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ОглавлениеTHE POSSESSION OF JOHN STARKIE
Joyce Froome
1. Introduction
On 4 January 1597, John Starkie, a boy about 13 years old, and the heir of one of the wealthiest families in Lancashire, was reading a book when ‘he was suddenly stricken down with an horrible scryke [screech], saying that Satan had broken his neck’. That night,
being in bed, he leapt out on a sudden, with a terrible outcry that amazed all the family. […] Then was he […] very fierce like a madman, or a mad dog, snacted [snapped] at and bit everyone that he laid hold on […] hurling bed-staves, pillows, or whatsoever at them, and into the fire.1
This was, of course, disturbing for his parents, but it is hardly unusual for children to behave in hurtful and alarming ways. However, John’s father, Nicholas Starkie, was convinced that John was in the power of a demonic evil. And this conviction was the result of the Starkie family’s relationship with two people who practiced magic – a ‘witch’ called Edmund Hartlay and the well-known magician Dr John Dee. Behind John Starkie’s strange behaviour, and his father’s drastic interpretation of it, were some powerful and complex ideas about the connection between magic and the spirit world.
2. The Possession
John Starkie was the fifth child of Nicholas Starkie and his wife Anne, who was also from one of Lancashire’s most powerful families. John had a younger sister, also called Anne, but the four older brothers and sisters they should have had were dead; all of them had ‘pined away in a most strange manner’2 not long after being born. Although John and his sister had never known them, memories of them must have haunted their parents, and at times it must have been a difficult burden for John and Anne to be the consolation and hope that enabled their parents to live with their grief. There was a further painful complication: their mother had become convinced that the children had died as the result of a curse put upon them by her Roman Catholic relatives. Then, in February 1595, when Anne was 9 or 10 years old and John about 11, Anne began to suffer from seizures.
For parents who had already lost four children, watching Anne suffering from this ‘fearful starting and pulling together of her body’3 was agonizing. John must have been terrified; and not only on his sister’s account. If this was another magical attack by his mother’s embittered relatives, he was in danger too. And yet, he was probably ignored while his parents panicked over Anne. About a week after Anne’s first seizure, all this became too much for John, and he ‘was compelled to shout vehemently, not being able to stop himself’,4 to his parents’ uncomprehending horror. Over the next 10 weeks the children got steadily worse, in spite of Nicholas paying out £200 to various physicians. Then someone recommended ‘Edmund Hartlay – a witch’.5
Folk magic practitioners like Edmund Hartlay were extremely important figures in early modern Europe. The Lenkiewicz Manuscript, a magical notebook from this period, gives an idea of the wide range of services they provided. It included a love spell using a bone from a frog; a spell to force a thief to confess, which involved hammering a nail into a picture of an eye; and an account of how to obtain stones from the stomach of a swallow that would ease childbirth or compel people to do whatever you asked (Figure 1.1).6 However, their most important skill was healing magic. Edmund Hartlay’s methods were typical – a combination of ‘certain Popish charms and herbs’.7 The herbal remedy he used for Anne was probably similar to one included in The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus:
This herb [vervain] (as witches say) gathered, the sun being in the sign of the Ram, and put with grain or corn of peony of one year old, healeth them that be sick of the falling sickness.8
It is likely that he also used a widely known charm that invoked the help of the three Magi:
Gaspar fert myrrham, thus Melchior, Balthasar aurum,
Hoec tria qui secum portabit nomina regum,
Solvitur a morbo Christi pietate caduco.9
[Gaspar brought myrrh, Melchior frankincense, Balthasar gold, / Whoever carries the names of these three kings with them, / Will be freed from the falling sickness by the compassion of Christ.]
It is less clear how Edmund would have handled John’s emotional problems. One possibility is a medieval fever charm that was also adapted for a wide range of other purposes:
Archidecline [Lord of the Feast – i.e. Jesus at the Last Supper] sits on high and holds a virgin yard [wand] of hazel in his hand and says, also soth [truly] as the priest makes God’s body in his hands and also soth as God blessed is mother Mary and also soth, I conjure thee, virgin yard of hazel, that thou close and be bote [remedy] of this evil fever to this man [name].10
Whether or not this was the exact charm Edmund used to treat John, it epitomizes the qualities that led to these charms having a very effective psychological impact on patients. The magical practitioner would have been holding a hazel wand as he or she recited the charm, so that the use of direct speech and the present tense not only generated dramatic immediacy but also blurred the distinction between Jesus addressing the wand and the practitioner saying the charm. The effect was to create the impression that the practitioner was Christ’s representative, the channel for his divine healing power. And this is underlined by the way the transformation of the hazel stick into a healing wand is likened to the transformation of bread into the body of Christ during mass. These charms were not innocent tributes to Christian folk traditions. They were profoundly heretical, because through them magical practitioners portrayed themselves as members of a priesthood with the power to bridge the gap between the material and spiritual worlds.
