Presenting on the Stage of verity the late wofull Tragedy of the destruction of the Earle of Rutland's Children, 1618

I attended a viva voceexamination last week, in which the candidate stuck out his neck and suggested that the anonymous author of The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower Daughters of Joan Flower, by Beaver Castle, and executed at Lincolne the 11 of March 1618 had not actually believed his own pamphlet’s tale of deaths by witchcraft. His external examiner noted that the best guess was that the writer was Samuel Fleming, D.D., a local J.P. and often named in the text. Fleming would then have to have been a sceptic who concurred with the fatal verdicts because, in the end, to quote the examiner herself, “a witch is a person in front of a court accused of witchcraft”.

I had missed any such subtleties in a pamphlet I’d read (after a fashion), so I decided to take another look. The basic narrative is graspable enough: Joan Flower, and her daughters Margaret and Philip (“The Charwoman, and her daughters Pocketing and Filch”, as Richard Bernard quipped in 1626) were in service at Belvoir Castle, Margaret actually living at the castle, until they were dismissed for pilfering. In their revenge, a glove of young Henry Manners was stolen, rubbed on the back of their cat familiar Rutterkin, then buried, causing the young nobleman to waste away and die.

Fleming, if it is him, starts off quite well. A reason for the veracity of witchcraft lies in “those infinite Treatises of many of them convinced [‘convicted] by Law, and condemned to death”. He has also had access to sceptical positions on witchcraft: “there be certain men and women grown in years, and over-grown with Melancholy and Atheism, who out of a malicious disposition against their betters, or others thriving by them; but most times from a heart-burning desire of revenge, having entertained some impression of displeasure, and unkindness, study nothing but mischief and exotic practises of loathsome Arts and Sciences: yet I must needs say, that sometimes the fained reputation of wisdom, cunning, and to be reputed a dangerous and skilful person, hath so prevailed with divers, that they have taken upon them indeed to know more then God ever afforded any creature, & to perform no less then the Creator both of Heaven & earth.” Age, craziness, malice, the desire in the self-fashioned witch to be feared or respected; the impossibility of God allowing such powers to such people - such points touch on good, solid objections to the veracity of witchcraft and the eligibility of confession from such people.

Fleming could supplement his treatise with other papers, examinations of further local suspects: “These Examinations and some others were taken and charily preserved for the contriving of sufficient evidences against them, and when the Judges of Assise came down to Lincoln about the first week of March, being Sr. Henry Hobert, Lord chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and Sr. Ed: Bromley one of the Barons of the Exchequer.” The phrasing is unfortunate here, but the sense of ‘contriving’ was neutral.

So, ‘some’ of these ‘charily preserved’ papers he adds to his account in the most baffling way: we have been reading about Joan Flower and her daughters, Margaret and Philip. Suddenly, we have Anne Baker, Joane Willimot, and Ellen Greene brought in as further suspects, with some of the evidence taken from them post-dating the executions of Joan Flower’s daughters. Then Fleming lurches back in time to provide examinations of Margaret and Philip Flower, taken in January and February.

The pamphlet says more than once that the accused women killed both of the children of Francis Manners and his second wife Cecily. But the younger son did not die until March 5^th 1619-20:

http://www.thepeerage.com/p1590.htm

If March 1620 was the new style date of the younger boy’s death, we have a pamphlet describing the convictions of the murderers on March 11^th1618 (if that’s an old style date, then we still have a year to close).

In 1688 ‘R.B’ (Richard Bouvet) attempted to summarise the Belvoir Castle case in his compilation of paraphrases, The kingdom of darkness. R.B. cannot make sense of the chronology, so he falls back on vagueness: “About the same time Joan Willimot of Goadby a Witch was examined by Sir Henry Hastings and Dr. Fleming Justices in Leicestershire about the murder of Henry Lord Ross…”

He cannot work out why we are not told about the outcomes of the examinations of Anne Baker, Joane Willimot, and Ellen Greene: “and the rest questionless suffered according to their deserts.”

R.B. does quote this passage from the 1618 pamphlet, a passage in which the young Lord Francis Manners is still alive, though afflicted:

“At last as malice increased in them so the Earls Family felt the smart of their revenge, for Henry Lord Ross his eldest Son fell sick of a very unusual disease and soon after died; His second Son the Lord Francis was likewise miserably tortured by their wicked contrivances; And his Daughter the Lady Katherine was oft in great danger of her life by their barbarous dealings, with strange Fits, &c. the Honourable Parents bore all these afflictions with Christian magnanimity.”

