Kilkenny, Ireland
AT KYTELER'S INN, A BLACK CAT BECKONED. It arched in agitation on a sign above the doorway, at once a welcome and a warning. Inside, a band played “Ring of Fire” as I settled in at the bar. Perfumed gin wafted from a glass in front of me. Football was on the TV. In the walls, on the floor, at the bar, the stone and wood were worn, and it looked like any medieval pub—save for the witch statue in the corner. I sat on a stool taking it all in for over two hours, looking like someone casing the place—or maybe just a lonesome traveler. The gin flowed; I jumped in the river.
Lively Irish accents lilted through the rafters; some fell in a growl at my feet. It was late afternoon on a lazy summer day and people were talking sport, love, and life. Boredom threatened, so I took my drink to the basement to stretch my legs. More a cavern than a room, the Tavern Bar is held up by pillars of Kilkenny marble, some of which date to 1324. Back then this place was owned by a wealthy woman—some say a witch.
Tipping my gin, I finished my umpteenth drink under the moody subterranean lights. I ordered another and ran my hand absentmindedly across one of the pillars, hundreds of years beneath my fingertips. Drink refreshed, I took in the hypnotic scent of juniper—sweet, woody, crisp. Head spinning, I held my glass high, toasting the namesake of the tavern, and through the bottom of my glass I saw Dame Alice. First, she was the hissing of tonic bubbles, the flirtation of ice cubes clinking. Then, she was a face in a pillar, cheekbones muted gray, her waist the curve of stone. I shut my eyes, then opened them. She had fully taken shape.
Other patrons paid no mind. They faded to mere ghosts as a gauzy silence enveloped the room. And then it was the two of us—three if you count the large black cat circling her heels. Dame Alice Kyteler's legend and life story erupted at once from her lips, like two strains of music resonating in harmony, then in discord. It was hard to tell them apart.
The daughter of a Flemish merchant, Alice had wanted for few things in life. She controlled money as a lender, controlled acreage as a landowner, but could not control the gossip about her. She laughed delivering that last line, looking down at the cat who moved about her skirts, hunting loose threads like his life depended on it. A purring companion, a kitchen mouser, a harmless pet—but the cat had been suspect, too.
Alice had had four husbands. When her trials began, she had already buried three, feeling sorrow for some more than others. Suspicious of her motives, Alice's stepchildren began to accuse her of unsavory things. They wondered why their fathers had died so unexpectedly, had been taken ill so suddenly. And most of all there was the question of their inheritance—the money. Her eyes glistened with tears, but I couldn't tell if she was laughing at her misfortune or weeping for it.
Alice's stature, her wealth, and her long line of men would be used against her. Kyteler was accused of denying the Christian faith and leading a covert gang of heretical sorcerers in Kilkenny. According to records from the Diocese of Ossory, “over an oaken fire they boiled the intestines and interior organs of cocks sacrificed to demons” along with “certain horrifying worms, various herbs, and also nails of the dead, buttock hairs, and frequently clothes of children who died without baptism, as well as many other abominable ingredients, in a pot made from the head of a certain decapitated thief.” Then, Kyteler's alleged sect of witches cooked these “various powders, ointments, and potions, and also candles from greasy fat left in the said pot, as they said various incantations, to arouse love or hatred, to kill and also to afflict the bodies of faithful Christians, and for innumerable other purposes.”
But that wasn't all. Alice was accused of poisoning her first three husbands, as well as poisoning her current husband, who remained barely alive, his hair and fingernails all falling out, nearly at death's door. Finally, Alice Kyteler was accused of having sex with an incubus named Robin or Robert. He was said to have known her in ways none of her husbands ever could. He knew the flush of her skin, the arch of her back. He slaked her thirst like no other, they said.
Sometimes, he took the form of a cat.
