Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain

A Feeling for Magic

Ronald Hutton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349568840
  9781137444813
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137444820
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume investigates the physical evidence for magic in medieval and modern Britain, including ritual mark, concealed objects, amulets, and magical equipment. The contributors are the current experts in each area of the subject, and show between them how ample the evidence is and how important it is for an understanding of history.

       

1

Introduction

Ronald Hutton

This book is affectionately dedicated to the memory of Ralph Merrifield, an archaeologist and museum curator who specialised mainly in the study of Roman London. In 1987, when he was in retirement, he published a book entitled The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic,¹ which surveyed the evidence for ritual deposits of material in the historic period, mostly in England but with material drawn from all over Britain with comparative examples from Ireland and Continental Europe. More than half of its contents were concerned with the pagan Roman and Anglo-Saxon period, but what made the work remarkable was that it continued to consider deposits from the succeeding, Christian centuries, and to treat them in much the same way. It found evidence for the continuation of the ritual placement of the same kinds of object – animals (whole or represented by parts or single bones), pottery, garments and metal artefacts – in much the same contexts as in ancient times and seemingly in much the same manner. Merrifield did not suggest that the accompanying belief system had remained unchanged: indeed he acknowledged that it would have altered dramatically between different periods. Nonetheless, the basic form of rite seemed to him to have been essentially unaltered, even if acts which in pre-Christian cultures would have been part of an overarching religious system had turned into what usually seemed to have been simple acts of symbolic protection against misfortune or magical attack – Merrifield defining magic in this context as the attempted manipulation of uncanny power by human beings, for their own purposes. He was expert in the medieval and early modern texts of high ritual magic, and understood its symbolic code of astrological correspondences and Hebrew divine names, so that he was well equipped to spot references to this code when they occurred on material objects. The result was a major pioneering study, designed explicitly to alert archaeologists, and scholars in other disciplines, to the importance of recognising, preserving and studying what seemed to be ritual deposits from any period, and of making linkages between those from different ages.

Ralph Merrifield died in 1995, and this was his last book. A quarter of a century after its publication, in 2012, one of the most distinguished archaeologists to specialise in British medieval material, Roberta Gilchrist, reviewed its message with the comment that ‘there has been a stubborn reluctance to address this phenomenon in relation to later medieval archaeology’: in this context the later Middle Ages can be taken as commencing in about the year 1000.² Her observation is even more true of early modern and modern archaeology, while historians, even now often reluctant to engage with material evidence at all, have been yet more inclined to ignore the implications of Merrifield’s work. Nonetheless, when a top-ranking scholar like Gilchrist expresses concern about an issue, that is a sign in itself that it is emerging into greater prominence. Gilchrist also paid due tribute to the importance of the work of researchers in the field who operated outside mainstream academic disciplines. Moreover, in the remainder of her book, she made full use of the existing archaeological data for magical acts in England during the later medieval period. In particular she drew attention to the presence of objects in graves which seemed to represent wands and amulets, believed to have a protective significance; to the placement of rings, pieces of glass, stones, crystals, pots and brooches in post holes and floors, possibly as foundation deposits; and to the burial of disused fonts and paternoster beads in a church floor. She also performed a considerable service to other researchers by providing a complete catalogue of materials found in buildings which seemed to have been placed there to repel harm and attract good fortune.³

