A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 Part 9

[26] Potts, E 3 verso, F 4, G 2; also _The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, ..._ (London, 1619), 21.

[27] See MS. account of the Northampton witches.

[28] _Ibid._: "Sundry other witches appeared to him.... Hee heard many of them railing at Jane Lucas, laying the fault on her that they were thus accused."

[29] There was practically no spectral evidence in the Lancashire cases.

Lister on his death-bed had cried out against Jennet Preston, and John Law was tormented with a vision of Alizon Device "both day and night"; Potts, Y 2 verso. But these were exceptional.

[30] See _The Most Cruell and b.l.o.o.d.y Murther committed by ... Annis Dell.... With the Severall Witch-crafts ... of one Johane Harrison and her Daughter_ (London, 1606).

[31] MS. account of the Northampton witches.

[32] See Potts, Z 2.

[33] The dramatist Dekker made use of this; see his _Witch of Edmonton_, act IV, scene I (Mermaid edition, London, 1904):

1st Countreyman.--This thatch is as good as a jury to prove she is a witch.

Justice.-- Come, come: firing her thatch? ridiculous!

Take heed, sirs, what you do; unless your proofs Come better aimed, instead of turning her Into a witch, you'll prove yourselves stark fools.

[34] See Potts, P 2.

[35] See _ibid._, Q verso. This, however, was the second time that the judge had tried this ruse; see _ibid._, P 2.

[36] See above, note 21.

[37] North Riding Record Soc., _Quarter Sessions Records_ (London, 1883, etc.), III, 181.

[38] Two of them, however, were issued to the same woman, one in 1604 and one in 1610.

[39] _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137, 139-140, 144, 147-148.

[40] The term "spinster" was sometimes used of a married woman.

[41] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1619-1623_, 125, Chamberlain to Carleton, February 26, 1620: "Peac.o.c.k, a schoolmaster, committed to the Tower and tortured for practising sorcery upon the King, to infatuate him in Sir Thos. Lake's business." This is one of those rare cases in which we know certainly that torture was used.

[42] Sir Thomas Lake to Viscount Cranbourne, January 20, 1604, Brit.

Mus., Add. MSS., 6177, fol. 403.

[43] _Cal. St. P., Dom., 1623-1625_, 474, 485, 497.

[44] T. B. and T. J. Howell, _State Trials_ (London, 1809-1818), II.

[45] See Potts, O 3 verso.

[46] See _Hist. MSS. Comm. Reports_, XIII, 4 (Rye), pp. 136-137, 139-140, 144, 147-148.

[47] See Alexander Roberts, _A Treatise of Witchcraft ..._ (London, 1616), dedicated to the "Maior and Aldermen."

[48] M. A. Richardson, _Table Book_ (London, 1841-1846), I, 245.

[49] North Riding Record Soc., _Quarter Sessions Records_, I, 58.

[50] "... neither had they authoritie to compell her to goe without a Constable."

[51] Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 36,674, fol. 148. This is a brief description of "how to discover a witch." It recommends the water ordeal and cites the case of Mr. Enger and Mary Sutton.

[52] In the case of three of these four we know only that they were sentenced.

[53] Before the Flower case at Lincoln came the Willimot-Baker cases at Leicester. The Bedford trial resembled much the Northampton trial of the previous year.

CHAPTER VI.

NOTABLE JACOBEAN CASES.

It is possible to sift, to a.n.a.lyze, and to reconstruct the material derived from witch trials until some few conclusions about a given period can be ventured. A large proportion of cases can be proved to belong in this or that category, a certain percentage of the women can be shown to possess these or those traits in common. Yet it is quite thinkable that one might be armed with a quiver full of generalizations, and fail, withal, to comprehend Jacobean witchcraft. If one could have asked information on the subject from a Londoner of 1620, he would probably have heard little about witchcraft in general, but a very great deal about the Lancashire, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, and Fairfax trials. The Londoner might have been able to tell the stories complete of all those famous cases. He would have been but poorly informed could he not have related some of them, and the listener would have caught the surface drift of those stories. But a witch panic is a subtle thing, not to be understood by those who do not follow all its deeper sequences.

The springs of the movement, the interaction of cause and effect, the operation of personal traits, these are factors that must be evaluated, and they are not factors that can be fitted into a general scheme, labelled and cla.s.sified.

This does not mean that the cases should be examined in chronological sequence. That is not necessary; for the half-dozen cases that we shall run over had little or no cause-and-effect connection with one another.

It is convenient, indeed, to make some cla.s.sification, and the simplest is that by probable origin, especially as it will enable us to emphasize that important feature of the trials. Now, by this method the six or more trials of note may be grouped under three headings: cases that seem to have originated in the actual practice of magic, cases where the victims of convulsions and fits started the furor, and cases that were simply the last stage of bitter quarrels or the result of grudges.

