My ol’ man told me that one dark winter mornin’ when ’e went into the stable with ’is lantern, ’e finds to ’is amazement the team all with their collars on, an’ a-sweatin’ an’ a-tremblin’ fit to drop; one in ’ticular was fair frenzied. So, suspectin’ somethin’, ’e looks around, an’ there on Turpin’s back ’e sees two wheat straws, crossed. He picks one off, twistin’ it, without thinkin’ like, an’ as ’e did so, t’other straw seemed to jump down an’ disappear. Then ’e heard a voice, quite distinct, say, ‘Come on, Sally, be quick.’ An’ another voice answered, ‘I can’t, because me ’eels is tied over me ’ead.’ Bewitched, they was, ’e said.
Some of these stories may perhaps have a natural explanation at the back of them – some ‘hag-ridden’ horses, for instance, may have been secretly borrowed by smugglers for their nocturnal journeys. It has been pointed out that a certain Dame Prettylegs, living at Albourne in the nineteenth century, who is said to have been much given to this type of spell, had a husband engaged in smuggling. Even the immobilising of carters’ horses could be based on fact; it is known that horses are so sensitive to certain smells that they will refuse to pass an object smeared with the smelly substance, and that ploughman and carters sometimes took advantage of this to play secret tricks on other people – so perhaps some of these alleged witches knew such secrets too.
Similarly, one reputed wizard was obviously simply a man with strong hypnotic power. He was a nineteenth-century farmer known as Pigtail Bridger, ‘a very tall, big man, terrible to look at’, eccentrically dressed and with his hair in a pigtail. He had the uncanny knack of freezing a man dead in his tracks, and keeping him stuck in the one position while he mocked and jeered at him as long as he chose, the helpless victim being quite conscious all the time. He used to use this means to terrorise and punish the workmen on his farm; for instance, he might lie in wait for one of them as he was coming in to a meal, immobilise him just beside the table, and then himself calmly sit down and eat up the food, taunting the hungry and infuriated man as he did so.
There is an obvious humorous element in several of these anecdotes; as one writer, the Revd H.D. Gordon of Harting, shrewdly noted in 1877:
Public opinion was lenient with the witch if there was a joke about her story. If, however, fear rather than laughter was appealed to, the ‘wise woman’ had a hard time of it, and stood in danger of ducking or burning… Other humorous lovers of the black arts at Harting had the wonderful power of teasing people in a solemn way – making loads of hay fall off in the streets near quagmires, turning swarms of bees on their creditors and on Sheriff’s Officers; and, of course, bewitching small pigs… But when witches kill pigs, they become serious…
For the most dreaded power of the witch was that of causing sickness, whether in man or beasts. It does not figure so often in the anecdotes, for it does not make such a good story as the witch-hare or the stopped wagon, but there is no doubt that it was taken very seriously indeed. When someone was stricken by any mysterious and stubborn illness, and witchcraft was suspected, the first step was to identify the person concerned, and the second to apply counter-magic. Sometimes ‘professional’ help was called in, in the person of the ‘cunning man’ or ‘wise woman’ who could once be found in almost every country town and village – a person credited with supernatural but benevolent powers, who could provide charms against illness, find lost property, and identify thieves and witches.
Boys Firmin describes one such case in Crowborough in the 1860s. A certain woman was pining away, and no remedy was of any use, until her husband, suspecting witchcraft but not feeling certain of the culprit’s identity, consulted a cunning man named Oakley, who lived in Tunbridge Wells. Mr Oakley produced a cupful of some liquid that first fizzed up and then became still and clear; he told the husband to scry in it, and the latter exclaimed excitedly: ‘I see her, ’tis Witch Killick! She is the person tormenting my wife!’ – Mrs Killick being a neighbour of his, who already had the local reputation of a witch. The cunning man then sent him home with instructions on how to drive off the evil spirit, but what these were is not said.
