SOURCE : "White Magic and Black Witches," in The Elizabethan Underworld, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1977, pp. 79-96.

[In the essay below, Salgaμdo examines the varying social responses to white and black witchcraft in Elizabethan England.]

The medieval Catholic Church laid claims to many powerful kinds of magic which touched the lives of its members at every point. There was the magic of confession and absolution which assured the sinner in a voice of unshakeable authority that his transgressions were forgiven. There was the magic of conjuration and consecration by which ordinary materials and objects—oil, water, salt, crosses, rings, pieces of paper—could be invested with the power of God so that they protected the wearer from evil and misfortune. There was the magic of exorcism and healing whereby tormenting demons were cast out by the priest using the divine power granted to the true Church and the sufferer made whole again. And the magic of the sacraments gave shape and sustenance to a man's life, particularly the crucial sacrament of the Mass in which the bread and wine were truly and magically transformed into the body and blood of the Redeemer.

This magic was not of course the invention of the Catholic Church. In most cases it had taken over and adapted for its own purposes folk beliefs whose beginnings are beyond the reach of history. The Church in its wisdom saw that these beliefs prevailed because they fulfilled a deep and abiding need in the lives and minds of those who held them. In a world where for most people life was hard and precarious, where natural disaster was often both savage and inexplicable, the teachings of the Church may have offered an explanation which reconciled men to their misery, but its ritual magic held out the promise of power to alter their condition. If on any given occasion the magic failed, the failure could always be blamed on some defect in the performance or in the spiritual condition of the supplicant, not on the magic itself. An d unlike science, in which one failure blots out the impact of a thousand successes, one apparent magical triumph cancelled out innumerable failures. The magic remained all-powerful and inexhaustible. The Catholic Church simply insisted that its source was always and only God. It did not try to beat folk beliefs to the ground; it merely joined them to its own vast and intricate system.

With the coming of the Reformation this faith was formally replaced in England by another brand of Christianity which differed from it in many important ways. We may sum up these differences in a single phrase by saying that the Church of England almost literally took the magic out of Christianity. It did its best to deny its flock access to these magical resources and certainly claimed no magical powers for itself. It abolished auricular confession and was opposed to exorcism and conjuration. In general it took the view that consecration was not an operation by which the actual nature of objects—oil, water, wine, bread or whatever—was miraculously transformed, but only an act by which certain articles were dedicated to the worship of God. From this it followed that no particular object, whether it was a cross, Bible or anything else, nor any particular form of words had magical power in itself. The sacrament of the Mass had to be understood symbolically, like all other rituals; the bread and wine did not actually change into flesh and blood. Feeding a horse on holy bread and water could not prevent it from being stolen. Prayers were not infallible charms but humble supplications to God which He might heed or not, in His divine wisdom and mercy. If God looked with favour on a man, he would prosper. If he did not prosper, then he should look closely into his own life, discover where he had gone astray and strive to mend his ways and please God. Constant prayer and strenuous effort were what the Protestant Church advocated. That was the true religion, and it had nothing to do with magic.

This new, official view offered cold comfort to the labouring poor. If a man's son died or his cattle were stricken, it was no real solace to be admonished to examine himself more closely and pray harder. God might be testing him or punishing him, but under the new dispensation there was virtually nothing he could do about it in either case. He was strictly forbidden to try and change God's mind and thereby alter his own state by having recourse to magic. But the need that was supplied by magic did not disappear just because of a fiat of the new Church. The conditions that gave rise to magical beliefs—the threat of sudden disaster from a hostile environment and the hope of some sort of control over it—still persisted, and if the Church no longer provided the magic, ordinary folk would look elsewhere for it. There is good reason to think that even before the Reformation, the mass of people was not particularly reverent as far as their attitude to the official teaching of Christianity was concerned. Many only went to church for the rituals of baptism, marriage and burial, as many do today. As for the behaviour of the congregation, this seemed to have been little different from their behaviour in a playhouse—they drank, spat, heckled the preacher and swore with little regard to their surroundings. What was important about the Catholic Church seems to have been not so much its official doctrine, but its claims to powerful magic. When these claims were implicitly withdrawn by the Elizabethan Church, they were taken up by other men and women who held out the same promises and offered the same services that the Catholic Church had earlier provided. These people were variously called 'cunning men', 'wise women', 'blessers', 'charmers', 'conjurors', 'sorcerers' or 'witches' and were familiar in virtually every village community in Elizabethan England.

