La Devineresse, 1679

La Jobin and the Marquis, with body parts falling down the chimney

La Divineresse, ou les faux Enchantements was a play first performed in 1679, created by the younger Corneille (Thomas) and Jean Donneau de Visé.

My purpose here is to try to read this text against texts which are far more familiar to me, the Jacobean and Caroline witch plays. One first finding instantly suggests itself - just as Heywood and Brome converted the cruelly credited accusations and the slow-moving central process to resolve the 1633-4 Lancashire case into a ‘merry and excellent’ comedy, so Corneille and his co-adjutor opted to write a comedy, one that is as free as possible from polemic, or from promoting any metaphysical alarm. 

King Charles might have found a model for state intervention in local witchcraft trials and verdicts (as happened in 1634) either in some of the later actions of his father, or from learning of processes abroad, specifically in France. Across the channel, if provincial courts passed guilty verdicts in witchcraft trials, the Parlement de Paris would overturn these verdicts. Witchcraft remained an uncontested verity: but the central authorities would quench or nullify all local action about particular instances of it.

Then, in ‘the affair of the poisons’, sorcery was discovered to be happening in Paris, and at Versailles. Ian Bostridge suggests that the surviving documents perhaps give us access into a world of ‘elite’ witchcraft. Privileged clients, male and female, were apparently willing to credit a wide range of paranormal powers and pay to have them harnessed to their desires. La Bosse, La Voisin, La Vigoreaux and other practitioners seem to have been dispensing love philtres, fortune-telling (by palmistry, mainly), and selling all kinds of charms and amulets. These ‘sorceresses’ also seem to have been the agents for more dangerous services. The double moral weight of Louis’ authoritarianism and that the church seem to have promoted recourse in some people to acts of desecration, in having black masses performed. For women in trouble with unwanted pregnancies, La Voisin facilitated abortions, then illegal. Switching to the other obvious category of person a woman might desperately want to be rid of, these urban wise women offered methods of causing husbands who refused to die to depart with a more convenient speed - either by magic purportedly promoting this desired effect, or by poison. La Bosse was conclusively proved by an entrapment to deal in poison. Numbers of female clients were susceptible to this fantasy of murder with responsibility as it were magically transferred to its facilitators.

As with Simon Forman and the Countess of Essex in London forty years before, credulity and cruel desperation reached to the top of the social ladder. Louis XIV’s chief investigator, La Reynie, was soon eliciting (by ‘enhanced interrogation’, as the Pentagon might say) from the arrested ‘sorceresses’ and their associates, the names of people from the highest social circles, including the Sun King’s own former maitresse en titre, Madame de Montespan. The story concocted was predictable (being the kind of thing that was said about the Earl of Somerset and James I): that she had won his love in the first place by magic, had subsequently tried to regain it by more magic, and that she had a hand in the death of a rival, the Duchess of Fontanges, when that occured right in the middle of the poisons affair.

As soon as aristocrats were named, Louis had set about a cover up - all testimonies naming courtiers, and records of the questioning of those courtiers who did not flee the scene rather than testify, were to be kept by his investigator La Reynie on separate sheets of paper. A coherent and continuous account of the evidence against the expendables, without obvious redactions, could then be produced. Famously, when the king finally called off the whole investigation, he personally burned all the evidence against the favoured denizens of his Versailles - that La Reynie had made copies was unknown to him, and from their rediscovery comes the knowledge scholars have of these murky events and allegations.

And so, in a Paris gripped, mortified, appalled by these findings (for elite Parisian gossip served as effectively as Twitter might do now, and names leaked out from the ‘Chambre Ardente’ hearings despite everything), and when ten expendable persons had already been put to death, the play, La Divineresse was performed. Like The Late Lancashire Witches, it was well-timed, and a great success. Its lengthy series of 175 performances was rather more like what we’d understand nowadays as a good theatre run than the wonder of three consecutive afternoons which was the exceptional achievement of the Heywood-Brome play.

Poisons? Abortions? Black masses and acts of desecration? Non, non, et non! Against a background of wild stories - many of which probably originated with wretched people under torture trying to prolong their own lives by naming aristocrats as their former clients - and operations of the melodramatic court, that newly-revived ‘Chambre Ardente’ - black-draped, flambeau-lit, inquisatorial and (notionally) secret, Donneau and Corneille opted for a drawing room / quack’s consultation room comedy. There is no black magic here: there is only macabre fraud and gullibility. They recommend their piece as highly didactic, salutory, a helpful exposure of the realities of professed practitioners of magic.

Their play is described critically as a pièce à tiroirs, a chest of drawers, as La Jobin’s clients (like those of Jonson’s Alchemist) arrive one by one. Each embedded scene contains its own little set of contents. The diablèrie is in the heads of the clients. La Jobin is lucid, acute, and, when not entire in control, a brilliant improviser. She is assisted by subordinates, who, to impress new clients, say and hint far more about their mistress’s dark powers than she herself does. La Jobin plays up to their expectations while parting them from their money.

Besides the very expressive pièce à tiroirs designation, La Divineresse is also described as thèâtre de machine, a play reliant on spectacle or stage machinery. La Jobin, nothing else but a charlatan and a cheat, has at her command the illusionistic and personnel resources of a theatre. At moments in Jonson’s Alchemist, belief in the project seems to rub off from the clients onto Subtle, who will start talking about the ‘Great Art’ as if he believed in it in some part of his mind separate from knowledge of his own utter fraudulence. Madame Jobin has no such deviations from clear-sightedness. She is a bland promise-making machine - as soon as she knows what the client wants (and one truly believing customer can barely be brought to utter what it is, so confident is she in the supernatural insight a sorceress has to have), La Jobin is ready with assurances. A commercial fairy-godmother, she will condescend to grant the wishes of each client: an ointment that will peel away ugliness from a woman, and then a syrup that will which enable her to sing like an opera singer. A magical hand-grip upon a rapier, the little finger held just so to make the charm operative, that will give the war-loving coward M. Gilet invulnerability. (His enthusiam to show his courage has finally to be reined in with a caution that he must be mindful that she has performed the same service for other men, who also bear charmed lives). One woman client wants larger breasts (and breast augmentation certainly seems to have been part of La Voisin’s stock-in-trade). A male client called La Giraudiere seeks the ability to have sex with any woman he desires. After he has filled the purse of a masquerade devil, La Jobin’s establishment extends to a procession of the women he will have. She barely leaves the stage to make what would be in realistic terms very hasty arrangements for this parade. La Giraudiere is artfully led to understand that he will get to have these women only after six months or maybe more, the spirits involved in such a powerful spell being very difficult to win over.

The main plot strand of the play involves three characters. Madame Noblet comes closest to the realities of the poisons scandal: she wants her old husband out of the way, and for La Jobin to prevent the possible marriage to a countess of the marquis she has decided on as his successor. The countess (of Astragon), in her turn, will only marry the marquis if he can prove to her that La Jobin is a fraud. Despite La Jobin deploying her most elaborate effects to convince him, he perseveres, and eventually succeeds.

Madame Jobin’s business repeatedly involves convincing a woman who is reluctant to marry, or to re-marry, that a suitor really loves her, and only her. The fortune-teller as go-between and match-maker is familiar enough from the kind of accusations made about William Lilly’s manipulation of clients by prediction. In Act 2, a Marquise is convinced of La Jobin’s abilities by witnessing bodily swelling pass from one of her accomplices to another (Julia Prest seems to think this is an oblique allusion to the abortions La Voisin arranged. If this demonstration hints at a pregnancy, it ludicrously transfers to a man). Once she has been convinced, the Marquise is told that she will see her husband-to-be in a magical mirror (this stage property is initially curtained off). Beyond a sheet of what may in performance have been smoked glass, the sorceress has positioned her male client. A love-letter is sent, with an instant delivery and reply accomplished, rather as in ‘Harry Potter’, by means of ‘une maniere de Chat-huan qu’elle a la-dedans’. The Marquise sees the paranormally-delivered letter she has just written arrive; and then she sees a reply being written, and sent by owl-post, so that it falls to her from above.