Disciplinary tradition, however, dies hard. Specialists in the archaeology of ancient Europe, from the Old Stone Age to the conversion to Christianity, have always been accustomed to the idea that its peoples made deposits of objects in earth, water, or human structures for symbolic reasons. There seems, however, to have been an inherent assumption that Christians did not, and also that magical practices during the Christian period, though there was an acknowledgement that they had existed, would not normally leave identifiable physical remains. During the past forty years there has been a tremendous increase in interest among professionals in the history of magic in medieval and early modern Europe. The early modern trials for witchcraft, defined there as the presumed use of magical means by some human beings to injure others, usually as part of an adopted allegiance to Satan and with demonic assistance, have become one of the biggest growth areas for study by cultural historians, in Britain as elsewhere.⁴ Medieval European magic of the learned, ceremonial sort, while not attracting as much attention, has still recently blossomed as a focus of increasing academic interest, and again, this includes Britain.⁵ This work, however, has been carried out by historians working in the conventional manner, from texts, and with little reference to material evidence. Conversely, historians of late medieval and early modern English religion have now come to pay a great deal of attention to physical remains from the period as sources for patterns of piety, but have shown little or no interest in magic.⁶ Popular magic in Britain during the medieval and early modern centuries has been given some treatment, of good quality, but again, this has focused on texts.⁷ Unsurprisingly, in view of all this, when solid objects have been studied in relation to magic, they tend to be those with a textual component. Into that category would fall Don Skemer’s fine monograph on the use of written words to bless and protect people and places in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages, and the work of Mindy McLeod and Bernard Mees on the use of German and Scandinavian runes for that purpose.⁸

Despite all this, individual pieces of archaeology have sometimes impinged on the history of ritual acts in Christian Britain and have thus attracted a significant amount of attention. One of these was the study made by David Stocker and Paul Everson, published in 2003, of depositions in water in the central Witham Valley of Lincolnshire.⁹ Ralph Merrifield had drawn attention to the number of weapons, spanning between them the whole medieval period, found in the Thames at London, and noted that these objects were also dedicated at saints’ shrines at the same time. He therefore suggested that they may have been ritually deposited in the river, a treatment given to weaponry in watery contexts in Britain from the Bronze Age until the pagan Viking settlements.¹⁰ Stocker and Everson found that causeways had led from ten medieval monasteries towards the River Witham, which were probably constructed originally in ancient times as prehistoric and Roman finds were common along them. What was really significant, and surprising, was that deposition had continued near most of them throughout the Middle Ages, especially of swords, daggers, and the heads of axes and spears, which were either laid upriver of the causeways or in pools nearby. In three of these cases the medieval finds outnumbered the prehistoric, and generally those left between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries were more numerous than those of the Anglo-Saxon period.

The two archaeologists remarked that, as the river crossings were controlled by the monks and the deposits had peaked with the power and influence of the monasteries, the depositions clearly took place in a Christian context, but there was no textual evidence whatever to explain how. Pilgrims, liturgical processions and funeral corteges would all have passed these points, going to and from the religious houses, and it is likely that the placement of the objects in the water was associated with such events. In particular, Stocker and Everson pointed out that the deposition of weapons had declined when the custom of hanging military equipment around tombs became fashionable. In that case, it would have been the weaponry of dead lords which was cast into the water as their bodies were taken for burial at the monasteries. Such a hypothesis has obvious implications for the interpretation of one of the most famous moments in late medieval literature, when Sir Bedivere throws the sword of the dying King Arthur into the lake. It is possible that this episode reflects the fact that swords (and other weapons), often of great beauty, were deposited in watery contexts in late prehistory, with some frequency, and would have been discovered at points in the Middle Ages. It would have possessed far greater symbolic resonance, however, if it had reflected an actual funerary custom of the period, and that preceding it; but seemingly thus far no expert in medieval literature has taken notice of this possibility.

