On the ground, things could be different, as the very complaints and invectives of medieval churchmen testify to the fact that magicians continued to flourish even at royal courts, while commoners still resorted in large numbers to lower-grade counterparts for their ills, worries and desires. Between the ninth and twelfth centuries Christian thought itself, at least as articulated by certain writers, adapted to legitimize some forms of divination and healing charms anew. None the less, for the most part the new religion condemned magic in general more fiercely and uncompromisingly than its predecessors had done, and this persisted through the whole medieval period.27 Moreover, Wolfgang Behringer is correct that medieval law codes, starting with those of the Germanic kingdoms which supplanted the western Roman Empire, continued to prescribe penalties for the deliberate working of harmful magic. If the harm done was serious, such as murder, then the penalties were as severe as those specified for doing equivalent damage by physical means; which is logical in societies, such as those in medieval Europe, which believed in the literal potency of spells and curses.28
The results of these laws can be divided into two categories. One consisted of accusations of the use of magic to harm or constrain as a political weapon, of the sort that had been found among the Hittites and in imperial Rome. As such, it was deployed to promote feuds within families, allocate blame for the sudden death or mysterious illness of a ruler, assert the authority of one, or remove a minister. It remained a widespread and persistent, if occasional, feature of the Middle Ages, occurring in the Frankish kingdom in the sixth century and the Frankish empire in the ninth (thrice), at the French royal court and in that of the count of Maine in the tenth, in Aquitaine and Aragon in the eleventh, and in Flanders and Byzantium in the twelfth.29 Fewer than a dozen cases, however, spread over eight hundred years and most of Europe, do not represent a significant element in medieval political life and state-building; and such charges were spectacular enough to be recorded by chroniclers.
The second category of actions against suspected evil magicians consisted of local trials and mob actions, and here again there is a succession of episodes, some long well known.30 Women were put to death for practising magic at Cologne in 1075, Ghent in 1175, in France in 1190 and 1282 and in Austria in 1296. Most of these cases involved one or two victims, but there is a chronicle reference to the burning of thirty women in a single day in the south-east Austrian province of Styria during 1115, for an unrecorded offence that, given the penalty, was probably witchcraft. A priest was burned as a magician in a Westphalian town in about 1200. These all seem to have been legal executions, but in addition there were lynchings, especially a notorious case at Freising in Bavaria in 1090 when three women were burned to death by their peasant neighbours who blamed them for poisoning people and destroying crops by uncanny means. Bishop Agobard of Lyons published a now famous sermon concerning the murder by mobs in the 810s of people suspected of using magic to cause storms that annihilated crops, and epidemics among humans. In Denmark in 1080 women were also blamed for bad weather and disease. Medieval Russia seems to have been particularly prone to such responses, and a string of reports between 1000 and 1300 testify to the killing of old people, with or without legal sanction, by crowds that blamed them for engineering crop failures and so causing famines: this was a reaction which had died out by the early modern period when witch trials were at their height elsewhere in Europe. Around 1080 King Wratislaw II of Bohemia allegedly supported his brother, the bishop of Prague, in punishing individuals accused of using magic to cause madness and storms, and purloin the milk and grain of other farmers. According to this account, he beheaded or burned the male suspects and drowned the women, to a total above a hundred.31
Wolfgang Behringer seems right again, therefore, that in some countries murders or executions of people for destructive magic were more common in the allegedly tolerant early and high Middle Ages than during the main, succeeding, period of trials. None the less, the pattern revealed by the surviving records is one of occasional executions or murders of isolated individuals or very small groups in Western Europe, and sporadic savage outbreaks of worse persecution, especially in eastern parts of the Continent, triggered by unusual calamities of hunger or disease. The recorded cases must undoubtedly represent only a proportion of an unknown number that has been lost to history, but the records of them suggest that these were events dramatic and rare enough to be worth chronicling. What seems to be especially significant in those records is the part played by churchmen. As said, they regularly and vehemently condemned all or most kinds of magic as demonically inspired and assisted, and none seems to have argued against a belief in witchcraft: indeed, the most influential theologian of the central Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, ruled firmly that the Christian faith proclaimed that to dispute the existence and effectiveness of harmful magic was to deny the reality of demons.32 On the other hand, they did not develop any theology that demanded and encouraged the hunting of witches either, and, in practice, seem to have acted more frequently to encourage than to discourage it before 1300. It is true that the bishop of Beauvais in northern France led the citizens in trying and executing a woman for practising magic in 1190.33 Against this it must be recorded that we know that women were blamed for storms and epidemics in Denmark in 1080 