THE APPEARANCE OF a comet early in 1619 was seen by many as an evil portent. When the queen died a short while later, it seemed that their predictions were coming true – particularly as the king himself was ailing. He was too frail to attend his wife’s funeral, and it was widely believed that he would soon follow her to the grave. But he rallied, apparently thanks to a bizarre remedy that he himself had devised. ‘On Saturday last the King killed a buck in Eltham Park,’ it was reported, ‘and so soon as it was opened stood in the belly of it and bathed his bare feet and legs with the warm blood; since which time he has been so nimble that he thinketh this the only remedy for the gout.’1
There was no such miracle cure for the young Lord Ros, whose condition continued to worsen, despite the ministrations of the country’s best doctors. It may have been Joan Flower’s failure to heal her son that persuaded Cecilia and her husband to finally heed the ‘newes, tales and reports’ which their servants and tenants had been whispering ever since the death of the elder Manners boy. Now, ‘by degrees’, they too came to suspect that their sons had been bewitched by the Flower women.2 It was said that ‘their hearts began to breed dislike, and greatly grew affraid’.3 In common with the rest of the local community, they had started to believe that they and their children had fallen ill not of natural causes, but of witchcraft.
It is easy to understand the appeal that the rumours about the Flower women held for the earl and countess. If Joan and her daughters had bewitched their young son, then there was always the hope that the curse might be lifted. It transformed the boy’s parents from helpless bystanders to active participants, able to hunt down the witches and thus restore their victim. If, on the other hand, the boy was simply suffering from a natural (possibly inherited) disease or condition, then the prospects of his recovery seemed bleak indeed, especially given that his ailment had confounded the best medical minds of the age.
With her husband still at court, Cecilia may have superintended the attempts to cure their son by persecuting the Flower women. Before seeking a cure for bewitchment, it was important to find out the name of the suspected witch. In this case, village gossip had already pointed the finger of blame at Joan and her daughters. A number of options then lay open to the victim or their family and friends. They included ‘banging and basting, scratching and clawing, to draw the blood of the witch’, ‘burning of the thatch of the suspected parties house’, making her touch the victim, or simply threatening the accused.4 Contemporary trial records reveal that other, more obscure methods were also employed. One of the witnesses in an Essex witch trial of 1582 testified that she had taught the victim to ‘unwitche her self’ by gathering some pigs’ dung and bones, telling her to ‘holde them in her left hand, and to take in the other hande a knife, and then to cast the said into the fire and to take the said knife and to make three pricks under a table and to pricke the medicine three times, and to make three pricks under a table, and to let the knife sticke there: and after that to take three leves of sage, and as much of herbe John . . . and put them into ale, and drink it last at night and first in the morning’. The witness claimed that this malodorous potion had achieved a marked improvement in her patient.5
More traditional methods ranged from burning the victim’s hair to plunging a red-hot spit into cream. Alternatively, one could boil, bake or bury a sample of the victim’s urine, which would render the witch unable to urinate. Plagued with extreme discomfort, she would be forced to confess her guilt. Also common was the use of witch bottles, which were filled ‘with varying quantities of bent nails, cloth, human hair, fingernail clippings and urine’ from the victim.6 At the same time as curing the afflicted, this method was believed to torment the attacker or to bring them back to the scene of the crime. Other methods included burning a sample of the suspect’s hair, or making an image of them and pricking it with pins. The father of Elizabeth Chamberlain claimed that she had been bewitched to death by Jane Kent. When his wife looked set to go the same way, he hastened to a doctor in Spitalfields, who advised him to take some of his wife’s urine, nails and hair and boil them up in a cooking pot. The man duly did so, and declared that when this unsavoury concoction reached boiling point, he heard Jane Kent at the door and she ‘screamed out as if she were murdered, and that the next day she appeared to be much swelled and bloated’.7 In this way, as one seventeenth-century commentator wryly observed, people ‘often become witches, by endeavouring to defend themselves against witchcraft’.8
