The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton

I am afraid I have been very unwell and ended up in hospital this week, so the post on flying witches hasn’t been finished. So in the interest of getting a post up on time (while also getting my prescribed rest) I am instead posting a small piece of analysis which was originally part of my doctoral thesis. Although interesting in and of itself, it did not in the end drive home my thesis’ main argument, and was therefore taken out of my thesis earlier this year. But I hope you may find this short exploration of The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton, by Richard Head, moderately interesting. Apologies for the change of plans, but the flying witches will be here next year,  in February. 

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I have argued throughout this thesis that there is an interaction between elite debates and popular representations of witchcraft. Though the details of the Restoration debates on witchcraft are beyond the scope of this thesis, the sense of their scope and some of their key ideas can be found in popular texts and trials. One of the most frequently re-published was The Strange and wonderful history of Mother Shipton, by Richard Head, which was first published in 1677 – the same year as John Webster’s assault[1] on Glanvill’s defence of witchcraft beliefs and trials.[2]

Head’s narrative centres on a young Mother Shipton who had ‘made a Hellish Contract’ with the Devil.[3] The ‘Strange and wonderful history’ Head relates has many features which accord with the ‘unusual’ demonology of the East Anglia trials, and also illustrates the confusion and contention over what witches and the Devil could and could not do.

Head’s The Life and death of Mother Shipton claims that Mother Shipton’s ‘hellish contract’ was a form of marriage, and that following her agreement theirs was a wedding ceremony between the witch and the Devil. This work recalled Henry More’s Antidote against Atheism and its rationalisation of the Devil’s cold body.[4] This 1653 commentary on the feeling of the Devil when he physically interacted with witches was also discussed in Head’s The life and deth of Mother Shipton, where Shipton reports to her midwife that the Devil was ‘cold as ice’.[5]

Head’s account of Mother Shipton continues on from their wedding night to discuss how Shipton’s liaison with the Devil was uncovered when she became pregnant to him. She was ‘discovered by the great swelling of her Belly, to be with Child’.[6] Head reports that ‘The people could not tell what to think, or who should be the Father, concluding that none would be so vile and wicked, as to have Copulation with a Devil incarnate; neither could they believe a Spirit had either desire or power, to generate with any humane Creature’.[7]

Although Shipton, in the narrative, admits her child was begotten ‘by no mortal Wight’, she is not believed. As she cannot provide bail two ‘Gentlemen as they appeared by their habits’ arrive to free her, but as soon as their bail is accepted and Mother Shipton is set free, they vanish.[8]

It is easy to see in this narrative a reflection of the demonological debates of the era, especially in terms of the questions people had about whether the Devil did or did not have copulation with witches, and his ability to take physical form. Head’s discussion of the contestation of witch beliefs therefore reflected the debate playing out in demonological and theological works in the late seventeenth-century.[9]

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[1] John Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy, but that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the witch ... is utterly denied and disproved, (1677).

[2] See Joseph Glanvill, A philosophical endeavour towards the defence of the being of vvitches and apparitions. In a letter to the much honoured, Robert Hunt, esq; by a member of the Royal Society, (1666) [later re-pblished in several editions, including as Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts: the first treating of their possibility, the second of their real existence (1681)].

[3] Note, Mother Shipton was widely discussed in this period. Not only were there several publications on her during the Civil War, but she was also a matter of discussion, according to the diary of Samue Pepys, in the Royal Family and was of particular import during and after the Great Fire of London. See Samuel Pepys, Samuel Pepys Diary “Entry for Saturday 20 October 1666”. See also ‘Mother Shipton’ [Anon], A true coppy of Mother Shiptons last prophesies as they were taken from one Joane Waller in the year of our Lord 1625 who died in March last, 1641 being ninety foure yeares of age of whom Mother Shipton had prophesided that she should live to heare of wars within this kingdome but not to see them, also predicting other wonderfull events that should befall in the clymate in these times, with two other strange prophesies threunto annexed, all which were never published before, (1642); [Anon], Fourteene strange prophesies: besides Mother Shiptons, and Mr. Salmarsh, predicting wonderfull events to betide these yeares of calamity, in this climate, whereof divers are already come to passe, worthy of observation, (1648); Head, The life and death of Mother Shipton.