R.B. sensibly leaves out all the inconsistent references in the 1618 pamphlet to the Earl having lost more than one child to the diabolic conspirators:

“I have presumed to present on the Stage of verity for the good of my Country & the love of truth, the late woeful Tragedy of the destruction of the Right Honourable the Earle of Rutlands Children …”

“the Right Honorable Earl had sufficient grief for the loss of his Children; yet no doubt it was the greater to consider the manner, and how it pleased God to inflict on him such a fashion of visitation …”

“Notwithstanding all this did the noble Earle attend his Majesty, both at New-market before Christmas, and at Christmas at Whitehall; bearing the loss of his Children most nobly, and little suspecting that they had miscarried by Witch-craft, or such like inventions of the Divell …”

What had been happening in Leicestershire? Tracy Borman was encouraged by the opacities of the case to produce a conspiracy theory (the man who sought to profit by the deaths of the boys was the Duke of Buckingham, set to marry Katherine Manners as sole heir to her father’s fortune).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/30/witches-tracy-borman-review

I haven’t read Borman’s book, having been put off by that review. But there is  undeniably a curious and unusual strand to the witchcraft in the pamphlet, with the witches boasting that their practices will prevent to the Earl and Countess having any more children: “She further saith, that her Mother and she, and her Sister agreed together to bewitch the Earle and his Lady, that they might have no more children.”

There are certainly some things left unsaid in the text. Fleming ascribes to Francis Manners, Lord Rutland,  an exemplary acceptance of God’s inscrutable will in allowing the innocent to be tormented. Fleming is adopting the official (and rather comfortless) church line on witchcraft: that you must accept your trials. The problem was that Manners and his family were Catholics, so this exemplary Christian behaviour just has to be treated as part of Manners’ general nobility of character.

But the main unmentioned, un-located, and unidentified person has to be a Leicestershire witchfinder. Who had pushed the 1616 case in Leicester, leading to the hanging of nine women on the testimony of a demoniac boy? King James had disconcerted his circuit judges by declaring that the case had been fraudulent. But a variant upon the sentiment in The Late Lancashire Witches ‘once and ever a witch, though knowest’ could be offered: ‘once and ever a witchfinder, thou knowest’. The pleasure, at once sadistic and righteous, of sending to the gallows those you have proved to be wicked seems to have been irresistible to some. I think it might have been this same person who is proving his point in the 1618 case. Someone had broadened the investigations, drawing in Anne Baker, Joane Willimot, and Ellen Greene. They seem to have been local wise women, whose general expertise was in pronouncing whether a sick child had been ‘forespoken” or not.

Everybody accused in this case is strikingly free with their confessions: “for here you see the learned and religious Judges cried out with our Saviour, Ex ore tuo.”  The triumphant allusion is to Luke 19, 22, ‘And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.’ This aligns the court with one of Christ’s most harshly judgemental moments, in the parable of the talents. They were also willing to name names: both Willemot and Greene have been induced to say where they got their familiar spirits from. “This Examinate [Willemot] saith, That she hath a Spirit which she calleth Pretty, which was given unto her by William Berry of Langholme in Rutlandshire, whom she served three years”…  “She saith further, that Gamaliel Greete of Waltham in the said County Shepheard, had a Spirit like a white Mouse put into him in his swearing; and that if he did look upon any thing with an intent to hurt, it should be hurt, and that he had a mark on his left arm, which was cut away; and that her own spirit did tell her all this before it went from her.”

Ellen Greene “saith, that one Joan Willimot of Goadby came about six years since to her in the Wolds, and persuaded this Examinate to forsake God, and betake her to the divel, and she would give her two spirits, to which she gave her consent, and thereupon the said Joan Willimot called two spirits, one in the likeness of a Kitlin, and the other of a Moldiwarp”. The author uses such anecdotes and accusations to suggest a hinterland of cunning folk who have actually bartered their souls to the devil: “They admit of those execrable conditions of commutation of souls for the entertaining of the spirits, and so fall to their abominable practises, continuing in the same till God laugh them to scorn.”

The 1618 pamphlet makes a passing reference to torture: “because the mind of man may be carried away with many idle conjectures, either that women confessed these things by extremity of torture”. Again, an off-note: torture of women, minors in the view of the law, was not legally allowed. There’s something collusive about ‘extremity of torture’, as though a little bit of torture was only to be expected.

This pamphlet was re-printed in 1621, perhaps as part of the backwash from the Elizabeth Sawyer case, or maybe because the younger son had by then died. Whoever put this reprint together added in an account of how to set about verifying witchcraft by ‘swimming’ suspects. This notion came from other sources, but its inclusion just might have been prompted by a rumour of such rough handling having been used in Leicestershire, and used successfully.

