Witches, Wives and Mothers:witchcraft persecution andwomen’s confessions inseventeenth-century England
...inherited from a pagan past.[18] Although a few of the women implicate others whom they worked with as witches, most do not. Most of the women, as I shall show in my examination of the Suffolk material, seem to have been very isolated in their role as witches. WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS 67 Witchcraft, throughout the period, was treated as a ‘secret crime’; this meant that, similar to poisoning, it was likely to be committed in private or behind closed doors. No one except the witch herself, could know about her meetings or compacts with the Devil. From a rationalist twentieth-century viewpoint it was also an ‘impossible’ crime – the criminal potential of witchcraft was completely dependent upon a belief in the spirit-world which had to be shared by victim, witnesses, judge and jury alike. Demonic possession, for example, was only possible in a society which believed it could actually happen. The implications of all this for an alleged witch were that many forms of evidence were accepted as proofs which would, at a later date, fail to stand up in a court of law. It was accepted that the appearance of familiars, the presence of witch-marks, even the abatement of an affliction after an alleged witch had been ‘scratched’, were all clear signs of proof. When a case came before the court, evidence was given by four different categories of witness – accusers (often neighbours who claimed they were the victims of witchcraft), interrogators (such as Stearne and Hopkins who questioned the accused), watchers, and searchers. The watchers were employed to observe the witch in her home or in prison to see if her imps appeared. The searchers checked the woman’s body for witch’s marks, teats or paps from which her imps suckled. Most of the watchers and searchers mentioned in the text are women and often the same individuals performed both functions. Prissilla Brigs, for example, was employed to search Thomazine Ratcliffe and she told the court she had found two teats on her body. Abigail Brigs (her sister?) told the court that Thomazine had been in custody for 6 days and that during this time she had confessed to Abigail that she had killed her husband; Stearne, who also questioned Thomazine, expanded on her statements. All in all a total of 13 women and 45 men are actually named as court witnesses in the manuscript depositions. This gender ratio of one female to every four male accusers appears to represent a totally different pattern to that discovered by Clive Holmes in his analysis of Home Circuit witch trials.[19] Holmes has discovered that nearly 50% of witnesses were women in the Home Circuit counties during the seventeenth century. However, rather than seeing this as evidence of an equal involvement of men and women in the witch trials, Holmes goes on to show that leading men in the community instigated the legal process of prosecution and then mobilised their neighbours, often women, into giving confirmatory testimonies. It was the male élite, therefore, who set the legal ball rolling. I do not think the picture in Suffolk was very different. Most of the 13 named women were watchers and searchers, involved in the court process, rather than individual informants. There are, however, several instances in which male witnesses refer to the ‘bewitching’ of their wives, to their comments and actions. It seems that in Suffolk, although women made informal allegations about other women in the LOUISE JACKSON 68 village, their husbands may well have acted alone as official informants when the matter came to court. For judges and juries the clearest and most incontrovertible form of evidence was the confession. Michael Dalton wrote in The Country Justice in 1630 of “their own voluntary confession ... which exceeds all other evidence”.[20] However if a witch did not choose to confess ‘voluntarily’ there were ways and means, some more covert than others, of forcing her to make a statement. Historians of the English witch trials agree that the extreme and macabre forms of torture used in Scotland and on the continent were not in use in England; but it is clear that the English confessions were often obtained by imposing physical and psychological pressures on the accused. An examination of the tract, written by Matthew Hopkins in 1647 to defend his methods, throws up the most common. Hopkins admitted that sleep-deprivation and ‘walking’ had been used in Suffolk and Essex; watchers kept accused witches awake, usually by making them walk round their cell, “because they being kept awake would be the more active to call their imps in open view”.[21] Against the charge that alleged witches had been “extraordinarily walked till their feet were blistered, and so forced through that cruelty to confess”, Hopkins claimed he had “never had a hand in it” although it was a method used by “rusticall people”.