Later, and more strikingly, a Monsieur Troufignac from Perigord arrives late in the action. His wife has left him, and he wants magic to bring her back. ‘Donnez-moi sept pièces d’or pour les offrir a l’Esprit qui m’amènera votre femme’. No nonsense about offering the spirit your soul, or blood from your body. Only money counts. He cavils at the price: how about four gold pieces? Haven’t you ever heard, she asks him, that seven is a mystical number? This he reluctantly concedes.

La Jobin is reflecting in soliloquy on how how many fools there are, who make her wise in spite of herself, when he re-enters, with news that he has just seen his wife arrive outside, dressed as a man (and he allows that he’s very impressed by the speed with which Jobin’s spirit has coerced her to the house). He leaves the scene, and the information he has just given allows La Jobin to stupefy Madame Troufignac with her occult powers of identification. But the wife herself has arrived with a quite remarkable request to the sorceress: to be transgendered into a man, to escape the disagreeable life of a married woman (‘La condition des femmes est trop malheureuses’). La Jobin tries to normalise this extraordinary woman, telling her to go back to Perigord with her husband. But Madame Troufignac says they can talk about that another day when the money she has purloined from the marital home has run out: for now, she will spend as long as she can in the role of libertine, chasing the women she has noticed seem to be responsive to her new appearance. The practitioner of magic is simply unable to make any money out of this lesbian. As La Jobin works on commission to convince those who doubt the wisdom of marrying, and would profit from Monsieur Troufignac if she did persuade his wife to return, she seems in general to promote and guard marriages. But here, she meets a person beyond her manipulation, a misogamist beyond her  ill-founded assurances (Madame Troufignac would not be interested in having the husband she has left treated with a love philtre, as is offered - that’s of no use to her at all.)

The discourse of misogamy, professions of reluctance to marry, or of a woman’s desire to remain a widow, is prominent in the play. It is as if a mutual scepticism can only be banished by practices that, in a proper view of the reality of things, demand their own scepticism. But then again, contrary to the suggestion I have just made (that the scepticism of the misogamist requires magic to deceive it), it might be inferred from this play that the feeble nature of the fraudulent contrivances that impart belief expresses how little we require to instil belief that a would-be partner is the ideal. (Off-hand, I can only think of Massinger’s The Picture as mixing misogamy and magic.)

Up to date as it seems to be about the daunting price of marriage (especially for women), the play also sounds modern about money. La Jobin makes her promises in return for a fee. In place of the diabolic contract, it’s a situation where any unscrupulous but moneyed client secures illicit aid. The clients arrive at the consulting rooms pre-corrupted by the money that promises to secure their wishes for them. Handing it over is a transfer of sin to an experienced sinner - or we can see it as a version of confession (‘I wish to do these amoral things in the future’, they confide), with a absolving penance beforehand (‘then part with your money’). La Jobin has a brother, introduced to us as anxious about the damage to his reputation in the tax office done by having a sister who is a reputed sorceress is doing. In some gently subversive humour, his sister convinces him that switching to assisting her in her trade would only be a small change, and he’d make more money than he does as a ‘pauvre Procureur Fiscal’. He does indeed join in with her fleecing of her clients. It is this brother that the Marquis forces to confess at pistol point to end the action. At the denouement, what seems to be a devil is revealed to be Gosselin, the taxman. While Gosselin sustains his role, his sister’s theatrical tricks back him up, with lights emerging from a hellish trapdoor. ‘Vostre Enfer ridicule ny tous vos eclairs ne m’etonnent pas’, affirms the Marquis. The only credible tormenter left is the taxman. La Jobin seems to hint that she would make the silence of those who have seen her exposure worthwhile, but the Countess says that ‘Il faut que la chose eclate, afin que personne n’y soit plus trompe’. 

But I am omitting the spectacular elements. Stolen property is located (La Jobin arranged the disappearance anyway) when a vision of the missing pistolets is given by means of a gauzy curtain on which they are painted, which flaps down from a ‘zigzag’. More impressive is the elaborate means she uses to convince the sceptical Marquis: parts of a dismembered body fall down the chimney, assemble into a kind of golem, which then walks to the middle of the theatre, and disappears through the floor. That’s the scene illustrated at the top of this post. One assumes that the back of the chimney was black cloth with long vertical slits. Puppeteers behind might control the fall of fake legs and arms, and then start to assemble them, until a performer can rise up in place of the composite puppet. In the subsequent scene, La Jobin’s brother says he helped move the pretend body-parts. The highlight of Act V was a big scene with a talking head and a terrified female client who is persuaded to touch it.

The scholars writing about this play point out some resemblances between the duped clients in this play and those who consulted La Voisin and her like. Like M. Gilet, the Marquis de Feuquieres wanted invulnerability from La Vigoreaux; the Duchess of Foix wanted larger breasts; and various clients asked, like the Marquis in this play, to talk to the devil.

As with The Late Lancashire Witches, there has been some scholarly surmise that there was an element of official collusion in the appearance of this play, even a suggestion that La Reynie personally encouraged the authors. The play is certainly in line with the 1682 royal legislation against sorcery, which was aimed at people who pretend to undertake magic, at poisoners, and at those who commit acts of desecration. Yet it seems odd that a play so resolutely insistent on simple fraudulence should be written and produced when La Voisin was shortly to be burned at the stake. The play makes La Jobin guilty of exploiting other people’s stupidity, and allows her to leave the scene at the end, vaguely promising restitution, and pursued by those who suddenly doubt that she can deliver their foolish dreams. No judge, no magistrate, no cleric is referred to, the only tribunal is public opinion after exposure, the only investigator the Marquis, whose motivation comes from the challenge set by the Countess, not personal zeal.

The play is studiously not ‘about’ La Voisin. La Jobin was played by a man. The play isn’t about sorcery, but about not being made ‘jobard’ (gullible) by someone like La Jobin. When witchcraft comes to town, it is a matter of trickery. There’s something like a perception that illicit or unassuaged needs and desires in more or less anyone can be exploited by the crafty. As La Jobin herself reflects, it is fools that teach her to be wise, in spite of herself. In prison cells, accused people made up confessions under duress. La Voisin fought desperately to remain in the coffin in which she had been brought to the stake. In his palace, the Sun King burned testimonies against aristocrats. In theatres, audiences laughed night after night at this comedy of their own folly.

‘Their eyes were holden that they should not know him': J H Glaser's anamorphic Fall, 1638

This is Johann Heinrich Glaser’s anamorphic composition, ‘The Fall’, 1638, dedicated to the Rector of Basle University, a man called Remi Fasch.

I sourced the image in Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Anamorphic Art (1977), following up a reference in Stuart Clark’s 2007 book, Vanities of the Eye. I post this because I tried to find the image somewhere on the web, but failed apart from a couple of impossibly small-sized reproductions in Google books. (I haven’t been able to source a copy of Fred Leeman’s Hidden Images book of 1976, which may have a better version.)

So, this is two scans merged together of one A3 sized photocopy of a double page reproduction in a book. I then fastened my long strip to a piece of plywood with blu-tack, and tried taking oblique photographs from the principal point of view you must use if the anamorphic face of Christ crowned with thorns is to appear.

 

Well, much has been lost in this series of reproductions. I did my best; it conveys the idea. There’s no angle that gives a better view of the image of Christ, without those alarmingly dissimilar sized eyes that is. Baltrušaitis does not give the original dimensions of the 1638 print. Judging by the size of the letters in the dedicatory inscription that runs along the bottom, I’d guess at twice the size of the reproduction, which is 40cm across in the book. The real thing must work far better than the reproduced version. Clarity in this case is everything, if the eye is to be deceived.