Was this Leicestershire witchfinder in fact Samuel Fleming himself? As a Doctor of Divinity and a J.P., he had the right sort of credentials and position. He was an eager reader of witchcraft tracts (his pamphlet begins with a commentary on the books he approves, King James, John Cotta, Alexander Roberts and the rest; he has examined sceptical positions).

His fractured account of the Belvoir witches would then not be the product of a man who didn’t believe what he was saying, but rather someone who believed it all too well, masking his role, playing down the strength of his opinions. He evidently regards young Francis Manners as doomed, dead already. He pushes Baker, Willemot and Greene into the reader’s attention because they were products of his newest investigations. If you look closely at the pamphlet, you see that Fleming was working on Anne Baker on March 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd. On the first day, in front of Francis Manners, his brother George, and Fleming, Baker resisted quite successfully. She then had a day being interrogated by Fleming alone, and he established a connection to the main inquiry when she repeated (or was lead to repeat) the story of the buried glove. By the third day, back in front of George Manners and Fleming, she confessed to having a familiar spirit in the form of a white dog: far better for a conviction than her previous baffling talk of their being four colours of planets that can strike people.

In demonological theory, the deaths of Joan, Margaret and Philip Flower should have seen young Francis Manners recover quickly. Francis Manners, Lord Rutland, had showed little appetite for the investigation of witchcraft, but he obviously believed in it: his own memorial records the death of both of his sons as a result of witchcraft. There might have been some pressure to find other suspects when young Manners did not recover after March 11^th, the date of the executions.

To conclude, there is a sense of the stories notbeing told in this pamphlet. Leicestershire was not at this time an area liable to foster disbelief. Samuel Fleming, D.D. and J.P. might have been a covert sceptic. But he might instead have been a covert witchfinder. 'Utinam tam facile vera invenire possem, quam falsa convincere', ends the pamphlet, Cicero's 'Would that I could find the true as easily as I can detect the false'.

An enigma!

Some notes on familiar spirits

I read James Serpell’s piece on familiar spirits, ‘Guardian Spirits or demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530-1712, which appeared in Angela Creager and William Jordan’s The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (2002). It’s a thorough job, with some very good quotations and a jolly chart of the various animal forms the devil was said to have adopted.

The sources of bemusement remain: where such a strange idea came from, and in particular why it was English witchcraft that so featured the diabolic familiar in animal form.

It’s useful first to remind oneself of a widespread psychological phenomenon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_friend

The Wikipedia writers paraphrase  from Klausen and Passman, ‘Pretend companions (imaginary playmates): the emergence of a field’ in the Journal of Genetic Psychology (2006): “Adults in early historic times had entities such as household gods and guardian angels, and muses that functioned as imaginary companions to provide comfort, guidance and inspiration for creative work.”

After a non-Christian origin, a conceptual and etymological inevitability operated to produce the familiar spirit in animal form.

In Roman times, Ronald Hutton explains, you had a lares familiares, a guardian angel called your genius (a woman might have referred to hers as her natalis Juno). On your birthday, you made special vows and little sacrifices to your geniusor juno on the household shrine, the lararium. Emperors, meanwhile, had a numen, and their re-union with their numen at death was what made a dead emperor into a god. Evil spirits, says Lemprière, were the Larvae or Lemures. They were considered to be the spirits of the dead, and ceremonies, Lemualia, were performed to keep them in their graves or make them depart. These evil spirits are just a general supernatural nuisance; they are not assigned to living individuals as opposites to the genius.

The genius is considered by some lexicographers to link to the word jinn. In Moslem tradition, Jorge Luis Borges explains, Allah created three forms of intelligent beings: angels, from light, the jinn, from fire, and humankind, from earth. The jinn can be evil. They manifest, Borges reports his sources as saying, first of all as clouds or undefined pillars, then can stabilise or condense into a human or animal form, as jackal, wolf, lion, scorpion, or snake – definitely not as domestic animals. Jinn can overhear angelic conversations, and so pass on second hand vatic information to wizards. But the harms attempted by an evil jinnee are easily defeated by invoking the name of Allah, the all Merciful, the Compassionate.

For the European tradition, the OED’s etymologies take the story forwards. In post-classical Latin of the 12^thcentury, the guardian angel is the angelus familiaris. Because the culture was Christian, and that culture was intensely given, after Prudentius’ hugely popular 5^th century Christian poem, to analysing the psychomachia, the battle happening in and around an individual soul, familiar devils followed, c.1464. You now have both a Good and a Bad Angel, like Faustus, and they form a morally effective pairing, as in this illustration:

A court scene, with the person testifying between his evil and good angels.

