The Witches of Orkney

I have been studying the European witchcraft persecutions for more than 40 years, and I have never read anything on the subject more enlightening than one amazing chapter of Peter Marshall's Storm's Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (2024). This vast book is a detailed (sometimes too detailed) history of Orkney from 1468, when it passed from the Kingdom of Norway to the Kingdom of Scotland as part of a marriage settlement, to the early 1800s. Marshall is deeply learned in the history, language, folklore, geography and documents of Orkney, and his broad expertise is part of what makes his treatment of witch cases so compelling. I highly recommend this 48-page chapter.

I want to dwell here on two particular cases. There is an idea out there that there "were no witches," that is, that the people burned at the stake were just unfortunates caught up in a malignant system. There is a monument in Kirkwall today on the spot where many witches were strangled and burned, and it bears the words "They were cheust folk": they were just people. However, this was not always true. Yes, when the big panics got going and accused witches were tortured until they named their accomplices, anyone could be condemned. But so far as we can tell, most accused witches were people widely reputed to have magical powers, and some of them absolutely did try to harm their neighbors with black magic.

The magic of Orkney, like everything else about the islands, was drawn in part from their Norse past. During the period of the persecution, the 1500s and 1600s, English and Scots were gradually replacing Orkney's old Norse dialect, but the magical formulas that come down to us were mostly in Norn. The witches often spoke of "going with the good wights." The word "wights" is usually rendered into modern English as "fairies," and of course the grim ministers of the Reformation Kirk translated it "demons." But it seems to denote a unique class of beings more like Norse trolls than British fairies. Marshall believes that people "went with" the wights in dreams or trance, and we do have some accounts of meeting them in dreams, but I suspect people thought they could be met in the physical world as well.

This brings us to Oliver Leask, a man who was condemned in 1616 after what looks like a very long career as a healer, enchanter, thief, extortionist, and expert on the spirit world:

Leask's modus operandi involved travelling around, begging money, food, and drink, and making veiled threats when his requests were denied. That he continued in this manner for so long suggests a reluctance to tangle with those thought to possess magical powers. Not everyone complied. During 'bere seed time', Leask  came to John Craigie's farm at Swandale, on the east side of Rousay, 'boasterously' demanding grain. When Craigie refused, bitter words ensued, and Least got a blow from 'the shaft of the Clodmell' – a large mallet for greaking up clods of earth. Since that time, Craigie had found 'ane great number of his horses and beasts all dead.' (192)

One woman responded to Leask's threats by saying, 'If God be with me, what can ye do to me?' Leask answered that he could harm her whether God was with her or not. Leask was also a healer, and one of the charges against him concerned a time when he heard that a wealthy man was sick and travelled a long distance to offer his services as magical physician. Leask was found guilty of witchcraft, but the jury also declared that he was insane, so he avoided the death penalty. Which raises another interesting question: was Leask crazy? If so, what was the relationship between his mental illness and his career as a sorceror? Consider the way he lived, homeless, wandering the islands begging for his keep while believing that he had great magical powers: does that not seem a bit mad? There is a strong association between shamanism and lunacy in many cultures, so it would not be surprising if it existed in 17th-century Orkney

Leask sometimes used an alias, 'Walliman.' This was no ordinary name, but an old word for sorceror likely derived from the Norse völva. Sort of like calling yourself 'Warlock.' And this brings us to our next case, which I find even more interesting. Jonet Rendall was condemned in 1629 for a long bill of charges stretching back 20 years, the most damning of which was regularly consorting with the devil:

Her acquaintance with the Devil began two decades earlier, 'above the hill of Rendall' – somewhere along the windy ridge joining the summits of Hackland, Enyas and Gorseness Hills. . . Satan arrived at a vulnerable moment: Jonet had 'sought charity and could not have it'. He made her an offer, and though the dittay [bill of charges] uses the theological language of a 'pact', the Devil does not seem to have demanded anything in return. He promised to 'learn you to win alms by healing of folk, and whosoever should give you alms should be the better either by land or sea. And those that gave you no alms should not be healed . . . whatever you craved to befall them should befall." Despite this promise of vengeance on the mean-fisted, Satan, it appears, wanted to make Jonet Rendall into a magical healer.

It was, however, the prosecutor who identifiedthe mysterious figure 'clad in white clothes, with ane white head and ane grey beard' as the Devil. Jonet had her own name for him: Walliman. It seems very likely that her life-changing encounter was with a human not a supernatural being: the showman-warlock Oliver Leask, whose professional technique was precisely as described in the offer to Jonet, and who frequented this part of Orkney in the first decade of the seventeenth century. (199)

If Marshall is right, this case is a very important one, because one of the things we know the least about such cunning folk is how they learned their trades. 

It also looks to me like Jonet Rendall shared something else with Leask, a weak grasp on sanity:

If Jonet Rendall learned her secrets of curing and cursing from Oliver Leask, their last meeting must have been prior to Leask's banishment in the spring of 1616. In the succeeding years, he evidently assumed in her mind a more than human status. Jonet's confession spoke of 'praying to Walliman', and in admitting nearly all the charges she emphasised his power rather than hers: 'Walliman took away the profit of the ky'; 'Walliman slew the mares.' (200)

One of the charges against Jonet raises other important themes:

In 1621, Andro Matches of Sundiehous in Hackland Denounced Joney to the sheriff after losing the profit of his milk. Nine months later, he took complaint to the Evie Kirk Session. Matches was clearly unusual in his willingness to cause trouble for Jonet; a few days later, she remonstrated with him for 'always dealing with and complaining' of her, and said he would repent it.

Sure enough, three days later, Andro went out of his wits. His wife's reaction may seem curious to us, but is one commonly met with both in Orkney and elsewhere: she sent for the woman she believed to have cursed her husband. As soon as Jonet arrived, Andro began to feel better, and Jonet was rewarded with a plate of meat. Before tasting it, she spat three times over her left shoulder, and Andro's wife, 'fearing ye had been doing more evil,' spring forward to strike her. 'Let me alone,' Joney snapped, 'for your goodman will be well.'

The image of Andro's anxious wife, unsure if she was witnessing a ritual of healing or harming, captures the uneasy relationship between those who knew how to work magic and those who were eager to benefit from its effects. People in the farms of the West Mainland put up with Jonet's presence because she offered useful services and because they were afraid of her.

I believe that Europe was full of such characters throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and quite likely going much farther back in time. But we can know few of them in the wonderful way Peter Marshall helps us to know Oliver Leask and Jonet Rendall.

Witchcraft Persecution in Africa

Across much of Africa, the persecution of witches is still a terrible problem. Estimates of the number of accused witched murdered with or without trial go into the hundreds of thousands, although as I will explain these numbers beg a lot of questions. The persecution of witches draws on a range of problems: belief that misfortune can be causes by black magic; suspicion of anyone who "gets ahead" by means that seem mysterious to the neighbors; fear of mental illness; sexual jealousy; distrust of the government and its ability to provide justice; occasional encouragement by ambitious political leaders or ministers.