All the ‘cures’ for witchcraft were united by a common idea: that by causing harm to the witch, the victim would be freed from their malevolent power. Violence towards suspected witches was therefore freely sanctioned. When old Mother Rogers of Sussex was accused of bewitching a child in 1593, a local cunning man advised that she be stabbed in the buttocks. Drawing blood by ‘scratching’ was a more common practice. ‘For some fall upon the Witch and beate her, or clawe her, to fetch blood: that so her spirite may have no power,’ observed George Gifford.9 Joan Flower’s friend Anne Baker was beaten by a local man, William Fairbarn, in order to release his son Thomas from her spell. ‘They said William Fairbarn did beat her and breake her head,’ she testified, ‘whereupon the said Thomas Fairbarn, did mend.’10 But the most effective cure of all was to have the witch prosecuted and put to death. ‘The malefic is prevented or cured in the execution of the witch,’ declared the mid-seventeenth-century authority John Gaule. Likewise, Jean Bodin counselled that ‘with the end of the chief cause, comes the end of the effects’.11 James I himself agreed that the annihilation of the witch was ‘a salutary sacrifice for the patient’.12
We do not know which, if any, of the known cures for bewitchment the Countess resorted to in an attempt to save her ailing son. But given how close she was to despair, she must have been willing to try anything. The strength of feeling among her servants and tenants was such that there would have been no shortage of volunteers to carry out the common ‘cure’ of threatening or harming the suspected witch. Joan Flower and her daughters now found themselves subject to increasing hostility and intimidation on the part of their neighbours.
None of this worked any effect upon the health of young Francis. The accepted wisdom of the day was that if all efforts to ‘unwitch’ a victim failed, then the only hope was if the suspect was forced to confess and a reconciliation followed. Others insisted that healing would only be achieved if the witch was put to death. In both cases, the law was required to take over. Cecilia needed no further incentive. What happened next is a testament to the injustice possible when the aristocracy accused commoners of witchcraft.
Joan Flower and her daughters were arrested either just after Christmas 1618 or at the beginning of 1619. By now, the process of bringing a suspected witch to trial was well established. In rural communities, a complaint would be made (often by the victim) to the village constable, who in turn would pass it to the local magistrate. The latter would then question both the accused and their accuser. In so doing, he would attempt to draw out information which would be useful at the court of assize. All of this would be written down in quite a formulaic way by the magistrate’s clerk in a pre-trial document – or ‘information’ – against the witch. Finally, the accusation would be put to the defendant, and her response would be recorded by the same clerk as an ‘examination’. On the basis of these accounts, the magistrate would commit the suspected witch for trial at the next assizes, and she would pass the period of waiting in gaol. This could be up to six months, depending on when in the court cycle arrest and examination had taken place. At the same time, any person likely to be able to give material evidence in the case would be bound over to appear at the assizes.
According to the author of the Belvoir witch pamphlet, it was apparently thanks to God’s intervention that Joan and her daughters were now brought to justice. Rather than their accuser being named directly, he claims that God ensured that their crimes were discovered. We are left to consider whether it was a vengeful neighbour or a member of the Manners family who first raised the alarm. Certainly it was not their alleged victim, Lord Ros, who still lay dangerously ill at Belvoir. Neither was it the Earl of Rutland, who was at the court in Whitehall when the arrest was made. More likely is that his wife Cecilia – increasingly frantic with worry over their ailing son – had taken matters into her own hands.
To bring a suspected witch to justice, one had to either have money enough oneself, or to enjoy the patronage of a local gentleman or aristocrat. Most accusers were drawn from the ranks of yeoman farmers and their families. It was rare for members of the gentry to be the prime movers in a case, which is one of the reasons why the Belvoir trial attracted so much attention. By contrast, those who were tried for witchcraft were, if not completely destitute, certainly very poor and always of a lower social grade than their accusers.
Interestingly, there are no surviving witness statements by whoever brought the case against the Flower women before the local magistrate. The absence of such statements in a case of this profile suggests that either the author of the Belvoir witch pamphlet chose not to include them along with the other evidence cited, or that they were not taken in the first place. Both scenarios hint at a hasty arrest, the outcome of which had been predetermined.