From Ulrich Tengler, Der neü Leyenspiegel (Strassburg, 1514)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/yalelawlibrary/11734629074/in/album-72157639358477444/ (See folio CXXXV).

The OED assigns spiritus familiaris to the 15th century, and has the term in its English form from 1545. EEBO can be used to add further quotations. The “familier spirit of a mannes awne minde” is mentioned quite neutrally in the translation of Erasmus’ commentary of Cato’s precepts in 1553, while 1554 provides the more opprobrious “one that had a familier spyrit, and used enchauntry” in a work by Richard Smith.

Of course, the neutral use is in commentary on a Roman writer. In the context of magic, the familiar spirit may have set off like the daemon of Socrates, being the source of your knowledge. But when that knowledge was forbidden, no neutral ‘daemon’ is possible: it is a demon informing you (or, more likely, misinforming you).

Lurking in familiar was a connection to the house: Latin, familiaris,‘of a house, of a household, belonging to a family, household, domestic, private’. Canis familiaris is the domestic dog.

The Roman lares familiaris or penates were represented in the form of dancing human-shaped figures, who carry a libation cup and dish. But when the familiar spirit is no longer a daemon but a demon, no longer a geniusbut an evil genius, a witch-hunter can infer that, as it would be instantly incriminating to have a largely human-shaped devil visible in the household, the devil is going to be present either invisibly, or disguised in animal form.

Genesis, as it had been interpreted from the second century, gave ample warrant for Satan assuming animal form. Nobody could imagine Jesus appearing to them in the form of a dog, but part of satanic debasement was non-angelic form. Milton has his Satan suavely passing from cormorant, to tiger, to toad, to serpent, as best serves his advantage. Intelligent writers of Genesis-based poems, like Du Bartas and Milton, were fascinated in just how Satan could get a snake to speak. Du Bartas even seems to imagine that one way round this difficulty is that Satan, invisible, is ‘playing’ the serpent, like a brilliant musician coaxing a good sound from a poor musical instrument (Sylvester, translating Du Bartas, interjects an allusion to John Dowland’s ability to coax harmonious music out of a broken-down old instrument).

Imputed 'devil's door', Warfield Church, Berkshire

I think that the medieval church in general down-played the genius or ‘good angel’. They are mentioned, but really they occupied a role the church wanted for itself: leaving aside special miraculous interventions by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the church is the best protector. Having promoted itself to guardian-angeldom, the church would naturally incline to emphasise what you were being so well protected from. As an instance, on the Heritage Open Day this last weekend, I cycled to Warfield Church in Berkshire, which has one of the reputed ‘devil’s doors’. It is asserted that such small doors, in the North wall of a church, were opened during the medieval Catholic baptismal rite – involving exorcism – of a baby in the font placed near to the devil’s door. Subsequently, ‘devil doors’ tended to be walled up: in the Reformation, it is said. Maybe very early Christian buildings had a North-side door for the not-yet baptised, and the feature was reproduced in later buildings. An exorcised devil flying out of an aperture is such a common motif that such doors probably did at some later time have that different function in a drama of exorcism (absurd though it is for a spirit to require a doorway). This is a separate issue; my point is about the church’s tendency to make the devil familiar. The devil was inside you prior to your baptism, and he is always trying to resume control, he will always be close at hand.

Once the devil had become multiplied into vast numbers of evil spirits, every sinner can have one, and the church can busy itself beating them away. Some irremissible sinners, demonology began to say, struck personal covenants with devils. Invisible devils inevitably had a neither-here-nor-there quality. It became the duty of the person accused of witchcraft, or the person who said they were bewitched, to see devils. Particularly in England, and perhaps because the English always seem to have accommodated an odd range of animals living with them, animals already in the house were co-opted as devils; or in the absence of animals, the assumed attendant devils were assigned animal forms by those who claimed to be witnesses, or by witches who were trying to confess compliantly enough to worm their way back into judicial favour.