So, within these limitations, I think we can see, reading across from the right, Adam and Eve at the forbidden tree, with a large and properly serpentine (rather than Lamia-like) serpent coiled round the tree trunk, while an owl sits on a branch, and a peacock stands at their feet. Between them, Death rises up as they disobey God.

The animals: an ape gazes at the lake, but it is viewing the ‘vexierbild’, the puzzle-picture from the wrong side: the ape will not see Christ (as if the picture demonstrates that it lacks a soul). On this side of the lake, and nearest the act of transgression, foxes, a bear, a cow, rabbit, a cat and a dog sparring. Behind these animals, a half-hidden row of birds: what might be a toucan (known from the mid 16^th century), two ibises, a cockerel with two rather exotic hens, a bird with a crest, a pheasant, a turkey, and a sprawling alligator. Then at the far left, the angel or cherubim chases Adam and Eve out of Paradise, the serpent wriggles at their feet, ready to start receiving its curse, and Death encourages their flight from Eden into his realm.

The lobe-like shores of the lake are of course where the anamorphic, hidden Christ begins. As a lake in Eden, He enlarges the usual four source streams of Paradise, usually depicted as clear rivulets stemming from a fountain, and usually allegorised as God’s grace flowing out to the whole world (the Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates, as Scafi’s book on Medieval maps explains, being taken to water all countries). Man’s sin has the reservoir of grace ready, the redeemer will not be revealed for millennia, but His mission, for which He is ready, has started.

Glaser has found a new way to put the two Adams into one picture (“First, wee see the difference between the two Adams: the first made sin, and infected all the world with it: The other made no sin, but redeemed all the world from it”, wrote Nicholas Byfield in 1623, it was a favourite thought of Donne’s – and of course many others).

There must be a larger study of unrevealed or half-revealed Christs. That Christ’s divine nature was hidden during His incarnation is one regular idea. But Christ is repeatedly not seen, or unrecognized. My title for this post comes from Luke 24, verse 16, non-recognition on the road to Emmaus; Mary Magdalene does not know him at John 20 14-16. At the start of His mission, in Like 4, 28-30, in one verse, Jesus is about to be cast down from the top of the hill by those angered by His calm self-announcement (after He has read from Isaiah in the synagogue, ‘This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears’), and His apparent refusal to show His ministry in Nazareth: the next verse, He has somehow slipped away through the angry mob: Jesus autem transiens in medio illorum, the line medieval travellers liked to have on their good luck charms.

There ought, really, to be more early modern pictures like this. The Reformation’s iconoclasm made depictions of the godhead controversial. This was a perfect way to compromise (you’d have thought): Puritans, all you see is a landscape, Anglicans, squint in from the left frame. But I guess they were so much one or the other, compromise never appealed that much.

‘And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.’ (Luke 24, 31)

At Pendle Hill

After talking about The Late Lancashire Witches for years, I finally got up to Pendle Forest to try to get a sense of the area. It had been my odd hope to be there when some of the famed 'mist over Pendle' was rolling by, as I fancied seeing a 'Brocken Spectre' on the Mountain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brocken_spectre
as some people have been lucky enough to do:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/arg_flickr/8277453523/

 

 

Pendle Hill, like the Brocken (or Blocksberg) has a microclimate that causes strange sightings, and then (it seems to me) follow rumours of the supernatural. Witches (‘trulli’) are associated with mountains at Kyöpelinvuori, Finland; at the Brocken or Blocksberg; and at Pendle. George Fox had the vision up on this mountain that led him to found the Quaker movement. It's evidently a place that generates visions.

Instead, I got the coldest of Easter weekends, which at least meant that I didn't miss the views:

It is a mountain of considerable presence. I had seen photographs, of course, but they don't give you the sound - the cry of the curlew adds immensely to the atmosphere of slight weirdness. To get to a fuller extent the effect, this sound file could be played while looking at photographs: that other-worldly rising keen:

 http://sounds.bl.uk/Environment/British-wildlife-recordings/022M-W1CDR0001375-0600V0

Of course, all this 'Bare Mountain' stuff is romantic and added in after the event: 'Old Demdike' and 'Old Chattox' and the rest met Satan on familiar lowland paths and in fields way below the mountain. Their concerns, and broodings, concerned resentments in daily life.

I was struck by how often the familiar names from the 1612 and 1633-4 witch cases appear in the area. Churchyards are well stocked with members of the Hargreaves dynasty, the Nutter clan, Southworths, Ashtons and Starkies abound (thinking of other local cases and instances of possession). If your family lived there, your family stayed there, the consistent appearance of local names indicates an isolated population.

It's a beautiful landscape, with just a touch of Mordor about it. 

God shakes his fist at Berkshire: the 1628 'Hatford' meteorite

I was talking this last week to some of my students about Donne and terror, and this led me (via fear of God, plague, and prodigies) to Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet about the meteorite which brought hypervelocity to Berkshire in 1628, Look Up and Wonder.

The title page illustration (above) epitomizes the splendid muddle of the whole work. “This is a strange Chronicle, written by a strong hand … for God himselfe puts his owne Name to it”, says the pamphlet in its preliminaries (what God wrote in the skies, Thomas Dekker now puts into print). And as it was God who was sending a message to England at 5pm on Wednesday 9th April 1628, the sky gets filled, as the woodcut shows, with beings and objects. The Winds blow, a celestial army is ready for battle, and enormous cannon are placed up in the sky to discharge the quite substantial space rocks which fell to ground in Berkshire, and were dug up and collected.

Once the rocks are on the ground, Dekker can be quite factual about them. Up in the air, their prodigious nature of the sound they made was the thing of primary importance, and it was the terrific sound that prompted all those visionary beings and objects.

Dekker doesn’t really seem to have a very large amount of material about these dramatic events. Following the standard 17th century model for spinning out thin material, he moralises bravely, until he adjudges his reader to be in the right frame of mind (or maybe just impatient enough) to hear the actual details of this celestial warning. Even so, the pages of moralizing are not without their own interest.

Dekker certainly begins with great verve: “SO Benummed wee are in our Sences, that albeit God himselfe Holla in our Eares, wee by our wills are loath to heare him. His dreadfull Pursivants of Thunder, and Lightning terrifie us so long as they have us in their fingers, but beeing off, wee dance and sing in the midst of our Follies.”

I really liked God ‘hollering’. The cannon floating in the air suggested by these cataclysmic bangs and divine hollers seem to prompt Dekker to recollect a passage from the second book of Kings, where a carpenter’s axe-head falls into a river, but Elijah miraculously makes it float up to the surface again. That heavy artillery was floating up there in the sky primarily because cannon were the definitive, the sole source for stupendously loud bangs, so the sonic boom and the shock waves of the air-bursting bolide simply had to be products of a magnified and heavenly cannonade.

Lurking as a background anxiety seem to be the continental religious wars. Britain, Dekker reminds his readers, enjoys peace: “The Drum beates here, but the Battailes are abroad: The Barbed Horse tramples not downe our Corne-fieldes: The earth is not manurde with mans Bloud”.  Very loud bangs in heaven apparently (though this is not explicitly spelled-out) prompt the fear that such horrors may be about to spread to England. It will happen, we gather, unless England ceases to sin, sin being itself explosively dangerous: “our sinnes … daily lay traynes of powder, to blow us up, and confound us”.