because the Pope himself, Gregory VII, wrote to the king to stop it, as a barbaric custom which prevented the realization that such disasters were divine punishments.34 When Bishop Agobard preached against the murder of presumed storm-raisers and disease-bringers, it was to denounce the practice vehemently on the same grounds. Agobard claimed to have intervened to save the lives of some of those accused, while noting that the persecution had to some extent been provoked by men who tried to work a protection racket on farmers, demanding money from them to spare their crops from being magically attacked.35 One of the Russian persecutions of people for causing famine, in the diocese of Vladimir in the 1270s, was recorded because the bishop condemned it with the same theological argument as Pope Gregory.36 The three women murdered at Freising in 1090 only suffered because the local bishop had died and a successor had not been appointed, creating a gap in formal authority, and monks from a nearby religious house interred the burned remains in their own cemetery, as those of martyrs.37
Such clerical attitudes would perhaps have done much to discourage precisely that popular tendency to blame magic for natural disasters, which seem to have had the greatest potential to generate local witch-hunts in the period. It appears to have been of a piece with them that when, in the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church developed a formidable inquisitorial machinery to detect and annihilate heresy – the holding of false religious opinions – Pope Alexander IV ruled that magic in itself should not be the concern of inquisitors.38 Dominican friars were the most active staff of the new inquisitions, but in 1279 some of them stopped the burning of a woman as a witch by peasants in Alsace.39 Churchmen between 500 and 1300 were also generally consistent in condemning as illusions and superstitions some widely held popular beliefs which would, had they taken them literally instead, have encouraged witch-hunting. One of these was the belief in the night rides undertaken by followers of Diana or Herodias, or the other names attributed to the roving superhuman lady or ladies, declared illusory from the canon Episcopi onwards. Another belief was that in night-roaming cannibal women who attacked sleeping people, children or adults, and consumed their organs. It was seen in the second chapter of this book that this idea, embodied in the earliest surviving Germanic law code, was outlawed in subsequent codes as the effect of Christianity (and perhaps of educated Roman opinion, which had questioned the reality of the strix demon from pagan times) was felt. Early medieval sermons and penitentials continued to condemn belief in such figures as a fiction.40 Thus it can be suggested that early and high medieval churchmen both believed in the existence of magicians – and indeed this was beyond doubt as there were always plenty of people offering magical services, and also probably some who did attempt
to use magic to harm enemies – and the need to stop them; and yet operated in many ways to reduce the likelihood of frequent and large-scale witch-hunting.
What at first sight appears to be a notable exception to this rule turns out on closer inspection to prove it: the case of Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, who in 860 came to the defence of Theutberga, the wife of the emperor Lothar II, whom her husband wished to divorce. He accused the supporters of the annulment, and especially Lothar’s mistress Waldburga, of using magic to further their ends. He made clear that he believed their powers to be real, and gained in alliance with demons. In accordance with the custom of the time, he lumped together practices such as divination with those designed to afflict others, in the same general category of evil and forbidden craft, to be fought with the rites of the Church. Moreover he believed that the workers of magic were usually female, and motivated by a desire for power over men. At no point, however, did he call for their trial and execution, so confident was he that the effects of Christian ritual, and especially of consecrated salt and oil, were sufficient to undo their work without need of any further measures.41 In addition, Norman Cohn drew attention to the importance of the medieval legal system itself in damping down accusations, by confronting those who accused others of crimes with a substantial penalty if they lost their cases. As the use of magic was in its very nature hard to demonstrate, this could present a formidable obstacle.42 Cohn’s argument is almost certainly correct in as far as it concerns private charges brought between individuals (although, as shall be seen, it was not impossible to provide evidence which could convince a court even under these conditions). What is clear, however, is that such barriers to prosecution and conviction could be flimsy indeed if large numbers of people in a community rounded on presumed workers of magic and believed the charges against them, or if a ruler gave such an accusation full credence. This was true under the Romans, who developed the legal system concerned, and remained so as long as that system endured; otherwise the cases listed above would not have occurred. It may be suggested, therefore, that a will to hunt, at least regularly and intensely, was what was missing, and that allowed a judicial process unfavourable to accusations of witchcraft to persist. Wolfgang Behringer’s suggestion that the climatic upturn of the high Middle Ages left people more prosperous and secure, and so less likely to fear witchcraft, may have some bearing on the relative absence of trials and murders at that time. The extent of decline was, however, slight, given that such events had always been few; and the idea is somewhat difficult to prove. A warmer