FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Live at the Witch Trials! Part III

This week, we are continuing our investigation of a 16th century pamphlet that recounts the tale of three witches tried and executed in Chelmsford in 1589. Previously we have heard how both Joan Cunny of Stysted and Joan Upney of Dagenham had confessed to keeping familiar spirits in the shape of frogs, toads and "moule like" creatures, and sending these demonic beings out to wreak havoc and cause injury, illness and death. 

Now the allegations of using familiars were a common feature in many of the witch trials in this period of English history. These beings were said to appear as common animals, albeit sometimes are freakish beasts rather than natural creatures, which could converse with their human masters and mistresses and possessed magical powers. Indeed in these three cases it would appear that all the alleged magic was accomplished by the familiars, with the witches merely giving them orders. For in England at that time, witchcraft was more seen as commanding and consorting with supernatural beings rather than the potion-brewing and spell casting the popular imagination depicts witches engaging in. Indeed in a statute against witchcraft, passed by Elizabeth I in 1563, very clearly defines the crime of witchcraft as being chiefly "Invocacons and Conjuracons of evill and wicked Spirites".  Indeed the three women on trial only appear to be witches by dint of the fact that they had access to familiars. Likewise Joan Cunny's daughters were also tried for witchcraft as they had used their mother's black frog sprites. 

However while the confession of Joan Cunny tells of how she was taught to draw a circle and intone certain words to raise her familiar spirits (see Part II for details), claims of actually conjuring up sprites are actually somewhat rare in the accounts given at the witch trials. More common was the means by which Joan Upney received her familiars - being given them by another witch. And more interestingly after Joan Upney's  first familiar seemingly wore out, new ones came  on their own to replace it. However equally common was the way in which our third witch gained her little helper. 

Joan Prentice lived at the Almshouse of  Hinningham Sibble (a town now called Sible Hedingham), and she related to the court that some six years previously, one wintry night some time between Halloween and Christmas, around ten o'clock as she was preparing to go to bed,  she received a strange visitation. For in her bed chamber appeared a dunnish furred ferret "with fiery eyes", who scampered towards her, and standing on its hind legs, placed its forepaws in her lap. The odd creature stared her in the eye and spoke, saying "Joan give me thy soule". The shocked lady asked what this creature was, to which the ferret replied "I am Satan" and went on to reassure her - "feare me not, my coming unto thee is to doo thee no hurt but to obtaine thy soule, which I must and wil have before I departe from thee". Joan replied that her soul belonged to Jesus, who had shed his blood to redeem it. And hence the wily ferret said "I must then have some of thy blood". And so Prentice offered the creature her left forefinger, which it bit and drank from. She asked again what the creature's name was and this time it replied its name was "Bidd". Then when her strange visitor had drank its fill of her blood, it promptly vanished.

However this was not the end of the story for Prentice then went on to relate how about a month later, the curious animal reappeared, again as she was preparing to go to bed. This time Bidd leapt up on her lap and sucked blood from her cheek. But after sating itself this time, the ferret spoke to her saying "if thou will have me doo any thing for thee, I am and wil be alwaies ready at thy commaundement". And so having had a quarrel with a local man, one William Adams, Prentice instructed Bidd to go and spoil the ale his wife was brewing. And so began a partnership or mischief and malice. Prentice only had to intone the words - 

Bidd, Bidd, Bidd, Come Bidd, come Bidd, come Bidd, Come suck, come suck, come suck

- and lo, Bidd would appear, and after drinking blood from her left cheek, would ask for instructions.

However recently the partnership had soured - a Master Glascock had turned her away while begging and so in revenge she instructed to Bidd to go nip one of his daughters, a girl named Sara, "but hurt it not". However the following night when the ferret returned, it reported that not only had the child been attacked but she would now die as a result. Prentice was horrified and chastised her familiar, who promptly vanished, never to reappear to her again. As for Joan Prentice herself, the court spared little time in finding her guilty, and like Joan Cunny and Joan Prentice, she was hung without delay. 

While an account of a blood-drinking ferret, which may or may not have been Satan himself, may sound extremely weird to our modern ears, the witch trials that flourished in England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries were full of similar tales of familiar spirits. While European and Scottish witch trials were dominated with accounts of Black Masses and Sabbats, English witchery in these period was dominated by accounts of these supernatural creatures. However what is very strange is that during the period of these Essex witch trials, the use of torture was outlawed. Now historians have speculated that the lurid accounts of the Sabbats found in Scottish and European trials were the results of torture, but at the time of these Chelmsford witches, legally the courts were not allowed to extracted confessions by torture. Hence we appear to have here three ladies giving of their own free will these disturbing accounts of malicious familiars, confessions that they surely knew would seal their doom. 