That the finger of blame should be pointed at Joan and her daughters after such a prolonged period – at least five years – is typical of other cases of witchcraft. As one recent authority on the subject put it: ‘an indictment for witchcraft was usually the outcome of a web of suspicion which was woven over a lengthy period’.13 Once a suspected witch had been identified, a process of post-rationalisation would begin, whereby a whole series of misfortunes that had occurred in the community over a number of years would be laid at her door. The arrest of an accused witch therefore rarely followed a single incident, but was the result of growing tensions and suspicions. The contemporary legal sources reveal that some women were accused of witchcraft on several occasions and over a long period of time – 10 years or more in some cases.
Thus, for example, when Amy Duny and Rose Cullender of Lowestoft were accused of bewitching two young girls to death in 1664, several witnesses came forward to testify that the women were responsible for various misfortunes over the previous few years. Anne Sandeswell recalled an incident seven or eight years before, while Dorothy Durent blamed the witches for her daughter’s death five years earlier and the illness of her infant son in 1657. When Jane Wenham was tried in the following century, and the judge asked Elizabeth Field why she had not testified earlier, considering that her child had allegedly been bewitched to death many years before, she artlessly replied that she appeared now, ‘the opportunity presenting itself’.14
In his Discourse of the Subtill Practises of Devilles, George Gifford described the common process by which suspicion of a member of the community could deepen into something altogether more dangerous.
Some woman doth fal out bitterly with her neighbour: there followeth some great hurt . . . There is a suspicion conceived. Within fewe yeares after shee is in some jarred with an other. Hee is also plagued. This is noted of all. Great fame is spread of the matter. Mother W. is a witch. She hath bewitched goodman B. Two hogges which died strangely: or else hee is taken lame. Wel, mother W doth begin to bee very odious & terrible unto many, her neighbours, dare say nothing but yet in their heartes they wish shee were hanged. Shortly after an other falleth sicke and doth pine, hee can have no stomacke unto his meate, nor hee can not sleepe. The neighbours come to visit him. Well neighbour, sayth one, do ye not suspect some naughty dealing: did yee never anger mother W? Truly neighbour (sayth he) I have not liked the woman a long tyme . . . I thinke verely shee hath bewitched me. Every body sayth now that mother W is a witch in deede . . . Then is mother W apprehended, and sent to prison, she is arrayned and condemned, and being at the gallows, taketh it uppon her death, that shee is not gylty.16
There was a strikingly insular nature to accusations of witchcraft in England, most of which were rooted in rural communities, where the presence of an undesirable person could less easily be ignored than in a town or city. A leading authority on the subject has calculated that in 410 of 460 cases in Essex, the witch and their victim came from the same village.17 The vast majority of the population – as many as 80 per cent – lived in the countryside, and with the exception of London, most urban centres were very small.18
Many witchcraft cases concerned not just one village, but sometimes one small section of a village. Reginald Scot argued that a witch’s power only extended as far as their neighbours: ‘for their furthest fetches that I can comprehend, are but to fetch a pot of milke, &c.: from their neighbors house, halfe a mile distant from them’.19 The evidence also strongly suggests that almost all of those accused were closely linked to their ‘victims’ in some way. Most commonly, they had been involved in a dispute. Bringing charges of witchcraft was a means of expressing deep-seated animosity in an acceptable guise.
But the insular nature of communities did not always produce such negative results. There is also evidence that the strength of local ties could help prevent injustice in witchcraft cases. Thus, when the Yorkshire gentleman Edward Fairfax brought charges against the women whom he claimed had bewitched his daughters, they were acquitted after the judges received scores of testimonies that they had never before practised witchcraft. Similarly, when Mary Hickington was imprisoned in York Castle on suspicion of witchcraft in 1651, a petition with 200 signatures was sent to the northern assizes attesting to her good character.
Many of those accused of witchcraft were on the periphery of village life: they were eccentric, unconventional, or just did not fit in. Sometimes, though, as seems likely in the case of the Flower women, the accused were obnoxious characters who were determined to antagonise members of their community with their antisocial behaviour. In short, they were often people one would not have wished to have as neighbours. The witch hunts represented an ideal way of getting rid of them.
