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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    return if he wishes, but, on account of his flight, let his chat¬ tels (£4, 5s.) be confiscated.” 192 One feels sympathy for the Abbot of Sulby, Thomas of Whalley (bad as he was), who, after he had been at the head of that house for ten years, was found, on visitation of the arch¬ bishop in 1280, to have squandered a great sum of money upon Elias Favelle, incantator and sortilegus, whom he em¬ ployed to discover the body of his brother, drowned in the Ouse.193 We can but wonder whether Elias resorted to the old method (still practised) of floating a loaf of bread (with or without a candle, or ballast of quicksilver) on the theory that it will come to rest directly over the corpse.194 At all events, Abbot Thomas was excommunicated for this and other offences. In 1286 an apostate Cistercian monk of Rievaulx named Godfrey Darel was reported to the Archbishop of York as a vagrant practiser of witchcrafts (maleficia) and wicked in¬ cantations.195 In the Confessional of Bishop Quivil (Synod of Exeter, 1287) various kinds of sorcery and witchcraft are denounced as dishonorable to God — conjurations for detecting theft (by means of sword or basin [mirror magic] or of “names written and enclosed in balls of clay and placed in holy water”), and divinations and sortilege such as “some wretches use for the sake of women with whom they are madly in love.” 196 Adam de Stratton, Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most infamous of extortioners and false stewards in English annals, was arrested and tried in 1289 and 1290. Infinite treasure was found in his possession. There was also seized among his chattels, we are told, a coffer or silk bag containing parings of nails, human hair, the feet of toads and moles, and other “diabolical things.” It was sealed up by the king’s justiciary, but Adam broke the seal and threw the magic objects into a vault. Therefore he was accounted a sorcerer.197 Adam’s magic bag has excellent parallels in a French ma¬ gician’s bag described by Gregory of Tours in the late sixth century and in the negro obeah-man’s bag described by Monk Lewis in his West Indian journal in the early nineteenth. The French sorcerer, a pretended holy man arrested at Paris
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