'At this date' wrote Reginald Scot in 1584, 'it is indifferent to say in the English tongue "she is a witch" or "she is a wise woman".' Scot was an educated and humane observer, anxious to expose the so-called miracles claimed by the Catholic Church as well as to save harmless old women from the monstrous accusations of witchcraft often brought against them. As such it was no part of his purpose to draw a clear distinction between 'black' and 'white' magic. But we shall see that in the popular mind the difference was quite clear, because the white or 'blessing' witch served a very different psychological and social function from the maleficent or black witch. The same person could sometimes change from one to the other, but this did not alter the basis of the distinction.

The white witch could be of either sex, a cunning man or a wise woman. Both the Protestant and the Catholic Church condemned them, the former because it did not believe in 'good' magic, the latter because the white witch threatened its own magical claims. In some ways the white witch was a greater threat to the Church's authority than the black witch because his or her services were called upon more often. But here again we find the usual contrast between official theory and grass-roots activity. In 1583, the churchwardens of Thatcham in Berkshire sent for a cunning woman to find out who had made off with the communion cloth from the church, and in the previous year an Essex cunning man, Miles Blomfield had been chosen as churchwarden. There are also several instances of clergymen themselves practising white magic during this period.

The cunning man or wise woman was very often an ordinary member of the village community who occupied a definite place in it and whose magical activities were only a side-line. Unlike in some primitive societies today, the role was not hereditary. Indeed it is difficult to understand just how one established a claim as a white witch. Sometimes being the seventh son of a seventh son or having some special distinguishing mark or quality such as a prominent birthmark or protuberant eyes could help. The initial requirements seem to have been simply a certain amount of self-confidence together with the ability to make one's claims plausible; the latter would naturally be vastly enhanced by a successful miracle or two. Given the kind of situation in which he was consulted and the conditions within which he worked, it is no surprise to find that the cunning man had an impressive degree of success.

One great appeal of the cunning man was the comprehensiveness of his range. His magic could be harnessed to the service of any situation which his clients were likely to come across. There were charms to encompass everything, from getting rid of impotence to getting rid of rats. There were charms to banish toothache or protect one in battle, to win at dice or at love, to safeguard cattle from lightning or disease or make children sleep, to make corn grow or develop a person's musical abilities. An ever-popular commodity was the love potion, used by clients in all walks of life; a sinister variant of this was the draught of poison such as that which Dr Suckling's wife wanted the wise woman Mary Woods to brew in Norwich in 1613 to be administered to the doctor himself. If a woman wanted to know why her child had come out in sores or whether she would live longer than her husband or why her butter wouldn't turn, the cunning man or wise woman could not only tell her, but nearly always what to do about it as well. Among the most frequent services they rendered was the healing of sickness in human beings and animals. As a good many of their remedies were based on country herbs and practical psychology, it is at least possible that the white witch brought about more cures than a doctor who based his science on the theory of humours and who would often bleed a patient as soon as look at him. In any case there was a shortage of physicians at this time, especially in rural England. The white witch's charms and concoctions at least had the great merit of being fairly painless prescriptions—and their fees were usually much lower than those of the physicians.

The finding of lost or stolen goods and livestock was another of the white witch's skills very much in demand. For a poor peasant owning no land, the loss of a few sheep or a cow could be a very serious blow, and it was just the sort of misfortune which occurred fairly frequently. A rarer and more positive aspect of the search for lost goods was the search for buried treasure. This was an activity in which the cunning man was often assisted by a 'familiar' or spirit in animal form which he sometimes carried about within a ring or mirror; the familiar was necessary to exorcize the evil demon who usually kept watch over buried treasure; it is not perhaps surprising that nearly all efforts to locate buried treasure with the aid of the white witch failed.

Even walking on the water was not beyond the scope of the Elizabethan image, if the word of Thomas Ross is to be believed. In his Natural and Artificial Conclusions (1567), a little handbook so popular that no copies of the first two editions have survived, he gives the following instructions on

How to walk on the water, a proper secret: For to do this, take two little timbrels and bind them under the soles of thy feet, and at a stave's end fasten another, and with these you may safely walk on the water unto the wonder of all such as shall see the same: if so be you often exercise the same with a certain boldness and lightness of the body.

This admirably lucid and simple advice, however, carried less than total conviction to at least one contemporary reader, who has scrawled on the margin of a copy of the 1581 edition: 'and if you do not sink you shall be sure to go upon the water.'

Other usual activities of the cunning man were fortune telling and the making of weather forecasts with particular reference to the requirements of farming. Before the countryman entered on any important transaction, the marriage of his daughter or a distant journey for example, he would consult the white witch who would use his skill to advise him with an appropriate degree of ritual. And finally, the cunning man would be consulted by anyone who had reason to believe that he had come under the influence—through curse, evil eye, bodily contact or other means—of a black witch and wanted to have the evil removed.