One of the strange offshoots of this problem is the phenomenon of "witch camps." When I first read about these I thought it must be a lie, or maybe a mistranslation, but no. Here is wikipedia's description of the camps in Ghana:

Witch camps are settlements where women in Ghana who have been accused of being witches can flee for safety. Women in such camps have been accused of witchcraft for various reasons, including mental illness. Some camps are thought to have been created in the early 20th century. . . . There are at least six witch camps in Ghana, housing a total of approximately 1,000 women.

From what I have been able to read, mostly news articles, it seems that the protectors of "witch camps" are exploiting the women as cheap labor, making them an odd sort of protection racket.

I have written here about this problem before, noting that some witch hunters have claimed protection for their activities under "freedom of religion." But what got me started on it again this week was my discovery that the Catholic Church is trying to right one of its historic wrongs by fighting the persecution of African "witches":

Those accused of witchcraft have now found a perhaps unlikely charity ally in their fight for justice: the Catholic missionary society missio, which is part of the global Pontifical Mission Societies under the jurisdiction of the Pope, has declared August 10 as World Day against Witch Hunts, saying that in at least 36 nations around the world, people continue to be persecuted as witches.

While the Catholic Church encouraged witch hunts in Europe from the 15th to the 18th century, it is now trying to shed light into this dark practice. Part of this might be a sense of historical obligation — but the real driving force is the number of victims that witch hunts still cost today.

Historian Wolfgang Behringer, who works as a professor specializing in the early modern age at Saarland University, firmly believes in putting the numbers in perspective. He told DW that during these three centuries, between 50,000 and 60,000 people are assumed to have been killed for so-called crimes of witchcraft — a tally that is close to being twice the population of some major German cities at the time.

But he says that in the 20th century alone, more people accused of witchcraft were brutally murdered than during the three centuries when witch hunts were practiced in Europe: "Between 1960 and 2000, about 40,000 people alleged of practicing witchcraft were murdered in Tanzania alone. While there are no laws against witchcraft as such in Tanzanian law, village tribunals often decide that certain individuals should be killed," Behringer told DW.

Other counts of the number of witches killed during Euroupe's witch hunts go as high as 200,000, but the number cited by Behringer is probably close to the average of what historians think, so I have no issue with it.

It is equally hard to get a good count of the "witches" killed in contemporary Africa. This is because in many places "witchcraft" is an accusation thrown around so much that it's hard to get a handle on what it means. Sometimes it seems like a justification for trying to cut a relative out of an inheritance, or something to throw at unfaithful women, or at crazy people, or religious heretics, and many other such cases. So when you read that someone was persecuted as a witch you can't easily tell if people really think sorcery is involved or if they are just very angry and using the worst insult at hand. But if you take all the accusations seriously, you indeed get numbers in the tens of thousands per decade.

African witchcraft persecutions are the sort of problem that gives some leftists fits. On the one hand, the persecutions are brutal, sexist, patriarchal, and oppressive, falling most heavily on poor women. On the other, the people opposing them do so almost exclusively in the name of either western ideas about science and human rights, or else modern, western notions of Christianity. For the Catholic church to fight witchcraft in Africa is about as neocolonial an act as you are ever likely to see, besides being open to accusations of hypocrisy. If you really believe that Africa's problems were mainly caused by westerners and that we should back off and let Africans run their own lives, then the Catholic church is making a mistake. But I disagree, because I don't think it matters at all if beliefs are European or African, black or white, colonial or anti-colonial; I care only if they are true or false, just or unjust, good or evil.

Stuart Clark, "Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe"

More from my old web site:

Between 1400 and 1700 the governments of Europe killed somewhere between 35,000 and 200,000 people for the crime of witchcraft. It was during the Renaissance, not the Dark Ages, that the fear of witches reached its peak; the terrible fires of the Rhineland that depopulated whole villages burned against the backdrop of world exploration and scientific revolution. Leaders of both the Protestant and Catholic reformations joined the outcry against witches, and notable preachers and the founders of seminaries added their denunciations to those of eminent judges, famous courtiers, and brilliant scholars. Sometimes it seems that the whole continent was witch mad, including some of the grandest intellectuals. Jean Bodin, author of a famous book of political theory and creator of the first quantitative economics, wrote the most terrible of all the witch books, arguing that anyone who opposed burning witches must be a witch himself and deserved to be burned.

Reading books about witchcraft written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a profoundly unsettling experience. Apparently sane men foam at the mouth about the threat posed to civilization by impoverished old women who fly to the Sabbath, and the petty crimes that earn them the wrath of their neighbors (milk spoilt, sheep sickened) are revealed as part of a gigantic conspiracy against Christendom hatched in Hell and organized by demons. Scenes of horrific torture are presented as Christian good works, since it was the theory of the witch hunters that the witches only denied their crimes because they were in the grip of Satan. Sometimes, indeed, the victims were tortured and exorcised at the same time, and their exhausted confessions marked the moment at which they were freed from the grip of the Evil One.

Why? The question has hung over Renaissance history since men of the time wrote their own narratives. Their own explanation was that they were so greatly afflicted by witches because they were approaching the End of Days, and their reading of the Bible suggested that attacks by demons would intensify as the second coming approached. During the eighteenth century Enlightened philosophers dismissed the whole witch panic as a symptom of the medieval barbarism and religious stupidity they were struggling against. Though both these explanations still have defenders, historians have abandoned them since we have failed to find evidence that either Satan's assault on humanity or religious stupidity was worse in the 1600s than in any other time. The questions remains unanswered.

The latest attempt to offer some kind of explanation of the witch craze comes in the form of an immense book from British historian Stuart Clark. Thinking with Demons (1997) is an amazing book, and Clark's learning is astonishing. The history of witchcraft has been my chief intellectual hobby for 15 years, but Clark has read dozens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonologies that I have never even heard of. His 686 pages of text are followed by no less than 106 pages of bibliography--and these are big pages with little print. Clark's intent is to understand what witchcraft beliefs meant to intellectuals during the centuries when the crime was routinely punished by death. It is a question I find fascinating, and Clark's picture of thought and belief is rich and convincing. Yet in the end, though he manages to rule out a whole class of possible explanations, he comes no closer than anyone else has to answering the basic question of why so many old women were burned.

Books of Renaissance demonology are so repulsive to us that we instinctively dismiss their authors as backward savages. The works of witchcraft skeptics, on the other hand, are so pleasing to us that we try to assimilate their authors to ourselves, making witchcraft skepticism a sign of modernity and classing the skeptical authors as "progressive" or "advanced." Clark shows that this is a gross distortion of the historical situation. The basic beliefs that made up the lore of witchcraft were nearly universal among Renaissance writers. The existence of witches and demons was proved by their appearance in the Bible. The reality of the cures, curses, and other magic performed by village witches was accepted nearly as widely as the truth of scripture. Since everyone knew that the sorts of verbal charms and spells used by witches could not have any power of their own, their efficacy could only come from the assistance of demons. And have demons ever helped people without demanding something in return? Obviously magicians had sold their souls to get their power.

