by L A Vocelle
Unfortunately, in 1484, the fate of women and cats took a dire turn for the worse when the Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger complained to Pope Innocent VIII that witchcraft and heresy were consuming all of Germany and nothing was being done about it. The Pope thus issued a Papal Bull Summis Desiderantes Affectibus stating that all witches and their cats were to be burned at the stake. For the next three hundred years more than nine million people would be executed, the majority marginalized women and children (Gage, 1893).
Three years later, in 1487, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, written by both Kramer and Sprenger was published. Divided into three parts, the first outlines the belief in witches as heresy and explains why women are more apt to be witches than men. The second part explains the investigation of witchcraft and the third describes the legal proceedings that are required for those accused of witchcraft.
Women were more likely than men to be suspected of having relations with the devil because they were considered mentally and physically weak. In fact, through men’s interpretation of the Bible, women were defective because they were created from Adam’s bent rib. According to Ecclesiasticus XXV women were evil. Who could argue with the quote from the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”? Seen as deceivers and feeble minded, women and their cats were the prime suspects of practicing witchcraft. Even the word femina (woman) meant lacking in faith. The fe prefix means faith and minus means less (Gage, 1893 p. 224). “A witch was held to be a woman who had deliberately sold herself to the evil one; who delighted in injuring others, and who, for the purpose of enhancing the enormity of her evil acts chose the Sabbath day for the performance of her impious rites, and to whom all black animals had special relationship” (Gage, 1893, p. 217). A poem from the Middle Ages states:
Woman is a snake to be venomous.
Woman is a lion for imperiousness.
Woman is a leopard to devour.
Woman is a fox to deceive.
Woman is a bear to be combative.
Woman is a dog to have sharp senses.
Woman is a cat to bite with teeth.
Woman is a rat to destroy.
Woman is a mouse to be sneaky
(Fiero, Pfeffer, & Alain, 1989, p. 124).
Men in the Middle Ages feared women, feared their pagan powers, and feared their ability to create life. So intimidating were women that the Malleus Maleficarum even addressed their ability to emasculate a man by removing his “virile member” (Summers, 1926).
In Chapter IX of the Malleus Maleficarum, the authors built upon earlier accounts of women changing themselves into cats by citing an account of a man near Strasburg who was attacked by a large cat while chopping wood. When he tried to chase it away, two more cats appeared and scratched and bit him. Looking quite disheveled after these cat attacks, he was arrested and charged with beating three women in the village. The man pleaded that he had not done this crime, as he had never beaten a woman in his life. He thought back to the time of the accused crime, and he told the judge that he had been in the woods and had in fact at the same time beaten three large cats. The judge realizing that the man had been set upon by devils, released him, and the incident was quietly forgotten (Summers, 1486/2009). Accusations of witchcraft became easy excuses for the abuse of women as well as cats.
A similar story about an English hunter originates from Scotland. The hunter, who had set up camp for the night with his dogs, was confronted by a large cat that moved close to his fire and, as he claimed, grew larger and larger. The hunter, fearing for his life, took the silver buttons off his coat and used them to fire at the cat. The cat ran away, but the next day, since he was a doctor, a farmer sent for him. It seems the farmer’s wife had fallen ill, and when the doctor examined her, he found that she had been shot in the right breast from which he extracted a silver button, the same silver button that he had used the night before (Campbell, 2003).
Because of religious unrest, Henry VIII thought it prudent to enact a law against witchcraft in 1542 making the act a felony punishable by death. Ironically, even though most regarded cats as evil, the cunning Cardinal Wolsey seemed to have liked cats very much. So much so that he allowed them to sit next to him in his chair while he gave important audiences.