The scope of the blessing witch's activities therefore extended as far as the magic of the old Church. He also often provided something of the larger-than-life theatricality which the earlier Church ritual contained. Clients were often shown into special rooms, suitably darkened and furnished with objects such as magic beads, images, crystal balls and mirrors which were intended to produce an atmosphere of credulous awe. Occasionally the witch would wear a special item of dress or ornament such as a shawl or chain with a cross in imitation of a priest; and he tried to build around himself the same atmosphere of austere purity which in theory at any rate, celibacy had given to the Catholic clergy. William Barckseale of Southampton, for example, prepared himself for the detection (sometimes successfully) of stolen goods by fasting and praying for three days.

In 1569, Edwin Sandys, Bishop of Worcester produced a list of magical practices prohibited by the Church which offers a glimpse of the bewildering variety of diagnostic techniques employed in the service of magic: 'charms to cure men or beast, invocations of wicked spirits; telling where things lost or stolen are become by key, book, tables, shears, sieves; looking into crystals or other casting of figures.' This is the baldest summary and it leaves out more methods of healing and divination than it includes. It would take several pages merely to catalogue all the recorded methods in any detail, but it is worth pausing to look at some of the most important methods as well as some of the most improbable ones.

In the absence of any highly developed notion of natural cause and effect, we need not be surprised that the diagnosis of disease was often based on the view that an evil spirit was lurking within the sick person's body and needed to be exorcised by charms, conjurations and similar rituals. After all, it was quite usual for physicians to attribute their failure with a particular patient to the presence of an evil demon inside that patient. If such demons did exist, they could only be overcome by a more powerful magic. For the white witch this came from the Christian God who was mightier than the devil and his minions. On this the witch and the Christian minister were in agreement. The dispute arose as to the methods by which God's power could be invoked and manifested. For the white witch believed that this could be done through the use of specially 'consecrated' objects and appropriate rituals. The first essential was to establish the presence of the malignant spirit within the affected person. A common method of doing this was to measure the patient's belt, girdle or similar item of clothing. The assumption was that the article would vary in size according to the condition of the patient by a kind of sympathetic transference. Thus Elizabeth Mortlock, a wise woman of Cambridgeshire, began operations with prayers, then measured the girdle of the suspected patient from elbow to thumb while invoking God to tell her whether the person con cerned 'be haunted with a fairy, yea or no'. If the answer was positive, the girdle would be shorter when she next measured it.

Other methods used were mainly methods of detection rather than of medical diagnosis. Bishop Sandys' list gives us some of the most usual ones. Many of the techniques were simple and required no special apparatus. Indeed, they were often practised by 'amateurs', though no doubt the cunning man dressed up the operation appropriately. One form of divination was done with a Bible and a key into the hollow of which each suspect's name was in turn inserted. The key was then put between the pages of the Bible. When the guilty person's name was inside the key, the Bible would begin to shake as soon as the key was inserted in it. Another equally simple and common method was divination by shears. For this, a sieve was pierced with a pair of shears which were then held by the point, with the sieve stuck in it. The name of each suspect was then mentioned, with the question whether he was guilty or no; when the culprit's name was mentioned, the sieve would begin to spin round. In another method clay balls containing suspects' names written on pieces of paper would be put in a bucket. The paper with the guilty person's name would unroll first. Other techniques were peculiar to a particular individual. Robert Harris of Maid-stone practised divination simply by staring into people's faces, and Joan Moores, if we are to believe her, could prophesy by listening to frogs croaking. Thus in 1594, Cuthbert Williamson's eyes ran tears when he stood before a 'forspoken' or bewitched person. An eye drawn on a wall was alleged to make the guilty person's eye water when he stared at it. Perhaps the most gruesome forms of diagnosis and detection were those involving corpses, skulls and earth from freshly dug graves, all of which were used in the dangerous (because forbidden on pain of death) practice of raising the spirits of the dead.

