The Vanishing Witch

by Karen Maitland

  Beef bonet – A bonet was a broth thickened with breadcrumbs or other ingredients, such as ground almonds, cream, curds, honey or egg yolks. Dishes such as ‘hens in bonet’ or ‘beef bonet’ were simple broths of stewed meat, often cooked in blood, thickened with bread and flavoured with spices. They would have been considered nourishing and easily digestible food for invalids.

  Bloodstone – Green jasper or chalcedony containing dark red spots of iron oxide. It was also known as heliotrope because it was symbolically linked to the sun. In the Middle Ages it was believed that it would instantly stop haemorrhages if the afflicted part was touched with the stone. It also prevented the wearer from being poisoned. The bloodstone was supposed to have the power to turn the sun red and to call down thunder and lightning. It gave the wearer the gift of second sight, while protecting them from the madness that frequently accompanied such a gift.

  Boar – In Norse tradition the golden boar, associated with Freyr and Freyja, had a mane of fire that could illuminate the darkest night. In Valhalla, each night the gods killed and ate a boar, known as Saehrimnir, which was restored to life each morning. In Europe a ghostly boar was said to run with the Wild Hunt during storms. The boar was the most frequently sacrificed animal among the Saxons: because of its strength, bravery and fearlessness, it was seen as a fitting gift for the gods. Only the courageous would dare to hunt them. A number of golden boar heads used as amulets or to decorate warriors’ helmets have been found in Saxon hoards in Lincolnshire. In Viking, Celtic and Saxon cultures the boar symbolised strength and resolution.

  Bor – Dialect form of address used for boys and men by Fenlanders and river-men in some parts of Lincolnshire and East Anglia.

  Broggers – In the wool trade these men bought fleeces and skins directly from the individual farmers and cottagers, then collected them together to sell on as loads to the merchants.

  Civey, Civet or Cyve – A richly spiced stew made from the meat and blood of any game animal. It could be used to dress the meat of the game animal itself or as a stock or sauce in which to cook other meat, or fish such as haddock.

  Consistory Court – The highest bishop’s court and the busiest, for it oversaw the execution of wills and trusts, resolved tithe and debt disputes and accusations of defamation. It also dealt with marriage law, including broken contracts and runaway spouses. Mostly it heard the cases in which people were suing each other, rather than answering charges brought by the Church. The judge, known as the Bishop’s Official or Commissarius, was usually a university graduate, tutored in law. Those called to testify were questioned in secret with no opportunity for advocates to cross-examine their opponent’s witnesses, but they could submit a list of questions and arguments to the Bishop’s Official, which he could put privately to the witnesses, plaintiffs and defendants.

  Dauled – A dialect word meaning the person is tired, weary, or exhausted.

  Dwale – Atropa belladonna, otherwise known as deadly nightshade. Dwale comes from the French, meaning ‘mourning’. It was thought to be a key ingredient in witches’ ointments, used to help them to fly or transform into animals, and the ointment might well have caused them to hallucinate that they were flying or transforming. Dwale was widely used in the Middle Ages in sleeping draughts. Chaucer refers to it when he says, ‘There needeth him no dwale.’

  In the Parthian Wars, Marcus Antonius’s troops were said to have been killed by dwale being added to the drinking wells. According to legend, in AD1010, the Scots mixed the juice with food for the invading Danish army; the soldiers became so stupefied that the Scots were easily able to slaughter them.

  Fog-head or Fog-breather – a derogatory name for the English used by people originating from better climates who considered the island to be permanently damp and foggy, which made the English dour and dull.

  Gambeson – A padded quilted tunic, which was worn under or over armour by knights, or was worn instead of armour by the common foot soldiers. It was also known as the acketon, aketon, hacketon or hauketon. ‘Gamboised’ meant quilted or padded. They could be stuffed with wool, straw, grass or cloth. Such garments were hot and cumbersome, so soldiers usually donned them just before engaging the enemy in battle, which left them vulnerable if they were unexpectedly ambushed.

