Belief and Practice: Ideas of Sorcery and Witchcraft in Late Medieval England

Esther Liberman Cuenca

This thesis analyzes fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sorcery and witchcraft cases from England and argues that witch-beliefs were developed and spread at the community level. Unlike the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland, there were no inquisitional authorities in England that could have influenced ideas about sorcery, which can be found in legal records from London and Durham. The ideas found within these records reflect medieval laypeople's beliefs about magic, as well as their concerns about urgent social problems.

BELIEF AND PRACTICE: IDEAS OF SORCERY AND WITCHCRAFT IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND A THESIS Presented to the Department of History California State University, Long Beach In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History By Esther Liberman-Cuenca B.A., 2002, Loyola Marymount University May 2007 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to first thank my mother and father for their constant financial and emotional support, love, and patience throughout my undergraduate years at Loyola Marymount University and my time here at Cal State Long Beach, without which this thesis most definitely would not have been completed. They have provided the torch by which I was able to light the way and discover my own path, and to them I am eternally grateful. Many thanks to my stepfather’s French instructor, and now my new friend, Dr. Miguel Aparicio, whose unceasing enthusiasm for helping me clarify some of the obscurities of the medieval French texts was unexpected, but wonderful and greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank Guillaume Dubosc for his help with a particularly tricky French passage and the delicious chocolate crêpes. Many thanks to my dearest friend Greg Douglass, who is certainly no stranger to the thesis-writing process, for his empathy, friendship, and our weekly jaunts to L.A. for dinner and movies. His willingness to lend a sympathetic ear and give out encouraging words, as well as provide a break from the mundane, has been crucial to my completing this thesis with my sanity intact! In the same vein, I would like to thank my cousin Ronit Liberman for being such a sweet and wonderful roommate when we were living together in L.A., and for bringing me a cup of hot tea and good gossip upstairs to my room when I needed a break from writing or studying. iii Of course, this thesis could not have taken the direction it needed to go nor been fit for public consumption without the guiding hands of a knowledgeable group of scholars, all of whom left their mark on this work in various ways. Even though she was not on my committee, Dr. Sharlene Sayegh very kindly pointed me to some helpful books on English law and discussed with me some of the obscure legal terminology found in some of the English court cases. Warm thanks to Dr. Elaine Wida, who has been my Latin teacher all of my years here at Long Beach, and who made sure that my translations of the cases in Latin were not completely off-base. Her Latin classes have not only given me the skills needed to make adequate translations of the sources used in this thesis, but have also prepared me for any future scholarly work that may require Latin. My extreme gratitude goes out to Dr. Moshe Sluhovsky, who took a teaching position at Brown University shortly before I began to write the thesis. He very generously agreed to work with me long-distance over email, and his expertise in European witchcraft has been invaluable to the writing of this thesis, as well as his numerous comments and suggestions during the editing process. Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to thank Dr. Marie Kelleher for agreeing to chair my committee and for constantly challenging and pushing me to produce the best work possible. Without her patient guidance, the thesis truly would not have taken the direction it has, nor would it have been completed! Dr. Kelleher’s insights and advice, as well as her enthusiasm for this project, made working with her not only a pleasure, but also an honor. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................... iii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN WITCHCRAFT ....................................................................... 1 The Rise of the Witch in the Popular Imagination .............................. Feminist Approaches to the Study of European Witchcraft ................ 3 16 2. MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND DEVIL-WORSHIP IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE.................................................................. 25 Early Christian Works.......................................................................... The Penitentials .................................................................................... Thomas Aquinas, Papal Decretals, and Inquisitional Manuals............ The Trial of Dame Alice Kyteler: A Case Study ................................. 26 34 42 48 3. FEMALE WITCHCRAFT, MALE NECROMANCY: A REEVALUATION OF GENDERED CATEGORIES OF MAGIC ................................................................................................ 56 4. PROCEDURE, COMMUNITY, AND FAMA IN ENGLISH SORCERY CASES ............................................................ 71 Sorcery Cases in the Church Courts .................................................... Secular Cases ....................................................................................... Defamation Cases ................................................................................ 73 81 87 5. DEVIL-WORSHIP, REGICIDE, AND COMMERCE: THE PROFESSIONAL NECROMANCER AND HIS CLIENTS ............................................................................................ 94 The Business of Magic and Devil-Worship ......................................... 96 Regicide ............................................................................................... 105 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................... 116 APPENDICES ................................................................................................. 119 A. THE TRIAL OF RICHARD LAUKISTON AND MARGARET GEFFREY .......................................................................... 120 B. THE TRIAL OF MARGARET LINDSAY ............................................... 124 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................ 126 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN WITCHCRAFT Writing in 1921, Margaret Murray, a respected British Egyptologist and anthropologist, wrote in the introduction of her famous work The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: “The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community . . . . It can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe.”1 Murray’s arguments for the survival of underground pagan fertility cults whose members were prosecuted as witches by Europe’s ecclesiastical elite would become highly influential in the early twentiethcentury historiography of witchcraft. The publication of Murray’s The God of the Witches (1931), an elaboration of her previous thesis, capitalized on the success of her first book, and Murray was even given the honor of writing the entry for “Witchcraft” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica for many editions until her death in 1963 at the ripe old age of 100. The Encyclopaedia’s article merely summarized the contents of her books, in which she argued that fertility cults survived the onslaught of Christianity and, that up until the seventeenth century, the members of these cults, by then mostly peasants, met in covens to worship their horned, two-faced fertility god in the hopes of ensuring a bountiful harvest. In these assemblies, a male devotee usually represented the god, and 1 Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 12. 1 inquisitors mistook this representative as the devil and the cult’s ritual practices as outright diabolism. Murray, working mainly with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets from England and Scotland, conveniently chose to ignore some of the more outrageous elements contained in descriptions of witchcraft practices, such as the invocation of demonic spirits and animal shape-shifting, in order to fit the evidence within this idea that congregations of “witches” and their devotional practices did indeed exist, and that proof of this could be found in the documents left behind by secular and inquisitional authorities. Murray’s ideas were not, by any means, new historiographic developments. The nineteenth century had witnessed a boom in scholarly works dedicated to the study of this European witch-cult, and many theories similar to Murray’s were already in circulation among many scholarly circles: In 1828, Karl Ernst Jarcke, commenting in the University of Berlin’s legal journal on a seventeenth-century witch trial in Germany, concluded that witchcraft was a remnant of the religion of German pagans; Jakob Grimm arrived at a similar conclusion in his 1835 work Deutsche Mythologie.2 The German historian Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan wrote in 1843 that the witch-cult originated in pagan antiquity, and was not a Teutonic religion as Grimm had theorized, but a legacy of the GrecoRoman world.3 Yet the extreme popularity of Murray’s theories seemed to have 2 Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, vol. III (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1031-2. (See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; revised ed. 1993], 148). 3 The work of Wilhelm Soldan is in two volumes, titled Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, ed. Max Bauer (Hanau: Muller & Kiepenheuer, 1966). (See Hugh 2 invigorated the historiography and steered it in other scholarly directions that would explore new questions, theories, and sources. The type of witchcraft purportedly practiced (usually by the poor and disenfranchised), the exchange and transmission of witch beliefs, the prevalence of women as legal targets of witchcraft accusations, and how ideas about a menacing and international witch conspiracy impressed upon the medieval imagination are topics that would dominate the late twentieth-century historiography of witchcraft in the later Middle Ages. However, while there were numerous twentieth-century historians that surveyed early modern witchcraft cases in England, there are only a few scholarly works that discuss English sorcery in the Middle Ages, and practically none that discuss it exclusively. If medieval sorcery in England is touched upon at all by twentieth-century historians, it is usually relegated to a short preamble before the substantive sections dealing with early modern witchcraft, for which there are far more archival and literary sources than for the medieval period. What twentieth-century discourse there is on medieval witchcraft mainly focuses on trials on the Continent. This chapter will discuss the pertinent historiographic questions dealing with European witchcraft and present an overview of the historiographic gaps that this thesis will address in the following chapters. The Rise of the Witch in the Popular Imagination In the early twentieth century, the historiography of European witchcraft and magic went through three phases. The first of these phases concerned itself with how Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century and Other Essays [New York: Harper and Row, 1956], 98). 3 people were considered witches in the sources—a question that Margaret Murray attempted to answer in her books on the subject. This question stimulated the scholarly direction which these early works took: they described the sorcery or rituals that were believed to have been practiced by witches and the condemnations of the Church and state of such practices, both of which had a hand in sanctioning witch-hunts in various regions of Europe in the late Middle Ages. Then, in the second phase, scholarly concerns in general seemed to have shifted toward an examination of what the witches were, taking into account the targets, usually female, of sorcery accusations and placing them in their larger legal and social contexts in order to discern the reasons why some people were targeted and not others. The third phase is closely connected to the second, in that it seems that historians now became concerned with the idea of who made the witches, which led to the exploration of how demonological and prescriptive literature influenced the spread of witch ideas, and how these ideas were then implemented in legal procedures that facilitated the witch-hunt to occur in various European regions. The historiographic questions that arose from this phase understandably began to deal with a dichotomy between learned and popular witch beliefs, as the emphasis was now placed on literature that was considered largely responsible for the trickling down of witch ideas into Europe’s illiterate communities, who internalized, transformed, and then acted upon these learned notions of witchcraft. Cecil L’Estrange Ewen, an English historian whose archival research focused primarily on the Home Circuit records, attempted to point out Margaret Murray’s limited understanding of the witch phenomenon with the publication of a vociferous attack on her scholarship. He famously called Murray’s writings “vapid balderdash” in a response 4 to her criticisms of his work Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (1928).4 Ewen pointed out that Murray, who had previously not done any archival research, was in no position to criticize the information culled from, and amount of effort placed into examining these rich sources of information: “It weighs nothing with the petulant lady that the work is restricted to the Home Circuit, and the whole of the extant documents of that circuit were scrutinised! . . . . The book, of course, is not written for the know-alls, but for those having little familiarity with the subject, and conspicuous among them it seems is Miss Murray . . . .”5 Ewen held a strongly rationalist view of witchcraft, which dictated that there were no witches and nocturnal gatherings, and that those unfortunate individuals accused of witchcraft were either completely innocent or completely delusional. It would seem that Murray and Ewen were firmly planted on two opposite ends of the spectrum, as both their theories and methodologies set them far apart from one another.6 There was a general assumption among some historians, such as Ewen, that the learned elite bore most of the responsibility for the spread of witch-beliefs, as they were able to articulate what these beliefs entailed. Ewen’s Witchcraft and Demonism (1933) 4 C. L’Estrange Ewen, Some Witchcraft Criticisms: A Plea for the Blue Pencil (London: C.L. Ewen, 1938), 5. 5 Ibid., 3-4. 6 The 1920s also saw the publication of the eccentric Montague Summers’ History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1927) and The Geography of Witchcraft (1928). Summers would, incidentally, publish the first translation into English of the famous inquisitorial manual Malleus Maleficarum, as it appears that he still believed that witches were still active in modern times. Norman Cohn would later call Summers a “religious fanatic” on the account of his belief that witches, as real and fearful diabolical opponents of the Church, actually existed in the ways they were described by inquisitors. (See Cohn, 160). 5 provides a good example of the ways in which historians started to question how ideas about witchcraft were transmitted and propagated throughout various communities. According to what he observed in researching the testimonies given at English witch trials, it seemed to him that, while England’s learned elite were influenced by Continental writings on witchcraft (as they would have a working knowledge of foreign languages to understand them), villagers most likely practiced a primitive type of magic unrelated to theological notions of diabolism, although they could have been easily influenced into accepting “the view of the doctors of theology, that an active devil roamed the earth ever ready to assist a human being to deeds of wickedness.”7 In the same vein, Ewen seems to have a cynical view of how witchcraft accusations spread, placing the fault firmly on the shoulders of those in positions of authority and excusing the majority of the common populace as passive and ignorant participants of the witch-hunt. He gives nine reasons for how this “absurd belief in the existence of devils and witches” disseminated throughout all strata of society: (i) Blind biblical teaching, (ii) Corrupt clergy and their impostures, (iii) The diagnostic errors of the medical profession, (iv) Statutes against the craft, (v) Misunderstanding of the causes of the great mortality of children and cattle, (vi) Confessions of demented or harassed persons, (vii) Credence placed in evidence of mental degenerates, (viii) The payment of witch-finders by results, (ix) Issues of the printing press.8 Of the nine he mentions, only the third and fifth items illustrate how an accusation or the spread of a nasty rumor could have originated at the village level, but even then it is 7 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonism: A Concise Account Derived From Sworn Depositions and Confessions Obtained in the Courts of England and Wales (London: Heath Cranton, 1933), 29, 44. 8 Ibid., 25. 6 merely because of ignorance, as opposed to the deliberate calculations of those in power as seen in the first, second, and eighth items. Ewen believed that, in most cases, the accused witches were lonely and deranged crones, most of whom would have profited from modern psychiatric care, and that their neighbors despised and suspected them as result of their dementia and solitude. Although this may have been true in some instances, there are also numerous cases in which the accused were not isolated or deranged individuals, and the complaints made about them in court seemed to reflect various commonplace disputes that occurred between neighbors, as we shall see in chapter four of this thesis. In the postwar era, the analysis of the witch-hunt turned to an explanation of sorcery accusations within the context of the larger phenomenon of state-sponsored persecution. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (1956) analyzed how the witch-hunt was merely an extension of the persecution of other scapegoats, such as the Jews. Trevor-Roper subscribed to the argument put forth by Joseph Hansen in 1900 that the witch-hunt originated in the mountainous regions of the Alps in the early fifteenth century, and that it came about as a byproduct of the persecutions of other heretical groups, such as the Waldensians and Cathars, by overzealous inquisitors. “The mythology of the witch-craze,” Trevor-Roper suggests, “was the articulation of social pressure.”9 The inquisitors themselves specifically articulated this mythology, defining their conceptions of the witches’ sabbath and the diabolical pact within the boundaries of a coherent legal system, which allowed 9 Trevor-Roper, 115. 7 them to prosecute witches for their various supernatural crimes. Yet these inquisitors, he points out, did not act alone. Inquisitors seemed to have responded to popular pressure in their prosecutions of witches, whom Trevor-Roper considered to be scapegoats of a new anxiety-riddled age, and that accusing witches of their crimes was a method by which social frustrations in an increasingly chaotic world could be released.10 Although TrevorRoper focused on the Continental witch-hunt of the early modern period, some of his ideas are pertinent to the discussion of the prosecution of sorcery in England during the Middle Ages, even though one cannot fully apply his thesis to the sorcery cases of late medieval England, as English trials were never adjudicated by inquisitors. However, his argument shows how historians of witchcraft in general began to accept the more active role of the European community in the formation and spread of witch beliefs. As we shall see in the next few chapters, English laypeople were instrumental to the articulation and spread of these beliefs within their own communities. One must also consider the role of the law courts in both the creation of witchbeliefs and the prosecution of those allegedly involved in practicing sorcery or witchcraft. Trevor-Roper suggested that judicial torture played a crucial role in the making of witchcraft and advancing demonological ideas among common people, but did not go so far as to say that torture in and of itself produced witchcraft, as some scholars had previously argued.11 The absence of legally sanctioned torture from England’s law courts 10 11 Ibid., 114-16. Trevor-Roper mentions that Henry Charles Lea, whose unfinished monumental work on witchcraft was published as Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft (1939), charged that judicial torture contributed greatly to demonological science. George Lincoln Burr, a student of Lea’s, went so far as to say that torture created witchcraft. 8 seemed to have resulted in tamer confessions that lacked the overly shocking or obscene elements contained in Continental trial accounts. Indeed, in the English trial accounts of the late medieval period, the sorcery accusations that were lodged between neighbors tended to reflect more mundane concerns like robbery and impotence than a genuine fear of devil-worship, a practice that Church officials, but not ordinary English people, feared. In this way, the law courts available to English commoners also helped shape beliefs about sorcery during that period. Trevor-Roper understood the differences between the accusations in England and on the Continent as a clear indication of how the use of torture could compel accused witches to confess, and even elaborate upon, their engagement in diabolical activities so as to satisfy the expectations of inquisitors or secular judges promising to release them with minor penalties. Yet, he points out that not all witch beliefs that appear in the confessions of the accused could be ascribed to torture, as one may see in cases where torture was not applied and the confessions that were produced as a result were just as outrageous as those wrangled from torture. The rationalist view, such as the one to which Ewen subscribed for his book Witchcraft and Demonism, is fundamentally incomplete, as it looks only to external causes for the rise of witchcraft confessions and tends to ignore internal causes that can be analyzed from the perspective of psychology and psychopathology.12 “For every victim whose story is evidently created or improved by torture, there are two or three who genuinely believe in its truth,” Trevor-Roper maintained, implying that one could not accept the rationalist view of witchcraft since it 12 Trevor-Roper, 124. 9 is apparent that some of confessions came from the accused witches’ “subjective reality.”13 Other critiques of the rationalist school tended to focus on how it would ignore the community’s involvement in the making of the European witch. Keith Thomas, in his book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), criticized the rationalist school precisely because it did not seek to penetrate beyond the trials to the essence of popular witch beliefs, which Murray had admirably attempted to do even though her methods were fundamentally flawed.14 Thomas agreed that there was a subjective reality to witchcraft, but that it was the introduction of these ideas about devil-worship by the ecclesiastical elite in the Middle Ages that distinguished this particular brand of European witchcraft from other primitive forms, such as the type of witchcraft practiced in Africa. Ecclesiastical thinkers at the time had believed that the practice of witchcraft as simply a byproduct of diabolical heresy. However, Thomas asserts that popular conceptions of witchcraft were almost always restricted to plain sorcery, since allegations of such types of magic, not the threat of heresy, are what motivated one neighbor to turn on another. While these Church officials were able to put together the necessary legal systems in place that would support the trials of those suspected of witchcraft, it was at the village level, Thomas argued as Trevor-Roper had before him, where accusations of supernatural 13 Ibid., 123. 14 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 515. 10 wrongdoings would originate.15 Furthermore—as we shall see in chapters three and four of this thesis—devil-worship was not a key feature, and many times was not even mentioned, in the English sorcery accounts of the late Middle Ages; however, this merely illustrates how diabolical practices were not especially threatening to the community as was the practice of sorcery. The idea that the gradual increase in the persecution of people perceived to be witches and sorcerers was directly influenced by the establishment of organized legal institutions would lead historians to question how this persecution was related to the centralization of Church and state powers in the high Middle Ages. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (1972) theorized that medieval witchcraft arose from heresy in a struggle against the overwhelming authority of the Church but that witchcraft itself developed from motifs and ideas drawn from popular folklore, sorcery, demonology, heresy and Christian theology over this time span.16 He succinctly describes European witchcraft as “a religious cult of the Devil, built on the foundations of low magic and folk traditions but formed and defined by the Christian society within which it operated.”17 Russell argued that the Church always condemned magic in all its forms, even the beneficial kind, because churchmen assumed that magic always involved some invocation of diabolical forces to achieve its ends, since God nor the angels can be compelled by mere mortals to work magic or bend the rules of nature. 15 Ibid., 438, 448-49, 463, 514-15, 522. 16 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 3-4, 23-5. 17 Ibid., 17. 11 The centralization of the institutional Church’s power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, coupled with the rise of scholasticism that articulated ideas concerning heresy, allowed for an organized, and sometimes systematic, prosecution of religious dissent. After 1300, the economic and social changes that resulted from years of plague “created conditions in which various expressions of revolt occurred, witchcraft being the most prominent.”18 Robert I. Moore’s influential book The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), published years after Russell’s work, argued that the rise of organized and strong government both in the Church and in secular kingdoms laid the foundations for a legal system that permitted an organized way to persecute religious dissenters or deviants, such as heretics, Jews, and lepers. Indeed, Russell argued that, where matters of spiritual welfare and orthodoxy were of the greatest importance, it had appeared to medieval people that heretics waged a religious war against these very sacred things.19 He based his discourse on the assumption that those who practiced witchcraft were either consciously or subconsciously protesting the religious monopoly of the Church, much as other heretical groups had during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This argument, however, becomes problematic when applied to English sorcery cases. It seems that witch-beliefs in England were fostered primarily from long-standing traditions of magic and superstitions, some of which may have been inherited from the Continent. The threat of heresy may have prompted churchmen and inquisitors to prosecute sorcery more fervently than before, but since sorcery trials appeared at the English courts because of public rumor or an individual’s complaint, it is difficult to imagine that this type of 18 Ibid., 26. 19 Ibid., 266. 