The first of the famous witch trials held in a secular English court in 1556 involved a cat. The old and frail Elizabeth Francis was accused and confessed to practicing witchcraft in Chelmsford, Essex (figure 5.23). Elizabeth was the descendent of a witch, her grandmother, and had been instructed in the black arts from the age of 12. Her grandmother had also given her a white spotted cat named Satan, who ate bread and milk and occasionally begged for droplets of Elizabeth’s blood as a reward for doing her bidding. At first Elizabeth only desired wealth and asked her cat to give her sheep, which he did. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, these ill-gotten sheep soon all died and left her as poor as she had been before. Then she asked her familiar Satan to make Andrew Byles, a rather well-to-do man, marry her. The cat demanded that she let Byles have his way with her first, and after so doing, he refused to marry her. Much angered, she begged the cat to take away all his wealth and kill him, and this Satan did. Again she asked for a husband and the cat granted her a marriage with a not so wealthy man with whom she had a baby girl. Unhappy in her marriage and with her baby daughter, she asked Satan to kill the helpless girl. This was done, and the daughter died at six months of age. Next, according to Elizabeth’s wishes, her husband then became lame after the cat was said to have lain in his shoes and turned into a toad. After keeping Satan for nearly 15 years, she gave him to Agnes Waterhouse, also known as Mother Waterhouse, who was 64 years old at the time. Agnes was the first woman to be executed for witchcraft because she had been accused of causing the death of William Fynne and of also causing the deaths of many of her neighbors’ livestock through the powers of her familiar, Satan, the cat. Agnes was eventually hanged in 1566, as was Elizabeth in 1579. Elizabeth had been continually in and out of jail for almost ten years until she was finally charged with causing the death of Alice Poole through the use of witchcraft in 1578.
Both executions took place after Queen Elizabeth I implemented a new stricter Witchcraft Act in 1563. The Queen, by no means a cat lover, had great numbers of the abused animals stuffed into an effigy of the pope and burned for entertainment at her coronation ceremony.
In contrast, Elizabeth’s adversaries seemed to like cats. The Duke of Norfolk, after having been committed to the Tower by Queen Elizabeth I for plotting to take over her throne, was regularly visited by his favorite cat that entered his cell through a chimney. However, this was not the first story of a cat saving an inmate in the Tower. Sir Henry Wyatt (1460-1537) perhaps had his life saved by a cat too. Imprisoned by Richard III for supporting Henry Tudor, he was sent to the Tower of London to starve in a cold bare cell. If not for the kindness of a stray cat that he befriended, he might have died. “A cat came one day down into the dungeon unto him, and as it were, offered herself unto him. He was glad of her, laid her on his bosom to warm him, won her love. After this she would come every day unto him divers times, and when she could get one, bring him a pigeon….Sir Henry Wyatt, in his prosperity, for this would ever make much of cats, as other men will of their spaniels or their hounds” (Bell, 1854, p. 12). A stone memorial to this cat can still be seen in The Church of St. Mary the Virgin and All Saints in Maidstone, Kent. Located near the altar, it states, Sir Henry Wyatt, “...who was imprisoned and tortured in the tower in the reign of Richard the third, kept in the dungeon, where fed and preserved by a cat” (Stall, 2007, p. 45).
Also imprisoned in the Tower of London, it was a cat, too, that saved Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of South Hampton, by climbing down the chimney with morsels of food. Imprisoned there by Queen Elizabeth for supporting the rebellion against her by the Earl of Essex, Wriothesley’s constant companion was his cat, Trixie, who kept him company until he was released by James I in 1603. A portrait of the
Earl, with his loyal cat sitting beside him, still proudly hangs in Boughton House, Northamptonshire (Figure 5.24).
Figure 5.23. Hanging of the Chelmsford Witches, Woodcut, 1556, English Pamphlet, 1589
Figure 5.24. Wriothesley and Cat, Trixie, 1603, Broughton House, Northamptonshire
However, on the other hand, weird stories of cats and witchcraft continued, and in 1569, a servant, Agnes Bowker, claimed in court that she had had sexual relations with a cat six or seven times, and that she had, consequently, given birth to a stillborn cat†. The claim was so contentious that it even reached the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth I. Bowker’s midwife even supported her story by swearing that she had received a stillborn skinned cat (figure 5.25). It was not a coincidence that Agnes’s neighbors reported days earlier that she had wanted to borrow their cat for some reason. And even though they had refused to give her their cat, it mysteriously vanished and was never seen again. The court also found that the so called still born cat had meat and straw in its gut; thus, proving that it was no monster at all. In reality, Agnes most probably murdered an ill-conceived child and hid it with the aid of her midwife and tried to confuse the authorities with this fantastic story of giving birth to a cat (Cressy, 2000).