  Green sickness – A medieval term for a wasting sickness that was probably severe anaemia. Symptoms might include pallor, dizziness, tiredness, breathlessness, pains, and brittle hair and nails. There are several different types of anaemia, but a common cause in the Middle Ages would have been dietary deficiency, particularly among the poor and certain religious orders that followed a strict ascetic diet. In the Middle Ages, green sickness was often associated with people who were melancholic, grief-stricken or lovesick.

  Small but regular doses of some poisons, such as mercury, can produce similar symptoms and eventually death. However, it was only too easy to attribute any illness that caused the sufferer mysteriously to waste away to sorcery or the evil eye, especially if the victim had been previously healthy.

  Hand-fasting – This started as a betrothal ceremony in Saxon times when the couple would swear to be faithful to each other for a year, after which the engagement was either annulled or a full wedding would take place. In the Middle Ages it became a lay wedding ceremony, performed by the couple and their families without a priest. The culmination of the ceremony was when the couple held hands and had a cloth, rope or garland wrapped round their hands. Other customs might include the couple leaping over a bonfire together hand in hand.

  Formal weddings were often too costly for poor families. A priest would ask for a fee to perform the ceremony, and if the couple were not freeborn, the lord of the manor also required a payment to permit the marriage. If a man’s wife had run away, or if a woman’s husband had gone missing at sea or in war, the Church deemed they were still married unless they could prove their spouse was dead. If they could not, the abandoned partner could not legally remarry, so hand-fasting was a way round this.

  Hippocras – Wines in the Middle Ages were often highly acidic so were mixed with other ingredients to improve the taste. Hippocras, which, according to medieval legend, was believed to have been invented by Hippocrates, was drunk by those of high status and was made from red or white wine flavoured with ginger, cinnamon, pomegranate, sugar and an ingredient known as turesole, which was possibly made from sunflower seeds. A cheaper version, drunk by those of lower status, was made from wine, ginger, cinnamon, long pepper and honey. Spiced wines were usually served after the cloth was taken off the table at the end of the meal.

  Jetons – These were small, round, flat discs of brass or bronze, often stamped to look like coins or decorated with patterns, coats of arms or mottoes. They were used by merchants for adding and subtracting large sums of money, and calculating tolls and taxes. A board was divided into black and white squares, known as checks, each square representing a number or amount of money. (From this we get the term ‘Exchequer’.) By moving the jetons around the board, complex calculations could be made without the use of costly parchment and ink. Jetons are often excavated in archaeological sites or dug up in gardens.

  John Barleycorn – is thought to be one of the oldest harvest festivals in England. The word ‘barley’ comes from the Anglo Saxon Beow, and the figure of John Barleycorn may have his distant origins in the mythical Anglo-Saxon hero Beowa. There are many pre-Christian rituals in which the king or spirit of the grain is slain, then rises again to bring about the return of spring and new crops. John Barleycorn is killed and ploughed into a field, but his head rises from the earth, covered with green spikes. He is gathered up, crushed and burned, and the blood containing his spirit is ceremoniously drunk to bring strength and new life to the drinkers. This myth was stylised in post-Christian centuries so that it eventually became a tale of the different processes involved in producing beer or whisky from grain. It has been immortalised in a number of ballads, the earliest surviving possibly dating to the reign of Eliz
abeth I.

  Kempy – There are three types of fibre found in a fleece of many breeds of sheep – wool, which has different textures depending on the breed; hair, which is stiffer than wool, more like dog or horse hair, and kemp, which is white, bristly and coarse. Kemp, which is found mainly around the legs and head of the sheep, doesn’t easily take a dye of the type used in the Middle Ages, so it could ruin a batch of yarn if a good even colour and texture were required.