The sinister, vice, element from psychomachia had in effect combined with the household suggestions of ‘familiaris’(“some domestical or familiar devil” in Daneau, A Dialogue of Witches, 1575) to suggest that the spirit prompting to evil adopted disguise as a domestic animal, as when Elizabeth Stile confessed that when she went to gaol, “her Bunne or Familier came to her in the likenesse of a black Catte” (1579). The OED does not include this sense for the noun ‘bun’, but it was in regular early modern use, alongside ‘imp’, as in Great News from the West of England: “In the Town of Beckenton … liveth one William Spicer, a young Man about eighteen Years of Age; as he was wont to pass by the Alms-house (where liveth an Old Woman, about Fourscore) he would call her Witch, and tell her of her Buns; which did so enrage the Old Woman, that she threatened him with a warrant…”

If the church had appropriated the role of good genius, we can then see Milton’s Comus as powerfully re-instating the guardian angel, the daemon, sent direct from heaven to intervene - because Milton was well on the way to his repudiation of organised worship.

I think the most revealing familiar spirits are those whose forms and actions are recounted in Edward Fairfax’s Daemonologia. I say this because Helen Fairfax, the writer’s eldest daughter, was simply making them up, deliberately and in a calculated fashion, to get her father’s attention. Yes, reported familiars were always made up, but in this case there’s no ambiguity about delusions, or hysteria, or deception by a third party. Helen Fairfax simply let rip, unleashed her imagination and expanding on themes she’d heard in other reports.

She witnessed a Protean devil: human formed, then a beast with many horns, then a calf, then “presently he was like a very little dog, and desired her to open her mouth and let him come into her body, and then he would rule the world”

Her father is completely credulous. On the 16^thNovember, 1621, a black dog, she said, had leapt onto her bed “and I tried if I could feel the dog, but I felt nothing; and the wench said ‘The dog has leaped down and gone’ ”

Then there is Margaret’s Wait’s alleged familiar “At last the woman pulled out of a bag a living thing, the bigness of a cat, rough, black, and with many feet”. This alarmingly non-tetrapodic beast keeps trying to sit on the Bible Helen is conspicuously attempting to read.

More imaginative is the black cat: “when the cat opened her mouth to blow on her, she showed her teeth like the teeth of a man or woman”. This imaginary being mixes together the devil in animal form and the witch who, in her animal form, is incompletely transformed.

The women that Helen Fairfax so heedlessly accused were taken for examination. No supernumerary teats were found on them, and they were acquitted when tried. The relentless Helen, who is making all this up, subsequently sees a witch breast-feeding her familiar, and is indignant at this crafty way of escaping exposure. She has come up with a way the women at the York assizes escaped proper detection. Finding her lies officially disbelieved only caused Helen to rally with more lies.

What moved Helen Fairfax was said to be paternal neglect. She maybe also took some pleasure in deceiving a father who had no regard at all for her intelligence. A desire to be married and away from home is also apparent. Satan appears to her as a gallant gentleman. The God himself appears to her in the hall. This is too much for the family, who can believe in the devil being present, but not God himself, and Helen swiftly adjusts her story, as the God who appeared to her produces evasive answers, and finally shows his horns.

The evil eye in early modern England

I had always rather casually assumed that Elizabeth Sawyer, in The Witch of Edmonton, could have been seen as a particularly striking example of a witch possessed of an evil eye - through having just the one. The play mentions that she's one-eyed, though rather in passing ("let her curse her t'other eye out"), and it's not necessarily the case that the actor went through with being consistent with this when preparing to go on stage and actually played her while wearing an eye patch.

The play does, on the other hand, seem conscious about eyes, and offers its own version of cruentation when the corpse of the murdered Susan Carter opens an eye to glare accusingly at Frank Thorney. So, in that moment of occult resemblance between the good and bad woman of the play, we understand that a spirit is doing this to Susan's body to bring Frank to justice.

But does the text show any awareness of the evil eye? According to the OED, it should not be thought to do so:

This took me slightly aback. The notion of the evil eye seems so ubiquitous in human cultures. There's a very good Wikipedia entry, giving a sense of how wide-spread the idea was and is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_eye

This said, there's no great mystery as to why the evil eye could not be confined to witches: the English Bible translations had not only Solomon (in Proverbs chapters 23 and 28) but also, and crucially, Jesus using the idiom in a generalised fashion:

In the Parable of the Vineyard (Matthew, 20):

Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

And in Mark, 7:

And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man.

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,

Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.

Therefore English early modern culture is full of moralised reflections on evil eyes. I particularly enjoyed finding John Sheffeild's The sinfulnesse of evil thoughts, 1650, who attempts a full taxonomy:

1. The Eye of envy, is a very bad and sore Eye

2. There is an evil Eye of disdain

3. The evil Eye of suspicion

4. The Censorious Eye, is another evil eye

5. The Covetous and Greedy Eye, is another evil Eye

6. The Eye of adultery is another evil eye

7. The malicious and revengefull Eye is a devilish evil Eye

8. The Unnaturall and Ungracious Eye of children to their parents

I dragged myself away from all this useful wisdom (you have to imagine that he moralises upon each of his eight categories, in this kind of vein: "The harlots eye-lids are very dangerous").


