Since it’s not halloween any time soon, here’s something about witches. Ladies will be glad to know that it is no longer punishable by death to have your imp or familiar suckle your third nipple, but in 1645 - things was different. Witchcraft supposedly existed to tempt man and defy God, and has existed in its various forms since well before the dawn of Christianity, and one can imagine that the two didn’t get on hugely well. The recorded persecution of witches had actually been in decline in the thirty years leading up to 1645, but then a certain Matthew Hopkins bestowed upon himself the totally unofficial title of Witch Finder General, and went on a two year terror trip through Essex and Suffolk. Many witches were hanged, but for what exactly?
I do wonder whether witch finding in general was just a catastrophic failure on man’s part to understand the earliest suffragettes, but either way the idea of some black magic virago used to have people defiling their britches all over Europe. About three hundred years after the St Osyth Trials of 1582, an Essex man inadvertently exhumed two of the executed witches in his garden to find that each had their arms and thighs riveted together by the executioner lest they had decided to escape their graves and brew a Charybdis of mischief. I mean really.
But what caused the blind frenzied panic that led to so many prosecutions of witches between 1645-7? It seemed that Hopkins had a large cauldron full of shit himself, which he was particularly adept at stirring. These witches weren’t actually that bad by European standards anyway - they didn’t fly or partake in perverted orgies. But there was one thing, and given the instability of the time after the Civil War mixed with the braying stupidity of terrified bumpkins, Hopkins pounced on it.
Suspected witches all had their own imps, which could be in the form of dogs, cats, mice, spiders, toads, crows, hornets, moles, whatever. Supposedly they could be sent on malevolent missions, such as wrecking the bread at a bakery (only someone that followed Satan himself could imagine conjuring such evil). This delightful conjecture extends to suggest that they could however be used for other things, as I have found out.
Margaret Landish confessed on the 6th of May 1645 that “lying sick by the fireside in her own house, something came up to her body and sucked on her privy parts and much pained and tormented her.” Landish claimed that if it was an imp then it must have been sent by Susan Cock. No shit. A witness actually claimed that this was a regular occurrence. Erm, right. More likely story - her husband walks in, sees her being licked out by the cat, and denounces her in disgust.
This isn’t an isolated incident however. Joyce Bonds had two imps like mice, who apparently crawled into her bed and suckled her, whilst Anne Cooper had three black imps called Wynhoe, Jeso and Panu, “which suckled on the lower parts of her body.” Jane Cooper had a frog named Frog that killed two children, and Mary Johnson pushed her rat through a door to kill a baby, but my favourite is Margaret Moore, who kept a rat in her drawers. (Surely all women do that? Ed.) She often sent the rat to do her evil bidding, and her rat was said to give off “such an extreme and offensive stink” that nearby people were “scarce able to endure” it. Other infamous imps included Vinegar Tom the greyhound, Elemauzer, Pyewacket and Grizel Greedigut, names that, declared Hopkins - “no mortal could invent.”
THOMAS
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