RWGreader

Witch Persecutions of 1530 - 1690 in Europe

I'm going to talk about the witch hunts in the 16th and 17th Century England. I have returned to this subject again and again over the years and as my politics have changed, so has my views on the witch hunts. The most exciting book to come out recently is "Caliban and the Witch" by Silvia Frederici and I quote a lot from it here, but feminists and feminist marxists and socialists have been writing about this subject for years.

About a quarter of all criminal trials in England during this period were witch trails, and mot who were accused died. It is really hard to get figures of how many, but certainly tens of thousands died during the persecutions. In Europe things were even worse with up to a million women being killed over this period. One of the continually shocking things is how much it is STILL as sideline story in history - glossed over again and again.

The witch trials did not exist before this phase. Between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the Reformation in 1534 there were only six recorded executions of witches and those were mostly do to with trying to kill the monarchy. It died down again in the 18th Century with witchcraft no longer being a crime after 1736. The last trial was 1717 and she was acquitted. The most intense phase was 1580 to 1630, which was when 'mercantile capitalism' had mostly taken over from feudal relations. In the UK in 1532 Witchcraft became punishable by death.

In 1559 Bishop Jewel said "the number of witches and sorcerers had everywhere become enormous. This kind of people within these last few years are marvellously increased". Or Chief Justice Anderson in 1602 "The land is full of witches. They abound in all places and would in short time overrun the whole land"

In this talk I will go through a bit of background and the gender issue, then how the witch trials happened, and then why: Independent women as a threat; wise women, healers and midwives and the rise of the medical profession and science; female political activists; economic changes and the witch trails as part of the transition to capitalism.

Background

During the middle ages, more or less the 12th to 15th century, it was partly a feudal system with villagers working common land giving a certain amount of the produce to the landowner. There were also women working in all sorts of trades in manufacturing e.g. the textile industry and belonging to the respective guilds. Some statistics from birth and death registers show women outnumbering men 110 or 120 to each 100.

In the 15th and 16th century we see the bloody birth of mercantile capitalism. There were the battles against enclosures of land as people lost their rights to the use of the commons for grazing animals or gathering wood or herbs. There was the rise of industry, migration to the cities, the rise of universities and professions and huge battles going on within the church such as the reformation, protestant / catholic splits, Martin Luther… Although significantly - all the branches of the Christian church were on the same side against the witches. The state and the church were becoming more interlinked and more powerful. Women were inevitably excluded from these new areas of power.

The enclosures were part of the rise of the capitalist mode of production in the sense that people were forced into wage work. There were sizable migrant or vagrant communities moving into the new cites, but not always finding work. These included independent women such as prostitutes, dancers or nurses. In England, most of the witch trials occurred in Essex where most of the land had been enclosed. Whereas in the Scottish highlands, where the communal life continued, there is no evidence of witch hunting at all.

Those pushing these new social structures wanted to break the old ones and found an excellent weapon in the witch trials. It could be used not only to condemn and break up old communal forms of life, but was also "a weapon by which resistance to social and economic restructuring could be defeated". The class element is proved in that most of the women accused were poor peasant women, and the accusers were wealthy members of that same community - often their employers or landlords.

The witches were women. There were men practicing all sorts of magic and healing, but they were not killed. Jean Bodin, a French author of a witch finder's manual set the ration of men to women as 50 to 1. In England 90 % of the accused were women, and most men were the husbands of accused women.

How did they do it?

The Mallues Maleficarum (hammer of witches) was published in 1484 by two Dominican monks and spread widely throughout Europe. Many clerics, scholars and royalty also published their own texts. King James wrote is own witch finders text and passed laws against witchcraft. The texts seem so ridiculous now, but were taken so seriously then and were still being discussed rationally in academic circles up to the 18th century.

The witch hunts were organised, co-ordianted, multi-facted systemic attacks. The rise of the printing press lead to more anti-witch pamphlets and manuals being printed. The church is then the translator for the people. Only the church has access to the divine truth, much as only the doctors have access to the medical training. So the church defines the problem with the witches, the doctors examine, torture and condemn them, the lawyers press charges and oversee legal proceedings, the state administrators organise the executions.

The process started with a steady indoctrination with the authorities publicly expressing anxiety about the spread of witches. Witch finders would travel from village to village with propaganda and notes on how to identify witches. Notes were pinned up that the witch finder was coming in two weeks and everyone should tell who the witches of the village were. Refusing to co-operate could put your life in danger. Witches would be accused in public and anyone trying to assist the woman would be immediately a suspect. Frederici claims "The witch hunt was the first persecution in Europe that made use of a multi-media propaganda to generate a mass psychosis".