To the first group belongs the Lancastrian case of 1612, which, however, may also be cla.s.sed under the last heading. No case in the course of the superst.i.tion in England gained such wide fame. Upon it Shadwell founded in part a well-known play, _The Lancashire Witches_, while poets and writers of prose have referred to it until the two words have been linked in a phrase that has given them lasting a.s.sociation. It was in the lonely forest of Pendle among the wild hills of eastern Lancashire that there lived two hostile families headed by Elizabeth Southerns, or "Old Demdike," and by Anne Chattox. The latter was a wool carder, "a very old, withered, spent, and decreped creature," "her lippes ever chattering"; the former a blind beggar of four-score years, "a generall agent for the Devell in all these partes," and a "wicked fire-brand of mischiefe," who had brought up her children and grandchildren to be witches. Both families professed supernatural practices. Both families no doubt traded on the fear they inspired. Indeed Dame Chattox was said to have sold her guarantee to do no harm in return for a fixed annual payment of "one aghen-dole of meale."

That there was a feud between the two clans was to be expected. They were at once neighbors and compet.i.tors, and were engaged in a career in which they must plot each against the other, and suspect each other.

There are hints of other difficulties. Years before there had been a quarrel over stolen property. Demdike's daughter had missed clothes and food to the value of 20 shillings, and had later found some of the clothing in the possession of Chattox's daughter. A more serious difficulty involved a third family: a member of the Nutter family, well-to-do people in Lancashire, had sought to seduce old Chattox's married daughter, and, when repelled, had warned her that when he inherited the property where she lived she should be evicted. Chattox had retaliated by seeking to kill Nutter by witchcraft, and had been further incited thereto by three women, who wished to be rid of Nutter, in order that "the women, their coosens, might have the land." As a consequence Nutter had died within three months. The quarrel, indeed, was three-cornered. It was said that Demdike's daughter had fashioned a clay picture of a Nutter woman.[1]

We have all the elements here of a mountain feud; but, in place of the revolvers and Kentucky moonshine of to-day, we have clay images and Satanic banquets. The battles were to be fought out with imps of h.e.l.l as partic.i.p.ants and with ammunition supplied by the Evil One himself. It was this connection with a reservoir of untouched demoniacal powers that made the quarrel of the miserable mountaineers the most celebrated incident in Lancashire story. Here were charmers and "inchanters,"

experienced dealers in magic, struggling against one another. Small wonder that the community became alarmed and that Roger Nowell, justice of the peace, suddenly swooped down upon the Pendle families. It was but a short time before he had four women cooped up in Lancaster castle. In a few days more he was able to get confessions out of them. They admitted acquaintance with the Devil and implicated one another.

Now comes the strange part of the story. According to confessions made later, Elizabeth Device, not yet shut up, but likely to be at any time, called a meeting on Good Friday of all the witches in Pendle forest.

They were to come to her home at Malking Tower to plot the delivery of the imprisoned women by the blowing up of Lancaster castle.[2] The affair took the form of a dinner; and beef, bacon, and roasted mutton were served. "All the witches went out of the said House in their owne shapes and likenesses. And they all, by that they were forth of the dores, gotten on Horsebacke, like unto Foales, some of one colour, some of another; and Preston's wife was the last; and, when shee got on Horsebacke, they all presently vanished out of ... sight." This was the story, and the various witnesses agreed remarkably well as to its main details. Those who believed in the "sabbath" of witches must have felt their opinions confirmed by the testimony of the witnesses at Lancaster.

Even the modern reader, with his skepticism, is somewhat daunted by the c.u.mulative force of what purports to be the evidence and would fain rationalize it by supposing that some sort of a meeting actually did take place at Malking Tower and that some Pendle men and women who had delved in magic arts till they believed in them did formulate plans for revenge. But this is not a probable supposition. The concurring evidence in the Malking Tower story is of no more compelling character than that to be found in a mult.i.tude of Continental stories of witch gatherings which have been shown to be the outcome of physical or mental pressure and of leading questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a substratum of fact.[3] Probably one of the accused women invented the story of the witch feast after the model of others of which she had heard, or developed it under the stimulus of suggestive questions from a justice. Such a narrative, once started, would spread like wildfire and the witnesses and the accused who were persuaded to confess might tell approximately the same story. A careful re-reading of all this evidence suggests that the various testimonies may indeed have been echoes of the first narrative. They seem to lack those characteristic differences which would stamp them as independent accounts. Moreover, when the story was once started, it is not improbable that the justices and the judges would a.s.sist the witnesses by framing questions based upon the narrative already given. It cannot be said that the evidence exists upon which to establish this hypothesis. There is little to show that the witnesses were adroitly led into their narratives. But we know from other trials that the method was so often adopted that it is not a far cry to suspect that it was used at Lancaster.

