for twenty years fulfilled the duties of her office "not without commendations." But it happened that she quarreled one day with her benefactor, and then his difficulties began. The tale is almost too trivial for repetition, but is nevertheless characteristic. Master Enger's servants were taking some corn to market, when they met "a faire black sowe" grazing. The wayward beast began turning round "as readily as a Windmill sail at worke; and as sodainly their horses fell to starting and drawing some one way, some another." They started off with the cart of corn, but broke from it and ran away. The servants caught them and went on to Bedford with the load. But the sow followed. When the corn had been sold, one of the servants went home, the other stayed with his "boone companions." When he rode home later, he found the sow grazing outside of town. It ran by his side, and the horses ran away again. But the servants watched the sow and saw it enter Mother Sutton's house. Master Enger made light of the story when it was told to him, and, with remarkable insight for a character in a witch story, "supposed they were drunke." But a few days later the same servant fell into conversation with Mother Sutton, when a beetle came and struck him. He fell into a trance, and then went home and told his master. The next night the servant said that Mary Sutton entered his room--the vision we have already described.[22]
The rest of the story the reader knows from the last chapter. Mother Sutton and her daughter were put to various ordeals and at length hanged. Doubtless the imaginative servant, who had in some way, perhaps, been involved in the original quarrel, gained favor with his master, and standing in the community.[23]
The tale of the Bakewell witches is a very curious one and, though not to be confidently depended upon, may suggest how it was possible to avail oneself of superstition in order to repay a grudge. A Scotchman staying at a lodging-house in Bakewell fell in debt to his landlady, who retained some of his clothes as security. He went to London, concealed himself in a cellar, and was there found by a watchman, who arrested him for being in an unoccupied house with felonious intent. He professed to be dazed and declared that he was at Bakewell in CHAPTER VI.
77
Derbyshire at three o'clock that morning. He explained it by the fact that he had repeated certain words which he had heard his lodging-house keeper and her sister say. The judge was amazed, the man's depositions were taken down, and he was sent to the justices of Derby.
All that we really know about the Bakewell affair is that several witches probably suffered death there in 1607. A local antiquarian has given this tale of how the alarm started.[24] While it is unlike any other narrative of witchcraft, it is not necessarily without foundation.
The reader has doubtless observed that the cases which we have been describing occurred, all of them with one exception, between 1603 and 1619. In discussing the matter of the distribution of witchcraft in the last chapter we noted that not only executions for the crime, but even accusations and indictments, were nearly altogether limited to the first fifteen years of James's rule. If it is true that there was a rather sudden falling off of prosecution in the reign of the zealous James, the fact merits explanation. Fortunately the explanation is not far to seek. The king's faith in the verity of many of the charges made against witches had been rudely shaken.
As a matter of fact there had always been a grain of skepticism in his make-up