Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England

A History of Sorcery and Treason

Francis Young

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia del cristianesimo

Treason and magic were first linked together during the reign of Edward II. Theories of occult conspiracy then regularly led to major political scandals, such as the trial of Eleanor Cobham Duchess of Gloucester in 1441. While accusations of magical treason against high-ranking figures were indeed a staple of late medieval English power politics, they acquired new significance at the Reformation when the 'superstition' embodied by magic came to be associated with proscribed Catholic belief. Francis Young here offers the first concerted historical analysis of allegations of the use of magic either to harm or kill the monarch, or else manipulate the course of political events in England, between the fourteenth century and the dawn of the Enlightenment. His book addresses a subject usually either passed over or elided with witchcraft: a quite different historical phenomenon. He argues that while charges of treasonable magic certainly were used to destroy reputations or to ensure the convictions of undesirables, magic was also perceived as a genuine threat by English governments into the Civil War era and beyond.

CHAPTER 1

‘Compassing and Imagining’: Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval England

The idea that magic could be a ‘political crime’ – except in the general sense that magicians were criminals and therefore a threat to civil society – did not emerge in England until the fourteenth century. The simplest reason for this is that the practice of magic came under the jurisdiction of the law of the church (canon law) rather than the king's law, and therefore magic was scrutinised by the ecclesiastical authorities for its violations of divine law. A more complex reason is that the fourteenth century marked a turning point in attitudes towards magic across Europe. As a consequence of anxieties about the Cathar heresy in southern France and northern Spain, the Fourth Lateran Council produced a dogmatic definition of demons in 1215 and the church began to re-emphasise the devil's activity in the world. As a result, the church was less likely to write magic off as empty superstition and came to view it as something definitively inspired by the devil – and therefore something capable of actual harm.¹

One striking English example that shows the magnitude of the shift in attitudes towards magic can be found in accounts of William the Conqueror's siege of the island of Ely in the Cambridgeshire Fens in 1070. William's siege was failing to dislodge the English warrior Hereward ‘the Wake’. The Norman knight Ivo Taillebois told William that he knew an old woman ‘who by her art alone could shatter the strength and stronghold [of the English] in the isle’. William hesitated, perhaps because he had a reputation for ignoring superstition,² but in the end he instructed his soldiers to fetch the woman in secret. The old woman was set in a high place, ‘and having gone up, fulminated for a long time against the isle and its inhabitants, making many destructive spells, likenesses and fantasies of their overthrow’.³ However, just as the woman was about to launch her third attempt at a magical attack against the defenders, they crept out of the reeds and set fire to the trees at the edge of the fen. The woman was so terrified that she fell from her place and was killed:

And that aforesaid poisoner, having been set in a more eminent place over everyone else, so that she might be freer in her incantations, fell from the height by terror, as if struck by a hurricane. And thus, by a broken neck, she who had come beforehand to kill others lost consciousness and perished.⁴

The willingness of a king who claimed to be England's legitimate ruler to use magic against his enemies bespeaks much more ambivalent cultural attitudes towards magic in Norman England than existed by the fourteenth century. The early medieval tradition of classifying magic as a collection of dangerous pretences began with the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636), subsequently passing into the influential writings of Hrabanus Maurus, Burchard of Worms, Ivo of Chartres, Hugh of St Victor and John of Salisbury, as well as into the definitive textbook of medieval canon law, Gratian's Decretum. These authors ‘debated the legality of magic but not its efficacy; magic was a form of moral and religious perversion, but it was not, perhaps, something that needed to be explained’.⁵ Commentators of the early and high Middle Ages were clear that dabbling in magic was a sin, but theological enquiry into the demonic causes of magical phenomena as experiential realities (demonology) did not truly exist as a mainstream scholarly pursuit until after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

In 1281, under the influence of a harder line being adopted against magic by ecclesiastical authorities across Europe, Archbishop John Pecham of Canterbury drew up a constitution that identified magic as an infringement of the First Commandment, against idolatry: ‘You will not have strange gods before me. You will not make for yourself any sculpted thing or the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or of those things that are in the water beneath the earth; you will neither adore nor worship them’ (Exodus 20:3–4).⁶ Yet in spite of its classification as a form of idolatry, magic was not a serious crime, insofar as it was punished only by the church and not by the king's courts. Since the church courts could not, without the collaboration of the secular authorities, impose any sentence more severe than excommunication or penance, it was not possible (in theory, at least) for anyone to suffer the death penalty for magic alone.

