But mythical origins apart, there may be a partial explanation of the belief in the actual structure of the Celtic house. In north and west Ireland18 the traditional house has two opposite doors one in each lateral wall; and it used to have a central hearth without a chimney. Only one door was open at a time. The front door was open normally, but if the wind ‘blew contrairy’ the back door served instead. Thus, opposite doors, following this explanation, would be necessary to regulate the draught; and it would be impractical for someone to use both doors at a visit; for if he used the door on the windward side he would perhaps smoke out the occupants by opening it even for a few moments. The Welsh long-house19 with its opposite doors and passage is a type of dwelling where a similar explanation could conceivably apply. And if we hesitate to adduce evidence from the Celtic countries to illuminate East Anglian problems, at least we have the encouragement of the recent excavations at Exning near Newmarket.20 Here the remains of a second-century house have come to light, a house that was identical in plan with the Welsh long-houses described by Dr Peate, with long sides and opposite doors providing a passage from side to side, and dividing the building roughly in two.
Whatever the origin of the belief, however, it has remained a powerful one; and up to recent years front doors in many farms and country cottages were not opened except for weddings and funerals. Even today many front doors in the country get very little use. Until he became wiser, the writer often used to knock at a front door after approaching rather tentatively along a path aggressively green with moss. And more than once, while waiting for bars and bolts and an occasional chain to be drawn back – reluctantly, so it seemed – and while listening to the protesting creak of the door as it was being slowly opened, he had time to think that even the search for truth could hardly justify such labour as this, especially as it was someone else’s; and it would have been much better for all if he had taken the less interesting but well-worn path and approached the house uneventfully from the side or the rear.
1 G.B., Part I, Vol. 2, p. 43.
2 W.G., p. 185.
3 On the other hand, there is a tradition in Suffolk that the elder is a good tree to have growing outside a dairy as its bitter smell keeps flies away.
4 Lady C. Gurdon, Suffolk Folklore, p. 4.
5 I.F.W., p. 297.
6 It is worth noting that the ancient Chinese had an equivalent figure or daemon (called P’o) who was feminine and characterized by the colour white. Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 114.
7 W.G., p.175.
8 A.F.C.H., pp. 201–2.
9 E.O.S., pp. 289–90.
10 Mary Nattrass, Witch Posts, Gwerin, Vol. 2, No. 5.
11 Margaret Murray (The Witch Cult in Western Europe, p. 10) suggests that this belief in a witch’s course through the house is understandable against the background of prehistoric mound dwellings, and the taboos connected with the door among those primitive peoples, (cf. the early Latins, one of whose deities was a two-faced door God.)
12 Gratton and Singer, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, p. 197.
13 Macbeth, Act 1, Scene vi.
14 East Anglian Notes and Queries (1864), Vol. 2, p. 202.
15 Personal Communication.
16 F.L.H., p. 90.
17 Philip Barker, Woolpit.
18 I.F.W., p. 45.
19 Iorwerth Peate, The Welsh House, passim.
20 S. Applebaum, Agricultural History Review, Vol. XI, Part 1, pp. 4–5.
6
The Hearth
THE hearth is the centre of the household and the home, the place where the family gathers when it is most characteristically a family, a group united by blood and common interest. The hearth and its fire were once sacred; and Frazer1 suggests that the sanctity was linked with ancestor worship and stems from the ancient custom among the Romans and other nations of burying their dead in their houses. The dead’s spirits, they believed, hovered round the house to protect the family; and the Lares et Penates, the Roman household gods, were their symbols. If, therefore, in a climate like Britain’s and particularly during winters like those of East Anglia, additional reasons are needed to remind us that the hearth is a special place, here then are some of these reasons. It is probable, moreover, that the hearth’s association with witchcraft stems partly from this ancient legacy: certainly, under the hearthstone was the spot most frequently chosen to bury the witch-bottle, a device designed to act as a repellent against witches, and often found under the hearths of the timbered houses in East Anglia.
A number of these witch-bottles are known to have been discovered in East Anglia since the last war.2 Their purpose was to counteract a curse put on the house and its occupants by an ill-disposed person; and it is significant that many of the witch-bottles in this part of England have been discovered in old inns, as if they needed – as public houses – some sort of general insurance against their high risk of being bewitched. The whole practice and rationale of the witch-bottle ceremony is a good example of sympathetic magic; but before examining it in detail here is a contemporary account from Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphans or A Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions, published in London in 1689:3
‘… which puts me in mind of a very remarkable story of this kind, told by Mr Brearly, once Fellow of Christ’s College in Cambridge, who boarded in a house in Suffolk where his landlady had been ill-handled by Witchcraft.
