English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young

Author:Francis Young [Young, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 17th Century
ISBN: 9781317143161
Google: mVUfDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-06T16:15:10+00:00

The Boy returning homeward, from Schoole, to Bilson in Staffordshire where hee dwelt, an old woman, unknowne, met him, and taxed him in that he did not give her good time of the day, saying that he was a foule thing, and that it had been better for him if he had saluted her. At which words the Boy felt a thing to pricke him to the very heart.

Subsequently, Perry suffered fits and showed the classic symptoms of demonic possession, vomiting unnatural objects from his body like pins and feathers. Perry’s parents seem to have brought in local cunning-folk before seeking the help of missionary priests, since when he arrived the exorcist demanded that the ‘Sorceries of Witches’ that had been applied to the boy’s body should be burnt before he proceeded.150 The priests described the objects vomited by the boy as ‘maleficialia’ or ‘sorceries’, which they burnt. When the boy seemed to improve somewhat, the exorcist instructed him to pray for the witch, ‘and for her conversion from that wicked life’.151 However, the priests do not seem to have gained a monopoly on exorcism in the Perry household, and the lead exorcist was eventually obliged to come to a pragmatic recognition that Perry’s father would bring in ‘witches’ (that is, cunning-folk) again, on the proviso that they could not make use of the blessed water and oil that the priests had left with him, since ‘I would not mingle God and the divell together.’152

William Perry was not all he seemed, and eventually confessed to the Bishop’s Court that he had faked possession in order to avoid going to school.153 Whatever the outcome and the subsequent glee of Protestant controversialists, however, the Catholic account reveals that belief in witchcraft was very much alive amongst missionary clergy and, indeed, a critical component in the campaign of exorcism and healings. It remained so after the Civil War. A Catholic pamphlet of 1663 claimed that during a period of five weeks a priest named Blake conducted a campaign of miraculous healings in London that included ‘Edmond Swine Souldier, living in Eagle-Court over against Somerset-House in the Strand, in Mr. Crossbye’s a Shoomakers House, being by Witchcraft impotent to know his new married Wife’. At the same time ‘Mrs. Anne Prince, living at the Hen and Chickens in Middle-Rowe at Holborn, being just a year troubled with Witchcraft and Devils, was perfectly cured and dispossessed of both.’154 The widespread Continental idea that witches caused sexual impotence was rare in England,155 and its appearance in this missionary pamphlet is another indication that Catholic priests brought certain Continental beliefs about witchcraft with them.

The Jesuit Annual Letter of 1651 reported that the ‘Water of St Ignatius’ was frequently used ‘in the case of possessed persons and witches’,156 and the Annual Letter for 1655 recorded that ‘The devils cry out from the bodies of those possessed that they are tormented by the water, and that the charms are broken, and that it alone, without any other exorcism, suffices to expel them.

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