[4] M2639 Henry More, An antidote against atheisme, or, An appeal to the natural faculties of the minde of man, whether there be not a God, (London: Prnted by Roger Daniel, 1653): p.138

[5] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 3.

[6] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[7] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[8] Head, The Life and death of Mother Shipton,  p. 9.

[9] See Jonathan Barry, Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England, 1640-1789 (2011); and  Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650-1750, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum

Even when the Devil tells the truth, he must not be believed.

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One of the interesting Latin phrases my father taught me was Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum. The idea that the Devil is so deceitful that even his use of the truth is tainted by association has always interested me. This was an idea the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins seems to have agreed with, arguing that the Devil used facts over which he had no power (the truth) to deceive witches into believing they had actually harmed their victims with his help.

In 2014 I attended the Early Modern Women, Religion, and the Body conference at Loughborough University. At that conference I presented a paper which focused on how on Matthew Hopkins used ideas found in earlier demonological works to underpin his arguments on the Devil’s deceit of witches in The discovery of vvitches (1647).

I argued that a key passage in Hopkins text described how when witches, the Devil’s ‘deare and nearest children’,[i] believed that the Devil was granting their desire to harm their enemies, he was actually tricking them into worshipping him in return for the deaths of people who were already ill and going to die in the near future:

‘[The Devil] is of a long standing, above 6000. yeers, then he must needs be the best Scholar in all knowledges of arts and tongues, & so have the best skill in Physicke, judgment in Physiognomie, and knowledge of what disease is reigning or predominant in this or that mans body, (and so for cattell too) by reason of his long experience. This subtile tempter knowing such a man lyable to some sudden disease, (as by experience I have found) as Plurisie, Imposthume, &c. he resorts to divers Witches; if they know the man, and seek to make a difference between the Witches and the party[.]’[ii]

This recourse to the idea that the Devil understands human beings and their natures, and has studied then for his work also appears in the earlier text of George Gifford. However for Gifford, his learning is not just about the Witch’s victim, but about the witch herself:

‘WHen Satan at the first enterprised the ruine and destruction of man, he did not vnaduisedly set vp on the worke, but in great subtilty chose him a fit instrument for the purpose, euen the serpent who was more subtill then any beast of the field. He is now an old serpent, & long practised, and hath increased his subtilty by much approoued experience. He doth not nowe attempt his wicked worke, but [...] all y^[...] fittest waies & meanes that hée can: hée doth obserue time & place, with all other circumstances: and looke of what sort soeuer his worke shalbe, he séeketh co~uenient persons as matter to work vpon; he chuseth out fit instruments to worke withall·when he raiseth vp some heresie to destroy y^[...] true faith, which is with subtill shew to be defended: he suggesteth not the same into the minde of a blunt vnlearned foole which is able to say litle: but if it be possible, he espieth out a subtil minde, which is also proud, vaine glorious, & stiffe to maintain any purpose[.]’[iii]

The idea that the Devil tailors his temptation to the victim was a common theme, and my own favourite discussion on who the Devil chooses, and how he them fits his temptation to them, comes from King James VI & I’s Daemonologie. For King James there were witches who did not need to be deceived, as they were of the “grosser sorte, [who]runnes directlie to the Deuill for ambition or desire of gaine”.[iv] In my thesis I argue that:

King James did not see this plain and knowing contract as the only way in which people came into the Devil’s service, also citing two other forms. In some cases ignorant people could be deceived by the Devil into magical practices, without understanding that doing so was apostasy and diabolism.^[v] And some learned men were tempted by knowledge into attempting sorcery, believing that they could control the Devil. In both cases King James emphasised the Devil’s use of deceit, and his desire to entice both the learned and the ignorant into the same grave error as the wilful, sinful witch: making a contract with the Devil that damned their soul.^[vi] So for King James, witches could be divided into the sinfully greedy, the woefully ignorant, and the learned who, through pride, were deceived by the Devil.

