Operative Witchcraft by Nigel Pennick

Author:Nigel Pennick
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Witchcraft
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2019-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 10.1. Prince Rupert and his dog Boy, with the city of Birmingham burning behind them

Just as people were sometimes accused of witchcraft for controlling horses in an unnatural and spectacular way, so were people who trained dogs, cats, and other animals. Long after it could prove fatal to own animals that looked or behaved unusually, people still played on the fears of gullible neighbors with trained animals. At Willingham, north of Cambridge, Jabez Few, who died in the late 1920s, was a practical joker who called his trained white rats “imps” (Porter 1969, 175–76). Neighbors were terrified of them.

The name Old Mother Redcap has been carried by several women believed to be witches. The most famous Old Mother Redcap was an alewife in medieval London whose given name was Elinor Rummynge, and the connection between brewing and the concoction of medicines and other substances is direct. The name Red Cap also appears among the Horseheath imps, which were supposed to be kept in a box somewhere in the village. According to Catherine Parsons, these imps were named Bonnie, Blue Cap, Red Cap, Jupiter, and Venus. Unlike their keepers, they were immortal and had to be handed on. In 1915, Parsons announced that they were then in the keeping of a woman from Castle Camps (Parsons 1915). A newspaper report of 1928 recounts that a black man called at a house in Horseheath and asked the woman there to sign a receipt book. If she did, she was told that she would be the mistress of five imps. Shortly afterward, the woman was seen accompanied by a cat, a rat, a ferret, a mouse, and a toad. After that, her neighbors believed her to be a witch, and many people visited her to obtain cures (Robbins 1963, 556).

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