Bottles, magic and healing in 17th-century England

Nigel Jeffries, finds specialist, is principal investigator in a project to understand witch bottles, with Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook, who study magic, witchcraft, popular medicine and the material culture of healing. They’d like to hear from you:

Begun in April, Bottles Concealed & Revealed is a three-year project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (award ah/s002693/ 1) to recalibrate understandings of the English mid to late 17th-century “witch bottle” practice. The project is led by Nigel Jeffries at Museum of London Archaeology ( mola), in collaboration with Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook at the University of Hertfordshire.

“Witch bottles” is a name applied to deliberately concealed 17th-century glass and stoneware vessels believed to have served for ritual protection or as containers of a “prepared cure” against bewitchment. As evidenced by the Greenwich bottle featured in British Archaeology (News Jul/Aug 2009/107), the cure was often a curious cocktail of ingredients: these were commonly pins and nails, but sometimes included (for e example) hair, nail clippings a and cloth hearts. Urine w was also a key component, t though this rarely survives c centuries of concealment. T The bottles have been f found in a range of c contexts, from hearths a and beneath thresholds a and the floors of b buildings of the period, t to churchyards, ditches a and riverbanks, and ha have b been rediscovered during l later renovations or unearthed from a archaeological sites.

Our research represents the most c comprehensive synthesis relating to 1 17th-century witch bottles to date, b building on the foundational work by R Ralph Merrifield, archaeologist and M Museum of London curator, in the 1950s to 1980s, and recently added to by Brian Hoggard ( Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of CounterWitchcraft, 2019). The project will examine the bottles, their contents and their concealment, and the appropriate historical context of the practice.

First all the known examples that survive in museums and other collections around London, southern and eastern England – the geographical centre of this curiously English phenomenon – are to be surveyed first hand or through literature review, and critiqued along with their contents. In building a national collection, the project has collated data on over 120 German or London stoneware bottles, with a few glass examples, that have been reported as witch bottles over the past 150 years or so. Early observations suggest most bottles post-date the Restoration of Charles ii in 1660, and that the practice might have been relatively short-lived for 30 to 40 years. While some vessels are curated and published, other reported bottles do not appear to have found their way into a museum collection and have been retained by their finders.

By examining the 17th-century origins of this long-lived practice, the project will help determine how this first form of “bottle magic” was then adapted and spread across Britain in subsequent centuries. “Witch bottle” does not appear to be a term used in the early modern period, and

the earliest published reference we have so far found is 1844. The subsequent acceptance of this parlance was influenced by the way these objects were first encountered in Victorian times, and how sympathetic and bottle magic were then understood. “Witch bottles” of all periods have therefore become tarred with the same brush; they are thought of as folkish, as “protective” or as “charms against witchcraft” (Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual & Magic, 1987), and this has deeply influenced how they are recorded and described today.

Another important enquiry is therefore to situate the practice within its full historic and cultural context. Annie Thwaite, whose doctoral research examines magic and the material culture of healing in early modern England, has called for these bottles to be viewed in the history of healing (see also “A history of amulets in 10 objects,” Science Museum Group Journal 11, 2019, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.15180/191103/001). So were witch bottles healing bottles, part of a broader interconnected world of early modern medicine, religion and popular and sympathetic magic? Was bewitchment as a specific disease an unusual diagnosis for illnesses? And if so, how could an individual be cured and protected? The creation of these bottles was not a random individual response. How cunning folk, apothecaries, physicians, astrologers, chemists and the healers of the day administered, spread and communicated the practice needs to be better emphasised. There are references to the creation and use of the bottles by contemporary writers around 1670 to 1705 – although none specifically mentions using stoneware. But these texts have been uncritically read to reinforce the idea that the objects were used to counter witchcraft, with the apotropaic and prophylactic use of the bottles frequently emphasised. The idea they were linked to the magical protection of the “house” is an area the project will therefore also be examining. These ceramic and glass containers have been found deliberately concealed not only in “houses” or “domestic” contexts, but also in a variety of rural and urban buildings, in addition to open ground, watercourses, ditches and so on.

While witch bottles have no continental European counterpart, their placement may follow broader northern European traditions. This is an area that Ralph Merrifield drew attention to, but has not been reviewed since. We hope that the publications, catalogue and datasets which the project will generate, and the insights revealed, will benefit not just specialist historians and archaeologists but also engage and inform museum and folklore curators, and those outside academia for whom the subjects of healing and witchcraft resonate.

Do you know of any witch bottles of the period the project is studying? We are interested in hearing from readers of British Archaeology who might know of examples stored in a museum archive, on display or in private collections. Please email witchbottles@mola.org.uk. For help if you find a suspected witch bottle, visit https://www.mola.org.uk/blog/whatshould-you-do-if-you-find-17th-centurywitch-bottle

Above: Nigel Jeffries examines pins from the Holywell Priory bottle

Above and right: A Dutch or German jug found in 2004 at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich; sealed with a cork, it held fingernail parings, hair, pins and iron nails in a liquid identified as human urine

Left: A London stoneware jar, c 1670–1710, excavated in 2008 at Holywell Priory near Bishopsgate during the East London Line project; it was buried in a large hole under the floor of an 18thcentury house in a basement or latrine doorway, holding 60 bent copper-alloy pins, rusty nails and a piece of wood or bone

Left: 19th-century glass, possibly a candlestick base, found during building work in Lincolnshire and holding corroded iron and copperalloy objects (possibly pins and dress hooks) and a leather strap (bottle base 5cm across); the oldest use of the term “witch bottle” the project has found is 1844, when the practice may have changed from its 17th-century origins