12 litigation involving neighbors was a result of Church and state reactions to the perceived rise in heresies and other deviant behaviors during this time. The drastic changes that European societies underwent during the late medieval period could have produced an atmosphere in which social anxieties were channeled into witchcraft and sorcery accusations, which allowed physical violence to be averted and channeled into non-physical aggression played out in the courts. Richard Kieckhefer, in his European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular Culture, 1300-1500 (1976), conjectured that, prior to 1500, Europe’s urban centers were undergoing deep social changes as a result of the plague, the disintegration of old economic systems, and the breakdown of the traditional family unit. This produced a new class of urban dwellers unaccustomed to a new environment, which entailed a new set of problems and tensions for assimilation into a complex heterogeneous society.20 European Witch Trials, which is dedicated solely to the identification of popular and learned ideas found in witch trial accounts, questioned the theory of the Alps as the birthplace of late medieval witchcraft, finding that “the rural villages of Europe experienced an increase in witch trials along with towns.”21 While Kieckhefer admitted that it was almost impossible to discern where such witch beliefs originated, he did propose a methodology whereby learned and 20 Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular Culture, 1300-1500 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 95. 21 Ibid., 94. Jeffrey Burton Russell also asserted that witchcraft superstitions did not originate in the regions of the Alps but rather “in the lowlands where heresy was strong and only then moved into more remote regions like the Alps,” basing some of his information for this on trial accounts from Toulouse that have since been proven by Norman Cohn to be nineteenth-century fabrications. (See Russell, 228; Cohn, 183-87). 13 popular notions of witchcraft may be distinguished from one another depending on the sources one chose to critique. He advised careful examination of trial accounts where coercive measures were not used on the accused and where the original testimonies of witnesses and plaintiffs prior to formal interrogation have survived; the cases tried by secular courts were usually, though not always, better sources for distinguishing between learned and popular beliefs about witches and sorcery, and English trials especially were singled out by Kieckhefer as having a lower rate of legally sanctioned torture in its proceedings and as having more lenient judges than those on the Continent. The division between popular and learned beliefs about magic tended to fall in line with how the different types of magic seemed to function, and for what purposes they were used. In his general survey of medieval magic, appropriately called Magic in the Middle Ages (1989), Kieckhefer identified two broad categories of magic having to do with their supposed natural (occult) or demonic origins. These forms of magic evolved over time, and demonic magic came to be popularly known and prosecuted as witchcraft; those engaged in occult magic seeking to exploit nature’s own supernatural qualities slowly developed this into modern science.22 However, such delineations between natural and demonic magic were not always so obvious. He explains both in Magic in the Middle Ages and in his article “The Specific Rationality of Magic” (1994) that a great source of anxiety for Church leaders was the uncertainty of the origins by which some of 22 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rprnt. Canto ed., 2000), 201. 14 the even most innocuous forms of magic were seemingly derived.23 Kieckhefer also discusses the nature of demonic magic in another article that explored the ways gender dictated the type of persecutions some medieval women and men experienced, specifically in regard to what was considered witchcraft and necromancy.24 Since female spirituality was deeply suspect, there was often a thin line that separated the labeling of a woman as a witch or a saint.25 While the preponderance of women as witches was not a defining feature of medieval trials, ecclesiastical or other learned authorities would increasingly view women as the most susceptible victims of the devil with the rise of diabolism as a recurring motif in these trials. Necromancers, whose combination of demonic magic and religious devotion was thought to have originated from a seedy clerical underworld, best represented male crimes that employed the (demonic) supernatural in its favor in a fusion of the sacred and profane.26 Necromancy not only referred to the calling up of the dead 23 Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 176; Kieckhefer, “The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic,” The American Historical Review 99 (1994): 818-20. 24 See n. 26 below. 25 Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Elliott argues that the female saint at this time was a weapon used by orthodoxy to combat the theological teachings of dualist heretics, such as the Cathars, whose persecution at the hands of the Church gave a veneer of authenticity to their particular brand of pious martyrdom, against the Church was trying to vehemently combat. The increasing rate of canonizations of female saints in the later Middle Ages likely reflected Church anxieties about the need to legitimize female saints whose brand of piety was confined to orthodox male control over other popular female saints whose spirituality was much more suspect. However, the Church’s attempts to do this were not always successful. 26 Kieckhefer, “The Holy and the Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” in Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and 15 but also forms of black magic; this concerned Church theologians deeply because necromancy implied that learned and religious men made pacts with diabolical beings to manipulate nature via these diabolical forces. Kieckhefer’s separation of magic into groups defined by either their connection to the demonic or the occult attempts to explain medieval magic in ways that would have been familiar to contemporary churchmen for whom such distinguishing qualities were seen as crucial in their decision to permit or persecute some forms of magic. While this “learned” and “popular” dichotomy is useful to some extent in the exploration of witch beliefs in England, in some instances these beliefs defy this strict categorization, and at times represent an overlap of what is considered to be traditional learned and popular ideas about witchcraft and sorcery. Furthermore, as we shall see in chapter three of this thesis, the categorization of magic into “female” witchcraft and “male” necromancy is not a useful analytical tool for the study of sorcery trials in late medieval England. Thus, it is better to discard these notions in favor of emphasizing how community dynamics and the local courts played an important role in the articulation of these beliefs. Feminist Approaches to the Study of European Witchcraft While forming categories can be useful to a discussion of witchcraft and necromancy in the Middle Ages, this thesis will question whether these binary categories are appropriate to late medieval England, as well as explore the ways in which sorcery may have been gendered in this period, by looking at the religious and legal developments in England rather than concentrating strictly on Continental literature that Rebellion, 1000-1500, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 329, 332. 16 may have had little influence on the ways in which English sorcery trials and accusations took shape (although Continental works will be discussed at length in the next chapter). Feminist scholarship on the subject of European witchcraft has sought to explore the reasons why so many women were the targets of these accusations. In much the same way that Trevor-Roper and Russell argued that religious dissenters or social deviants were frequently accused of sorcery and diabolical heresy, feminist scholars also pointed out that a majority of the accusations involved women because of the perceived moral weaknesses of their sex. Christina Larner’s Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (1984), published posthumously and edited by Alan Macfarlane, famously reopened the subject of women as witches and the misogynistic undertones of the witchhunt in her collection of papers that dealt with the persecution, anti-legislative measures, and literary culture of English and Scottish witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of the major themes she touched upon were the important political changes that sparked large-scale witchcraft persecutions—changes such as the shift to an abstract, bureaucratic justice system, the criminalization of women and the threat they posed to a male-dominated society, and the moral panic that arose from new social circumstances brought on by a changing political landscape. In her essay “Witchcraft Past and Present” she reacts against earlier feminist scholarship that equated witchhunting with women-hunting. The historiography that had come out of second-wave feminism stressed the misogynistic, male power structure that initiated a violent persecution in order to terrorize and intimidate women.27 The legal badgering of both 27 Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 86. 17 older and younger women for a variety of female-oriented “crimes” seems to lend some validity to this idea, and the estimated number of women as a percentage accused of witchcraft is overall staggering: in some places, the numbers were as high as ninety percent.28 However, Larner’s great contribution to feminist theory in the study of the early modern witch-hunt was her assertion that the crime of witchcraft, “while sexrelated, was not sex-specific”: There are other reasons for doubting whether the witch-hunt was a straightforward, thinly disguised woman-hunt. Those who were prosecuted for witchcraft were not, except during certain mass panics, randomly selected (any more than males who were prosecuted for crimes of violence in this period were randomly selected). The cursing and bewitching women were the female equivalent of violent males. They were the disturbers of social order; they were those who could not easily cooperate with others; they were aggressive.29 Larner preferred instead to look at witch-hunting as witch-hunting, a legitimate and organized judicial search for individuals purported to have made contracts with the devil and have denied their Christian baptism as a result. The belief in witchcraft was, indeed, very real to the men and women who acted as their village’s informants. The aggressive and unfriendly behavior of a woman who refused to act within her prescribed gender role was seen as suspicious, and her neighbors, usually other women, would not hesitate to bring her to justice if they suspect that she was intriguing with maleficent forces to bring about the destruction of the community. Elspeth Whitney’s article “‘Witches, Saints, and Other ‘Others:’ Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture” (1999) represents a good portion of the current feminist argument, which is clearly 28 Ibid., 85. 29 Ibid., 87. 18 indebted to Larner’s contributions to the field. Whitney suggested that the rise of witchhunting correlated with newly established anxieties about gender roles, the popularity of female saints and mystics, and literature and ideas cultivating the notion of “woman as deviant.”30 She argued that medieval ideas about women and the persecutions of perceived social deviants helped set the stage for targeting women for the crime of witchcraft; indeed, a dangerous female dichotomy is evident through the female mystic’s power, which aroused suspicion as much as it did admiration.31 While drawing substantially from Larner’s work, most notably from her essay on women and witchcraft, Stuart Clark, in his book Thinking with Demons (1997), tackled the subject of women and witchcraft early on in his work, stating that historians must begin to ask themselves not why women were associated with witchcraft, but rather why demonologists seemed to associate witchcraft with women.32 Clark disagreed with Larner’s assertion that, despite the long-standing image of woman-as-witch, “sixteenth century demonologists spent much time puzzling over why women were so much more wicked than men.”33 Although he praised Larner’s work for directing attention to the idea that witch-hunting was indeed a systematic persecution of witches rather than just of women, he noted that early modern demonological literature presupposed that women 30 Elspeth Whitney, “Witches, Saints, and ‘Others:’ Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture,” in Women in Medieval Western European Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 295, 301, 310-311. 31 Ibid., 296. 32 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 110. 33 Larner, 87. 19 were more vicious, and more susceptible to the wiles of the devil than were men, and that no dialogue concerning the divide between male and female in terms of maliciousness really existed.34 Moreover, he affirmed, after the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, contemporary demonologists seldom gendered witchcraft, since perceptions of women as unstable and carnal creatures were seemingly self-evident, and did not need to be reiterated, as a long literary tradition going all the way back to Aristotle had firmly established these misogynistic views within the early modern psyche. Clark argued that witchcraft’s association with women relied heavily on the binary opposition that dictates a dynamic gender relationship to a set of virtues and vices inherent to one’s sex: men represented the mind, suggesting rationality, and were endowed with a superior soul; women, on the other hand, represented the body, indicating a sensuality vulnerable to lust, and were accorded an inferior soul to that of men.35 The gradual process by which the practice of diabolical sorcery came to be gendered female in treatises that discussed witchcraft and magic likely affected the number of women who were tried as witches. In his article “The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages” (2002), Michael Bailey, whose specialty is the works of demonologist Johannes Nider, argued that the preponderance of women in witch trials spoke to the “feminine” nature of the witchcraft of which they were accused of practicing. In other words, the mechanics of the crude and 34 Clark, 115-8. 35 Ibid., 121. 20 often simple sorcery for which female witches faced the wrath of the courts seemed particularly suited to women, as they were uneducated and could not perform the complex rituals prescribed in a necromancer’s journal. And indeed, the results of the female witch’s brand of sorcery could be just as devastating as that of an educated necromancer’s sorcery. “Witchcraft was not an exclusively female crime,” Bailey writes, echoing some of Larner’s sentiments decades earlier, “but it certainly represented a more feminized form of demonic magic than did elite, learned necromancy.”36 Bailey discussed in his article what Clark had only briefly touched upon in Thinking with Demons: the influence of Nider’s demonology and his views on women, which would inspire many demonological treatises to begin gendering witchcraft, such as the Malleus Maleficarum. However, as this thesis will illustrate, the number of women accused of such crimes in late medieval England did not necessarily exceed the number of men accused of the same. While many of the women accused of sorcery had indeed defied gender expectations, they were usually targeted because they were seen as disruptors of the peace and generally destructive to their communities. It is fundamentally misguided to overemphasize the importance of gender roles and expectations in the prosecution of witchcraft during this time. While feminist theory can add to the discussion of late medieval sorcery crimes in England, the analytical framework of this thesis cannot solely depend upon it. 36 Michael D. Bailey, “The Feminization of Magic and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002): 128. 21 The historiography of late medieval and early modern witchcraft provides a few possible approaches to the study of this phenomenon: the feminist discourse on witchcraft delves into matters of sexual politics and the gendering of sorcery; the study of demonological and inquisitional works brings up issues regarding the intellectual traditions found within witch beliefs, and how the differences between these traditions and popular conceptions of magic manifested in trial accounts that have survived. While Margaret Murray may have stubbornly adhered to a flawed methodology and to her theories of the existence of an actual witch cult, her attempt to look beyond rationalist views of the witch-hunt to distill the nature of what was really believed by people living centuries before our time would inspire future scholars, such as Carlo Ginzburg, to expand the historiography by uncovering sources previously considered either unimportant or lost to posterity. In his books The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983) and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (1991), Ginzburg would revisit Murray’s theories to some extent with his monograph on the Benandanti, an agrarian fertility cult whose practices were condemned by authorities as witchcraft. The historiography’s shift in focus from its examination of how were they witches to what were the witches to who made the witches rests precisely on such innovative methods used to explore and integrate the sources into a larger, more variegated narrative. Past historians have discussed late medieval sorcery trials in England as separate, but vaguely related, incidents in connection with the Continental witch-hunt, or they have relegated the importance of these trials to the margins of the historiography of European witchcraft. What I aim to do in this thesis is to analyze late medieval sorcery cases in 22 England and reevaluate medieval beliefs about sorcery and witchcraft in the context in which they were expressed in court documents and in chronicles. I will attempt to approach the material in a variety of ways: Chapter two will discuss earlier medieval literature and laws that influenced the development of an organized and legal prosecution of witches and sorcerers on the Continent, including the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler. While I do argue that English beliefs about sorcery would develop in a slightly different way from what is expressed in inquisitorial accounts, one cannot ignore the importance of the Church and ecclesiastical teachings to the early modern witch-hunt, as well as the cultivation of witch beliefs throughout Europe. Chapter three will question, whether at the community level, certain forms of sorcery were more gendered than others, and how any resulting division between “female” witchcraft and “male” necromancy might be useful to an examination of witch-beliefs in late medieval England. Chapter four will argue that, since sorcery crimes in England were brought to the attention of the courts either by public fama or by the complaints of an individual litigant, the beliefs about the potency of certain types of magic and the culpability of certain individuals were, for the most part, developed at the community level. In addition to this, the community’s power to incriminate and exculpate others of sorcery crimes not only gave ordinary laypeople the agency to act aggressively toward perceived enemies or troublemakers in a legal manner, but also maintain peace and social order in a relatively organized way. Chapter five looks at how some of the few documented cases that deal with demonic magic or diabolism were mostly motivated by financial and material concerns, and how such concerns could have also created a market for the services of trained sorcerers. 23 English examples would seem to reveal much about common fears of certain types of magic during the later Middle Ages, and even shed light on the kinds of concerns the nobility and churchmen had with the uses of magic, as one may see with the plethora of sorcery trials connected with prominent figures of English society during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An examination of the sorcery trials in England from this period of time, and of those men and women who found themselves as targets of such accusations, may even lead us to modify or reevaluate feminist theories of witchcraft, to question the learned vs. popular dichotomy so embraced by so many previous historians, or even consider alternative analytical frameworks that might better suit a comprehensive survey of English sorcery trials in the later Middle Ages. 24 CHAPTER 2 MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND DEVIL-WORSHIP IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE In 1324, Dame Alice Kyteler was a wealthy middle-aged woman residing in Kilkenny County, Ireland, when she was brought to court on charges of diabolism and sorcery under the auspices of Richard de Ledrede, the Bishop of Ossory (d. 1360), a Franciscan inquisitor who was English by birth but whose theological training took place on the Continent. The trial itself would foreshadow the Continental witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also present a picture of a woman socially marginalized not just for her alleged use of demonic sorcery but also for all the lands that she inherited upon the death of her previous husbands—an instance of financial independence that was probably rare among women of those days. Most importantly, the trial itself and the witch-beliefs expressed in Ledrede’s account seem to come out of an already long-established and prevalent ecclesiastical tradition that included theological treatises, decretals, penitentials, and other prescriptive literature. While one can seek the roots of medieval European ideas about witches and sorcery as far back as biblical narratives, this chapter will begin with a survey of early Church writings, from which inquisitors such as Ledrede drew their ideas about sorcery, and end with a discussion of the infamous treatise the Malleus Maleficarum (1487), an inquisitional manual that encapsulated European fears of female-oriented witchcraft, and that would heavily influence the witch-hunt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It 25 is only then that we can grasp the implications of the Alice Kyteler trial in the history of European witchcraft. One can view the Kyteler case as a preview of what was to come in Continental Europe: the witch-hunt, the burnings, the inquisitorial prosecution of suspected witches, and the general compliance or passivity of the native populace. But in addition to this, the Kyteler case provides a striking contrast to the witch-beliefs that were expressed in near contemporary accounts of sorcery activities in late medieval England, since the English populace was generally untouched by the influence of inquisitorial ideas that conflated magic practices and elaborate rituals of devil-worship. Early Christian Works The influential works produced by various Christian scholars of late antiquity and the early medieval period helped shape the mostly negative attitudes towards magic and other practices that bore traces of pagan influences. A subject that seemed invariably to come up in discussions about magic focused on the role of the devil within the Christian world. However, medieval theologians also looked to justify the presence of demonic forces within this world, arguing that they were part of a larger soteriological plan for mankind—meaning that Christians, in a sense, should accept the presence and temptations of such forces as they were necessary to test one’s faith and separate the faithful from the sinners, ensuring salvation for the former and damnation for the latter. Discourses on the devil and his minions would become a popular theological topic throughout the Middle Ages. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who had a prolific and influential career in the Church, produced tomes of Christian writings on practically every conceivable topic, some of which aimed to deal with the urgent questions brought up by the constant threats of heresy and popular pagan practices. His ideas on the 26 workings of the devil were based partially on the Jewish apocrypha that contained elements of Eastern dualism—a theological notion that probably appealed to Augustine’s dormant Manichean sensibilities.1 Augustinian literature on magic and demonology would have a profound effect on later Christian thinkers and provide the foundation for what would constitute a strong literary tradition of folk morality tales and hagiography. Augustine’s On Christian Teaching (397), a four-volume work on how to read Scripture through the lens of Christian faith, dedicated a portion of its discussion to the “utterly futile practices” of astrology, divination and augury. Augustine’s distaste for astrology seemed to have been personally motivated by his experiences of having once been a follower of Manichaeism, for he also wrote a lengthy invective against it in his autobiographical Confessions, where he had tried to systematically discredit astrology by appealing to logic above anything else. Augustine’s discourse on magic in Christian Teaching would prove especially important to the study of magic in the Middle Ages because it outlined the types of practices that seemed common among the newly converted, who were perhaps not fully oriented with the boundaries of their Christian faith. For the most part, Augustine referred to the popularity of amulets and incantations as superstitions, a word that seems tame by our modern standards but had fairly serious connotations of dangerous ignorance when Augustine had applied it to the pagan customs still in practice alongside Christianity. Alluding to the false hope that such magical practices could produce, Augustine pointed out in an ironic fashion that “When free people go to see such an 1 Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, eds., Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: A Documentary History, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 7. 27 astrologer, they pay money for the privilege of coming away as slaves of Mars and Venus,”2 which seemed to indicate that the continual belief in astrology, or in any other similar “magical” sciences, would present an alluring temptation to fall back on the old gods of the Roman religion, which were still at that time threatening to either corrupt or halt the spread of Christianity. Also prevalent in Christian Teaching was the assumption that those who had succumbed to “these superstitions and deadly kinds of divination” seemed to have possessed feeble or corruptible minds. Augustine pondered: “In this way it happens that, by some inscrutable plan, those who have a desire for evil things are handed over to be deluded and deceived according to what their own wills deserve.”3 Augustine had believed that those who wielded magic had either inherently bad or weak characters, an indication of how easily a sheep could stray from the flock with just the slightest instigation. This belief was to later play out in medieval and early modern witch trials, where the clandestine nature of witchcraft activity had made the establishment of a person’s good or bad character an essential element of the trial. Augustine’s masterpiece Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans (410) represented a psychological response to the shock of the successful barbarian invasion of Rome, the symbolic Eternal City from where Augustine had acquired his Roman culture and education. The book itself sought to counteract “those who worship the multitude of false gods, whom we usually call pagans, [who had] tried to lay blame for this disaster on the Christian religion, and [who] blaspheme the true God more fiercely and bitterly than 2 Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. R.P.H Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 93-5. 3 Ibid., 97. 28 before.”4 The subsequent accusations of Christian ineffectuality at stopping the occupation of the city prompted Augustine not only to examine the beliefs of the pagans, but also to define two societies within the context of his theological vision of the world. One was the City of God, ruled by the ever-merciful divine hand and populated by those who obeyed the divine will, and the other the City of Man, doomed to eternal punishment on account of its injustice, violence and human fallibility. In the City of Man, of course, lived individuals under the thrall of superstition and demonic spirits. Augustine’s use of the term “demons” in Book VIII clearly showed that he had began to confirm the strong affiliation between the pagan gods and demonic, harmful spirits out of his need to disprove that Rome had deteriorated under Christian influence. He wrote that the worship of demons should be rejected because the demons clearly hold sway over many men, who are untrustworthy to participate in the true religion, and they treat them as prisoners and subjects; and they have persuaded the greater part of them to accept the demons as gods, by means of impressive but deceitful miracles of action and prediction. But there are others who have observed the viciousness of these demons with rather more careful attention. The demons have failed to persuade them of their divinity; and so [the demons] have pretended that they are intermediaries between gods and men, securing for mankind the benefits of the gods.5 According to Augustine, the demons, “having an airy composition of their bodies,” had adequately convinced mankind that they could communicate with the gods. Thus, these demons have duped them into accepting “superstitious beliefs . . . thanks to 4 Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), xvi. 5 Ibid., 330. 