Gender and Witchcraft

New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology

Brian P. Levack, Brian P. Levack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136539114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Witchcraft and magical beliefs have captivated historians and artists for millennia, and stimulated an extraordinary amount of research among scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This new collection, from the editor of the highly acclaimed 1992 set, Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology, extends the earlier volumes by bringing together the most important articles of the past twenty years and covering the profound changes in scholarly perspective over the past two decades. Featuring thematically organized papers from a broad spectrum of publications, the volumes in this set encompass the key issues and approaches to witchcraft research in fields such as gender studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, history, psychology, and law. This new collection provides students and researchers with an invaluable resource, comprising the most important and influential discussions on this topic. A useful introductory essay written by the editor precedes each volume.

The Devil in the Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England^*

Abstract

Historians agree that most early modern witches were women. A question rarely asked, though, is how any men came to be accused at all, given the strong association of women and witchcraft in popular folklore and learned demonology. This article examines the prosecution for witchcraft of a Kentish farmer in 1617, and argues that an integrated qualitative context of conflict and belief is essential for understanding this and other accusations. The aim is not, however, to offer yet another overarching explanation for the rise of witchcraft prosecutions, but rather to demonstrate how witchcraft can open windows on early modern mentalities.

Seeing as both [sexes] are subject to the State of damnation, so both are liable to Satans snares.

(Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witch-Craft (1617), pp. 180-1)

In 1617, the same year as the Reverend Thomas Cooper’s treatise appeared in the London bookshops, a day’s ride away at New Romney in the marshlands of south-eastern Kent Susan Barber and Margaret Holton also had witchcraft on their minds.¹ The two women, the wives of a carpenter and a farmer respectively, and both in their mid-thirties, claimed to have suffered disturbing experiences and misfortunes in recent years. It was Barber’s contention, for example, that diabolical spirits had tried to abduct her newborn baby, while Holton complained that her young son had perished in inexplicable circumstances and that periodically she found her laundry spattered with blood. Additionally, both women swore that on numerous occasions in the night they had been terrified by strange noises. The specific configuration of circumstances in this case was, of course, unique; yet in their thinking and responses Barber and Holton had much in common with many other early modern people who believed themselves the victims of witchcraft. In the first place, they were convinced they knew who was responsible for their misfortunes: a reputed witch living locally with whom both women had experienced difficult relations. Secondly, they came forward as witnesses in the legal prosecution of their supposed tormenter.²

Recent research has extended the scope of female involvement in English witchcraft prosecutions beyond the role of the persecuted scapegoat.³ We now know that many ordinary women like Barber and Holton were eager participants in pre-trial procedure, sometimes acting in conjunction with men, but at other times seizing the initiative to further disputes within more exclusively female spheres.⁴ Nor did this female autonomy belong exclusively to witnesses. Many women accused of witchcraft, instead of passively accepting charges against them, vigorously defended their reputations informally and at law,⁵ conversely, others confessed in the belief that they could indeed harness supernatural forces to further their own ambitions.⁶ Overall, these findings challenge certain assumptions about the so-called European ‘witch-craze’. Most prominently, explanations where misogyny provided the primum mobile of accusations no longer seem adequate,⁷ despite the fact that demonological theory, consistent with mainstream thinking in all areas of society and culture, presupposed the spiritual, mental and moral inferiority of women.⁸ Even the idea of a seventeenth-century ‘gender crisis’ needs careful handling here.⁹ Prosecution for witchcraft was more than just a strategy by which insecure men subjugated innocent female victims, if only because, in terms of legal redress for injury and loss, more women were actually beneficiaries of witchcraft legislation than were its victims. More importantly, a gender-persecution model underplays the assertiveness and independent thinking displayed by early modern women, both witnesses and witches.¹⁰