Even most of the skeptical writers accepted that witchcraft was possible. The Renaissance skeptic whose work was best known in his own time was German physician Johann Weyer, who denounced the witch trials of Cleve in an emotional book published in 1563. Weyer believed that the trials he witnessed were perversions of justice because the poor old women convicted were too weak in mind and ignorant of theology to even understand the crimes they were accused of, let alone commit them. What they needed, he thought, was the care of doctors and ministers, not the attentions of the torturer. Weyer's humanity and compassion shine across the centuries, but there is nothing particularly modern about his thinking. He had no ties to up-to-date science, and he accepted the possibility of witchcraft--indeed, he suspected that it was rife among the cynical courtiers who promoted witch trials as a way to advance their careers.

Those skeptics who completely rejected the reality of witchcraft, such as Montaigne and the English writer Reginald Scot, were hardly more intellectually progressive than Weyer. They tended to take their inspiration from the ancient Cynics and to be skeptical of everything, including the advanced science of their day. Their thought points toward nothing in particular, certainly not toward modern science.

The intellectual arguments demonologists used were not only widely accepted, they were very old; none of them would have seemed unusual to St. Augustine. They existed, therefore, centuries before the time of the witch burnings. They also existed after the fires ceased to burn; as Clark shows, most English writers of the early 1700s continued to accept both the activity of demons in the world and the possibility that people would ally with them, even though English witch trials had stopped in the 1660s. If there is a direct connection between witchcraft skepticism and the rise of experimental science, nobody has yet been able to find it.

Clark's exhaustive tour of the intellectual underpinnings of the witch trials shows that intellectual changes explain neither their start nor their end. What, then, does explain it?

Fear. Fear that the Christian world was under assault by demonic forces was the thing witch persecutors had in common with each other and that distinguished them from those who, though they accepted the possibility of witchcraft, were not particularly concerned about it. Clark demonstrates this convincingly. The advocates of witch burning thought their world was descending into chaos, and they sought order in a religiously-based government. This was the age that elevated the divine right of kings to rule to its most absurd pitch--and what better way for kings to prove they had God's sanction than by warring against those soldiers of Satan, the witches? For the intellectuals who codified and chronicled it, witch burning was one weapon in a war fought against demonic disorder, a war also fought with preaching, catechism, church reform, the hiring of more policemen, the imposition of harsher penalties for criminals, and the elevation of royal power to a divine sacrament.

The question of why so many people were burned as witches during the Renaissance is therefore the question of why so many people were afraid. There are many possible explanations, from the Black Death to the Turkish conquests to changes in the weather. All of these may have contributed, but my guess is that the pervasive fear was generated by the same great changes that make us celebrate the Renaissance as a time of marvels. The opening of new continents upset the old structure of the world and overturned parts of the economy, enriching some people and some regions while ruining others. New ideas were exciting but also frightening. Religious reform thrilled those who sought a more perfect church but abolished many comforting traditions; confessional conflict turned what had been a source of comfort into a sphere of battle. Rapid change is disturbing, and sometimes it makes people profoundly afraid.

But whatever the causes of the fear that haunted Europe, the hanging and burning of so many innocents reminds us of the grim dangers of being afraid. When people are afraid, they lash out stupidly. They mistrust friendship and put their faith in violence and revenge. They elevate petty criminals and political opponents into agents of the Devil and make war upon them. In times of fear we should do all that we can to set it aside, for it is a wicked counselor. We should turn, instead, to the other legacy of the Renaissance, the faith in the intellectual power and great traditions of our species that we call humanism. We must reject madness and obsession in favor of reason and empathy. If we must use violence, we should use it with reluctance and with compassion for the those we fight against, not as if we were battling demonic creatures born of our darkest nightmares. 

April 13, 2002 

For a review of a more recent book that sheds light on these questions, see here.

Michael Hunter, "The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment"

The persecution of "witches" in western Europe peaked between 1590 and 1650. Thousands were burned, whole villages depopulated. Then, mysteriously, the persecution petered out. By 1670 burnings were rare, by 1690 almost unheard of. A handful of cases were prosecuted into the 1720s, but these usually involved accusations of poisoning or religious heresy as well as simple witchcraft.

Why? Despite 300 years of scholarship – the first history of the rise and fall of witch burnings in England was published in 1718 – there is no agreement. Which I suppose is not really surprising, since we are equally in the dark about why the persecution began in the 1400s.

One is tempted, of course, to credit science. But actually science had nothing to say about the matter, at least not directly. In England the Royal Society was several times invited to investigate particular cases of witchcraft or other demonic visitations, and once a petition was got up to have them investigate witchcraft in toto, but they refused to get involved. Scientists were anyway divided on the question. One of England's top scientists, Robert Boyle, was a great defender of the reality of witchcraft, and while Isaac Newton was dismissive of village witchcraft he devoted years of his life to unraveling Biblical prophecy.

Was there, perhaps, some argument among philosophers, in which the believers were gradually beaten down by skeptics like Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooke? Actually, no. There was next to no skeptical publication about witchcraft before the 1690s, after the trials had essentially ceased. The only prominent writer to take up the skeptical side was Thomas Hobbes, who devoted a single chapter of Leviathan (1651) to dismissing the whole business in terms so vague that orthodox divines found nothing in it to argue against. A writer of the 1670s who tried to defend the orthodox Christian position on Satan and demons found only three skeptical books in English to refute, compared to many hundreds of demonologies. The most prominent of those works, Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft, had been published in 1584, before the worst of the persecution even got going, and really no skeptical author had found any additional arguments since Scot's time. The printed arguments for and against witchcraft did not change at all between 1500 and 1700, and the pro-witchcraft books always massively outnumbered those by skeptics. Somehow, though, the arguments of the demonologists ceased to persuade.

Back in 1971, English historian Keith Thomas published Religion and the Decline of Magic. This is one of my favorite academic books, a marvelous look at all the things English people believed in the 16th and 17th centuries. But when it came to the "decline" part, Thomas had little to say. Nobody found that part of the book in any way convincing. Thomas' own work showing how deeply belief in witches, demons, faeries, astrology, oracles and so on were woven into European society made the problem even more difficult.

The mystery of witchcraft's decline, highlighted by Thomas, inspired a generation of British historians to take up the question. Until this week I would have said they had not made much progress, but I am happy to report that Michael Hunter's The Decline of Magic (2020) changes that. The Decline of Magic is not an elegant or charming book; Hunter explains in the introduction that it was cobbled together from a series of articles and talks, and rather than trying to smooth over the breaks he keeps calling attention to them. Despite being only 180 pages long it repeats itself to an irritating degree. Really Hunter has only one thing to say, but it is such a fascinating and important thing that I happily forgive him the foibles of this book.

Hunter says there was a great argument over the reality of witchcraft, in which the defenders of witchcraft were routed and the skeptics emerged triumphant. It does not appear in books because the whole argument was carried on orally. It was within the oral culture of the English elite, at the court of Charles II, in the coffee houses, and among chattering lawyers at the Inns of Court, that witchcraft accusations were made ridiculous and demons ceased to be taken seriously.