The importance of the Devil’s understanding of human desires and the human body are central to Hopkins’ work. Therefore I have always argued that Hopkins’ The discovery of vvitches presents a complex demonological argument about the corporeality of the Devil, and his interaction with witches and the bewitched. And though he only cites James VI & I, it is easy to trace many of his ideas in George Gifford, William Perkins and Richard Bernard’s seminal demonological texts. Hopkins brief (comparatively it was extremely short for a treatise on demonology or the account of a witchfinder) work presents its reader with a mixture of popular beliefs around familiars, and elite demonology.[vii] There are several signs in both Hopkins’ and Stearne’s pamphlets that they consulted with demonological texts, magistrates and others in formulating their method of finding witches, for example at one point Hopkins claims his methods in one case were ‘upon command from the Justice’. ^[viii]

These links to others place Hopkins and Stearne firmly within English demonology – not without as claimed by Wallace Notestein.[ix]

At Loughborough I pointed out that Hopkins himself opened his pamphlet with the injunction from Exodus 22:18 cited by both Gifford and Richard Bernard: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, and likewise follows the paths laid down by earlier demonologists in ascribing to the Devil only a limited role in God’s work:

‘God suffers the Devill many times to doe much hurt, and the devill doth play many times the deluder and impostor with these Witches, in perswading them that they are the cause of such and such a murder wrought by him with their consents, when and indeed neither he nor they had any hand in it[.]’

Unlike John Gaule’s assessment that the witchfinders and those who employed them had no respect for God’s providence, Hopkins was demonstrating an understanding of how the world was supposed to work, with the Devil’s ‘power’, such as it was, primarily lying in deception and illusion. When Hopkins argues that “God suffers the Devill many times to doe much hurt”, he does not mean physical hurt, in terms of acts of maleficium or harmful magic, rather he means that the Devil is allowed to do much hurt to the witch.

This idea came to mind when I recently read Verena Thiele’s “Demonising Macbeth” in Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage (2014), which argues that the demonic, tangible, transferable evil of the witches is contrasted with the temporary, localised evil of the human Macbeth who is a ‘bad man’ made worse by the influence of the witches. As I was reading her work I was struck by the way in which the three witches seem to do more than represent evil, they seem to embody the Devil (an inversion of the Holy Trinity?). While Macbeth himself stands in the place of the early modern witch. Macbeth is a bad man whose faults are manipulated. But the witches use truths (and half-truths) to deceive Macbeth, and to engender his ‘fall’.

This is an idea I am just wandering around the edges of – and I wager there may well be someone in the vast wealth of Shakespearian literature who has thought of it before me! Yet it seems to be playing on my mind, and I keep returning to Macbeth’s terrible declaration in Act V, that nothing can harm him because he has been told it cannot.

‘Bring me no more reports; let them fly all:

Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,

I cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm?

Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know

All mortal consequences have pronounced me thus:

'Fear not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman

Shall e'er have power upon thee.'[x]  

But Birnam did come to Dunsinane, and Malcolm was not ‘born of woman’. The witches (as the Devil) knew how to manipulate Macbeth, knew how he would interpret their prophecies, and so they used they used truth to deceive him.

For Hopkins, the Devil used ‘the truth’ of a person’s illness to deceive a witch into believing she was able to cause physical harm to another human being through him. Hopkins representation of the Devil’s knowledge and ability to deceive, and its interaction with the witch’s malice, vanity, and pride, has become one of the key points I keep in mind when I think about witchcraft in early modern England.

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[i] Matthew Hopkins, The discovery of vvitches, (1645): p. 9.

[ii] Matthew Hopkins, The discovery of vvitches, p. 9.

[iii] George Gifford, A discourse of the subtill practises of deuilles by vvitches and sorcerers (1587): p. 32.

[iv] James VI & I, Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three books, p. 12.

^[v] James VI & I, Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three books, pp. 7-8

^[vi] James VI & I, Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three bookes, pp. 9, 12,

[vii] See Richard Bernard, A guide to grand-iury men, (1627); George Gifford, A discourse of the subtill practises of deuilles by vvitches and sorcerers; William Perkins, A Discourse of the damned art of witchcraft, (1610).

