Alexander
Roberts, ‘Preacher of God’s word at Kings Lynn in Norfolk’ produced his A
treatise of witchcraft Wherein sundry propositions are laid downe, plainely
discovering the wickednesse of that damnable art …With a true narration of the
witchcrafts which Mary Smith, wife of Henry Smith glover, did practise: of her
contract vocally made between the Deuill and her, in solemne termes, by whose
meanes she hurt sundry persons whom she envied (etc) in 1616. It is an
interesting composite of brief demonological treatise and a reportorial
pamphlet occasioned by a particular case in which he had had a personal
involvement.
The work is not,
of course, ‘original’; it offers no new opinions; Roberts is doctrinaire rather
than insightful. But as he was a conscientious and learned man, he wrote a
highly symptomatic book. In the first place, it is the form of his treatise
that is indicative. Any demonological tract, when written with application,
tended to be a text surrounded by side-notes. Roberts has not reached the condition
of some of the more massive works, where a window of authorial text sits inside
a square fortress of citation.
But his annotation is thorough enough to be
eloquent of a text made out of derived opinions, an argument sustained by its
sources.
The overall
structure is also one of an enwrapped account: the disaster which overtook the
quarrelsome and needle-tongued Mary Smith is told in a set of plain text pages,
preceded by seven lengthily expounded and much-annotated ‘propositions’ about
witchcraft advanced by Roberts, and followed by two more ‘propositions or
corollaries’. Any witchcraft tract is made up by accretion: confirmatory
opinions, various witnesses, individually incredible stories that, together,
confirm an unlikely truth. One of demonology’s enfolded narratives was its own
counter-discourse, and here, though Reginald Scot is either not known to
Roberts or was avoided, Johan Weyer pops up repeatedly. He’s there to be
confuted, of course, a voice of unreason amongst so many witnesses to the
truth. But then, what curious witnesses they are! Roberts naturally uses first the
standard bible texts, but (as a learned man of his age would do), he then multiplies
examples from what he calls the ‘gentiles’ – a whole anthology of enchantresses
in the classical world from Homer’s Circe onwards. Roberts means to reinforce
his opinion about the veracity of witchcraft by the unstated ‘no smoke without
fire’ tactic behind this and all such accumulations. But assembling the kind of
stories people have told one another merely witnesses the general way in which
people like stories. Such fictionality witnesses something in us, not in
reality. Roberts, a bookish man, clearly cannot resist books: they have an
authenticity to him, an authority worth repeating no matter (in the end) what
they are, provided they are revered enough.
Out of the usual
defensive welter of the demonologist (for witchcraft belief was always
sandbagging itself against disbelief, and this work is just a conspicuous
example of that) emerges the unlucky Mary Smith, a shrewd and shrewish woman
with ‘a tongue like a tang’. She was perhaps smart enough to spot the symptoms of
conditions that the people she cursed so accurately were concealing from
themselves. In a later age she might have been a brilliant diagnostician, or at
the least an astute health visitor. Anyway, if the people she crosses are starting
to show their age or fray in health, she voices it sharply, her malediction
foresees the worst possible outcome for the sufferer.
A sailor, John
Orkton, struck her son, so she “wished in a most earnest and bitter manner,
that his fingers might rotte off”. Whatever symptom of disease she had noted
and used to give force to her curse, after nine months, “his fingers did
corrupt, and were cut off; as also his toes putrefied & consumed in a very
strange and admirable manner”. Mary
Smith then took pleasure, it seems, in her astute observation: the “malitious
woman, who long before openly in the streets, (whenas yet the neighbours knew
of no such thing) rejoicing at the calamity, said, Orkton now lieth a rotting”.
A similar victim
was Cicely Bailey, who provoked Mary Smith by sweeping in a manner Smith
considered offensive to her (I should imagine that the direction in which the dirt
was flicked was involved): “Mary Smith began
to pick a quarrel … and said unto her she was a great fat-tailed sow, but that
fatness should shortly be pulled down and
abated. And the next night being Sunday immediately following, a Cat came unto
her, sat upon her breast, with which she was grievously tormented, and so
oppressed, that she could not without great difficulty draw her breath, and at
the same instant did perfectly see the said Mary in
the chamber where she lay, who (as she conceived) set that Cat upon her, and
immediately after fell sick, languished, and grew exceeding lean; and so
continued for the space of half a year together…”
Cicely Bailey did finally escape,
and back at work in service to a master who lives outside Mary’s operating
radius, recovered (one can imagine) her comfortably fat tail. The cat is the
interesting thing here. All too clearly Mary Smith found her neighbours
intolerably irksome. But she loved her cat, in a way we’d all recognize and
understand. But in the age of demonology, part of the evidence against her was her
victim Cicely’s account (and 17th century building standards feature
here) of peeping through a crack in the partition between the house she
inhabited and Mary Smith’s bedroom. The cat, off duty from oppressing plethoric
Cicely (“the Divel being willing to apprehend and take hold upon such an
occasion, that so he might do some pleasing office his bond-slave”) is being
caressed: “whom she adored in submiss manner, upon her knees, with strange
gestures, uttering many murmuring, broken, and imperfect speeches, as
this Cicely did both hear and see, there being no other partition
between the chamber wherein she performed these rites, and the house of her master
with whom she then dwelt, but only a thin seeling of board, through a cranny or
rift whereof she looked, listened attentively unto her words, and beheld diligently
her behaviour, and might have seen and heard much more, but that she was with
the present spectacle so affrighted, that she hastened down in much fear and
distemper.”