She was amused, then betrayed by these hostilities—but not surprised. She knew wealth was as deadly an intoxicant as any and how it could easily lead you astray. But it wasn't Alice's stepchildren alone who wanted her quite literally to pay. There was a man of the church, she spat, face pinched into a glower, who was unnaturally obsessed with Kyteler's supposed sins.
In 1317, English bishop Richard Ledrede had come all the way from the papacy—then in Avignon—to become Bishop of Ossory. He was called to instill order to this so-called lawless land, which was then believed by many Catholics from the continent to be Christian on the surface but Pagan underneath. Ledrede's obsession with heretical sorcery—inspired by Pope John XXII's views no doubt—began to stir up superstition in the minds of Kilkenny's citizens, too. It was Ledrede who convened the Inquisitional court made up of knights and nobles to prosecute Alice. In fact, Ledrede pursued Alice so doggedly that he was briefly arrested and imprisoned in Kilkenny Castle by an esteemed relative of hers, Chancellor of Ireland Roger Outlawe: kin to Alice's beloved son William.
Dame Alice stopped mid-sentence to grab a nearby broom and began to sweep the floor of the Tavern Bar. It was beneath her, perhaps, but phantasms have their own proclivities. Her red-gold hair was dancing fire as she stirred ancient dirt from the ground. Swirling the broom in circles, she made the bristles scratch out an earthy symphony. The act was in keeping with another accusation documented in a less-thantrustworthy source, for it was also reported that certain townspeople saw Alice sweeping the streets like this and repeating an incantation after sundown: “To the house of William my sonne, Hie all the wealth of Kilkennie towne.”
Alice and the broom twisted across the stone floor, humming. But then she stopped, her hand gripping the handle with purpose as she steadied herself. Her tongue raked slowly across her lips, and I heard the cat's purr begin to grow louder and louder as she let me peer into the past. Alice looked up, and I heard the story—the hearsay—once more.
The bishop's imprisonment did not last long. There was only so much sway the secular Irish authorities—chancellor of Ireland included—had over the all-powerful Catholic Church. Ledrede was eventually freed and doubled down on his desire to see Alice burn. She managed to hold off arrest for as long as she could, but realizing there would be no easy end for her, she used her great means to leave Ireland for England.
Alice never returned to her birthplace, her home. But now, she avowed, she can come and go as she pleases. She can walk—or sweep if the mood strikes—the grounds of her former estate that still lures curious travelers like me here, drawn in by the lore of her name.
I had so many questions, but my vision was blurring and Alice would communicate no more. She stared mutely as I tipped my glass for another drink and vanished as peculiarly as she appeared. The room erupted in chatter, in music. The basement bar was getting more and more crowded, and I needed air—and answers. I paid my tab and went back upstairs and outside, past the statue of Alice, broom in hand and cat at her feet, that stood in a corner near the door.
I stepped out of Kyteler's Inn and onto the medieval thoroughfare. The sun was out, but flagging. Turning left, I cut up a side passage called the “Butter Slip,” fossils shining white in black Kilkenny marble beneath my boots. Nearly back on High Street, I walked past a restaurant, Petronella. The place is named after Petronilla de Midia (also known as de Meath), located mere steps away from where she burned alive in Alice's stead.
Furious that a woman—a witch—had escaped justice, Bishop Ledrede forged ahead in his case even after Alice escaped. He arrested multiple other people who found themselves entangled in his web, including Petronilla de Midia, who was reputedly Alice's maid in whom she confided over the years. At Ledrede's direction, Petronilla was repeatedly flogged. In excruciating pain, she passed her breaking point.
Using torture, the bishop obtained Petronilla de Midia's confession and all the information about Kyteler he needed to hear. Petronilla admitted to renouncing God and to practicing demonic magic that Alice Kyteler had taught her, even offering sacrifices to demons and acting as a medium. She also confessed to cleaning up after Kyteler and her demon lover's trysts—and goddess knows what that entailed.