Alternatively, home-made spells might be used to force the witch to reveal herself and take off the curse. The same Tom Reed mentioned above gave an account of one such procedure, used when the daughter of a friend of his ‘wilted and withered’ after being given an orange by a woman over the garden gate. Reed thought this counter-magic had saved the girl’s life, by forcing the witch to betray her true nature:
First, the women of the neighbourhood should be informally summoned to the cottage for a chat, or a cup of tea. A cauldron or pot, containing boiling water, must be hanging over the fire, and all the windows, doors and keyholes must be effectually sealed up, under cover of the women’s chatter. The tips of the hair or a piece of the fingernail of all those who are present should then be flung into the boiling pot, those of the suspected witch being stealthily taken, as she would be likely to offer resistance. A witch will always scream shrilly when her nails or her hair touch the boiling water, whereas an ordinary mortal will show no sign at all. Should the witch not be of the party, ‘witch-noises’ are to be expected, outside the window.
Boys Firmin alludes briefly to another form of counter-spell which had to be carried out in complete silence – that is, silence as regards human speech, though ‘any amount of noise from heavy hammers and gunpowder was not only permissible but desirable’. But what the spell actually was he does not record.
The well-known counter-spell of the ‘witch-bottle’ has also been noted in Sussex in the nineteenth century, in connection with a case of epilepsy. Mrs Latham tells how a friend of hers ‘observed, on a cottage hearth, a quart bottle filled with pins, and… was requested not to touch the bottle, as it was red-hot, and if she did so, she would spoil the charm’. The woman of the cottage explained that she had consulted a ‘wise woman’ about her daughter’s fits:
She told me that people afflicted with falling fits were bewitched, and I must get as many pins as would fill a quart bottle, and put them into it, and let it stand close to the fire, upon the hearth, till the pins were red-hot; and, when that came about, they would prick the heart of the witch who had brought this affliction on my poor girl, and she would then be glad enough to take it off.
The effectiveness of the pins would consist not only in their sharpness but also in the fact that they were of iron, a substance universally believed to be powerful against supernatural evil. A red-hot poker was effective too; in Hastings in the 1880s a man whose wife was thought to be bewitched was advised to make her sit by the hearth and to burn her wrists with the poker, ‘to make the evil spirit fly up the chimney’. Similarly, one of the Crowborough traditions concerns a woman whose butter refused to ‘come’, however hard she churned. Suspecting sorcery, her son plunged a red-hot poker into the churn; he heard a loud hiss like a scream, and not long afterwards met Dame Neve, one of the local witches, limping about with a burnt leg. One might also break a witch’s spell by scratching her hand ‘accidental like’, for drawing her blood has long been believed in as a way of destroying her power.
It would be best, of course, never to let her cast a spell at all, but that is easier said than done. For one thing, you must never offend a witch; for another, you must never eat or drink in her presence; for a third, you must not accept anything she tries to give you, for instance money – one man who simply agreed to do a witch’s shopping for her and took her money from her to pay for it, was said to have fallen ill in consequence. In short, the only safe thing was to have nothing to do with her at all. In order to know who was and who was not a witch, it was useful to own a spayed bitch, for they could invariably detect them. The witches themselves, it was thought, could always recognise one another:
When two witches meet on the road, they don’t speak, and they don’t stop, and they don’t even nod at each other, however much they may be friends; they just laugh softly, and pass on.
Another recur
rent feature in the Sussex traditions was the belief that a witch could not die while still in possession of her powers and secrets, and still attended by her familiars. Boys Firmin describes how in Crowborough people said that no witch could die till someone came to her bed to receive her ‘spirit’ from her, but the longer she lived, the worse it was for her, since the spirit, which was inside her body, tormented her more and more. For this reason, when Witch Killick was dying in the 1860s, her daughter was persuaded, much against her will, to come to her bedside and receive her mother’s ‘spirit’ into her own body, so that the old woman might die. The same belief is shown in Tom Reed’s account of the death of ‘Old Mother Venus’, at which his own mother had been present. The old woman’s last act was to pass her hand rapidly across the bosom of one of the women at her bedside, after which she fell back dead. The younger woman denied having been given anything, but from that day her cottage was haunted in poltergeist fashion, and soon she left home and moved to Kent; Reed believed she had been given a mouse.