[viii] Hopkins, The discovery of vvitches, p. 2.

[ix] Wallace Notestein. A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, 127-129

[x] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene III

   

"Where God hath a temple, the [D]evil will have a chapel": Roman Catholics, Witches, and Fear of 'the Devil within'

 

This post began as a response to the oft-repeated questions I got from other academics and friends on how many Recusants were tried for witchcraft and/or what is the connection between witchcraft and Catholicism in early modern England?

Early in the English Civil War in 1642, anti-royalist and anti-papist mobs rioted in many towns and villages in the pro-parliamentarian counties of southern East Anglia. The riots were followed by organised iconoclasm and the largest witch-hunt in early modern England. I argue that violence against religious non-conformists, particularly Catholics, ‘superstitious’ idols, and witches were all rooted in a fear of the Devil working from within to subvert the godly community.^[i]

Malcolm Gaskill has suggested several other women in Suffolk were likely of different religious persuasions from the majority of their community – including being Catholic.^[ii] Although some of the accused witches may have been from Recusant families the accusations against them seem to bear a far greater resemblance to the template of Alan Macfarlane: accusations rose out of disputes between neighbours rather than that these women (and sometimes men) being targeted because of their religion.^[iii] I agree with the assessment of Francis Young that witch-hunting in England was never Catholic-hunting. Young argues that “there is no evidence that Catholics in England were ever accused of witchcraft in England (except in rhetorical fashion)”.^[iv] However, during the crisis of the Civil War there is an overlap between the communities that rioted against Catholics in 1642, and those that propelled the East Anglia trials in 1645.

The town of Long Melford in Suffolk has few claims to either fame or infamy for most people. However in the seventeenth century the town produced one of the most successful witchfinders of the seventeenth century. John Stearne was witchfinding partner of Matthew Hopkins, who would become far more infamous as ‘The Witchfinder General’. Stearne was a gentleman of some means, a committed protestant with perhaps an overtone of ‘Puritanism’, who became involved in the interrogations in Manningtree , in March 1645. Over the following three years he participated in or directed the interrogations of hundreds of women and men accused of witchcraft in the eastern counties of England.^[v]

Although the town I wish to discuss in today’s blog post, Long Melford, saw only one actual witch prosecuted (an elderly man called Alexander Sussums), it still makes for an interesting case study. The town and its surrounding area were one of the many pockets of godly religion in the eastern counties, yet it had a small, but well-supported catholic minority; it was the witchfinder John Stearne’s childhood home; was the site of anti-catholic rioting in 1642; and was almost at the geographic centre of Stearne’s area of interest in Suffolk, being just seven miles from his new home in Lawshall. Unlike his associate Matthew Hopkins who travelled from Essex to northern Norfolk, and across to Ely, Stearne’s activities in 1645 were concentrated near his home in Lawshall, and later in nearby regions of Ely, Norfolk and Huntingdonshire. Malcolm Gaskill suggests this may be in part because his young wife and baby were in Lawshall, and he had friends in the area who assisted his efforts.^[vi]

Long Melford’s major claim to fame in the Civil War period, is that it saw significant anti-Catholic riots in 1642. As John Walter has established in Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, these riots were in part directed at the eminent catholic Elizabeth Savage, Countess Rivers.^[vii] Savage had fled to Long Melford after her property in St Osyth, Essex, another community that would likewise experience witchfinding in 1645, was threatened. The riot in Long Melford severely damaged Countess Rivers house, and caused the Countess to send for assistance to the Earl of Warwick (amusingly both a Protestant and a Parliamentarian, as well as a judge in the Essex witch trials in 1645), who consequently sent his steward to rescue the Countess.

The pre-existing conditions in Long Melford were not unusual across the Eastern counties. The town experienced spasms of religious violence during the Civil War. From anti-papist riots to iconoclasm, to the visit of a witchfinder in the summer of 1645, towns like Long Melford could be described as undergoing a series of panics about the Devil’s sinister influence inside their community.