But most intriguing is the last section of Joan Prentice's confession, which indicates that the familiars were seemingly somewhat independent rather than servile beings.  For she claimed that she was not the sole mistress - indeed if mistress she truly was - of the demonic ferret Bidd. For she claimed that two other women, one Elizabeth Whale and Elizabeth Mott, wife of the town cobbler, also knew of Bidd, but she did not know what, if any, mischief it had carried out on their commands. Curiously, from the surviving historical records there is no indication whether these two other ladies were brought before the court. Bidd's current whereabouts remains unknown...

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Live at the Witch Trials! Part II

Last week we delved into the world of the early popular press, the world of the ha'penny one sheet broadside, and found a late 16th century ballad telling of three witches tried in Chelmsford.  Now the street ballads of the 16th and 17th centuries, while often drawing inspiration from current events, aren't exactly known for their historical accuracy; indeed a good deal of sensationalist embellishment was part and parcel of penning a popular ballad. So then was there any truth to the tale laid out in A New Ballad of the Life and Death of Three Witches Arrayned and Executed at Chelmsford 5 July 1589? 

Well fortunately for us, another branch of the popular press of the day can provide us with a good deal more detail. From the late 1400s onward the publication of essays, tracts, stories, songs and poems as quarto sized booklets formed by folding printed pages together became exceeding popular - they cost little to print, were fast to produce, and were sold cheap. Their short and inexpensive nature proved to be very popular with the public, and this ensured that a writer could reach a very wide audience very swiftly. While political and religious pamphlets would start to dominate the market in the late 16th and early 17th centuries as England lurched towards the Civil War, much like the one sheet broadsides and ballads accounts of trials, preferably involving murder and mayhem, were highly popular. Therefore when a craze of witch-hunting swept through the country, the pamphleteers had ringside seats at the trials, ready to pass on all the lurid details of deviltry and black magic to an eager public. 

Hence we have a lavish account of the case in the form of a pamphlet entitled The Apprehension and confession of three notorious Witches. Arreigned and by Justice condemned and executed at Chelmes-forde, in the Countye of Essex, the 5. day of Julye, last past. 1589. Yes, while these little booklets were very short, they hadn't yet mastered the art of punchy titles. However thanks to high amount of detail in this pamphlet, historians have been able to verify that this trial took place as described from the records of the local court of Assizes. The Assizes were Crown appointed courts that were held quarterly across England with the country divided into six circuits. At this time Essex was part of the Home Circuit which also covered Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey and Sussex and were held in Chelmford. Hence what we have detailed in this pamphlet is not one witch trial but three separate ones, featuring three separate charges of suspected witchcraft being brought to the court from over the previous quarter. Somewhat oddly however all three witches were named Joan. 

After a stern warning about the perils of witchcraft and shielding those who go against God in this fashion, we have the first case brought against one Joan Cunny of Stysted, Essex, tried by Anthony Mildemay on the 31st March 1589. The case opened with her confession, in which this widow claimed to have been taught how to raise the Devil by a Mother Humfrye of Maplested, who instructed her on how to draw a circle on the ground and intone certain words to raise "Sathan the cheefe of the Devills". She carried out this instructions in a field and "two Sprites did appear unto her within the said Circle, in the similitude and likenes of two black frogges". In return for her soul, these Sprites would do whatever she wished, and having struck the bargain, apparently Cunny was to command four of these black frogs for the next few years, each with its own name and powers - "Jack killed mankinde. Jyll killed womenkinde. Nicholas killed horses. Ned killed Cattell". These hell-frogs were kept in a box, fed upon milk and white bread, and often conversed with Mother Cunny. She soon set them to work such as destroying property (a local's stack of firewood) and causing harm and hurt to those around her. While she held that some folks she was unable to harm thanks to their faith and virtue, he admitted that "she hath hurt divers persons within this sixteene or twenty yeeres, but how many she now knoweth not". She also confessed that her daughter Margaret had sent out the sprites to harm villagers too. 

Further evidence is presented by her own grandsons, the bastard children of her daughters, aged 10 and 12. The elder boy testified that on the way to Braintree market, a man named Harry Finch whose wife was then busy brewing, refused to give them any drink. For this Joan Cunny sent out the sprite Jyll to Finch's wife, who was "greevously taken in her head, and the next day in her side, and so continued in most horrible pain for the space of a week, and then dyed". The same lad testified that his grandmother had sent out another of her frogs to harm a boy who had stole firewood from him, and furthermore had instructed him to take the imp Jack to a field belonging to Sir Edward Huddlestone, the Sheriff of the Shire, where the sprite then raised a wind that brought down a mighty oak tree. 