When we move from diagnosis to prescription, the modes of operation become even more bizarre. The most straight-forward remedies consisted of the utterance of certain magic spells, usually Christian prayers. We may see here the persistence of the notion that the language of religion had a special virtue which could be used for practical purposes. In 1528 Margaret Hurst described how she healed sick people by kneeling and praying for them to the Holy Trinity. She then prescribed five Paternosters, five Aves and a creed for nine consecutive nights, followed by three more Paternosters, three Aves and a Creed and so on. For the ague she prescribed herbs, to be taken with holy water and accompanied by specified prayers. Mad dogs and their victims could be cured by feeding them with charms written on paper, and sick horses with charms hung from their manes. A man possessed by the devil could be cured by releasing a live bat in the room, whereupon the bat would carry the evil spirit away with him. One remedy for pains in the head was to boil a lock of the sufferer's hair in his urine and throw it on the fire. Not all recommended cures were as drastic as those for Anthony Wood, who was told to jump in the river to drown the evil spirits that caused his ague, and few were as macabre as the cure for goitre—the victim had to be touched by the dead hand of a freshly hanged corpse. Compared to this, the cure practised by Katherine Thompson and Anne Nevelson in 1604—to put a white duck's bill into the patient's mouth and intone charms—seems quite innocuous. Sometimes the white witch 'took on' the patient's affliction and cured her in that way. What lay behind all the diagnosis and the remedies prescribed was a need for external reassurance and a habit of mind as far removed as it is possible to imagine from that which we think of as 'scientific'.

From the middle of the sixteenth century to about the middle of the seventeenth recourse to white witches (and the hunting down of black ones) seems to have been fairly persistent in England. In 1549 one William Wycherley, arrested as a sorcerer, estimated that there were five hundred like him in the country, while thirty-five years later Reginald Scot reckoned that there were less than a score of parishes without a wise woman or cunning man. We are told that in Elizabethan Essex a cunning man was never more than ten miles away from any countryman. Part of their success was due, as we have seen, to the fact that they fulfilled a genuine need; the cures they recommended—the 'natural magic' of herbs and minerals—genuinely did alleviate suffering. There would also have been a proportion of people whose ailments cured themselves, but for which the cunning man could take the credit. As for the identification of those who had wished evil upon clients or the recovery of stolen goods, a certain amount of lucky guessing has to be allowed for. But the chief reason for the white witch's success in this respect is undoubtedly that his client came to him not for information he himself did not possess but for some sort of external confirmation of his own suspicions. The first question the cunning man asked his client was invariably: 'Whom do you suspect?' In a closed village community the number involved was bound to be small and it would require no exceptional skill to discover who was the most likely suspect. In the nature of the case it would be difficult to prove that the identification was wrong—how did a person prove that he had not cursed someone? Finally, as I have suggested, success would count for a great deal but failure could always be attributed to factors which would leave the white witch's reputation undamaged.

The question 'whom do you suspect?' took on a much more sinister overtone when what was at issue was not who had stolen corn or butter but who had cast a spell on another. And yet, in England at least, the identification of 'black' witches often rested on matters as trivial as these. For the most striking thing about witchcraft in England compared to developments on the Continent was the smallness of scale and the triviality of the charges involved. The witches in Macbeth could cause tempests and help to murder a king, but the real life 'witches' of Elizabethan England rarely claimed to perform or were accused of performing such spectacular deeds. One witch did claim at her execution to have been responsible for all the frosts and bad weather for some years past, but generally most of the claims and the accusations were petty and personal. Twelve-year-old Agnes Browne was convinced that Joan Waterhouse had bewitched her by causing a black dog with an ape's face to haunt her; Agnes protected herself by uttering the name of our Lord. Margaret Harkett who was executed at Tyburn in 1585 picked peas from her neighbour's field and when asked to return them flung them down with a curse, after which no peas grew in his field. The wrath of a guardian demon apparently descended on one Peters of Devonshire and reduced him and his companions to ashes while they were digging for buried treasure. Philip Benny of Hereford knew that Mary Hodges was a witch because every night he saw her in her room making water in a dish and throwing it in the fire over crossed andirons. We are in an altogether different world from that described by the sixteenth-century Frenchman Jean Bodin who described a witches' sabbath where each witch, carrying a candle, kissed a huge black goat under the tail, while the devil commanded them to 'revenge or die'.

Indeed, disappointing as it may seem, it must be noted that as far as England is concerned, there is no evidence to suggest the existence of anything like an organized witch cult with covens, black sabbaths, midnight orgies and aerial transportation (a broomstick is mentioned only once in English witchcraft trials). What we do find are lonely old women living on the edge of poverty, often reduced to begging from their neighbours who looked on them with suspicion and resentment and whose guilty conscience probably troubled them a good deal. The fact that they were women is only to be expected because old women and childless widows were economically and socially the most vulnerable members of a small rural community. Often their only companions were a pet cat, a toad or a weasel. Sometimes they kept them in a pot of wool and called them affectionate names, Grizzell or Pyewacket or Sack-and-Sugar. These were transformed in the imagination of their accusers into their 'familiars' or puckrels, lent them by the devil to do his evil business. If in addition the lonely old woman had any distinguishing marks, a hump back or hair on her chin or a 'devil's teat' under her armpit, suspicion became near certainty; but once the accusation had been made a distinguishing mark was not difficult to find, nor was a familiar. For Matthew Hopkins, the notorious 'Witchfinder General' of the mid-seventeenth century, a mere fly settling on a suspect's shoulder was indubitably the suspect's familiar, and was strong evidence of her guilt.

