Witchcraft, charming, &c. - by Eliza Henry-Jones
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You live on a wild and beautiful collection of islands off the coast of mainland Scotland. Your name is Jonet.
On the 14th of May, 1643, you are denounced as a witch by your neighbours. You are charged with witchcraft, charming &c. and soon you will be sentenced to die. Did you hear whispers of unrest on the sharp wind, kicked up from the icy tides of the North Sea? Or is the denouncement a shock to you? You have helped more than one wealthy man on the islands. Perhaps you mistook their desperation, their need, for something softer and more accepting. Perhaps you thought that through the goodness of your deeds, you would be protected.
Safe.
*
Your tools for witchcraft, charming &c. are bone and hot iron; sieve and stone and water. Were other tools tried, inspected and discarded? Do these particular items call to you in a way that others do not? Do you feel something rising in the air outside your body when you touch your skin to them? Or is the power internal – a flooding of your own strength and compulsion?
*
I want to know whether you felt the brittle danger of your witchcraft, charming, &c. Whether the stones trembled in your hands. I want to know whether you felt it, this risk, and found the will and courage to brace against it. Whether the bracing – relishing it – was the point. Perhaps your practices had all felt safe and good, until the 14th of May, when they quite suddenly hadn’t. Perhaps you had never practised anything at all, although I like to believe that you had; and that goodness and kindness were at its heart.
*
Something I think about: the spaces that exist around what is known about you. The absence of fact. Perhaps far more of your story has survived than what I have found out – I hope so. Perhaps some of my wonderings will be pressed away by fact.
Another thing I think about: that without the denouncement, charges and execution, your name would likely not have been remembered. The kind things you did would have been forgotten. This oblique preservation is not worth the horror of your ending, but it is something – this endurance of goodness.
*
You are accused of drying corn for the devil.
*
“This was done by your witchcraft and devilry and this you offered in and sacrificed to the devil your master.”
*
What use does the devil have for corn? An accusation brimming with scarcity, with desperation.
*
Do those who denounce you believe in their accusations as they speak them? Repeat them?
Do they ever think of your ghost, after?
*
You cured a man called Robert Sinclair of impotence. The same man, newly married to his second wife, comes to you again – troubled by ghostly visits from his first wife which “wexit him and difquietit him verie much”. I imagine you stepping by the edge of the kirk yard, gazing at the graves. Do you believe in ghosts? Regardless, you tell him “to goe to his firf wyifis grave, and to charge hir to ly ftill and truble him no moir”. What would be painted as a woman’s hysteria is here cast as a man’s great and solemn burden. How could this tame advice be leveraged against you, cast (and preserved) as a spell?
*
Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair claims that after you drank milk from his cow, the cow bled whenever she was milked, and then she died.
*
You cure folk of boneshaw/beanschaw (I do not know what either of these things are). You cure them of ills, unspecified. You make the crippled walk. Your work – your witchcraft, charming &c. – is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the healing of others (the bloodying of milk and the killing of cows).
*
One day, you are confronted by an ill child whose future you are asked to discern. The charges here – your acts of divination – read almost like a poem.
*
You took one pot with water in it and laid the stones at the mouth of the pot and then lay one cold with the tongs and set the child on it. After that you took one stone and set it on the child’s head and threw a cup full of water in the fire and laid on stone on the child’s mouth and then you took lead and put it in the one iron map and melted it and poured it through the bowl of stones into the water there several times, divining through the lead whether the child would recover or not.
*
You say the child will be well – is it the mother you tell of this news? At the bottom of the charge, however, reads this – “[but as zit the child is not]”. Would it have worked in your favour if the child had quickly recovered? Would it have been worse if the child had died?
*
Why is healing and the settling of restless spirits framed as something in such stark opposition to Christianity? These people you helped – did they denounce you for the same reasons that they sought you out? Desperation? Fear? It wasn’t just witchcraft that was punishable by death under the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563. All of those who sought you out (and later denounced you) had consulted with a witch and were therefore also facing the punishment of death. Did they truly think so ill of you? Or were they saving themselves at your expense?
*
Did you also denounce people, trying to save yourself? Others were tried, later in 1643. Was it you, or another woman, who named them?
*
I hope it was not you. All that space afforded by time: it may not have been.
*
Regardless of how you end up locked in St Magnus Cathedral, awaiting your trial, you will be questioned and then strangled and then your body will be burnt. This will happen on the 22nd of July. Another woman will also be executed on this day – strangled and burnt, as you will be. Are the two of you tried together? It is your companion’s second trial. Were you in the crowds at her first? Do you think of yourself, watching, while your own body is pressed into the very same dock? Surely, with witch-hunting so intense in these last decades, you would have heard stories of other trials? Do you watch other women die? Do you shiver, wondering if you will follow their footsteps a few years later? Your ashes, like theirs, cast into the wind by flames?
*
There is a dungeon in the kirk called Marwick’s Hole. There are other cells too, now dismantled, on the second floor. Are you kept in Marwick's Hole? That void in stone that will be preserved for hundreds of years? The endurance of something other than goodness. It is a space, surrounded by stone. Do people linger in these spaces, long after they have gone?
This space: the dungeon. Its floor is shaped like the bottom of a champagne bottle and, from its narrow interior, the sounds of the kirk drift up. Do you hear singing? Laughter? Do you catch snippets of words, ordinary conversation, and wonder at the wrongness of everything you feel and hear and smell from that tiny, dark and restless space?
*
On the day that you will die, the men tell you this: that you wrong both man and beast.
*
She be taken by the lockman, her hands bound behind her back, conveyed to the place of execution, tied at a stake and burnt in flames.
*
What happens to the parts of you that remain after burning? The bones; the ashy remnants of flesh. Your tools, now discarded. Do you carry on your own magic? Bone and hot iron; sieve and stones and water. ▼
Photo: Giulia Hetherington (immediately above); image of Orkney at top of article by Judy Dean
References
Maitland, J. (1837) Trials for Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Superstition, in Orkney. Trials of Marable Couper, Anie Tailzeour, Marion Richart, Katherine Cragie, Jonet Reid. 1624-1643. Edinburgh Printing Co.: Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Goodare, J., Martin, L., Miller, J. & Yeomen, L. (2003) Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database 1563-1736. http://witches.shca.ed.ac.uk/
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