However, matters were not quite so simple if magic was entangled with other crimes, as it was in many medieval accusations – particularly with poisoning (veneficium), swindling, sexual misconduct and heresy. The association of magic with heresy was never as potent in England as in other European countries where magicians were accused of actively worshipping the devil,⁷ but the advent of the Lollard heresy in the fourteenth century made the authorities more sensitive to the possibility that magic might mask other deviant beliefs. The church courts treated heresy as a violation of the Second Commandment, ‘You will not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’ (Exodus 20:7), because it represented a misuse of religious doctrines. The irony of trying to associate Lollardy with magic, given the Lollards' own condemnation of the church's blessings and exorcisms as ‘necromancy’,⁸ seems to have been lost on the authorities. When Robert Barker of Babraham, Cambridgeshire, appeared before Bishop William Gray of Ely charged with magical treasure-hunting in January 1466, it was ‘on account of a vehement suspicion of heresy and the art of necromancy’.⁹ In condemning Robert to a penance, Gray commented on his ‘superstitious, idolatrous wisdom and, as a consequence, heretical wickedness’.¹⁰

The fact that Bishop Gray himself presided over a simple case of magic was a sign of the hierarchy's concern (such cases were usually left to archdeacons and other commissaries¹¹), but luckily for him, Barker was found guilty only of magic and not heresy. In 1401, Henry IV's Parliament introduced the statute De haeretico comburendo which allowed the church courts to hand over a relapsed heretic to the secular authorities to be burnt alive at the stake. Furthermore, whereas before 1401 only a synod of bishops had been able to convict for heresy, after 1401 judgement lay with the local bishop alone.¹² Yet in spite of harsher penalties for heresy and determined attempts to smear magicians as heretics, it was a great deal safer to practise magic in the Middle Ages than it was in subsequent centuries. The Friar in Geoffrey Chaucer's ‘Parson's Tale’ puts magic under the First Commandment, but considers it part of the sin of Wrath – one of the less serious of the Seven Deadly Sins.¹³ The medieval church was protective of its right to try cases concerning magic, denying the right of secular magistrates to try a spiritual crime. Magic was the proper concern of the church, partly because clerics were often the culprits, and partly because magicians almost always constructed their ritual procedures by misusing the church's rites and ceremonies. Furthermore, canon law provided relatively little guidance on what actually constituted ‘good’ and ‘bad’ magical practices, a fact which allowed many magicians to escape justice.¹⁴

Since ritual magic was largely the preserve of literate individuals, it was perhaps inevitable that accusations would surface at the royal court among the king's clerks. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart has argued that the case of Adam de Stratton, a moneylender and financier to the court of Edward I, might be interpreted as an early instance of an accusation of magical treason. According to the chronicler Bartholomew de Cotton, in 1289 Stratton was arrested, taken to the Tower, and his belongings seized. Amongst them was found a ‘silken box’ in which Stratton kept nail-clippings, pubic hair, and the feet of moles and toads. Because the box had a seal attached to it by one of the royal justices, and Stratton threw it into a latrine (presumably in an effort to conceal it from the searchers), ‘everyone considered him to be a traitor to the King, and he was accused of belonging to that group of people called sortilegi’.¹⁵

It seems likely that in this case, Stratton's ‘treason’ had nothing to do with the magical nature of the box's contents; rather, it derived from the fact that he threw the royal seal attached to the box into the latrine. Defacing the image of the king (especially his seal) was close to treason, and there is no suggestion that Stratton intended to use the contents of his magical box against the king. In another incident, in 1313 or 1314 a man named John Tanner (alias Canne) was hanged for trying to seize the crown by the aid of the devil.¹⁶ This was a very general slur, however, and such an accusation may have been intended to convey Tanner's general sinfulness rather than implying the use of any form of ritual magic on his part.

JOHN OF NOTTINGHAM AND THE PLOT AGAINST EDWARD II

The first unambiguous case of an individual using magic in an attempt to kill the monarch occurred in the reign of Edward II. In fact, Edward was only a subsidiary target of a plot that was aimed primarily against the king's favourite Hugh Despenser, earl of Winchester (c. 1286–1326), who was widely hated. On the evening of 30 November 1323 a delegation of 28 citizens of Coventry called on the house of John of Nottingham, a reputed necromancer. The citizens swore John and his lodger Robert le Mareschall to secrecy and complained that the Prior of Coventry, supported by the Despensers, was extracting extortionate taxes.

The citizens asked John to use magic to kill Despenser and his father, as well as the king and the prior. In return, they promised him twenty pounds (an enormous sum at the time) and a ‘reward’ (gareison) in any religious house he chose. This probably meant a corrody (a permanent income derived from the lands of a monastery). Robert was promised fifteen pounds if he assisted the necromancer with his work. Shortly afterwards some of the citizens delivered seven pounds of wax and two ells (yards) of canvas. The canvas was probably needed for the drawing of magical circles that would protect the magician from the spirits he conjured to appear.