So Dekker describes what was at first an amazing sonic event by assimilating it to the sounds of battle, and battle in turn justifies a sky full of celestial beings methodically working through the sound effects of war: “in an instant was heard, first a hideous rumbling in the Ayre, and presently after followed a strange and fearful peale of Thunder, running up and down these parts of the Countrey, but it strake with the loudest violence, and more furious tearing of the Ayre, about a place called The White Horse Hill, than in any other. The whole order of this thunder, carried a kind of Majestical state with it, for it maintayned (to the affrighted Beholders seeming) the fashion of a fought Battaile. It began thus: First, for an on-set, went on one great Cannon as it were of thunder alone, like a warning piece to the rest, that were to follow. Then a little while after, was heard a second; and so by degrees a third, until the number of 20. were discharged (or there abouts) in very good order, though in very great terror. In some little distance of time after this, was audibly heard the sound of a Drum beating a Retreat. Amongst all these angry peals, shot off from Heaven; this begat a wonderful admiration, that at the end of the report of every crack, or Cannon-thundering, a hizzing Noyse made way through the Ayre, not unlike the flying of Bullets from the mouths of great Ordnance: And by the judgement of all the terror-stricken witnesses, they were Thunderbolts.”

The Wikipedia’s general entry on meteorites says “Explosions, detonations, and rumblings are often heard during meteorite falls, which can be caused by sonic booms as well as shock waves resulting from major fragmentation events. These sounds can be heard over wide areas, up to many thousands of square km. Whistling and hissing sounds are also sometimes heard, but are poorly understood. Following passage of the fireball, it is not unusual for a dust trail to linger in the atmosphere for some time.”

The debris-field for this air-bursting meteorite was extensive (these fields are usually elliptical in shape, with the heaviest portions of the space rock traveling furthest). Dekker centres his account, rather enigmatically, on Hatford, which he describes as a town. But Hatford has always been a tiny village, from the time of the Domesday book to the present. He perhaps misunderstood the geographical prejudices of a local informant. Hatford is very close to Stanford in the Vale, a far more obvious reference point. But something must have happened there at Hatford. The Meteoritical Society’s website very confidently places a Google pin just to the west of the village:

( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=11855 )

but I do not know on what basis they do that - i.e., whether it means ‘this is where Hatford is’ or ‘a piece landed here’. Their figure for the weight of the Hatford meteorite is 29 kilograms, and I don’t know how this figure was arrived at either. Dekker indicates earth-impacts over a larger area, and says one collected stone, broken on impact, weighed together 24 pounds (about 10 kilos).

For the largest earth-impacting fragment mentioned in the pamphlet fell somewhere near Baulking. The two Letcombe villages (Dekker does not specify which Letcombe he means) are about ten kilometers away from Hatford: the pamphlet documents another fragment landing there, which was impounded by the sheriff. That well-known landmark White Horse Hill gets mentioned as a site of special terror (Dekker is cited from here in the OED as the first recorded user of the idiom ‘terror-stricken’), and it’s about eight kilometers west of the Letcombes. Dekker also mentions a ‘Sheffington’, and that baffles me. This area suggested (amounting to some 80 square kilometers) includes both a Shellingford and Uffington, so I wonder if they have coalesced on some blotted or scribbled notes, or in muddled recollection of a verbal report. Especially in the mysterious ‘Sheffington’, “all men …were so terrified, that they fell on their knees, and not only thought, but sayd, that verily the day of Judgement was come. Neyther did these fears take hold only of the people, but even Beasts had the self-same feeling and apprehension of danger, running up and down, and bellowing, as if they had been mad.” In the woodcut, the man digging and the man on the ground are perhaps meant to be the same person, busy working at one moment, overthrown by terror the next. If animals as phlegmatic as cows thought the Day of Judgement has arrived, then these must indeed have been terrifying phenomena.

Dekker seems to regard Berkshire as a long way away from his London readers (“Nothing is here presented to thine eyes, to fright thee, but to fill thee with Joy, that this Storm fell so far off, and not upon thine own Head”). It’s a pity he wasn’t more thorough about where fragments landed, so one could get a sense of a debris-field. The empty downlands to the south probably had unobserved pieces fall. An air-bursting meteor can generate hundreds of fragments. But it was a stony, ‘chondritic’ meteorite, so a search across winter fields up near the Ridgeway with those convenient little magnets on sticks unfortunately wouldn’t work.

The piece that landed in Baulking gets described very well, with no fanciful accretions: “For one of them was seen by many people, to fall at a place called Bawlkin Greene, being a mile and a half from Hatford: Which Thunder-bolt was by one Mistress Greene, caused to be digged out of the ground, she being an eye-witness amongst many other, of the manner of the falling. The form of the Stone is three-square, and picked in the end: In colour outwardly blackish, some-what like Iron: Crusted over with that blackness about the thickness of a shilling. Within, it is soft, of a gray colour, mixed with some kind of mineral, shining like small pieces of glass. This Stone brake in the fall: The whole piece is in weight nineteen pound and a half: The greater piece that fell off, weigheth five pound, which with other small pieces being put together, make four and twenty pound and better.”

Twenty four pounds’ weight (plus) of material is impressive (about 10 kilograms). It was identified as stone rather than metal, and has the blacker fusion crust of a chondritic meteor. If it was shaped like a three-sided pyramid (“three-square” is not a helpful phrase), ‘picked in the end’ is perhaps a description of ‘regmaglypts’, the cavitations on the surface of a meteor after it has burned its way through the atmosphere. They were probably looking at something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NWA869Meteorite.jpg

The shining bits of ‘mineral’ were probably the flakes of iron and nickel typically seen in such a meteor. The threatening cannons of heaven have fired, but there have been no casualties. Stones have fallen harmlessly (though very alarmingly) to the ground. All England needs to do is repent its sins, and God will not send the real scourge of real cannons discharging real cannonballs.

Part of the burly charm of Dekker’s pamphlet is that it manages to give a hearty endorsement to the supernatural explanation of this messenger from the skies, and on the other hand to be dismissive of the more imaginative responses of those who were there:

“Many do constantly affirm, that the shape of a Man, beating of a Drum, was visibly seen in the Ayre, but this we leave to proove. Others report that he, who digged up the Stone in Bawlkin Greene, was at that instant stricken lame, but (God bee thanked) there is no such matter. Report in such distractions as these, hath a thousand eyes, and sees more than it can understand; and as many tongues, which being once set a going, they speak any thing. So now a number of people report there were three Suns seen in the Element; but on the contrary side, they are opposers against them, that will affirm they beheld no such matter, and that it was not so…”

I have cycled back and forth across this still lovely bit of landscape on many occasions. The villages are still villages, and tend to have well-built and beautiful churches. To the south, the Uffington White Horse, Dragon Hill, and Wayland’s Smithy beside the Ridgeway give mystery to the landscape. Not even Dekker can suggest why God would ever have wanted to shake his fist (“with fear and trembling casting our eyes up to Heaven, let us now behold him, bending his Fist only, as lately he did to the terror and affrightment of all the Inhabitants, dwelling within a Towne in the County of Barkshire”) at such a quiet region.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite_falls

http://www.q-mag.org/stonesfallingfro/index.html


Update, September 23rd, 2013: I have been contacted by Mr Mark Crawford, who has been doing research into this historical meteorite fall, and web-publishes what he has assembled here:

http://historicfalls.com/pre-scientific-falls/hatford-meteorite/

To the historical sources, this adds a passage that Nehemiah Wallington, some of whose extensive compilations survive up in Manchester at the John Rylands library, copied out from a contemporary letter that had been published. It adds either East or West Challow to the debris field.

 

 

Espadrilles of gannet-neck: St Kilda in the late 17th century

I’ve generally enjoyed the novels of Jim Crace, and was pleased to see from Adam Mars-Jones’ review in the LRB that another is out, with a setting both atopical and anachronistic. One feature of his invented village is (the reviewer notes) that nobody there owns a mirror, and this made for me a pleasing little connection to a late 17^th century work that had actually reminded me (while reading it) of Crace’s fiction, Martin Martin’s account of his incident-filled visit to the Isle of St Kilda in 1694. Among the things Martin says about those male St Kildans who get to larger, more inshore islands, is that “they admired Glass Windows hugely, and a Looking-Glass to them was a prodigy”.