The belief is certainly old. In Hurstpierpoint in 1895 there were memories of a certain Nanny Smart who had lived there a hundred years before, and was much feared for her ability to put people in a trance and to immobilise horses. It was said that ‘she could not die unless someone bought the secrets of her life, and at last a man from Cuckfield bought them for a halfpenny, and she died in a blue flame’. The man, whose name was Old Hockland, died in Hurstpierpoint workhouse in the 1830s.
There is a strong similarity between these various anecdotes about Sussex witches in the last 150 years or so, so that we obviously see here recurrent story-patterns which become attached to particular individuals to whom they seem appropriate, in just the same way as recurrent tales of treasures or underground passages are attached to appropriate features in the countryside. It would be very interesting, both psychologically and sociologically, to know more about the women who became the focus for this lore – what it was about them that attracted it in the first place, and how they themselves reacted to their reputation. The material is too scanty for proper analysis, but the picture that emerged would, I suspect, be an unhappy one.
The Revd Thomas Geering, writing about Hailsham in the late nineteenth century, noted that all the reputed witches he had ever known or heard of had been poor; he describes one whom he himself had feared as a boy – decrepit, housebound, poor, and shunned by all the children, who believed that she used her walking-stick to ride to the moon ‘on nightly errands of mischief’. She knew of the rumours about her, and used to say: ‘If I was a witch, I would never want for snuff.’ A more recent writer describes how, in an unnamed village, gangs of boys used to follow an alleged witch round the streets on sunny days, with open pocket-knives in their hands; they thought that if they could stick a knife in her shadow she would have to stand still, or might even fall down, but she always heard them and looked round, at which they ran away. Even more recently, a woman who was a young child in Worthing in the early 1960s remembers seeing boys lurking outside the home of a certain deaf, reclusive old woman; she was a witch, they said, and if she came out they would follow her and tread on her shadow, which would force her to stand still. A minor matter, no doubt, not to be compared with real ostracism, but unpleasant all the same.
On the other hand, there is some evidence that some alleged witches exploited their reputation to their own advantage. It is said of old Nanny Smart in eighteenth-century Hurstpierpoint that she ‘would go into anyone’s house and have tea with them’ because they were too frightened of her to wish to annoy her, and of an old and crippled witch in Hastings in 1830 that ‘she seemed to delight that she, old and miserable as she was, could keep in awe so many happier and stronger fellow-creatures’. Of yet another, who flourished as late as the 1890s, it was said:
Her reputation was very valuable to her. If she stopped a child and said, ‘What a fine crop of plums your mother had down in Crabtree Lane, dearie,’ the result would be a basket of the best plums, as otherwise the tree would wither and die. So she kept herself provided with good things.
But on balance, the reputed witch’s situation must have been an unhappy one, if only because the belief that it was dangerous to accept anything from her hand or to eat in her presence must have isolated her from normal social contacts, while an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and hatred surrounded her. How cruel such isolation could be when the woman suspected was old and ailing comes out clearly in a description published in the Sussex County Magazine in 1943 – the events described having occurred as recently as 1920, or thereabouts:
That kind of wicked old woman always has books – powerful books, which have a deal of evil written in them. I know Betsey had books, because I’ve seen them.
She was a very old woman at the time I’m telling you of, and when her husband – a quiet, ordinary chap – died, she found it hard to carry on as she’d been used to. For one thing, money was short, and for another thing her wickedness was rewarded with chronic rheumatics. She went on as best she could, but it was not easy, as no one would lend her a hand, being frightened of what she might do to them. She used to swear away to herself when she lifted potatoes from the garden, and made a great trouble of going to the farm for milk. I remember the farmer wouldn’t let her pass the gate for fear she would put a spell on the cows. She had to get on the road side of the gate and holler out. The farmer’s wife were a bit hard of hearing, and many’s the time old Betsey stood there and bawled her head off for half an hour at a time. Then her rheumaticky hands made it hard for her to do a bit of washing on a Monday morning.
