7 - The Call Goes Out

For a full century following the appearance of Malleus Maleficarum, witches were both prosecuted and persecuted with increasing severity along the established lines. New territories were often opened more rapidly than witchcraft could be stamped out in old, hence the craze was constantly on the rise. Add to that the zeal of new witch hunters who were naturally eager to outdo their predecessors and the results were just about what should 'have been expected.

Where Sprenger and Kramer had been inclined to show fair play toward persons accused of witchcraft on the evidence of a lone witness, or sometimes no more than two, later writers felt that such a limitation was like playing into the hands of the Devil himself. What was more, they cited cases to prove their point, such as those attributed to Bartolomeo de Spina, whose book on witchcraft appeared in the year 1523.

One case involved a man who was discovered drunk in a ducal wine cellar and would probably have been accused of attempted robbery if he hadn't come up with a more plausible story. He claimed that he had seen his wife preparing for a witches' sabbat, so he had copied her procedure to find out where she went. He had landed amid the witches in the wine cellar, so alarming them that they had taken off in a body. Unable to find his way from the cellar, he had been drinking to drown his fear of their return. The poor man was cleared of theft and his wife was burned as the witch she must have been.

The other instance concerned an innocent young girl from Bergamo, who was surprised in the bed of a married man in Venice. Her only mistake had been watching her mother smear herself with flying ointment and, seeing how well it worked, she had done the same. Her flight landed her in the house in Venice where her mother was about to murder the man's child, but flew off when she realized she was discovered. They burned the girl's mother.

Considering the ease with which de Spina could shunt the blame on witches, it is not surprising that he and his associates were credited with burning at least a hundred witches in the area of Como during that same year, 1523 ; and that he estimated that during the next year, one thousand were burned throughout Northern Italy.

To say that witch burning was spreading like wildfire through France at this period would be putting it almost literally, for according to one authority, fires for the execution of witches blazed in almost every town. In Piedmont, so many witches were said to have been burned that, in one township, every family lost at least one member. Any rebellions that did break out were the exceptions rather than the rule, because the people were so steeped in ignorance and superstition that the closer witchcraft came to home, the more real it seemed.

In addition to relaxing the laws on witnesses, new types of testimony were allowed, all to the discomfort of suspected witches. New and improved modes of torture were introduced, so that the "gentler" sort once recommended in Malleus Maleficarum became nonexistent. Preliminary forms of torture were apparently introduced as mere routine prior to the initial questioning of a suspect, but no mention was made of it in the records, so the confessions were classed as voluntary.

Another point on which Sprenger and Kramer had been sticklers, namely the appointment of an advocate for the defense, was overruled by the more ardent witch hunters. To side with a suspect could mean becoming the Devil's advocate as well, since he was the only witness upon whom a witch would really rely. That explained, too, why one member of a family would turn against another, just for safety's sake.

An account of one French trial tells how a group of women, including a few who were young and beautiful, were accused of having joined a witches' dance at midnight under a blasted oak, where they had been recognized by creditable people. The husbands of the women insisted that, at the time specified, their wives were comfortably asleep in their arms; but it was to no avail.

The husbands were told that they had been deceived by the Devil and their own senses. They might have had the semblance of their wives in their beds, but actually they were far away at the Devil's dance beneath the oak. Hearing that from men in authority, the husbands were so confounded that they stood by while their wives were burned as witches. Oddly, it may never have occurred to them to ask why creditable people should have been snooping around a blasted oak at midnight hoping to see a witches' dance.

The quaint town of Verneuil, seventy miles west of Paris, site of a famous battle between the English and French in 1424, became briefly famous again in 1561, when five local witches were found guilty of changing themselves into cats and attending a sabbat, where they danced on the back of the Devil, who was present in the shape of a huge goat. They were burned, of course.

Three years later, a witch and three wizards suffered the same fate after confessing under torture that they had also worshipped the Devil in the form of a goat. But their crime was far worse, for they had prepared deadly ointments at his direction and had smeared them on sheep pens in order to kill the sheep. Unquestionably, many crimes were committed in which witchcraft served as a contributory factor; but those only spurred the witch hunters on in their quest for victims, whether guilty or innocent.