The cat, identified by Roberts with the devil, was attacked
by a neighbour with sword and pikestaff. It still managed, maimed, to get away
and die somewhere. Mary Smith subsequently accuses the neighbour of having
killed her cat, but Roberts opts to ignore her knowledge of its death to play
up the supernatural quality of its apparent survival: “a great Cat which kept with this Witch (of whose infernal
both purposes and practises wee now speak) frequented their house; and upon doing
some scathe, her husband moved therewith, thrust it twice through with his
sword: which notwithstanding those wounds received, ran away: then he stroke it
with all his force upon the head with a great pike staff, yet could not kill
her; but she leapt after this upward almost a yard from the boards of that
chamber where she now was, and crept down: which he perceiving, willed his lad
(a boy of fourteen years) to drag her to the muck-hill, but was not able; and
therefore put her into a sack, and being in the same, still moved and stirred.
Whereupon they put her out again, and cast her under a pair of stairs,
purposing in the morning, to get more help, and carry her away; but then could
not be found, though all the doors that night were locked, and never heard what
afterward became thereof.”
A silkman, John
Mason, tried to call in a debt from Mary’s husband. After “some execrations
and curses being wished unto him, within three or foure days (being then gone
to Yarmouth in Norfolk upon necessary business) there fell sick, and was
tortured with exceeding and massacring griefs”. Mary has managed to trigger stress
enough to affect him. We are told that his condition did finally improve when
“this mischievous woman was
committed to prison … at which time (so near as he could conjecture) he then
received some release of his former pains, though at the present when he made
this relation, which was at Candlemas last past, had not perfectly recovered
his wonted strength: for his left hand remained lame, and without use.” So Mason
sounds like a slowly-recovering stroke victim, a man who’d been in a poor state
of health and who had just needed agitated alarm.
I know that I am
sounding like Edward Bever on the efficacy of witchcraft, and maybe this post
can be thought of as a response to his book, which I had out of the library just
long enough to gallop through perhaps a third of the work before some other
reader requisitioned the work. But one Elizabeth Hancock, after a quarrel about
a hen, goes the same way as Mason, Mary triggers a psychosomatic collapse: “whereupon,
breaking forth in some violence, she wished the pox to light upon her, and
named her proud [h]inny, prowde flurts, and shaking the hand,
bade her go in, for she should repent it; and the same night, within three or
foure hours after these curses and imprecations uttered, she was taken and
pinched at the heart.”
Elizabeth Hancock
suffers a ‘sodaine weaknesse in all the parts of her body’, but with no loss of
appetite. Every time she feels a little better, she gets some fresh air by leaning
on the open-air stall in her house and shop. And, every time she is seen there,
Mary Smith puts more the pressure on her: “whom this Marie
Smith seeing, did ever ban, adding the former curse,
the pox light upon you, can you yet come to the door?” After three weeks
of this, there’s a climactic episode:
“and at the end
of these three weeks, being but very weak, came forth as she used to do, to
take the ayre, this mischievous woman most bitterly cursed her again, whereupon
she went into the house, fell into such a torturing fit, and nipping at the
heart, that she fainted, hardly recoverable for the space of half an hour, and
so grievously racked and tormented through all parts of her body, as if the
very flesh had been torn from the bones, by the violent pain whereof she could
not refrain, but tore the hair from off her head.”
Elizabeth,
convinced that she is the victim of Mary Smith’s effective curse, plays the
part of witch’s victim with great energy. One doubts that there was much wrong
with her, her appetite remained good. But she is getting three weeks in bed,
lots of attention, and if she can get Mary Smith incriminated for witchcraft,
then convicted and hanged, the witch will lose her power, and Elizabeth wins
the quarrel.
With this
forceful and unpleasant personality, and victims either willing to act out the
part assigned them or exhibiting symptoms of a more advanced stage of their
illness, it was in the end easy enough for Mary to believe in her own malign
powers.
Roberts as minister
got to know her in her last days, and says he will be “sparing by anie amplification
to enlarge this” but will “nakedly rehearse the truth, and number of her own
words unto me.”
From Roberts,
Smith learned how to analyse her experience in the right demonological way: her
first surrender to the devil, who “appeared unto her amidst these
discontentments, in the shape of a black man,
and willed that she should continue in her malice, envy, hatred, banning and cursing;
and then he would be revenged for her upon all those to whom she wished evil:
and this promise was uttered in a low murmuring and hissing voice” (Roberts makes a point of this, that the devil "cannot so perfectly represent the fashion of a man's
body, but that there is some sensible deformity, by which he bewrayeth
himself ... as in his body assumed, so in his speech there is a
defect, for it is weak, small, whispering, imperfect."
Mary was executed
on January 12th, 1616, in very “distemperate” weather. They clearly
wanted to postpone the business to a better day, offering up as an excuse the
notion that she might be brought to acknowledge more of her crimes, but Mary
was not minded to oblige them “which she in no wise would condescend unto
should be deferred”.
Despite the
weather, a large crowd gathered, and Mary took control of the proceedings. As
before, when she was considered to be an associate of the devil, she’d
thoroughly convinced people that such were her real powers, so at the end she managed
to play up to their ideology forcefully enough to give the impression that she
was, despite everything, on her way to heaven:
“she in
particular manner confessed openly at the place of execution, in the audience
of multitudes of people gathered together (as is usual at such times) to be
beholders of her death. And made there also profession of her faith, and hope
of a better life hereafter; and the means whereby she trusted to obtain the
same, as before, hath been specified. And being asked, if she would be contented
to have a Psalm sung, answered willingly that she desired the same, and
appointed it herself, The
Lamentation of a Sinner, whose
beginning is, Lord turn not
away thy face, &c. And
after the ending thereof thus finished her life: So that in the judgment of
charity we are to conceive the best, and think she resteth in peace,
notwithstanding her heinous transgressions formerly committed.”