Of course panics about witches and papists were nothing new in England in the early modern period. There are, I think, three discernible peaks and troughs in the experience of local panics about both topics, which coincide with national political, religious, and military crises. This is not to suggest these threats were ever far from the minds of the Godly, but I think the periods at which these panics are heightened says something very interesting about the relationship between threats to the nation at large and local panics about the Devil within the community.^[viii]

In discussing the intermittent nature of panics about Catholics, Robin Clifton described a brief timeline of panics which could have been experienced by someone alive at the beginning of the Civil War.^[ix] There were panics in Sussex panic in 1596, and in Hampshire and Monmouthshire in 1605 – of course there was also the Gunpowder plot later that year. These were followed by a series of panics in Northumbria in 1613, and in the south east in 1625 (the year of Charles I accession), and then a few more scattered every so often up until the actual Catholic rebellion in Ireland in 1641. During the aftermath of the rebellion in Ireland fears about the internal Catholic threat in England were more pronounced than they had been since the sixteenth century, and fears about Irish Catholics joining forces with Royalists were perpetuated by accounts of Irish women wielding skeins accompanying the King’s army.^[x]

I would argue that the pamphlet material and English witch trial data suggests a co-relation between fear of external violence – from Catholic armies and/or rebellions – and fears about the presence of the Devil’s agents (whether witches or Catholics) inside the community.

As the home of John Stearne’s youth, Long Melford and its neighbouring villages make an interesting place to focus upon in a micro-study of the interplay of local and national concerns. Between the confession of Alexander Sussums and the writings of John Stearne, a picture of how both witches and Catholics were seen as a form of internal disease, a cancer if you will, which others felt needed to be cut out or removed in order to protect the godly from their influence, can be seen.

As John Stearne put it in 1649 “I have heard in some places … where popery and prophanenesse is, with contempt of Preaching or vile neglect thereof, there Witch-craft is most rife.”^[xi] Of course in 1645 the outbreak of the witch panic had been a source of satire for Royalists who joked at the godly counties of the Parliamentarian Eastern Association having ‘a plague of witches’, and noted the Bible's injunction from 1 Samuel 15:23 that ‘Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft’. An offended parliamentarian newsbook, A Diary, or an Exact Journall, responded to their mirth indignantly in 1645, proclaiming that while:

It is the ordinary mirth of the Malignants in this City to discourse of the Association of Witches in the Associated Counties, but by this they shall understand the truth of the old Proverbe which is, that where God hath his Church the Devill have his Chappell. To labour in to the depth of this Mistery of Iniquity, we must dive as low as Hell.^[xii]

The internal threat could often be narrowed down to particular people, from particular families; not only recusant families, but families whose disorder had threatened community stability, and/or who were accused or prosecuted for witchcraft. Alexander Sussums, an elderly man living in Long Melford meeting John Stearne in a local house, presumably where Stearne was staying during his work in the area, confessed without any questioning, or any accusations against him, to being a witch: “he confessed that he had things [meaning familiars] which did draw those marks I found upon him· but said he could not help it, for that all his kin[d]red were naught’.^[xiv] This comment on kindred who were naught is echoed in other trials in the 1640s where witches were either accused of having had relatives executed for witchcraft, or admitted to having mothers, sisters, uncles or cousins who were witches.^[xv]

Apart from the fear they evoked from their Godly neighbours, witches, like Catholics, could also suffer from a reputation established in previous generations. Like families locally ‘known’ to be recusant or ‘church papists’, families could have a reputation for witchcraft. John Stearne was clearly shocked by Alexander Sussums’ proclamation of his own diabolism and questioned him on his confession:

I asked him again why he should do it, when as God was so merciful towards him, as I then told him of, being a man whom I had been formerly acquainted withal, as having lived in Town. He answered again, He could not help it, for that all his generation was naught; and so told me his mother and aunt were hanged, his grandmother burnt for Witchcraft, and so others of them questioned and hanged.^[xvi]

This emphasis on a family ‘known’ for being of a dangerous sort is one of the more notable parallels between recusancy and witchcraft in early modern England.^[xvii] 

