“[I]n the case of Witch-Craft many things are very difficult, hidden, and infolded in mists and clouds, over-shadowing our reason and best understanding.”

INTRODUCTION

William Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins, not with the play’s namesake, but with a meeting of three witches at night. Under the cloak of darkness, the “weird sisters” gather to plan out their encounter with Macbeth. The play, written and performed around the turn of the 17th century, is one of the longest-lasting and most popular depictions of witchcraft. Though not main characters themselves (their names are but “First Witch,” “Second Witch,” and “Third Witch”), they are central to the unraveling of the plot. Marion Gibson notes that “with their economical, rhythmic and riddling speeches,” the weird sisters “create in a few short scenes an oppressive atmosphere of evil and mystery which blights the whole play.” Gibson at 112.

Just like the three witches in the play, however, little is known about the witches they intended to imitate in real life. Theorizing their purpose in the play, Gibson notes a doubt left unanswered: “Attention is directed towards the source of evil, but nothing is revealed [about them] and the audience and readers, like the characters, are left unsatisfied.” Gibson at 112. Gibson’s analysis veers in the direction of attempting to explain the inspiration for the witch characters (likely a blend of Scottish and English references to indulge the King and audience, she notes). Id. Though modern readers of Shakespeare know very little, presumably, about the witches, how much did the audience at the time of the play’s development know? How did they relate to the characters (and what about the real witches)? After all, at the time of the play’s creation and performance, witchcraft was considered real by many—and a crime at that.

-- My intent in this paper is to explore some of the reasons why early Modern English people convicted others of witchcraft. Much is written on the evidence used to convict these women, for they were primarily women, of evil-doing but much less is known as to the reasons why the common belief allowed such an outcome. This, of course, is a far more complicated question with few definitive or satisfactory answers. Reaching the thoughts and beliefs of the common people is a difficult task to undertake. For one, what has passed on in time of common beliefs, much like the words of the weird sisters, has been facilitated through the mouths and memories of others(actors in real life, if you will). Most common people, after all, could not read or write. Additionally, the sources from which we can divine the common understanding of witchcraft are largely biased: the court sources, in the form of records and the writings of educated observers, and demonological tracts, written by theologians. Sharpe at 58.

Left with few historical records, this papers reaches some of these questions by attempting to understand the cultural life which the witches and their accusers inhabited. My original inquiry into how witchcraft, again a crime, was proved at trial necessarily leads to the question of the state of mind of those on whom the conviction hung: the lay jurors. I use the anthropological writings, heavily borrowing from Clifford Geertz on common sense and the law, to arrive at some of the answers and to think through some other proposed suggestions.

On some level, a basic one perhaps, witchcraft helped explain the reason why events, many of them tragic or unfortunate, occurred—why bad things happened to the supposed good people of the community. Though Trevor-Roper has called witchcraft persecution “[t]he rubbish of the human mind,” and he, in certain respects, is not wrong, it is also worth exploring the socio-cultural beliefs that made a belief in witchcraft real. Trevor-Roper at 97. As Carlo Ginzburg explores in Ecstasies, witchcraft persecution, with the witches’ sabbath at the center, emerges from a history of scapegoating in continental Europe. In this vein, common beliefs and imaginations were critical to the prosecution of witchcraft. Gaskill suggests that “no social, economic, religious or cultural facts shaped the history of English witchcraft more.” Gaskill, Witchcraft and Evidence, at 39. For a conviction of witchcraft to stand—that is, for the evidence to prove successful it had to convince the people of the community; it had to make sense of their lives.

SETTING THE STAGE

The prosecution of witches in England materialized during the early modern period. By the sixteenth century, the belief in the existence of witchcraft was a common one and the belief in dark magic was regarded as “the logical corollary of the equally widespread possibility in the belief of beneficent magic.” Thomas at 437. Though the beliefs in dark magic “were as old as human history, and in no sense peculiarly English,” during the late Middle Ages, Christianity began to distinguish this type of magic from the unharmful kind. Thomas at 438. Among the intellectual class, what resulted was demonology, which constructed a new way of seeing the world from the old beliefs. Trevor-Roper at 91. As such, though witchcraft was ascribed to “virtually every kind of magical activity or ritual operation that worked by occult methods,” Thomas, in Douglas, at 48, it came to be regarded as the “supernatural activity, believed to be the result of power given by the Devil, and causing physical damage….” McFarlane? , in Douglas, at 82. In practice, the ways in which witchcraft mattered to English society differed between the learned classes and the rest of society. Whereas theologians and others who studied witchcraft were concerned with Devil-worshipping, a heretical practice, the “uneducated populace” was more concerned with the damage that these evil creatures caused to persons and property within the community—those experiences which they could feel and to which they fell victim at times. See Thomas, in Douglas, at 48-49; Sharpe.