Is it possible to move an association of evil eyes and witches closer to the date of the play? In some senses, yes, it is. Authors writing about classical witches use the idea.

W. L., Gent, in his 1628 translation of Virgil's Eclogues, says that "Such an Eye the Shepherd in the third Eglogue complaines had looked upon his Lambs: this kind of mischievous looking he calls Fascination: Pliny (out of Cicero,) reports, that there are some women born with Eyes, having duplices papillas, the apples or pupils of their eyes double: & that such doe naturally faescinum circumferre, beare about them this kind of Eyewitchcraft, (as I may term it.)" After various examples of eye power (Basilisks and the like), he concludes that "wee may easily believe the witchcraft, and mischief of an  evil Eye, to be a most true conclusion."

John Gaule, a witch-believer, but a critic of Matthew Hopkins, wrote in his Select cases of conscience touching witches and witchcrafts (1646) about the ways that witches bewitch their victims (this is just the start of his list):

"Let me instance more expressly in a few particulars, 1. Some work their bewitchings only by way of Invocation, or Imprecation. They wish it, or will it; and so it falls out. 2. Some by way of Emissary; sending out their Imps, or Familiars, to cross the way, justle, affront, flash in the Face, bark, howl, bite, scratch, or otherwise infest. 3. Some by Inspecting, or looking on, but to glare, or squint, or peep at with an envious and evil eye."

The respected Scottish divine John Weemes produced (oh dear) A TREATISE OF THE FOURE DEGENERATE SONNES, The ATHEIST, the MAGITIAN, the IDOLATER, and the JEW in 1636. He has a lot to say about evil eyes:

But Weemes would have so much to say, because he was Scottish, and Gaelic cultures seem to have a more extensive repertoire of folklore about the evil eye. In English authors, the term 'eye-biting' is used, and associated with Irish beliefs by the tireless Reginald Scot::

"The Irishmen addict themselves wonderfully to the credit and practise hereof; insomuch as they affirm, that not only their children, but their cattle, are (as they call it) eye-bitten, when they fall suddenly sick, and term one sort of their Witches eye-biters".

Thomas Ady, a sceptic like Scot, describes the bad consequences:

"Master Scot in his Discovery telleth us, That our English people in Ireland, whose posterity were lately barbarously cut off, were much given to this Idolatry in the Queens time, insomuch that there being a Disease amongst their Cattel that grew blind, being a common Disease in that Country, they did commonly execute people for it, calling them eye-biting Witches."

Scot gives a summary of beliefs about how the evil eye operated based on Leonardus Varius, De fascino libri tres. In quibus omnes fascini species et causae optima methodo describuntur, et ex philosophorum ac theologorum sententiis scitè et eleganter explicantur: nec non contra praestigias, imposturas, illusionesque daemonum, cautiones et amuleta praescribuntur: ac denique nugae, quae de iisdem narrari solent, dilucidè confutantur. (Venice, 1589, and Paris, 1583).

Varius gave a whole process for fascination, an account of how it works at the bodily level. Scot reports this account of how a human being, usually female, can focus and intensify natural influences, holding it (as is his manner) at arm's length as an interestingly awful of thinking before moving in to the kill at the end: 

"But I may not omit here the reasons which they bring to prove what bodies. are the more apt and effectual to execute the art of fascination. And that is first they say, the force of celestial bodies, which indifferently communicated their virtues unto Men, Beasts, Trees, Stones, &c. But this gift and natural influence of fascination may be increased in man, Note in marg:  L. Vair. lib. de fascin. 1. c. 12. according to his affections and perturbations, as through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by hate (saith Varius) entereth a fiery inflammation into the eye of man, which being violently sent out by beams and streams, &c. infect and bewitch those bodies against whom they are opposed. And therefore he saith (in the favour of women) that is the cause that women are oftener found to be Witches than men. For (saith he) they have an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by no means it is possible for them to temper or moderate the same. So as upon every trifling occasion, they (like brute beast) fix their furious eyes upon the party whom they bewitch.  Note in marg:  Much like the Eye-biting Witches, of whom we have elsewhere spoken. Hereby it cometh to pass, that whereas women having a marvellous fickle nature, what grief soever happeneth unto them, immediately all peaceableness of mind departeth; and they are so troubled with evil humours, that outgo their venemous exhalation, engendered through their ill-favoured diet; and increased by means of their pernicious excrements which they expel. Women are also (saith he) monthly filled full of superfluous humors, and with them the melancholic blood boileth; whereof spring vapours, and are carried up, and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth, &c. to the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth: For they belch up a certain breath, wherewith they bewitch whomsoever they list.  Note in marg:  Who are most likely to bewitch bewitch and to be bewitched. And of all other women, lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women (saith he) are the most infectious. Marry he saith, that hot, subtil, and thin bodies are most subject to be bewitched, if they be moist, and all they generally, whose veins, pipes, and passages of their bodies are open. And finally he saith, that all beautiful things whatsoever, are soon subject to be bewitched; as namely goodly young men, fair women, such as are naturally born to be rich, goodly Beasts, fair Horses, rank Corn, beautiful Trees, &c. Yea a friend of his told him, that he saw one with his eye break a precious stone in pieces. And all this he telleth as soberly, as though it were true. And if it were true, honest women may be Witches, in despite of all Inquisitors: neither can any avoid being a Witch, except she lock herself up in a chamber."