29 all those ceremonies, and all those temples.”6 The greatest fear Augustine held regarding the presence of demonic spirits seemed to involve their particular deceitfulness, which he thought would have invariably led to beliefs of false miracles and divination. Augustine maintained that this encouraged the worship of the gods through beliefs that such demonic spirits had intermediary powers to persuade the gods to dispense of earthly “benefits.” This would accelerate the decline of men “untrustworthy to participate in the true religion” and block their admittance to the City of God. In this sense, these demonic spirits were as dangerous and petrifying as Alaric’s army of Goths. Alaric’s occupying army might have endangered the Roman way of life, but demonic forces certainly would have jeopardized the state of one’s spiritual welfare. The general purpose of these early Christian writings on magic seemed to be a concerted effort to stamp out vestigial pagan practices and beliefs still present in mainstream Christianity. The Gallo-Roman monk Caesarius (d. 542), who later became the Bishop of Arles, attempted to expedite this process by way of preaching, which helped transfer theological ideas to, and influence the behavior of, illiterate Christians. A true spiritual successor of Augustine, he adapted a similar style of rhetoric for his series of famous sermons, which emphasized the dangers of vice and the virtues of Christian morality in simple, precise language. Following this method, one of his sermons started out with a direct appeal “to by no means observe those wicked practices of the pagans,” which set the tone for what would be the main argument against the use of magic. This request was followed up by a lengthy discussion of the consequences that would befall someone if they did not abide by the rules of proper Christian conduct: 6 Ibid. 30 No one should summon charmers, for if a man does this evil he immediately loses the sacrament of baptism, becoming at once impious and pagan. Unless generous almsgiving together with hard, prolonged penance saves him, such a man will perish forever. Likewise, do not observe omens or pay attention to singing birds when you are on the road, nor dare to announce devilish prophecies as a result of their song.7 In this sense, soliciting the services of professional soothsayers equaled that of losing both one’s identity as a Christian and the grace of God, since Caesarius considered the offense so terrible as to merit an invalidation of such an important sacrament as baptism. The admonishment for spotting omens for the purposes of augury carried a particularly heavy penalty because it implied the willingness to sidestep God’s vision for the future and interpret nature in a way that God had not intended. Ideas concerning magic that Caesarius had espoused did not stray far from Augustine’s earlier warnings about observing superstitious pagan habits that could imperil one’s soul. His analysis of the devil merely built upon what Augustine had said previously, and brought to the forefront the devil’s ability to sway people of weak character. Caesarius also focused on the idea that “the Devil cannot injure you, those who belong to you, your animals, or the rest of your earthly substance even in small matters, unless he receives his power from God.”8 This suggested that even when God had invested the devil with limited powers “to try us, if we are good, or punish us, if we are sinners,”9 everyone should always remain steadfast in the faith and maintain their 7 Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, trans. Mary Magdalene Mueller, vol. I (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1956), sermon 54, 265-6. 8 Ibid., 268. 9 Ibid. 31 strength in the face of adversity. God would ultimately banish the devil and restore those deserving of clemency to favor. Caesarius had also felt the need to address the seemingly truthful results that some might have gotten through divination or omens. He attributed such results to the workings of demons, and pointed out that “even if they tell you the truth, do not believe them, ‘For the Lord your God trieth you, whether you fear him, or not.’”10 Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636) was probably well aware of earlier Christian writings that had commented on the practice of magic, since he attempted to categorize all history and knowledge in one thorough and exhaustive compendium in his work Etymologies (c. 630), and he likely drew his entries on magic from Augustine’s writings. Yet, Isidore also tried to take his work one step further by reaching outside the GrecoRoman tradition and touching upon the Eastern roots of some of these magic arts. In his typical etymological dissection, he wrote, “The magi are they who are usually called malefici because of the greatness of their guilt. They throw the elements into commotion, disorder men’s minds, and without a draught of poison they kill by the mere virulence of their charm.”11 Isidore had clearly made the assumption that there existed certain witches who knew how to cause considerable discord through their supernatural and vicious magic. Indeed, the term malefici later became the universal acknowledgement for 10 Ibid., 267. 11 Ernest Brehaut, An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville (New York: B. Franklin, 1912; rprnt, 1964), 202. 32 witches in the later medieval period, especially when the Malleus Maleficarum helped disseminate ideas on the evils of witchcraft in the late fifteenth century.12 A curious element of Isidore’s theology of magic was its soteriological slant on astrology and divination by an “observance of natal days.” He asserted that “at first the interpreters of the stars were called magi, as if read of those who announced the birth of Christ in the Gospel, later they had only the name of mathematici,”13 who Isidore considered (along with other groups) as superstitious and ignorant. However, he went on to say, “A knowledge of this art was granted up to the time of the Gospel, that when Christ was born no one after that should read the nativity of anyone from heaven.”14 What could be gleaned from this passage is that stargazing or astrology used in an attempt to gather information about the future was acceptable in a pre-Christian era, but certainly not after the coming of Christ. Since Christ’s atonement invalidated all religious practices and beliefs that had originated before His time, it followed that previous uses of magic and other religious beliefs would become obsolete and downright blasphemous when considering the redeeming powers of Christ’s blood sacrifice. Since mankind’s salvation heralded a new Christian era, there was simply no place in the world for soothsayers and magi. Before the advent of medieval scholasticism, major Christian writings on the subject of demonology generally understood the devil as a being associated with pagan 12 Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1995), 54-6. 13 Brehaut, 203. 14 Ibid. 33 cults, and possessing limited powers, subject to the will of God. In one way, the devil represented a challenge to uphold one’s faith and to cast off any temptations to fall back on old pagan customs. It seemed that, for the most part, early medieval theologians understood diabolism—a pact made between a human and the devil—as being fundamentally separate, although partially related, to the practice of magic. Most lay or non-educated clergy who had dabbled in magic were summarily condemned for perpetuating obsolete folk-pagan practices, not necessarily for being in league with the devil. The Penitentials The anti-magic writings of Christian theologians like Augustine, Caesarius and Isidore were put into practice with the early medieval handbooks of penance, which were clerical guides that outlined penalties for many different deviant behaviors and degrees of sin. There is, however, one important change that should be noted: the gender-neutral language that had characterized the admonishments of earlier writings on the subject of magic gradually became more gendered in some of the penitentials. The reason for this probably had to do with the circumstances under which the penitentials were composed: the ecclesiastical authors of the penitentials most likely intended to address the immediate concerns of magic and sorcery they believed threatened the stability of the communities under their spiritual charge. When put into this context, and combined with what previous theologians had said about the weak characters of suspected witches, these handbooks began to establish the idea of vulnerable women cavorting with the devil with the aim of bringing about the destruction of Christendom through their immoral and vicious acts. As we shall see in a more detailed discussion of the Alice Kyteler case at 34 the end of this chapter, some of the charges brought against Kyteler focused on her quid pro quo relationship with a demonic force. One of the earliest penitential works is attributed to Halitgar, bishop of Cambrai (d. 831), who had apparently written it at the request of the archbishop of Rheims. Halitgar might have had adapted his penitential, or lifted whole passages, from an earlier book called Poenitentiale Romamum, which might have had Roman or Celtic origins.15 Later named The So-Called Roman Penitential of Halitgar (c. 830), it dealt with crimes such as theft, perjury and fornication in a direct and concise manner—in such a way that would make a priest’s duty in assigning penance to a confessed sinner a fairly hassle-free job. Halitgar’s small section on magic and sacrilege does not necessarily specify that these were female crimes in the strictest sense, but it provided a precedent on which later penitentials would rely. These penitentials also outlined the type of religious anxieties caused by the social encroachments of magic and sorcery. His section on magic concerns itself with how sorcery was used to cause death or conjure up storms, crimes that entailed a punishment of several years on a fast of bread and water. Halitgar, like Augustine and Caesarius before him, seemed preoccupied by the observance of pagan rituals; some passages imply that he harbored specific fears concerning the activities of nature-worshippers, all of whom he feared would invoke the powers of demonic forces for their devotional practices. He condemned anyone who ventured to take food or drink at a “sacred place, [but] if it is through ignorance, [the confessant] shall do penance for forty days on bread and water. But if he does this 15 John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, eds., Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal “Libri poenitentiales” and Selections from Related Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 295-6. 35 through contempt, that is, after the priest has warned him that it is sacrilege, he has communicated at the table of demons . . . .”16 Whether this actually reflected real pagan practices that went on at this time, and whether there did exist pagan groups that made offerings or vows “beside trees or springs or by a lattice,” is difficult to say. What can be said about this passage is that Halitgar was likely suspicious of folk customs and practices, and considered them to be obstacles to the layperson’s understanding of proper Christian teachings. Concerns about pagan practices continued with the writings of Regino of Prüm (d. 915), an abbot whose political expulsion from Lorraine brought him to Trier under the archbishop Rathbod’s employment, and who at the archbishop’s insistence composed the manual Ecclesiastical Discipline (c. 906) for clerics to use in their diocesan visitations. The manual’s division into two parts, one dealing with the clergy and church property and the other on the discipline of laypeople, drew on patristic writings, papal decretals, Church councils and earlier penitentials such as Halitgar’s handbook.17 In fact, the penitential canons from Ecclesiastical Discipline displayed the same anxieties about the celebration of the Kalends of January—where it seems that revelers had dressed like stags or bovine creatures—and even employed the same language that appeared previously in Halitgar’s manual.18 Other grievances expressed in Regino’s penitentials 16 Ibid., 306. 17 Kors and Peters, 61. 18 Halitgar had written in his penitential: “36. If on the Kalends of January, anyone does as many do, calling it ‘in a stag,’ or goes about in the [guise of] a calf, he shall do penance for three years.” Regino more precisely asked, “Have you done anything that the pagans do at the Kalends of January, in [the guise of] a stag or a cow? You 36 involved the singing of “diabolical songs over the dead”19 and performing fortune-telling tricks, which both Augustine and Caesarius had come out against in their respective works. Regino’s lengthy catechism included a warning to all bishops about the various witchcraft activities of women, which signified a turning point in prescriptive literature on the role of women in magic and demonology. Consequentially, it had significant repercussions on the discussion and study of witchcraft and provided the foundation for the belief in the witches’ sabbath, which had captured the European imagination during the early modern witch-hunt. Regino’s allusion to an exclusive congregation of witches reveals the ongoing clerical fear of pagan practices and, more specifically, cults of goddess-worship: It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, who have given themselves back to Satan and been seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that, in the hours of night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the night traverse great spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their lady, and are summoned to her service on certain nights.20 It would seem that he had not actually believed that women indulged in night escapades with the goddess Diana, but condemned women who entertained such should do penance for three years.” The only confusion here seems to be about the revelers celebrating “in a stag” or as stags, which might have hinted at either the nature of their costumes or the object of their devotion. 19 20 McNeill and Gamer, 318. Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. Arthur C. Howland, vol. I (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), 178-9. The inclusion of Regino’s text in Gratian’s Decretum (1140), one of the most important and influential works on canon law, had allowed the ideas contained within the Ecclesiastical Discipline to gain widespread popularity in the later Middle Ages. 37 fantasies. In this case it was Satan, along with his score of minions, who had seduced some women with exciting illusions of nocturnal adventures, which in turn led this “innumerable multitude of women” astray from the Christian mainstream. The transformation of the devil from God’s Biblical opponent and mischievous flunky to an ever-threatening figure ready to interfere in human affairs is key to understanding why the anti-witchcraft and anti-pagan rhetoric took so sharp a turn towards women. Regino himself explained it when he described the lengths to which the devil would go to beguile “the minds of infidels”: Thus Satan himself, who transfigures himself into an angel of light, when he captured the mind of a miserable little woman and has subjugated her to himself by infidelity and incredulity, immediately transforms himself into the species and similitudes of different personages and deluding the mind which he holds captive…leads it through devious ways, and while the spirit alone endures this, the faithless mind thinks these things happen not in the spirit but in the body.21 This is not to say that Regino believed that men did not ever succumb to the wiles of the devil. Nevertheless, he accepted that women—generally thought to have had both weaker minds and bodies than men in all respects—would have been unable to resist the devil’s enticements. They thus stood in danger of gravely sinning on account of their sex. According to the text, the devil had the ability to physically transform and hold the (female) mind captive by devious illusions. This would set the stage for allegations made in future witch-trials, such as the Kyteler case, that singled out women for using demonic household animals to create disturbances within their communities, an implication that the devil had imbued its spirit into the witch’s familiar. 21 Ibid., 179. 38 While Regino’s text contained the basis for what would develop into later concepts of women’s roles in relation to the devil, Burchard of Worms (d. 1025) was able to take these ideas, expound on them, and successfully transmit them to the high and late Middle Ages. Burchard, in this respect, is one of the last major thinkers of the early medieval period to write about magic and women’s relationship to demonic forces. Burchard, who held the bishopric of Worms from 1000 until his death, wrote and compiled his Decretum (with some outside assistance) over a four-year period in which he ambitiously sought to cover every facet of canon law and address urgent issues on moral behavior.22 His Decretum is astonishingly expansive, comprised of twenty books on topics such as ecclesiastical, moral and civil law, and it included a reference book for priests in need of guidance on distributing penance when hearing confessions. This book, sometimes separately titled as the Corrector, “contains ample corrections for bodies and medicines for souls” and was written in such a way that interrogated the confessant on the specifics of his or her crime in order to properly administer the correct penance for the sin committed.23 Burchard had drawn many of his theological questions and conclusions from Regino, who used Halitgar as a source, and harbored many of the same intense fears of idolatry and pagan sacrilege as his predecessors. However, Burchard’s writings manifested a more intricate and extensive grasp of the particularities of these fears, such as his condemnation of those who infuse Christian prayer into pagan ritual, resulting in a heretical syncretism of the sacred and profane. Other items such as the observances of 22 James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (New York: Longman, 1995), 32. 23 McNeill and Gamer, 321. 39 oracles and prophecies, beliefs in nymphs and gods, and superstitious chanting for the dead all recapitulated, but in greater detail, what had appeared in previous texts on the same subjects. In two separate places Burchard discussed the crime in merely believing that women could traverse the globe aloft a throng of beasts, when in fact, as Burchard asserted, such things never happened except inside the perverse delusions of demonically seduced women. Regino had already mentioned this in his book, but Burchard elaborated on it by labeling this belief an act of “infidelity,” and using Scripture to illustrate his point in a subsequent passage: Who then is so foolish and stupid that he supposes that those things which take place in spirit only, happen also in the body? When the prophet Ezekiel saw and heard visions in the spirit, not in the body, he himself spoke thus: “Immediately,” saith he, “I was in the spirit…” Therefore it is to be openly announced to all that he who believes such things loses the faith; and he who has not sound faith in God is not His, but [belongs to him] in whom he believes, that is, the devil.24 The things that occurred “in spirit only” referred to the various illusions that might have possessed a woman into thinking she had gone out at night with Diana and or “the witch Hulda,” a German fertility goddess, even though it had never actually happened “in the body.”25 For Burchard, believing in such foolishness suggested a tenuous hold on reality, which could have meant a heightened vulnerability to the advances of the devil. Most importantly, it represented an obstacle to fully surrender oneself to the Christian faith and a validation of the existence of a Diana or any other creature descended directly from pagan lore. In other words, these beliefs were incompatible with Christianity and could not be allowed to coexist. The one- or two24 25 Ibid., 333. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 81. 40 year-long penance for this offense (depending on the passage consulted) may seem a little harsh, but perhaps Burchard felt the crime needed to carry a heavy sentence because it more or less implied that the confessant had strayed away from Christian orthodoxy and was in danger of perpetrating heresies. However, Burchard did proclaim to know that women attempted to use magic to control the natural order with superstitious magic practices that involved their summoning the aid of the devil. “Have you done,” he asked, “what some women filled with the discipline of Satan are wont to do, who watch the footprints and traces of Christians and remove a turf from their footprint and watch it and hope thereby to take away their health or life?”26 This type of sorcery not only uncovered a woman’s criminal intentions toward her fellow neighbors but also proved especially egregious on account of her manipulation of powerful forces. Burchard also warned about women who, at the urging of the devil, performed clandestine rituals on children who had died without baptism to prevent the corpses from rising. In another passage he reprimanded women who transfixed “the mother and the child in the same grave with a stake [driven] into the earth” when the death of a woman and her child arose from postpartum complications.27 The preventive magic used to guard against childbearing difficulties designated a penance “for two years on the appointed days.” Targeted at midwives or perhaps neighborhood enchantresses for extending their influence and power beyond their roles in society, it also indicated that female-oriented magic crimes began to come into focus amongst all other types of devious acts involving an invocation of demonic forces. 26 McNeill and Gamer, 339. 27 Ibid. 41 Thomas Aquinas, Papal Decretals, and Inquisitional Manuals The social and religious issues that arose from the practice of magic and sorcery, which various churchmen attempted to address in their theological and penitential works during the early medieval period, would also become important for scholastic thinkers of the thirteenth century to discuss, especially in light of the seeming growth of heretical movements at the time. The prominent medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) treated the subject of witchcraft and magic as a serious demonological discourse much like his patristic forbears had done. Yet his particular discourse pertained to larger philosophical questions dealing with the nature of evil. Thomistic philosophy strove to completely understand acts of magic and the influence of the devil on human actions so that, from a theological perspective, he would be able to address all doctrinal issues that may have arisen from questions regarding such controversial practices. It is also important to note that Aquinas may have also been responding to the seemingly rapid growth and spread of heretical ideas during his time; his theological questions may have reflected these fears and, as a result, attempted to systematically explain how devilworship and magic functioned. Aquinas’s massive Summa theologica and Summa contra gentiles addressed questions concerning diabolical agency in the practice of magic, and the conclusions at which Aquinas arrived using deductive logic indicated his belief that magicians must have derived their powers from “lower bodies,” as opposed to celestial ones. Furthermore, in his Summa contra gentiles, he stated that it was a sign of an ill-disposed mind to practice such things that are fundamentally contrary to virtue: the magic arts, he claimed, “are often used for purposes of adultery, theft, homicide, and other kinds of 42 wrongdoing. As a result, the practitioners of these arts are called malefics.”28 In the Summa theologica, he tackled questions about demons meddling in human affairs and argued that, while one can exercise their free will to avoid entanglements with demonic forces, it is part of the nature of demons to constantly assail, to tempt, and to trick mortals into believing false miracles.29 According to Aquinas, the border between the demon and human worlds was porous, and people were always in danger of capitulating to demonic temptations and using magic for vicious ends. What Aquinas implicitly suggested in his works was that people could only perform magic with the aid of diabolical forces and, because people chose to do this of their own free will, some sort of pact must have been made between the demon and the human supplicant for the latter to obtain supernatural powers. This reasoning seemed to have later influenced fourteenth- and fifteenth-century inquisitional manuals, all of which built upon earlier Christian writings about the nature and efficacy of magic.30 However, even before Aquinas’s time, the Church had begun to issue in rapid succession anti-witchcraft laws in the form of papal decretals as part of an aggressive campaign against heretical movements that threatened Christian orthodoxy. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227-41) sent a letter to the metropolitan of Mainz and to other 28 Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, Summa contra gentiles, Book Three: Providence, Part II, trans. and ed. Vernon J. Bourke (Garden City: Hanover House, 1955), 98. 29 Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. I (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947-8), 557-8. 30 Charles Edward Hopkin, The Share of Thomas Aquinas in the Growth of the Witchcraft Delusion (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1940; New York: AMS Press, 1982), 1-27. 43 princes of Germany about the problem of pestilential heretics in the Rhineland, describing in detail the initiation rites that a novice must perform in order to gain acceptance into this “sect of the damned,” who in this case were a group of rebellious peasants called the Stedinger. However, this decretal would have a broader significance and appeal to inquisitors on the hunt for heretics. Now known as Vox in rama, this Gregorian decretal marks the beginning of the conflation of anticlerical heretical movements with the practice of witchcraft. “At length,” Gregory IX writes in his description of the initiation ritual, “[the novice] is met by a man of marvelous pallor, who has very black eyes and is so emaciated and thin that, since his flesh has been wasted, seems to have remaining only skin drawn over bone. The novice kisses him and feels cold, like ice, and after the kiss the memory of the catholic faith totally disappears from his heart.”31 The sexual overtones of the initiation process seems to be eerily reminiscent of sixteenth-century witch trial accounts that list the numerous nocturnal activities of dangerous maleficii: the infamous witch’s kiss, bestowed on the buttocks of the devil, was among a series of acts meant to reaffirm the witch’s complete submersion into diabolical apostasy. It was during Gregory IX’s tenure as pope that the Inquisition became a more efficient and organized institution—a development that proved to further assist Church authorities in defining and detecting heretical movements in general. In 1258, Pope Alexander IV (r. 1254-61) set some guidelines for inquisitors in pursuit of heretics: “The inquisitors of pestilential heresy, assigned by the apostolic see, should not 31 The decretal is excerpted and translated by Malcolm Barber in “Propaganda in the Middle Ages: The Charges Against the Templars,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies 17 (1973): 45-6. 