The text has the title, A Late Voyage to St Kilda, the Remotest of all the HEBRIDES, OR Western Isles of SCOTLAND. WITH A History of the Island, Natural, Moral, and Topographical. Wherein is an Account of their Customs, Religion, Fish, Fowl, &c. As also a Relation of a late IMPOSTOR there, pretended to be Sent by St. John Baptist (1698). The author of the Preface to the book (who tells us that Martin was himself from the Western Isles, went to university in Edinburgh and had met members of the Royal Society), makes an entirely persuasive point: “Men have Travelled far enough in the search of Foreign Plants and Animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural Climate”.

St Kilda in the late 17^th century emerges as an utterly fascinating mix of things: a Gaelic-Polynesian-Christian-Animist community of one hundred and eighty people, 18 horses, and 90 head of cattle, plus two thousand sheep dispersed over Hirta and the even smaller local islands. It’s a community so traditional in its ways as in places to recall the weird rituals of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast – yet so marginal, that you feel that had they dared deviate in the slightest from customs handed down over generations, that abandonment of the rigour necessary to survival in this place might have doomed their entire way of life. Secured by their extreme isolation from most of the perils threatened by other people, they lived a life that tolerated an astonishing degree of natural risk. Their voyages on their one open boat to the other islands and sea stacks around Hirta, the main island, involved life-threatening dangers both in launching and landing, then from currents and storms. For a main part of their diet, they harvested eggs and birds, suspended over the sea cliffs on ropes made of twisted hemp bound in leather. These daily hazards were not enough, it seems, for their courtship customs, like those of Easter Island, required foolhardy demonstrations of nerve and agility in climbs that modern free climbers could emulate easily enough, though Martin is hugely impressed:

“In the face of the Rock, South from the Town, is the famous Stone, known by the Name of the Mistress-Stone; it resembles a Door exactly, and is in the very front of this Rock, which is Twenty or Thirty Fathom perpendicular in Height, the Figure of it being discernable about the distance of a Mile: Upon the Lintel of this Door, every Batchelor-Wooer is by an Antient Custom obliged in honour to give a Specimen of his Affection for the Love of his Mistress”. The young man who had managed the climb then had to strike a time-honoured (and ridiculously risky) posture high on the exposed pinnacle. I found the following images (Martin may have confused the Mistress stone and Lover’s stone into one story).

Though cool-headed modern visitors seem able to emulate this feat, the St Kildans were clearly, and necessarily, expert climbers. Boys would, Martin says, begin by climbing the walls of their houses, this from the age of three. One stunt by which especially proficient climbers could show off was making climbs with their back to the rock face.

The community gets by with so little. There’s the one boat, with seating and stowage on board assigned and restricted with utterly exact specification of each man’s allocated space. The whole community owns just three ropes for the egg and bird collecting. “The Ropes belong to the Commonwealth, and are not to be used without the general Consent of all”. There is “one Steel and Tinder-Box in all this Commonwealth”, and the guardian of this precious equipment makes a small toll in goods for providing his services.

Every St Kildan is an expert reader of the sky, and as the stark requirement of your life probably depending on reading it correctly (if a boat was to be launched), it was imperative to update your reading experience all the time. But nobody is (literally speaking) literate. They can tell the time to an exactitude by the tide, and continuous awareness of the phase of the moon.

When Martin was there, some of the older people could still remember wearing nothing else but sheepskin garments. Plaids have arrived on boats from other outer islands less wildly distant from the mainland, and the odd pair of trousers abandoned by sailors caught by the natives filling knotted trouser-legs with their precious birds’ eggs. Their plaids and mantles are pinned together with bones from fulmars. The island women wear little espadrilles fashioned out of the necks of gannets: “the only and ordinary Shoes they wear, are made of the Necks of Solan Geese, which they cut above the Eyes, the Crown of the Head serves for the Heel, the whole Skin being cut close at the Breast, which end being sowed, the Foot enters into it, as into a piece of narrow Stocking; this Shoe doth not Wear above Five Days.” There is no money in circulation. Their rents to the laird, of the clan MacLeod, are paid in barley grain, measured out in an immemorial grain measure which they will not change, though its battered state makes it a regular point of dispute. In other acts of trade they are implacable bargainers: “They are reputed very Cunning, and there is scarce any Circumventing of them in Traffick and Bartering; the Voice of one is the Voice of all the rest, they being all of a piece, their common Interest uniting them firmly together.”

Occasionally alcohol is brewed out of nettle roots, but mainly they drink water or whey – Martin praises the superb water quality of some of the springs ( … but still).

These people lived mainly on the sea birds that nested in abundance around them. The map in this little book shows the many pyramids of loose stone that the St Kildans built to store both eggs and dead birds: “They preserve the Solan Geese in their Pyramids for the space of a Year, slitting them in the Back, for they have no Salt to keep them with. They have Built above Five hundred Stone Pyramids for their Fowls, Eggs, &c. … scattering the burnt Ashes of Turf under and about them, to defend them from the Air, driness being their only Preservative”

Gannets, or ‘Solan geese’, were caught in profusion when they were nesting on the island and adjacent sea-stacks. The birds were taken with horse-hair nooses on long rods, or simply clubbed while trying to defend their young. From the sea-stacks, bird corpses were thrown down from cliff-tops into the sea for collection in the boat, until the islander in the boat declared the boat full to capacity. Gannets were also killed by exploiting their methods of diving onto prey:

“a Board set on purpose to float above Water, upon it a Herring is fixed, which the Goose perceiving, flies up to a competent height, until he finds himself making a strait line above the Fish, and then bending his course perpendicularly piercing the Air, as an Arrow from a Bow, hits the Board, into which he runs his Bill with all his force irrecoverably, where he is unfortunately taken.

The gannets survived: St Kildans still had the tragic Great Auk: “The Sea-Fowls are, first, Gairfowl, being the stateliest, as well as the Largest of all the Fowls here, and above the Size of a Solan Goose, of a Black Colour, Red about the Eyes, a large White Spot under each Eye, a long broad Bill; stands stately, his whole Body erected, his Wings short, he Flyeth not at all, lays his Egg upon the bare Rock, which, if taken away, he lays no more for that Year.” In the crassly stupid human annihilation of this bird the St Kildans played a main role. Flightless, the bird was unable to escape them, and the last great auk sighted in the British Isles was collected by St Kildans, kept briefly in captivity, then beaten to death for being a witch that had raised a storm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Auk

The fulmar chick, which protects itself by a projectile-vomit of its acidic stomach contents, was (amazingly) exploited for those same nauseous ejecta: “the Inhabitants and other Islanders put a great value upon it, and use it as a Catholicon for Diseases, especially for any Aking in the Bones, Stitches, &c. some in the adjacent Isles use it as a Purge, others as a Vomiter; it is hot in quality, and forces its passage through any Wooden Vessel.” Yes, one can imagine how emetic that was.

Martin allows himself some sentimental reflections on the people as noble savages: “The Inhabitants of St. Kilda, are much, happier than the generality of Mankind, as being almost the only People in the World who feel the sweetness of true Liberty: What the Condition of the People in the Golden Age is feign’d by the Poets to be, that theirs really is.” But who wouldn’t? He saw a resourceful and brave people, who possess next to nothing, but require nothing from anyone else.