Figure 5.25. Agnes Bowker's Cat, 1569, British Library, London
The curse of witchcraft even infiltrated the upper classes, and in
The curse of witchcraft even infiltrated the upper classes, and in 1590, after accusing Mother Samuel of witchcraft, Lady Cromwell dreamt of a cat that threatened to tear off her skin and flesh. Little over a year later the Lady fell ill and died. Mother Samuel, accused of bewitching the Lady and causing her death, was executed. The poem, The Old Woman and Her Cats, written by John Gay, could have been written for poor Mother Samuel.
A wrinkled hag of wicked fame,
Beside a little smoky flame
Sat hovering, pinch’d with age and frost;
Her shrivell’d hands, with veins emboss’d,
Upon her knee her weight sustains,
While palsy shook her crazy brains:
She mumbles forth her backward prayers,
An untamed scold of four score years:
About her swarmed a numerous brood,
Of cats, who lank with hunger mewed.
Teased with cries, her choler grew,
And thus she sputter’d, ‘Hence ye crew!’
Fool that I was, to entertain
Such imps, such fiends, a hellish train!
Had ye been never housed and nursed,
I for a witch had ne’er been cursed.
To you I owe that crowds of boys
Wory me with eternal noise;
Straws laid across my pace retard,
The horseshoe’s nail’d (each threshold’s guard)
The stunted broom the wenches hide,
For fear that I should up and ride;
They stick with pins my bleeding seat,
And bid me show my secret teat.’
‘To hear you prate would vex a saint;
Who hath most reason of complaint?
(Replies a cat) Let’s come to proof.
Had we ne’er starved beneath your roof,
We had, like others of our race,
In credit lived as beasts of chase.
‘Tis infamy to serve a hag;
Cats are thought imps, her broom a nag!
And boys against our lives combine,
Because, ‘tis said, your cats have nine’
(Gay, 1822, pp. 58-59).
The next year, 1591, saw John Fian become Scotland’s most famous warlock. He and his coven attempted to sink King James I’s ship on its way to Denmark by tying a cat to a dismembered corpse which they then threw into the sea while chanting incantations. Invoked by the spell, a storm arose and forced the ship to return to harbor. As a result, Fian was tried for high treason and witchcraft for the attempted murder of King James I and Queen Anne and was subsequently executed.
For having visited Adam Clark and his wife in the form of a cat, Isobel Grierson was tried for witchcraft on March 10th, 1607. Clark claimed that Grierson, in the company of many cats, had terrorized them throughout the night by making frightening noises in their bedroom. Accused of other such incidents of witchcraft, she was eventually burned at the stake.
Further inflaming the fire of witchcraft accusations that revolved around cats, in the same year, 1607, Edward Topsell (1572-1625) first published his book The History of Four Footed Beasts, wherein he stated, “The familiars of witches do most commonly appear in the shape of cats, which is an argument that this beast is dangerous to the soul and body.” He also added that cats were able to cause serious illnesses. Their breath could cause consumption, their teeth vicious bites, and swallowing their hair would cause suffocation (Topsell, 1658, pp. 81-83) (figure 5.26).
Ambroise Paré, a famous physician of the age, had earlier claimed that by even looking at a cat a person could come under its spell and lose consciousness and that sleeping with one was highly risky as it would cause tuberculosis (Rogers, 2006). Joannes Jonstonus (1603-1675) wrote a similar book to that of Topsell’s and agreed with both Topsell and Paré that cats’ “breathe is pestilent, and breeds consumptions, and …, for the brains are poyson, and made an Uratislavian Girl mad...”(Jonstonus, 1678, p. 97). However, Jonstonus does claim that there are several cures to be gotten from cats. He states that, “The ashes of the head burnt in a pot and blowninto the eyes, clears them; the flesh sucks weapons out of the body, and eases emrods, and back-ache; the liver burnt to powder eases the stone, the gall fetches away a dead child, the fat is smeared on gouty parts; the pisse stiled helps the thick of hearing, the dregs of the paunch with rosin, and oyl of roses in a suppository, stops woman’s flux of blood. Some mince the flesh, and stuff a fat goose with it, salt, and rost it by a soft fire, and distill it, and annoint gouty joints with successe. The fat keep iron from rusting” (Jonstonus, 1678, p. 97). Ironically, the black cat would later become a cure for a myriad of diseases. Its skin, blood and excrement would be used to cure shingles, hives, ringworm, stys, and fevers (Bergen, 1899).