  Linkman – A link was a burning torch, usually in the form of a stout stick covered with a ball of rags at one end that had been soaked in a flammable substance, such as pitch. It was used to light the way through the streets. (The word ‘link’ probably comes from the Latin lychnus meaning lamp or candle.) At night, men or boys would hang around outside taverns and cockpits with these blazing torches and offer to light the way home through the dark streets in exchange for a small fee. But sometimes the linkmen were in the pay of thieves and would lead visitors who didn’t know the town, or men who were the worse for drink, into some quiet alley or courtyard where thieves would be waiting to rob them.

  Lich gate – The word ‘lich’ or ‘lych’ means corpse and this was a small roofed gate at the entrance to the church graveyard, where the bier could be set down and the corpse-bearers given refreshment before continuing up the path to the burial plot or the church door. Some bearers would have to carry the body many miles over marked corpse roads to reach the church and, when they arrived, might have to wait for the priest, churchwarden and sexton to be fetched, since word might not have reached them that a burial party was on its way.

  Many churchyards had two gates, a lich gate and a bridal gate, because it was considered very unlucky for a bridal party to enter through the lich gate. If they did, either the marriage would die or, worse still, one of the couple would be a corpse before their first wedding anniversary.

  Mavet – The name of the narrator’s ferret means ‘death’ in Hebrew, but it is also used as a proper name to indicate the embodiment of death, as in biblical phrases such as a ‘covenant with Death’, or ‘first-born of Death’. So Mavet also means the ‘Demon of Death’ or ‘Angel of Death’ (Malach Hamavet). Mavet also was the name of a Canaanite god of the underworld, mortal enemy to the god Baal.

  Mortrews – The name of the recipe comes from the mortar in which the ingredients were pounded or ground. Chicken and pork livers were boiled together to make a broth. The livers were taken out, pounded to a paste and mixed with breadcrumbs, softened with some of the broth. They then added egg yolks and powdour fort, which was a mixture of ground spices such as pepper and cloves. The mixture was then boiled again, seasoned with salt, ginger, sugar and saffron. It was left to set until it resembled a modern pâté. Poorer households would not have been able to afford the costly spices to season it, so for them it would have been a simpler dish intended to make a little meat go further by mixing it with breadcrumbs.

  Mutton or beef olives – Thin, beaten slices of meat, spread with egg yolks, spices, suet and onion, then rolled up and baked, making convenient finger-food. They were sprinkled with vinegar and spices before serving.

  Nine Men’s Morris – A game of strategy that dates back to Roman times and was often played in monasteries. The modern board has twenty-four points. One player has nine black pieces or ‘men’, the other nine white ones. The object is to place your men on the board to achieve a ‘mill’, a line of three balls. If you can do so, you are allowed to remove one of your opponent’s balls until one player only has two remaining pieces on the board, and therefore loses the game. The number of holes and men varied and dice were sometimes used. Some board designs reflected the sacred mysteries of both Christian and pagan religions. Giant boards were often constructed in monasteries or in public places and there is a board carved into the base of a pillar in Chester Cathedral.

  Pag – A Lincolnshire dialect word meaning ‘to carry a load on your back’. Paggers were men who loaded and unloaded boats and wagons, or were paid to carry goods to someone’s house. In estuaries and on the coast they would also carry men and women on their backs across the wet mud or sand at low tide, when the passengers were disembarking from boats or ferries. In later centuries, 14 May was known in Lincolnshire as Pag-Rag Day, when servants packed up their meagre possessions and left their old employees to find new masters.

  Pattens – Shoes had very thin soles in this period and many city streets remained unpaved and were thick with mud and refuse, including rotting food, fish guts, animal dung and even human excrement thrown from night-pots out into the streets. Men and women often wore wooden pattens, tied over their shoes with a band of leather or cloth, to lift their feet above the dirt when walking in the street or to protect them from contact with cold flagstones in the house or church in winter.

  The pattens of this period consisted of a thick wooden sole raised up on two wooden V-shaped wedges, one across the ball of the foot, the other at the heel, with the sharp points of wedges resting on the ground so that the patten made the least possible contact with the dirty street. The V-shape of the wedge meant mud and dung would more easily slide off. These pattens could lift the wearer up by about four inches and, rather like walking on stilts, must have taken practice to walk in and probably caused some nasty sprains if you slipped or fell off.