In some accounts of the tale, Alice's home was searched again, and when the authorities looked through her closet, they found “a wafer of sacramental bread, having the devil's name stamped thereon instead of Jesus Christ, and a pipe of ointment wherewith she greased a staff, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what manner she listed.”
Ointments such as the one described above used for magical flight, or transvection, would become part of the early modern witch-on-abroomstick discourse centuries later. However, it remains unclear if such a thing was ever found in Alice's home. But flying ointment or no, Petronilla's confession was enough to get her killed. She was burned alive with much fanfare for the whole town there to see. The rest of those Ledrede arrested were given punishments of various penances—nothing more. Petronilla de Midia would go down in history as the first woman to be executed for heresy in Ireland. Nevertheless, it is Alice Kyteler whose name is most remembered.
The history of witch hunting in Ireland isn't as bloody or storied as that of nearby Scotland or England, which is why Dame Alice and her cohorts remain so captivating. Witches didn't stir up nearly the same dread on the Emerald Isle as they did elsewhere.
Ronald Hutton explains in “Witch Hunting in Celtic Societies” that the Irish somehow “managed to absorb a fervent Counter-Reformation Catholicism without also importing the stereotype of demonic witchcraft that commonly accompanied it.” And yet, Kyteler's case has notable hallmarks of the early modern witch hunts, foreshadowing their particulars hundreds of years prior.
“Ledrede's prosecution of the Kyteler case offers a classic representation of the witch craze in many of its aspects,” asserts Maeve Brigid Callan in The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland. “An older woman who deviates from the norm is charged with outrageous crimes against God and decency in a deliberate subversion of Christian ritual and patriarchal order.”
But unlike most accused witches, Alice was rich. She was educated. She had connections. Nevertheless, there is much about Ledrede's witch hunting that has a familiar ring to it, especially in poor Petronilla de Midia's torture-driven confession, which Callan suggests was “largely shaped by Ledrede,” through its volatile combination of “maleficia with diabolical sorcery and ritual and love magic with apostasy.” Ultimately, it was the Bishop of Ossory and his ideas of heresy and dark magic steeped in fourteenth-century French demonology who spun the accusations of Alice's stepchildren into something far more sinister.
In search of surviving remnants of Kilkenny's medieval witch hunt, I headed down the bustling High Street to Saint Mary's. This thirteenth-century cruciform church was central to the community in Alice's day, and it was the place where her son William Outlawe was confronted with his imposed penances by Bishop Ledrede after she skipped town. Now, the stone structure and its many ornate carvings are preserved as the Medieval Mile Museum, which offers a glimpse into Ireland's past through its treasured artifacts and architecture.
I studied the aging graves outside that mark the final remains of Kilkenny's richest, before confirming the pronunciation of “Kyteler” with the docents inside the museum. (They said Dame Alice's name—unfortunately—rhymes with “Hitler,” though I heard other locals say the name with a bit more “eh.”) The selection of imposing Celtic crosses had me dreaming up epic tattoos, but Kilkenny Castle awaited, so I moved on to see the end of the Medieval Mile.
Built in the twelfth century, the castle complex resides on a rolling landscape of bright emerald grass—the kind of cat's eye electric green that blankets Ireland. Many elements of the medieval foundation and fortification remain in the castle, and it's easy to imagine Ledrede shut away here in his brief imprisonment. Initially built by the Anglo-Normans, Kilkenny Castle signifies the town's long-running divisions along ethnic lines, between the indigenous Irish and the settlers/invaders/colonizers from England and beyond.
My final destination was the Kyteler burial slab at Saint Canice's Cathedral on the other side of town. A short walk from Kyteler's Inn lies the divide between what was formerly “English Town” or “High Town” where the merchants and wealthy colonists lived, and “Irish Town,” which was decidedly less well off. At the time, Saint Canice's was the religious heart of the latter.
