The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  The European record is therefore patchy, but Britain looks like especially promising ground for a connection between magicians and fairies. For a long time, it has been noted by scholars of fairy lore, and the occasional historian interested in the subject, that British service magicians often claimed to be instructed by these beings.16 A connection between such beings and accused witches has also long been recognized, as stated above. It is worth laying out the (now mostly well-known) evidence for these relationships, to align it with the questions posed earlier. Starting in Scotland, such a connection appears in the very first trial for witchcraft to leave a detailed indictment, that of Janet Boyman of Edinburgh, probably in 1572. She said that she had learned healing skills from a rite taught by a fellow service magician which had called up the ‘good neighbours’, a normal pseudonym for fairies, and with them gained knowledge of the ways of the ‘seely wights’, which enabled her to protect people against them. Unhappily, her cures were clearly not sufficiently effective, and she dabbled in political prophecy as well, and was arrested.17 In 1576 an Ayrshire woman, Elizabeth Dunlop, confessed that a man called Tom Reid, who had died in battle almost thirty years before, had introduced her to the ‘good wights’ of the ‘court of Elf-home’, where she saw another man whom she knew to be dead. Reid’s mistress, the elf queen, visited her at her home. From Tom and his superhuman companions, Dunlop said she had learned healing with herbs and the ability to see the future and trace lost or stolen goods; which ended disastrously when men whom she had identified as thieves denounced her to the authorities in self-defence.18 A dozen years later Alison Pearson, from Fife, stated that she had learned the arts of healing by observing a group of green-clad superhuman men and women, who were sometimes fair-looking and merry, and sometimes fearsome. She had learned much more of these arts from a dead male cousin of hers, who told her that the same beings had carried him out of the human world.19 Her mistake was probably to include an archbishop of St Andrews among her medical clients, so that his political enemies turned upon her.20 When the first great wave of Scottish witch trials began in 1590 it was alleged that Lady Foulis, in Cromarty, had consulted a local magician about a means to kill some of her relatives, and was advised to talk to fairies on a local hill.21 That same year Isobel Watson at Stirling claimed to have taken service with them as midwife to their queen, befriending a human man who may have been a ghost, and learning how to heal from them. She also, however, said she was aided by an angel.22 In 1597 the trial took place at Edinburgh of Christian Lewinston, who testified that she had learned witchcraft from her daughter, who had herself been abducted and taught by fairies.23 In that year Isobel Strachan attributed her magical skills to the teaching of her mother, who had learned them in turn from an elf-lover.24 Andrew Man, who boasted of working healing and protective (but also blighting) magic on humans, animals and farmland, was tried at Aberdeen in 1598. He spoke of two superhuman helpers, the queen of Elf-home, who had known him since visiting his family when he was a child, and an angel called Christsonday, whom he thought to be the son of God and seemed at times to identify with Jesus. The two beings were associates, but Man’s magical powers appear to have derived from the queen. He said that he had seen dead men in her court, including the famous Thomas the Rhymer, reputed to have been her lover in legend, and King James IV, who had been killed at Flodden Field.25

  In 1615 Janet Drever was accused on Orkney, in the Northern Isles of Scotland, of keeping up a relationship with the ‘fairy folk’ for twenty-six years. The following year, Elspeth Reoch appeared in the same court, with the relation that she had been given the ability to gain access to hidden knowledge concerning human affairs, and power to heal with herbs, by two mysterious males. One had identified himself as a ‘fairy man’, a kinsman of hers killed in a quarrel.26 Another healer from the far north, Catherine Caray, said she had met a ‘great number of fairy men’ with their leader in nearby hills at sunset.27 Two years later John Stewart, a wandering juggler and fortune-teller, was tried at Irvine in Ayrshire for using magic to sink a ship. He told the court that he had gained his skill in divination by weekly visits to the fairies, and especially their king, and had seen many dead people with them, as all who died suddenly went to Elfland.28 In 1623, a Perthshire woman, Isobel Haldane, replied to interrogators that she had been given healing abilities and the power to predict people’s deaths during a stay in a fairy hill to which she had been magically transported from her bed. She had also, however, been enabled to curse, and was reported to the authorities for using this resource on a man who had caught her stealing grain. Examined with her was her friend Janet Trall, another well-known magical healer, who said she had been taught to heal and blight by a company of fairy folk that had likewise carried her off from her bed.29 In 1628 a popular healer operating near Stirling, Stein (Steven) Maltman, ended up in court because he was suspected of transferring the sufferings of his clients to other people. He said that he acquired his techniques from fairies, but also emphasized his devotion to ‘God and all unearthly creatures’ and the fact that the fairies caused many of the ills that he cured.30 Back in Orkney in 1633 Isobel Sinclair was accused of having boasted of gaining the ‘second sight’ by being six times ‘controlled with the fairy’.31 In 1640 one John Gothrey appeared before the presbytery at Perth and told it that he had likewise been kidnapped by fairies, and taught healing spells with them by a little lad who claimed to be John’s own brother, stolen by the fairy folk as a baby.32 At Livingston, west of Edinburgh, in 1647, Margaret Alexander testified to having befriended the fairies thirty years before and having an affair with their king: she learned a healing technique but also magic with which she murdered two people.33 That same year Janet Cowie was tried at Elgin on charges of harming several people with witchcraft, and accused also of explaining away her frequent absences at night as jaunts with fairies.34