[22] While sleep-deprivation and watching had been clearly used in Suffolk to precipitate confessions, the process was, however, not always necessary. In 12 (13%) of the Suffolk depositions it was reported that the confession had been made ‘freely’ or ‘without watching’. Rebecca Morris, for example, “confessed before any violence, watcheinge or other threats” that the devil came in the shape of a little boy to make a covenant with her. Alicia Warner of Rushmere “freely beeinge at her liberty confessed that she had enterteined certaine evill spirits”. In the case of Eliza Southerne of Dunage, questioned by minister Mr Browne, we are told that “the minister used no other argument to make her confes ... [only] sayinge doe wronge yor selfe but cleare your conscience”. Eliza was being asked to judge herself and her behaviour on Christian moral grounds as a way to producing confession. Physical and mental pressures explain to a certain degree why a substantial number of women accused of witchcraft made the confessions they did; the amount of bullying and harsh treatment that was used against them must not be underestimated. However, this does not provide the whole picture. Some women clearly believed they had met the devil and he had persuaded them to use witchcraft; their motives for believing this can only be unravelled by working towards an understanding of their material and psychological experiences. The confession records show a great attention to detail and an interesting mix of popular elements of witchcraft belief (the devil, imps) with localised, individualised aspects. There are interesting references in the WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS 69 Suffolk depositions to local topography (meetings with the devil at named places in the neighbourhood)[23] and domestic objects and food items (apples, butter) within a broader symbolic framework of a widely accepted demonology. There is clearly an interaction taking place in the confession-making process; between the accused, her accusers and her interrogators; between a widespread witchcraft belief and individual experience. We need to treat the confession text as a palimpsest; it is made up of different layers of detail and interpretation, added one on top of another as different people became involved in the process of accusation and confession. An alleged witch may have told earlier versions of her story before she came into contact with the courts. At some point in her career she chose, for some reason, to take on the language of demonology to describe her actions and motives. Thus production of a written confession was a very complicated and involved process. A real woman’s life had been interpreted, altered and filtered through a linguistic system to become written words on a page. There are numerous stages in the process; but the common factor in each is the transforming power of language. Dale Spender has written that “language is our means of classifying and ordering the world, our means of manipulating reality”.[24] Language is used to interpret and define experience and to give meaning to it. When I use the term ‘experience’ I am referring to physical and psychic events, how women reacted to them, and how women remembered them. Events become culturally organised experience when they have been labelled and examined within a set framework of belief. Lyndal Roper has written: Narratives in which people try to make sense of their psychic conflicts usually involve borrowing from a language which is not at first the individual’s own. We might find that coming to understand oneself can involve learning to recognise one’s feelings in terms of theory, psychoanalytic or diabolic, which one might not have originally applied to oneself.[25] Language can also be said to create experience since it constructs existence and identity. Once a woman was labelled ‘witch’, with her original experiences distorted and set within this context, this was what she became. Just as she had, with a strong input from others, constructed what ultimately became a written testimony, so that text would end up constructing her, both in terms of her identity within the community and of self-identity.[26] Of course, not all the women involved in the trials were found guilty but defendants who were acquitted could still find their reputations coloured by the trial and their destiny shaped by it. LOUISE JACKSON 70 Persecution and Gender The witch trials are significant in the study of gender relations and women’s oppression because they are a clear example of organised state violence against women.[27] Although a few men were accused (20% in the Suffolk sample), a significant number of these were associated with another female witch. The key to understanding the witch trials lies in their gender-specificity. The details of the cases refer directly to traditionally defined feminine space – the home, the kitchen, the sickroom, the nursery; to culturally defined female tasks or occupations and their direct opposites – feeding (poisoning), child-rearing (infanticide), healing (harming), birth (death). Given the involvement of women in the dairying economy of Suffolk, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Suffolk material contains many references to witchcraft in the dairy and the bewitching of cattle. When things went wrong in the domestic world or the farmhouse – the cream curdled, the butter would not set or the child fell ill, witchcraft might be suspected. Women were in a potentially extremely powerful position through their control over child-rearing and feeding; the witchcraft persecutions can be seen as an officially sanctioned bid to control this threat and to reassert male power over women. The witch trials were not the only way of clamping down on women at this time. Laws against infanticide were reinforced in an attack on young single mothers whose behaviour was seen as deviant and suspect. Hoffer & Hull have shown there was a leap in the number of indictments for infanticide brought before the Home Circuit during the late Tudor and early Stuart period.