Another recent archaeological development which focused attention on unorthodox ritual practices in Christian Britain was the excavation between 2001 and 2008 of a total of 35 pits in a valley in western Cornwall. They had each been carefully lined with a swan’s pelt, and contained between them more swans’ skins, along with magpies, eggs of a variety of birds, birds’ claws, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron. The swans’ pelts have been dated to around 1640, and the construction and filling of the pits would have needed the attention, over an extended period, of a significant number of people, presumably the inhabitants of the nearby hamlet of Saveock Water who worked at a local mill. A stone-lined spring there also proved to have been given seventeenth century deposits, including 128 strips of cloth from dresses as well as pins, shoe parts, cherry stones and nail clippings, before being filled in. Another pit, found subsequently, contained eggs and the remains of a cat and was dated to the eighteenth century; and another, with parts of a dog and a pig, to the 1950s. It seems very likely that the seventeenth century deposits were ritual in nature, and just possible that the later two were. Jacqui Wood, the leader of the excavations, not surprisingly, publicised the results in an extensive campaign in the mass media; Wood, however, chose to interpret them as evidence of a pagan fertility cult carried on by witches, despite a considerable risk of execution for doing so, and suggested that the later pits meant that it had continued until recent times.¹¹

Leaving aside the question of whether the later deposits had a ritual character, less sensational interpretations are possible for the finds, which cover a range of practices intended to secure protection or good fortune, which would have been perfectly legal at the time, and had nothing to do with paganism and would not have been comprehended within the legally defined crime of witchcraft. Thus far, this interesting excavation seems not to have been properly published in order to allow an informed discussion of it to ensue. Meanwhile, other early modern pits with apparent ritual deposits are being identified and are starting to receive such publication, such as the four found at Barway in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Two were on a north-south alignment and two on an east-west one, together forming a T-shaped pattern. The former pair were half packed with stones on one side and had a copper disc put into the top; the latter each had a seventeenth century shoe placed in the bottom. All were certainly earlier than the nineteenth century orchard on the site, and the first two pits were aligned on Ely Cathedral. The protective symbolism of shoes will be considered later in this volume; while copper is the metal of Venus in alchemy and astrology, although (as the excavator suggested) the discs might also have had a lunar significance. Again, this looks like a rite, or a sequence of rites, of blessing and protection, but other interpretations are possible.¹²

Such cases as these have served to raise general awareness of the value of material remains to the study of ritual of all kinds in Christian Britain, and the potential for expansion is considerable. Suddenly change is in the air. The study of material culture in general is now becoming a recognised sub-discipline of history.¹³ Dietrich Boschung and Jan Bremmer have edited a collection entitled The Materiality of Magic concerned with solid objects associated with magical practices in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, but with two final chapters taking the story further, into modern Europe.¹⁴ At the 2013 session of the main annual meeting of British archaeologists, the Theoretical Archaeology Group, Ceri Houlbrook and Natalie Armitage organised a session with an identical title, on cross-cultural examples of physical evidence for magic. It attracted papers of sufficient number and quality to make another collection possible, edited by Armitage and currently in press.¹⁵ Antje Bosselman-Ruickbie and Leo Ruickbie are currently editing a third collection of essays, spanning the globe, on The Material Culture of Magic.¹⁶

Individual researchers are also making explorations in the same field, although they tend, like many of the contributors to the three collections, to concentrate on subjects where textual evidence makes it easy to match the artefacts to an established story or tradition: a good example is Amy Gavin-Schwartz’s study of objects related to rites of protection, health, divination and the negotiation of social relationships, recorded in the Gaelic folklore of modern Scotland.¹⁷ David Barrowclough, the excavator of the Barway pits, suggested that the only sure way to identify ritual behaviour from material evidence is to triangulate archaeology, historical sources and folklore, in an essentially te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Magic on the Walls: Ritual Protection Marks in the Medieval Church
• 3  Apotropaic Symbols and Other Measures for Protecting Buildings against Misfortune
• 4  Instances and Contexts of the Head Motif in Britain
• 5  Witch Bottles: Their Contents, Contexts and Uses
• 6  Concealed Animals
• 7  Shoes Concealed in Buildings
• 8  Garments Concealed within Buildings: Following the Evidence
• 9  Spiritual Middens
• 10  Textual Evidence for the Material History of Amulets in Seventeenth-Century England
• 11  Amulets: The Material Evidence
• 12  Cunning-Folk and the Production of Magical Artefacts
• 13  The Wider Picture: Parallel Evidence in America and Australia
• Index