  Isobel Gowdie claimed to have visited the fairy queen and king in their realm within some nearby hills, though not to have acquired any powers from them: perhaps significantly, she never referred to herself as a service magician.35 A male magician at Duns in the south-east, tried in 1669 and called Harry Wills, said he had spent nineteen days with fairies at the start of his career, and retained a female spirit who came to him at night to advise him.36 In 1677 one of two men accused of cattle-rustling at Inveraray in Argyll claimed to have the power to recover stolen goods, gained by befriending a people whom he had first seen dancing inside a hollow hill, which represented the court of their king.37 Margaret Fulton, one of the Renfrewshire women accused of multiple murders by witchcraft in 1697, declared with reference to her magical dealings that her husband had ‘brought her back from the fairies’.38

  Most of the people whose stories are recorded here ended up sentenced to death for the crime of satanic witchcraft, as in Scotland the crucial element in such a conviction was confession to the making of a pact with a demon; and fairies could very easily be assimilated to demons by magistrates. Indeed, the Devil himself, or his minions, often made appearances in these narratives, and the fairies themselves were often credited with satanic behaviour such as demanding a renunciation of Christianity. Conversely, Christian elements – in addition to those mentioned – peeped out of accounts of the actual service magic provided by the accused: their spells were often uttered in the name of the Trinity, or involved water taken from a well formerly dedicated to a saint. It seems likely that the cases cited make up the great majority of those surviving from Scottish witch trials that mention fairies.39 Despite their number, they are still a small minority of the total number of trials from which records exist; but it is also possible that they represent the majority of cases in which service magicians were accused of witchcraft, and that makes the connection between such practitioners and fairy lore much closer. The service magicians concerned seem mainly to have been those who stepped outside the normal bounds of their kind, by making enemies, failing clients or becoming embroiled in political rivalries. Certainly there are
other sources that reinforce the sense of association between human magicians and fairies in Scotland. A study of trials of magic held in local church courts found that people denounced for selling magical services claimed that their skills were fairy-given all across the central Lowlands from Angus and East Lothian to Ayrshire. It concluded that all social classes resorted to these magicians and that they were safe from prosecution if their clients prospered.40 A genteel commentator in 1677 complained to a correspondent that the ‘white devils’ known as fairies ‘to this day, make daily service to severals in quality of familiars’.41

  On the other hand, it would not be safe to assume that all early modern Scottish service magicians, or even perhaps the majority, claimed a fairy origin for their abilities. Julian Goodare has shown that when people accused of witchcraft confessed to receiving powers from a superhuman entity other than an unambiguous demon, they spoke of a range of such beings, including angels, ghosts and (often) vaguely defined ‘spirits’.42 Something of a case study of the range of sources claimed by Scottish service magicians for their powers may be provided by one particular and specialist branch of the genre, the Gaelic seers or predictors of future events. In the later seventeenth century, they became a focus of deliberate research by British scholars interested in gathering evidence for the reality of a spirit world, and the records thereby gathered have been collected and published.43 The seers too were regarded at least by some as gaining their powers from the fairy realm. A writer from the eastern Highland region of Strathspey in the 1690s said that the main Gaelic name for them indicated somebody who conversed with ‘the fairies or fairy-folk’ while a correspondent of his agreed that some said that the second sight was gained from ‘those demons, we call fairies’.44 Yet, when the seers and their associates were consulted, a range of beliefs for the origin of the ‘sight’ was manifested, including inheriting it, achieving it spontaneously, or inducing it by looking through the knot of a tree or the blades of shears, or placing hands or feet over those of an existing seer. Some practitioners offered to sell it to enquirers, and others confessed that nobody had any real idea whence it came.45