The context of Sussum’s confession to coming from a family that was ‘naught’, is one of religious contention. Clifton argued that “attacks on Catholics in the autumn of 1642… [indicate] that serious occurrences in national politics may have been understood in terms of a papist/anti-papist dichotomy.” In other words, national crises or national concerns could cause local outbreaks of persecution against Catholics. Given the rhetorical association between Catholics and witches during the Civil War, and the emphasis on the diabolic elements within Royalism (often equated with the King’s catholic supporters), heightened fears about witches in the same period seems almost inevitable.^[xviii]

Ian Gentles concluded in The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdomes, 1638-1652 that the outbreak of popular activism reflected Puritan Preaching that the “construction of a godly people reinforced the idea of an active citizenship”.^[xix] He concluded that the English revolution and the accompanying print revolution helped enlarge the role of popular activism in English politics, and that in 1642 this resulted in the outbreak of popular violence against Catholics and Royalists.

In 1645 local members of the communities across East Anglia undertook the watching of witches, and generally only once a confession had been obtained was the accused witch brought before a JP or magistrate. In many communities ministers were also actively involved in the process of extracting these confessions. However by mid 1645 parliament was concerned enough about this outbreak of popular witchfinding to send a special Commission of Oyer and Terminer to oversee the cases in Suffolk, including that of Alexander Sussums. It is interesting to note that this attempt to restore order was an echo of Parliament’s response to the anti-Catholic riots of 1642 – bringing the violence to an end and into the courtroom, rather than allowing the mob to continue to attack people and property.

By and large witches were punished for being witches, and Catholics were punished for being Catholics. However the two groups had significant similarities in the way in which they were conceptualised by their godly neighbours. Both were a form of ‘heresy’ to the majority of Protestants around them; both were seen to have passed down their secret and diabolic beliefs through their families; and both were seen as a danger to their community. So, while violence against Catholics and the prosecution of witches are certainly linked to the same underlying fears of their Protestant neighbours, there is little evidence that recusant Catholics or members of non-conformist Protestant communities were commonly accused of witchcraft in court. Many authors made rhetorical links between witchcraft and papacy, and later between witchcraft and Quakerism, but this did not, by and large, result in accusations and prosecution. That is not to say that religiously fractured communities weren’t a major source of witchcraft trials, just that the accusations themselves were not made because of someone’s religious denomination.

As for Alexander Sussums, the records of his trial have sadly been lost, and we only have fragments with which to reconstruct it. It appears he was tried by the Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer, along with nearly a hundred other accused witches, the majority of whom were found guilty, and hung for witchcraft. Fortunately in the case of Sussums, the Special Commission that Parliament had sent to Suffolk was not convinced. In spite of his confession, he was found not guilty.

The witchfinder John Stearne disgustedly recorded that “This man is yet living, notwithstanding he confessed the sucking of such things above sixteen yeers together, [and] was suspected for doing of mischief”.^[xx]

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[i] Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A seventeenth-century English tragedy, (London, 2005): p. 2

[ii] Note, One of the few cases which I have seen where a witches religion was openly discussed was in Wickham Skeith, Suffolk, in 1645. The local Minister Edward Willan – who was an indiscriminate persecuter of all sectaries, be they Leveller, Quaker, Familist or anything else – described one of the accused witches in his parish as an Anabaptist and ‘runner after the new sects’. See C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witch-Hunting and Witch Trials (1929): pp. 302– 3. See also Peter Elmer, ‘Saints or sorcerers: Quakerism, demonology and the decline of witchcraft in seventeenth-century England’, in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in Early Modern England: Studies in Culture and Belief, (Cambridge, 1996): pp. 176– 7.

[iii] See Gaskill’s coverage of the Elizabeth Tillott in Gaskill, Witchfinders, pp. 94-95; See also British Library, Add MS 27402, fos. 104–121: f. 107; Alan Macfarlane,

[iv] Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829, (Ashgate, 2013): 15.

[v] See John Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft, (London, 1648).

[vi] Gaskill, Witchfinders, p. 80.

[vii] John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press, 1999): pp. 38-39, 45-46; See also John Walter, 'Anti-Popery and the Stour Valley Riots of 1642' in David Chad, History of Religious Dissent in East Anglia, III (Norwich, 1996), p.121-40; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester University Press, 2006), p.133.