Exaggerated claims by witches often brought drastic results, as was the case of a master wizard named Trois Echelles, who was burned in Paris in 1571. Before his execution, he boasted that he had twelve hundred accomplices and that the total number of witches in France exceeded one hundred thousand. He revealed the names of his alleged confederates and thereby started a full-fledged witch hunt of his own.

Whether Trois Echelles was hoping to incriminate some of his enemies through false charges or was merely making a show of bravado so that he could go out in grand style, the net result was the same. His descriptions of sacrifices to the Devil, the debaucheries committed with youthful witches, the unguents that they prepared for the destruction of men and beasts, simply fanned the flames of fanatacism still higher.

One country that enjoyed immunity from the witch craze at this period was Sweden. There, although the power of witchcraft was recognized, it was evidently somewhat respected. In 1563, during the early stages of a seven-year war with Denmark, four witches were employed as secret weapons by King Eric XIV of Sweden, who apparently wanted them to raise storms that would wreck the powerful Danish fleet. If so, the results were disappointing, for Denmark came out ahead in the long, though somewhat futile, struggle.

Eric himself became so deranged in 1567 that he could have been regarded as personally bewitched. He fancied that his brother John was reigning in his stead and when he temporarily recovered his reason the next year, he issued a proclamation ordering a general thanksgiving for his delivery from the attacks of the Devil, further evidence of his belief in witchcraft. Later, he relapsed and was soon deposed by his brother John.

By curious coincidence, when Eric became King of Sweden, due to the sudden death of his father in 1560, he was about to embark for England, hoping to marry Queen Elizabeth I. He never did, but they had a mutual belief in witchcraft. In 1563, while Eric was hiring his storm-makers, Elizabeth was issuing a statute against witchcraft in England, to open an era of persecution.

Politics vied with superstition in producing that edict. Elizabeth became Queen of England in 1558 and early in her reign, a wax image in her likeness was found with a pin thrust through its heart in Lincoln Inn's Field in London. In 1562, a plot was uncovered to kill Queen Elizabeth, so that Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and next in succession to the English crown, could rule in her stead. Two of the conspirators were definitely charged with employing witchcraft toward their deadly purpose.

That helped trigger the witchcraft statute the next year; and an act against fantastic prophecies was included. That was partly because a prophetic poet of three centuries earlier, Thomas the Rhymer, had predicted that a French Queen would have a son who would rule all Britain. Some of the Rhymer's verses had been fulfilled; and it so happened that Mary Stuart had married King Francis II in 1558 and they had been crowned King and Queen of France a year later. When Francis died in 1560, Mary returned to Scotland and although she had no children, she was contemplating another marriage. So there was a chance she might have a son and become the "Queen of France" meant by the Rhymer's forecast.

Mary Stuart did marry again and she did have a son, who was proclaimed King of Scotland when she was forced to abdicate in 1567. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, he became King of England as well, and the prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer was fulfilled. By then, it was no longer Elizabeth's concern, but she had experienced plenty of scares during the intervening years. Plots against her life had been frequent, often with witchcraft involved to some degree.

One notable instance was the discovery, in 1578, of three wax images representing the queen and two of her courtiers; these bore mystic symbols and were stuck with sharp bristles. In 1580, a man was arrested for merely making a wax image of Elizabeth; and another case cropped up in 1589. In 1587, Mary Stuart was executed on trumped up charges of plotting against Elizabeth's life; and when Ferdinando Stanley, son of one of the judges, died suddenly in 1594, witchcraft again was suspect of rearing its ugly head.

Ferdinando was the fifth Earl of Derby and he suffered from a week of violent stomach ailments which no physicians could correctly diagnose until they found a wax image, hidden in the bedroom, with hair resembling the earl's twisted within the figure. Such evidence of witchcraft merely served to increase its potency, for the earl's condition became worse after he saw the image and within a few days after it was burned, in hope of destroying the witch, the earl died.

In the light of later opinion, the image could have been purposely planted to draw attention from a poison plot against the earl; if that was the case, it was doubly efficacious in that it played upon the victim's mind as well as his body. Such was the grip that belief in witchcraft held upon the public of that day; and the higher the rank, the greater the fear. Hence it was only logical that the queen, as prime target of all plotters, would encourage any law that discouraged witchcraft.