[28] A statute of 1624 enacted that the concealment of birth of a bastard child would be taken as evidence of murder.[29] Martin Ingram’s research has indicated that church court action against scolding women was not as widespread as David Underdown has suggested. However, it is undoubtedly true that the figure of the scolding woman, portrayed in ballads, prints and plays in this period – Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is an obvious example – presented a powerful image of the disorderly female whom, it was stressed, needed to be controlled.[30] The witch trials pinpointed women as potentially threatening, violent and harmful; that threat being seen as particularly insidious because of the ‘secret’ nature of witchcraft itself. Women were portrayed as particularly vulnerable to the attentions of the devil because they were identified, through Christian scripture, as the lustful daughters of Eve, who had openly brought evil and sin into the world; they were described by demonologists as hot-headed, governed by passion rather than intellect. Continental texts such as the Catholic Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 had portrayed female sexuality as threatening, deviant and subversive and as such, strongly associated with witchcraft.[31] In England local communities seem to have been primarily WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS 71 interested in the ‘harming’ activities of individual witches – there is little mention of the macabre and elaborate sabbats which captivated continental imaginations.[32] By 1645, however, some of the more elaborate notions were beginning to take hold (perhaps disseminated by Matthew Hopkins himself) and the Suffolk trials refer directly to the making of covenants and sexual activity with the devil. The relationship between the witch and her familiars was highly sexualised. Margaret Baytes confessed that “when she was at work she felt a thinge come upon her legs and go into her secret parts and nipped her in her secret parts where her marks were found”. Goody Smith confessed that “her imps hange in her secret parts in a bag and her husband saw it”. Female libido and sexual desire seem to have been associated with the temptings of the devil in Puritan as well as Catholic minds and this is reflected in the confessions. Hence Anne Usher confessed to making a covenant with a pole cat and that “she felt 2 things like butterflies in her secret parts with witchings dansings and suckinge & she felt them with her hands and rubbed them and killed them”. The strong links which were made between witchcraft and female sexuality, the subsequent depiction of female desire as deviant, and the important prescriptive role of the witch trials in society, meant that the persecution of witches was an ideal mechanism for the control of women’s sexual behaviour. Woman were faced with a basic set of role models against which to judge themselves – the good wife, the witch, and the scold.[33] As I shall show, women were very aware of these constructions; both those who were being accused and those women who were participating in watching or making allegations, desperate to prove they were on the side of virtue before someone also tried to label them as witch. The witch was the stereotypical opposite of the good wife. She was the woman who was trying to act entirely independently of male control, asserting her own powers, sexual and otherwise, to gain financial reward or carry out revenge on her enemies. The witch was a warning to women as to what would happen if they behaved in a way which could be counted as subversive. As I have said, the type of activities associated with witchcraft were a direct inversion of the traditionally accepted roles for women. The position of the ‘scold’ was a ‘halfway house’ – she was the woman who was just beginning to break out of control and therefore must be kept in order through the bridle or the cucking stool. In the production of confessions, coercion was as much cultural as it was physical. Frameworks of belief about women’s roles, responsibilities and expectations would lead women to condemn themselves. It is important to remember that it was a popularly held belief during the seventeenth century that the devil existed as a material phenomenon and that any individual could meet him in a wood or on a country road. Chance meetings with strangers or animals could be explained in such a way. Explanations for LOUISE JACKSON 72 both macrocosmic and microcosmic events were similarly sought in terms of God and the devil. Hence, when Thomas Hudson fell lame and his doctor could find no cause for it he assumed that Ann Ellis of Metlingham had bewitched him; however, the deposition records that “lately changeing his surgeon he doth now begin to mend” – and Ann was found innocent. The devil also functioned in the psychological as well as the material world – on mind as well as body. Ann Laurence has shown that seventeenth-century women who gave testimonies to the civil war churches about their conversions referred to extremes of emotion in terms of religion: A woman who was convinced that God had ceased to love her because of her transgressions reported that ‘I had temptation by Satan to drown myself in a Pond’, and another woman reported that it was only her unborn child which prevented her from destroying herself. Two other women mentioned suicide among the temptations offered by Satan, which they overcame thanks to God’s intervention.