Here we encounter one of the great challenges facing any historian: most of what matters in history is spoken, and few of history's major actors have been book-writing people. We have to reconstruct the culture within which history happened from the bits and pieces that chanced to be written down. Hunter does this in a very impressive way. He starts from the many books written by ministers and philosophers arguing for the reality of witchcraft. Since there were hardly any skeptical books, who were they arguing against? Fortunately, they tell us. They write, over and over, that England is plagued by "wits and scoffers" who deny the reality of magic and demons and come perilously close to denying God. They tell us, over and over, that these wits and scoffers are to be found at court, in the coffee houses, and at the Inns of Court.

The later 17th century is the first period from which private letters survive in quantity, and Hunter makes great use of these. In these letters some of the coffee house scoffers and wits are named, and we are told about the skeptical things they said. Others of their breed appear in Pepys' diary. We also meet them in Restoration drama and occasionally in verse. They are, once Hunter started looking for them, everywhere. He even has first-hand accounts of dinner parties at which these matters were argued out, the believers against the scoffers. By 1705 we have doctors like Sir John Sloane arguing that anyone who sees spirits or hears their voices is suffering from a mental disease.

Hunter seals his argument with an amazingly detailed analysis of a single case, a poltergeist known as the Drummer of Tedworth. This famous case of mysterious drumming and other odd phenomena in a grand country house, in the years 1671-1673, was reported on and debated all over Britain. A memorandum on the case even appears in the papers of the Privy Council, and it eventually showed up in a comedic play by Addison. Hunter has dug up dozens of mentions of the case in letters, books, broadsheets, even a printed ballad. He shows that the believers who used the case to argue for the reality of spirits were mocked at every turn by "wits and scoffers" who thought the whole thing was faked by the servants to get revenge on a bad employer. At least two churchmen whose letters survive found themselves embroiled in arguments over it with coffee house skeptics. Two noble friends of the king (Lords Sandwich and Chesterfield) went to Tedworth and reported back in mocking terms to the court. They seem to have treated the whole thing as a lark, an amusing way to get out of London for a few days of ribaldry on the road.

So the question of why the English stopped trying people for witchcraft when it was still a capital crime, and most of the common people still believed in it, and most of the books published on the subject still argued for it, has this answer: because any lawyer or judge who involved himself in such a case risked being laughed at by all the other lawyers, and jeered out of his favorite coffee house. As John Wesley later wrote in his diary, "the infidels have hooted witchcraft out of the world." Plus, any English capital case could in theory be appealed to the king, who would hear it in his privy council, stock full of wits and scoffers like Lords Sandwich and Chesterfield. This actually happened in 1712, when one of England's last convicted witches received a royal pardon.

Hunter is writing only about Britain, but I feel certain that all of this applies to France and Holland as well. Charles II's court was after all modeled on the French court, and the French Parlements were equally stocked with worldly lawyers, the salons with scoffing wits. Meanwhile the Dutch led the world in both coffee house culture and philosophical skepticism. 

As to why the European elite turned toward deism and against demonology, that is a very grand question. One could point to a reaction against the religious enthusiasm of the 1500-1650 period, and the wars it spawned. But certainly skepticism about witchcraft fits perfectly with the whole elite culture of the eighteenth century: neoclassical architecture, the great arc of Baroque and classical music that runs from Bach to Mozart, the obsession with the Roman world, the cult of Reason. 

What is great about The Decline of Magic is that Hunter ties the cessation of witchcraft trials to those big cultural changes without any hand-waving. He shows us the places, the people, sometimes the very words by which the change was made. Where other authors have given us vague assertions about the influence of science, or the philosophical triumph of deism, Hunter shows us the men, the conversations, the jokes that made this change happen. It is a remarkable work of scholarship.

I think Hunter's point about the great difference between print culture and oral culture has much wider application. For example there have lately been several major books about the survival of "superstition" in the eighteenth century, with titles like The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. The claim or at least the insinuation of these books is that the Enlightenment was not really so rational, that people continued to believe in demons, witches, and the like, besides dreaming up new false beliefs like racism. All of which is true, to a point. Many people still believe in ghosts and demons. But as Hunter convincingly shows for the 1670s and 1680s, people may be writing books because they have been shouted out of the coffee houses and have no other way to get their ideas out. Consider how many books in our own time were written from their authors' frustration that "you never hear about x." Most people don't write books, and we cannot, ever, assume that those who do publish speak for the rest.

And, I should add, most people who write books are not nearly as smart as Michael Hunter.

Halloween 1596, or, the Trail of Janet Wishart

Aberdeen's market square, with the 1686 Mercat Cross

During the Scottish Witch Panic of 1597, more than 400 people were tried as witches, and more than a hundred executed. One of these was Janet Wishart of Aberdeen. I find her case fascinating, besides which it includes this wonderful Halloween story:

Janet's son, Thomas Leyis, was found guilty of being a ringleader and convicted on three accounts of witchcraft. He is said to have presided at a meeting held on Halloween at midnight in the Castlegate when many witches convened between the mercat and fish crosses 'under the conduct and guiding of the devil present with them'. These people all danced and played instruments about the crosses and Thomas was accused of being foremost amongst them and of hitting Kathren Mitchell 'because she spoilt the dance and ran not so fast as the rest'. 

This story introduces the theme, which is that the trial of Janet and the other Wisharts connects much  more with the literature and theory of witchcraft than any other British case I know. Tales of witches frolicking on Halloween or other special nights abound in the stories but are rare in the trial transcripts.

Modern scholars have been very interested in why most victims of the witch trials were women, and one of their theories has been that the patriarchy used such accusations to control women and especially their sexually. Certainly some of the old books on witchcraft, especially the infamous Malleus Mallificarum, ooze disgust for women's bodies and women's desires. But again this is very rare in the trial transcripts, where after all the typical witch was an old woman, not a young, sexually active one. But Janet Wishart was a different sort of witch:

One of the earliest accusations referred to an incident in May 1572 when five men, three of them students, caught Janet creeping out of the yard of Adam Mair, her neighbour, at two o’clock in the morning. The men immediately woke Mair’s wife and told her what they had discovered. Furiously, Janet said, ‘Weill haif ye schemit me. I sail gar the best of yow repent’. Whereupon, that same day, between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, two of the youths were drowned in the Auld Wattergang in the Links, where they had gone to wash themselves.

The obvious interpretation of this is that the young men thought Janet was coming back from visiting her married lover, and when they informed the wronged wife Janet responded by cursing them in a way that killed two of them.

Brown dog from the Aberdeen Bestiary

And then this:

There is an air of novelty about the next case, that of John Allan, cutler, Janet Wishart's son-in-law. Quarrelling with his wife, he 'dang' her, 'whereupon Mistress Allan complained to her mother, who immediately betook herself to her son-in-law's house, 'bostit' him, and promised to gar him repent that ever he saw or kent her. Shortly afterwards, either she or the devil her master, in the likeness of a brown tyke [dog], came nightly for five or six weeks to his window, forced it open, leaped upon the said John, dang and buffeted him, while always sparing his wife, who lay in bed with him, so that the said John became half-wod and furious.' And this persecution continued, until he threatened to inform the ministry and kirk-session.