They carried on their immemorial way of life on an island whose small area is diminished by its precipitous nature, and swept by storms. Somehow they also managed the struggle against a small gene-pool, with very careful consideration given to who might marry whom (They are “nice in examining the Degrees of Consanguinity before they Marry”, Martin says). In terms of not out-consuming their resources, they had the conception-limiting practice of continued breast-feeding (“They give Suck to their Children for the space of Two Years”), while Martin gives the impression, without saying very much about it, that they had an abstinence-based (yet successful) management of sexual desire.

These other - (or out-of-worldly) - people were as vulnerable as a rare species (and they would finally follow the great auks into extinction). Every time a boat arrives from the mainland, a cough goes round the entire community, Martin learns, though has to be persuaded that this is true. Two families are struggling with leprosy.

Their other susceptibility was that they were, alongside that conservatism which seems a survival mechanism, all mad for novelty, any kind of novelty. Martin is followed about and watched intently, for at any time he might do or say something that they have never conceived of before.

Martin had been able to get to the island because word had reached the mainland of the previous arrival on Hirta of an imposter, one Roderick, who had found in this place possibly the only community anywhere who could have believed his preposterous lies. Sent to the island (he told them) by John the Baptist, Roderick seems to have been bent on some improvised experiment in social control, yet managed it extremely badly, improvising his way into trouble. The Ten Commandments have been replaced (he told them), and he offered the updates. Roderick seems to have made the women of the island his target, and they may have been his motive for the whole imposture. Accustomed to a life in which a woman has to be frugal with her body as with everything else, these island women on the island were absolutely faithful to their husbands (Martin says). They could not be corrupted by money (if sailors managed to make a landing from a ship during some rare moment of dead calm), as money meant nothing to them. But Roderick was achieving seductions. Discovery of these actions ran neck-and-neck in discrediting him with his other crazy innovations, which all failed, as they were bound to do in a place that could only function and survive in the one traditional way it could function.

Because of the imposter Roderick, Martin got his dangerous voyage out to the island (with narrow escapes from drowning, being swept away into the main ocean, and being wrecked at landfall) in the same boat as a minister, who has been sent out to put the people back to rights. Even Roderick seems relieved, while the St Kildans are happy to be back to what they were.

Martin described this remarkable island with the Royal Society in mind. He does not waste words on its wild beauty. There’s a good map and some good photographs at the following URL’s:

http://maps.nls.uk/counties/view/?id=658#zoom=4&lat=18612&lon=36140&layers=BT

http://www.scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/search_item/index.php?service=RCAHMS&id=139772&image_id=DP046581

“The Devil came to me once, I think, like a Lyon”: the Bideford witches of 1680-2

Sources under discussion

I return to an old project for this blog: to write something about as many witchcraft-related pamphlets as possible. In this post I will look at three pamphlets on the Bideford witches of 1682. The Bideford case is fairly well known, as it was almost certainly the last group hanging of convicted witches in England. There are various sites on the internet about the events, many of them perfunctory. This is an attempt to make sense of the main printed materials:

 1. A True and impartial relation of the informations against three witches, viz., Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards, who were indicted, arraigned and convicted at the assizes holden for the county of Devon, at the castle of Exon, Aug. 14, 1682 with their several confessions, taken before Thomas Gist, Mayor, and John Davie, alderman, of Biddiford, in the said county, where they were inhabitants : as also, their speeches, confessions and behaviour at the time and place of execution on the twenty fifth of the said month (the account runs to forty pages, 1682)

2. The tryal, condemnation, and execution of three witches viz. Temperace [sic] Floyd, Mary Floyd, and Susanna Edwards. Who were arraigned at Exeter on the 18th. of August, 1682. And being prov'd guilty of witch-craft, were condemn'd to be hang'd, which was accordingly executed in the view of many spectators, whose strange and much to be lamented impudence, is never to be forgotten. Also, how they confessed what mischiefs they had done, by the assistance of the devil, who lay with the above-named Temperence Floyd nine nights together. Also, how they squeezed one Hannah Thomas to death in their arms; how they also caused several ships to be cast away, causing a boy to fall from the top of a main-mast into the sea. With many wonderful things, worth your reading (six pages, 1682)

3. The life and conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd; and Susanna Edwards three eminent witches (eight pages, 1687)

There is also a street ballad which has survived, though its straightforward moralising about the case adds no new insight or information. This had the heading Witchcraft discovered and punished. Or, The tryals and condemnation of three notorious witches, who were tryed [at] the last assizes, holden at the castle of Exeter, in the county of Devon: where they received sentance for death, for bewitching several persons, destroying ships at sea, and cattel by land, &c. To the tune of, Doctor Faustus: or, Fortune my foe.

The chief source is the longest pamphlet. The second 1682 pamphlet, which doesn’t even get the names right, might be taken to be freely invented by someone who had read the first and longer account, but it still has some convincing additional information. Five years later the subject was returned to – again, the anonymous author supplies convincing details, either from his own invention, or from some informant, about the demeanour of the convicted women at their execution.

Intellectual context

Witchcraft cases simmered on in the last two decades of the 17^th century. The author recommends his pamphlet as remarkable “in regard we have had no Conviction or Execution of any Witches for many years past”. That Joseph Glanvill was keeping the issue alive isn’t impossible: Saducismus triumphatus, or, Full and plain evidence concerning witches and apparitions in two parts was going through multiple editions in the 1680’s. Reports of Swedish witch Sabbaths at ‘Blockula’ kept it all going, and Scotland contributed its share. Then, of course in the early 1690’s, a blast of anxiety reached England from New England thanks to Cotton Mather’s hyperventilating tales of Salem.

Glanvill’s book, though it is described as “Dr. More’s learned Discourse” (Henry More had contributed material to the book about the recent Swedish panic) gets mentioned at the start of the largest pamphlet, which has the usual gambit of saying, in effect, ‘if you doubt the existence of witchcraft, the proof of its reality is to be found in these authorities’. Inevitably, first comes the bland and grand directive, “Study the sacred writ”, then the reader is invited to consider that there’s a parliamentary statute against witchcraft, and then to consult a brief bibliography: King James, Matthew Hales the judge, and Saducismus Triumphatus.

On the scaffold

The author warns his reader that if “any other” accounts do “creep abroad”, they will be “lame and imperfect”, whilst his is the “onely True, Authentick, and Exact Account”. Even so, the account is pitchforked together without any reflection: brusque summaries of the evidence given by the various accusers and their supportive witnesses against the three women in turn, and then “The Substance of the Last words and Confessions of Susanna Edwards, Temperance Lloyd, and Mary Trembles, at the time and place of their Execution; as fully as could be taken in a Case liable to so much noise and confusion, as is usual on such Occasions”. The interlocutors of the three women on the gallows amid the bedlam ‘usual on such occasions’ were the town clerk, John Hill, and the Sheriff.

Beneath the nooses prepared for them, the three women are faced by all the charges that have been made against them, and for which they have been found guilty: having carnal relations with the devil, suckling their familiar spirits, and a wide range of murderous malefice. All these charges, which they have had found against them, they deny flatly. Yet somehow they also give a muddled assent to their guilt: Mary Trembles half concedes “The Devil came to me once, I think, like a Lyon”. Temperance Lloyd, under the intense pressure of hoping at least to find mercy for her soul, tries to express her sense of what her conscience tells her to confess to: the devil, she explains, coerced her into some kind of malign action: “I did hurt a Woman sore against my Conscience: he carried me up to her door, which was open: The Woman’s name was Mrs. Grace Thomas.”

Up on the scaffold, amid the baying hubbub, the town clerk Mr Hill persists with the usual asinities of the demonologists: “Temperance, How did you come in to hurt Mrs. Grace Thomas? did you pass through the Key-hole of the Door, or was the Door open?” The door was simply open, Temperance affirms, either patiently or with some truculence. How the women got through doors seems to have been important to the case and perhaps to the guilty verdict.