If the activities of witches were local in scope, the proceedings against them were proportionately smaller in scale, compared to what happened on the Continent. Between 1558, when Elizabeth I came to the throne and 1736, when witchcraft ceased to be a statutory offence in England, some 513 charges of witchcraft were examined in the Courts of the Home Circuit, which comprised Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex. There were 200 convictions and 109 persons were hanged. This is very different in scale from the 900 reported to have been burnt at the stake in Lorrain between 1580 and 1595 and the 1,000 at Como in the single year 1524. It has been suggested that one reason for the difference was that in England witches were generally tried for specific acts of evil against individuals, not, as on the Continent, for entering into a compact with the devil and thereby losing their immortal soul and becoming one of Satan's agents on earth. By a statute of 1542, witchcraft for the purpose of discovering treasure, injuring others or provoking un-lawful love was made a capital offence without benefit of clergy. In 1563, the first law against witchcraft of Elizabeth's reign made the use of witchcraft resulting in anyone's death an offence punishable by death. For practising witchcraft resulting in a person's bodily harm, the first offence carried a penalty of one year's imprisonment and the pillory; a second offence was punishable with death. The penalty for practising witchcraft to provoke unlawful love was one year's imprisonment and the pillory for the first offence and life imprisonment and forfeiture of goods for a subsequent one. In the first year of James I's reign the penalty for a second offence became death, James being a far more fierce opponent of witchcraft than Elizabeth. Conjuring of spirits was a felony in all three Acts and the Jacobean Act added for good measure the capital offence of taking up a dead body for conjuring. In this last Act we can perhaps see the influence of continental ideas about a compact with the devil, for covenanting with spirits is also specified as a felony. But the cases which came before the court were usually particular offences against named individuals, not vague accusations of liaison with the devil.

On a national scale, then, the impact of witchcraft on English life was probably not very great. A. L. Rowse is probably right to say that far more people were hanged in Elizabethan England for cutting a purse or stealing a sheep than for witchcraft. But we need to note that there was a continuous prosecution of witches in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, rather than any intensive witch-hunt (though there were years such as 1612 when multiple executions of witches took place in Lancashire and Northamptonshire). Furthermore it appears that certain areas, notably Essex, were more given to witch-hunting than others, though this may have been due partly to the fact that fuller records survive for that area than for some others, and partly to the zeal of a particular witch-hunter such as the Essex Justice of the Peace, Brian Darcy. But we should also remember that the information we have relates almost entirely to those cases of witchcraft that came before the courts; in the nature of things we cannot know how many allegations of witchcraft were settled outside the judicial system; it is reasonable to assume that they were at least as many as were brought before it.

We have glanced briefly at what black magic in England was not and also at the laws concerning it. It is time to take a closer look at what it usually was and what kind of impact it had on those who were involved in it. As we have seen, the accused persons tended to be old, single women who often went the round of the village begging from door to door. This was a very different practice to that of the vagrant beggars, because the 'witch' was already known to those she begged from. She might be refused on certain occasions for a number of reasons. Perhaps the man who refused her charity believed her to be a malingerer, perhaps he himself was going through hard times (or thought he was), perhaps he simply couldn't be bothered. Whatever the reason, it is easy to imagine a situation arising where the old woman went off muttering to herself or lay in wait for an opportunity to pilfer or both. If shortly afterwards the person concerned suffered some misfortune, especially if it was something sudden or mysterious, his thoughts would go to the old woman whom he had denied. Before he even went to the cunning man to find out how to mitigate his distress he would have a pretty good idea who had cast the evil eye or tongue upon him. In the words of George Gifford, an Essex parson who was, like Reginald Scot, an enlightened and humane enquirer into the phenomenon of witchcraft: 'A man is taken lame; he suspecteth that he is bewitched; he sendeth to the cunning man; he demandeth whom they suspect, and then showeth the image of the party in a glass.' In A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (1593) also by Gifford, one of the speakers admits that he cannot tell whether a witch has harmed him or not. His hog had died and so had five hens belonging to his wife. He may have displeased a certain old woman but he could not be certain. Not everyone in Elizabethan England was as forthrightly sceptical as the other speaker in Gifford's Dialogue who says roundly: 'The devil hath bewitched your mind.'