climate is not necessarily less stormy or unhealthy, and the witch-hunts in Russia were provoked by famines caused by droughts, not floods, and continued through the climatic optimum. It may be that, once again, ideological factors were more significant than functional factors in producing a low and intermittent rate of persecution of presumed witches. After all, exactly the same period, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, saw what has been called ‘the formation of a persecuting society’ in Europe, as its peoples turned upon Jews and homosexuals with a new hostility and introduced ever more rigorous measures and structures to deal with a new problem of widespread and mass Christian heresy.43 The witch figure, however, did not get caught up in these developments. These seem to be the conclusions that can be drawn from a Continent-wide survey, but a closer and more detailed survey of a single country may contribute more to knowledge of the matter; and here England provides an obvious choice, not merely because of convenience to the present author but because of the range and quantity of its surviving records. Here as elsewhere, early medieval churchmen denounced magic in all its forms, and prescribed penances for the practice of it, though it is now difficult to distinguish destructive forms of it because of the imprecision of the terminology used. As said before, the Latin maleficium could now be applied to neutral or even beneficial objectives if magical operations were used to secure them, and Anglo-Saxon expressions (to be discussed below) were apparently used as broadly in clerical texts.44 Things are only a little clearer when turning to secular law codes written in the native language. The latter had more than thirty terms for magical practices and practitioners, but a few recur with especial frequency, and were criminalized most often. Their meaning can only be recovered vaguely, and by association with other words in Anglo-Saxon that include their components. Gaeldorcraeft seems to have had connotations of song or incantation; libcraeft of potions; and scincraeft of delusion and phantasm. That leaves wiccecraeft, the ancestor of ‘witchcraft’, practised by a female wicce or male wicca, from which of course comes ‘witch’: as the ‘cc’ was pronounced as ‘ch’, the derivation is even closer than the spelling suggests. This is more difficult to match with other expressions, and so we rely on context to reconstruct a meaning.45 Such a meaning does seem to emerge from the criminal law codes. The earliest, of Alfred the Great at the end of the ninth century, is also the least helpful, because as a self-consciously devout Christian king he paraphrased the Hebrew injunction in the Book of Exodus. Thus, gealdorcraeftigan, scinlaecan and wiccan, and those who resorted to them, were not to be allowed to live; but Alfred provided no further definitions of these (and the original biblical reference is itself, as discussed earlier, obscure). His law was augmented by one issued by his grandson Athelstan in the late 920s, which made death the penalty for killing by wiccecraeftum, lyblacum and morðdaedum: in other words by the three dishonourable means which were alternatives to homicide committed in a fair fight: magic, poison and murder by stealth. This set of provisions was further amplified by a series of law codes issued by successive regimes between 1000 and 1022 which all seem to have been drafted by the same reforming churchman, Archbishop Wulfstan II of York. They prescribed banishment, or death on refusal to depart, for wiccan and wigleras (the latter being another term for a magician). The significant thing here is the list of other offenders placed in the same clause: perjurers, murderers by stealth and either prostitutes or flagrant serial adultresses. All these could be regarded, once more, as committers of offences against the person, and so wiccan and wigleras were probably, in this context, workers of destructive magic. The clause was repeated, with some amendments such as the inclusion of scincraeft or libcraeft, in the other codes drafted by Wulfstan.46
There does not appear to have been any stereotypical witch figure in Anglo-Saxon England: people seem just to have been expected to yield to the temptation to use magic against their fellow humans at particular moments and for particular reasons. The terminology applied to magicians also suggests that there were individuals who had a reputation for expertise in particular kinds of magical technique, who might provide their services for malicious as well as beneficial ends; and the terms show that these were expected to be of both sexes. To churchmen, of course, all magical practitioners were probably colluding, consciously or not, with demons, and persisting in ways which came out of a pagan past in which these devils were openly worshipped; but the concern of clerics was mainly with condemning acts of healing and divination, which still attracted much belief and support from the populace, and they paid little attention to destructive magic.47 There are traces of belief in supernatural female figures who could protect or harm humans, but especially the latter. Again, different terms were used for these, most of them rarely encountered and now difficult to understand, but one, haegtis or haegtesse, occurs more commonly in texts, and was to engender the word hag, for a malevolent old human woman.48 Early English glossaries equate it with the Latin word striga, for the murderous night-roaming female demon.49 One now very famous healing charm, ‘against a sudden stitch’, brings such figures momentarily sharply into focus, as ‘mighty wives’, who ride across the land yelling and sending darts which cause stabbing pain in the humans at whom they are aimed. They are equated with both elves and pagan deities, so are clearly not supposed to be mortal. The charm aims a magical spear back against them in turn.50