Or we have William Bishop in 1608: "Phisitions tel us of a perilous eye-sore called in Latin Fascinatio, Englished the Eye-biting: it appeareth most, when from a cancered stomach boiling with malice, certain venomous vapours ascend into the eyes, and flowing from them doe infect young and tender things, whereof the Poët [he means Virgil] speaketh: Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos; 'I wote not what biting eye hath blasted my tender lambs'. This contagious eye-malady, is to our purpose described more properly in the book of Wisdom".

This is Philemon Holland translating Pliny (1634), and talking about apotropaic charms: "We see it is an ordinary thing, that if a stranger come in place where a babe lieth in the cradle, or look upon the said infant whiles it is asleep, the nurse useth to spit thrice: although I am not ignorant that there is a religious opinion of this syllable 'Mu', that it is able to defend such young sucklings; as also of the foolish puppet Fascinus; both which are of power to put back any witchcraft from them, and return the mischief upon the eye-biting witch." 

They were fully aware of the phallic amulets used by the Romans to protect children from the evil eye (image from the Wikipedia 'evil eye' entry, the phallus of the dwarfish figure swings behind him):

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0062:entry=malus-oculus-harpers 

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.729/--curse?rgn=main;view=fulltext  

So, did 'witches' in England have the evil eye? I think, not till the mid 17th century. John Gaule seems to be the first secure instance I have found (1646). That's a 150 year OED antedating. Yet they seem to have some repertoire of charms against the evil eye, and were willing to hang Irish 'eye-biters'.

This is William Hooke, in his New Englands teares for old Englands feares (1640): "it is commonly observed, that men and women who have turned Witches, and been in league with the devil, thereby to doe mischief, are never given over so to doe, till they begin to have an evil eye, which grieveth at the Prosperity, and rejoyceth at the misery of others. Hence Witchcraft is described by an evil eye." 

He's talking about witches, but envisages a process in which pacted witches acquire an evil eye after the moralised and generalised fashion given in Solomon and in the gospels.

Yet eyes do crop up witchcraft accusations. This was Goodcole's really strange note about Elizabeth Sawyer. He's asking about how she came to be deprived of an eye, because he must have heard that one of her parents had suffered similarly (his syntax in the marginal note is muddled). His question seems to be connected to his next question, which is about whether she actually touched as well as saw the devil - there was nothing wrong with her eye, the devil was also there to be touched:

In 1612, Thomas Potts wrote this about Janet Device: "This odious Witch was branded with a preposterous mark in Nature, even from her birth, which was her left eye, standing lower then the other; the one looking down, the other looking up, so strangely deformed, as the best that were present in that Honorable Assembly, and great Audience, did affirm, they had not often seen the like."

It looks to me as though Jesus using 'evil eye' (as something any self-seeking or malignant person might have) kept the notion of a witch's evil eye in the background in the bible-fixated culture of early modern England. The witch fitted well enough to the idea, though, as a conduit for intensified 'influence'. The notion that you could simply be born with the evil eye (seventh daughter of a seventh daughter type of category) and only use it by accident, or even spend your life carefully NOT looking at things you might inadvertently kill is also around, especially in Ireland. A witch acquires an evil eye from the devil, and means to use it.

Wikipedia explains that evil eyes are blue. (But we all knew that.)

Typographical terror in later works on witchcraft

The bad news about witchcraft and the devil raging in the last days was spread by print. Some of the earliest works about witchcraft were formidable accomplishments on the page, oceanic commentary lapping around islands of text:

(An image from the Gale Witchcraft database, as reviewed on this blog in 2010). 