Susanna Edwards came to these piteous extremes through poverty, but her final request was poignantly apt, and seems to show that she had been a pious women: those round the gallows “sung part of the 40 Psalm, at the desire of Susanna Edwards”. This psalm would have been asked for by her because of these verses:
¹¹ Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O Lord: let thy lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me. ¹² For innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me. ¹³ Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me: O Lord, make haste to help me. ¹⁴ Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my soul to destroy it; let them be driven backward and put to shame that wish me evil. ¹⁵ Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame that say unto me, Aha, aha. ¹⁶ Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: let such as love thy salvation say continually, The Lord be magnified. ¹⁷ But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.
It may be right to assume that the congregational singing stopped short of these fine biblical reproaches to those saying “Aha!” around the gallows.

The Usual Suspects

The Bideford case developed as English witchcraft tended to, fitting very well to the ‘charity refused’ model. The three women were old (Temperance Lloyd being the oldest) and very poor. Susanna and Temperance are widows, Mary a ‘Single woman’. Their small importunities were continuous. They keep turning up at the door (“the said Susanna would oftentimes repair unto this Informants Husband’s house upon frivolous or no occasions at all”), or you ran into them in the street. Susanna confesses in the end that she first met the devil when out (like Elizabeth Sawyer in Edmonton) gathering sticks. A gentleman approaches, and she gathers herself to ask him for a ‘piece of money’, dropping her usual curtsy. But he is the devil, who asks her if she is poor, and this she absolutely confirms.

Through the whole account, one keeps meeting the word ‘door’: it gives a sense of doors being shut in faces, puzzlement in official questions about how such people ever got into the houses of shopkeepers to torment family members, an idea of respectable households under siege by the devil in the shape of a ‘Braget’ (does this mean ‘honey-coloured’?) cat or a magpie, the devil’s human accomplices either passing through keyholes, or entering invisibly, or themselves in feline form. In the 1687 pamphlet there may be a hint that it was remembered that whether a door (to the house of Thomas Eastchurch) was open or shut had been significant in the trial. A witness seems to have asserted that one of the accused had got through a locked door, and this proved that she had diabolical powers. One accused woman cried out “that is false, for the door was open, which tacitly implied that she was then an Actor” (p.7). A denial of having passed through a locked door rebounded as an admission that she had gone into the house to do something nefarious.
Exactly as the historians have the general picture of accusations, Temperance Lloyd had been suspected of witchcraft before, and had been put on trial once, twelve years before, and at that time acquitted, and then strongly suspected once more in 1679, even to the extent of being searched for supernumerary teats, though the case against her was not pursued.

With these unfortunate women obtruding themselves on people’s notice, and regular refusal to them of charity, a trigger like this was always going to happen:
“She (Mary Trembles) this Examinant did go about the Town of Biddiford to beg some Bread, and in her walk she did meet with the said Susanna Edwards, who asked of this Examinant where she had been. Unto whom this Examinant answered, That she had been about the Town, and had begged some Meat, but could get none. Whereupon this Examinant, together with the said Susanna Edwards, did go to the said John Barnes’s house, in hope that there they should have some Meat. But the said John Barnes not being within his house, they could get no Meat or Bread, being denied by the said Grace Barnes and her Servant, who would not give them any Meat.”

The request for a small gift is repeated, and gets the same refusal – it is then reported that a curse was uttered:
“And afterwards on the same day the said Susanna Edwards did bid this Examinant to go to the said John Barnes his house again for a Farthings worth of Tobacco. Whereupon this said Examinant did go, but could not have any; whereof this Examinant did acquaint the said Susanna Edwards, who then said that it should be better for her the said Grace if that she had let this said Examinant to have had some Tobacco.”

A doctor speaks

Meanwhile, it seems as though the uselessness of 17^th century medical practices contributed to the problem. The local doctor, Doctor Beare “did repair unto this Informant. And upon view of her Body he did say, that it was past his skill to ease her of her said Pains; for he told her that she was Bewitch’d.”

This type of diagnosis gives you authority to find the person who is sending such preternatural torments, and as you have refused charity to the local poor women, they easily become the witches who are tormenting you. On the scaffold, as Temperance Lloyd tries to get across that the devil coerced her into harming Grace Thomas against her own conscience, the town clerk persists in trying to get her to confess to every premature, accidental, or suspicious death in the last few years. Those children died of small pox, she says, and no, she “never hurt any Ship, Bark, or Boat in my life”.

A visit to the Indignitas clinic?
But there is another side to all this fitting up of the most resented people in the parish as chief suspects. The women apparently had, prior to their last limited confessions on the scaffold, confessed to a whole range of diabolic activities. Temperance Lloyd in particular seems to have been suicidal, and if the author of the 1687 pamphlet has the Judge at the trial recognize as much of all three:
“At the Assizes being brought upon their Tryal, they all three pleaded guilty: Thereupon the Judge ordered the Gaoler to Secure the Prisoners, but in his charge to the Jury, “gave his Opinion that these three poor Women (as he supposed) were weary of their Lives, and that he thought it proper for them to be carried to the parish from whence they came, and that the parish should be charged with their maintenance; for that he thought oppressing Poverty had constrained them to wish for Death. Whereupon several neighbours, who had been great Sufferers by their diabolical practices, moved that if these Witches went home in peace, none of them could promise themselves a minute’s security, either of their Persons or Estates.”

That’s quite a moment. The Judge speaks up for Christian charity to the old, the parish rallies to see them hanged. Those who fancied themselves harmed by the three women lead the community, and backing them up are their corroborative witnesses, whose testimonies had been collected in pre-trial examinations. These people testified to various informal but demonologically florid confessions by the condemned. It’s a nightmare: every other person seems to be a reader of Sprenger and Kramer.

Popular demonological knowledge

“(Grace Thomas) upon the first day of this instant July, as soon as the aforesaid Temperance Lloyd was apprehended and put in the Prison of Biddiford, she this Informant immediately felt her pricking and sticking pains to cease and abate.”

Dorcas Coleman, given over as incurable by the facile Dr Beare, can see the spectral presence of Susanna Edwards around the bedroom where she lies suffering: “she this Informant would point with her Finger at what place in the Chamber the said Susanna Edwards would stand, and where she would go.” Elizabeth Eastchurch sees marks of pricking in one of the knees of her afflicted sister, Grace Thomas: “Whereupon this Informant afterwards, upon the same 2d day of July, did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd whether she had any Wax or Clay in the form of a Picture whereby she had pricked and tormented the said Grace Thomas?” Anne Wakely, tending on the preternaturally afflicted Grace Thomas, saw “something in the shape of a Magpie to come at the Chamber-window where the said Grace Thomas did lodge. Upon which this Informant did demand of the said Temperance Lloyd whether she did know of any Bird to come and flutter at the said Window.”

The good people of Bideford are determined to have proof that image magic has been practiced in their community against them. The day after their testimonies have been officially gathered, they return to the matter, “because we were dissatisfied in some particulars concerning a piece of Leather which the said Temperance had confessed of unto the said Elizabeth Eastchurch, in such manner as is mentioned in the said Elizabeth Eastchurch’s Examination, and we conceiving that there might be some inchantment used in or about the said Leather.” With the agreement of the Lord Mayor, they haul Temperance Lloyd off to the parish church for interrogation by the rector, Michael Ogilby. It’s the usual type of thing, featuring questions that are based on an assumption of guilt: “where the said Temperance was demanded by the said Mr. Ogilby how long since the Devil did tempt her to do evil.”