It is easy to understand why in a backward society some people would accuse others of witchcraft. As an explanation of sudden loss or suffering witchcraft had the great virtue of being an unfalsifiable theory, and a guilty conscience soon pointed the accusing finger at a known person. What is perhaps less easy to understand is why some people should claim powers of witchcraft for themselves. The risks were high—though perhaps lower in England than elsewhere because prosecutions were for specified acts of ill-will. But whatever the risks they were evidently felt to be worthwhile for there were many instances of people claiming to be witches, not all of them under duress. An extreme case perhaps was that of John Palmer who in 1649 confessed at St Albans to having transformed himself into a toad in order to torment one of his victims. Gifford cites the case of a butcher's boy who came out in sores; the cunning man learnt the suspect's name from the boy's father and advised the father to burn some of the boy's hair outside her house. When she returned, the suspected women asked the boy to scratch her face till it bled (drawing a witch's blood was a popular method of overcoming her evil power). When he did this his sores healed. In 1670 Joan Townsend even offered to turn girls into witches if they laid down before the church font and forswore their Christian name seven times.

Among the many motives which we may attribute to those who accused themselves of being witches, the materialistic desire to relieve poverty may have been the most important, just as it may have been for those who took to the road as vagrants. For an old woman living by herself in an Elizabethan village the difference between bare survival and barely tolerable misery may only have been a handful of peas, a bag of corn, or a few eggs. A reputation for witchcraft might, within limits, be a useful way of ensuring that her neighbours did not let her go without too often. Another reason which might persuade a woman without much company that she was a witch was a conviction of excessive sinfulness. It is not a long step for a recluse from a sense of unforgivable sin to the feeling that if the devil was going to have her soul anyway she might as well be of the devil's party and know it. But there could sometimes be a certain amount of confusion over this; a woman from Huntingdonshire who ended her days at the stake as a witch in New England confessed to having sold her soul to the devil in return for being able to pray more eloquently.

Related to the economic motive but distinct from it was the sense of power conferred on the witch by those who feared her. Again, the border-line between power feared and maleficence persecuted was a hazy one and the 'witch' herself could not always control the event or events which turned the community's violence against her. Perhaps a more powerful motive was the desire for revenge against a community which she felt had ill-treated her, on the part of someone to whom the usual means of revenge—the law, wealth, physical power, social standing and the like—were closed.

Once the suspect had been identified, it was not difficult to find evidence of her guilt. Apart from physical peculiarities already mentioned, which were invariably found, the alleged victim nearly always remembered at least one occasion when he had given offence to the 'witch' or might have done so. Others in the community would not be slow to come forward with corroborative evidence, for Elizabethan village life was harsh and those whose way of living differed from the set pattern of the majority were immediately regarded with suspicion. The 'witch' would be kept away from communal festivities—harvest ales, weddings and so forth—and then accused of harbouring a grudge for not being invited. And there would always be someone to say that he or she had seen the witch cursing—many lonely old women mumble under their breath—or perhaps a natural talent for swearing and cursing could in itself be a foundation for an accusation or conviction of magical powers; Sarah Brice of Hereford made a practice of kneeling in the churchyard when she felt the need to curse her neighbours.

When the complaint had been made and the suspect identified, the next stage was to obtain a confession from the accused person. Not every accused was as obstinate as Margaret Landish who in 1645 refused to confess that she was a witch and made 'a strange howling in the court to the great disturbance of the whole bench'. Though physical torture was hardly ever used in England to extract confessions of witchcraft (perhaps the accusers remained apprehensive to the end of the evil powers of the accused), the line between physical and psychological torture is notoriously difficult to draw. Witches were not hung by their feet or pressed with weights, though the custom of 'swimming' suspected witches was certainly practised in Elizabethan England. In this case the old woman was thrown into the water and pronounced guilty if she floated because this was a sign that the water, being the medium of baptism, refused to accept the evil one; if she drowned of course she was considered innocent—for all the good it did her.