The pamphlet records that the judge wasted no time in sentencing her to death. However looking through the records of the Assizes, we can also discover the fate of Joan Cunny's daughters. For both were  brought before the same court on charges of witchcraft, with Margaret being found guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to a year in prison, and to be pilloried. Her sister Avice was also found guilty of murder by incantation, however she begged for mercy on the grounds that she was pregnant, and so was instead remanded in custody. It seems a little odd that the pamphlet writers did not make more of a whole family of witches, but knowing their audience's appetites we may guess that prison sentences did not warrant as much interest as an execution. 

The next case recounted is somewhat shorter, but bears a number of similarities to its fellows. This was the testimony of one Joan Upney of Dagenham, who was brought before Sir Henry Gray Knight, on 3rd May 1589. Upney had been identified as a witch by two local men, John Harrolde and Richard Foster, and had attempted to flee justice. In her confession, she claimed that some seven or eight years previously.a witch from Barking named Fustian Kirtle or Whitecote, had given her "a thing like a Moule", and was instructed that the creature would harm anyone who she bade it to. Rather strangely, this creature seemingly worn out - "it consumed away" - but was replaced by another just like it, and a toad which she had for a great while, and had had many more toads too. 

One toad she placed in the Harrolde house, and it was claimed the creature "pinched his wife and sucked her til she dyed". Another toad was unleashed on Richard Foster's wife, whom it "pinched" as well. Both of these familiar creatures did not return after their mission. Upney claimed she had two more toads in her home but they too had been "consumed away" when she fled her house. She too was sentenced to death, however the pamphlet claims she showed repentance for her sins and asked God for forgiveness before her execution. It also notes that she "cryed out saying: that she had greevously sinned, that the devill had deceived her" - and considering how her familiar sprites appeared to be one-shot deals and prone to wearing out, we might well conclude that the Devil indeed did deceive her - certainly at least she got a poorer deal than Joan Cunny, who had received a far better class of familiar!  

However our third witch had the most interesting familiar of all, whose exploits we will examine in detail in the third part of Live At the Witch Trials! 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Live at the Witch Trials! Part I

One of the main problems for any investigator of folklore is that while assorted sages and scholars did an excellent job in the 19th century of preserving whole swathes of legend and lore from oral and local traditions, as one ventures back in time through the 18th century and beyond, there is a good deal less being written down and recorded. By its very nature, folklore thrives on the lips of people rather than in the pages of  books; it is passed down in tales told by the fireside, passed around the ale house, or spun out at bedtime. And so, as we have often discovered in this series of wanders down the leafy lanes and shadowy byways of folklore, when searching out sources dating from before the 19th century we are often left hunting for tidbits that have slipped into proper history books, and references to folk beliefs turning up in poems and plays.

Fortunately however we do have somewhere else to turn other than the jottings of antiquarians and poets. For while books and literature were the preserve of the rich and hence a limited resource in centuries past, from the 16th century onwards there was a popular press, churning out a variety of publications designed to tempt the pennies out of the pockets of ordinary working folks. There were inexpensive chapbooks and pamphlets, but cheapest, and hence the most popular, were the broadsheets and broadsides. These were single page publications which provided a whole world of entertainment: some relayed the news of the day, other retold exciting stories, and many did both in the form of popular ballads. Produced regularly and widely circulated, essentially these broadsides were the equivalent of the rolling news, movie channels, and the pop charts all rolled into one. Therefore just as modern bars have widescreen TVs to tempt customers in, so too wily landlords in ages past ensured their pubs and taverns had the latest broadsheets pinned up to attract the punters.   

Now admittedly these are perhaps not the most reliable of sources, for often fact and fiction were freely mixed up in the most sensational manner possible in order to sell as many copies as possible. Turning both popular stories and contemporary news into song form was highly popular, and these street ballads provided material that could be read for pleasure, recited as a poem or performed as music. Historically speaking they represent a fascinating time which sees the older oral traditions of storytelling, minstrelling and balladeering merging into what would become the modern newspapers, the book trade and the music business. Popular topics, whether fact or fiction, often would spawn many ballads on the same subject, while bestselling broadsides would be reprinted, re-illustrated, revised, expanded, and even pirated - proving that in the entertainment business, cover versions, sequels and remakes are not just a modern curse!   

But nevertheless there is a wealth of interesting material to be discovered here. Given that the broadside printers soon learned that the public loved a sensational story, the archives of surviving broadsheets feature a good deal of interest to folklorists. As criminal trials and accounts of gruesome murders were particularly popular with the punters who ponied up a halfpennies for ballads, it is no surprise that several ballads focused on the numerous witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries. 