The trials were a farce with random evidence and almost no chance of acquittal at all. Torture was a huge part of the trails. James I: "Loath they are to confess without torture, which witnesses their guilt". This torture was severe and usually extremely sexually abusive.
The crimes themselves were so inexact, indefinable and vague that we can see the parallels with 'terrorism' today. A vague term that can be thrown at anyone - but a very powerful term that puts you beyond the rest of humanity and the expectation of humane treatment. "As term was impossible to prove by evokes the maximum of horror, it could be used to punish any form of protest and generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life". SF 170

"The proof of such crimes is so obscure and so difficult that not one witch in a million would be accused or punished if the procedure were governed by the ordinary rules. He who is accused of sorcery should never be acquitted".

The whole concept of the devil as an all powerful entity was introduced at this time. Prior to that he was a sort of mischievous, but relatively powerless troublemaker. To introduce a male, singular dominating evil fitted the new image of women as submissive to male power, one husband, one god, one devil. The power and agency of women was denied as they became servants of the devil. Also - the daily power of ordinary people was denied. Magic and miracles became the sole domain of god and the church, or the devil. People magic was denied.

The trials and executions, hangings or burnings were very public affairs with the whole community forced to attend - including, and sometimes especially, the daughters of the witches.
The spiral of fear cannot be overestimated in towns were there two burnings a week. Or hundreds of women burned at one time. There people were your neighbours, friends and family. Reports of neighbours accusing each other are a reaction to the fear. This is a very different story to the 'witch craze' or communal psychoses explanation that is sometimes given.

Why did they do it?

The witch hunts were one of the mechanisms to control and subordinate women who's social and economic independence was a threat to the emerging social order. Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1893

"The superior learning of witches was recognised in the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages… As knowledge has ever been power, the church feared its use in women's hands, and levelled its deadliest blows at her".

Or Mary Daly: the witches were "women who's physical, intellectual, economic, moral and spiritual independence and activity profoundly threatened the male monopoly in every sphere".

Changes in methods of social control

I don't want to paint a picture of village life before the witch hunts as some rural paradise. There was a lot of social control and gender divides, but the close knit nature of the communities meant that the social control was an internal matter. Anti-social behaviour was dealt with by ostracising or ridicule. As the communities broke up, and the role of women was much more defined and controlled into this new powerless role, social control became the domain of the brutal authorities.

There was very little tolerance of non-conformity and all life was played out in public. "In England, every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye on his neighbours house as to whether the married people live in harmony".

Independent women as a threat

Women who were too loud, to confident, to angry were condemned. Reginald Scott didn't accuse women of being in league with the devil but rather "The chief fault of witches is that they are scolds". Meaning women who speak back to their husbands and talk amongst themselves. A scold was defined as a woman who was "a troublesome and angry women who doth break the public peace and beget cherish and increase public discord". It was a crime to be: a busy woman of the tongue, a maker of rhymes or nicknames or libellous lascivious ballads.

Or a poem from 1630
"Ill fares the hapless family that shows
A cock that's silent and a hen that crows.
I know not which live more unnatural lives,
Obedient husbands or commanding wives"

In 1576 Margaret Belsed of Boreham was condemned for 'being a witch and not living with their husband".

Sexuality

Part of the project was redefining women's sexuality. Prior to this period women were more equal actors in the sexual relations. In over half the trials women are accused of some sexual crime such as sex outside marriage, sex with the devil, sex with animals etc. Men would accuse women of bewitching them into sex, thereby justifying rape or getting out of unwanted affairs or pregnancies.

There is the most bizarre stuff on women's sexuality such as this quote from the Malius Malificarum: "And what then is to be thought of those witches who collect male organs in great numbers together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box where they more themselves like living members and eat oats and corn as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?" Or "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable".
The last quote is interesting as it portrays women as sexually active and aggressive, in contrast to the later stereotype of submissive and week, fully developed by the end of the witch trials. The witch hunts provoked a fear of the powerful woman, then used the pact with the devil to ridicule that power. Women's sexuality was reconstructed during this period into the submissive wife and mother that has lasted to this day. Women's passive sexuality serves the capitalist model of unpaid mother, carer and worker and the property of her husband. All non-procreative forms of female sexuality were demonised". [Frederici p194]

The Taborites, the Bretheren of the Free Spirit and others were against the institutions of marriage is so far as the love of people was an act and thing in and of itself, much as the communion with god was. It did not need the blessing of the state. The these groups were mercilessly persecuted.