As would be the case at Salem, the legal proceedings are led astray by obvious impostures by accusers who have a firm notion of what they might do to secure conviction. Anthony Jones drew attention to Susanna Edwards’ involuntary bodily movements: “observing her the said Susanna to gripe and twinkle her Hands upon her own Body, said unto her, Thou Devil, thou art now tormenting some person or other. Whereupon the said Susanna was displeased with him, and said, Well enough, I will fit thee”. I think the words attributed to Susanna can be taken to be made up to fit the story. Jones has planted an idea, and later he will act out its proof:  “she the said Susanna turned about and looked upon this Informant, and forthwith with this Informant was taken in a very said condition as he was coming up the Stairs of the said Town-hall before the Mayor and Justices; insomuch that he cried out, Wife, I am now bewitched by this Devil Susanna Edwards.”

In response to all this, the women seem to have been acquiescent, almost ideal witnesses against themselves, readily responding to suggestions put to them with a willing compliance. It’s hard to see what is going on. Were the women just too old and confused to cope? (Temperance, the oldest, is said to be seventy in the 1687 pamphlet, the broadsheet ballad inflates this to eighty.) Was a long-harboured desire to strike back at their uncharitable neighbours gratified by a discovery that somehow, by some means mysterious to them, they had achieved exactly that? Were they indeed ‘weary of their lives’, and acquiescent because an end to their miserable existences was in sight?

The accused women have a general idea of what they should say. Once Temperance is being questioned, and confessing, the son of her victim from twelve years previously cannot understand her ready confession now, against her strong and then credited denials. Temperance knows that she is supposed to be party to a time-limited pact: “This Informant demanded of her the said Temperance, why she had not confessed so much when she was in Prison last time? She answered, that her time was not expired; For the Devil had given her greater power, and a longer time.”

Acquiescence and denial

Of course, there are moments when there is a mismatch between what the accusers want the women to say, and the stories they deliver. It is most obvious when it comes to their relations with Satan. They denied on the gallows things they had reportedly confessed to before, either before witnesses, or in their pre-trial examinations:

H. Had he any of thy bloud?

Mary. No.

H. Did he come to make use of thy Body in a carnal manner?

Mary. Never in my life.

….

H. Temperance Lloyd, Have you made any Contract with the Devil?

Temp. No.

H. Had he ever any carnal knowledge of thee?

Temp. No, never.

These denials can be compared to earlier examinations. (Mary Trembles): “after that she had made this Bargain with the said Susanna Edwards, that the Devil in the shape of a Lyon (as she conceived) did come to this Examinant, and lay with her, and had carnal knowledge of her Body. And that after the Devil had had knowledge of her Body, that he did suck her in her Secret parts, and that his sucking was so hard, which caused her to cry out for the pain thereof”.
“She (Joan Jones) did hear the said Susanna Edwards to confess, that she was suckt in her Breast several times by the Devil in the shape of a Boy lying by her in her Bed; and that it was very cold unto her. And further saith, that after she was suckt by him, the said Boy or Devil had the carnal knowledge of her Body Four several times.”

One has to wonder if Susanna wasn’t trying to make a confession that sounded impossible, putting out an invitation for someone to say, ‘this is absurd: a devil in the form of a boy, but still capable of having carnal knowledge of her?’ She repeated her de-sexualising formula at her pre-trial examination: “there was something in the shape of a little Boy, which she thinks to be the Devil, came into her house and did lie with her, and that he did suck her at her breast” – her demon-lover as baby. In a dim way, she is trying to forestall the salacity of the 1682 pamphlet: “She confessed also that the Devil lay Carnally with her for Nine Nights together, and that she had Paps about her an Inch long, which the Devil us’d to suck to Provoke her to Letchery”. This is alleged about Temperance Lloyd, but illustrates the tendency to impute demoniality.

An interesting moment is captured, where we see Temperance Lloyd starting to do her best with confessional material which is being suggested to her. She is bodily searched by Anne Wakely, who discovers “in her Secret Parts two Teats hanging nigh together like unto a piece of Flesh that a Child had suckt. And that each of the said Teats was about an Inch in length. Upon which this Informant did demand of her the said Temperance whether she had been suckt at that place by the black Man? (meaning the Devil).”
What Anne Wakely meant as an alias for the devil, Temperance obediently makes literal. She takes the prompt  - though even as she does so, she is perhaps trying to forestall the next imputation, for she miniaturizes the black man: “Being demanded of what stature the said black Man was, saith, that he was about the length of her Arm: And that his Eyes were very big; and that he hopt or leapt in the way before her, and afterwards did suck her again as she was lying down; and that his sucking was with a great pain unto her, and afterwards vanish’d clear away out of her sight.”
~ their bodily relationship she specifies as painful. It also took place out in the street, the very place where she had first met this devil. It is as if Temperance Lloyd was trying to make impossible and unthinkable the grotesque idea she is simultaneously acceding to:
“she also confessed, that about twelve of the clock of that same night the black Man did suck her in the Street in her Secret parts, she kneeling down to him. That he had blackish Clothes, and was about the length of her Arm. That he had broad Eyes, and a Mouth like a Toad, and afterwards vanisht clear away out of her sight.”

Very late in the pamphlet what Temperance Lloyd actually met in the street in Bideford becomes more clear: it was a black bullock. But as all living things can be the presence of the devil, a bullock was enough. The devil will appear as ‘braget cat’, or a magpie, anything can be made suspicious.

Temperance Lloyd made one final gesture that was remembered. It seems to be hinted at in the title of the 1682 short pamphlet: being prov’d guilty of witch-craft, were condemn'd to be hang’d, which was accordingly executed in the view of many spectators, whose strange and much to be lamented impudence, is never to be forgotten. 

This unspecified ‘impudence’ (one might relish the ambiguous syntax, but it was the impudence of the convicted women) is explained in the 1687 version: “As to the manner of their Deportment going to the place of Execution. It is certainly affirmed the Old Witch Temperance Floyd, went all the way Eating, and was seemingly unconcerned; but Mary Floyd was very obstinate, and would not go, but lay down, insomuch that they forc’d to tye her upon a Horse-back, for she was very loath to receive her deserved Doom.”

There were two types of ‘impudence’ here: Mary Trembles making a scene, Temperance Lloyd being impudently phlegmatic. It was quite usual for the condemned to halt outside a tavern, and be given ale (a good tongue-loosener for the last confession). But to be so unconcerned as to be able to eat, not to be dry-mouthed with horror! That was not acceptable. Seen as “the woman that has debaucht the other two”, Temperance was last to be hanged. She was, perhaps, ready to go, and appeared too composed, too willing to die. Did the witnesses sense that they were the abettors of her judicial suicide? There may also be in this general ‘impudence’ a memory that the choice of Psalm 40 by Susanna Edwards was just too apt, a hit at them.

I find, then, plausible some of the description of the demeanour of the women at their execution in the two short pamphlets. It is the kind of thing that might be remembered and reported. But most of what they allege looks like free invention. The short 1682 pamphlet garbles the names, and seems to invent and edifying tale of “Mr. Hann a Minister in those parts … these Hellish Agents intended mischief and misery to the person of Mr. Hann: but the Over-ruling Power prevented them”.

Both this short pamphlet and the 1687 one come up with the same final ‘proof’ of guilt: “being asked at their Tryal to say the Lords Prayer, they answered, that they could not, except it were backward” (1682 short pamphlet), “and [the minister] desired them to say the Lords prayer, of which the last could not repeat one word, but Temperance Floyd said all, with these alterations; when she should have said Lead us not into Temptation, she said Lead us into Temptation, and instead of Deliver us from evil, said deliver us to evil; and protested that she could say no otherwise” (1687).

Belatedness and mutual disdain

The Bideford case, in conclusion, has about it an air of belatedness. The townspeople are just too knowing, working for and getting the outcome they want, while the accused women accept the role that's imposed upon them, for their own private reasons. If this is the last English group hanging - some claim Temperance Lloyd was the last English victim of all, the fatal phase of the English witchcraft scare ended at that Exeter gallows with contempt on both sides: a community killing impoverished elderly women who had made nuisances of themselves, and the victims projecting a disdain that made its mark