In a deserted, half-ruined house outside the city walls,¹⁷ John and Robert set to work to make effigies of the four main victims as well as the prior's cellarer and steward and an unfortunate courtier, Richard de Sowe, on whom the magic was to be tested. This was a form of magic known in Latin as invultuacio, from the word vultus meaning ‘face’ or ‘image’. The first mention of this practice in England occurs in an Anglo-Saxon penitential from the reign of King Edgar (959–75), and it was punishable by death according to the Leges Henrici, a code composed in around 1114 during the reign of Henry I.¹⁸ The earliest mention of the crime being committed may have occurred in 948 but was recorded between 963 and 975 in a charter of King Edgar confirming lands to Wulfstan Ucca including the manor of Ailsworth in Northamptonshire, because ‘a widow and her son had previously forfeited the land at Ailsworth because they drove iron pins into Wulfstan's father, Ælfsige. And it was detected and the murderous instrument dragged from her chamber; and the woman was seized, and drowned at London Bridge, and her son escaped and became an outlaw’.¹⁹ Most historians interpret this incident as effigy magic, although Carole Hough argues that there is no actual mention of an effigy in the original Old English, which says simply ‘they drove iron pins into Wulfstan's father’ (hi drifon serne stacan on Ælsie Wulfstanes feder) and that a morð was dragged from her chamber. The Old English word morð usually meant ‘death’ but could also mean an instrument that caused someone's death. Hough suggests that the passage can be interpreted as referring to a literal physical assault on Ælfsige by the widow and her son with an iron bar.²⁰ However, drifon (‘drove’) would be a peculiar word to use for such a literal attack.

John and Robert must have done rather more than just make effigies, since they were working from early December 1323 until May 1324, and it is likely that John was combining traditional sympathetic effigy-magic with more sophisticated astrological techniques. A surviving manuscript in the British Library, although it dates from about a century later, contains an example of astrological magic using images. This is a Latin translation of a work by the Arabic astrologer Sahl Ibn Bishr, the Liber imaginum (‘Book of Images’),²¹ which was probably produced in London or Westminster in the mid-fifteenth century. The text contains rituals to promote concord, to make enemies stumble, for help in illness and on journeys, as well as for many other eventualities like the planting of trees and even hair loss and constipation. A common feature of all the rituals in the Liber imaginum is that they must be performed at certain hours of the day or night, and that they invoke the magical assistance of the ‘lord’ (dominus), meaning the presiding spirit, of that day or hour. This was an idea found across much Christian, Jewish and Arabic magic. Clearly, the correct performance of the magical operation required considerable astrological knowledge.

One example of harmful magic in the Liber imaginum involves the ‘burial’ (sepultura) of an image of someone who has been stung by a scorpion in order to save his or her life and drive the scorpion away. However, the rite can also be turned around to achieve the person's death. The procedure requires the magician to make two images, one of the person stung by the scorpion and another of the scorpion itself. The resulting magical images can be used both for good and ill:

Make an image when Scorpio is in the ascendant; likewise let the moon be under an unfortunate lord [i.e. spirit] and with a malevolent aspect. Let the names of the ascendant [planets] and the name of the moon be inserted. When it is something good which someone inserts, put it on the front [of the image]; if something bad, put it on the back. Bury the image in the middle of a place and bury it with the Scorpion so that he should go back from that place and not return.²²

The text's broken Latin then seems to instruct that the name of a spirit should be written on the head of the wax effigy of the person, as well as astrological signs for Venus and the Sun on the shoulder blade and breast, before the effigy is thrown into water to bring harm (iniuria) to the person it represents. Finally, the magician should hold the effigy by the feet and burn it in a fire at sunrise, when the moon is still visible in the sky:

At a fortunate hour, at sunrise, sculpt [into] the head of the image you are moulding who should be the lord of the head … Thus the body will be good, at sunrise, and let there be a waxing moon at the fortunate moment. Let there be on the shoulder blade and the breast at sunrise, and imprint the stomach at sunrise, in which let there be the aforesaid Venus at sunrise, in which let there be the sun. Throw into water without delay at sunrise the one in whom there should be an injury, neither draw it back nor draw it out, but throw it into the water. Come and burn it by the feet at sunrise when there is a moon. It is complete.²³

This sort of ‘astral magic’ ultimately derived from an eleventh-century book of Arabic magic, Gayat al-Hakim (‘The Goal of the Wise’), known in the Latin West as the Picatrix. The Christian re-conquest of Spain brought this and other products of Islamic learning into Christendom in the eleventh century. The burial of symbolic objects occurs again and again in harmful magic based on the Picatrix. As Richard Kieckhefer explained,

Burial ensures secrecy, fixes the object's location, and perhaps implies an appeal to demons or other chthonic [underworld] powers … a buried image can work insidiously on the place where it lies. When the magic is psychological, the point is presumably to affect the victim's mind by establishing a kind of magical force field within his or her environment. One might even speak of this as environmental magic, designed to afflict individuals indirectly by planting sinister forces in or near the places they frequent.²⁴

If this was the sort of learning that John of Notting...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. Compassing and Imagining’: Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval England
• 2. Treason, Sorcery and Prophecy in The Early English Reformation, 1534–58
• 3. Elizabeth versus The ‘Popish Conjurers’, 1558–77
• 4. A Traitorous Heart to the Queen’: Effigies and Witch-Hunts, 1578-1603
• 5. A Breach in Nature’: Magic as a Political Crime in Early Stuart England, 1603-42
• 6. The Decline of Magic as a Political Crime, 1642-1700
• Notes
• Bibliography