Prostitution became illegal for the first time during this period and many prostitutes were burned as witches. They were economically and sexually independent women that did not fit the new model. Adultery made punishable by death, and birth out of wedlock was made illegal.
Post-menopausal women were often killed as witches and the new stereotype of the old hag - desperate, horny but repulsive was constructed in stark contrast to the revered and cared for wise woman. With the break down of communal life and the beginnings of the nuclear family the status of the 'elderly relatives' were demoted.
In the middle ages both the wise woman and the prostitute were considered positive social figures, demonised for their non-procreation sex.

Lesbians were also accused such as "William Bonner saith, that Elizabeth Bennet and his wife were lovers and familiar friends and did accompainies much together". When the wife dies, Elizabeth is accused of "clasping her in her arms and killing her".

Prior to this phase the word 'gossip' simply meant friend, but as women's relations with each other were seen as suspect, the word became an insult.

Wise women, midwives, healers and the rise of the medical profession
(See also the link to "Witches, Midwives and Nurses").

Prior to this period health was the domain of women healers and there were women in each community with a huge amount of knowledge and skills. As knowledge is power - that power was in the hands of working class or peasant women. In 1548 Reginald Scott said "At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, 'she is a witch or she is a wise woman'." Many of the trials featured the topic of health, for example women curing someone, and that person becoming ill again. Or even women curing someone and that person becoming well as witchcraft itself was a crime. The wise men and magicians were not killed and ended up in some kind of equilibrium with the new physicians.

Now we have the rise of the medical profession. The university-taught physicians were on the rise and some see the witch trials as them wiping out the competition. The witch beliefs also covered up for the doctor's incompetence. For example there was little knowledge of cancer or strokes and so it was easy for the doctors to blame unexplainable deaths by accusing a witch.

But it is also much deeper than that. The whole monopoly for the treatment and theory and therefore control of the body was being contested.

The new forms of work and social relations wanted to control bodies, especially female bodies. They should provide the next generation from their bodies, be available and controlled by their husbands and make their bodies dispensable to the new systems by losing control of their knowledge of them.

"Just as the Enclosures expropriated the peasantry from the communal land, so the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus 'liberated' from any impediment preventing them to function as machines for the production of labor. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women's bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons" [Frederici p 184]

Birth and midwives
At the time capital and the state were particularly concerned with birth rates. They wanted labour and saw big populations as the sign of a wealthy nation. The population was falling and the authorities were worried about demographic collapse. Therefore they were anti-abortion and anti-contraception. Many of the first witches burned were engaged in this work. The fairy tales of witches killing children and babies stem from this campaign.

They authorities didn't want the control of reproduction in the hands of lower class women themselves. The Malleus Maleficarum states: "no-one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives".

Or the Papal Bull of 1484 "witches destroy the offspring of women… They hinder men form generating and women from conceiving" So all sexual health work - be it midwifery or contraception help was condemned.

Science
Ironically, much of this was empirical knowledge, using cause and effect and experimentation, which we now are told is the result of modern science and represent progress from the belief systems of the middle ages. The male scientists at the time were actually basing their knowledge on philosophy and clerical studies. The healers had a knowledge of chemistry, botany, natural science, pharmacology and anatomy. Paracelsus, often claimed to be the father of modern medicine, said in 1527 that he "learned from the sorceress all he knew"

The men so praised as the fathers of modern science were involved in the witch-hunts. Francis Bacon for example. The torturing chambers of the witch-hunts served as medical laboratories and overseen by physicians. Those men advocating empirical science such as Gallileo or Copernicus were accused of heresy.

The churches position was that it was faith alone that one should rely one as the 'senses were the devils playground". Only god's representative could work miracles. The radical Christians at the time such as the Anabaptists and the Taborites were also against this view as they said that everyone could have direct communication with god - unmediated by priests or the church.

Older women

Many of the accused were widows. As the communal forms of living changed and some people were not provided, as they were not engaged in the new wage labour systems, they turned to begging as a means of subsistence. Witches were accused of "going from house to house for a pot full of milk, yeast, pottage or some other relief, without which they could hardly live". There was a lot of poverty at the time and accusing someone as a witch could alleviate the guilt and responsibility to provide for dependant neighbours. The feeling of having a curse could be the guilt and tension of neglecting and condemning members of your community. In many of the trials the accuser had actually wronged the woman previously e.g. refusing charity to her. This is something that Keith Thomas focuses a lot on in "Religion and the Decline of Magic".