A New Ballad of the Life and Death of Three Witches Arrayned and Executed at Chelmsford 5 July 1589 was one of the earliest of these street ballads that detailed such a trial, which saw three women from Dagenham accused separately of witchcraft. Printed in London in 1589, a tattered copy eventually found its way into the hands of legendary editor Peter Haining, who restored the text and printed it in his excellent volume on the Essex witch trials The Witchcraft Papers (Robert Hale 1974) -  

A New Ballad of the Life and Death of Three Witches 

Arrayned and Executed at Chelmsford 5 July 1589

(To the tune of 'Bragandary Down', & etc)

IList Christians all unto my Song
'Twill move your Hearts to Grace,
That Dreadful Witchcraft hath been done,
Of late about this place;
But Three that cried the Devil's Name
With those who did them follow,
Now to Justice are brought home
To Swing upon our Gallow.

IIThere's scarse a Month within these Years
but Witchcraft foul is done,
And many are the weeping tears
These Satan's Fiends have rung;
Though they sought Mercy ere the rope
Soon as the Judgement's read,
Who gainsays the Devil's Hope
Is all when they are Dead?

IIIA vile long life they have run on
Regarding not their End,
Their hearts still bent to cruelty
Not minding to Amends;
Men and cattle they Bewitched
No Peace they gave the Rest,
But yet, in turn the parts were switched
By Marks upon their Breasts.

IVAs to the Story now to tell
The Truth I will Declare,
It was the Witches Children small
That they did not Beware;
For God into these Infants Hearts
Did pour the Light of Reason,
And all against their Mothers spoke
Of Witchcraft and of Treason.

VEvil were the tales of their demands
Sprung from the Depth of Hell,
And terrible the work of their Commands
As did the children tell;
Now the Judge the Sentence read
And ended in our town,
The rule of Imps and Spells and Dread
For many miles aroun'.

VISo listen Christians to my Song
The Hangman's swung his rope,
And on these Gallows hath been done
An end to Satan's Hope;
Give the News from Chelmsford Town
To all the world be spread,
A crew of Evil Witches have gone Down
Hang'd by the neck, all three are Dead
(Repeat)

As is typical of many ballads of the time, the case is recounted as a moral lesson while at the same time reveling the dark deeds of the story and details of the execution. But also, even allowing for a degree of sensationalism and poetic license, this ballad does tells us much about the times it was written in, reflecting very clearly both how common witch trials were and how widespread the fear of witchcraft was during this period. The second verse make specific reference to the regularity of reports of witchcraft, and its claim of the discovery of witchcraft being nearly a monthly event is no exaggeration for dramatic effect. For in the Essex area at this time, there were 670 men and women accused of witchcraft between the years of 1560 and 1675  (see here for the staggering full list). 

Furthermore the text also assumes that its audience possessed a certain amount of foreknowledge and familiarity with the details of witchcraft. The mention of "Imps and Spells" is no idle poetic fancy, but an allusion to a common feature of many of the trials of the period, where it was claimed that the accused witches carried out their malice through the agency of a familiar spirit or creature which they sent abroad to do their will. Secondly the third verse mentions "Marks upon their breasts" referencing the common belief that witches had bodily signs of their allegiance to their master Satan, which were said to be either scars where the Devil had touched them, or wounds or malformations where they suckled their imps and familiars with their blood.  

The text also makes clear that more generally witchcraft wasn't seen as an isolated crime, but part of the grand plan by the Devil himself to bring chaos into the world. Witchcraft was seen as a fifth column in society, a destabilizing force from an enemy power. In a worldview that held that the Earth was a battleground for the forces of Good and Evil, monarchs were believed to have been given a divine right to rule, and hence in many witchcraft trials the accused were being tried for treason as well as sorcery, for to practice black magic was not only to be against God but to be against the Crown too.  Hence the line here - "all against their mothers spoke of Witchcraft and of Treason". 

Now as stated earlier, due the sensationalist nature of broadsides and the complete lack of journalistic ethics of their writers, aside from giving us a snapshot of contemporary attitudes and beliefs, is there any historical truth to the tale recounted in this ballad? Well, luckily for us, there are court records that verify that there was indeed such a trial and execution, and furthermore there was a similarly cheap and sensational pamphlet produced in the same era that gives us a more detailed account of the crimes and trial of the three witches of Chelmsford Town! 

And the full shocking tale of witchery - featuring blood drinking, storm raising, frog assassins and killer talking ferrets! - will be examined in full next week in Part II of Live at the Witch Trials!