[34] Personal life crises such as suicide attempts and depression were almost always seen as temptations from the devil; desire to carry out acts which were considered ‘morally bad’ was associated with evil. What we today might choose to call undesirable thoughts, impulses, or drives were in early modern England seen as external influences on the individual and were associated with the devil. In shorthand, Satan was everything you did not want to admit to. The temptations of the devil were a particular feature of the conversion narratives produced by members of baptist and other sects. Presbyterian Hannah Allen described in her autobiography, which took the form of a religious testimony, how she had battled against the devil during the dark days of her melancholy to regain her faith and happiness in God: “12th May 1664 Still my time of great distress and sore trials continues. Sometimes the Devil tempts me woefully hard and strange thoughts of my dear Lord which, through his mercy, I dread and abhor the assenting to, more than hell itself”. She also recorded that the devil had suggested to her that she must die and be with him.[35] Baptist Sarah Davy, in her autobiographical account, Heaven Realised, described how her “distrustful heart” was “exercised with variety of temptations by the devil as to distrust the goodness of the Lord”.[36] The language Hannah Allen and Sarah Davy used to describe their emotional despair is not very different, as I will show, from the words attributed to the women of Suffolk in their witchcraft confessions. Witches, Wives and Mothers What I would like to suggest, by looking closely at some of the material in the Suffolk cases, is that women’s insecurities as wives and mothers as well WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS 73 as traumas about experiences or events, were being played out through the framework of the witchcraft confession. Susanna Stegold of Hintlesham was found guilty of using witchcraft to kill her husband. One of the inquisitors, John Easte, read out her confession in court. She had, he said, confessed that the devil had first come into her after her marriage and that she knew she had special powers because her greediest pig had died when she had wished it would stop eating. The marriage seems to have been an extremely unhappy one for Susanna; she may well have been beaten or ill-treated. She had allegedly confessed that her husband was a ‘bad husband’ and Susanna clearly hated him. Indeed her strength of feeling was so intense that, when he died mad, she seems to have believed she had killed him through her own evil thoughts: Her husband being a bad husband she wished he might depart from her meaninge as she said that he shold die and presently after he died mad ... she cryed out, oh! my deare husband, but being asked whither she bewitched him or noe and said she wished ill wishes to him and what so ever she wished came to pas. In common law a man was entitled to beat his wife (so long as it was not fatal) and a woman was supposed to accept it as her due – only when a woman’s life was actually in danger could the ecclesiastical court intervene.[37[ Susanna’s husband had obviously made her suffer in some way but it is she who was racked with guilt. She knew that sickness which had no obvious natural explanation was attributed to the devil. Hence the framework of belief about gender roles and about the association between witchcraft and illness caused her to feel his death might be her fault. She assumed she was a witch and went on to confess that she had three evil spirits or imps. For Susanna, belief in the devil seems to have been a way of coping with guilt or hiding the emotional trauma. Susanna’s case is not the only one in which it appears that a victim of abuse may have taken on the language of demonology to explain her feelings or experience. Margaret Benet confessed that “the divell in the shape of a man ... carried her body over a close into a thicket of bushes and there lay with her and after scratched her hand with the bushes”. Jana Linstead “met with the devill in the shape of a man who wold have lyen with her but she denied him whereupon he threatened her but did her noe hyrt”. Widow Thomazine Ratcliffe “confessed that a month after the death of her husband there came one to her in the shape of her husband and lay hevy upon her and she asked him if he wold kill her and he answered in the voice of her husband no I will be a loveing husband”. Belief in the devil could provide a framework to describe a situation in which a woman was frightened or felt threatened and which she was unable to articulate in any other way. With no other language available to describe or explain her feelings, belief in the devil became the only answer. Nazife Bashar has shown that, while rape legislation existed in early modern LOUISE JACKSON 74 England, prosecutions were very few.