"The old woman had passed by the door, where the girl was eating a new wheaten loaf. She 'looked earnestly upon Mary, but, speaking nothing, passed by; and yet instantly returned, and with the like look and silence departed. At which doing the bread which she was chewing fell out of Mary Glover's mouth, and she herself fell backwards off the stool where she sat, into a grievous fit" [Quoted in Thomas]

It developed the capitalist mentality of private property and wealth as those previously provided for as part of the whole, become beggars asking for charity. Widows being excluded form feasts and the like are the origin of fairy tales such as sleeping beauty. Women were thus the scapegoats for all sorts of ills - deaths, crop failure, animal disease etc.

In England there were changes in the law around this time regarding women and property - widows now got 1/3 of the husbands land, not all of it. Rented property did not pass to the widow. The poor law banned begging without permission and said that each parish should be responsible for it’s own poor. The trials also enabled the authorities to confiscate any property or wealth the women had - also explaining the numbers of economically independent women killed. But all in all this is not enough of an explanation as it was not really that lucrative in the short term. Silvia Frederici sees it as fairly insignificant, but Maria Mies claims that the money made was much more significant than we assume and has some evidence, especially from Germany such as the letter from Bailiff Geiss to Lord Lindheim:

"If only your lordship would be willing to start the burning, we would gladly provide the firewood and bear all other costs, and your lordship would earn so much that the bridge and also the church could be well repaired. Moreover, you would get so much that you could pay your servants a better salary in the future, because one could confiscate whole houses and particularly the more well to do ones" [Quoted in Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a world Scale; Women in the Global Division of Labour"]

Organised women, organised resistance

Of course wise women were organised into groups too - to share knowledge and herbs and discuss together.

One of the main accusations was of being part of an organised rebellion. And to be sure these women were. And the famous sabbats were the meetings of these rebellious communities and meetings of women.

Witches accused of rebelling against the village constable who was trying to get their sons to be soldiers, or the overseer of the poor who put their children into compulsory service. Joan Peachy was accused in 1582 after complaining the poor relief collector gave her inferior bread. Margaret Harkett was accused of driving a bailiff mad after being caught illegally collecting wood on his masters land. Other women were accused after retaliating against the local tyrants, against enclosures and shutting rights of way.

The real covens were not cultish religious devil worship, but dissident underground groups of women (or mixed groups) - pissed off, disenfranchised and angry.

Just like today any underground resistance would be about communication between villages, bringing together other anti-authoritarian people and also having a subculture of parties, discussions, skills and knowledge sharing. The authorities were terrified of self-organised groups and networks. In 1920 historian Montague Summers wrote "The witches were a vast political movement, an organised society, which was anti-social and anarchical, a world wide plot against civilisations". Then - just as now - it was the witch hunters who were the organised anti-social plots of terror.

The phase before the height of the witch trials was politically explosive all over Europe. The birth of the new order was, as ever, a bloody process. There were the peasant wars in Germany, the growth and crushing of the radical Christian groups who in many ways were the 1st anarchists. There were the battles against the enclosures in England, the revolt of the Croquants in France against tithes, taxes and the price of bread. In all these struggles women played a central role. They were an integral part of the communities being attached, and an integral part of the struggle against those attacks. There is much evidence of women initiating and leading the actions all over Europe. The trials were a "class war carried out by other means. We cannot fail to see a connections between the fear of uprisings and the prosecutors insistence on the witches Sabbast, the famous nocturnal". Throughout this period any peasant gathering, festival or dance was described by the authorities as a virtual sabat.

Those burned as witches were these same women a few years later when the revolts had been crushed. The witch-hunts crushed those who remembered the struggles and would have remained to carry on the resistance. As the trials continued, the communities were robbed of those women who would have fought back. The independent, strong, radical, rebellious women who would have served as role models and lead a fight back.

Silver Frederici: "What has not been recognised is that the witch-hunt was on of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat. For the unleashing of a campaign of terror against women, unmatched by any other persecution, weakened the resistance of the European peasantry to the assault launched against it by the gentry and the state… The witch hunts deepened the division between women and men, destroyed a universe of practises, beliefs, and social subjects whose existence was incompatible with the capitalist work discipline" [Frederici p 165]

The witch trails worked to divide the class along gender lines by spreading fear and mistrust. "The years of propaganda and terror sowed amongst men the seeds of a deep psychological alienation form women, that broke class solidarity and undermined their own collective power… just as today, by repressing women the ruling class more effectively repressed the entire proletariat." [Frederici p 189]

Conclusion

"If we consider the historical context in which the witch-hunt occurred, the gender and class of the accused, and the effects of the persecution, then we much conclude that the witch hunting in Europe was an attack on women's resistance of the spread of capitalist relations and the power that women had gained by virtue of their sexuality, their control over reproduction and their ability to heal" Frederici p. 170

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