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| The Witches by Frans Francken II (1581 – 6 May
1642) |
If my
great-grandmother had lived in the 17th Century there’s a good chance she would
have been named a ‘wise woman’. Great-grandmother Margaret was ‘fey’: she knew things. Take for instance the time she
and her husband, who was a forester, took a few precious days holiday in a
remote area of the Mountains of Mourne. During the night, Margaret woke with a
start saying she must get to a poor woman who was giving birth. She dressed,
hurried out into the rural black night and somehow located a lonely croft,
where a woman she had never met was in labour – alone. Margaret, who had a
large family of her own, delivered the child safely, and the family talked
about it ever after. There were other incidents, but this on its own would have
named her as ‘suspect’. How did she know? And how is it that I can answer
questions about events I know nothing of or people I have never met? Actually I
haven’t used a hand-pendulum for a very long time, it makes me too nervous. But
it does explain my rather empathic interest in women accused of witchcraft, and
why, when I was an English teacher, I tried to get adolescents to seriously
consider Shakespeare’s use of the witches in Macbeth.
Let’s take
these famous three – or four, if you count the doubtful inclusion of Hecate –
as a starting point. Popular history tells us that in the early 17th
Century Shakespeare needed to curry favour with King James, who had written a
tract on witches in 1597, Demonologie.
Knowing this, and apparently in an effort to emphasise James’ right to the English
throne, Shakespeare opens his play on the wickedness of those who usurp a legitimate
monarch with this famous scene:
Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches
Why,
I used to ask, are the women on the heath; what are they talking about; and who
is Greymalkin? Well, I think they are
on the heath because they had no place in the village. They had no home other
than a remote hovel, and no means of feeding themselves except by gathering and
begging. They were on the heath, well away from any local hamlet or cultivated land, gathering berries to eat,
bracken to burn . . . who knows, but they were there for a practical reason. These
women are not welcome in villages because they make the inhabitants feel guilty
(about not helping or housing them), and because they are accused by these same
villagers as being the cause of anything from a bad harvest, to dry cows, to
bringing about the death of an innocent child.
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| Book Cover circa 1624 |
The three witches here speak in
riddles and call to their cats or ‘familiars’. Lonely people talk to their
animals; people who live alone talk to themselves. Women who are close friends
or family often chat together in a manner that makes little sense to outsiders,
and laugh in unison at things other people can’t see, or don’t find amusing.
These women on the blasted heath are quite easy to explain: they are social
outcasts, misfits, ‘other’. They are too ugly to have found a marriage partner;
widowed and childless so they have no home or income; or mentally and/or
physically infirm so local villagers fear them. They know each other well and
offer mutual support in a friendless environment, and chatter to each other in
riddles.
Here
is Polanski’s version of the witches in the first scene of his 1971 Macbeth.
There’s
an old crone in black, a childless woman in late middle age, and an unmarried
wench who’s mentally unstable. Polanski’s witch scenes are somewhat extreme,
but I think he probably comes as close to identifying who these women really
were as the script permits.
I
also used to ask my students to think about how poor, aging single women and
elderly or infirm men survived before workhouses or social welfare; to consider
how they kept themselves alive. Then I’d ask why so many of those accused of
witchcraft were women. To us it may seem obvious, but to sixteen-year-olds in
the healthy, wealthy western world it’s an eye-opener. Keith Thomas, in his
book Religion and the Decline of Magic
(1971) says;
it
is necessary to bear in mind that judicial records reveal two essential facts
about accused witches: they were poor and they were usually women. (…) James I estimated
the ratio of female witches to male at twenty to one. (…) Contemporary writers
also agreed that witches came from the lowest ranks of society.
Lonely,
elderly, infirm, malnourished women were easy to blame and they had no way to
retaliate. People couldn’t or wouldn’t support them, and so consciously or
subconsciously local communities wanted rid of them. Keith Thomas points out
that witch trials during the 17th Century “included people from each
social strata, but those condemned were overwhelmingly from the bottom of the
social hierarchy”.
This leads me back to who was
considered ‘suspect’. Apart from the reasons outlined above, I think society
feared them primarily for their solitary ways. Any woman without a man -
father, husband, son or brother - was suspect. A woman without a home or anyone
to speak for her was suspect. Here’s Crook-back Aggie from my novel The Chosen Man, she is agonising over
how to disobey her employer who
had as good as promised to protect her if
– when – anyone accused her. Lady Marjorie understood: a woman as deformed as
Aggie was always at risk.
If
she hadn’t got a proper home and she had to sleep in the woods and beg a bite
of food, people would lay all the crimes they could name on her. And prove them
too. It’d take just one girl to see her picking berries or herbs, just one girl
who’d lost her beau, or one woman who’d miscarried; one woman who’d be
expecting and see Aggie’s crooked back and know her own child would be deformed
– which was what had happened to her own mother – she’d be tried for a witch
and burnt on the same day...
Crook-back Aggie, like Deborah Swift’s
fictional wise woman Margaret Poulter, knows about herbs and medicinal plants.
She also knows that if she loses her job this skill will be her downfall. As
Keith Thomas says, “In a society more
backward technologically than ours the immediate attraction of the belief in
witchcraft is not difficult to understand. It served as a means of accounting
for the otherwise inexplicable misfortunes of daily life”.
The adjective ‘inexplicable’ here is the
key to perhaps all the cruelty and malevolence involved in witch trials. This
is what led to Joan of Arc’s trial; her inability to explain her success as a
charismatic leader in terms that grown men, soldiers and ecclesiastics (on the
losing side) could understand. What people do not understand they fear.
However, centuries later, that which to
many of us is inexplicable or uncertain is keeping fortune-tellers in business.
I live in Spain,
where every daily newspaper has at least one page of advertisements by women (and
a few rather odd-looking men) offering their so-called skills with tarot cards
or crystal balls. In this current period of severe unemployment, bad harvests
and economic uncertainty fortune-tellers are doing a thriving business here. I
do not understand the words of economists, I cannot grasp GDP or what is
happening in banks, but if I wanted to
I could seek comfort from the words of one of these wise women. And then, when what
little security I have left is taken from me, when I realise her words were
meaningless or have caused me greater problems than I already had, I could
point my finger at that soothsayer and say ‘hex’.
If I were to direct a modern
adaptation of Macbeth I’d like to
introduce an alternative reading of the witches. In my version there’s a group
of older women winding up a young man, who’s very full of himself, very eager
and sharp-suited. They could be the cleaning ladies down in the basement of a
high-gloss business premises; and he – let’s call him Mack - could be one of
those New York ‘Mad Men’ or a London merchant bank executive. He’s gone
downstairs because he’s after a huge account that will change his future and he
knows Iris does the tea leaves. Iris is tickled pink. She and her pals have got
him in their kitchenette where there’s a huge kettle steaming on the gas ring,
and they’re pretending they can cook up a magnificent future for him in their cauldron.
They’re having a tremendous time at his expense: “. . . oh yes, and an eye of a
newt and a toe of a frog. What else shall we pop in Maud – a slice of tiger’s guts,
baboon’s blood? You still got that bit of umbilicus . . .?”
What I’ve always wanted to know is how
those supposedly illiterate women on that blasted Scottish heath in 1606 knew
about tigers and baboons in the first place.
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