  None the less, the connection between fairies and the gift of magical ability was clearly very strong, and it is time in this context to consider Julian Goodare’s ‘seely wights’. He started his essay on them by quoting a popular Scottish verse, published in 1826, which warned that to refer to fairies directly was to invite their hostility, but to use a flattering circumlocution such as ‘good neighbours’ or ‘seely wights’ would win their favour. So, by 1800 the latter expression was recognized as simply another one for fairies, and ‘good neighbours’ was certainly used as such in the early modern period: but was ‘seely wights’? The term occurs twice in the trial records cited above, where it could very well have that connotation, so if the ‘wights’ are to be distinguished from fairies, as a related but different kind of being, everything hangs on the earliest source for them. That is the text from the 1530s, by a theologian at Aberdeen University called William Hay, and it is unhappily a far from straightforward one. It starts by declaring that there are certain women who say that they have dealings with Diana, queen of the fairies. This is apparently a repetition of the oft-rehearsed and by now very old clause in the canon Episcopi, updated linguistically by calling Diana’s retinue ‘fairies’. It goes on to gloss this by saying that there are others (in the context, presumably other women) who say that the fairies are demons and that they have no dealings with them. This is actually to repeat the canon again, but to put the author’s condemnation of Diana and her spirits as a demonic delusion into the mouths of contemporaries. Transplanted to sixteenth-century Scotland, this could work well as a declaration that some women – who in this context could well be service magicians – claimed to have dealings with the fairy kingdom, which as shown is well established in the early modern records. It would also be credible to declare that other commoners had internalized the official message that such beings were likely to be demonic. A third sentence is added, however, and this is the problem, for it seems to state that ‘they’ (presumably the women who will not deal with fairies) themselves gather together with an ‘innumerable host’ of uneducated or common women whom ‘they call in our language seely wights’.46 Literally read, this means that the women who will not deal with fairies assert that instead they attend huge meetings with other women which have nothing disreputable, or supernatural, about them: but they give those other women a name always elsewhere associated with fairies.

  Clearly something is wrong here, and our ability to determine what it is must be severely compromised by the fact that we have no idea from whom Hay obtained his information, and how garbled it had become in transmission to him. Julian Goodare chose, as said, to read the passage to mean that the women who condemned dealings with fairies insisted they themselves dealt with a different kind of fairy-like being called seely wights. He also presumes that Hay received his data, directly or indirectly, from a member of the ‘cult’ of these ‘wights’, and hypothesizes at length on ways in which he could have interviewed one.47 I am inclined to think that Hay was repeating things that he had been told by others and did not fully understand, and that ‘seely wights’ was actually an expression used for fairies by women – probably service magicians – who claimed to deal with them and denied that they were demons. Readers may choose between our differing readings, or decline the task as inevitably inconclusive.48

  What of England and Wales? Here there are also many examples of service magicians claiming to have learned their skills from fairies.49 They are recorded in Somerset around 1440, Suffolk in 1499 (conjoined with ‘God and the Blessed Mary’), Somerset again in 1555 (with the ‘help of God’ added), Dorset in 1566 (where a male magician contacted them in their homes inside prehistoric burial mounds) and Yorkshire in 1567.50 As for Wales, in 1587 an author called for the suppression of ‘swarms’ of magicians there who claimed ‘to walk, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at night, with the fairies, of whom they brag themselves to have their knowledge’.51 A rare and now famous English case of somebody accused of witchcraft for dealings with fairies was that of Susan Swapper, a reputed service magician at the Sussex port of Rye, in 1609. Her alleged encounters began in what we can now regard as the classic manner, with a group of green-clad people coming to her to offer aid and teach her a healing skill; after which she went on to meet their fairy queen. In her case, however, the relationship turned into a hunt for treasure, and so, through the operation of local factional politics, into a witch trial, though one ending in a pardon.52

  The same tradition continued through the seventeenth century. During the late 1640s a maid in a Cornish household, Ann Jeffries, established a considerable reputation for herself as a magical healer, which was associated with her claim to have conversations with fairies (and her profound Christian piety). Her career was ended because she added political prophecies to her repertoire that were unfavourable to the current government.53 In the middle of the century a man was accused of witchcraft in the north of England after attempting to cure people with a white powder. He told the court that he obtained it from fairies living in a knoll under the rule of their queen, and the jury acquitted him because his cures seemed generally to work.54 A London woman called Mary Parish provided a range of magical services in the later seventeenth century, and claimed to have befriended the fairies, and especially their king and queen, entering their realm through a hillock on Hounslow Heath. She led her aristocratic patron, Goodwin Wharton, a merry dance in the 1680s by offering to introduce him to them and reporting each time a colourful new impediment that prevented it. As usual, her charms had Christian references.55 A writer in 1705 recorded the story of a Gloucestershire woman tried for her claim to predict the deaths or recovery of sick people, who maintained that she learned these results from fairies who visited her at night.56 As in Scotland, therefore, the linkage between service magic and fairies seems very strong, though again it does not seem universally
associated with providers of such magic, and may not, indeed, have been a characteristic of the majority. Once more, also, most of the known cases of it concern women, who represent eight of the ten English instances described above; it is not clear, however, whether this fact results from a special tendency for female service magicians to identify with fairies, or because most such magicians were female, or because female magicians were more likely to get into trouble, and so enter the record. Certainly in England and Wales, and possibly in Scotland, the association of fairies with human magic faded away in the eighteenth century. By the end of that century, service magicians were believed to be empowered by the books they possessed or the humans who instructed them, and there does not seem to be a single recorded case thereafter of one who made the claim to knowledge transmitted by fairy folk. Perhaps the latter had simply ceased to seem so credible.57