44 get involved in cases dealing with divination or sorcery unless manifest heresy is involved, nor punish those kinds of people, but release them to be punished by their own judges.”32 Even though charges of divination and sorcery were suppose to be relegated to the local ecclesiastical or secular courts, it did give inquisitors the license to pursue sorcerers for heresy, which may have been liberally defined and indiscriminately applied to a variety of magic-related cases, as inquisitors were now trained theologians (usually Dominicans) who believed that all magic practices were necessarily demonic and heretical. However, Pope John XXII (r. 1316-34) began to reverse past papal decisions and charged those with inquisitorial duties to seek out sorcerers and witches. Seeking to reform the administration of the Church and to invigorate the office of the inquisition, he invested inquisitors with powers to investigate sorcery as a heresy and, in his decretal Super illius specula (1326), he bewailed the fact that there were false Christians among them who make magical charms and “sacrifice to demons, entering into an agreement with death and making a pact with hell.”33 The explicit mention of a diabolical agreement between the sorcerer and the devil places a sense of urgency on the matter, setting the struggle against not just those who pertinaciously defend heresies, but the 32 Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2d ed. (Union: The Lawbook Exchange, 2000; reprint of the Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879-1881 edition), Liber Sextus, V.2.8, col. 1072: “…pestis inquisitors hæreticæ, a sede apostolica deputati, de divinationibus aut sortilegiis, nisi hæresim saperent manifeste, intromittere se non debent, nec punier talia exercentes, sed eos relinquere suis iudicibus puniendos.” 33 Joseph Hansen, ed., Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1963; reprint of the Bonn: C. Georgi, 1901 edition), 5: “…cum morte fœdus ineunt et pactum faciunt cum inferno, dæmonibus namque immolant…” 45 forces of the devil himself, whose human followers on earth threatened to bring about the destruction of Christendom. Six years earlier, Cardinal William of Santa Sabina, in his letter addressed to inquisitors stationed in Carcassone and Toulouse, expressed John XXII’s wishes for their cooperation in apprehending diabolical heretics: Also, concerning sorcerers and witches, who debase the sacrament of the Eucharist or the consecrated host and indeed other sacraments of the Church by making use of material or forms like these things in their sorcery or witchcraft, you can examine and proceed against them, by any necessary means, which are assigned to you via canon law in proceedings made against heresy.34 It seems that at this time the Church sought to take immediate measures to ensure that diabolical heresy did not, in Cardinal William’s words, infect the rest of God’s flock. Indeed, the rise and spread of inquisitional justice quite naturally correlated with the increase of the number of inquisitional manuals, which sought to systematize in a legal manner the detection and prosecution of spiritual crimes—sorcery being one of many. Nicolau Eymeric’s Directorium inquisitorum (1376), a handbook composed during Eymeric’s tenure as inquisitor of the Crown of Aragon, invoked the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas when exploring the act of offering sacrifices to, and worshipping demons, in exchange for magical powers—an act Eymeric considered to be heretical and worthy of punishment.35 Yet Eymeric’s work was also a continuation and an adaptation of previous inquisitional works such as the 1324 manual of Bernard Gui. If any of these works had come to be read by the noble or ecclesiastical elite of England, they had 34 Ibid.: “item de sortilegis et maleficis, qui sacramento eucharistie seu ostia consecrata necnon et aliis sacramentis ecclesie seu ipsorum aliquo quoad eorum formam vel materiam utendo eis in suis sortilegiis seu maleficiis abutuntur, possitis inquirere et alias procedere contra ipsos, modis tamen servatis, qui de procedendo cum prelatis in facto heresies vobis a canonibus sunt prefixi.” 35 Kors and Peters, 120-7. 46 almost no effect on the witch beliefs of the ordinary people who brought charges of sorcery to secular and church courts, as we shall see in later chapters; their beliefs were more about grievances such as theft and loss of reputation than about the use of diabolical agents. While writings about witch beliefs in the fifteenth century were mostly focused on the diabolical pact made between the witch and the devil—as in the fifth book of the famous treatise Formicarius (1438), written by Dominican theologian Johannes Nider based on the experiences of the inquisitor Peter of Grayerz—the increasing concern about female involvement in diabolical heresy derived from a clerical understanding of women’s spiritual fallibility and highly susceptible natures. The best-selling Malleus Maleficarum (1487), which went through many printed editions because of its popularity, was an encyclopedia of witch beliefs written by the inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Translated in numerous languages at the time with the exception of English, the Malleus Maleficarum would make popular the identification of witchcraft as a sex-related crime in Continental Europe. Drawing considerably from Eymeric and Nider, the Malleus Maleficarum sought to first prove that sorcery and witchcraft did exist, how such acts were performed, and how to properly try, sentence, and punish convicted witches. However, the Malleus Maleficarum also dedicated much of its discussion to how women were far more superstitious, more easily deceived, and more likely to spread the knowledge of their arts to other women than their male counterparts: “since [women] lack physical strength, they readily seek to avenge themselves secretly 47 through acts of sorcery.”36 Some of these ideas expressed in the charges against Alice Kyteler would come up again in the Malleus Maleficarum, which was published nearly a century and a half after this trial. Most importantly, the Kyteler case presents a sort of pastiche of sorcery and demonological ideas drawn from the writings of earlier Christian theologians—writings which were obviously not lost upon successive generations of inquisitors and prelates. The Trial of Dame Alice Kyteler: A Case Study It was during John XXII’s pontificate, but before the issuing of his above mentioned decretal Super illius specula, that the Kyteler trial took place under the inquisitorial supervision of Richard de Ledrede, a Franciscan bishop. Ledrede’s account of the trial, in which he mainly describes his political feud with a prominent Irish seneschal, represents, on a small scale, the larger legal and cultural issues that had developed between the foreign bishop and the Irish natives. The latter, it appears, had wanted to adhere to English law, rather than to Roman law, under which the inquisitorial process would be allowed to take place.37 The seneschal from Kilkenny with whom Ledrede was feuding, Lord Arnold le Poer, appears in the trial account almost as much as the accused heretics, and le Poer takes Ledrede to task on his meddlesome ways, saying: “So if some tramp from England or somewhere has obtained his bull or privilege in the 36 Christopher S. Mackay, trans., ed., Malleus Maleficarum, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116. 37 The introductory essay by L.S. Davidson outlines the legal issues and political background of the trial, as well as providing valuable information on all the major players, and found in a translated edition of the trial narrative, edited by Davidson and J.O. Ward, The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler (Binghampton: State University of New York, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1993), 1-16. 48 pope’s court, we don’t have to obey that bull unless it has been enjoined on us by the [English] king’s seal . . . . Now this foreigner . . . says we’re all heretics and excommunicates, on the grounds of some papal constitutions that we’ve never heard of.”38 English law dictated that instances of sorcery were to be tried under the legal jurisdiction of the civil courts as a felony, whereas Continental laws categorized sorcery and witchcraft as forms of heresy, punishable under the statutes of the inquisition, whose methods of extracting confessions through torture were generally not permissible by English law.39 The foreign bishop’s attempts to implement Roman law on the Irish in his district produced obvious tensions derived from this situation, and this is played out in a quasi-moralistic tale in Ledrede’s narrative, where in the end le Poer asks for the bishop’s forgiveness and submits to his request to bring suspected heretics to an episcopal court presided by Ledrede himself. The accused was a distant relation of le Poer named Alice Kyteler, who, along with her co-conspirators and her son William Outlaw, was tried in Kilkenny and convicted. Alice, however, managed to escape her punishment and fled to Dublin, eventually ending up in England. Unfortunately, Alice’s servant Petronilla of Meath was 38 39 Ibid., 48. The differences between Continental and English trials also extended to the ways in which both legal systems punished convicted witches: in England they were hanged like common thieves and murderers; on the Continent they were burned at the stake, a punishment reserved for heretics tried by the inquisition. Although it does not focus on medieval English witchcraft, Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study goes into detail about the regional characteristics of English witch trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe focuses mainly on Continental trials, their procedures, and the demonological worldview that laid the foundation for witchcraft trials. 49 not so lucky, and she was the first person in Ireland to be burnt at the stake for sorcery. William was not accused of sorcery, but rather for aiding and protecting his mother from justice, and as penance he was obligated to make monetary contributions to the roofing of a cathedral and to go on pilgrimages to Becket’s shrine and the Holy Land. Alice and William had supporters among the powerful le Poer family, and Alice in particular had a substantial amount of wealth vested in property and money-lending when, in 1324, she was convicted by Ledrede on seven counts of sorcery. Alice had benefited from Irish inheritance laws that allowed her to accumulate land upon the deaths of her four previous husbands, all of whom she was accused of seducing and murdering by magical means— an allegation prompted by Alice’s dispossessed stepchildren. However, this was not the first time Alice was charged with a serious crime: In 1302, according to the Irish Patent Roll 31 Edward I, Alice and one of her late husbands, Adam le Blund, were accused of murder by the sheriff of Dublin and the seneschal of Kilkenny, who at the time was Fulk de la Freyne, not the sympathetic le Poer. The sheriff (named Kiteler and presumably Alice’s relative) and Freyne were able to steal three thousand pounds from Alice and her husband, even though it appears as if the beleaguered couple was acquitted of murder charges.40 Although Alice’s wealth and her connection to the influential le Poers seemed to have afforded her some protection from those who wished to disinherit her from her fortune, it could also be said that her affluence and land-holding status, which essentially set her apart from other middle-aged women within her community, made her a target for 40 Davidson and Ward, appendix VIIa, 85-6, is Ward’s translation of the Roll that tells the story of Alice’s early run-in with the law. 50 accusations motivated by resentment and jealousy. The first accusation—that of her denouncing Christ and refusing to partake in the sacraments—was to lend credence to all subsequent charges of diabolism, and it demonstrated that she had committed apostasy and thus must have replaced faith in Christ with something else.41 The second and third—where it was alleged that she sacrificed to, and took advice from, demons—was meant to complement the first charge by showing that she had transferred her allegiance from Christ to the devil. This was important as Ledrede meant to demonstrate how Alice first committed diabolical heresy—a charge reminiscent of Burchard of Worms’ assertion that discovering a confessant’s belief and allegiance to another power was important when assigning penance, since erroneous beliefs above anything else signaled the moral decay that threatened to envelop the heretic. The fourth charge leveled at Alice and her associates would set a precedent for a popular accusation that would appear time and again in early modern witch trials, at least on the Continent: the nocturnal, clandestine meeting of a witches’ coven. According to Ledrede’s narrative, Alice and her friends “were usurping the authority and the keys of the church when they held their nocturnal meetings because by the light of waxen candles they would hurl the sentence of excommunication even at their own husbands, calling out, one by one, the names of each and every part of their body from the soles of their feet to the top of their head, and then at the end the witches would blow out the candles 41 All seven charges are listed at the beginning of Ledrede’s trial document in Davidson and Ward, 26-30. 51 and say ‘fi: fi: fi: amen.’”42 The nocturnal meeting that allegedly occurred between Alice and her female friends slightly echoed the concerns that Regino of Prüm expressed about delusional women still involved in cults of goddess-worship, where they would meet under the cover of night to engage in their worship. Indeed, it seems that at this time the fundamental aspects of the witches’ sabbath were beginning to take shape. Later trials would introduce other outrageously nefarious elements to the belief in the witches’ sabbath, which not only posed a threat to ecclesiastical authority, as Ledrede perceived it to be, but was a deliberate inversion of sacred Christian rituals: Mass would be mocked and chanted backwards, Christian infants would be cannibalized in an obscene imitation of Eucharistic devotion, and naked dancing and ecstasies would occur under the cover of darkness. The devil’s female followers would engage in sexual orgies with either the devil himself or his male devotees, and these male devotees in turn would engage in homosexual activities with each other.43 Indeed, in the first decades of the fourteenth century, sodomy and a ritualistic mockery of Christ were one of many accusations aimed at the wealthy Templars in the quest to suppress and discredit the order on charges of heresy.44 The fifth allegation expounds on the fourth, reporting that Alice and her coven had concocted mixtures of foul materials and ingredients in their secret meetings, 42 Ibid., 28. They suggest that “fi: fi: fi” may have been short for “fiat, fiat,” or “let it happen.” 43 A psychological analysis of the symbolic nature of the sabbath within the medieval and early modern Christian imagination could be found in Levack’s The WitchHunt in Early Modern Europe, 38-44. 44 Barber, 42-57. 52 including nails and hairs plucked from cadavers and the clothing of unbaptized infant boys, from which the women would make candles from the remaining fat left in the cooking pot in order to chant love spells or inflict harm on whomever they chose. This accusation seems to reflect what Aquinas had said about sorcerers being invested with demonic powers to achieve their malicious plans: “for we read about some people who, in their practice, have killed innocent children.”45 Alice herself was a powerful woman of means, but Ledrede attempted to demonstrate how she obtained her wealth through diabolical and deadly ways; earlier literature, such as Burchard’s penitential, had discussed the concerns about women dealing with demons for selfish purposes and their immoral handling of unbaptized corpses. The sixth accusation, made by Alice’s stepchildren, charged that Alice had stupefied their fathers into entailing their properties on herself and William Outlaw, and then resorting to murder using magical lotions and powders once they had successfully signed away their lands, leaving nothing for their other children. The seventh accusation, which would reappear in both Continental and sixteenth century English witch trials, put forward the idea that Alice had a demonic familiar who came to her in the shape of a cat, a dog, or an Ethiopian man, and that she would have sexual relations with it in exchange for wealth and power. Regino had singled women out as being targets of the devil’s illusions, stating that the devil had the ability to transform “himself into the species and similitudes of different personages” after he has managed to capture the “mind of a 45 Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, 98-9. 53 miserable little woman.”46 This type of sexual quid pro quo arrangement likely reflected the idea that women were primarily carnal creatures, who were governed by their sexual impulses, and thus were more susceptible to the advances of the devil, in addition to being more liable to any sort of demonic illusion than their male counterparts. As one can see, the Kyteler case represents a mixture of various intellectual and traditional ideas about female-oriented witchcraft and the nature of devil-worship that spanned the centuries from the time of Augustine of Hippo all the way to Thomas Aquinas. This case is also significant in illustrating the tensions that existed between the Irish natives, who were accustomed to the law of their English overlords, and the foreigner Richard de Ledrede, whose inquisitorial proceedings against Alice aimed to embarrass his political rival and to further establish his influence in the area. Bishop Ledrede was himself an Englishman, but was obviously not bound to obey English laws as his loyalty was to the Church and his interests in maintaining the power he held within his bishopric. His ideas about sorcery and witchcraft were formed on the Continent, probably in a Franciscan monastery where he studied classic texts that discussed demonology; he may also have been trained in canon law. Not only did Alice’s dispossessed stepchildren help fan the flames against her and aid Ledrede in formulating some of the charges, but we must also consider Ledrede’s background and education when considering the demonic elements of some of the accusations lodged against Alice and her friends, especially when we compare this case with other sorcery trials concurrent in England where there was no inquisitorial procedure involved and, hence, almost no classical ideas about diabolical witchcraft at the forefront of these accusations. 46 See n. 21 above. 54 Indeed, the ideas about sorcery and witchcraft to which Ledrede contributed would appear again during the witch-hunt of the late medieval and early modern periods, although English conceptions of sorcery would develop in a slightly different manner than they did on the Continent. Ledrede’s literary successors would expand on both classical ideas about demonology and contemporary inquisitorial concerns about heresy, and compile them in inquisitional manuals, which were used to educate and guide inquisitors in assessing spiritual crimes. In English sorcery trials of the late medieval period, there may have been some forms of magic of which women were accused far more than men (such as love magic), but the singling out of women as being more prone to practicing sorcery than men was not common until the middle of the sixteenth century, perhaps precisely because medieval beliefs about demonic agency in the practice of sorcery were never as much of an issue in English trials as they were on the Continent. 55 CHAPTER 3 FEMALE WITCHCRAFT, MALE NECROMANCY: A REEVALUATION OF GENDERED CATEGORIES OF MAGIC The Bishop of London, Ralph Baldock (d. 1313), who was himself a respected inquisitor of the Church, wrote to the Archdeacon of London in 1311 that “in our city and diocese of London we learned that the abominable crimes of sorcery, enchantments, and the magical arts have grown strong, so much so that a great many disasters and dangers threaten our parishioners’ spiritual welfare unless we respond more swiftly to the calls of our duty.”1 Bishop Baldock then went on to list the various illicit activities that had come to his attention: some of his parishioners were practicing soothsaying to acquire foreknowledge of certain events and performing spells to recover lost property; others were invoking demons in secret gatherings or pretending to summon them by looking into stones, mirrors, and rings for demonic signs. It is difficult to say whether Bishop Baldock’s concerns were genuinely reflective of widespread sorcery in London or if he was merely reacting to the prosecution of certain types of forbidden magic on the Continent. What can be known about his request made to the Archdeacon about 1 R.C. Fowler, ed., Registrum Radulphi Baldock, Gilberti Segrave, Ricardi Newport, et Stephani Gravesend, episcoporum Londoniensium, AD. MCCCIVMCCCXXXVIII, vol. I, in Canterbury and York Series VII (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1811), 144: “In nostra civitate et diocesi Londonie sortilegiorum, incantacionum et artis magice nephandum scelus invaluisse reperimus in tantum quod plerisque nostris subditis magna strages immineat et periculum animarum nisi de congruo ex officii nostri debito celerius ordinemus.” 56 launching an investigation into the prevalence of sorcery practices in the London diocese is that it was probably a response to reports given by local priests and chaplains about such activities. If so, the clerics who reported these activities that went on in their parishes did not say to Bishop Baldock if either women or men were especially prone to practice some types of sorcery over others. Accounts of legal proceedings in England involving sorcery and necromancy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveal a variety of supernatural activities that people were thought to have practiced. The late twentieth-century historiography of witchcraft places heavy emphasis on the types of magic in which medieval people seemingly engaged, as well as the folk (popular) or ecclesiastical (learned) traditions from which these practices might have been drawn. Naturally, when categorizing magic in strictly binary terms, it is also too easy to think of certain forms of magic as predominantly “feminine” or “masculine” because necromancy required a degree of literacy that typically only men possessed (thus making it male-oriented), and folk magic was primarily domestic and improvised (thus making it female-oriented).2 These distinctions are important as they help to demystify a rather convoluted belief system that involved various concerns about how magic was performed, why it was practiced, and who was responsible for its effects on others. Yet, gendered categories of magic have the potential to be more problematic than useful when examining some of the English sorcery cases that provide some detail of the type of magic used. The word “witch” often is gendered female, both in the modern 2 Richard Kieckhefer and Michael Bailey are both prominent scholars of European witchcraft who tend to gender magic and witchcraft in their discussions of Continental cases and demonological literature. 57 usage and in early modern works discussing witchcraft, though it appears that in late medieval England both men and women could be accused of practicing magic typically considered the “female” kind, such as image magic, so really anyone could be considered a “witch.” Furthermore, the terms “witch” and “witchcraft,” although used in sources written in English, are historiographically associated with diabolical magic; hence, this thesis will generally employ the more neutral terms “magic” and “sorcery” when discussing late medieval English cases, as they more accurately describe the nature of the crimes of which English people were accused. This chapter will argue that, while categorizing some magic practices can be useful in some cases, the majority of English sorcery cases in the late medieval period defied traditional gender categorization, and that the boundaries between what are known as “popular” and “learned” magic were often quite porous. Necromancy, although usually understood to be distinctly a male crime of sorcery (women were never explicitly referred to in the sources as necromancers), sometimes overlapped with some of the devious sorcery activity of which women were accused—so once again we must consider the limitations of gender categories in a discourse about the practice of sorcery in late medieval England. Furthermore, the exchange of ideas that went on between neighbors in a community, and the complaints about different kinds of sorcery that very publicly made their way to the courts, may have influenced some educated men to try their hand at “female” magic, while women were perhaps similarly inspired to pick up necromancers’ manuals (even if they could not read them) or simulate in their own way what they had heard or seen some men do in their performance of certain magic rituals. 58 The straightforward definition of necromancy is a practice involving the raising of the dead, but the term as it was used in medieval documents also encompassed other ritualistic procedures dealing with, and ideas about, how the spiritual and physical worlds interacted. Most importantly, the prevailing belief about necromancers was that they were able to work the physical elements in various ways to manipulate destinies and circumstances supernaturally. Richard Kieckhefer, when detailing how witchcraft and necromancy were typically gendered differently, explained that the “clerical underworld,” which was perhaps an imagined gathering of priests devoted to the practice of demonic magic, was quite naturally restricted to men only.3 The ecclesiastical intelligentsia typically assumed that necromantic magic drew its power from demonic forces, and oftentimes necromancy was conflated with diabolism, or devil- and demonoriented sorcery. Sir Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of the King’s Court, was described in a chronicle as being a practitioner of a demonic type of magic, which was to guard him from his death. He was associated with King Richard II’s (r. 1377-1399) inner circle of favored courtiers, all of whom were proclaimed traitors by what is now called the Merciless Parliament of 1388, and it seems that the description of his desperate attempt to cheat death was a way to further add to his infamy. According to the chronicler Thomas Favent, Tresilian apparently said on the way to Tyburn for his execution: “While I carry a certain something around me, I am not able to die.” Immediately they stripped him and found particular instructions with particular signs depicted in them, in the manner of astronomical characters; and one depicted a demon’s 3 Richard Kieckhefer, “The Holy and Unholy: Sainthood, Witchcraft and Magic in Late Medieval Europe,” Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500, Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 329. 59 head, many others were inscribed with demons’ names. With these taken away, he was hanged nude, and for greater certainty of his death his throat was cut. And it became night. And he was left hanging until the next day and, with permission for carrying away his body sought and obtained from the king by his wife, it was taken to the Franciscans and is there buried.4 Though he was executed at the prompting of anti-Ricardian forces for reasons having to do with enabling Richard II’s incompetent rule, this account is explicit in its depiction of what the necromantic arts tended to involve: amulets, knowledge of astronomy and demonology. It perhaps indirectly reveals more about the writer than Tresilian himself. Thomas Favent was a cleric by profession, and the recondite knowledge of the instruments used in the necromancer’s magic frequently meant that some sort of religious training might have been in play, although this was not by any means always true. This is not to suggest that Favent was a necromancer or even that he knew any personally, but rather that he may have embellished the story by adding details from rumors he had heard here and there from his coterie of clergymen friends, and painted a sort of composite picture of a stereotypical necromancer. The slitting of Tresilian’s throat to ensure his death in the event that his amulets might prove effective is a significant detail in the story, as it illustrated how Tresilian’s executioner (and perhaps the crowd as well) accepted the efficacy of his magic charms. 4 Thomas Favent, Historia sive narratio de modo et forma mirabilis parliamenti, May McKisack, ed., in Camden Miscellany XIV (London: Camden Society Publications, 1926), 18: “ ‘Dummodo aliqua feram circa me, mori non possum.’ Mox spoliarunt eum et invenerunt certa experimenta et certa signa depicta in eisdem ad modum carecterum celi; et unum caput demonis depictum, et plura nomina demonum inscripta fuerunt, quibus ablatis, nudus suspensus est. Et pro maiori securitate mortis, scissum est gurgulio eius. Et facta est nox; et pendebat usque in crastinum et, licencia petita et optenta a rege per uxorem pro corpore auferendo, ducebatur ad fratres minores et ibi humatur.” 60 As some cases can only be classified as vague attempts at performing some type of sorcery, it is evident that male sorcerers tended to be implicated in far more cases dealing with necromancy than did their female counterparts, and that most men in these accounts had received some type of religious education. In the next chapter, we will briefly discuss myriad cases of sorcery for which men involved in the Church were tried in both ecclesiastical and secular courts: The bishop of London presided over the case of the chaplain John Brugges, who was convicted for performing the illicit “art of magic,” and Richard Walker—who was brought to Canterbury for having two books with occult formulas, yellow wax images, and a beryl stone that he attempted to use in what one presumes was a necromantic ritual—was also a chaplain.5 Similarly, a Dominican friar was tried for being in possession of forbidden materials, which likely were books or papers that were instrumental to his attempts at magic.6 However, there is also a case in which a certain Ellen Dalok, who, much like Richard Walker or the Dominican friar, was charged with possessing a book that foretold the future to her.7 It appears as though some women may have also tried to emulate and perform necromantic rituals even if they were unable to read or understand the requirements set forth in the manuals. Ellen’s claims to the court that her spells and curses were indeed effective, but that she had regularly 5 David Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnæ Britanniæ et Hiberniæ, vol. III (London: Fleetstreet, 1737), 394. 6 Thomas Rymer, ed., Fœdera, conventiones, literæ, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, inter reges Angliæ, 3d ed., vol. IV (Farnborough: Gregg P., 1967), 177. 7 William Hale, ed., A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes: Extending from the Year 1475 to 1640 (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1847), 36-7. This case will be further discussed and analyzed in the proceeding chapter. 61 consulted a book for the purposes of soothsaying, suggest that she had powers comparable to that of a necromancer, and that she at least had some understanding of how to prophesy like one. The charge of incantation was perhaps as damning as diabolical magic, since it usually implied the summoning of cosmic forces—a practice that was at times conflated with diabolism. It is important to note that when translating the word incantatio from Latin into English, most scholars choose to translate it as “witchcraft” or “spells,” and while this is not incorrect, it is crucial to distinguish how this type of sorcery was subtly different from the others: The practice of incantatio generally meant that the sorcerer or the sorceress was invoking cosmic forces by harnessing the powers inherent to the words being chanted.8 The legal language of the court documents refers sometimes to these practices as incantatio, which in all probability reflected the learned belief that the popular use of spells and charms implied the summoning of nefarious forces that were crucial to the effectiveness of the sorcerer’s magic. A couple of brief entries from 1481 in the York Fabric Rolls mentioned a man who was tried by an ecclesiastical court for engaging in incantatio, as well as a midwife from Hemswell, who neither “possessed the skill nor the knowledge of midwifery,” and who also practiced magical incantations, presumably to make up for her lack of expertise.9 A Durham case tried in an 8 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 9. 9 The Fabric Rolls of York Minster (Durham: Publications of the Surtees Society 35, 1859), 259: “Johannes Parkyn utitur incantacionibus;” 260: “Agnes Marshall, alias Saunder, de Emeswell, exercet officium obstetricis, et non habet usum neque sciencian obstritricandi; utitur etiam incantationibus.” 62 ecclesiastical court in 1451 or 1452 tells of an older woman, Alice Davison, who was accused of sorcery and for her use of lead and iron in her practice of some type of medicine.10 While this does not appear to indicate that Alice had an extensive knowledge of necromancy, it does perhaps suggest that the pseudo-scientific qualities of the necromancer’s magic arts may have been incorporated into the popular imagining of practical magic and remedies, and that necromancy was not always gendered male. Even though it was traditionally far less sophisticated than necromantic practices, image magic concerned both the ecclesiastical community and the population at large because of what was perceived to be the relatively simple procedures that it took to make this form of magic successful and effective. Since it did not require any special abilities beyond a malicious will and basic raw materials for it to have an effect on the victim, women especially, although not exclusively, were suspected or accused of practicing it. A case that appeared before the Commissary in 1490 was rather stereotypical of how image magic was perceived as an easy revenge tactic against one’s enemies: Jane Benet alias Warde, a sorceress who practices sorcery, summoned on the 10th day of June: the said Jane wishes to take the length of a man and to forge in candle wax, and to defile openly, a [sculptured] image, and just as the waxen image deteriorates, so too in the same manner should the man waste away.11 10 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth (London: Publications of the Surtees Society 21, 1845), 33: “Joh. Davison, Alicia Davison. Alicia mater comparuit. Imponitur sibi quod utitur arte sortilegii, scilicet utitur arte medical’ cum plumbo et pect’ et ferro c.” 11 Hale, 20: “Johanna Benet alias Warde sortelega et utitur sortelegiis: Citata ad x diem Junii: et dicta Johanna vult accipere longitudinem hominis et facere in candelam ceri et offerri coram imagine, et sicut candelam consumit, sic debet homo consumere.” What is striking about this account is that Jane Benet apparently had a considerable amount of money to buy all the wax that was needed to build a life-size sculpture of her intended victim! Charles Dickens’ nineteenth century readers must have immediately recognized the lunacy exhibited by the Miss Havisham character from Great 63 The forging of certain materials in someone’s image with the goal of doing this person harm was a serious offense, as it took no more than the proper components to produce similar results to that of the necromancer’s magic. Women who would otherwise have very limited powers within their own communities were later seen as trying to exert some form of control over their neighbors by resorting to simple forms of sorcery such as image magic. A contemporary case brought before the Chancery dealt with an adulteress named Tanglost, who was accused of hiring two experienced sorceresses to vindicate herself on her lover Thomas, who had spurned her after he made an oath that he would refrain from committing adultery with her. Tanglost was also said to have killed Thomas’s wife with “wychecraft,” although this was not the primary charge against her; it was also alleged that Tanglost and two other women fashioned three wax effigies to destroy Thomas. They were thwarted in their efforts when Thomas had come to learn about their malicious plans, and Tanglost was forced to flee.12 Yet the perceived efficacy of image magic was not limited solely to women who were accused of seeking to cause injury to others. One case that dealt with image magic Expectations because of her propensity to constantly burn wax candles, even in the daytime. This pointed not only to her madness but also to her great wealth. If wax was an expensive commodity in Dickens’ nineteenth century, it was even more so in the fifteenth. The man whom Jane Benet wished to harm must have had it coming to him if he was worth all that wax. 12 C. Trice Martin, “Clerical Life in the Fifteenth Century, as Illustrated by Proceedings of the Court of Chancery,” Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (1907): 374-5. The ecclesiastical court records in Latin may refer to a woman accused of witchcraft as a sortilega, or a sorceress, and sometimes as an incantatrix, or an enchantress. However, the secular accounts recorded in English use the terms witch and witchcraft, often with different spellings, as is the case here with Tanglost. 64 in this period at the secular level—a trial in Southwark officiated by the King’s Bench— tells of a man named Robert de la Marche, who, in 1331 along with two other men named Andrew of Oxford and John son of Robert of Gloucester, were imprisoned at Newgate for forging sheets of copper “fashioned in the shape of men and some molded figures of virgin wax, and underneath these figures were written the names of Robert of Ely and Margery, his mother . . . and along with them a book of circles . . . for killing whom they would and for making better whom they would . . . .”13 Andrew had told John about Marche’s talent and reputation for alchemy and magic, and John had apparently implored and paid Marche a nice sum to perform some complicated magical procedures, which involved the use of various metals and clay pots containing “all sorts of the most vile spells,”14 so that he (John) may obtain the friendship of Robert of Ely in an important, but vaguely described, dispute. However, it is then revealed that John’s intentions were not as benign as he previously claimed them to be, and he admitted to have wanted to kill Robert of Ely after an independent council was appointed to investigate the matter. It is notable that the kind of image magic practiced by Marche required at least some literacy and an understanding of alchemy, a knowledge that was mostly restricted to men, but that his magic was mixed with some simple and crude elements, such as the use of a wax effigy, perhaps in the hopes of garnering even more definitive results. Similarly, in a case that will be discussed in more depth in chapter five, two men who were hired to 13 G.O. Sayles, ed., Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Edward III, vol. V (London: Selden Society, 1958), 54: “…in forma hominum et quibusdam figures de cera virginea conpressatis, inter quas figuras scribebantur nomina Roberti de Ely et Margerie, matris sue…simul cum quodam libro de circulis…as interficiendum quos voluerunt et ad alleuiandum quos voluerunt.” 14 Ibid.: “…diversis sortilegiis vilissimus…” 65 perform murderous sorcery directed at the Prior of Coventry, his supporters, and Edward II, also planned to use wax effigies to kill their victims. However, the fact that many men during this time were part of the larger non-literate culture of medieval England, it is logical to assume that many engaged in what is traditionally considered female-oriented magic, as the ability to read was not required for some types of magic to work, such as image magic. If image magic was known to be a reliable form of magic that could quickly garner results, then it follows that both men and women could have performed it to satisfy their malicious needs. However, this chapter does not seek to completely destroy the taxonomy of gendered magic, for some types of practices do indeed fall neatly into categories of “female” and “male” magic. Devil-worship, or even demonic magic, seemed to have attracted exclusively male practitioners in late medieval England, and from the evidence that we have for cases involving love magic, women were primarily accused of performing it. While the idea of love magic would seem tame, frivolous, or maybe even sweet by our modern standards, it was indeed considered dangerous and criminal in the fifteenth century because it was thought to encourage fraudulent and sometimes even treasonous activities. In one such case, a London woman was brought before the Commissary in 1482 to answer to such charges: Jane Beverly from Lassell near Cowcross is a sorceress, and she recruited two other accomplices so that they could perform [their sorcery], because Robert Stanton and another gentleman from Gray’s Inn, both of whom committed adultery with her, loved her (and no one else), and, as it is said, they fought over her, and one nearly killed another, and her husband did not dare to stay with her 66 on account of these two men; and she is both a common harlot and a madam, and wished to poison these men because her sorcery had failed.15 It is unclear if she is being tried for sorcery or for trying to poison the two when the attempt at sorcery failed her. In any case, the account suggests that love magic was initially involved in making these two men act so irrationally as to almost have one of them killed as a result. Jane Beverly’s husband was obviously displeased with her adultery and the violence of these two men, and she resolved to remedy the situation by murdering both Stanton and the gentleman lawyer. Much like in the Tanglost and Thomas case, there is a reference to the recruitment of two other sorceresses, both of whom were to ensure the successful realization of Jane’s homicidal intentions. The practice of love magic was seen primarily as a female offense, perhaps especially if the woman was poor or undesirable in some way and would have had trouble attracting suitors with a paltry dowry. This is, of course, speculation based on what little evidence that has survived, but since one cannot unequivocally know the personal motivations for a woman’s need of love magic, one can only look to the possible social dynamics that demanded the need for this type of sorcery. In a 1446 account from the ecclesiastical court in Durham, two women, Mariot de Belton and Isabella Brome, were charged for being sorceresses who claimed to have powers to help single women 15 Hale, 7: “Johanna Beverly apud Lessell apud Cowcross est sortilega, et solicitavit ii sortilegas conjunctas, ut ipsæ laborarent, quod Robertus Stantone et alius generosus de Grayysyn diligerent eam, et nullam aliam, qui adulteraverunt cum eadem, et, ut dicitur, ipsi pugnarunt pro ea, et unus alium fere interfecit, et maritus ejus non audet morari cum ea pro ipsis ii viris; et est communis meretrix, et pronuba, et vult intoxicare viros, quod ejus ars defecit.” 67 seduce any man they desired into marriage.16 It must be assumed that Mariot and Isabella professed their innocence because they were ordered respectively to bring seven and four compurgators to testify to their oaths. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are also replete with narrative and legal sources that indicate the rise of a professional class of trained necromancers, whose services could be contracted at the right price. Alice Perrers was thought to have contracted a monk-sorcerer to perform love magic directed at King Edward III, and in the case of the widow Margaret Geffrey, which will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, it was Richard Laukiston who had wanted to broker the deal between Margaret and the sorcerer, who was to perform the love magic on her behalf.17 However, when taking all of this into account, it seems that applying a strict, female-only classification to love magic would not be altogether true. Men were, to some extent, involved in its practice, even though they were not the ones ultimately responsible for its implementation. It can also be argued that women with a reputation for possessing a talent for sorcery, perhaps like Mariot and Isabella, could have also offered similar services to other women (and maybe even men) in their communities. However, if the sorceresses recruited by Jane Beverly and Tanglost in their respective accounts were actually paid for their services in some way, there is no mention of it. 16 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, 29: “Quod est sortilega, et quod utitur illa arte, et dicit mulieribus solutis, nubere volentibus, quod faciat eas habere quos affectant et desiderant habere. Negat, et habet ad purgandum se cum xij manu. Similiter imponitur Isabellæ. Negat, et habet ad purgandum cum iiij manu.” 17 Hale, 32-3. See Appendix A for the full trial transcript. 68 When analyzing these accounts that describe various forms of sorcery, one must keep in mind that these were practices perceived to have serious consequences on the community as a whole, and, most importantly, potentially actionable in the courts. Medieval people in England did not seem to make any distinctions between what we consider “male” and “female” magic; what they considered first before accusing a suspected sorcerer or sorceress were probably the character, status, and motivations of the accused—factors that often influenced the ways in which the accusations would legally take shape in the courts. When the case involved two litigants, then the above factors were considered in addition to determining by what means the accused would have been able to smite the accusing party. Charges levied against those thought to have practiced image magic, incantations, and love spells, all of which aimed to disrupt order and harmony within the community, reflected, in some part, some learned traditions of magic; but since such influential ideas that originated on the Continent were nearly all absent from the cases discussed in this chapter one may conclude that popular ideas regarding the practice and prevalence of magic in everyday life also sprung organically from the social milieu of this late medieval period. Beginning in the sixteenth century, women may have been the predominant targets for accusations of image magic, and for witchcraft in general, but in the medieval period, men and women were not especially expected to have used only certain kinds of magic simply because women were somewhat limited in their pursuits and men were afforded the opportunities to perform more complicated procedures. In truth, the medieval community was a crucible in which ideas and beliefs about magic and sorcery were developed and spread amongst men and women, young and old, rich and poor. 69 Archetypal impressions of the female witch and the male necromancer do not actually represent an accurate picture of magical practices in late medieval England. In this context, and with perhaps the exception of love magic, men and women alike could have been suspected of resorting to sorcery, as its practice at this time was not necessarily gender-specific. 70 CHAPTER 4 PROCEDURE, COMMUNITY, AND FAMA IN ENGLISH SORCERY CASES In a 1447 ecclesiastical trial in Durham a woman named Mariot Jackson was accused of being an enchantress and practicing the art of incantation, although the short court summary fails to go into further detail on her method of practice. Since the document did not name her accuser, it is likely that she was brought to court on the basis of public rumor. She was given a chance to clear her name with the “fifth hand”— meaning that she was responsible to bring to the court five compurgators willing to testify under oath to her good character. Mariot apparently did bring to court the necessary witnesses for her case, as the document ends with a short statement about the fact that she was able to restore her fama, or public reputation, back to its pristine state.1 The active participation of members within the community, including the testimonies made to the courts as well as the instigating talk about a suspicious individual’s fama, not only determined who would go to court, but also often the outcome of the trial itself. Indeed, the three forms of magic that stand out in the often vaguelyworded sources—incantations, image magic, and love magic—are indicative of a culture that considered the power of the spoken word to be formidable: the premise behind how 1 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth (London: Publications of the Surtees Society 21, 1845), 29: “Mariot Jacson. Personaliter. Imponitur sibi quod est incantatrix, et quod utitur arte incantatricis. Et habet ad purgandum se in prox. cum vta manu, et restituta est pristinæ famæ.” 71 these types of magic functioned was that the sorcerer could make powerful verbal utterances to either manipulate physical matter or, as we shall see, supernaturally effect changes to the social dynamics of their communities. Although some Continental ideas may have influenced some English conceptions of sorcery, the limited availability of Continental literature, including the Malleus Maleficarum and other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century inquisitorial manuals, points to the fact that only the literate intelligentsia had ready access to these texts and their ideas, and so the image and fear of the English sorcerer was largely developed out of local traditions and folk stories. In many of the cases that will be discussed below, it is the people, not learned churchmen and inquisitors, who sought justice for those wronged by invidious and malevolent sorcerers. Hence, their beliefs about the kinds of sorcery in which male and female sorcerers could potentially engage, as they are reflected in the court records, heavily influenced the formation of the idea of the English witch in the years to come. The types of sorcery cases that this chapter will examine are ecclesiastical and secular court cases, ranging from the crowded streets of London to the small villages and towns of central and northern England. The secular and ecclesiastical courts both provided similar outlets by which commoners could have their complaints addressed in a legal fashion, a fact that perhaps helped curb potential physical violence from being inflicted on the accused or those convicted of dabbling in sorcery. An examination of documents that outline specific complaints about various types of sorcery, and especially how people were accused of and perceived to be involved in such activity, suggests not only some of the more popular beliefs about how certain types of sorcery were used against others, but also how community members used the courts to safeguard themselves 72 from the threat of sorcery. Furthermore, community involvement in bringing to justice suspected sorcerers—and their power to exculpate or indict before the courts these suspected individuals on the basis of fama—ensured that social order and peace could be maintained throughout the realm. Sorcery Cases in the Church Courts It is important to note that most sorcery trials and complaints involving non-noble laypeople were heard before churchmen (usually a bishop) and in the courts over which they presided. The majority of the cases in this section are drawn from two sources in particular: The Commissary court in London, presided over by the bishop of London, and reports of ecclesiastical proceedings in Durham, taken from the diocesan records of that region. That church courts tried such a large portion of sorcery cases, especially in the fifteenth century on the eve of the great witch-hunt, suggests they were expected to handle disputes about sorcery and proper Christian conduct, and that laypeople in general felt that their concerns about their neighbors could be equitably addressed in these courts. Since sorcery was considered a spiritual crime, and one that endangered the soul, the church courts naturally claimed jurisdiction over this type of crime, which often included “spoken” forms of sorcery such as incantations, spells, and curses. As the witch-believing culture of late medieval England placed a heavy emphasis on the power of words, “spoken” sorcery was such that relied on saying sequences of words or damning phrases to incapacitate or wound the sorcerer’s potential victims. However, the perception that certain individuals were able to disrupt the community using the power of their malicious speech was not limited to the belief that people would only engage in magical incantations. A 1493 trial held in London before the Commissary tried a woman 73 for excessive and damaging curses made upon her neighbors; one of the many accusations with which she was charged was scandalizing the community by her use of malicious and murderous sorcery, as well as her blatant apostasy: Ellen Dalok, a common offender among her own neighbors, is accused of the following charges: Especially as an enchantress, she says whomever she anathematizes departs from this world. Likewise, she says that she anathematized many people who never afterwards lived life in this world. Likewise, she says that if she has heaven in this world, she does not care about heaven in a future world. Likewise, she said herself she was in hell just as long as God was in heaven, that she had been able to vindicate herself with the claws of hell on a certain John Gibbs, who was dead. Likewise, she offended a certain honorable woman who still lived, but since she was unable to punish this woman while she still lived, she wished to punish her when she is dead. Likewise, she always acted diabolically, never godly. Likewise, she never went to confess to her own priest, so much that her own parish priest did not know her own spiritual life, so he said. Likewise, she said, that if she would command the rain to fall, on her order it pours down. Likewise, she says that she has one book, which foretells the future to her.2 Ellen’s case is significant because the outrageous charges directed at her were practices that her neighbors perceived as both plausible and legally actionable based on her bad fama. Her quasi-heretical understanding of the powers that God and the devil possessed on earth and in the afterlife is strengthened by the implication that a diabolical 2 William Hale, ed., A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes: Extending from the Year 1475 to 1640 (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1847), 36-7: “Elena Dalok communis skandilizatrix vicinorum suorum et istis articulis sequentibus: Item in primis quasi incantrix et dicit quemcumque anatimatizat semper migrat ab hoc seculo. Item quia ipsa dicit quod anatimazavit quamplures qui nunquam postea in hoc seculo vitam duxerunt. Item quia ipsa dicit quod si habeat celum in hoc seculo, non curat de celo in seculo futuro. Item ipsa utinizavit se fuisse in inferno quamdiu Deus erit in celo, ut potuisset uncis infernalibus vindicare se de quodam Johanne Gybbys mortuo. Item ipsa scandilizavit quondam honestam mulierem viventem, et quia non potuit vindicare in ea vivente, modo theranice vellet vindicare in ipsam mortuam. Item quia diabolice semper agit, et nunquam Deifice. Item quod ipsa nunquam fuit confessa suo proprio sacerdoti, in tantum quod sacerdos ejus parochie non novit vitam ejus spiritualem, ut asserit. Item quia ipsa dixit, quod si mandaverit pluviam pluere, ad mandatum ejus pluit. Item quia dicit, quod habet unum librum, qui dicit sibi omnia futura.” 74 force may have imbued her various curses with the power to inflict death and chaos on her victims—a “common offender” indeed. In the period following the plague, another kind of female criminal sprung up alongside the sorcerer for whom society held a particular contempt: the communis rixatrix, or the common scold, who William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), defined simply as a “public nuisance to her neighborhood.”3 The scold was (usually) a woman, who loudly and publicly insulted or defamed her neighbors, and was generally seen as a disruptor of the peace.4 Scolding and certain types of sorcery, such as incantations, were seen as criminal acts aimed at disturbing and agitating the community by using words as weapons; the public’s belief in the power of the spoken word made scolding and sorcery of this sort to be serious offenses. The additional charge of weather magic during this time and in the early modern witch-hunt was as serious as any other charge of diabolical witchcraft: the sorcerer able to negatively impact the weather looks to not only ruin one person, but a whole community. Many of the ecclesiastical trials that did not involve two distinct, opposing parties, were brought to the attention of the presiding cleric by rumor of the defendant’s scandalous behavior. Oftentimes the defendant, at least in the Commissary’s court, had to pay the fees required to stand trial and possibly clear themselves of charges that 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. IV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979; facsimile of 1st ed., 1765-1769), 169. 4 Sandy Bardsley, “Sin, Speech, and Scolding in Late Medieval England,” In Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 154. Bardsley also identified barratry and cursing as other types of deviant speech that carried similar penalties assigned to the crime of scolding. 