The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Over the same period, however, a different approach was more slowly developing. It was presaged by a passing suggestion by a historian of Gaelic Scotland in 1994, both that its lack of witch-hunting was significant, and that it had been due to cultural differences, Gaels conceiving of supernatural activity in ways distinct from those of Lowlanders.9 In 2002 a further suggestion was made, again without any sustained research or argument to support it, that the apparent absence of trials in both Gaelic Scotland and Gaelic Ireland was due to such differences, Gaels tending to blame fairies for the kind of misfortunes which elsewhere were charged against witches.10 Half a decade later, a leading historian of English witchcraft beliefs turned his attention to the Isle of Man, which possessed the best records for any early modern Gaelic society. He found that the island had produced few trials, but had a strong image of the malignant fairy, and agreed that the two might be related.11 Meanwhile further research was under way in the early modern Welsh criminal records, which are also very rich, and proved that neither community solidarity nor customary law had prevented the Welsh from accusing and executing each other on a grand scale for other offences than witchcraft. In particular, late sixteenth-century Wales had seen a ‘thief hunt’, which had claimed about four thousand lives. Furthermore the Devil had a high profile in the Welsh popular culture of the age; and yet witch trials were few and a demonic element even rarer in them. They were, moreover, mostly found in geographical areas, and historical periods, of greater English influence. It was suggested that this pattern might be explained by cultural factors.12

  In 2011, I published an article of my own which attempted to draw these converging strands of enquiry together.13 It concluded that the core area of Scottish Gaeldom – the Central and Western Highlands and the Hebrides, representing about a third of Scotland – had barely participated in the early modern Scottish witch-hunts, which were among the worst in Europe. It provided in fact eight known cases, out of 3,837 identified in the whole nation, and these were often of a special kind, in which witchcraft was a subsidiary offence to another, such as cattle-stealing, or they were launched as part of a deliberate attack on native culture. This pattern was sustained on the Isle of Man, which produced just four cases, two of which (a double trial) ended in execution, after which no more were brought. This is the more noteworthy in that across Northern Europe, islands were exactly the kind of small self-contained communities in which witchcraft accusations flourished. This was true in the Baltic and at the north-eastern extreme of Norway, and also in the Channel Islands of the English Crown, where a Norman culture predominated, and the Orkney and Shetland Isles of Scotland, where a Scandinavian one was dominant. Man however seemed almost as disinclined to them as those other Gaelic islands, the Hebrides. Witch trials seem to have been totally absent among the native Irish, and the rich Welsh source material reveals just thirty-four of them, the majority in regions under some English influence, with just eight convictions and five executions. My article proposed that in the case of Gaelic Scotland, the local spirits of land and water were regarded as being especially ferocious and dangerous, perhaps because of the formidable nature of the terrain, and the same exceptional fear was accorded to the local equivalent of elves and fairies, the sithean. These seem to have been dreaded more acutely and persistently than in Lowland Scotland or England, for committing precisely those attacks upon humans and their animals and homes that were credited elsewhere to witches. Gaelic Scots did also have a belief in witches and some fear of their deeds, especially the use of magic to wreck vessels at sea and steal the profits of dairy farming; but this fear was considerably tempered by other factors. One was that to an extent the Gaels regarded curses and spells as a legitimate means of furthering their own designs and thwarting or punishing enemies. Use of them did incur censure if the action concerned seemed disproportionate or unjust, or was conducted with deception or spite, but this was also true of actions involving physical tools or weapons. There was little sense of witchcraft as an inherent force of evil that menaced the whole community. Another factor was that Scottish Gaels also disposed of an unusually wide range of rites and objects – such as pieces of iron or bread, the Bible, special stones, salt, burning embers, specially made and shaped holes, sprigs of juniper or rowan, and an array of prayers, blessings, rhymes, chants and spoken formulae – which were trusted as effective in averting hostile magic. A third factor which would have damped down accusations of witchcraft was a widespread Gaelic belief in the ‘evil eye’, the damage inflicted by which was in many, and perhaps most, cases presumed to be unintentional. The damage concerned was, as in other regions where this belief was held, the blighting of humans, beasts, crops and domestic processes in a manner generally credited to witches, with the difference that the perpetrator could not automatically be held responsible. It was counteracted, instead, by a variety of charms, spoken or material, or by the avoidance of individuals credited with the power, or by expecting them to avoid gazing directly at others, or their property. The ‘evil eye’ is recorded elsewhere in Britain, but much more rarely, and there it was generally regarded as a deliberately wielded weapon, being one of the vehicles of witchcraft. That is why it never features in the defences presented in British witch trials.