It's a bad idea to hit your wife when her mother is a powerful witch. In another case Janet was accused of sending a "nightmare cat" rather than a dog, with the same sleep-disturbing effect.

The source I am following rendered most of the trial transcript into something closer to modern English, but for this charge against one of Janet's daughters he also provided the original, which I provide since I know some of my readers are interested in the history of our language:

Fourlle thou art Indyttit for passing to the kirk of dyce and then gathe Ring of a numer of deid folkis banes, and seything thame in watter and tacking of That watter and therefter wasching willea[m] sy[m]mer in the haltoun of fyntrie (he Than being lyand deidlie seik) and therefter causing the said willia[m]is gude Mother tak the saids banes and cast thame in the watter of doyn, q[ui]lk Quhen sche had done, the watter ru[m]lit in sic a sort as all the hillis had fallin therin and this sich you can not deny

Fourthly you are indicted for passing to the Church of Dyce and there gathering a number of dead folk's bones and boiling them in water, and taking that water and thereafter washing William Symmer in the Hatton of Fintray (he then being lying deadly sick) and thereafter causing the said William's good mother take the said bones and cast them in the River Don, which when she had done, the water rumbled in such a manner as [if] all the hills had fallen therein and this you can not deny

But most of the charges against Janet were the usual sort. An example:

In the month of April, or thereabout, in 1591, in the "gricking" of the day, [that is, in the dawn,] Janet Wishart, on her way back from the blockhouse and Fattie, where she had been holding conference with the devil, pursued Alexander Thomson, mariner, coming forth of Aberdeen to his ship, ran between him and Alexander Fidler, under the Castle Hill, as swift, it appeared to him, as an arrow could be shot forth of a bow, going betwixt him and the sun, and cast her "cantrips" in his way. Whereupon, the said Alexander Thomson took an immediate "fear and trembling," and was forced to hasten home, take to his bed, and lie there for the space of a month, so that none believed he would live;--one half of the day burning in his body, as if he had been roasting in an oven, with an extreme feverish thirst, "so that he could never be satisfied of drink," the other half of the day melting away his body with an extraordinarily cold sweat. And Thomson, knowing she had cast this kind of witchcraft upon him, sent his wife to threaten her, that, unless she at once relieved him, he would see that she was burnt. And she, fearing lest he should accuse her, sent him by the two women a certain kind of beer and some other drugs to drink, after which Thomson mended daily, and recovered his former health.

And this:

She [Janet] and her daughter, Violet Leyis, desired ... her woman to go with her said daughter, at twelve o'clock at night, to the gallows, and cut down the dead man hanging thereon, and take a part of all his members from him, and burn the corpse, which her servant would not do, and, therefore, she was instantly sent away.

Like many other accused witches Janet Wishart was also a healer, and regularly gave out or sold charms and potions. In one case a woman said she had earned Janet's enmity by revealing to her friends a charm Janet had sold her. When Janet's son was in prison awaiting trial, one of his neighbors visited him for advice on how to rid her home of a troublesome spirit.

Janet Wishart comes across as a formidable woman. She was described as the leader of her family, more dangerous and powerful than her husband or son. People said that with her magic she murdered children, ruined people financially, coerced them to do her bidding by sending them nightmares. She is shown, more than any other accused witch I know of, playing up her fearsome reputation to get her way. Her anger was power.

And one more case, which perhaps more than any other gets into the minds of people who feared witchcraft and invoked the power of the law against witches:

Twelve years since, or thereby, Janet came into Katherine Rattray's, behind the Tolbooth, and while she was drinking in the said Katherine's cellar, Katherine reproved her for drinking in her house, because, she said, she was a witch. Whereupon, she took a cup full of ale, and cast it in her face, and said that if she were indeed a witch, the said Katherine should have proof of it; and immediately after she had quitted the cellar, the barm of the said Katherine's ale all sank to the bottom of the stand, and no had abaid [a bead] thereon during the space of sixteen weeks. And the said Katherine finding herself 'skaithit,' complained to her daughter, Katherine Ewin, who was then in close acquaintance with Janet, that she had bewitched her mother's ale; and immediately thereafter the said Katherine Ewin called on Janet, and said, 'Why bewitched you my mother's ale?' and requested her to help the same again. Which Janet promised, if Katherine Ewin obeyed her instructions ... to rise early before the sun, without commending herself to God, or speaking, and neither suining herself nor her son sucking on her breast; to go, still without speaking, to the said Katherine Rattray's house, and not to cross any water, nor wash her hands; and enter into the said Katherine Rattray's house, where she would find her servant brewing, and say to her thrice, 'I to God, and thou to the devil!' and to restore the same barm where it was again; 'and to take up thrie dwattis on the southt end of the gauttreyis, and thair scho suld find ane peice of claithe, fowr newikit, with greyn, red, and blew, and thrie corss of clewir girss, and cast the same in the fyir; quhilk beand cassin in, her barm suld be restorit to hir againe, lyik as it was restorit in effect.'

And the said Katherine Ewin, when cracking [gossiping] with her neighbours, said she could learn them a charm she had gotten from Janet Wishart, which when the latter heard, she promised to do her an evil turn, and immediately her son, sucking on her breast, died. And at her first browst, or brewing, thereafter, the whole wort being played and put in 'lumes,' the doors fast, and the keys at her own belt, the whole wort was taken away, and the haill lumes fundin dry, and the floor dry, and she could never get trial where it yird to. And when the said Katherine complained to the said Janet Wishart, and dang herself and her good man both, for injuries done to her by taking of her son's life and her wort [which Katherine seems to have thought of about equal value], she promised that all should be well, giving her her draff for payment. And the said Katherine, with her husband Ambrose Gordon, being in their beds, could not for the space of twenty days be quit of a cat, lying nightly in their bed, between the two, and taking a great bite out of Ambrose's arm, as yet the place testifies, and when they gave up the draff, the cat went away.

The Scottish Witch Panic of 1597

This post started with a monumentally annoying article in the Times, in which the writer bemoans that nobody remembers the persecution of Scottish witches. This is, for some reason the author does not explain, a very bad thing to forget. And maybe it would be, if anyone had actually forgotten it. I have found that the persecution of witches is one of the most widely known things about European history; I have personally never encountered a freshman who had not heard of it, and I have met freshmen who did not know that princesses had arranged marriages.

But that inane piece linked to a cool interactive map posted by the University of Edinburgh that shows all the well-documented witch trials in Scotland. Perusing this map, I noticed that the obscure town of Kirkcaldy had 34 known witch trials. Clicking on the little blue woman, I found that many of those cases were from a single year, 1597.