Unfortunately, the repercussions among the lowly were greater than in court circles. That wasn't too hard to understand, considering that any commoner accused of witchcraft would automatically gain a distinction that until then had been reserved almost exclusively for the nobility. That was proven in 1556, just three years after promulgation of the witchcraft statute, when Elizabeth Francis was brought to trial in an Essex town, on rather vague charges of bewitching a neighbor's infant son. Apparently, the woman thought she was a witch, or wanted to be a witch. Either way, it was enough for people to suspect that she really was a witch. So she revelled in the distinction and came up with a story that was to make history, and also make a lot of misery for a lot of people, herself included.

In her poor, pitiful, but forthright way, Elizabeth Francis became the prototype of a modern LSD inspired dropout, mugging a TV camera in defiance of the existing Establishment. The difference was that in her day, it was the Elizabethan Establishment, for the coincidence of the name "Elizabeth" must have occurred to the superstitious judges and to her superstitious self as well, to say nothing of super-superstitious Queen Elizabeth I.

Eliminating such technicalities, Elizabeth Francis really went to town. The big reason she was considered to be a witch, outside of the way she mumbled, cursed, or cast a mean eye, as about everybody else in Essex was doing in those days, was this: Her grandmother had been a witch.

Good thinking, that. It was a known fact that witches breed witches, though nobody had really admitted it, because until then, witches had been a subject of whispers, not talk. So that left it for Mrs. Francis to prove, which she did, before the judges of her day. She did it just as happily as if she were extolling the Chicago Seven before the Supreme Court of the United States. What was more, she sold it.

She claimed that her dear old grandmother had initiated her into the sorority of witchery when she was only twelve years old by giving her a white-spotted cat named Sathan. She didn't specify whether the cat was black with white spots, or white with black spots; nor did she emphasize that the name "Sathan" might have been interpreted as "Satan." She left that for the judges to decide and, as customary in such cases, they decided against her.

However, once Mrs. Francis had established Sathan as an entity, there was no stopping her. Sathan, it turned out, was a talking cat, who asked her, in a deep hollow tone, just what she wanted; and when she told him, Sathan went out and got it for her, just like that.

Sathan brought her a flock of sheep, some white, some black, possibly to match his own markings. What happened to them, she didn't know, because by then she was more interested in the prospective husband that the clever cat produced for her. After he abused her, but then refused to marry her, she complained to Sathan, who touched the reluctant lover with his paw and caused him to wither away and die. Thinking that she might have a child as a result of this brief union, she again asked Sathan's advice and the fantastic feline recommended a special preparation which she concocted, drank, and put a prompt end to her problem.

Sathan next beguiled Christopher Francis into marrying her, but either would not, or could not, guarantee them domestic tranquility. Six months after the birth of a daughter, Mrs. Francis tired of her husband's cursing and the baby's howling, so she appealed to Sathan for further aid. The cat obliged by causing the child to die, but when that failed to bring quiet to the household, Mrs. Francis urged Sathan to take direct action against her obstreperous husband.

Obligingly, the cat transformed itself into a toad and squatted in one of Christopher's shoes. When the man touched the squirmy thing with his toe, he was so shocked that he went suddenly lame and remained so for a dozen years, up to the time of his wife's trial for witchcraft. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Francis had decided to dispose of Sathan, one good reason being that the cat, in order to fulfill a wish, invariably demanded that she prick herself with a pin, so that she could feed it a goodly supply of her blood along with its regular diet of bread and milk.

Mrs. Francis showed the judges pin marks that she had carried on her body from years back and told how one day she had swapped the cat for a cake cooked by an older woman called Mother Waterhouse, who was intrigued by Sathan's wish-granting powers. Mother Waterhouse was also charged with witchcraft and gladly told the judges how she often assigned tasks to the talented tabby; and she, too, showed pin marks to prove it.

