Witchcraft, Magic and Superstition in England, 1640–70 by Frederick Valletta

Witchcraft, Magic and Superstition in England, 1640–70 by Frederick Valletta

Author:Frederick Valletta [Valletta, Frederick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351872591
Google: 2qZBDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-03-02T01:36:58+00:00


6.1 The witch of Newbury

Source: BL, TT E 69 (9), A most certain, strange, and true Discovery of a witch.

The influence of popular attitudes to the punishment of witchcraft is also illustrated by the unofficial action occasionally taken against a suspected witch without recourse to the law. One such case took place during the English Civil War, when a woman was summarily executed for witchcraft by a group of Parliamentary soldiers at Newbury in 1643.87 This incident also demonstrates the anxieties prevalent during the Civil War concerning witchcraft. The woman was captured, after being seen on the river standing on a plank floating downstream past some Parliamentarian soldiers. It is likely she may have been punting in a coracle, or similar vessel, and the superstitious soldiers may have thought this either supernatural or suspicious. This is reflected by the fact that a second version of the story reports the incident from the point of view that the woman may have been a spy sent by the nearby Royalist garrison.88 Apparently she survived being shot twice, and being run through with a sword. She was only killed when one of the soldiers pointed out her spells of protection would be removed if they could draw blood from her forehead. Once they had done this she was despatched with a pistol shot behind the ear. Thus she had been proved to be a witch not in a court of law, or by proving she had made a compact with the devil, but by the reliance on popular superstition concerning witch-lore, namely that scratching, or drawing blood from the forehead of a suspected witch would prevail against the strongest magic. Scratching or the drawing of blood from a suspected witch seems to have been a common remedy for mobs of people who wished to see a suspected witch punished, especially before the legal process had started. It is also possible that such behaviour may explain the massacre of the Royalist baggage women following the battle of Naseby, many of whom were said to have been scratched on their faces by the Parliamentarian soldiers.89

One thing is certain, once a suspect had been accused of witchcraft he or she was in great danger of being attacked by those who genuinely believed such remedies would be of benefit in removing the witch’s powers. When Edmund Bower was narrating his account of his involvement in the trial of the suspected witch Anne Bodenham in 1653, he described a visit to her cell in Salisbury. He brought with him the afflicted party in the hope that Bodenham would be able to remove the bewitchment. He mentioned that there were also some women in the room who wanted to take some blood from the suspected witch, and that he was there to protect her from them, ‘she being very much afraid, and crying out, The wicked people will scratch and tear me’.90 When the suspected witch, Joan Rigg, was examined by justices at the Ely assizes in 1647, she



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