That started me searching for information on the Scottish Witch Panic of 1597. Scotland, it turns out, had five major waves of witch burning, in 1590-1591, 1597, 1628-1631, 1649, and 1661-1662.  The 1649 panic is fairly famous because it was by far the biggest and took place in the middle of the British civil wars, and the 1590-1591 comes up because King James VI/I wrote a book about it, and it is supposed to have inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth. But I never heard of the 1597 panic.

Historians like to explain things. For example, the 1590 witch panic followed a disastrous harvest and was personally pushed by the king, and the 1649 panic followed the victory of the godly "Kirk Party", who tried to turn Scotland into a Puritan state. But nobody has any idea why there was a witch panic in 1597. Sometimes, it seems, things just happen.

During this year, at least 400 people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland, and more than 100 were executed. The exact number of deaths is hard to pin down, because from this period a lot more indictments survive than verdicts.

As to why there were so many trials in Kirkcaldy, that is an interesting tale. It resulted from the arrest of one woman, Margaret Aitken, in the nearby hamlet of Balwearie. Balwearie had been a place of sinister reputation since the time of medieval scholar Michael Scot of Balwearie, remembered in Scottish folklore as a mighty wizard. Anyway when Margaret Aitken was arrested and put to the torture, she told the judges that she had been to a sabbath in Atholl with 2,300 other Scottish witches, and she started naming names.

She quickly ran through all of her neighbors, several of whom were also tried. Aitken kept the judges listening by saying that she could identify other witches by a look or sign in their eyes. Feeling like they had finally had a stroke of luck in their long battle against Satan, the judges carted Aitken around eastern Scotland for four months, letting her identify other witches, some of whom were also tried. People started calling Aitken the Great Witch of Balwearie.

According to a pamphlet written afterwards, Aitken was eventually exposed as a fraud. A skeptical judge brought some people to before her for her verdict on whether they were witches, then brought them back the next day in different clothes, whereupon Aitken gave different verdicts. The exposé, people say, brought that wave of witch persecutions to a close. Whether that is true, I have no idea; as I said there is only one source and it sounds an awful lot like a folktale. But somehow or other the authorities turned against Aitken and had her executed, and somehow or other the persecution did end. For a few years, anyway.

Kepler's Mother: "The Astronomer and the Witch" by Ulinka Rublack

Astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a fascinating man whose thoughts went in a thousand directions. He developed the first accurate description of planetary motion but he also thought the ratios of the distances from the planets to the sun defined musical harmony. Yeah, he was pretty strange.

He was Imperial Mathematician to one of Europe's strangest rulers, Emperor Rudolf II, who was obsessed with alchemy and astrology and preferred staring for hours at new works of art he had acquired for his collection to governing; his favorite portrait of himself was this one.

And he had a pretty strange mother, too, who in her old age had a feud with some of her neighbors that landed her in jail on charges of witchcraft. I've just finished reading The Astronomer and the Witch by Ulinka Rublack (2015), which describes the 1619 trial Katharina Kepler and the intervention of her famous son, who was able to secure her acquittal. It's a good book mostly because it sticks to the sources and what they actually say about these events and Kepler's part in them. This is important because Kepler is famous enough, and his involvement in a witch trial striking enough, that there exist dozens of popular and fictional accounts of his life (including two operas) that mostly mangle the Keplers' story.

This was a lousy period in German history, with plague, famine, religious strife, and violent conflict that led in 1618 to outbreak of what we call the Thirty Years War. Witchcraft accusations were part of the background horror; across Germany thousands of people were executed for witchcraft between 1600 and 1625, most of them older women. The Duchy of Württemberg where the Keplers lived had a fairly rational court system for the time, generally holding that one or two accusations were not adequate grounds for putting a suspect to torture. Unless, that is, she was a person of "bad reputation." Reputation was central to medieval and early modern law, which distinguished between people of good repute and others in myriad ways. So when some of Katharina's neighbors decided to press charges of witchcraft against her, their main challenge was to prove that she was a person of dubious reputation.

Leonberg, where Katharina lived

To achieve this they presented more than twenty witnesses. Some of them thought she was a witch, and others just admitted to wondering about it.  Like, "She came to my house, and then my calf got sick, but I was never sure if she was responsible or not." The wonderful thing about these intense investigations is that they provide almost our only way to get to know the ordinary people of the past.

Katharina, like many of her neighbors, was very interested in herbal medicine and regularly brewed her own concoctions and passed on prayers and other verbal formulae that were supposed to aid healing. A tailor testified,

When two of his children became seriously ill, Katharina taught his wife words to say during "full moon in the church yard under the open sky." (167)

One witness recounted a story she said she heard from a young woman who had gone to work in Katharina's house for a few days as a seamstress.

"Close to midnight", the girl had said, Katharina had risen from her bed to 'roam about' in the main room of her house. As the seamstress woke, she asked, "Why do you roam about in the chamber instead of lying in bed?" Katharina replied, "Would it not please you to become a witch?" promising the young girl "joy and debauchery beyond measure." On earth, Katharina had declaimed to the girl, there was "neither joy nor spiritedness."

Klebl continued to repeat apparently verbatim how this strange nocturnal exchange continued. The seamstress worried, "If you have a lot of joy and voluptuousness in this world, you will have to pay for it eternally." Katharina had instantly dismissed such pious concerns. "There is no eternal life. When man dies, he dies, like senseless beasts." The seamstress had nonetheless insisted on the message she had heard in Lutheran sermons, catechism classes, and school for so many years. "The pastors preach that the one who believes and has been baptized will live for eternity. Those who do not believe will be damned." Katharina had responded darkly that the only reason for having pastors was that people could safely cross the streets when visiting one another instead of fearing violence. (161-162)

This fascinates me. If it really happened, I feel like I can imagine it perfectly: an older woman whose abusive husband has gone off and left her completely alone, so that she must work all the time to keep a roof over her head, and gets no spiritual comfort from her Lutheran church, says, "Wouldn't it be fun to be a witch? We could fly around the world and party all night and have sex with anyone we want!" When the pious girl responds that this is blasphemy, the older women lets slip her skepticism: "bah, there's no heaven or hell, it's just a lie the authorities tell us to keep us in line."  The cynicism is perfect: we know that such beliefs were in the air because the same accusations show up in heresy trials from the 13th century on, and in hundreds of books by divines complaining about the lack of faith around them.

Other witnesses brought up Katharina's troubled marriage. Her husband had left home several times to serve as a soldier in various armies, seemingly indifferent to what he was fighting for so long as he was paid. This was the subject of much gossip, as the trial record shows:

Some men blamed Katharina for driving her husband away. A "proper, honest wife, who valiantly keeps her husband well," they said, would not have a man leave her. (167)

Another witness lays out perfectly what some skeptics at the time said was really behind these accusations: the obligation of charity toward neighbors and the guilt over not doing enough. The witness repeated a story she had heard from her parents about Katharina from 25 years earlier:

They had told her that in 1590, just after her husband had left, Katharina had asked the forester to help her put manure on the fields, the all-essential treatment for her soil. He had been too busy, but in turn had worried that she, in revenge, had made one of his pigs go wild and die. (168)

And then there's this:

There was, however, one exceptional thing that Katharina Kepler had done: she had asked for her father's skull. . . . Allegedly, Katharina had entered the baker's house announcing to his wife what a "stately thing" is was for a person to possess her father's skull. The baker's wife had already heard from the gravedigger's widow that Katharina had asked him to dig out her father's head and bring it to her. She wanted to turn it into a drinking cup, and knew a man who had done the same. (171)

Witnesses alleged that she intended to mount it in silver and send it to her son in Prague, that is, Johannes. This is interesting partly because Humanistic historians were very interested in ancient tales about skull cups, and several collectors, including Emperor Rudolf, had specimens in their cabinets of curiosities. But it was a dangerous thing for an old woman who had issues with her neighbors to talk about.