Although an individual fanatic like Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder General' in the 1650s, was to anticipate modern methods of 'intensive interrogation' such as keeping suspects confined for long periods in uncomfortable positions and without food and drink, it is probable that most Elizabethan confessions of witchcraft were obtained by the psychological pressure put on the suspect. Consecrated bread which would choke a guilty witch, or boiling water or a hot iron which she could safely touch if she were innocent—these were still fairly straightforward ways of demonstrating the witch's guilt so that she confessed. Even more direct was the recommendation of one Zacharias, a cunning man of Hastings, who in 1593 advised sticking a knife in the buttock of an old woman suspected of bewitching a child. But the more usual process of extracting a confession is probably best illustrated by one of the most celebrated Elizabethan witch trials, that of Mother Samwell, her husband and her daughter, all three of whom were hanged for witchcraft in 1593. At first it was only the old woman who was accused of bewitching the children of Robert Throckmorton of Warboys in Huntingdonshire, in whose house she worked. The children broke out in fits at prayer time and screamed that Mother Samwell had bewitched them. The old woman very sensibly put down the accusation to 'pure wantoness' on the children's part, but soon the pressure began to build up; divines from Cambridge University came over to see her and the doctor whose treatment for the children was unsuccessful began to look on her with suspicion. One of the divines told the old woman in so many words that if she did not confess he himself would bring the wood and fire to see her burnt at the stake. When Lady Cromwell visited the children and scolded Mother Samwell, the latter answered back. Lady Cromwell grew ill, had bad dreams and died a year later. The old woman was arrested together with her husband and daughter. The woman who had earlier asked Lady Cromwell why she ill-treated her since she had done no harm now confessed that she had caused the lady's death—and she probably believed it. Earlier she had confessed to bewitching the children—'O sir I have been the cause of all this trouble to your children'—and her daughter was made to confess that she had been a party to the bewitching of Lady Cromwell—'as I am a witch and consenting to the death of Lady Cromwell, I charge thee come out of her'. As soon as the accused were hanged, all the children recovered. The worldly goods of the Samwells, worth some forty pounds in all, went to the lord of the manor, Sir Henry Cromwell.

It is probable that the courts in England were more lenient towards those accused of witchcraft than were the rural communities where they lived. Generally speaking, witch-hunts sprang from the grass roots, not as a result of pressure from those in authority. One of the speakers in Gifford's Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts, a woman, says: 'I f I had but one faggot in the world, I would carry it a mile upon my shoulders to burn a witch.' We can get some idea of what it was like merely to be accused of witchcraft from the fate of Agnes Fenn, a ninety-four-year-old woman who in 1604 was punched, beaten, pricked and then stabbed in the face with a knife by a group which included Sir Thomas Grosse, gentleman. A 'witch' could be dragged bodily from her own house and kicked, beaten and scratched in the open street; the necessity of drawing blood usually meant that the physical assault was severe.

In discussing both black and white magic we are dealing with an area of Elizabethan life where the line between those who were genuinely believed to have, or believed themselves to have, magical powers and the legions of counterfeiters is almost impossible to draw, since an imposter could have just as much 'success' as a 'genuine' witch. But we can glance briefly at a few examples of fairly obvious fraud. Reginald Scot exposed the fraudulent practices of Mildred Norrington of Westwell in Kent who claimed, in fits of apparently demoniacal possession, that her mother, Alice, kept two devils in a bottle and had already bewitched two men and a child to death through them. Adam Squier, Master of Balliol College, Oxford (1571-80) was accused by a group of irate Somerset men of having sold them a 'fly' or familiar spirit guaranteed to win for them in any dice game at the third try. After this, they had lost all their money and land. Squier managed to hang on to his Mastership because he had friends in high places. Not so fortunate were Alice and John West whose 'several notorious and lewd cozenages' were exposed in a pamphlet of 1613. One of their claims was that they were the King and Queen of the Fairies and could bestow wealth and happiness at their pleasure. Some idea of their mode of operation can be gained from evidence given at their trial on charges of pretending to introduce Thomas Moores and his wife to elfin royalty:

They brought him into a vault, where they showed him two attired like the King and Queen of Fairies, and by them little elves and goblins, and in the same place an infinite company of bags, and upon them written 'This is for Thomas Moores', 'This is for his wife', but would not let him touch anything.

Their powers, however, were insufficient to save them selves from the pillory; Ben Jonson based a scene in his great comedy The Alchemist in part on their exploits. In another comedy The Devil is an Ass, Jonson drew some of his inspiration from the activities of John Darrel, a Puritan preacher, and one of the more spectacular charlatans in a period not notably lacking in them. Darrel had two doubtless laudable aims, to put the fear of God into atheists who disbelieved in devils and to show the world, now that the Church of England had renounced any claims to magic, that not only the popish priests could work miracles. His speciality was exorcism. He began by casting the devil out of a girl and followed this by casting out eight more devils. In Lancashire he exorcized demons out of seven people simultaneously. But his greatest success was at Nottingham with a young lad named Somers whom he had met at an alehouse at Ashby where Somers was playing and singing. Darrel displayed Somers in his fits, speaking with strange voices, foaming at the mouth and so forth. People came from miles away to see the possessed youth; some saw him speak with his mouth shut, others saw something running up his leg and into his mouth. The lad's belly under the coverlet swelled enormously and his movements and voice seemed totally out of his control. Popular excitement and enthusiasm were immense. To add to it Darrel discovered in Somers a talent for identifying witches. In Nottingham alone Somers pointed to thirteen, most of them the usual old widows. But it was all too much for Somers who finally confessed that Darrel had taught him the whole bag of tricks, including using black lead to cause foaming at the mouth. All Somers had wanted was to get out of serving his period of apprenticeship as a musician. Darrel tried valiantly to make out that the devil had possessed the lad and tempted him into dissembling, appearing in the guise of a large black dog (which a fellow Puritan preacher actually saw, if we are to believe him), but things were never quite the same again.