  My article then turned to the other early modern societies with Celtic social groups and cultures to ascertain whether similar beliefs were found there, and the result was uniformly positive. The study mentioned earlier of witch trials in the Isle of Man found that the early modern Manx were not only characterized by a strong belief in fairies, but also an acceptance of the legitimacy of the formal cursing of people who had wronged the person delivering the curse. After trials for witchcraft were abandoned there, the normal response to an accusation was an attempt to reconcile the people involved, and to make an accused person, if they admitted placing a curse on the accuser, apologize and withdraw the action.14 This was exactly what the new research into early modern Wales also disclosed. That portrayed a society in which the image of the morally depraved witch, an inherent menace to her community, was rarer than in England and Lowland Scotland. The native Welsh attributed uncanny misfortune to the involuntary evil eye, or spells cast by service magicians hired to help prosecute personal feuds. Counter-magic and the blessings of priests and power of prayer were regarded as being effective against both. Likewise, cursing an adversary was regarded as acceptable if employed as retaliation for injustice, and a common response to an accusation of witchcraft was to arbitrate between the parties and win an apology and the retraction of the curse if the person making it was found to be in the wrong. Wales was also revealed to have a fear of the depredations of fairies greater than that in England and perhaps more than that in Lowland Scotland.15

  The remaining Celtic society to be considered in the article was Gaelic Ireland, and the same pattern held there. That was revealed to have a pronounced belief in witches, but the main activity charged against these was the magical theft of dairy produce, a belief also found in Gaelic Scotland and Man. This could be a serious matter for subsistence farmers, but was normally regarded as being on the level of an annoyance and irritation, and used as a whispered mechanism to explain why some people prospered and others did not, without apparent reason. Apparently almost missing from Irish culture was an image of the witch as a killer, of humans and livestock, who was motivated by natural malevolence. That role was allotted to the fairies, which were dreaded as the source of uncanny illness and death, to people, crops and beasts, and uncanny misfortune in the home and business, as well as as abductors of vulnerable humans, especially children. Much care was expended on avoiding, propitiating and repelling them; and scholars noted that the deeper into purely Gaelic areas they went, the more the fear of fairies seemed to wax and that of witches to wane. There was also a persistent Irish fear of the evil eye, often used unintentionally, and, just as in Gaelic Scotland, belief in a wide range of magical remedies that were believed to ward it off.

  Recent Refl
ections on Gaelic Witch Beliefs

  The article was published with the intention of developing the debate and of testing the ideas proposed within it, and not of concluding matters. At the time of writing the present book, initial responses to it seem to have been favourable. A well-researched essay on witch trials and beliefs in the early modern northern Highlands has accepted its conclusions.16 So has Andrew Sneddon, who has emerged as the leading expert in early modern Irish witch trials, and filled out knowledge of the Irish context considerably. He has confirmed the lack of prosecutions among the Gaelic majority in the island, but also among the medieval English settler population, the ‘Old English’, who continued to adhere to Roman Catholicism. Even the ‘New English’ settlers, who arrived as Protestants in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, only produced four known trials, with one execution (making a glaring contrast with the usual estimate of around five hundred executions in England, let alone those in Lowland and Scandinavian Scotland, where in relation to population witch-hunting was twelve times as intense as in England). This was, he shows, despite the fact that both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants believed in witches during the period: Old English aristocrats and the wife of one Gaelic nobleman accused relatives of attempting to use witchcraft in family feuds, and there were many rumours of it among the New English. It was also despite the fact that Ireland had more or less the same laws against it as England, and the same legal machinery with which to take action. To make the contrast still more glaring, it is now clear that Irish Catholics, including Gaels, made regular use of law courts controlled by Protestant English officials, with respect to offences other than witchcraft.17

  Sneddon has demonstrated that the lack of trials among the Protestant settler population was largely due to the fact that the bulk of that population arrived in the seventeenth century, when the judges who dominated the law courts were starting to become cautious in accepting accusations of witchcraft. With respect to the native majority of the population, he held to the view that cultural factors among it left it disinclined to make such accusations at all. He accepted that it lacked the concept of the satanic witch, and thought that witches did not normally injure humans or livestock. He agreed with the significance in preventing witch trials of a belief in the evil eye and in fairies, and in the efficacy of counter-magic, and documented those more securely back into the early modern period. He also emphasized the importance of the belief, which the Irish shared with other Gaels, in the chief activity of witches as being the lesser one of stealing milk or butter by magical means. This, he pointed out, had existed since the high Middle Ages, if not before, as in the late twelfth century Gerald of Wales had reported the tradition, which he said was found in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, that ‘old women’ turned into hares to suck milk from cattle.18 Sneddon also documented from folklore studies, some of which had been cited in my own article, the endurance of this belief into modern times.