Witchcraft rarely occurred among family members (except perhaps in cases of bewitched husbands or magical acts to induce marriage) and, as a result, was treated as more of a communal problem. Macfarlane at 87. As such, witches of the bad sort were really those who “afflict[ed] their neighbours and others with misfortune, sickness, and death, and who also practise[d] a range of ungodly magical rites in the community.” Marion, Intro at x. From these definitions, we can gather that witches accused of wrongdoing did not practice their craft silently. Rather, she was one who exposed her community to the evils which she possessed and with which she disturbed the community’s peace.

In the courtroom, witchcraft was treated as an “anti-social crime” rather than heresy. Court records suggest that most prosecutions were provoked by accusations of damage to persons and property in the community rather than worshipping with the Devil. Thomas at 443. Unlike theologians, witch finders were not as interested in “the mechanics of the operation than in the fact of the witch’s malice.” Thomas, in Douglas, at 51. Though proving either strand of the crime would seem like an uphill battle by modern evidentiary standards, the law of evidence, though in its development at the time, was not yet in place during the early modern period.

As to the actual evidence introduced, confessions, whether forced or otherwise obtained, “unnatural” body marks, and witness testimony became popular methods to substantiate the accusations of witchcraft. The records that remain of the processes are troublesome: not just because they are few but also because it is difficult to extract from them what the accused believed. Confessions should be analyzed with a healthy degree of skepticism as evidence of the accused’s actual beliefs. After all, demonologists and witch hunters advocated the use of trickery and false promises of leniency to extract confessions “from those who [were] obviously guilt but [would] not say so.” Gibson at 25. Though judicial torture was formally disallowed in England (unlike continental Europe and Scotland), it sometimes made its way into witch investigations by way of sleep deprivation and ordeals, such as “swimming a witch.” Witch hunters, like Matthew Hopkins, used these practices that verged on torture to obtain confessions. Hopkins, for example, popularized the use of “dunking” and “walking” the witch as means to extract confessions during the period of the Civil War.

As indicated, little remains of the thoughts and beliefs of those accusers, but far less remains of the unmitigated thoughts and beliefs of those accused of witchcraft. Though much is speculated about the minds of the accusers, far less is known about the accused. Gaskill notes, if merely in passing, “Most suspects were marginal women whose confessions reflected the misery of hardship, anxiety of moral guilt, and fear of damnation.” Gaskill at 53. Though the outcome of these cases largely turned on what the accused confessed to, we can discern far less about what they thought, even from their supposed own words. As Geertz has remarked, “Men, of course, can lie, and, especially in the presence of judges, often do....” Geertz at 189.

PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN

What is perhaps most readily striking in the prosecution of witchcraft is the process of law in the making: its effort to find and form some sort of relation—whether of alignment or power over or something else—with the community and its values. This is perhaps part of what Geertz meant when he wrote that “the ‘law’ side of things is not a bounded set of norms, rules, principles, values, or whatever from which jural responses to distilled events can be drawn, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Geertz at xxxx (Local Knowledge). Through witchcraft, the beliefs from above—whether intellectual, divinely ordered, or both—merged with the lived experiences and beliefs of those below. In this, we see a process that is not neat or orderly but constantly in flux and struggling to make sense of relations between the people in the community and their systems.

Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have both offered valuable insight into the function of witchcraft in early modern society. In The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of English Witchcraft, Thomas suggests that witch accusations helped alleviate the pressures—whether of social, moral, and/or religious guilt—that afflicted community members as English society moved away from reliance on private charity for care of the poor to [governmental and individualistic ideas of self-help]. Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex offers a similar argument. In it, he suggests that witchcraft was the means through which neighbors, in a society founded on Christian communal values, transitioned to publicly dealing with conflict. In this worldview, a witch would inflict harm on her victim for his “unneighbourly behavior”—for example, denying her the sale of a pig or refusing her a loan. Macfarlane at 92.

Though neither of their account is implausible, and perhaps it helps account for some of the accusations, it is difficult to imagine such a widespread phenomenon, at its most basic level, driven on unaired social tensions. In a way, these accounts undermine the fantastic fervor, whether real or imagined, with which witchcraft manifested:

Though, of course, we ought to question such accounts of social life in early modern England, Trevor-Roper’s incredible description helps shed light on the complexity of the circumstance.

Although Thomas and Macfarlane’s analyses arguing that deteriorating social relations between the community’s well-to-do and the poor precipitated accusations of witchcraft are persuasive, these evaluations create a not insignificant ideological vacuum. Perhaps these tensions laid the foundation, but what else made up the “witch-craze”?