Gradually she dropped off coming into the village for provisions, making one visit do a long time, until one day the farmer said in the Woodman’s Arms that old Betsey must be drinking ale, as she hadn’t been near him for milk for quite a week… Well, to cut a long story short, the keeper did tell the Rector, who called at the old woman’s cottage that afternoon to find her ill in bed, hardly able to move a finger.
The workhouse people came next day and took her away. One of the head men stayed behind to sort out her belongings. She hadn’t much furniture, but they found a pile of books. My neighbour, who was very fond of reading and very curious as well, asked the official if he could have them, or at least read them, but we said it wasn’t right, and anyway we didn’t want anyone else learning the secrets and playing us up – Betsey Shadlow was trouble enough – and we asked the workhouse chap to burn them. He looked at them, and said they were rubbish anyway.
It’s a strange thing, but when they came to set fire to all the unwanted stuff from the cottage along with those books, we lookers-on saw green flames coming from the fire!
This account well describes the final phase of traditional folk-belief in the reality and power of witches. However, from the late 1950s onwards, there has been much rumour and press gossip about ‘modern witch-covens’. These generally are members of a recent cult called Wicca or ‘the craft’, who claim to be the successors of the witches of history, whom they regard as much maligned practitioners of benevolent magic. Wicca is a pagan belief system chiefly concerned with nature’s seasonal cycle, and worshipping a god and a goddess (each having several names taken from ancient myths) through elaborate and eclectic ceremonies. It began in the 1940s and was widely publicised from the ’50s onwards. Though far from being folklore itself, it may affect the development of subsequent folklore. This can happen when groups of Wiccans choose to hold seasonal gatherings or perform magical rituals at places already famous in local folklore; in Sussex, Chanctonbury Ring and the Long Man of Wilmington have been so used. When this becomes known, the reputation of the site suffers; some people will start to avoid it, through fear or moral disapproval, while others (notably teenagers) go there to conduct copycat magic of their own. Also, the modern situation is projected backwards; people assume that there have ‘always’ been tales about witches at Chanctonbury, whereas they are the most recent addition to the folklore of that site.
Even when nothing occult has actually happened, a sinister atmosphere is easily created, as can be seen from the allegations about Clapham Woods which began in 1975. A group of young men with an interest in paranormal events latched on to reports in a local paper in May that year that two dogs had been lost in the woods, and a third gravely injured, and launched a campaign to show that mysterious forces were at work. At first they claimed that the animals were captured by aliens in UFOs; later, that some rich and powerful black magicians were using the woods as a meeting-place and regularly sacrificed dogs there to Hecate. It has since been established that an over-zealous and somewhat unbalanced gamekeeper used to club to death any dogs he caught in the woods, but this has not discouraged the campaigners from elaborating their accusations in various books and articles, with the aim of eventually hunting down and unmasking the ‘Friends of Hecate’. Locally, the rumours have given many people a fear and dislike of what is in itself a pleasant spot, while attracting others in search of psychic adventures. Half-remembered versions of the allegations still circulate, sometimes crystallising in the form: ‘There were witches in Clapham Woods who killed dogs, and the ghosts of the dogs still haunt it.’
8
Healing Charms and Magic Cures
The subject of folk medicine is extensive, covering a wide range of cures from the purely practical to the frankly magical, and he would be a bold man who would undertake to say with complete certainty, when faced with some of the old country recipes, precisely where medicine ends and magic begins. For instance, several Sussex writers say that the fat of an adder, melted down into oil, was highly prized as a cure for deafness; indeed, one man is said to have regularly sold it to a chemist in Uckfield at a guinea an ounce, late in the nineteenth century. It is a fact that oil will soothe ear-ache and loosen wax in the ears, but the particular value placed on adder’s oil may well have been due to the mistaken notion that adders are deaf, and if so the principle involved is no longer medical but magical – the idea that like cures like.
Folklore of Sussex Page 9