  Periwinkle – The Latin name for this flower is Vinca which means ‘bind’, because the plant twists. In medieval times it was used in funeral wreaths, and criminals on their way to executions were garlanded or crowned with periwinkle as a sign that they were about to die. Also known as sorcerer’s violet, devil’s eye or, as Chaucer called it, parvenke.

  Pipkin – A small earthenware pot used for cooking. In poorer households it could be transferred straight from the fire to the table as a common dish from which all could help themselves.

  Serpent’s tongues – These were sharks’ teeth, which were occasionally washed up on beaches, as they are today. People in the Middle Ages lived in constant fear of being poisoned, probably because many suffered stomach pains and vomiting after eating, due to poor food hygiene. Serpents’ tongues and unicorn horns, which were probably the horns of narwhals, were considered infallible defences against every type of poison. Those who could afford to do so often wore rings embedded with serpents’ tongues or other antidotes such as agate, serpentine or toadstones to counter the ill-effects of poison. By incorporating one of these stones into a ring, you could discreetly touch anything you suspected of being poisoned without offending your host.

  Snails – Edible snails, believed to be introduced to Britain by the Romans, were often carried by medieval travellers as convenient, portable and nutritious snacks. Live snails encased in a parcel of damp moss or grass could be kept for many days until they were required. If you didn’t have time to stop to cook during the day, the snails could be roasted in the fire at breakfast, then popped into a bag or scrip to be eaten later as you walked or rode along.

  Steddle – A Lincolnshire dialect word for the base of a stack of grain, peat or wood. It was important to construct a good sturdy base or the whole stack might tumble down. By extension, a person who was pear-shaped with a broad bottom and chunky legs was described as having a good steddle.

  Sumptuary Law – There were many sumptuary laws passed from the Middle Ages through to Elizabethan times in an attempt to curb excess and maintain class differences. The Sumptuary Law passed in 1363, called the Statute of Diet and Apparel, was designed to limit what the lower classes were allowed to spend on clothes and food at a time when wages were rising because of a shortage of labour. The nobles were complaining that prices of luxury goods were rising because of new demand from the lower orders.

  Under the 1363 law, agricultural workers, such as ploughmen and shepherds, could not wear cloth costing more than 12d per yard and were supposed to wear a simple blanket-like garment girdled with linen. Craftsmen could not wear clothes worth more than forty shillings, and neither they nor their families could wear si
lver fastenings, silk, velvet or sable fur. Only knights and those of higher rank could wear velvet, satin, imported wool, damask or sable fur. But there was huge variation in how strictly these laws were enforced.

  Tally – Many ordinary men had poor literacy skills. Even if they could read and write, parchment was expensive and documents easily forged, so business was often conducted using a tally. This was a stick into which notches were cut down the length to record the number of bales, barrels or livestock being sold or transported. The stick was split in two vertically, or two sticks were laid side by side and notched simultaneously, and each man would keep one. When the two were put back together, it was immediately obvious if any of the notches had been altered to falsify the number of bales or boxes. Hence we still use the expression ‘their stories don’t tally’ when people give conflicting accounts about an incident.

  Viaticum – Meaning ‘provisions for the journey’. This was the final element of the Last Sacraments. The dying person would first confess their sins and be absolved by the priest. The priest would then anoint them with chrism (holy oil) in a ritual known as Extreme Unction and finally offer them viaticum – the Eucharist, the consecrated bread and wine, which would be the last thing the dying person would eat or drink in this life.

  Wool-walker – Otherwise known as the fuller or tucker, he was vital in the wool and cloth trade for two processes: scouring the woollen cloth to remove grease and dirt, and milling or thickening to make the fibres tangle together, which, if not done thoroughly, would cause holes to form in the garment as the fibres pulled apart in wear. The fuller or walker would first pound the cloth in a vat of stale urine to scour it, then trample on it in the urine, feet bare, to mill it.