Even more intriguing is the case of Judith Philips, whipped through the City of London for defrauding a rich Hampshire man in Upper Samborne, near Winchester. Not satisfied with her first husband's meagre income, Judith Philips left him and set up as a cunning woman in Upper Samborne. Hearing that a rich and credulous farmer lived nearby, she made it her business to find out all she could about the man and his wife, including the fact that he was engaged in a lawsuit with a neighbouring landowner. She then went by night to the farmer's back garden and buried an angel and a silver sixpence under a hollow holly tree.

The next day the man's wife was sitting at her open front door when the cunning woman passed by and stopped to stare intently at her. When questioned, she said that the goodwife had a remarkably fortunate face. 'Have you not' asked Judith Philips 'a hollow tree standing near unto your house, with certain weeds growing about the root?' 'We have', was the answer, 'and what of that?' The cunning woman then asked to speak to the man of the house and was invited in. Again she gazed fixedly at the man's face and told him that she knew by certain signs on his forehead that he was involved in a lawsuit with some great man of the shire, and that he would win the case. This greatly heartened the farmer whose spirits were further raised when the cunning woman informed him that she could help him find much buried treasure that lay in his grounds if he undertook to defray her modest expenses. The farmer was naturally hesitant and wished to see some demonstration of Judith Philip's alleged powers. This was easily arranged. She took him by the hand and led him to the root of the hollow tree where, after some digging, he found the angel and the silver sixpence.

The man needed no more convincing. He promised to provide her whatever she needed for her operations, which included the substantial sum of fourteen pounds. The cunning woman then said: 'Now must I have the largest chamber in your house behung with the finest linen you can get, so that nothing about your chamber but white linen cloth be seen; then must you set five candlesticks in five several places in your chamber, and under every candlestick you must put an angel of gold.' All this was done. One further item was also supplied at Judith Philip's request, namely a brand new saddle with two girths.

All was now ready. The cunning woman ordered the couple to go into the yard and the man to get down on all fours. She then put the saddle on him, fastened it with the girths and rode him three times between the house and the holly tree. Her next commands were: 'Yo u must lie three hours one by another grovelling on your bellies under this tree, and stir not, I charge you, until I come back again; for I must go into the chamber to meet the Queen of Fairies and welcome her to that holy and unspotted place.' The cunning woman then went inside the chamber, made a neat pile of the linen, candlesticks and money, and vanished into the night, pausing only to drape herself in some of the linen and make a brief appearance as the Fairy Queen, chanting appropriate incantations to the hapless couple quaking in the cold outside.

When the farmer awoke to the reality of the situation, he was too abashed to let the truth be discovered by his neighbour. Judith Philips might have escaped scot-free had her victim not ridden post-haste to Winchester seven miles away where he revealed the matter to an influential kinsman who organized a hue and cry immediately as a result of which the Queen of the Fairies was caught in mid-career, as it were.

The witchcraft craze in England did not long survive the scientific scepticism of the later seventeenth century. At least as far as the courts were concerned, more stringent standards of proof began to be called for (one judge remarked that it was not a legal offence to fly through the air) and it was not long before it became impossible to recognize with certainty an act of witchcraft. But though sceptism, which had existed almost from the beginning, spread to the courts as the century progressed, it does not seem to have affected popular belief in witches and witch-craft, which survived well into the nineteenth century and is hardly dead today. The biblical injunction 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' continued to haunt the folk mind. Enlightened Christians like Reginald Scot tried to explain that this referred to those who secretly harmed their neighbours and those who deliberately pretended to have magical powers. They did deserve death. But others were either innocently accused or deceived themselves. Like Scot, Samuel Harsnet tried to expose both Popish and witchcraft 'miracles' for the frauds they usually were, while Gifford, as we have seen, thought the only witch-craft that really existed was that of the devil who bewitched the minds of the credulous. But though their humanity and scepticism finally triumphed in the courts and witchcraft trials dwindled in number and finally ceased, popular superstition lingered on: 'I f you read the executions done upon witches, you shall see such impossibilities confessed as none, having his right wits, will believe'. Scot's despairing words were to remain true for a long time to come.