75 threatened to taint their reputation. Ellen’s neighbors, who likely feared that she would smite them with bad weather and curses, may have had a significant hand in her indictment before the court; the first charge on the list stated that she was constantly offending her community, perhaps by annoying or scaring her neighbors with her excessive and evil chatter. One must also consider that, for Ellen’s neighbors, it literally cost them nothing to have her come before the court to answer for her scandalous behavior; she would have had to bear the financial burden for her alleged crimes against her neighbors. Her bad fama, which may have had its roots in her reputation as a scold, must have gotten her into a great deal of legal trouble, since usually this was enough to compel a person to stand trial (though not enough to secure a conviction).5 The community was a powerful and influential force in a medieval person’s life, since the individuals who made up the community were their own law-enforcement agency that protected others from violence (by raising the hue and cry), and were able to determine the fate of the accused by acting as witnesses or compurgators. Most importantly, the community could also determine who would stand trial, as illustrated not only by the Ellen Dalok case, but also another involving a woman named Margaret Geffrey, which came to the attention of the Commissary in 1492 by public rumor (fama publica referente). The Geffrey case deals with love magic as a fraudulent act, not only because love magic itself was legally considered a fraudulent practice, but also because her case dealt with criminal deception on a material level as well. A certain Richard Laukiston attempted to defraud the widow Margaret by telling her that his wife knew a 5 R.H. Helmholz, “Crime, Compurgation and the Courts of the Medieval Church,” Law and History Review 1 (1983): 13-14. 76 “connyng man” and “that by his connyng can cause a woman to have any man that she hath favour to,”6 and he promised to tell the sorcerer to find Margaret a wealthy husband if she were to give Laukiston the only valuables that she owned, which were two mazers, or bowls, worth at about five marks and ten shillings. The judge ordered Laukiston to return the mazers within a short period time or suffer major excommunication. Margaret was ordered to go before the procession barefoot on three Sundays, wearing a kirtle, a flame-colored headdress, and bearing in her a hand a crucifix made of wax worth one penny.7 While both parties in this case were charged for the crimes of heresy and sorcery, the penance given to Laukiston reflected more of the fraudulent nature of his crime than anything having to do with his association with trained sorcerers, while Margaret’s penance was obviously more religious in nature, as it was probably meant to renew her spiritual life toward orthodoxy. It is not entirely clear whether Laukiston truly attempted to con Margaret into giving him the mazers or if he had really wanted to do business with her, but what is known is that this transaction generated enough talk around the neighborhood that Margaret and Laukiston appeared at court because the authorities could no longer ignore the public rumor. One must also recognize that public outrage and talk on this matter played an important role as part of the larger legal machine 6 Hale, 32. 7 Ibid., 33: “viz. quod predictus Ricardus restituat, seu restitui faciat predictas ii murras, vel eorum valorem, dicte Margarete, sub pena excommunicationis majoris infra viii dies; quam tulit judex nunc pro tunc et tunc pro nunc; residuam partem penitentie judex sibi reservavit usque in crastinum diei Andree tunc proximum sequentem, et judex injunxit dicte Margarete publicam penitentiam, viz. tribus dominicis, nudis pedibus capite flammiola nodata cooperta kirtela, manu sua dextra deferentem candelam precii unius denarii crucem processionaliter precedat.” For a transcription and translation of this case in its entirety, please refer to Appendix A. 77 designed to protect the interests of a poor widow like Margaret from the predatory practices of fraudsters. One may also see how publicity played an important role in the relationship between the clergy and the community, since public knowledge and talk, in a sense, held the clergy accountable for their corruption or abuse of their relatively elevated status. A case brought before the Bishop of London in 1385, “before whom by their own confession John Brugges, chaplain, and John Wyghton, of London, a tailor, [stood] convicted of the practice of the prohibited art of magic,” gave the bishop permission to “do what he deem[ed] fit for their imprisonment until they submit to judgment and satisfy Holy Church for their disobedience herein.”8 This shows how even men like Brugges, who was involved with the Church to some capacity, were not immune to sorcery accusations for the “practice of the prohibited art of magic.”9 Indeed, within the community, the relationship between commoners and the clergy were often quite contentious, and the superior status of the clergy did not prevent ordinary parishioners from calling for their removal or bringing lawsuits against them.10 Sorcery charges made against those associated with the Church, especially those in minor orders, were common occurrences, as laypeople likely believed that priests and chaplains were privy to occult knowledge or practices that they themselves were not. 8 Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Richard II A.D 1385-1389 (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 63. 9 Ibid. 10 R.N. Swanson, “Problems of the Priesthood in Pre-Reformation England,” The English Historical Review 105 (1990): 845-869. 78 The differences between how ecclesiastical and secular courts prosecuted clergy for sorcery highlights the contrasting perceptions of the crime’s potential damage to the community. While the secular courts viewed sorcery as a rejection of good neighborly conduct that put the stability of the community in jeopardy, churchmen, on the other hand, viewed sorcery as a theological problem that could endanger the soul of the individual, who might then spread erroneous beliefs to his neighbors. In 1419, Richard Walker, a chaplain, was brought before the archbishop of Canterbury after he was apprehended for having “two books, in which figures and magical conjurations are depicted and inscribed, suggesting, as they say, the magic arts and sorcery; and also a box, which contained a beryl stone, suspended skillfully in a black strap, three small leaves of paper, and two small images of yellow wax.”11 Walker was able to avoid punishment for heresy at the ecclesiastical court in Canterbury because, although confessing to having experimented with the occult formulas prescribed in the books, he explained that he did not believe in these false operations since he was unable to have any success with them.12 This also points to a significant difference between how higher ecclesiastical courts and secular courts prosecuted clerical sorcery: the ecclesiastical elite were more concerned about the heretical belief in the efficacy of magical practices rather than the actual practice—which, although deeply frowned upon, was seen as a product of 11 David Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnæ Britanniæ et Hiberniæ, vol. III (London: Fleetstreet, 1737), 394: “…duos libros, in quibus scriptæ et depictæ fuerunt nonullæ conjurationes, et figuræ, artem magicam, ut dicebatur, et sortilegium sapientes; ac etiam unam pixidem, in qua contenti erant unus lapis de birillo, artificialiter in corio nigro suspensus, tres parvæ schedulæ, et duæ parvæ imagines de cera crocea.” 12 Ibid. 79 superstition and ignorance. Walker claimed that he no longer believed in the efficacy of his sorcery, hence he was released without punishment. The secular courts, however, treated both lay and clerical sorcerers as common felons whose activities posed serious threats to communities within the realm, much like thieves and murderers were seen as threats to the precarious order and peace of society on the whole. A Dominican friar from Worcester was apprehended in 1432, along with his books, which “discussed materials of depraved sorcery,”13 and tried by a royal court for his acts of sorcery. Before the Chancery around the same time, a priest named John Harry, was accused of injuring a man through “hys malys & evele wylle” and by “enchauntement wycchecraft & socerye.”14 The absence of an ecclesiastical authority in these cases is odd, but perhaps it speaks more to the growing alienation between the English judicial system and the Church’s legal authority than anything else. Henry II (r. 1154-1189) had issued to his prelates in 1164 the Constitutions of Clarendon, a ratification of certain administrative and legal practices he claimed were once common in the reign of his grandfather Henry I (r. 1100-1135), which included lay investiture and the right to try felonious clergy first in the royal courts. After the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, who vehemently opposed Henry II’s attempts to impede the rights of the Church, the crown ceased to insist on having both 13 Thomas Rymer, ed., Fœdera, conventiones, literæ, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, inter reges Angliæ, 3d ed., vol. IV (Farnborough: Gregg P., 1967), 177: “Necnon ad omnimodos Libros suos, tractantes materiam Sortilegæ Pravitatis, seu quascumque alias Materias suspectas, Scrutandum, Capiendum, seu Arestandum.” 14 Calendars of the Proceedings in Chancery, vol. I (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1827), xxiv. 80 secular and ecclesiastical trials for clergy. However, this ecclesiastical privilege gradually declined, and by the early fourteenth century, “criminous” clergy were once again being charged first in secular courts, leading to the abuse of “benefit of the clergy,” a practice in which the accused would claim their clergy in the event that the jury returned an unfavorable verdict.15 Secular Cases While ecclesiastical judges did preside over many of the sorcery cases for which we have evidence, there are some instances of secular justice dealing with suspected sorcery activity. As with most church trials that took place during this time, the cases brought before secular justices were overwhelmingly reflective of how relationships between members of a community were being constantly negotiated and renegotiated on the basis of fama. A 1302 proceeding in the city court of Exeter condemned a woman as a witch because of her reputation for friendly associations with known enchanters and witches within the community, a charge that illustrated the fear that magic arts such as incantation could be transmitted from one witch to another. According to the document: “Dionysia Baldewyne is accustomed to receive John de Wermhille and Agnes, his wife, and Joan la Cornwalyse of Teignmouth, who are witches and enchanters; and the said Dionisia consorts with them, and they [the grand jury] say that she is not worthy to be received in visnet.”16 Although no great terror was expressed in the matter of Dionysia 15 Theodore F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 4th ed. (London: Buttersworth, 1948), 414. 16 Thomas Wright, ed., “The Municipal Archives of Exeter,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 18 (1862): 307. Visnet was a legal term referring to a jury of twelve yeomen selected amongst the jurors present at the court; they were 81 and her friends, there was indeed a concern here that witches caucusing together about their craft could potentially harm the community more effectively than if it were just one witch working alone. However, the emphasis here is placed on Dionysia’s bad choice in friends, suggesting that bad fama alone was not enough to get her tried by visnet. Even more significantly, it suggests that the company one kept could damage one’s fama as much as one’s actions; Dionysia seemed to have gotten her bad fama merely by associating with others of ill repute. The fama and publicity attached to this type of criminal behavior perhaps explains why secular court punishments for sorcery were designed to inflict the maximum amount of public humiliation for the convict and act as a preventative measure toward any member of the community who might have an interest in such illicit activity. In a London chronicle from 1444 a man was punished for invoking a “wycckyd spyryte” and was placed in a pillory with the “maner of hys proces and werkyng . . . wretyn and hanggyd a bowte hys necke”17 for all to see—a form of punishment that was meant to publicly expose the man to the contempt of all. Although no criminal proceedings were recorded, one can infer from the narrative that the man was charged in a secular court, since the pillory was a punishment reserved for those convicted by secular jurisdiction, such as the King’s Bench, and usually for fraudulent crimes like deceitful trading essentially an assize of the neighborhood responsible for handing out verdicts in criminal trials. 17 James Gairdner, ed., The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century (London: Camden Society, 1876), 185. 82 practices, the making of forgeries, impersonating civic officers, and using magic.18 It comes as no surprise that being put in the pillory, which was a painful and humiliating experience, was also a form of punishment that would be forever tied to the convicted person’s fama; the memory of such an event would surely influence the way in which the community would interact in the future with the convicted sorcerer. Robert Berewold of London in 1382 was castigated and put in the pillory for performing some type of magic and soothsaying ritual to find his friend Alan’s stolen mazer. According to the account, he “took a loaf, and fixed in the top of it a round peg of wood, and four knives at the four sides of the same, in form like a cross.”19 Berewold then identified the thief as one Johanna Wolsy, who then took her accuser to court, where she complained that Berewold was purposefully defaming her and maliciously lying. Alan corroborated her claim by stating that Berewold was frequently heard throughout the parish defaming Johanna as a thief. Berewold did admit to his culpability in defaming Johanna, but his being punished in the pillory did not come as a result of his slander (for that, he was ordered to confess before his fellow parishioners at Mass how he had wronged Johanna). In fact, the pillory was assigned as punishment for his sorcery, for the judge sentenced him to endure it for an hour with “the said loaf, with the peg and knives stuck in it, being hung from his neck.”20 The judge had ruled that by such soothsaying and magic, even if used for the 18 John Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973), 184. 19 Henry Thomas Riley, ed., Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (London: Longman, 1868), 472; Bellamy, 63-4. 20 Riley, 473. 83 seemingly benign task of finding lost or stolen items, “good and lawful men and women might easily, and without deserving it, incur injury in their name and good repute.”21 The court of King’s Bench, usually situated at Westminster, was also involved in the adjudication of these types of cases, since the practice of sorcery was increasingly coming to be viewed as a threat to the stability of the realm. The perception of the realm as the symbolic body of the English people, with the king at its head, suggests that sorcery was more or less a national security matter, especially when considering sorcery cases involving regicide.22 In chapter three we discussed the case of a certain Robert de la Marche, who in 1331 was hired to kill a man and a woman by using sorcery in the form of image magic. However, since no one was killed in the end as a result of Marche’s sorcery, it was decided that the King’s Bench had no jurisdiction over this case, but if a killing had occurred, the court would have proceeded to treat it as a regular murder trial.23 The fact that some of these cases were tried in King’s Bench indicated how the higher secular courts attempted to be more involved in prosecuting those whose crimes were considered to have adverse effects on the whole realm. The court of Chancery was yet another legal venue before which people lodged their complaints about sorcery. The Lord Chancellor or one of his representatives usually heard the cases brought before them, and their decisions seemed to be highly respected 21 Ibid. 22 See chapter five for an in-depth discussion on the connection between regicide and sorcery. 23 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 467. 84 since they were based on their individual conscience, which was believed to be divinely inspired. John Hoigges, who had brought the above mentioned priest John Harry before the Chancery, had hoped to enlist the Chancellor’s help to legally prevent Harry from following through on his constant and public threats of sorcery directed at Hoigges.24 The Chancery tried a woman identified as Alice, the wife of John Huntley, in the late fifteenth century for exercising the “feetes of Wychecraft and Sorsery ayenst the lawe of the Chirch and of the kyng.”25 According to the report, she had used “dyverses mamettes [idols] for wychecraftes and enchauntementez, with other stuffe beryed and deeply hydd under the erthe.”26 But such cases that came before the Chancery did not deal only with the surreptitious activities of sorcerers. In what appears to be primarily a dispute over an unpaid debt, Mary Grenaker’s husband William Tyndale appeared before the Chancery to protest Mary’s ill treatment at the hands of a knight, named William Carrowe, who abducted her from church during services, and ransacked her house for “wrytyng of socery and wytchecraft,” meaning that perhaps she had some books or papers with spells written on them.27 Nothing was found, but Carrowe continued to mistreat Mary, and Tyndale asked that the court subpoena Carrowe to answer to the charges, which was sometimes just enough to compel the defendant to settle the dispute out of court. 24 See n. 14 above. 25 C. Trice Martin, “Clerical Life in the Fifteenth Century, as Illustrated by Proceedings of the Court of Chancery,” Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (1907): 373. 26 Ibid. 27 Martin, 376. 85 The development and reform of the Chancery as a separate legal institution in the thirteenth century gave rise to the Chancellor’s jurisdiction in a court of equity, as opposed to a trial determined by a jury. The prosecution of sorcery in the Chancery’s court may suggest that some litigants preferred to try their luck in this venue rather than risk a trial by jury, which could be unpredictable, or an ecclesiastical proceeding, by which a conviction was more difficult to obtain and the punishments deemed not severe enough. Richard Wunderli has argued that the practice of bringing lawsuits to ecclesiastical courts gradually declined in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as a result of the secularization of the medieval world. Laypeople began to seek justice in mayoral and city courts because secular authorities were increasingly perceived to be competent enough to adjudicate on different types of disputes, even those that traditionally were tried in church courts.28 Yet, in a fifteenth century Chancery case already discussed in chapter three, a woman named Tanglost appeared in court to answer the charges of sorcery that her former paramour had lodged against her. Tanglost denied the charges, saying that she had feigned her malice, and that “the mater theryn is determined in the Spirituall Court, and nat [sic] in this Court.”29 It seems that the transition to secular from ecclesiastical jurisdiction over sorcery trials did not become complete until the sixteenth century, when the first anti-witchcraft statutes were passed during the reign of the Tudors, making such activity a capital, rather than a spiritual, crime. 28 Robert M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge: The Medieval Academy of America, 1981), 137. 29 Martin, 375. 86 Defamation Cases With so much emphasis placed on the importance of one’s fama and the public knowledge of a crime within the community, it is no wonder that many medieval people who felt that they had been unjustly and wrongly accused of sorcery would take their suit to the courts so that they may be publicly exonerated from blame and clear their names in connection to these crimes of magic. The secular courts attempted to claim jurisdiction over most secular crime, but medieval common law conceded jurisdiction to the ecclesiastical courts over all defamation cases, with few exceptions.30 The church courts especially presided over cases having to do with sexual slander and scandalous rumors about the private lives of one’s neighbors—matters that directly affected a person’s fama within the community.31 The Robert Berewold case illustrates what sort of punishment was in store for slanderers prosecuted at the secular level (that is, the pillory). Similarly, in ecclesiastical trials, if the accusations lodged at the diffamatus went unfounded or if they were able to clear themselves of the charges, those responsible for spreading false rumors about the diffamatus had committed a crime, but the church courts usually assigned a specific penance or threatened excommunication if the behavior persisted. A 1435 slander case from Durham tells of a woman named Margaret Lindsay who brought three other men to an ecclesiastical court for spreading the rumor that she was an incantatrix who performed some type of ritual with a stake that put a hex on the men’s 30 Helmholz, 8. 31 Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27; Plucknett, 455. 87 genitals, rendering them impotent.32 The concern for magically induced impotence in the Middle Ages was discussed at length in various theological works from learned members of the Church, and this concept seems to have been somewhat widespread and believed by most people, whether learned or not, at least between the ninth and fifteenth centuries.33 Margaret was able to clear her name in this matter, along with some of her friends who had also been accused, and the three men were warned, under the pain of excommunication, that they should never again slander any of these women. Unfortunately, some of the defamation accounts fail to yield any detailed information about the type of magic that the defamed individual was rumored to have used; instead, such accounts tend to emphasize the ruin that could come to those in the community who were falsely or maliciously accused of sorcery. This was easily remedied in ecclesiastical proceedings that allowed for canonical purgation; the diffamatus in all likelihood welcomed, and perhaps even volunteered to undergo this procedure as a gesture of their innocence. A Durham case from 1450 describes a woman accused of defaming others in addition to practicing sorcery, which may have suggested that the sorceress was so morally bankrupt that her propensity for slander was seen as par 32 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, 27: “Margareta Lyndyssay contra Johannem de Longcaster, Johannem Somerson, Johannem Symson. Diffamata quod fuit incantatrix, videlicet quod ipsa, cum alia muliere, posuit unum stake ad ligandum membra virilia ibidem quod non possunt choire.” For a full transcript of this case, please refer to Appendix B. 33 Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 208. 88 for the course, although the account ends with the court giving the accused a chance to prove her innocence.34 The participation of the people within the community in determining the outcome of legal cases involving slander points to how important fama was to the litigious culture of these communities. As we saw in the Jackson case described in the beginning of this chapter, both the Durham and London courts sometimes required defendants to summon a certain number of compurgators, or witnesses able to testify to the defendant’s good character, especially in cases where it was difficult to obtain physical evidence of the criminal act, which of course included sorcery.35 The compurgators were required to have lived near or in the neighborhood of the defendant, but they were not expected to know all the facts of the case—their roles were limited to swearing to their belief in the trustworthiness of the defendant’s proclamation of innocence.36 A 1476 case from London describes a man, John Bere, who was accused of slandering his neighbors for 34 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, 29: “Notatur super sortilegium. Negat crimen. Item notatur super crimen diffamacionis. Negat, et habet terminum ad purgandum se in prox.” 35 Marie Kelleher argues that understanding inquisitio as a set of legal procedures used to prosecute “occult” or hidden crimes is valuable analytical tool when evaluating the symbiotic relationship between the community and the court justices in the prosecution of such crimes. Although this article specifically examines rape crimes in Catalonia, the prosecution of this criminal act (much like sorcery) usually came to the courts because of the suspect’s mala fama; frequently there were no witnesses who actually saw the suspect committing the crime. (See Marie A. Kelleher, “Law and the Maiden: Inquisitio, Fama, and the Testimony of Children in Medieval Catalonia,” Viator 37 [2006]: 352-359). One must also assume that the cooperation between the community and the courts in the prosecution of sorcery in England was equally essential in cases where mala fama is involved. 36 Helmholz, 13. 89 sorcery. Bere “appeared [at court] on the thirteenth day of March and he denied the above charges; on the next Monday he purged himself [of these charges by five compurgators]; on this day the man cleared his own name and was dismissed,”37 and thus Bere was able to legally restore his reputation. Taking legal action against slander may have seemed appealing to the defamed persons, as it provided a public forum and greater visibility for the beleaguered plaintiff to clear his or her name.38 In Durham again, this time in 1452, a woman named Jane Smithson appeared at court and produced two witnesses, “both of whom were called to testify that they heard Agnes [Thomson] publicly slander Jane [Smithson] for [practicing] sorcery,” and that Agnes Thompson had also been spreading the rumor that Jane was the chaplain John Smith’s mistress, who had showered upon her luxurious gifts.39 Agnes was to clear herself of the charges by summoning four compurgators. The 1470 defamation case involving Jaquetta, the duchess of Bedford, was an especially delicate matter because a certain Thomas Wake had accused her of performing image magic directed at the king and queen; if true, the crime would have been considered treasonous. Wake could not prove before the Bishop of Carlisle that the duchess forged the lead 37 Hale, 15-16: “Johannes Bere diffamavit vicinos et credit in sortilegio: comparuit Johannes xiii die Marcii et negavit prefatos articulos; in die Lune proximo purgare se se [sic] 5; illo die vir purgavit se se et dimittitur.” 38 McIntosh, 27. 39 Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, 33: “…quæ contestantur quod audierunt ipsam Agnetem publice diffamantem eandem Johannam de sortilegio, et eciam quod dominus Johannes Smyth, capellanus parochialis Sanctæ Margaretæ, in tantum luxuriatus est cum ipsa, quod, propter sibi per ipsum data munera, incarceratus fuit. Habet ad purgandum se cum iiijta manu.” 90 figurines he claimed were used for her sorcery, since John Daunger, a parish clerk in Northampton he brought in as a witness, refused to corroborate his story. And so in “the great council of January 19 last she was cleared of the said slander,”40 with the examination having very publicly and unequivocally cleared the duchess from any wrongdoing directed at the royal couple. False accusations that combined the crimes of sorcery and theft were explicitly connected to medieval people’s perceptions of the ways in which these crimes could potentially affect the community, even if they were untrue or difficult to substantiate. The rolls of the city court of justice from Exeter contains one of the earliest incidents of witchcraft slander in 1302, which describes a man who attacked his neighbor’s wife for being a “wicked witch and a thief,” charging her of “having surreptitiously taken the thread of the women and good men of the city, and sold it, and of gaining a living in this manner.”41 A woman named Alice appeared before the Commissary in 1497, claiming she had been defamed as a thief and a sorceress by the parish rector Master Robert, who had slandered many people using his sorcery, “and in particular Alice Hall, saying that she has stolen two rings from Robert Draper, just as he reveals through his own statement written by his own hand;” the record went on to say that he had “until next Saturday to respond to these charges.”42 It is difficult to discern how one could use sorcery to defame 40 Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward IV. Henry VI. A.D. 1467-1477 (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 190. 