‘For an Old Man that travelled up and down the County and had some acquaintance at that house, calling in and asking the Man of the house how he did and his Wife; he told him that he himself was well, but his Wife had been a long time in a languishing condition, and that she was haunted by a thing in the Shape of a Bird that would flurr near her face, and that she could not enjoy her natural rest. The Old Man bid him and Wife be of good courage. It was but a dead Spright, he said, and he would put him in a course to rid his Wife of this languishment and trouble. He therefore advised him to take a Bottle, and put his Wife’s Urine into it, together with Pins and Needles and Nails and Cork them up, and set the Bottle to the Fire well cork’d, which when it had felt a little while the heat of the Fire, began to move and joggle a little, but he for sureness took the Fire Shovel and held it hard upon the Cork. And as he thought, he felt something one while on this side, another while on that, shove the Fire Shovel off, which he still quickly put on again; but at last at one shoving the Cork bounced out, and the Urine, Pins, Nails and Needles all flew up, and gave a report like a Pistol, and his Wife continued in the same trouble and languishment still.
‘Not long after, the Old Man came to the house again and enquired of the Man of the house how his Wife did. Who answered, as ill as ever, if not worse. He ask’d him if he had followed his direction. Yes, says he, and told him the event as abovesaid. Ha, quoth he, it seems it was too nimble for you. But now I will put you on a way that will make the business sure. Take your Wife’s Urine as before, and cork it in a Bottle with Nails, Pins and Needles and bury it in the Earth; and that will do the feat. The Man did accordingly. And his Wife began to mend sensibly and in a competent time was finely well restored. But there came a Woman from a Town some miles off to their house with a lamentable Out-Cry that they had killed her Husband. They ask’d what she meant and thought her distracted, telling her they knew neither her nor her husband. Yes, saith she, you have killed my Husband; he told me so on his Death-Bed. But at last they understood by her that her Husband was a Wizard, and had bewitched this Man’s Wife, and that this Counter-Practice prescribed by the Old Man which saved the Man’s Wife from languishment, was the death of that Wizard that had bewitched her. This story Mr Brearly heard from the Man and Woman’s own Mouth who were concerned, at whose house he for a time Boarded; nor is there any doubt of the truth thereof.’
The main principle here will be recognized as contagious magic; and this is how the contemporary mind reasoned in carrying out this ceremony. The witch had got hold of something that his prospective victim ha
d touched, and by means of this link was able to cast his malevolence over this person and the house she lived in. But in so doing he, by reason of the ‘contagious’ link, had himself become indissolubly joined with the object of his curse; in fact, the victim had some sort of hold on him and all hope was not lost. A seventeenth-century writer4 explains the purpose of working on the victim’s urine: ‘The reason … is because there is part of the vital spirit of the witch in it; for such is the subtlety of the Devil that he will not suffer the witch to infuse any poysonous matter into the body of man or beast without some of the witches blood mingled with it.’ Herrick, in some lively verses, also gives a prescription:
To house the Hag, you must doe this;
Commix with Meale a little Pisse
Of him bewitcht: then forthwith make
A little Wafer or a Cake.
And this rawly bak’t will bring
The old Hag in. No surer thing.
Once the link had been established by the witch she was open to a counter-device through the medium of the urine. Anything that was done to that would instantly be transmitted by sympathetic magic to the person of the witch and would induce in her sympathetic pains that would compel her (or him) to come to the victim’s house to ask the victim or his helpers to desist from the counter-measures probably under promise of the removal of the curse.
Most of the East Anglian examples of witch-bottles are the so-called grey-beard, stone-ware jars with well rounded belly and narrow neck, and the distinctive feature of the mask of a bearded man in relief at the neck’s top. It has been suggested that the grey-beard jar is an anthropomorphic representation, a symbol of the figure of the witch. But it seems more likely that the jar or bottle was meant to be a simulacrum of the witch’s bladder. The fact that it was invariably buried upside down5 with the corked neck bottommost points to this, as does the finding of pubic hair in many of the bottles. Glanvil’s account implies that the action of the bottle and its contents was pointed directly at a specific bodily function – the nails and pins moving about in the heated urine were meant to transmit intense pains to the witch’s bladder. Yet some of the contents of these bottles appear to suggest that a ‘shot-gun’ effect was often intended: to strike the witch wherever it was possible. In one of the grey-beard jars discovered in Ipswich and now in the Ipswich Museum there was a cloth heart with pins stuck in it among the following objects: sharpened splinters of wood, brass studs, nails, hair, glass-chips, and a much-rusted table fork without a handle. On an occasional jar there is no grey-beard mask but a number of imprinted horse-shoes or a kind of horse-shoe motif which no doubt had apotropaic significance.
But witch-bottles were also buried under the threshold as well as under the hearth. They have also been discovered out-of-doors, as suggested in the second part of the remedy in the Glanvil story. These bottles have been dug up in fields and occasionally in hedgerows. One was found a few years ago in a Norfolk farm, and a recent example came to light in a Yorkshire farm6 following the ploughing up of a permanent grassland. The purpose of burying the bottle in a field may be, as in the story already quoted, a final gesture of sympathetic magic: first put the bottle underground and the witch will soon follow it; or, more likely, the bottle was placed in the field or in an adjoining hedgerow as a prophylactic charm, either against the bewitching of livestock or the blasting of the fertility of the land itself.