These suggestions are consistent with a more nuanced picture of women in early modern society, and a wider range of female roles than was once appreciated.¹¹ Although legally and culturally male privilege dominated society, in practice patriarchal ideals were tempered by pragmatism, and thus many women emerge from a close examination of evidence as important actors in their own right Yet it is undeniable that women adopted, or were forced to adopt, male roles and identities to a greater extent than men adopted theirs—an imbalance which is especially striking with regard to witchcraft prosecutions. Even though many women appeared as witnesses, only about twenty per cent of persons accused of maleficium were male, and in certain jurisdictions the proportion was even smaller.¹² In other words, however much the actions of women such as Barber and Holton may adjust our understanding of the dynamics of witchcraft accusations, the standard image of the accused remains, to use Carol Karlsen’s phrase, ‘the Devil in the shape of a woman’.¹³

Even so, surely it matters that even a minority of men were prosecuted, and therefore that witchcraft ‘while sex-related, was not sex-specific’.¹⁴ After all, male witches were still individuals who found themselves caught up in the processes of suspicion, accusation and trial—processes underpinned by cultural norms which, it is easy to think, presupposed that maleficent witches were by nature female. If this male minority still seems insignificant, perhaps we should attempt to see witchcraft in a wider perspective, and ask whether any type of accusation matters that much anyway. Although one sometimes receives the impression that English villagers were preoccupied with witches,¹⁵ between the passing of the first statute in 1542 and the repeal of the last in 1736 there were fewer than 1,000 executions; a figure around half that is probably closer to the mark. Even if we shift all known and probable executions to the key period of prosecution, say 1570-1680, this still only amounts to about between four and nine every year in a country of between three-and-a-half and five million people. Put another way, at a generous estimate perhaps one in every 500,000 English adults was hanged for witchcraft in the early modern period.¹⁶ Indeed, as some historians have pointed out, one of the hardest things to explain about witchcraft prosecutions is why they did not happen more often.¹⁷ Even if allowance is made for unsuccessful prosecutions (and a vast number of unrecorded suspicions and allegations) the term ‘witch-craze’ remains a misnomer for England. Seen in context, then, the relative insignificance of male witches is comparable to the relative insignificance of witchcraft as a whole. Because a witchcraft trial was such an extraordinary event it is easy to see how anyone prosecuted, regardless of sex or social status, by the very fact of their prosecution had more in common with all other accused witches than with the overwhelming majority of people who never attracted so much as a hint of suspicion.

It is possible, though, to emphasize the significance of male witches without needing to undermine the significance of witchcraft as a whole. Indeed, witchcraft remains a profitable area of study, less in itself than as a window through which popular mentalities may be surveyed and analysed. Too often, the full importance of witchcraft has been obscured by a compulsion to explain the rise and decline of prosecutions, producing overarching theories unable to bear the strain of the evidence in all its diversity.¹⁸ Instead, we might explore what witchcraft tells us about the popular experience of cohesion and conflict in local communities, and the ways in which ideas and beliefs were mediated, received and put into practice. Witchcraft can be treated less as a discrete phenomenon, and more as an opportunity to explore ‘the darker streets of the village, pausing to glance in at the windows and alehouses of the poor’, and perhaps even to hazard guesses about how they were thinking.¹⁹ Cultural historians need to scrutinize and dissect small events and experiences to see what they tell us about larger issues.²⁰ For this purpose, documentary evidence relating to male witches is as valid as that relating to their more numerous female counterparts; indeed, its very atypicality even promises to expand our understanding of the meanings which ordinary people attached to witchcraft in the early modern period.

Hence the point of this article is neither the rehabilitation of men, nor the historical reanimation of women, but the social and cultural meaning of a single witchcraft prosecution.²¹ The New Romney case from 1617 has been chosen because the accused was a man—a comfortably-off, middle-aged farmer by the name of William Godfrey—whose sole example demonstrates how the Devil could sometimes assume the shape of a man, and that the place of gender in witchcraft accusations requires careful contextualization and an awareness of its subtleties, complexities and contingencies.²² Although Susan Barber and Margaret Holton had almost certainly never heard of the Oxford-educated preacher Thomas Cooper or his scholarly treatise, at least part of their unconscious attitude to witchcraft was consistent with that of the clerical and judicial élite: namely that witches could be men as well as women. The fact that even a single man was prosecuted for witchcraft has implications for what witchcraft actually meant in terms of experience. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, then, not only why one comes across so few male witches in the archives, but why there are any at all. This article explores Godfrey’s case in pursuit of this question, and through this seeks insights into the broader mental and behavioural environment of early modern English society.

