Witchcraft in old and New England / by George Lyman Kittredge.

  • George Lyman Kittredge
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Witchcraft in old and New England / by George Lyman Kittredge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Homicide by witchcraft, then, came under the general head of secret murder (mor<5, murdrum),33 but it is particularly designated in the Laws of iEthelstan (ca. 930) 34 and in the Modus of King Edgar’s time (ca. 965),35 as well as in the ver¬ nacular Confessional36 and Penitential37 falsely ascribed, to Archbishop Ecgbert of York and in the Latin penitentials (Irish, English, and Frankish) to which the names 38 of Fin- nian, Columban,39 Theodore, Bede, and Ecgbert40 are at¬ tached. The legal treatise of ca. 1114 known as the Leges Henrici pronounces the crime of homicide by poison or witch¬ craft punishable with death; if, however, the victim survives but has suffered sickness or bodily injury, the offender is let off with the requirement of compensation. This clause in the Leges specifies as one means of such homicide, a form of witchcraft known from very ancient times, and still preva¬ lent— namely, invultuacio (<envoutement), that is, the mal¬ treatment of an image or effigy representing the person to be afflicted or destroyed.41 This occult method of murder is also mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Modus Xmponendi Poeniten- tiam of King Edgar’s period and, in identical terms, in the Anglo-Saxon Penitential of Pseudo-Ecgbert.42 An actual case of the kind, from the ninth or tenth century, is recorded (along with the witch’s punishment by drowning) in an ac¬ count of the title to a piece of land in Northamptonshire. We shall return to this matter presently.43 That the Anglo-Saxons believed in murderous witches who could fly through the air, would be probable anyhow, since their Germanic kin on the Continent lived in fear of such creatures in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries and even charged them with cannibalism,44 as their laws demonstrate.45 Such superstition is condemned by an Irish synod of about a.d. 800,46 and is mentioned as existent in full force by the tenth-century German penitential known as the Corrector a document embodied in his Decretum by Burchard of Worms about 1020.47 But when to this general probability is added the use of the word walcyries for “witches” in King Cnut’s Proclamation of 1020, and in other texts of the same century, the case must be taken as proved.48 This word, which properly designated the “killers” or winged battle- goddesses of Germanic mythology (originally, no doubt, act-
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