Before they were taken to their place of incarceration, it is possible that Joan and her daughters were subjected to one or more common ‘tests’ used to detect witches. One of the most popular, and feared, was ‘swimming’ the suspect. The use of ordeal by water – a practice wholeheartedly endorsed by the king in Daemonologie – was one of the most notorious ways of ‘finding out’ a witch. The premise of this brutal method was that water was so pure it would reject anything evil. As John Cotta put it: ‘Water is an element which is used in Baptisme, and therefore by the myraculous & extraordinary power of God, doth reject and refuse those who have renounced their vowe and promise thereby, made unto God, of which sort are Witches.’20 The accused person was duly thrown into a lake or river, often with their hands and feet bound; if they floated they were guilty (and punished accordingly), and if they sank they were innocent.21
Two later editions of the Belvoir witch pamphlet include a detailed description of this horrific practice.
The onely assured and absolute perfect way to finde her out, is to take the Witch or party suspected either to some Mildam, Pond, Lake or deepe River, and stripping her to her smocke, tie her armes acrosse, onely let her legs have free liberty; then fastening a rope about her middle which with the helpe of by standers may be ever ready to save her from drowning (in case she sinke) throw her into the water, and if shee swimme aloft and not sincke, then draw her foorthe, and have some honest and discreet women neere, which may presently search her for the secret marke of Witches, as Teates, blood-moales, most warts, and the like, which found, then the second time (binding her right thumbe to her left toe, and her left thumbe to her right toe) throw her into the water againe (with the assistance of the former rope to save her, if shee should chance to sincke) and if then shee swim againe and doe not sincke you may most assuredly resolve she is a Witch.
The author claimed that this method had proved so effective that he could ‘receite a world of others in the same nature’, adding: ‘But the trueth is so manifest that it needeth no flourish to adorne it.’22 Not everyone was convinced. When an elderly Suffolk vicar was interrogated by Hopkins and his men but refused to confess, they resorted to this ordeal to prove his guilt, as one who was present recorded: ‘They swam him at Framlingham, but that was no true Rule to try him by; for they put in honest People at the same time, and they swam as well as he.’23
The Belvoir pamphlet describes various other methods used to ‘discover’ witches. These included ‘the pricking of a sharpe knife, naule, or other pointed instrument under the stoole or seate on which the Witch sitteth (for thereon shee is not able to sit or abide)’, inviting their victims to scratch or draw blood from the witch, and ‘burning any relique or principall ornament belonging to the suspected Witch, which shall no sooner bee on fire; but the Witch will presently come running to behold it’.24
Why did the author trouble to include descriptions of these various tortures in his tract about Joan Flower and her daughters? He may have been keen to show off his knowledge of the procedures, but it is more likely that the Flower women suffered the ordeals he described. The hostility towards them amongst the local community would certainly have been strong enough to have ensured ample volunteers to assist in the tasks. But if they did endure such tortures, then they must have remained steadfast about their innocence, because there is no record of a confession at this stage.
Whichever method of arrest was employed for the Flower women, it all happened with bewildering speed. They would not have been allowed to return home first because it was feared that women who had been arrested for witchcraft might take revenge upon their accusers if they saw them again. The case was slightly complicated by the fact that Belvoir Castle was then part of Lincolnshire, whereas Bottesford was in Leicestershire. But it is a testament to the importance of the case that this administrative conundrum did nothing to delay proceedings in any way. It was swiftly decided that Joan and her daughters would be taken to Lincoln, where they would be imprisoned and interrogated at the castle while awaiting their trial.
The records do not tell us whether the women tried to evade capture or refused to go with those charged with arresting them. If they had, then the law dictated that the latter could beat them into submission. The same law stipulated that the conveying of a prisoner to gaol was to be at the prisoner’s own expense – or, if they could not afford it, then of the town where they were arrested.25 Given the poverty of the Flower family, it is unlikely that they met the cost of their journey to Lincoln themselves.
The arrest of Joan Flower and her daughters excited a great deal of interest among their contemporaries. It was unusual for a witchcraft case to involve such a high-profile family as the Manners; most centred upon little more than village squabbles. Although rare, such cases did tend to leave behind more detailed evidence than those in which the victims were much lower down the social scale. A contemporary of the Manners, Edward Fairfax, a Yorkshire landowner, accused six women of bewitching his two daughters, 21-year-old Helen and 7-year-old Elizabeth, in 1621. Meanwhile, in Scotland, a woman named Isobel Gowdie was accused of bewitching the Laird of Park’s sons to death in 1662.26 In the previous century, the notorious case of the Witches of Warboys involved the five daughters of Robert Throckmorton, who were believed to have fallen grievously ill as a result of witchcraft. Interestingly, as soon as the suspected witches were executed, all five girls recovered. This was taken as irrefutable proof that to effect a cure for witchcraft, the perpetrators must be put to death. With the young Lord Ros’s life hanging in the balance, there could have been no more powerful incentive for the Manners family to ensure that the full force of the law was visited upon Joan and her daughters.