[38] It is likely that in many instances, women did not possess the vocabulary to describe a bad experience as rape. Furthermore, if these are cases of abuse it is very significant that the women should assume they themselves are actually guilty of witchcraft as a result of the experience. As victims they are seeing themselves at fault and blaming themselves for what has happened. I have chosen to examine next the cases of Susanna Smith and Prissilla Collit since they both contain references to infanticide, a crime which has recently been associated with post-partum psychosis but which, in seventeenth-century England, was seen as the work of the devil. Again it was a subversion of the normal ‘motherly’ female role. Suicide, also referred to in these cases, was a great sin according to the church and canon law and was similarly the work of the devil. Prissilla Collit of Dunage confessed, after she had been watched in custody for three nights, that the devil had appeared to her when she was sick some 12 years previously and tempted her to kill her children to escape poverty. She refused to make a covenant on this occasion but did place one of her children next to the fire to burn it. Fortunately another child pulled its sibling away from the fire: In a sickness about 12 years since the divell tempted to make away with her children or else shold allways continue poore, and he then demanded a covenant of her which she did deny, but she carried one of her children and layed it close to the fyer to burne it, and went to bed again and the fier burnt the hare and the head lininge and she heard it cry but cold not have the power to helpe it, but one other of her children pulled it away. Here the devil is performing both a practical and psychological function. Firstly, for poor women like Prissilla, who had no economic resources or means of bettering their lives, a pact with the devil could, they hoped, bring financial security. It was a common cultural belief that the devil could bring his servants money and other rewards and could help them against their enemies. Indeed Prissilla confessed the devil promised her 10 shillings for sealing the covenant although she never received it. Other women, in their confessions, mention similar unfulfilled promises. Elizabeth Hobert, for example, covenanted with the devil that, in return for her body and soul, she would be avenged of those who angered her and would be furnished with money; he never performed it, however. Women may well have ‘turned to witchcraft’, through conscious decision, as a solution to poverty and powerlessness. Some of them may even have been open about their activities as a way of achieving status in the village, status which for poor women was impossible to achieve in any other way. Marianne Hester, analysing the 1566 Chelmsford cases of Elizabeth Frauncis, Agnes and Joan Waterhouse, has suggested that all three women were using witchcraft as a “means of empowerment: to obtain a rich husband and various commodities, to get WITCHES, WIVES AND MOTHERS 75 their own back on their husbands or neighbours or to kill their husband with whom they quarrelled”.[39] In Prissilla Collit’s case the devil came up with another practical suggestion – killing her children to escape poverty. The links between infanticide and poverty were strong throughout this period: Sharpe, in his study of Essex court cases, has shown that most women accused of infanticide were unmarried mothers, often domestic servants, who could not afford to bring up a child and were forced into the act out of desperation.[40] Of course it is impossible to tell whether prosecutions reflected the actual incidence of the crime – were single domestic servants simply more likely to be suspected than married women? However, although we cannot properly answer this question, it is undoubtedly true that infanticide was, for some women, a solution to poverty and desperation. In discussing infanticide and the devil it is also important to consider the psychological role of demonic intervention as an explanation of behaviour. Wrightson has shown that certain assumptions were generally made as to what ‘normal’ maternal feelings consisted of; he quotes the writer William Gouge who, in 1622, praised the “tender care” of the mother for the child, and argued that God had “so fast fixed love in the hearts of parents as if there be any who it aboundeth not, he is counteth unnatural”.[41] Although the courts were just beginning to accept illness as mitigation for infanticide in the most exceptional cases[42], there was no discussion of what we would perhaps now term post-natal depression or post-partum psychosis. Unmarried servant girl Sinah Jones, tried at the Old Bailey in 1668, was sentenced to death for stifling her baby although she said “she knew nothing of the cloath in the mouth of the child, and that she had not her senses and was light-headed”.[43] Infanticide was considered a crime against God and nature; it was a deviant subversion of the role of the ‘godly’ mother and therefore likely to be associated with witchcraft. One has only to glance over the pages of Malleus Maleficarum to find many references to witches cutting up and eating babies, inducing abortions, and cutting off male reproductive organs.[44] Murder and harm to children is...