Mother Waterhouse had enjoined her familiar to kill three pigs belonging to a troublesome neighbor; and after that, three geese owned by a neighbor she disliked even more. When a brewery made too much noise at night, Sathan soured its product so that Mother Waterhouse could sleep. He afflicted one mean neighbor with a lingering malady from which he died, so Mother Water-house had Sathan do the same with her own husband, of whom she had tired.

Mrs. Francis had kept Sathan in a basket, but Mother Water-house, finding that inconvenient, had managed to have him switch permanently from his form of a cat into that of a toad, so he could live in a pot instead. But her daughter, Joan, who was eighteen, admitted calling upon Sathan to annoy a twelve-year-old girl named Agnes Brown and he had assumed the shape of a huge black dog in order to accomplish that mission.

Joan Waterhouse, too, was charged with witchcraft and little Agnes Brown, who had been either lamed or partly paralyzed by her frightening experience, was called upon as a key witness. Not to be outdone, she added still more fanciful details, giving the shaggy dog a face like an ape's, a pair of horns like a devil's and a silver whistle which he carried on a chain around his neck. The young girl quoted dialogues between herself and the weird creature, in which she countered all his fiendish threats with pious responses, until he admitted that he belonged to Mother Water-house. That satisfied the court.

Under the terms of the Elizabethan Act, anyone causing death through witchcraft was to suffer the death penalty as punishment, so Mother Waterhouse, by her own admissions, was declared guilty of that charge and hanged a few days later. Her daughter Joan, who had only tried her hand once, and even then might have been ignorant of what would result, was acquitted. Mrs. Francis was convicted on the lesser charge of having used witchcraft to do harm, which carried the comparatively mild penalty of a year's imprisonment for a first offender. Possibly her admissions of causing death were doubted; or the fact that such deaths dated back before the passage of the act may have worked in her favor.

Anyway, her luck didn't hold. A few years later, she again meddled in harmful witchcraft and received another year's sentence, though the edict allowed the death penalty for a second offender. After a few more years, she had another try, was caught and summarily hanged as a third offender.

This case is deserving of detailed mention as it set an insidious pattern for the witch mania that followed. Superficially, it seemed fair and liberal; but there can be no fairness or liberality where prejudice and superstition are involved. Throughout the European continent, standardized questions, based on inquisitorial concepts, had given most witch hunts a stereotyped status. Apparently, English lawmakers thought that by letting the alleged witches speak for themselves, an impartial verdict could be reached. Yet often they condemned themselves voluntarily by echoing the stupid beliefs in which they, like their accusers, were so deeply steeped.

That happened even though physical tortures were banned in England and mental panic was lessened because the death penalty was hanging, not burning. Alleged pacts with the Devil were uncommon among English witches of the period; rather, they were suspected of harboring familiars, or imps, not just as cats, toads or dogs, but in the shape of lambs, rabbits, skunks and even spiders or flies, as well as imaginary monsters. These were suckled on witch's blood, so any peculiar marks or blemishes on a witch's body were evident of such.

This put all the more burden of proof on persons accused of witchcraft and when children became prime witnesses in trials and let their imaginations run riot, almost anything could happen. In many instances, both accusations and evidence were so preposterous and self-contradictory, even in that unenlightened era, that acquittals resulted; but far from being a good sign, that in itself was a highly deceptive factor. Enough new angles were being steadily admitted to increase the number of accusations and rouse the public to a greater fervor against witchcraft in general.

At a mass trial of Essex witches in 1582, one woman was accused by her stepdaughter, age eight, of keeping two toads as familiars, one black, the other white, named Tom and Robin respectively. Not to be outdone, another girl of seven told the judges that her mother kept six blackbirds as familiars, with six more in reserve. As many as eighteen persons were accused in this all-out witch hunt; and some were executed, though estimates vary as to the exact number.

At a third such trial in 1589, an eleven-year-old boy and his younger brother supplied the evidence needed to hang their old grandmother; two others were convicted on equally flimsy evidence. All three were executed in less than two hours after they were sentenced, establishing some sort of a record; and all three were named Joan. That may have set a precedent, because a modern commentator on witchcraft has pointed out that over the years the mortality rates on Joans has been far higher than that of any other name.

All this and more will be summarized later. But at present, we are still concerned with the rise of the witchcraft craze in England, which so far had hardly hit its stride.