In the seventeenth century, life in Romney Marsh was both dreary and demanding. Although well-populated before the Black Death, by the sixteenth century it had become one of the most sparsely inhabited regions in the country.²³ The reclaimed land, however, was highly fertile, leading many townsmen from the fifteenth century onwards to acquire land and hire labourers to cultivate it. Much was turned over to pasture, and by the end of the early modern period there were more sheep per acre there than anywhere else in England. The main problem of the marsh was its climate. In the fifteen-seventies William Lambarde described the area as ‘Evill in Winter, grievous in Sommer, and never good’, an opinion shared by the eighteenth-century historian Edward Hasted who called it a ‘sickly and contagious country’, and lamented the ‘sickly countenances and short lives’ of the inhabitants. The land was rife with ‘marsh ague’—a form of malaria—and mortality was high. Unsurprisingly, by the eighteenth century a strong tradition of absenteeism among landlords had been established, and resident gentry families were thin on the ground.²⁴

The town of New Romney, therefore, offered something of a haven positioned between this bleak landscape and the sea. As a Cinque Port, it enjoyed independent legal and administrative status in return for an obligation to defend the coast, and was thus governed by a mayor and jurats (aldermen) with rights of gaol delivery.²⁵ Professor Peter Clark describes New Romney as a second-rank urban community with lively economic relations with the hinterland; and in Lambarde’s opinion it was ‘good, sure and commodious’ as a port, enclosed as it was by shingle bank on both sides of its approach. By the seventeenth century it had a population of around 1,000, including a number of respectable’ families, and a map from 1614 shows approximately 200 buildings arranged in rows parallel to the coast with strips of land in between.²⁶ The site of the Brodhull (a liberty court dealing with economic matters), New Romney also hosted an annual cattle fair, and was an important fishing centre too. The principal church, of St. Nicholas, had the grandest Romanesque tower in Kent, and was used as a beacon to guide shipping into the harbour.²⁷ From the later sixteenth century, then, New Romney enjoyed a modest grandeur; socially and politically, however, it was becoming increasingly unstable.²⁸

The source of this instability was twofold: economic pressures and challenges to mayoral authority.²⁹ Relations with the bailiffs of Yarmouth, over whom the Brodhull had partial administrative control during the fishing season, were always stormy, as indeed they were with neighbouring Lydd concerning shipping and jurisdiction over the parish of Broomhill.³⁰ The local economy fared badly after the fall of Calais in 1558, and deteriorating town finances, inflation, debt, contracting trade and fishing and the administration of poor relief also led to local conflict.³¹ Relations with the centre were often fraught as well. Tudor centralization meant that the Cinque Ports were the only major independent jurisdictions left in Kent by the fifteen-sixties, and even their privileges were under threat. A generation later, due to increasingly bitter accusations of financial misconduct, bribery and corruption, the privy council was intervening directly to preserve order during New Romney’s elections. Taxation was a source of particular rancour, as it was between New Romney and its neighbour Old Romney, and indeed within New Romney itself. From the fifteen-nineties, challenges to municipal authority came from both local landowners and respectable townsmen who felt themselves politically marginalized. Controversy also raged between the town and church authorities over, amongst other things, the collection of tithes, and in doctrinal matters godly interests were hemmed in by religious conservatism on one side and Protestant fragmentation on the other. After 1600 it became increasingly difficult to maintain regular church services, and separatist congregations proliferated.³²

Peter Clark identifies 1617 as the point at which New Romney’s already waning fortunes took a turn for the worse.³³ In this year James I’s restoration of the Merchant Adventurers’ charter disrupted trade between the Cinque Ports and the Low Countries and contributed to an economic slump. Industrial and commercial contraction, combined with adverse weather and stagnating wool prices, hit small farmers hard and the swelling ranks of the poor harder still. In addition, the kiddlemen (‘kiddles’ being a Kentish word for nets) and others employed in the...