  The prevalence of the concept of the witch as thief of dairy produce by the twelfth century across the regions named by Gerald might indicate that it was specifically a Celtic motif, as the lands concerned are areas in which Celtic languages were found. It must count for more, however, that they were the main areas of the British Isles in which a pastoral economy was predominant, because the same idea was found in such regions across much of Northern Europe. It is condemned as a vain superstition (and one specifically concerning women) in the eleventh-century penitential of Burchard of Worms, in the Rhineland, which drew in turn on earlier texts.19 It was found in modern folklore in much of Scandinavia, including the motif of transformation into a hare, and there it has been documented back to the early fourteenth century in the more general form that witches were believed to steal milk. During the late Middle Ages that belief became a standard component of church paintings in Sweden and Denmark, with outliers in Finland and northern Germany: and again women were specifically the targets.20 In the early modern period, milk-stealing was one of the most common crimes of which women were accused in Polish witch trials.21 The abundance of Polish witch-hunting, and that of trials in the Scandinavian regions named, is proof that an association between women and magical milk-stealing was not in itself a disincentive to witch-hunting. Instead, like the voluntary evil eye, it could be readily incorporated into the construct of satanic and dangerous witchcraft. It may be suggested that the other factors that existed alongside it made Gaelic culture less inclined to witch-hunting; and this exercise in building on Andrew Sneddon’s valuable research may illustrate, again, the potential of the comparative method, across societies and regions, when studying the subject. One further reflection is relevant before leaving the figure of the milk-stealing witch, and that is that, across the Gaelic world, the magical theft of dairy produce was not thought to be confined to certain women: it was also, or became, one of the many injuries and nuisances which were blamed on fairies. At any rate, it features as such in nineteenth-century folklore, as collected in Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands.22 If the same feature was a part of earlier belief systems in those regions, then even a malpractice commonly associated with witchcraft would not necessarily be blamed upon it, thereby reducing further the inclination to hunt witches in these regions. Another striking characteristic of the rich nineteenth-century Irish folklore collections is the overall balance of misfortunes ascribed to witches and fairies. Not only were the latter feared more in general, but they struck at the core of human concerns. The attacks of witches tended to be on farming produce and processes, but fairies killed and injured people, and their animals, and were especially dangerous to children and young adults, the prime targets of witchcraft in both popular and learned belief across most of the Continent and indeed most of Britain.23 If these beliefs perpetuated those held by the same societies in the early modern period – and the societies concerned were little different then, at the level of rural commoners at which the folklore concerned was collected – then much of the absence of apparent animosity towards witches would be explained.

  These considerations may well beg a further question: what of the remaining areas that have been the home of surviving Celtic languages? Did they show the same pattern with respect to witch persecution in early modern times? Two such areas may readily be identified – Cornwall and Brittany – and in both cases there appears to be a paucity of relevant research. In both cases also, however, that may itself reflect a paucity of actual trials. At first sight it might seem as if Cornwall might simply be disregarded, as too small and too Anglicized to be included in the sample, its native language reduced by the early modern period to the extreme western districts. On the other hand, it certainly did retain a distinctive ethnic and cultural identity in that period,24 and had few known trials for witchcraft, especially in comparison with most of the West Country. It had, in fact, just twelve, compared with sixty-nine in neighbouring Devon and sixty-seven in Somerset, and all but one of those twelve trials occurred after 1646, when Cornwall had effectively been conquered by an English army at the end of the English Civil War and submitted to an exceptionally Anglicized administration. On the other hand, Dorset, the fourth county of the West Country, had only thirteen known trials, so Cornish particularism may not account for the contrast in itself.25 Brittany is a different matter, being a substantial region and the European Continent’s major centre of Celtic culture. There seem, however, to be no available published studies of witch trials or early modern beliefs concerning witchcraft in it. All that can be said so far is that it does not seem to have been notable for witch-hunting.

  A little earlier in this chapter, the issue was raised of the use of modern folklore to extend or interpret the early modern evidence for a predisposition against witch-hunts in Gaelic parts of the British Isles and in Wales. In the fifth chapter of the present book a warning was delivered against the back-projection of folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to fill gaps in the evidence for particular beliefs and customs in earlier periods w
ith the assumption that folk culture was essentially timeless. The argument for a fundamental cultural element in the lack of witch trials in at least the majority of Celtic societies has not quite fallen into that trap. My article in 2011 did draw heavily on nineteenth-century folklore collections to illustrate Gaelic and Welsh beliefs concerning magic, but also emphasized that the collections themselves contained much internal evidence of change and development; and considered that evidence. It furthermore pointed out that much of the material recorded in the nineteenth century was collected from elderly people who learned it when young, pushing it back into the previous century and so effectively to the brink of the early modern period. Moreover, the argument in that article was based on using folklore collections to flesh out and add insight to the scarcer material from early periods. It attempted to avoid the error of treating them as though they represented a body of information about significantly older times, which could be uncritically back-projected into them.26 For example, Martin Martin’s account of the Hebrides at the end of the seventeenth century, which is an important source for early modern Scottish Gaeldom, contains brief accounts of local beliefs in the efficacy of specific forms of counter-magic in allaying magically induced misfortune; of the theft of milk and butter by women using magical means; and of traditions concerning the evil eye.27 It is surely legitimate in such a case to join this information with fuller descriptions of the same beliefs as held in the same communities a couple of generations later, as long as the sources for them are clearly identified and distinguished.