It is not worth while to trace out the wearisome details that were elicited by confession. Those already in prison made confessions that implicated others, until the busy justices of the peace had shut up sixteen women and four men to be tried at the a.s.sizes. Sir Edward Bromley and Sir James Altham, who were then on the northern circuit, reached Lancaster on the sixteenth of August. In the meantime, "Old Demdike," after a confession of most awful crimes, had died in prison.

All the others were put on trial. Thomas Potts compiled a very careful abstract of all the testimony taken, perhaps the most detailed account of a witch trial written in the English language, with the possible exception of the St. Oses affair. The evidence was in truth of a somewhat similar type. Secret interviews with the Evil One, promises of worldly riches, a contract sealed with blood, little shapes of dogs, cats, and hares, clay pictures that had been dried and had crumpled, threats and consequent "languishing" and death, these were the trappings of the stories. The tales were old. Only the Malking Tower incident was new. But its very novelty gave a plausibility to the stories that were woven around it. There was not a single person to interpose a doubt. The cross-examinations were nothing more than feeble attempts to bring out further charges.

Though there is in the record little suggestion of the use of pressure to obtain the confessions, the fact that three were retracted leads to a suspicion that they had not been given quite freely. There was doubtless something contagious about the impulse to confess. It is, nevertheless, a curious circ.u.mstance that five members of the two rival Pendle families made confession, while all the others whom their confessions had involved stuck to it that they were innocent.[4] Among those who persisted in denying their guilt Alice Nutter merits special note. We have already mentioned her in the last chapter as an example of a well-to-do and well connected woman who fell a victim to the Lancashire excitement.[5] The evidence against the woman was perhaps the flimsiest ever offered to a court. Elizabeth Device, daughter of "Old Demdike," and her two children were the chief accusers. Elizabeth had seen her present at the Malking Tower meeting. Moreover, she stated that Alice had helped her mother ("Old Demdike") bewitch a man to death. Her son had heard his grandmother Demdike narrate the incident. This testimony and his sister's definite statement that Alice Nutter attended the Malking Tower meeting established Mistress Nutter's guilt.[6] The judge, indeed, was "very suspitious of the accusation of this yong wench, Jennet Device," and, as we have already seen, caused her to be sent out of the court room till the accused lady could be placed among other prisoners, when the girl was recalled and required before the great audience present to pick out the witch, as, of course, she easily did, and as easily escaped another transparent trap.[7]

The two children figured prominently from this on. The nine-year-old girl gave evidence as to events of three years before, while the young man, who could hardly have been out of his teens,[8] recounted what had happened twelve years earlier. It was their testimony against their mother that roused most interest. Although of a circ.u.mstantial character, it fitted in most remarkable fashion into the evidence already presented.[9] The mother, says the nonchalant pamphleteer, indignantly "cryed out against the child," cursing her so outrageously that she was removed from the room while the child kept the stand. It is useless to waste sympathy upon a mother who was getting at the hands of her children the same treatment she had given her own mother Demdike.

The Chattox family held together better. Mistress Redfearne had been carefully shielded in the testimony of her mother Chattox, but she fell a victim to the accusations of the opposing family. The course of her trial was remarkable. Denying her guilt with great emphasis, she had by some wonder been acquitted. But this verdict displeased the people in attendance upon the trial. Induced by the cries of the people, the court was persuaded to try her again. The charge against her was exactly the same, that eighteen years before she had partic.i.p.ated in killing Christopher Nutter with a clay figure. "Old Demdike" had seen her in the act of making the image, and there was offered also the testimony of the sister and brother of the dead man, who recalled that Robert Nutter on his death-bed had accused Anne of his bewitchment.[10] It does not seem to have occurred to the court that the principle that a person could not twice be put in jeopardy for the same offence was already an old principle in English law.[11] The judges were more concerned with appeasing the people than with recalling old precedents, and sent the woman to the gallows.

The Pendle cases were interrupted on the third day by the trial of three women from Salmesbury, who pleaded not guilty and put themselves "upon G.o.d and their Countrey." The case against them rested upon the testimony of a single young woman, Grace Sowerb.u.t.ts, who declared that for the three years past she had been vexed by the women in question, who "did violently draw her by the haire of the head, and layd her on the toppe of a Hay-mowe." This delightfully absurd charge was coupled with some testimony about the appearances of the accused in animal form. Three men attempted to bolster up the story; but no "matter of witchcraft" was proved, says the for once incredulous Mr. Potts. The women seized the decisive moment. They kneeled before the judge and requested him to examine Grace Sowerb.u.t.ts as to who set her on. The judge--who had seemingly not thought of this before--followed the suggestion. The girl changed countenance and acknowledged that she had been taught her story.