Sex and Satan: how witchcraft became a means to control and persecute women
Witchcraft stalks the latest novel of bestselling author Philippa Gregory who, during the two years spent writing Tidelands, discovered how it was used to oppress women as men looked to move into the traditionally female work of herbalism, medicine, surge
In my new novel Tidelands, my heroine is accused of witchcraft – one of the thousands of unknown women who died at the hands of their friends, neighbours, and ‘betters’ during the great witch-hunt craze of the 16th and 17th century. Why so many people (most of them women) should have been persecuted like Alinor, my heroine, has absorbed me during the last two years while I have been writing this book.
Early suspicion of witchcraft fell mostly on men: in the 1300s, 70 per cent of witchcraft accusations were made against men but the belief in women’s ‘nature’ as being oversexed and ill-disciplined led theologians to believe that women were more prone to rebellion and tempted by sex with the devil.
A Papal Bull in 1484 denounced witchcraft and authorised the “correcting, imprisoning, punishing and chastising” of devilworshippers – for the first time, witches were accused of that typical crime of unruly women: having “slain infants”.
Disobedient wives and women-rebels were increasingly viewed as a social danger during the reign of Elizabeth (a spinster herself, with frightening powers
of life or death), and these are the years where public punishments against women increased and become more severe – the scold’s bridle came into use in 1567, and the ducking stool was installed by royal decree in every parish – and mostly used against women.
Public shame and public torture were ways that 17th century England continued to keep women under control, and my heroine, Alinor, is very aware of the power of communal judgement.
They arrested and executed mostly poor women: 80 per cent of accused witches were women, most of them newly impoverished by the Elizabethan Poor Laws which were designed to take unreliable charity away from kitchens and back doors of the wealthy landlords, and send the poor to formally report, be judged, and granted financial help by the parish overseer. Where a landlord had once been responsible (however carelessly) for poor families on his lands, he now found himself taxed by the parish authorities. Charity at the gates of the big house dried up. The poor widow, who had previously come to the kitchen door for a hand-out, was now sent away – and sometimes she left with a curse. That was all that was needed to identify her as a witch to nervous wealthy families.
The greatest fear for Alinor’s fictional neighbours and the real people of the past was the apparent epidemic of witchcraft. Witches were the great rebels: against God Himself, allying with Satan, threatening their lords and masters, and betraying their husbands in adultery with the devil. Many of the witchcraft ‘confessions’ were those of Satanic seduction, as described in the insanely fanciful Malleus Maleficarum – a 1486 guide book for detecting and testing witches.
Alinor, like many women accused of witchcraft is a single woman – a deserted wife. Like many of them she struggled to survive and her neighbours were afraid she would fall on the parish and cost them money.
The arrival of the powerfully superstitious and womenhating King James VI of Scotland (King James I of England), who followed two queens – did much to stimulate witch-hunting in England, as he had done in Scotland, which saw five waves of witchcraft attacks from 1591-1661, killing (in Scotland alone) an unknown number of people, probably around 200. James himself investigated witches, believed he was an intended victim, and published a book about them.
At the time of the English Civil War when my book is set, there was a peak of witch-hunting, mainly due to the paid work of Matthew Hopkins, the selfstyled ‘Witchfinder General’. His records clearly show him torturing women with food and sleep deprivation, leading their testimony, and guiding their so-called confessions. One of the regularly reported features of sex with Satan was the tremendous coldness of his penis, but the modern reader must be struck with the disappointing nature of the experience. This is Satan! Is this all he can do? Some of the witches who had sex with Satan even reported their disappointment to the witchfinder. And Satan was a stingy date: the Prince of Darkness sometimes charged a fee. In the United Kingdom, it is likely that more than 2,500 suspected witches were executed by strangling at the stake and their dead bodies burned.
The prejudice against women witches was invoked by men wanting to move into women’s traditional work of herbalism, medicine, surgery and midwifery. Before the 1600s, most medical practitioners were ladies in their still rooms, and working women in their kitchens, trying to heal family, friends, and paying patients. Women surgeons worked both domestically, and were even paid by the public purse in hospitals. Many of the recipes that these early doctors used were published, and while some are clearly dangerous and infectious, some would have been effective. Only women were allowed into the birth chamber and so women monopolised midwifery and gynaecology.
In the United Kingdom, it is likely that more than 2,500 suspected witches were executed by strangling at the stake and their dead bodies burned
But there was growing interest by men throughout the 1600s and they created qualifications at universities (which women could not enter) and guilds (which became men only) to drive women out of general medical practice and away from profitable patients. Lady healers in their great houses started calling professional male doctors rather than treating their own families, women healers in villages became the last resort of the poor and incurable. To further enhance their status the so-called ‘professional’ male doctors emphasised the ignorance and superstitions behind the traditional cures of the women practitioners, accusing them of believing in and using magic. Early women physicians, herbalists, surgeons and midwives were banned; to guarantee that men could dominate medicine without female competition. The Malleus handbook on witches, devoted a whole section on the dangers of witch-midwives who could steal babies or sell them to Satan. My heroine, Alinor is a successful local midwife and herbalist but during the disruption of the Civil War she cannot get her licence to practice so she falls outside the licensing system – in almost every way she is a marginal figure, living on the edge of the land where the fields meet the sea.
Alinor – whose brother is a veteran of Cromwell’s New Model Army, whose lover is a royalist spy, lives in a country divided, everyone agreed that the world was ‘turn’d upside down’ in the phrase of the time. But it was not simply a question of royalist against roundhead, or rich against poor, the battle by men to dominate women, and exclude them from profitable work was also apparent. In uncertain times, people look for scapegoats.
My novel ends with a witchtrial in 1649, but the history of witchcraft in the UK extends, extraordinarily, to modern times. In the 18th century, the last witch to be burned in the UK was a Scotswoman who died in 1727, eight years before the witchcraft laws were changed to prosecute people who were pretending to be witches. That was the crime of Helen Duncan from Perthshire, who served nine months’ imprisonment after pretending to have psychic foreknowledge of the sinking of HMS Barham in 1941. The law which prosecuted Duncan was not repealed until 2008 and replaced with an EU directive about unfair sales and marketing practices.