Works in English on witchcraft tend to be far more haphazard printing jobs: written up in self-justificatory haste, printed at full speed without much in the way of editing. Over in Boston, Cotton Mather's printers manage to suggest (appropriately enough) a hyperventilating author, in a state of typographical terror:

I was interested to look at how Joseph Glanvill had his Blow at Modern Sadducism printed in 1668: particularly this little trick: the word 'witchcraft' starts to be set in large case black letter capitals:

while 'The Royal Society' gets the dignity of full caps. Roman:

As the land of spirits is a kind of unexplored new world

Glanvill encourages the members to pursue (in a strange pun) 'luciferous enquiries'

Inquiries both light-bringing and Satanic in subject matter.

Yet the black letter for 'Witchcraft': the intended contrast has to be between the beautiful clarity of the Royal Society's thinking, and the black nature of witchcraft (the OED has "black letter" from 1639, though it appears to be present as early as 1584 in The cauteles, canon, and ceremonies, of the most blasphemous, abhominable, and monstrous popish Masse. Black letter days are inauspicious days in the church calendar (as opposed, of course, to red letter days). So, his choice of an Old English typeface (as Black Letter would also be called) for WITCHCRAFT contrasts blackness and evil against lucidity and good. It has (incidentally) to be by Glanvill's direction, these are the only uses of black letter in the book.

All this said, 'Black Letter' would also become 'Gothic': even as he wants to argue that witchcraft is a real and present danger, there's an effect of something dated, slipping into the past, while THE ROYAL SOCIETY owns the future.

I must look out more attentively for typographical devices in witchcraft texts. Richard Bernard's Guide to Grand Jury-Men switched its final diagram of 'What the Lord Doth' versus 'What Satan Doth' from two columns on a page to facing pages between 1627 and 1629 editions, that might be a start.

On this day in 1621: remembering Elizabeth Sawyer, convicted witch.

Three hundred and ninety five years ago today, Elizabeth Sawyer was led out to her hanging at Tyburn, after having been found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Agnes Ratcleife.

Candidly described in the sole surviving report of her life and death as 'a very ignorant woman', Sawyer had lost her temper during her trial: 

"she was not able to speake a sensible or ready word for her defense, but sends out in the hearing of the Judge, Jury, and all good people that stood by, many most fearefull imprecations for destruction against her selfe then to happen, as heretofore she had wished and indeavoured to happen on divers of her neighbours: the which the righteous Judge of Heaven, whom she thus invocated, to judge then and discerne her cause, did reveale."

There's a sense that what she said in court (in this fashion) was the reason for her conviction. Certainly Henry Goodcole, the Chaplain of Newgate, who hastily wrote up his account of her conviction and the confession he finally got from her  ("though with great labour it was extorted from her"), shaped up and framed her story as a caution for all against blaspheming. He concludes: 

"Deare Christians, lay this to heart, namely the cause, and first time, that the Divell came unto her, then, even then when she was cursing, swearing, and blaspheming ... Stand on your guard and watch with sobrietie to resist him, the Divell your adversary, who waiteth on you continually, to subvert you that so you, that doe detest her abhominable wordes, and wayes, may never taste of the cup nor wages of shame and destruction, of which she did in this life..."

Her blasphemies seem to have caught everybody's attention. These days, we are fascinated by familiars, but plenty of witches had plenty of familiars in animal form without getting a play written about them. You can see their interest: Goodcole has her say:

"The first time that the Divell came unto me was, when I was cursing, swearing and blaspheming; he then rushed in upon me ... the first words that hee spake unto me were these: 'Oh! have I now found you cursing, swearing, and blaspheming? now you are mine.'"

And he adds a side note, reporting a spectator's extraordinary interest - he can't seem to get over it:

"A Gentleman by name Mr. Maddox standing by, and hearing of her say the word blaspheming, did aske of her, three or foure times, whether the Divell sayd 'Have I found you blaspheming?', and shee confidently sayd', 'Ay'."

Mr Maddox then disappears. He ought properly to appear among the list of names who attest to the truth that what is recorded was her confession. Goodcole promises this a couple of times in his text, but the names never got added. Doubtless Goodcole ran out of time.

Blasphemy as the moment of diabolic access went directly into the play Dekker, Ford and Rowley wrote about her.

But enough: almost 400 years later, that play has featured largely in my professional life as a university teacher. I think I know just about everything one can know, through the strange refractions of the pamphlet and the play. It is like peering into a fog, in which you can just about hear a voice, angry and lost.