2

Witchcraft, Fortune, and Misfortune

The protection racket operated by some witches has already been mentioned. Witchcraft and its related vernacular magic gave special opportunities to commit other crimes, especially the ability to steal without getting caught. In the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, “no door is ever closed to a toadman” is a saying (Pattinson 1953, 425). (For more on the power of the toad, see chapter 11.) A head horseman at King’s Lynn in 1911 was always said to be able to make locked doors fly open by throwing his cap at them (Randall 1966, 110–11). In 1953 it was said of a certain pig farmer in the Peterborough region who always had enough in the days of wartime shortages, “Pig feed rationing in the war meant nothing to him: he was a toadman” (Pattinson 1953, 425). In 1933 a magical formula for stealing extra corn to feed one’s horses was taken from a wagoner at Digby in Lincolnshire. It involved catching a frog, killing it, and cutting its heart out. The body of the frog was then buried, and the wagoner carried the heart. It gave him the ability to pass through the small holes cut in barn doors for cats to come and go. In this way he could steal extra corn (Rudkin 1933, 199). One of the powers of the toadman or toadwoman is to be able to travel “out of the sight of people,” which literalists interpret as becoming invisible. But this is not the invisibility of standing in front of someone who can see through you. It is the invisibility of not being noticed, not being seen. The Herefordshire clever man Billy o’ Dormee from Pembridge “could charm the taties out o’ the stacks and nobody’d know, till they went to get ’em out; they’d be gone, and no sign. . . . You canna keep nothin’ with folks like that about” (Leather 1912, 56).

Those who knew the secrets of animal control, and toadmen and toadwomen are the most celebrated examples of such people, could use their powers for good or ill. There are many instances of people controlling horses by means of secret techniques that were often classified as witchcraft (see especially “The Horse Witch” section in chapter 10). Those who put on shows with horses, such as circus performers, could make them do things that amazed the onlookers. Members of horsemen’s fraternities sometimes made their horses perform as demonstrations of their power to others. Other animals could be controlled similarly by those in the know. A woman near Ross in Herefordshire was said to be able to make pigs dance when she whistled (Leather 1912, 55). It is interesting that the Pig and Whistle is a traditional pub name. Miss Disbury of Willingham in Cambridgeshire, who was an old woman in 1900, was noted for her uncanny power over cattle (Porter 1969, 175).

Near-universal belief in witches and their powers was prevalent in country districts until well into the twentieth century. James John Hissey, writing about Lincolnshire in 1898, recalled a meeting with a clergyman he met on a journey there “who confided in me” and said, “To get on in Lincolnshire, before all things it is necessary to believe in game, and not to trouble too much about the Catholic faith.” He further assured Hissey as a positive fact that both devil worship and a belief in witchcraft existed in the county. He said, “I could tell you many strange things of my rural experiences.” And he did: how the devil is supposed to haunt the churchyards in the shape of a toad, how witchcraft is practiced, and so forth. “You may well look astonished,” he exclaimed, “at what I tell you, but these things are so; they have come under my notice, and I speak advisedly from personal knowledge” (Hissey 1898, 223).

Accounts with any detail show how women who practiced as witches were marginalized and socially excluded and numbered among the most impoverished people in their respective villages. An 1888 description of Old Judy, the “witch of Burwell” in Cambridgeshire, tells that she lived in the most northerly of the squatters’ cottages, which were “half a dozen primitive one-storeyed hovels built of wattle-and-daub with clunch chimneys thatched with sedge and litter” (Porter 1969, 161). The Horseheath witch, Daddy Witch, was described as “half-clothed in rags” and “lived in a hut by the sheep-pond at Garret’s Close” (Parsons 1915, 39). The theory of Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft that “the Divell exhorteth them to observe their fidelitie unto him promising them long life and prosperitie” could hardly have been more wrong (Scot [1584] 1886).

Although frightened of witches, people also showed curiosity. There are examples of the funerals of reputed witches being attended by large crowds of people. The funeral of Susan Cooper at Whittlesford in 1878 was accompanied by large crowds who expected strange phenomena to occur. After her interment, the children of the village school trampled on her grave “so that the imps couldn’t get out” (Porter 1969, 175). Similarly, the funeral of a witch known as Mrs. Smith in Cambridgeshire in 1880 drew “such crowds of people at her funeral, they pushed each other right into the grave, expecting she would burst her coffin” (Wherry and Jennings 1905, 189).

People would travel long distances to visit magical practitioners; for example, “a man living in the neighborhood of Chichester, whose children and grandchildren are much afflicted, has twice taken a journey of upward of a hundred miles, with different members of his family, to visit a cunning man in Dorsetshire, who professes to be in possession of the charms. The month of May is the only month when they will work, and the sufferers, to have any benefit therefrom, must have their eyes fixed on the new moon at the time when they are presented with a box of ointment made from herbs gathered when the moon was full” (Latham 1878, 45).

The shoemaker James Murrell of Hadleigh in Essex (1812–1860) was known widely as Cunning Murrell. His specialty was to treat sick animals with herbal remedies, to recover stolen horses or cattle, and to perform countermagic against those whom his clients believed had bewitched them (Howe 1956, 138). After his death, letters were found written to him by people from as far away as Suffolk and London, asking for advice (Howe 1956, 139). In Lincoln in the 1840s, around the same time that Murrell was practicing in Essex, a man known as the Wizard of Lincoln traded on his ability to find stolen goods and the thieves who had taken them (Gutch and Peacock 1908, 84). Also in the nineteenth century, a Herefordshire cunning man called Jenkins was known to have the ability to find lost property and to identify thieves (Leather 1912, 57–59). In 1891, the Reverend J. C. Atkinson noted, “The most lucrative part of the Wise Man’s ‘practice’ seems to have been connected with the recovery of stolen or otherwise lost goods” (Atkinson 1891, 120).

There are numerous recorded tales of misfortune following the slighting of a witch and various ways of dealing with it. Here are three accounts from nineteenth-century Oxfordshire. In 1902, Percy Manning recounted a story told to him by ninety-one-year-old Mrs. Cooper from Barton, near Headington. She remembered that when she was a child, a woman named Miriam Russell, known as Old Miriam, had the reputation of being a witch. One time, she went to the Powell family, her farming neighbors, to ask a favor but was rebuffed. She said she would remember them. A few days later, the cows and calves all suddenly ran about as though they were going mad, and several calves were found at last on top of a thatched barn. Old Miriam made it known that this was her work. The Powells then willingly gave her what she wanted, and then the cows were quiet and the calves came down off the barn.

Manning also writes of another “notable witch,” Dolly Henderson, at Salford near Chipping Norton, who was active in the 1860s. A woman called Ann Hulver believed that Henderson had bewitched her and went to a cunning man to have the spell removed. Henderson was eventually attacked with a thorn stick and died soon after. Another incident in the same village in 1875 involved a man who was convicted of manslaughter for using a pitchfork to stab an old woman. His defense, rejected by the court, was that she was a witch and he was attempting to break her spells (Manning 1902, 290).