What is missing in the early English texts is the cannibal woman, who preys upon people in th
e night, found in the first Germanic law codes. It could be that Christianity had stamped out the belief in her before the sources mentioning hags began to be written; but a number of pagan elements, including hags themselves, got through into those. The figures in the charm sound a lot more like the night-riding women of medieval Scandinavian literature – though there is no sign in the charm that the pain-inflicting females there are thought to be active specially by night – and indeed this northern literature, produced by peoples who neighboured the original Anglo-Saxons, likewise has no stereotypical witch figure in it. It could be that the concept of the cannibal night-witch was confined to certain Germanic tribes. In addition, there is a trace in one Anglo-Saxon text of a belief in people who have intimate dealings with demons, to the detriment of their fellows: it prescribes a protective salve against the ‘elf-kin’, ‘night-walkers’ and ‘people with whom the devil has sex’.51 It may be suggested, therefore, that most of the components of the early modern idea of witchcraft were already present in Anglo-Saxon England, but were as yet far from being assembled into that later construct. Of actual signs of enforcement of the laws against witchcraft, there is only one, now celebrated, case. It is that of a tenth-century widow living in Northamptonshire, who drove an iron pin into an image of a man whom she and her son disliked. When suspicion fell on her, her room was searched and the image found, and this proof was sufficient to get her executed, by drowning in a river: her son fled and was outlawed and their land confiscated.52
This record is only preserved, however, because the land concerned swiftly became part of another transaction, in which its new ownership needed to be explained. It is impossible to tell simply from the lack of other evidence whether such cases were as rare as the written sources would suggest, or were routine but, for lack of the keeping of legal records, only likely to emerge into the light of history by accident, as happened in this instance. It may, however, be possible to suggest an answer to this problem by approaching it from other angles. Anglo-Saxon royal families were divided by often vicious internal rivalries, and yet there is no contemporary or near-contemporary mention of magic being used as a charge in these, as it was occasionally in similar dynastic feuds on the Continent. It is also revealing to consult the very large collections of healing and protective charms and herbal medicine that survive from Anglo-Saxon England. Only four such charms were designed, even in part, as remedies against malicious human magic, and non-human beings, such as elves, demons and hags, and depersonalized menaces such as the ‘flying venom’ which caused disease, appear to have provoked more concern.53 It seems that the early English may be counted among the peoples who credited most uncanny misfortune to other sources than their fellow humans; which would have damped down an impulse to hunt witches. Not much altered after the Norman Conquest with respect to attitudes to magic, despite the tremendous political, social and cultural changes it brought in general. Twelfth-century authors did occasionally produce portraits of wicked English female magicians: in total, of a queen who used potions to turn herself into a mare; a woman hired by a stepmother to brew an evil potion to be administered to a rightful heir; another at Berkeley in Gloucestershire, who knew spells and could learn the future by listening to birds; and another hired by the Normans to help them against Saxon rebels, and who delivered a curse (ineffectually) from a platform. All these were, however, literary constructs designed to carry moral messages, set in a past age before that of the writer and involving formulaic activities, so that the image of the woman on the platform, for example, may have been borrowed from Norse accounts of seiđr.54 The law itself altered little, William the Conqueror himself forbidding the use of spells to kill people or animals, while a treatise written in the reign of his son Henry confirmed that the penalty for achieving this should be death, but for merely attempting it those convicted should pay compensation.55 Legal records exist from the late twelfth century onwards and show a few trials for magic: a woman arrested for it in Essex or Hertfordshire in 1168 and a Norfolk woman tried and acquitted in 1199 or 1209; while in 1280 an abbot of Selby, Yorkshire, was accused of employing a male magician to find the body of his drowned brother. There is no indication in the first two cases that destructive magic was at issue, and in the third it was not, but a thirteenth-century man at King’s Lynn was fined for drawing blood from a woman upon false suspicions; and in later centuries this was a standard means of averting bewitchment. In Northumberland in 1279 a man’s goods were confiscated because he had struck and killed a woman. Her body had been burned, probably indicating that she was believed to have been a witch.56 In the late twelfth century Henry II banished all magicians from his court, and by the thirteenth the charge of using magic for personal gain had at last entered the toolkit of high political rivalry: in the first half of the century the main royal minister, and in the second half a high financial officer, the Chamberlain of the Exchequer, were accused of it.57 So the fear of witchcraft remained, with laws against it, but does not seem to have been intense or to have manifested frequently in action. The English case seems to prove the European rule for the early to high Middle Ages.
The Witch Page 24