The grey-beard bottles are, however, of interest in themselves. They are usually a very robust stone-ware covered with a brown or grey salt-glaze which is attractively mottled or stippled. The usefulness and appropriateness of their shape for the purpose of witchcraft was enhanced by the salt-glazing which gave them added potency. These jars were made for about two hundred years – 1500–1700–first in the Rhineland and later in England, particularly at Fulham in the late seventeenth century. They are sometimes called Bellarmines, supposedly after Cardinal Bellarmine, a great chaser of Protestants in the Low Countries during the Counter Reformation period. But they were being manufactured as wine-jars long before Cardinal Bellarmine’s appearance, or that of the equally infamous Duke of Alva who has also given his name to them. The misleading name Bellarmine has been attributed to a Mr William Chaffers who decided to ‘christen them anew’ in a paper given to the British Archaeological Association in 1849.7 But there is another theory that the bearded mask has a much older history, and is the representation of the old pagan, Gallic god,8 Esus – a name which is probably a variant of Zeus. The oak was connected with both gods; and an oak-leaf motif often found as a decoration on these jars adds support to this theory. If, too, one of the old gods was depicted on the bottle this would lend them double strength as witch-scarers.
The following account, written about a remote Suffolk parish,9 shows both the persistence of the old custom and the essentially medieval temper of belief among ordinary villagers up to fairly recent times: ‘Will, like many of the old people in the parish, believed in witchcraft – was himself, indeed, a “wise man” of a kind. My father once told him about the woman who had fits. “Ah!” Old Will said, “she’ve fallen into bad hands.” “What do you mean?” asked my father; and then Old Will said that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this one, and “there weren’t but me and John Abbott in the place could git her right”. “What did you do?” said my father. “We two, John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins of the woman’s nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled” – he paused. “What happened?” asked my father; “did you hear anything?” “Hear anything! I should think we did. When ta biled, we h’ard a loud shrike a-roarin’ up the chimney; and you may depind upon it, she warn’t niver bad no more.”’ Into such practices as this did a crisis situation and a dim knowledge of the old logic of remote action through sympathy combine to betray its practitioners, causing some of their most bizarre and grotesque performances.
A similar method of boiling a witch-bottle on the fire is recorded by Enid Porter:10 it comes from the Cambridgeshire Fens. A blacksmith made an iron bottle especially for the operation, and the climax came when the bottle burst. But the most frequent type of bottle discovered in Cambridgeshire is the glass variety – long, thin bottles of greenish glass such as the specimens now in the Cambridge Folk Museum. They are usually discovered concealed in the wattle and daub above the lintel of the door through which the witch was most likely to enter; and their purpose was the same as that of the Bellarmine jar. But the makers of the Cambridgeshire witch-bottles used a different method to draw the witch who had supposedly cast her evil influence on someone in the house. The glass bottle was stuffed with coloured threads, red thread predominating. There are a number of examples of this apotropaic use of coloured thread: mothers once tied threads of different hues around the neck of an infant to prevent it being fascinated by the evil eye (compare the use of a coral necklace used in recent years for the same purpose); and just as horse-brasses were first used as amulets and not principally as decorations, so the hounces – the coloured worsted braids worn by farm-horses – originally had this function.
But the use of red thread as an amulet by the old Scottish11 farmers demonstrates that although the methods of making the Cambridgeshire witch-bottle and the Bellarmine were different, the principle underlying both activities was the same – sympathetic magic. On farms in Scotland to prevent a cow being bewitched twigs of rowan-tree were tied to the cow’s tail with red thread. As already stated, the witch was thought to be tied indissolubly to her victim by a thin but invisible filament of blood or the life-force. The thread is an analogue of this filament. And what other colour could the life-force be but red – the colour of blood? It was also believed at one time in East Anglia12 that if a witch was suspected of enchanting a person or was known to have expressed an intention of doing him harm, the best preventative was to draw blood from the witch herself. The red thread according to this belief would therefore be a pure instance of sympathetic magic.
&
nbsp; But to return to the hearth: a very old custom was the burning of the Yule log. This is kept up in Essex, so it is reported,13 even today; and the kindling of a Yule log by the help of a charred piece of log from the previous year was reputed to bring prosperity to the house. The Essex emigrants who formed a large section of the Great Migration from eastern England to North America during the seventeenth century, appear to have taken their Christmas custom of burning the Yule log with them, along with the Essex dialect14 and the typical Essex weather-boarded house.15 Edward Gepp has traced the connection between the Essex dialect and the speech of the Southern negroes, and the survival of an Essex custom in that region is not surprising. It is described by a writer16 from the Southern States: she mentions that in the slave plantations the Yuletide festival lasted as long as the backlog burned in the open-fire-place of the big house. The negro slaves, whose business it was to choose the Yule log, saw to it that it was of the greenest wood with the toughest bark. To ensure that it would burn slowly they soaked it secretly in an out of the way stream, thus hoping to prolong their period of rest to the utmost. Backlog, incidentally, is a seventeenth-century English word which has recently returned from the United States in a derived or figurative meaning.
The Pattern Under the Plough Page 6