Some years after Topsell’s book was published, the witch trials were still quite common. The trial of Joan Flower and her two daughters Margaret and Phillipa Flower, also known as the witches of Belvoir, took place in 1618. Joan and Margaret worked for the Earl and Countess of Rutland at Belvoir Castle until Margaret was eventually let go for stealing. Seeking revenge, they set about a plan to kill the Earl’s son. Rightly suspecting some sort of retribution, the Earl had them all imprisoned. Shortly after their incarceration their mother died, and the two sisters confessed that their mother had taken the glove of Lord Henry Roos, the Earl of Rutland’s eldest son, and had rubbed it on the back of Rutterkin, her cat familiar. After that she boiled the glove and stabbed it with a sharp knife and buried it in a dung heap while reciting certain curses over it with the intent to do him harm. Not long afterward, the Lord fell ill and died. The two sisters were convicted and hanged.
The young infamous Puritan Witch Finder General, Matthew Hopkins (figure 5.27), and his partner John Stearne found plenty to keep them busy in the districts of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. Through torture, the finding of so called witches’ marks, and the himself receiving 20 shillings for each conviction (Ross, 1868, p. 169).
It is often written that Hopkins was in the end convicted of being a witch just like his victims after having failed the swimming test; dreaded swimming test†, Hopkins managed to make a fine living for however, this is just a myth, and he died quietly of consumption in 1647 (Hopkins, Stearne, & Davies, 2007).
Anne Randall and Anne Goodfellow, both interrogated by Hopkins, claimed to have had cat familiars. Anne Randall stated that she had two familiars who came to her in the form of a blue cat and kitten. Their names were Hangman and Jacob, and they had regularly sucked her blood for thirty years† as evidenced by marks found on her body. Randall, intent upon using the powers of darkness,
sought revenge from her neighbor, William Baldwin, by asking her familiars to kill his horse after he had refused to give her wood. She also confessed to asking Hangman to kill a hog of Stephen Humfries’simply because he said something to her she did not like. Goodfellow confessed that after her aunt’s death, the aunt’s spirit, which had been taken over by the Devil, came to her in the form of a white cat. The cat asked her to deny her faith in the covenant and even renounce her own baptism. This she did, and the cat bit her on her second finger and sucked her blood to seal the pact.
Figure 5.26. Cat, Edward Topsell’s Four Footed Beasts, 1658, University of Houston Digital Library
Even though a law instituted in 1653 in Scotland stated that all those who used witchcraft or even pretended to would be punished by death, the most virulent use of the law came about during the Scottish witch hunts of 1661 and 1662 incited by the influence of John Kincaid and John Dick. Isobel Gowdie, one of 660 accused of witchcraft, (Burton & Grandy, 2004), was tortured and confessed and then convicted for claiming that her sisters regularly turned into cats to run wildly through the night. However, she told the court that she herself preferred to turn into a hare††. Having denounced Christianity, she had become one of 13 members of a coven. The court realized that she was mentally infirm and was perhaps lenient in her sentence as there are no records of her execution.
Alice Duke of Somerset in 1664 was convicted of witchcraft for confessing that her cat would regularly suck her right breast at around 7pm every night, and she would thus fall into a trance (Van Vechten, 1921). Likewise, in 1665 Abre Grinset, an old homeless woman, confessed that a grey-black cat came to her at night and sucked blood from a mark on her body.
In Cornwall in 1671 a witch, accused of crimes against the state, was blamed for causing the English fleet some problems during a campaign against the Dutch. She was said to have also caused a bull to kill a member of Parliament, and to top it off, was even accused of causing the barrenness of the queen. Ridiculous as it seems, all these accusations stemmed from the fact that a cat had been seen playing near her house (Notestein, 1911).
