A MEDITATION ON THE WITCHCRAFT TRIALS

 

I remember a line from an old folk song, “My mother was burned for a witch”.  One thinks of the title of Christopher Fry’s play – famously adapted by Margaret Thatcher – The Lady’s Not for Burning.  Women – men, too, actually – burned at the stake as a result of  male religious superstition is an image of witchcraft as firmly planted in the popular imagination as the medieval witches of Macbeth, or the unfairness of ducking stools

            In the light – so to speak – of this, it is startling to reflect that accusations of witchcraft against women were brought by other women quite as often as by men, and that even the hideous Matthew Hopkins had a female assistant; that such trials were instigated by the secular authorities quite as much as by the Church; that witches – in England anyway – were hanged rather than burned; and that the heyday of witch trials was not the Middle Ages, but the Seventeenth Century.   The most famous of them all – at Salem – took place, we should remember, as late as 1692.

You do find references  to witchcraft in medieval literature.   Morgan Le Fey, in Malory, is an enchantress.  There are witches in the ballads:  Alison Gross; or the anonymous, green-robed murderess of Little Sir Hugh; or the Queen of Elfland, who steals away Thomas the Rhymer.   But they are not such beings as you would prosecute.    They reflect the nascent English Church’s struggle with the native nature religion.  The Church blessed where it could – hence Eostre with her eggs and spring hares, who gave her name to Easter and the female sex hormone, or the Green Man whose image appears in medieval church carvings – and ostracised where it could not: the nature goddesses who became the green-robed witches of folklore, or the John Barleycorn – cousin, surely, to the Green Man, but source of illegal alcohol – who is cut down by the three kings from the East. 

  Even Little Sir Hugh – with its connotations of witchcraft – is only an offshoot of the fate of the real-life Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.  Little Saint Hugh – his corpse was later found in a well, as in the ballad – was murdered by a Jew.  That is to say, a Jew confessed to the murder under suitable persuasion, which is not necessarily the same thing; and the trial had everything to do with the status of Jews in English society – and whether the repayment of certain large Jewish loans made to the King still needed to be honoured – and nothing to do with witchcraft.   Chaucer’s Prioress gives a version of the story in which Jews feature a lot, but witches not at all: probably reflecting where the real medieval religious tensions lay.  

Despite the impression to the contrary one might gain from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, from the Witchsmeller Pursuivant episode of Blackadder, and –  above all –  from Macbeth, The Middle Ages was not the great period of witchcraft trials.   The Inquisition got going in earnest in the wake of the Cathars, but its target was heresy – wrong beliefs – rather than witchcraft: wrong deeds.  In the case of the most famous medieval burning, it was Joan of Arc’s ‘heresy’ –   not her ‘witchcraft’ – that determined the nature of her death.

Such late-medieval trials as occurred appear to have been driven by secular preoccupations.  One theory in explanation of this – plausible, but unproven – is that after The Black Death Europe needed to repopulate as fast as possible. Midwives, in addition to their obvious function, were also the best abortionists of the day. Actions were brought by the secular authorities against those midwives who practised a dual role and hindered the birth rate.   (One thinks of the row of abortionist doctors hanging on the Harvard wall in The Handmaid’s Tale).

This issue became distorted into the conviction in the public mind that certain women could cause sterility.  Accusations were made by other women who feared they might be made barren if spells were cast against them.   Saki’s short story The Peace of Mowsle Barton – two ghastly old crones who have spent their lives putting curses on each other – is probably a modern echo of the sort of situation that pertained.

There might have been other motives too, for women’s accusations against other women.  In The Crucible,  Abigail Williams wants to get Elizabeth Proctor out of the way  so that she can claim Elizabeth’s husband.  Conversely, a bunch of wives might well have combined to get rid of some pretty young thing who had taken the eyes of their spouses.  And so on.

Macbeth is a misleading play – it certainly misled me for years – because although it is based on a medieval story, its concerns are unequivocally Renaissance.  The witches, if you look carefully at what they say and at what is said about them, are characterised by three things.  They can tell the future:  or, at least, one of them can.  In this, their pedigree is very ancient; and they may well recall the three Norns – Past, Present and Future – of Norse mythology.  They have the medieval association with sterility, for they are linked with both human and animal infanticide: the ingredients of the potion include “finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch delivered by a drab”, and “sow’s blood that hath eaten her nine farrow.”

But they are also characterised by the ability to control the weather: they can conjure winds and storms, and destroy harvests.

That is what makes them essentially non-medieval figures.  Science in the Seventeenth Century was taking off.  New discoveries about the natural order and the size of the universe were being made.  A new world picture was emerging, and the unsettling of the old order troubled people’s minds.  (The issues raised by genetic engineering would be a sort of modern equivalent).  Witch hunting – establishing the legitimate limit of human action – was one of the ways, during the course of the century, of responding to this new unease.

            Even then, Matthew Hopkins – Witch-finder General, and most successful and unethical of ‘witch’ killers – was employed, as far as can be determined, by local authorities.  (When we complain about the waste of taxpayers’ money on some new lunacy, we may reflect that not much has changed.)  His activities were sanctioned not by the Church, but by the State; although it was, admittedly, a Puritan state.  If some freethinkers would have it represented otherwise, superstition and bigotry were by no means the exclusive preserve of the Church.  Samuel Butler ridiculed the whole witch-hunt nonsense in Hudibras; but, generally, the strongest condemnations of Hopkins seem to have come from clergymen. 

            But Hopkins’ victims were drowned or hanged, not burned.  Burning was for heresy, as already mentioned, or treason. If you look at a list of women burned in England, it is striking how many are for low (petty) ‘treason’: for murdering a husband or employer.   Trawling internet reviews of Ken Russell’s The Devils, it is instructive to see how firmly the film has associated witchcraft and burning in the minds of viewers.   And comments like, “It makes me glad not to have lived in Seventeenth Century France!” are worrying because they suggest that the film is about history, rather than about the state of Ken Russell’s mind: as if the Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu of the film bore more resemblance than their names to their real-life originals, and as if a crazed nun’s masturbation with the scorched thighbone of her dead lover had actually happened, and could serve as a dreadful warning about vows of celibacy.   In practice, Urbain Grandier was acquitted of charges of witchcraft.  He was subsequently burned, but that was for treason, after he had criticised the Cardinal.

This has not been an exhaustive – and is almost certainly not a fully accurate - picture.  (But as to inaccuracy, I am in good company).   I offer it as food for thought about the supposed medieval burning of witches: as a reminder that we need not accept the clichés and stereotypes about the trials and the Church –  such as a Grandier; or a medieval Blackadder being burned: funny, unsettling, and oddly moving though that episode is  –   to which I, for one, had long fallen victim.