[viii] Note, The first peak in witch trials and witchcraft pamphlets could be generally described as matching the period from the Spanish Armada to the Popish plot -with a little lee way a few years either side. So there was a peak in witchcraft prosecutions from the 1580s to 1605 – though as I say there is considerable leeway either side of those dates.^[viii] Robin Clifton,  argued that ‘from time to time English towns and villages were swept by panic fears of “Catholic Plots” – most of them imaginary – to rebel and massacre protestants”.^[viii] Similarly, from time to time, communities would experience spasms of witch trials, usually small such as those in Essex in the 1580s and 90s, and sometimes larger, such as in Lancashire in 1612.The second period of sustained panic about both witches and popish plots, unsurprisingly coincides with the Civil Wars of the late 1630s, and lasts until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. And a final spasm of concern occurs in the late seventeenth century, with concerns over a catholic head of state, James II, with a succession crisis followed by the Glorious Revolution, and then unease about rebellion in Ireland and/or a French invasion in support of the ousted James II.

[ix] See Robin Clifton, ‘The popular fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, in Past & Present, 52 (1971).

[x] Note, the depiction of Irish women as sexually depraved, violent, and diabolic whores, was an established part of anti-papist propaganda that was intensified by Irish insurrection and fears about Catholic infiltration through the Irish ‘backdoor’. Irish Catholics were portrayed as the inverse of English Protestants – much as the witch was portrayed as the unnatural inverse of good motherhood. They were part of the binary that depicted the true church of England as the good wife of God, and the Catholic Church as the ‘Whore of Babylon’. Mary O’Dowd, ‘Women and War in Ireland in the 1640s’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O'Dowd (eds), Women in Early Modern Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p.96.See also Alexandra Walsham, ‘“This Newe Army of Satan”: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in Elizabethan England’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

[xi] Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft,  p. 2

[xii] Matthew Walbancke. A diary, or, An exact iovrnall faithfully communicating the most remarkable proceedings in both houses of Parliament (London, 24– 31 Jul. 1645), pp. 5– 6.

[xiii]

[xiv] Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft, p.36.

[xv] For example, Elizabeth Clarks who I discussed last week was described as having “[a] mother and some other of her kinsfolke did suffer death for Witchcraft and murther.” See ‘H.F.’ [Anon], A true and exact relation, p. 1.

[xvi] Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft, p. 36.

[xvii] Note, There is also the suggestion that ‘his grandmother burnt for witchcraft’, which is rather extraordinary given that only very special cases in which a witch had also committed the crime of petit treason, were burnt at the stake. In fact I know of only one case in Suffolk of a witch being burnt at the stake, and that was from the same trial as Alexander Sussums. So while it is highly unlikely she died in the way he described, it is possible she was executed for witchcraft, although I have so far not found no other Sussums (or any name like it) being executed for witchcraft.

[xviii] During the Second Battle at Newbury, in October 1644, it was reported that the Catholics of the King’s army had many witches amongst them, whom ‘Cromwell’s souldiers did plainly perceive to fly swiftly from one side of the [K]ing’s army to another’. The original pamphlet, which apparently made this claim, has not been found but it was quoted in the Royalist newsbook Mercvrivs Avlicvs. See [Anon], Mercvrivs Avlicvs, (27 October to 2 November, 1644). The Mercvrivs Avlicvs later mocked the witch-hunt in England, claiming that ‘we have also multitudes of witches among us ... More, I may well say, than ever this Island bred since the Creation. I speak it with horror. God guard us from the Devil, for I think he was never so busy upon any part of the Earth that was enlightened by the beams of Christianity; nor do I wonder at it, for there’s never a Cross left to fright him away.’ See [Anon], Mercvrivs Avlicvs (July 13 to July 20 1645).

[xix] Ian Gentles concluded in The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdomes, 1638-1652, (Abingdon, 2014): p. 139.

[xx] Stearne, A Confirmation And Discovery of Witch-Craft, pp.36-37

*I presented a longer version of this at the Australian Historical Association conference in 2014.