In the end Kepler's learned brief convinced the judges that this was all rumor and spite, and they disallowed torture. Since Katharina never confessed, she was released after more than a year in prison and died peacefully in her home.

After the trial Kepler vented his wrath on some of his old academic acquaintances, for an interesting reason. Several years before he had circulated the manuscript of his strange story about a journey from the Earth to the Moon, in which the narrator learns about space travel from his mother, a witch. Kepler accused his friends of talking this over in front of their barbers, whence it had spread back to his mother's home and helped stir up resentment against her. Ulinka Rublack thinks this is far-fetched, and I agree; the charges seem to grow from conflicts between neighbors in the usual way, with no reference anywhere in the record to Kepler's stories.

What this weird episode does show is the vast distance between the half-mad, excessively learned court of Rudolf II of the lives of most of his subjects. When Kepler finally published his Somnium, Rudolf was long dead, his court dissolved, and Kepler included hundreds of footnotes explaining the many insider references and double meanings. For example, in one scene the narrator's mother summons demons at a crossroads who teach the narrator about the universe; the footnote explains that these demons represent facts learned by observing the natural world. What might have gotten a peasant woman put to the torture was at Rudolf's court just another game, another allegory that those in the charmed circle tried to puzzle out, either not caring about the thousands of innocents being put the stake or hoping to distract themselves from the wicked world around them.

As for Johannes Kepler himself, he was very much a man of this milieu. His brilliant mathematical discoveries were buried in immense books full of allegorical speculation about things like the relationship between planetary motion and the Trinity, or whether storms were bad moods in the Earth's soul. His mind went everywhere, tried to connect everything. Fortunately for his mother, his learning and status were sufficient to overmaster the testimonies of her angry neighbors, saving her from torture and death.

Witches and Wicked Bodies at the National Galleries of Scotland

The National Galleries of Scotland is mounting an exhibit on the art of witchcraft and such that looks quite cool. Highlights here. Above, The Witches Sabbath by Franz Fracken, 1606.

Agostino Veneziano, The Witches Rout, 1520, and detail. Images like this one and the first remind us that part of the horror of witchcraft was the sheer chaos associated with their mad revels.

John Runciman, The Witches of MacBeth, 1767.

John Faed, Illustration from Robert Burns Tam O'Shanter.

Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langenburg

When you have read as much about witch trials as I have, they all start to run together. Another poor old woman is brought before the authorities, accused by her neighbors of killing their cattle or their children. The authorities are not really much interested in cattle poisoning; they want to know if the old woman has sold her soul to the devil and become part of the army of witches that threatens Christian civilization. If anything about her makes them suspicious that she has, they throw her in prison and drag her out at regular intervals to be questioned until she confesses. If necessary, she is tortured, but usually the repeated intense questioning over months or even years is enough in itself. Eventually she is burned, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of relatives or neighbors.

Thomas Robisheaux's The Last Witch of Langenburg: Murder in a German Village (2009) is another tale of this basic type. What makes it interesting and unusual is that this suspected witch, Anna Schmieg, fell into the clutches of an investigator of the most fanatical Germanic thoroughness. Tobias Ulrich von Gülchen was Court Adviser to the Count of Langenburg, one of the many minor princes whose realms dotted the German Rhineland. He was trained in the law and in Lutheran theology, and he devoted his life to bringing order to his prince's small patrimony. Langenburg had been devastated in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and desperately needed some of the order that von Gülchen tried to bring it. If bureaucratic precision were enough, he would have succeeded brilliantly, since I have never seen a legal case as well documented as this one. Nor have I ever read about any ordinary person of the past whose life is as well known as Anna Schmieg's. Von Gülchen's questioning was a combination of police methods and religious instruction. He took Schmieg through her whole life, demanding that she confess all of her sins going back to childhood, trying to pinpoint the moment when she became the devil's minion.

Anna Schmieg's father died when she was a child, her mother when she was a teenager. Her stepfather, a schoolmaster, sent her to be a domestic servant in the household of her mother's sister, who was married to a tavern-keeper. The uncle was a successful man, the richest peasant in his village. In 1630 he was one of the leaders of a peasant protest movement called the Oberregenbach Assembly, which demanded tax relief and an end to the quartering of troops in their villages. Anna's brother went off to fight in the war and was never heard from again. Even though she was a propertyless orphan, Anna's guardians made a good match for her, marrying her into a family of well-off millers. (How her aunt must have crowed about that coup.) Hans Schmieg leased the lord's mill in the village of Bächlingen. Anna thus became one of the leading citizens of the village, the miller's wife, a person to be reckoned with. She never managed to fit into her new community, though. A quarrelsome person, she was regularly fined by the village court for fighting and swearing oaths. She also defied the court on several occasions, refusing to pay fines or petitioning to have them reduced. She was also, as she admitted to von Gülchen, a heavy drinker, and she sometimes invoked the devil's name when she was drunk. Of her seven children, only two reached adulthood, the others dying at ages between two months and 5 years.

But this is only the beginning of what we know about Anna Schmieg. When know that she talked to her pigs when she fed them, "as people do." We know that she would not share the cherries from her favorite tree with her neighbors. We know that her husband, troubled by repeated breakdowns in the machinery of his mill, decided that it was haunted by an evil spirit and obtained "several" cat heads from the court executioner and buried them around the mill to keep the spirits away. (Executioners were often thought to have occult knowledge, because of their profession, and some did a good business in the body parts of executed criminals.) We know that she lost her virginity when she was her uncle's servant, in the barn, with a friend of the uncle's that she described as a "whorish scoundrel." She and her daughter fell out because her daughter refused a match arranged by her parents and eloped with a neighbor boy -- the decisive moment in her trial came when her own daughter turned against her and accused her baking poisoned Shrovetide cakes. Her husband and son remained faithful to her to the end. It is quite remarkable to know a woman who died in 1672 in such detail.

The other thing I found most interesting about this case is that Robisheaux did not discover it. On the contrary, it has figured in local histories and general witchcraft books for a century, and two plays and a best-selling novel have been based (loosely) on Anna Schmieg's story. The thick bundle of papers that make up her trial record once appeared in a traveling museum exhibition on witchcraft. Like many other authors of famous history books, Robisheaux has taken one of the best known records of the past and re-examined in a new and very thorough way.