The Flower women and their captors set out on the 40 or so miles to Lincoln in the depths of winter. After 16 miles, they reached the ancient village of Ancaster, at the foot of the old Roman road, known as Ermine Street, which would convey them in a straight line to the city of Lincoln. This would have been more easily passable in poor weather than the muddier lowland roads along which they had travelled thus far. But for one of the women, it was where the journey would end.
Worn down by the treatment that she and her daughters had already suffered, Joan Flower was also terrified by the prospect of what lay ahead. Despite there being no recorded witch-burnings in England, the fallacy that this was the punishment that they could expect was a well-established part of popular folklore, both in the seventeenth century and today. Joan was said to have confided to a friend ‘that her spirits did say that shee should neyther be hanged nor burnt’.27 She was not alone in believing that burning might be the punishment for her alleged witchcraft. The misconception may have arisen from the rarely exercised power of the church courts to punish all heresy, including witchcraft, by burning. Or perhaps it recalled the notorious mass burnings of Protestants during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor, which were immortalised by the graphic illustrations in John Foxe’s hugely influential Book of Martyrs. Most people would also have heard stories of the witch-burnings in Continental Europe and, closer to home, in Scotland.
Fear made Joan desperate. When the party reached Ancaster, she demanded an ordeal that would prove her innocence straight away. According to the contemporary pamphlet, ‘Joane Flower the Mother before conviction, (as they say) called for Bread and Butter, and wished it might never goe through her if she were guilty of that whereupon shee was examined.’28 This method of ordeal had been practised for hundreds of years. The bread was first blessed by a priest to make it pure so that if an evil person attempted to swallow it, their body would reject it immediately. ‘Why should not Bread and Wine, being elements in that Sacrament of the Eucharist, be likewise noted and observed to turne backe, or flye away from the throats, mouthes and teeth of Witches?’ demanded one advocate of the trial.29 Legend has it that King Harold’s father, Earl Godwine, met his death in 1052 when he choked on a piece of bread in an attempt to prove his innocence of certain crimes.
It is possible that the Reverend Samuel Fleming, chaplain to the Earl of Rutland and rector of Bottesford, was among those who accompanied Joan and her daughters on their journey to Lincoln, for he had been prevailed upon to join in their interrogation. He may therefore have performed the blessing of the bread. Upon being presented with it, Joan broke off a piece and put it into her mouth. ‘So mumbling it in her mouth, never spake more wordes after, but fell donne and dyed as she was carried to Lincolne Goale, with a horrible excruciation of soule and body.’30 Her astonished captors were left gaping in wonder at having apparently witnessed God’s vengeance upon a witch.
No satisfactory explanation has been put forward for this extraordinary incident. Perhaps Joan – like many others who underwent this ordeal – had believed so strongly in its infallibility that she was seized by panic and terror, and either genuinely choked or had a heart attack. The claim by a nineteenth-century historian that Joan had been ‘overpowered by consciousness of the contrariety between these protestations [of innocence] and the guilty design which she had entertained in her mind’ is hardly more believable.31 The less palatable truth is probably that the tale was invented to cover up the fact that the Flower women had been mistreated, and that – as the eldest – Joan had proved fatally susceptible. The rigours of the long journey in the middle of winter must also have taken their toll.
According to the contemporary account of the case, Joan was buried at Ancaster. There is no sign or record of any such burial, but this in itself does not disprove the story. Not all graves were marked, particularly those of poor people, and as a suspected witch Joan would have been denied burial in a churchyard. Her death proves how dispensable such people were: they could literally be made to disappear without trace or recrimination.
With their mother dead and no other defender in the world, Margaret and Phillipa Flower were forced to endure the rest of the journey to Lincoln, tormented by the thought of what lay ahead.