The Round Tower on the site of Saint Canice's is over a thousand years old and one of the few you can still climb all the way to the top. The cathedral itself dates back to 1202 and inside is the black marble slab belonging to Alice's father Joseph Kyteler, inscribed with a simple Flemish cross. The Kyteler slab was found near Alice's home (now Kyteler's Inn) in the late nineteenth century and brought here. Not far from Joseph Kyteler lies his daughter's greatest foe, Bishop Richard Ledrede, who passed away after serving in Ossory for over forty years.
An effigy chiseled out of stone is affixed to Ledrede's tomb, depicting the bishop wearing a traditional robe and sandals—a reference to his humble beginnings as a priest in the Franciscan order. But despite his path, there is evidence that points to Ledrede being quite transfixed by the almighty dollar.
Maeve Brigid Callan cites a letter from the King of England and Lord of Ireland Edward III to Pope Innocent VI that is not so complimentary toward the Bishop of Ossory. It says that “‘forgetful of his original mendicancy,’ Ledrede fabricated heresy charges in order to extort money from the accused.” Callan adds that the “allegation can be substantiated by William Outlaw's payment to the bishop of £1,000 shortly after being released from prison and perhaps explains his enthusiasm in his prosecution of William's mother, an exceptionally wealthy woman.”
Greed was indeed a motivation in many early modern witch hunts, as the church, state, and/or powerful individuals often had the motives and ability to swallow up possessions of the accused and convicted. Once again, the case of Alice Kyteler foreshadows much of what would occur in witch hunts across Scotland, England, and continental Europe.
Taking in the church's aging finery, I caught a face staring back at me from one of the columns. I moved closer to confirm my suspicions. No, it wasn't Alice, but the Green Man, his marble mouth bursting with leafy foliage. This spirit or symbol of vegetative renewal was important enough to the indigenous Irish 800 years ago that it was built into the structure of this Christian church. Today, the Green Man remains an important symbol of nature's potency for contemporary Pagans and witches in Ireland and beyond. It made me think of the zodiac in San Miniato al Monte in Florence and of the ways Pagan nature-worship has been both incorporated and rejected by Christianity over the past millennium.
When I walked back to my hotel in the brisk summer twilight, music burst from the open doors of every pub on High Street. I pulled my jacket tightly around me like a protective shroud. Crossing the bridge by Kilkenny Castle, I saw the ramparts reflected in the River Nore, a watery inversion of its earthly glory. It was a beautiful but distorted vision of a reality just out of reach, much like the Pagan past so many of us who practice witchcraft try to apprehend.
In “The Nearest Kin of the Moon: Irish Pagan Witchcraft, Magic(k) and the Celtic Twilight,” Jenny Butler writes about the appeal of uniquely Irish witch figures like the “cunning woman” called the bean feasa and her male equivalent the “fairy doctor” to contemporary Irish witches and Pagans.
“It must be noted that many of the connections being made by Pagan witches with traditional healers, and the practice of certain types of rituals, involve some reinterpretations and reimagining of the past,” Butler explains. As with much contemporary witchcraft in Ireland and beyond, there is often a flexible understanding of history at play when practitioners seek to ground their workings in bygone eras. “Historicity becomes ancillary when more imaginative connections are being made between present and past spiritualities and context can at times be transcended in favor of making ‘magical’ connections explicit,” Butler continues. She adds that whether these connections are “true” or “false” is often the least compelling piece of the puzzle to explore.
The deeply romantic notion of a Pagan witchcraft practice that survived unchanged from pre-Christian times is not historically verifiable. But the lack of evidence for a witch cult doesn't preclude a magical dialogue between past and present that can exist within your own practice, within your own ancestry.
Staring at the reflection of the castle in a sheen of black water, I thought of the Green Man's carved face in Saint Canice's Cathedral. Though softened by time, it was a startling reminder that what came before can persist against all odds. The leaves that sprout from the Green Man's mouth proclaim the all-consuming power of nature, to which we all must ultimately submit, regardless of belief.