The Last Witch of Langenburg is a good book, and I recommend it. There are, however, many, many historical studies of witchcraft, and this one does not make my top ten list. If you want a thorough study of a single witchcraft case, I still recommend High Road to the Stake by Michael Kunze.

The Witches' Cottage of Pendle Hill

The Pendle Witches, famous in witch lore, are in the news this week because a partially intact seventeenth-century cottage was found under a pile of rubble in the village of Barley near Pendle Hill. A cat had been entombed in one of the brick walls, and its intact skeleton -- not "mummy" as some news accounts have it -- was found when the ruin was investigated by archaeologists. This has led to all sorts of mad speculation that this house was the home of some of the witches, perhaps even the mysterious Malkin Tower where the accused witches met shortly before their trial. The cat is indeed related to witchcraft but it would have put in the wall as a protective measure, and any superstitious 17th-century person might have done this; archaeologists find these all the time. But let me tell the story.

In 1612 ten women and two men from villages near Pendle Hill in Lancashire were put on trial, accused by their neighbors of murdering ten people by witchcraft. Ten were convicted, one died in prison, and one was acquitted. The guilty were hanged in a makeshift gallows on the moors. This was part of one of the biggest "witch scares" in British history, the trial of 17 witches at the 1612 Lancaster Assizes. The clerk, knowing he had a story in his hands that people would pay to hear, published the record of the court proceedings as The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. Thanks to this record and a few other sources, we know a lot about the case. The background to the scare involves King James I's moves against Catholicism, which was still strong in Lancashire (the first complaint against the Pendle Witches was made to an official who was searching for Catholics), and his personal interest in witchcraft, which may have led some local officials to seek his favor by looking for witches to prosecute.

Six of the Pendle Witches came from two families,

each headed by a female in her eighties at the time of the trials: Elizabeth Southerns (aka Demdike), her daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren James and Alizon Device; Anne Whittle (aka Chattox), and her daughter Anne Redferne. . . . Many of the allegations resulted from accusations that members of the Demdike and Chattox families made against each other.

The chief witnesses against Elizabeth Device were actually her own children, whom she cursed in front of the court with such vehemence that she was removed from the courtroom by the bailiff. She was the classic witch, with a deformed face, one eye lower than the other, and a nasty streak, given to publicly cursing people who would not give her what she thought was her due. Sixteenth-century English skeptic Reginald Scott described the lives of these people in The Discoverie of Witchcraft:

These go from house to house and from door to door for a pot of milk, yeast, drink, pottage, or some such relief, without which they could hardly live. . . . It falleth out many times that neither their necesities nor their expectation is answered or served in those places where they beg or borrow, but rather their lewdness (i.e. rudeness) is by their neighbors reproved. And further, in tract of time the witch waxeth odious and tedious to her neighbors, and they again are despised of her, so as sometimes she curseth one, and sometimes another, and that from the master of the house, his wife, children, cattle, etc., to the little pig that lieth in the stye. Thus in process of time they have all displeased her, and she hath wished evil luck unto them all, perhaps with curses and imprecations made in form. Doubtless at length some of her neighbors die or fall sick, or some of their children are visited with diseases that vex them strangley, as apoplexies, epilepsies, convulsions, hot fevers, worms, etc., which by ignorant parents are supposed to be the vengeance of witches. . . . The witch on the other side expecting her neighbors' mischances, and seeing things sometimes come to pass according to her wishes, curses, and incantations being called before a Justice, by due examination of the circumstances is driven to see her imprecations and desires, and her neighbours harms and losses to concur, and as it were, to take effect; and so confesseth that she, as a goddess, hath brought such things to pass.

This behavior is why some accounts of the trial (even the quite good wikipedia entry) say that the accused witches practiced "extortion." They were poor people --Elizabeth Southerns was 80 years old and blind -- and in village society poor people often depend on the charity of their neighbors, which up to a point is an obligation on the better off. Conflicts arose when a poor beggar was seen as demanding too much or acting too obnoxiously toward those who supported her. Calling down divine wrath on those who would not give alms is a very ancient practice, but in the European Renaissance it came to be seen increasingly as witchcraft, and it slowly died out.

Much of the testimony at the trial focused on a meeting said to have taken place at the Device family home on Good Friday, 1612. The house was known as Malkin Tower; in the local dialect "malkin" could mean either a cat or a doll made from rags or leaves, both of which might be associated with witchcraft. The house was "in the Forrest of Pendle," and various witnesses described hearing sounds near it like the shrieking of cats or the screaming of children. (That's Pendle Hill above.) When the meeting was held, Elizabeth Southerns and Alice Chattox had already been imprisoned, and a meeting of their friends and relations immediately aroused the suspicion of the authorities. According to court testimony, the lamb they had for dinner had been stolen by James Device. The Devices and their friends insisted that this was innocent get-together, but the courts (and Elizabeth Device's children) said it was to plot the murder those who had jailed the old women. Some modern historians think it was a secret Catholic service. All those who were proved to be at the meeting were eventually executed.

Today there is a witch industry around Pendle Hill, with shops and tours and commemorative teacups. The tour guides are going to be all over this witch house story, and now it will never die. But Malkin Tower was in the forest, not the town, and its mysteries remain undiscovered.

The Black School

Once upon a time there existed somewhere in the world, nobody knows where, a school which was called the Black School. There the pupils learned witchcraft and all sorts of ancient arts. Wherever this school was, it was somewhere below ground, and was held in a strong room which, as it had no window, was eternally dark and changeless. There was no teacher either, but everything was learnt from books with fiery letters, which could be read quite easily in the dark. Never were the pupils allowed to go out into the open air or see the daylight during the whole time they stayed there, which was from five to seven years. By then they had gained a thorough and perfect knowledge of the sciences to be learnt. A shaggy gray hand came through the wall every day with the pupils' meals, and when they had finished eating and drinking took back the horns and platters. But one of the rules of the school was, that the owner should keep for himself the student who should be the last to leave the school each year. And, considering that it was pretty well known among the pupils that the devil himself was the master, you may fancy what a scramble there was at each year's end, everybody doing his best to avoid being last to leave the school.

It happened once that three Icelanders went to this school, by the name of Sæmundur the Learned, Kálfur Arnason, and Hálfdán Eldjárnsson; and as they all arrived at the same time, they were all supposed to leave at the same time. Sæmundur declared himself willing to be the last of them, at which the others were much lightened in mind.

A staircase led from the school to the upper world, and when Sæmundur was about to mount this the devil grasped at him and said, "You are mine!"

But when Sæmundur came into the doorway, the sun shone upon him and threw his shadow onto the opposite wall. And as the devil stretched out his hand to grapple with him, Sæmundur said, "I am not the last. Do you not see who follows me?"

So the devil seized the shadow, mistaking it for a man, and Sæmundur escaped with a blow on his heels from the iron door.

But from that hour he was always shadowless, for whatever the devil took, he never gave back again.

Source: Jón Árnason, Icelandic Legends, translated by George E. J. Powell and Eiríkur Magnússon (London: Richard Bentley, 1864).