41 42 Wright, 307. Hale, 63: “Dominus Robertus rector ibidem notatur officio quod est communis diffamator plurimarum personarum per artes suas sortilegicas; et presertim diffamavit Aliciam Hall, dicendo quod furtive surripuit duos annulos cujusdam Roberti Draper, 91 others, as Master Robert was accused of doing, but the slanderers themselves seemed to have viewed this crime as perhaps being akin to thievery; both, in any case, aimed to rob the victim of what was most valuable or precious to them. Sorcery charges directed at both men and women by their neighbors reveal that community members used the local courts available to them to address grievances and injuries wrought by magic, which may have curbed any potential violence that could have occurred as a result of concerns about the rising levels of sorcery. Evidently the courts provided members of a community a legal and safe outlet in which to defuse existing tensions and repair relationships, and eased the difficulties and anxieties of town and village life that had resulted from a rapidly changing world. In this way, a layperson’s ability to bring an accusation of sorcery against another, or to defend their reputation in the courts, appeared to be a social mechanism by which the community could reaffirm the status quo, but also an efficient and public way to find justice for perceived wrongdoing. In this way, one can begin to see how people used the courts to bring to justice, in particular, scandal-making women and men of bad fama who were thought to have practiced certain forms of sorcery to socially elevate themselves or to wound those at the receiving end of their wrath. The social and personal problems that men and women could potentially cause to members within their communities during this period often dictated how their neighbors would proceed against them in sorcery cases. The courts, in this sense, also provided a venue in which neighbors could act out their aggression toward the accused in a non- prout patet per billam, manu sua scriptam; habet ad diem Sabbati proximum, ad respondendum articulis.” 92 physical way. Indeed, these lay members of communities who brought complaints about sorcery against their neighbors were integral to the development of the stereotypical image of the English witch that would emerge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The relative lack of demonological discourse from the Continent between the fourteenth to roughly the end of the fifteenth century does seem to point toward a somewhat independent formation of witch beliefs in England, and these beliefs seemed to have been informed by popular conceptions of magic, the evidence of which can now be found in these secular and ecclesiastical court trials. Accusations brought against those thought to have been spiritual menaces to their communities, and the trials that took place as a result, likely helped to establish the necessary legislation that would underpin the witchhunts in the early modern era. As people became more accustomed to litigating against their neighbors on the issue of sorcery and seeing how fama could land someone in court, the social conditions in which sorcery practices became increasingly criminalized seemed to have later called for harsher punitive measures against such practices. 93 CHAPTER 5 DEVIL-WORSHIP, REGICIDE, AND COMMERCE: THE PROFESSIONAL NECROMANCER AND HIS CLIENTS In the beginning years of the fourteenth century, Walter Langton (d. 1321), Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, was tried for devil-worship, one of many accusations lodged against him in an attempt to ruin his political career. Although found innocent by Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) and the archbishop of Canterbury, Langton remained vulnerable to attacks on his character, and continued to fight for several years against those who resented his extensive landholdings and royal influence after his trial.1 Boniface VIII, who had cleared Langton of the charges, had also come under attack for similar charges by Phillip IV of France who, only a few years later, instigated charges of diabolism, or devil-worship, against the Knights Templar. The accusation of devilworship, especially in regards to men belonging to the nobility or possessing high ecclesiastical offices, was an effective method in curbing their authority and influence. With the exception of the trial of Alice Kyteler in Ireland (1324),2 presided over by an English inquisitor trained on the Continent, the few criminal acts of diabolism for which we have evidence were primarily male-oriented transgressions and mostly motivated by 1 The trial of Walter Langton is discussed in depth by Alice Bearwood in her monograph, The Trial of Walter Langton, Bishop of Lichfield, 1307-1312, found in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 53 (1964): 1-45. 2 A more detailed discussion of this trial can be found in chapter two. 94 financial concerns. Furthermore, it seems that at this time the hiring of professional necromancers was an activity that both men and women at the time perceived to be potentially useful and personally beneficial, as both the client and the necromancer stood to benefit from their relationship. Such sorcery accusations lodged against members of the English aristocracy, prominent ecclesiastics, and clergymen during this period perhaps resulted from broader changes to the fabric of religious, political, and social life in Europe. The papal schism early in the fourteenth century divided Europe’s loyalties, and the papacy would never again wield the influence it once had. In addition, a series of plagues wiped out approximately one-third of Europe’s population and, with the lack of able workers to till the land, the binary foundations of most medieval communities—peasants and their lords—began to give way toward more diverse social and economic relationships. With the onset of uncertain times and the upheaval of traditional social structures, rising concerns about diabolical heresy and illicit magical practices coincided with new religious movements condemned by Christian orthodoxy. Moreover, the ruling and religious elite were not entirely immune to damaging accusations of necromancy and sorcery. Yet one cannot attribute the seeming rise of sorcery accusations solely to broader social changes in this period, as it does not adequately account for all the differences and varying motivations of every sorcery case. Instead, one must look at the world of medieval politics—and the noblemen, aristocratic women, bishops, and kings who inhabited this world—as an exclusive community operating on a similar set of fears, ambitions, and motivations than their less fortunate counterparts. The threat of sorcery was very real to late medieval aristocrats and ecclesiastics, but the purposes of accusing 95 another prominent figure of sorcery differed from those of commoners litigating against their neighbors for crimes of sorcery: by placing the accused in the role of a sorceress or a necromancer, the accuser was able to not only ruin their opponents and possibly bar them from the political scene, but it also helped the accuser to rationalize the accusation by placing the threatening person in a larger-than-life context. Criminal charges of sorcery directed at clergy and the ruling nobility also appear to have been colored by the necromantic and heretical practices that were at the time being tried in both royal and ecclesiastical courts. In sorcery cases involving sorcerersfor-hire and their aristocratic clients, it is notable that the sorcerers are always men; indeed, the nobility possessed the financial resources and connections necessary to purchase items or the services of professional necromancers necessary for the realization of their malicious intentions. It is no wonder that these professional sorcerers—who were almost always drawn from the educated and privileged sectors of society—tended to be men. The educational, economic, or religious background and status of the accused men determined not only how the courts prosecuted these men but also how conceptions of necromancy and devil-worship would develop and become influential in late medieval England. The Business of Magic and Devil-Worship That the ruling elite hired professional necromancers, or at least men with reputations for their knowledge of sorcery, was a practice that is prevalent in the sources does not mean that poor commoners did not also engage in this practice, as we saw in the Margaret-Laukiston case above, or that women did not offer these type of services to their communities as well. If we remember Tanglost’s case discussed in chapter three, it 96 was alleged that she had hired two women to smite her ex-paramour Thomas. We also discussed the 1446 Durham case of Mariot de Belton and Isabella Brome, both of whom were accused of performing love magic on behalf of single women in want of a husband, which they had denied.3 Of course it is entirely plausible that women could have hired the services of the local sorceress as well as men, but both the Tanglost and BeltonBrome accounts fail to mention whether any money changed hands. In accounts where male sorcerers are involved, there is usually a clear indication as to how they were hired, or how their clients had the means by which to afford such services. In some of the cases discussed in this chapter, the necromancers accused of sorcery were motivated by the promise of financial reward, or worked under the auspices of generous benefactors or benefactresses.4 In chapter four, we discussed the case of Richard Laukiston and the widow whom he attempted to defraud, Margaret Geffrey, which had come to the attention of the Commissary in 1492 on the strength of public rumor. Laukiston had offered to find Margaret a rich husband by having a sorcerer perform love magic to entice a man of her choosing into marriage. Laukiston had 3 For the Tanglost case, see n. 12 in chapter three. For the Belton and Brome cases, see n. 16 in chapter three. 4 The outsourcing of this type of activity to experienced sorcerers indicates how the economic changes in the fourteenth century that saw the rise in the use of cash capital enabled some to cultivate this “profession” on the side. The epidemic of 1348-9 signaled an upward trend in workers able to take on short-term work for higher wages, and combined with employers tempting their workers to stay by offering extra gratuities in cash, produced a class of consumers with perhaps more disposable income than was the case in the pre-plague years. (See Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England [London: Hambledon, 1994], 185-6). However, this is a gross simplification of the financial situation of the medieval worker in England. Dyer’s entire ninth chapter, “Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws,” 167-89, is especially illuminating. 97 probably approached Margaret about his offer because he was under the impression that she might have quite naturally been receptive to his idea, so much so that she would have to give up—and did—her valuables to pay for such a service.5 Margaret Geffrey was not by any means wealthy herself, but she had some financial assets that made the matter of Laukiston’s offer plausible in the eyes of the court. Yet, if we are to believe that Laukiston was not deceiving Margaret in saying that he would indeed make the arrangements with the sorcerer to secure her an advantageous match, then this sheds some light on how professional sorcerers came to be known and recommended for their work by their engaging in a process of networking. Laukiston’s wife knew the sorcerer, who in turn told Laukiston of his cunning skill, who was then recommended to Margaret, and so on and so forth. In the previous chapter, we discussed the 1331 Southwark case adjudicated at King’s Bench that involved three men (Andrew of Oxford, John son of Robert of Gloucester, and Robert de la Marche) who conspired to kill a man named Robert of Ely and his mother Margery by having Marche perform a specialized type of sorcery. Andrew had heard about Marche’s talent for alchemy and magic and recommended him to John, who had apparently implored and paid Marche a good amount of money to perform some complicated magical procedures that included the use of spells and image magic.6 5 William Hale, ed., A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes: Extending from the Year 1475 to 1640 (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1847), 32-3. For the full transcript of this trial, refer to Appendix A. 6 G.O. Sayles, ed., Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Edward III, vol. V (London: Selden Society, 1958), 53-7. 98 The fact that there could have been many of these professional necromancers offering their services to those able to afford them, especially in densely-populated areas such as London, indicates that there was likely a high demand for their services. Indeed, in 1426, a knight and a yeoman, along with a number of their associates, were accused in London for contracting the services of expert necromancers (note the plural form), one of whom was a chaplain, to “weaken and annihilate, subtly consume and altogether destroy” a certain William Botreaux by engaging in “soothsaying, necromancy and art magic.”7 As we shall see below, the specialized skills of a necromancer-for-hire were deemed necessary for the proper performance of regicidal magic. Thus, it is not surprising that professional necromancers were also hired to direct their homicidal magic towards other individuals as well. The benefactor-necromancer relationship is colorfully illustrated in the 1330 confession of Edmund, the Earl of Kent (1301-1330), which he gave to the Coroner of the King’s House. In the confession, he described how he had contracted the services of a certain friar to summon a devil in order to ascertain whether his brother, King Edward II (r. 1307-1327), was still living.8 Edmund was executed on political grounds for conspiring to put the deceased Edward II, who he was led to believe was still alive, back on the throne. Edmund’s removal from the political scene ensured that the interests of the dowager Queen Isabella and her associates were protected, as they had wanted the weak Edward II removed from power. But why was it necessary to accuse the Earl of 7 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Preserved in the Public Record Office, Henry VI A.D. 1422-1429 (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 363. 8 The transcript of the Earl of Kent’s confession can be found in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association VII (1851): 140-3. 99 Kent of diabolical improprieties in particular? The account of his confession indicated that there were some incriminating letters of dubious origins that nonetheless, in the hands of Queen Isabella, were able to secure Edmund’s conviction for high treason. One can deduce from the document that Edmund’s demands to the reprobate friar, who had “raysed up a devell” for him and engaged in blatant apostasy, were meant to convey to the English people and Parliament that the popular Earl of Kent was not only a traitor but a heretical one at that. That a nobleman or a high churchman should have to consort with the devil or demons might have been an idea that was slowly becoming prevalent across all strata of medieval society, since men such as Walter Langton, the aforementioned Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, and Edmund, the Earl of Kent, were powerful figures able to easily secure the services of demons or those who knew how to summon them. The prevailing image of the educated (male) necromancer would only seem to suit those having the means to employ agents to do their devilish work or the necessary skills to bring about the pernicious effects of the black arts. The frequency with which magic and diabolism were conflated made it problematic to discern the distinctions between the two, even for educated churchmen. If a pact was made with the devil, the human supplicant was given supernatural powers in exchange for his or her loyalty and soul. This was typically true for cases dealing with diabolism on the Continent, especially because inquisitors—whose theological training no doubt included patristic teachings on how the devil and demonic spirits interacted with the human world—tried most of these cases. In this way, the pact with the devil or a demon served a purpose similar to the hiring of a professional necromancer: the devil or demon was in fact “commissioned” by the sorcerer-client to either do his bidding or 100 imbue him with powers necessary to bring about the desired results. A curious 1337 case from a manorial court in Hatfield saw one man tried for failing to deliver the devil to another man in a commercial transaction, perhaps indicating how ideas about the ways in which people practiced devil-worship and sorcery were incorporated into the broader commercial culture of late medieval England: Robert de Roderham appeared against John de Ithen, because he had not kept the agreement made between them, and therefore complains that on a certain day and year, at Thorne, there was an agreement between the aforementioned Robert and John whereby the said John sold to the said Robert the devil, bound in a certain bond, for three pence halfpenny…[Yet] the said John refused to deliver the said devil…to the great detriment of the said Robert…and because it appeared to the court that such a suit ought not to exist among Christians, the aforementioned parties are therefore adjourned, as far as hell for the hearing of their judgments…9 Although it is most likely that this “case” was in fact an attempt at injecting some levity into a hypothetical case for students studying contract law, the details are nevertheless suggestive of a male-centric view of how the power relationship between the demon and the male sorcerer favored the latter, with the demon having severely limited powers in relation to its human master. The power of the devil and the devil’s supernatural hold over his human subjects is amusingly diminished here, as it seems that 9 Thomas Blount, “Conventio,” Nomo-Lexicon: A Law Dictionary (Los Angeles: Sherwin & Freutel, 1970): “Robertus de Roderham obtulit se versus Johannem de Ithen de eo quod non teneat Conventionem inter eos factam, & unde queritur, quod certo die & anno apud Thorne convenit inter prædictum Robertum & Johannem, quod prædictus Johannes vendidit prædicto Roberto Diabolum ligatum in quodam ligamine pro iiid. ob…idem Johannes prædictum Diabolum deliberare noluit…ad grave dampnum ipsum Roberti…Et quia videtur Curiæ quod tale placitum non jacet inter Christianos, Ideo partes prædicti adjournantur usque in infernum, ad audiendum judicium suum…” Cf. C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonism (London: Heath Cranton, 1933), 33-4. Ewen does not seem to question whether this trial indeed took place, despite its ridiculousness. He barely analyzes it, which suggests that he was merely interested in the account as an anomalous oddity that had to be included for the sake of making his exhaustive work seem more complete. 101 the devil was merely an object that could be perhaps bartered, traded, or bought under ordinary and mundane circumstances, and acquired in such a way because it was believed to be a relatively inexpensive and useful object for someone to have. The two men in this account are obviously in a position of authority over the diabolical force, since they have the power to dispose of the devil in any which way they choose. This, we might note, contrasts starkly with some of the accounts from the Continent that describe women being decidedly subordinate to their demonic familiars, and in Britain, the nearcontemporary account of the trial of Alice Kyteler, tried according to Continental ideas about witches, describes how she and a coven of female devotees paid homage and made sacrifices to the devil. Alice herself was accused of sexually submitting to her demonic familiar, who took on various shapes and disguises. However, even if we regard this case as a sort of quodlibetal exercise, or perhaps a theological joke, written for the sake of law students in need of a little amusement, it still reveals how the author of the account viewed the role of the devil in human affairs. By placing the devil in the overly ridiculous situation as a desired commodity that could be bought and sold at will, the author throws into sharp relief how diabolical nuisances often tempted the weak and the corruptible. More importantly, the exaggerated absurdity of the idea that the devil could trade hands so easily is meant to highlight what so many thought was the frightening nature of devil-worship: the devil’s services could indeed be bought, but not for a pittance. It would cost one’s immortal soul, ensuring eternal damnation. Sorcery cases that were brought to secular and ecclesiastical justices that involved diabolical necromancy could not have escaped the notice of prominent royal figures or 102 churchmen who wished to more fervently prosecute necromancers. A Southwark case in London from 1371 describes a certain man named John Crok, who was tried by a royal court for invocation and using a Saracen’s skull, which he had bought in Toledo, in order to trap the demonic spirit “so that the said spirit would answer questions.”10 Perhaps Crok was trying to perform some type of divination magic with the aid of a necromancer’s manual found in his bag with the confiscated skull and various pieces of papers and drawings. Crok was dismissed after having sworn an oath that he would refrain in the future from engaging in such practices, and the bag holding all the items was destroyed by the bailiff; yet this case apparently came to the attention of the king, who directed the archbishop of Canterbury’s bailiff to immediately take action against Crok and to deal with the matter of the Saracen’s head, having found the situation sufficiently disturbing. While the primary charge against Crok was for the invocation of a demonic force, the justices seemed to have been more preoccupied by the forbidden items purchased abroad, without which Crok’s attempts at magic would have failed. The success of this type of diabolical magic hinged on the sorcerer’s wherewithal to purchase the devices necessary to harness the demon’s powers. The few legal and narrative references to diabolism that survive in England at this time indicate that the notion of devil-worship was somewhat widespread across all levels of medieval society, but that the intentions behind the summoning of diabolical forces were relatively benign and somewhat materialistic, and not used—just to provide an 10 Sayles, Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, vol. VI, 163: “Qui dicit quod capud illud fuit capud cuiusdam Sarisini et quod ipse capud predictum in Tolet in quadam ciutate in Ispannia emit causa includendi in eo quendam spiritum ut idem spiritus ad interrogata responderet…” 103 example—to smite neighbors with sickness or death, as we see in witchcraft trials in early modern England. A 1366 chronicle tells of a man who confessed to his neighbors that he had made a pact with the devil to overshadow his competitors in the carpentry business: In this year a certain carpenter died, who, over the past fifteen years, worshipped the devil, so that he could excel in his craft over the other carpenters. Having foreknowledge of his end, he asked his comrades that they not permit him to harm anyone around him. But with all of them having been summoned, they returned, placing him in an empty room so that he might get some sleep. Shortly after waking to his shouting, they discovered upon entering the room him extracting his own intestines from his stomach; putting back his still warm entrails into his belly, they called together all their neighbors and priests, along with the Bishop, for witness, and when he confessed in secret and openly of his sins he died in the Catholic faith having received the holy viaticum.11 While no judicial proceedings were recorded, one can extract from this rather mundane account of devil-worship was that the man was chiefly motivated by financial gain, and ultimately caused his own physical deterioration by compromising his spiritual allegiance to the faith. It is interesting in this story that the carpenter’s neighbors seemed to have known about his pact with the devil, and that he still had friends who rallied for his well-being and redemption. Perhaps the man’s devil-worship was not seen as too horrible in the eyes of his neighbors and associates, since he was not specifically targeting anyone with malicious magic? The evidence suggests that, at least during the 11 James Tait, ed., Chronica Johannis de Reading et anonymi Cantuariensis, 1346-1367 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1914), 176: “Obiit et hoc anno quidam artifex lignarius qui annis quindecim præteritis diabolo servivit, ut ceteros carpentarios excelleret operando. Ille finis sui præscius a sociis petiit, ne aliquid quod posset lædere alicui circa se permitterent. At illum, sublatis omnibus, in camera vacua collocantes ut sompnum caperet, redierunt; clamore cujus paulo post excitati, cameram ingredientes propria viscera de ventre extrahentem reperierunt; quæ adhuc calida in utero reponentes, vicinos in testimonium sacerdotesque cum Corpore Dominico convocarunt, ac ubi secrete et palam de peccatis confessus cum sacro viatico in fide Catholica decessit.” 104 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, demonic pacts were at the very least a small part of a popular conception of what sorcery could involve, but that diabolical practices were aimed toward resolving personal or financial problems rather than bringing physical harm to others. The prevalence of women as targets of accusations involving the diabolical pact in early modern England was perhaps indicative of the shift in the perception of witchcraft as being a primarily female crime. What exactly precipitated a change in the gendering of diabolical magic is difficult to say, but perhaps the gradual spread of ideas about devil-worship eventually influenced the ways in which women were seen to obtain the powers needed to make their witchcraft effective. Diabolical magic at this time also seemed to be intimately associated with the business of magic and sorcery, which often included the exchange of money or favors for the performance of a certain act of sorcery. As we have learned so far in this section, the sorcerer-for-hire was used by noble and commoner alike for very specific, and usually very personal, reasons. That the demand for the services of professional sorcerers is evident in the various legal cases dealing with the practice of sorcery suggests that a good number of men, and maybe even some women, perhaps made a living this way, and that there was never really a shortage of people in need of such services. Regicide Prominently featured in legal or narrative accounts that detail the practice of regicidal magic are expert necromancers, whose clients were either rich or influential enough to secure their services. Men’s predominance in the practice of diabolism or professional necromancy seemed to be intimately tied to their financial flexibility, and this was never so true than in circumstances in which a certain malefactor paid another to 105 perform sorcery, or when the sorcerer had to purchase special items needed to work his sorcery. Usually, the individuals contributing monetary aid or another form of support to the professional sorcerer were also implicated as part of this larger conspiracy against the king. A 1325 testimony from a certain Robert le Mareschal, who lodged an appeal against Master John of Nottingham and twenty-five burghers from Coventry, describes how he was a boarder at John of Nottingham’s residence when these twenty-five men beseeched both himself and Master John to perform murderous sorcery directed at the Prior of Coventry, a few of his supporters, and the king himself (Edward II). Master John was apparently a well-known necromancer (we assume he earned his title Master at the university), and the burghers negotiated a deal with the men: Master John would receive twenty pounds and Robert fifteen, and they were duly supplied with the items needed for the task. Master John and Robert fashioned six wax figurines in the likeness of their intended targets, but a made a seventh in the image of a certain Richard de Sowe, which Master John and Richard set aside in order that they might test the efficacy of their magic. According to Robert’s account, Master John told Robert to impale the forehead of Richard’s image with a lead skewer, then bade him to visit Richard the next day to inspect their handiwork. Richard was apparently in a lot of pain, shrieking, braying, crying out “Harrow!” until Master John stuck the skewer in the heart of the figurine a couple of days later, which then, shortly thereafter, caused Richard’s death. Robert’s appeal to the Coroner of the Hospital, and then to the King’s Bench, was an attempt to commute his sentence to a lighter one by naming his accomplices in the matter of 106 Richard de Sowe’s death. Master John ended up dying in prison but the other men were acquitted in visnet—meaning, by a jury of twelve men.12 As noted in the previous chapters, image magic was a popular form of sorcery that required easily attainable skills that practically anyone could learn, especially when compared to the more intricate rituals typical to necromantic practices. Master John probably had some knowledge of necromancy, but fused it with perhaps more traditional forms of sympathetic magic using dolls or wax images; furthermore, he was probably perceived to be successful at it, since he developed a reputation as a “nigromauncer” whose services could not be bought on the cheap. As this case came to the attention of the King’s Bench, it probably reinforced among the ruling elite the terrible image of the male sorcerer who, at will, was able to cause death or ruin to the king and important churchmen and magistrates. Regicide by way of magic was essentially an anonymous crime of treason; for this reason, it was difficult to prosecute and required the cooperation of those willing to come forward to confess their culpability or inform on other people’s regicidal activities. Since the courts under the jurisdiction of the Crown began to try suspected sorcerers for their crimes, it is no wonder that treacherous magic became quite a matter of concern for the potential damage it could cause to the King’s person and, by extension, the whole realm. In this sense, the practice of sorcery at the community level, and the potential harm that neighbors could bring to one another, was really a microcosm of 12 F. Palgrave, ed., Parliamentary Writs and Writs of Military Summons, vol. II (London: Record Commission, 1832), 269-70; William Renwick Riddell, “A Trial for Witchcraft Six Hundred Years Ago,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 8 (1917): 40-44, is useful for its explanation of the legal jargon found in the text. 107 regicidal sorcery and the potentially harmful effects it could have on the entire realm. Around the years 1314 or 1315, during the reign of Edward II, a man by the name of John Tannere was convicted and hanged for treason as a false pretender to the English throne. Tannere professed to be one of the sons of the late King Edward, and later confessed in public, probably under considerable duress, that he had served the devil for three years and was promised the crown for his faithful service to his master.13 Although diabolism was rarely a key feature of regicide cases involving sorcery, it could be said that in this case it was important for agents of the crown to prove how Tannere was necessarily involved in a conspiracy, be it with the devil or with another treacherous person, which may explain why most accounts detailing the particularities of a regicide plot always required the participation of more than one individual, as we also saw with the Master John-Robert Mareschal case detailed above. Prominent women of the royal court were not above being blamed for using magic or employing necromancers in order to carry out their treacherous conspiracies; their roles in these alleged plots tended to highlight how their male contemporaries viewed their power or influence on the politics of the court. To take one notable example, Alice Perrers (d. 1400), mistress of King Edward III (r. 1327-1377), was accused of having hired a Dominican friar, who at first claimed to be a physician, to perform love magic directed at the king. According to the chronicle, written by a monk at St. Albans, the Dominican forged two wax effigies in the likeness of Alice and Edward, and utilizing these with some potent herbs, he managed to get the king under 13 Nicholas Harris Nicolas, ed., A Chronicle of London, from 1089 to 1483 (London: Longman, 1827), 44-5. 108 Alice’s thrall. The sorcerer-monk of these tales is likely a negative projection of the piously humble monk, whose inverted image of malice and worldliness served to enhance the spiritual piety of the true mendicant. The author also makes a curious reference to a magus famosissimus, the ancient Egyptian King Nectanebo, and the making of memory rings, as Moses once had, so that the king could not forget his mistress.14 The monk’s allusions to ancient magic may illuminate his belief in the very potency of the Dominican’s sorcery, as he provides the mystical precedents for the practice of this type of magic. The regicide case made against Joan of Navarre (1370-1437), the dowager queen and stepmother of Henry V (r. 1413-1422), had aspects similar to the Perrers case, although it was Henry V himself who had accused her of encouraging her sometime confessor Friar Randolf to engage in regicidal magic. It was announced in Parliament that “Queen Joan of England had schemed and imagined the death and destruction of our Lord the King in the most horrible manner that one could devise.”15 A contemporary narrative source is much clearer on subject of the alleged magical harm directed at the king, saying that Friar Randolf had specifically used “sorcerye” and “nigromancie” to 14 Edward Maunde Thompson, ed., Chronicon Angliæ, ab anno domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388 (London: Longman, 1874), 98; George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 105. As legend has it, the exiled Nactenebo II came to Phillip of Macedon’s court in the guise of a magician. He seduced Olympias, Phillip’s wife, and from their coupling Alexander the Great was conceived. 15 Rotuli parliamentorum; ut et petitiones, et placita in parliamento, vol. IV (London: 1767-83), 118. “…Johane Roigne d’Engleterre, avoit compassez & ymaginez la mort & destruction de n[ot]r[e] dit S[i]r[e] le Roi, en le pluis haute & horrible manere, q[ue] l’en purroit deviser.” 109 achieve these ends when he had later confessed to his crimes.16 Queen Joan’s lands were conveniently forfeited to the crown in 1420 following this incident, and she was put under house arrest while her accomplice was incarcerated. Despite all this, Queen Joan was kept relatively well during her years without her dower lands; the king paid the salaries of the men under her employ and apparently kept her household well supplied with food, livestock, and other myriad items necessary for her retinue.17 In fact, in the same year before his death in September of 1422, Henry sent out a writ expressing his will that his stepmother should be restored to her dower. The queen then petitioned to Parliament on this matter, and she was then monetarily compensated for the loss of her lands.18 The reasons for Henry’s personal vendetta against Queen Joan, and why it took such an ugly turn, are unknown, but it can be said with some certainty that Henry and his prelates were paranoid about the presence of sorcerers in the realm. In a 1419 mandate to the bishop of London, the archbishop of Canterbury describes ordering processions and prayers on behalf of the king in his war against the French; the king had desired protection from the “superstitious operations of necromancers, particularly like those that recently had been plotted through some against his person, according to reports.”19 16 Nicolas, 107-8. 17 Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry V A.D. 1416-1422, vol. II (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 276, 294, 304, 362, 396, 402. 18 Rotuli parliamentorum, 247-9; Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry VI A.D. 1422-1429, 84, 166. 19 David Wilkins, ed., Concilia magnæ Britanniæ et Hiberniæ, vol. III (London: Fleetstreet, 1727), 393. “…superstitionis necromanticorum operationibus, talibus 110 Because so much of Henry’s power as king depended on his ability to be successful in war, the idea that a sorcerer’s pernicious magic could tip the scales for Henry’s army— even if in one battle—was a terrifying thought indeed. That a network of sorcerers was behind intricate and perfidious plots involving regicide or some type of treachery directed at the royal household may not have been merely a figment of the king’s wild imagination. A monk at St. Alban’s told of an incident that took place in 1430, when “around Christmastime certain witches, seven of them from different parts of the realm, were captured in London and incarcerated at Fleet Prison, all of whom plotted the death of the king.”20 The text is frustratingly vague on the details, but the monk suggests that this was a coven of female witches (maleficae) who, although individually hailing from different parts of the country, convened in London in order to more efficiently collude with each other. The notion that these women, when united in their wickedness, were able to possess the type of agency that could possibly bring about the demise of a king shows how learned conceptions of sorcery envisioned women as being part of this bigger picture. Women could exact the same results as the monk-necromancers described in the aforementioned accounts, but did not utilize the same learned methods. As was seen in aforementioned accusations involving women of the royal court and their personal magicians, the employment of male necromancers to perform sorcery præsertim, quales jam tarde in perniciem et destructionem personæ suæ per nonnullos, ut refertur, excogitatæ fuerant.” 20 John Amundesham, Annales monasterii S. Albani, ed. Thomas Riley, vol. I (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 56-7. “Circa hos dies Christi Natalitios, quædam maleficæ, numero septem, de diversis partibus regni, captæ sunt in Londiniis, et incarcerantur apud le Fleete, quæ machinatæ sunt interitum Regis.” 111 is not only indicative of specific problems that these ladies were thought to have, but also the lengths to which they would exercise their wealth and influence in order to procure what they wanted. Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, was accused in 1441 of conspiring with Roger Bolingbroke, a clerk, Canon Thomas Southwell, and the infamous Witch of Eye (meaning, the Eye manor near the city of Westminster), Margery Jourdemayn, to kill the king by way of Bolingbroke’s “werchynge of sorcery.”21 While this could be classified as strictly a case of attempted regicide—and Bolingbroke indeed was hanged, drawn, and quartered like all common traitors—the case involved other elements of interest relevant to a discussion about sorcery practice among the ruling elite. When Bolingbroke was arraigned for the charges brought against him, he stood on the scaffold with a display of all of his “instrumentis” around him before he was examined and eventually convicted before the lords of the king’s council. Canon Southwell died in prison, but apparently his role in the matter was to say masses consecrating Bolingbroke’s instruments of “nygromancie.”22 These instruments were either images of the devil or the king, made of silver, wax, or other metals, and while Eleanor acknowledged these items, she claimed to have wanted these diabolical items to help her bear a child “by hir lord, the Duke of Gloucestre,” meaning that she had hired Bolingbroke for that purpose.23 Eleanor’s fertility problems were probably very serious, 21 Nicolas, 128. 22 William Marx and John Silvester Davies, eds., An English Chronicle, 13771461 (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003), 76, 147-8, 151. 23 Friederich W. D. Brie, ed., The Brut; or, The Chronicles of England, vol. II (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 480; Thomas Hearne, ed., Liber niger scaccarii, vol. II (Oxonii: e Theatro Sheldoniano, 1728), 460-1; Marx and Davies, 93. The story’s 112 as she also consulted with the notorious Margery, who nine years earlier was apprehended for sorcery (along with a monk and clerk), but was released from prison when her husband paid a bond to the Chancery.24 However, this time Margery did not get off so easily: she was burned at Smithfield, probably as a relapsed heretic. The Duchess herself was given penance in the form of public humiliation; she was ordered to walk through the streets “openly berhede with a keverchef on hir hede” and with a penitential taper in her hand to various places. She was then sentenced to life in prison.25 Aristocratic women such as the Duchess of Gloucester and the dowager Queen no doubt were perceived to have resources and people available to them for the implementation of their malevolent plans, and ecclesiastics especially were seen to have as much, if not more, at their disposal because of their international connections. In London in 1496, a Frenchman, Bernard de Vignolles, confessed in a deposition given to the king that he was the agent of John Kendal, the prior of St. John of Rhodes, a knight (Kendal’s nephew), and the archdeacon of London, and that these men had hatched a plot to murder the royal family and some of Henry VII’s councilors by using sorcery. Bernard had been ordered by Kendal and the archdeacon to meet up with a Spanish astrologer in Rome to acquire a certain magical ointment used for smearing across a appearance in at least three different chronicles may point to either its overwhelming popularity amongst the neighboring communities or the importance to which the authors attributed it to their respective histories. 24 Thomas Rymer, ed., Fœdera, conventiones, literæ, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, inter reges Angliæ. 3d ed. (Farnborough: Gregg P., 1967), 178: “…dicta Margeria exoneretur de Prisona, sub Securitate Mariti sui in Cancellaria Regis facienda.” 25 Nicolas, 129. 113 doorway entrance so that, when the king passed through it, those who loved him most would be compelled to rise up and kill him.26 Bernard, on his way back to England, was not able to go through with it and decided to throw away the box containing the magical ointment. He instead bought a similar box from an apoticaire and filled it with foulsmelling substances to make it seem like the original, and brought this ersatz potion back to the conspirators. Kendal was not able to go through with the plot either, and told Bernard to get rid of the box. Since, obviously, there was no murder and hence no crime, it never went beyond Bernard’s confession, and the king gave Kendal a general pardon that same year.27 Regicide was a treasonous crime punishable by death, and with what was perceived to be an increase in the amount of necromancers and witches in the realm, it also seemed increasingly urgent to prosecute these malefactors, whose treachery and vice would be practically impossible to trace because of the anonymity that sorcery practices provided. Bernard’s testimony implicated prominent church figures in this regicidal conspiracy, but most importantly, he was able to put a face on a generally faceless crime. But if this story tells us anything, it is that those accused of working sorcery for regicidal purposes, with the exception of the unnamed London witches in the above mentioned chronicle, tended to be easily identifiable people with vested interests in the crown or the 26 The text of the deposition can be found in James Gairdner, ed., Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII (Nendeln/Liechenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1965), 318-23: “…oingnement, qui estoit en ladite boueste, au longe et travers de quelque huys ou porte par ou passeroit le roy, affin que passat par dessus; le quel astreloge disoit, que sil est ainsy fait, que ceulx qui avoint et portoint plus damour au roy, que seroint ceulx qui turoint le roy,” on page 320 describes how the ointment works. 27 Calendar of the Patent Rolls Henry VII A.D. 1485-1509, vol. II (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 49. 114 church. The same could also be said of the accusers, whose status or security was better guarded by the removal of threatening individuals from the political arena. The Robert le Mareschal case was an example of an attempt at regicide that was prompted by purely monetary concerns, although the burghers that provided the funding were unequivocal about their treasonous wishes. Since men, especially clergymen, were also by and large more educated than women, it was they who were perceived to have been more likely to cultivate viable professions as necromancers, and more able to entice both commoners and nobility with certain promises about their abilities. Probably encouraged to develop such a livelihood by those willing to pay for their services, professional necromancers in this sense were not much different from goldsmiths, shoemakers, and other traditionally male-dominated professions that required a certain amount of training. Of course, this comparison falls short when one considers the guilds that set prices and controlled the standards by which young men became apprenticed, but the evidence shows that necromancers-for-hire had to cultivate a reputation for their experience and skill in sorcery in order for them to be recommended to potential clients—and this probably meant that the necromancer must have had, at one point, several satisfied customers. 115 CONCLUSION The surviving cases and narratives that describe the practice of sorcery and witchcraft in late medieval England point to how each individual’s beliefs were tightly wound around the culture and dynamics of their communities, which determined the popularity of some of these beliefs and how they spread from neighbor to neighbor. This is not to say that this phenomenon did not also occur on the Continent, but when it comes to analyzing popular beliefs about sorcery and witchcraft, it becomes quite a complicated exercise in discerning the differences between “popular” and “learned” ideas in cases presided over by inquisitors, as we saw in chapter two when we discussed the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland. Furthermore, as we saw in chapter three, the traditionally gendered categorization of magic, which is prevalent in the late twentieth-century historiography of medieval and early modern witchcraft, is based primarily on Continental examples. When we look at late medieval English cases dealing with sorcery, we find that the boundaries between “female” magic and “male” necromancy were often porous, and that the type of magic practiced by either sex depended more on the level of literacy, education, and financial resources than anything else. In chapter four we learned that cases that came to the courts because of an individual’s complaint about sorcery or on the basis of a person’s 116 bad fama reveal quite a bit about how English communities sought to resolve grievances between two individuals and possibly correct what they perceived to be disruptive behaviors. In this sense, the sorcery cases during this period in England likely reflected popular ideas about what such practices entailed, which in turn tells us quite a bit about some of the social problems that concerned medieval people living in these close-knit communities: robbery, slander, sexual impotence, erratic weather, disruption of the peace, infertility, and spinsterhood were some of the issues which people at this time thought were either caused by sorcery or could be remedied by sorcery. That people believed sorcery could be used to ameliorate their social circumstances or ruin those of others may explain why the services of professional necromancers, sorcerers, and (possibly) sorceresses were in such high demand—a phenomenon that was discussed in detail in chapter five. Who, in fact, needed the devil when the local sorcerer, or a learned friar, or the necromancer in the next town, were rumored to have such excellent results for their clients? The gradual disintegration of the authority of the church courts, and the rise of the secular courts, in the adjudication of sorcery trials, as well as antiwitchcraft laws that were passed during the reign of the Tudors, led to the classification of sorcerers and witches as threats to the stability of the realm rather than spiritual criminals, by which standard the church courts administered penance. The violent punishments meted out to sorcerers and witches by the early modern secular courts evidently reflected not only a growing suspicion of sorcery practices, but also more organized institutions eager to prosecute suspected 117 individuals. The preponderance of women in these later witch trials speaks to Christina Larner’s assertion that witchcraft, though not sex-specific, was sexrelated, as the number of women in these trials far outnumbered their male counterparts. But what changed between the late medieval and the early modern periods? Why did women in particular increasingly come to be viewed as practitioners of witchcraft, while just a century earlier, both men and women were equally accused of practicing sorcery? To answer this question, we must look at how sorcery became gendered female when the belief in it became gradually entangled with the idea that diabolical agents were necessary for it to be effective. The couple of cases that we examined in this thesis that dealt with demonic forces involved men who had wanted to harness these diabolical powers for material gain. Rarely, if at all, were medieval women implicated in such crimes of diabolical sorcery. As the notion of diabolical sorcery became more prevalent in the sixteenth century, as well as the devil’s prominent role in human affairs, the perception that women— especially old, poor, and mentally unstable women—were more susceptible than men to the devil’s advances and could have easily succumbed to the lure of witchcraft also became prevalent. The belief in, and practice of, sorcery in England in the late Middle Ages were equally enjoyed and reviled by all members of these medieval communities, be they lay or religious, common or noble, or male or female. 118 APPENDICES 119 APPENDIX A THE TRIAL OF RICHARD LAUKISTON AND MARGARET GEFFREY 120 Source: William Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes: Extending from the Year 1475 to 1640 (London: F. & J. Rivington, 1847), 32-3. Translated by Esther Liberman-Cuenca. The Latin Text Fama publica referente, nostro est detectum officio, quod quidam Ricardus Laukiston de parochia Sancte Marie Magdalene in Veteri Piscaria, et Margareta Geffrey vidua, nuper de parochia Sancti Batholomei Parvi, de et super certis articulis crimen heresie tangentibus et sorcerie; viz. quod idem Ricardus anno Domini millessimo cccclxxx mensibus Januarii, Februarii, Marcii, Aprilis, vel in aliquo mense predictorum, viz. quod idem Ricardus protulit ista verba vel eis consimilia, predicte Margarete in Anglicis, Thow arte a poor widow, and it wer almes to helpe the to a mariage, and if thow wilt do any cost in spendyng any money, thow shalt have a man worth a thousand pounds. Tunc respondebat predicta Margareta vidua, How may that be? Tunc dixit Laukiston, My wif knoweth a connyng man, that by his connyng can cause a woman to have any man that she hath favour to, and that shalbe upon warranties; for she hath put it in execucion afore tyme, and this shall cost money. Tunc dixit predicta Margareta, I have no good[s] save ii masers for to fynde me, my moder, and my children, and if thei wer sold and I faile of my purpose, I, my moder, and my children wer undoen. Tunc dixit dictus Ricardus Laukiston, Delyver me the masers, and I wille warrant thyn entente shalbe fulfilled. Tunc predicta Margareta deliberavit sibi ii murras ad valorem v marcarum et xs. in pecuneis. Super quibus dicti Ricardus et Margareta coram nobis Ricardo Blodiwell legum doctore in judicio comparuerunt et jurati, tactis sacrosanctis evangeliis, de fideliter respondendo 121 predictis articulis; et eorum cuilibet fatebantur hec omnia esse vera, prout hic suprascribuntur. Tunc judex, tactis evangeliis, de penitentia utrique parti injungenda perimplendo injunxit penitentiam predictis Ricardo et Margarete; viz. quod predictus Ricardus restituat, seu restitui faciat predictas ii murras, vel eorum valorem, dicte Margarete, sub pena excommunicationis majoris infra viii dies; quam tulit judex nunc pro tunc et tunc pro nunc; residuam partem penitentie judex sibi reservavit usque in crastinum diei Andree tunc proximum sequentem, et judex injunxit dicte Margarete publicam penitentiam, viz. tribus dominicis, nudis pedibus capite flammiola nodata cooperta kirtela, manu sua dextra deferentem candelam precii unius denarii crucem processionaliter precedat. English Translation Because of public rumor it has been brought to our attention that a certain Richard Laukiston of the Saint Mary Magdalene parish in an old fishing village, and the widow Margaret Geffrey, lately of the parish of Saint Little Bartholomew, concerning these certain articles touching on the crime of heresy and sorcery; namely, that this same Richard in the year of our Lord 1480 during the months of January, February, March, April, or in another month of those mentioned, and expressed these words to the abovementioned Margaret, or something similar to them, in English: “Thou art a poor widow, and if were alms to help thee to a marriage, and if thou will do any cost in spending money, thou shall have a man worth a thousand pounds.” The widow Margaret then replied, “How may that be?” Then Laukiston said, “My wife knows a cunning man, that by his cunning can cause a woman to have any man that she hath favor to, and that shall be upon warranties; for she hath put it in execution afore time, and this shall cost money.” 122 Then Margaret said, “I have no goods save two mazers for to find me, my mother, and my children—and if they were sold and I fail of my purpose, I, my mother, and my children [would be] undone.” Richard Laukiston then said, “Deliver me the mazers, and I will warrant thine intent shall be fulfilled.” Then the said Margaret reckoned the two mazers valuing at five marks and ten shillings in monetary worth. Moreover, the said Richard and Margaret appeared before us, i.e., Richard Blodiwell, a doctor of laws in our court, and swearing firmly under oath on the sacred Gospels, they responded to the aforementioned charges; and they confessed that all of these dealings of theirs was true, just as it was here transcribed. Then the judge, with their oaths having been sworn, concerning the punishment to be imposed and fulfilled by the said Richard and Margaret: namely, that Richard either give back the aforementioned mazers, or their equal amount, to Margaret within eight days under the pain of major excommunication; the judge pronounced [to Richard] nunc pro tunc and then for now [i.e., to reimburse Margaret immediately]. Concerning the remaining party’s punishment, the judge reserved his judgment until the following day after the feast of Saint Andrew, and the judge charged the said Margaret to do public penance; namely that, on three Sundays, her feet bare and her head covered in a flame-colored headdress with a knotted kirtle, her right hand bearing a waxen crucifix worth one penny, she should go forth, marching. 123 APPENDIX B THE TRIAL OF MARGARET LINDSAY 124 Source: Depositions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings from the Courts of Durham, Extending from 1311 to the Reign of Elizabeth (London: Publications of the Surtees Society 21, 1845), 27. Translated by Esther Liberman-Cuenca. The Latin Text 1 Feb. 1435. Parochia de Edlyngeham. Margareta Lyndyssay contra Johannem de Longcaster, Johannem Somerson, Johannem Symson. Diffamata quod fuit incantatrix, videlicet quod ipsa, cum alia muliere, posuit unum stake ad ligandum membra virilia ibidem quod non possunt choire. Negavit, et purgavit se, cum Agnete Wright, Cristiana Aresome, Alicia Fayhar, Emmota Letster, Alicia Newton; et restituta est ad famam. Et Johannes, Johannes, Johannes moniti sunt sub pœna excommunicationis, quod de cetero talia non prædicent de ipsa. English Translation 1st of February, 1435: Parish of Edlingham. Margaret Lindsay against John Longcaster, John Somerson, John Simpson. She was slandered for being an enchantress, namely that she herself, with other women, placed a stake on the genitals of men to bind them in that place so that they may not be able to have sexual intercourse. She denied, and cleared herself of, [these charges], together with Agnes Wright, Christina Aresome, Alice Fayhar, Emma Lester, Alice Newton; and her reputation was restored. 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