Evidently, this was exactly what John needed – to be the focus of attention of someone charismatic but also subversive, someone who had an aura of power that was very different from the authority and influence of an establishment figure like his father Nicholas. Edmund’s treatment of both children was a complete success – although it is likely that Anne simply outgrew her seizures, which in children are usually linked to a temporary abnormality in brain development. After 18 months Edmund pronounced the children cured and proposed ending his relationship with the family. But he had barely made it down the road before ‘John fell of bleeding’. And ominously, ‘thus it fell out at other times’.11 John was not prepared to have his relationship with Edmund severed. Nicholas offered Edmund an annual payment of £2 in return for his guaranteed ‘assistance in time of need’. But Edmund demanded ‘a house and ground’, which Nicholas refused.12 Suddenly there was tension between the two men. Edmund had no intention of becoming some kind of retainer in the Starkie household, and Nicholas was becoming uncomfortable at his family’s dependence on Edmund. But they were both still at John’s mercy. Nicholas’s response was to take Edmund to Huntroyde, near Pendle Forest in north-east Lancashire, to meet his father and also his uncle Roger Nowell, who would later be the justice of the peace who played a central role in one of England’s most famous witchcraft cases, the 1612 Pendle case (Figure 1.2).13
At some point their discussions must have focused on whether John had been cursed, because on that occasion Edmund ‘was sorely tormented all night long’,14 and by morning, he was convinced he had been the victim of a magical attack by whoever was responsible for John’s illness. An evening with Nicholas’s condescending or even hostile relatives had probably already left Edmund in no mood to show restraint. He now decided to assert his power with a particularly controversial form of magic – the invocation of spirits through a circle ritual:
He went into a little wood not far off from the house, where he made a circle a yard and half around, with many crosses and partitions. When he was finished, he came back to call Master Starkie, telling him what he had done. And he desired him to go and tread out his circle. […] This being also accomplished, he said, ‘Well, now I shall trouble him that troubled me, and be even with him that sought my death.’15
The ritual would almost certainly have involved other elements, such as inscribing words of power and the seals of the spirits around the circle and incantations to invoke their co-operation. But Edmund seems to have realized that Nicholas would be uncomfortable with that kind of magic. However, even his small degree of involvement left Nicholas unnerved by Edmund and his magical practices. He decided to take Edmund and the children for a consultation with someone who had managed to become both an expert on magic and a (fairly) respectable establishment figure: the warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, Dr John Dee.
Over a period of several years, John Dee had regularly conversed with spirits, with the help of Edward Kelley, a ‘scryer’ with a remarkable natural ability for seeing visions in a mirror or crystal. They used an obsidian ritual mirror looted from the Aztecs, a small crystal ball and the Seal of God – a talisman from the medieval book of magic The Sworn Book.16 Since Nicholas was seeking advice on Edmund’s dealings with spirits, it is obvious he must have known about John Dee’s special expertise in this particular area of magic. The meeting took place on 8 December 1596. John Dee was non-committal about the children’s problems although he agreed to see them again in three weeks’ time. However, he ‘sharply reproved’ Edmund.17
This seems to have reassured Nicholas, who no doubt felt that Edmund had been put in his place. It also apparently had a very positive effect on John, who must have found it extremely gratifying to have two magical practitioners now interested in his case. John Dee would have been an impressive figure – elderly, scholarly and authoritative. Furthermore, his criticism of Edmund may in fact have made Edmund an even more intriguing figure to John – someone willing to transgress the rules of the Establishment, to take whatever risks were necessary to possess forbidden knowledge. Over the next three weeks there was such a marked improvement in John’s state of mind – and therefore Nicholas’s too – that when the time came for their return to Manchester, Nicholas stayed at the family home, Cleworth Hall, and entrusted John and Anne to Edmund’s care.
However, Edmund had in fact been seething over John Dee’s insulting treatment. After the children had visited some relatives in Manchester, he refused them permission to go on to John Dee’s house. They defied him and went anyway. Edmund was furious.
He told them, with an angry look, that it had been better for them not to have changed an old friend for a new, with other menacing speeches, and so went before them in a rage, and never came near them all the way home.18
And so, John suddenly found his relationship with Edmund threatened for a second time, a crisis that precipitated his frenzied behaviour on 4 January – his claim that he had been attacked by the Devil and his pyromaniac pillow-throwing episode. John was playing dangerously on his father’s fears of evil spirits. But he needed to create a drastic situation to guarantee Edmund’s continued help. And if Edmund was forced to feel under more of an obligation because of the possibility that he might be responsible, that would be so much the better as far as John was concerned. Not that John would have articulated these motives to himself. On the contrary, he was trapped in a spiral where his emotional turmoil itself became, to him, a symptom of supernatural attack, and that in turn validated his confusion, frustration and panic. And what was really fuelling his torment was the ambivalence of magic. John’s relationship with Edmund was becoming both more compelling and more challenging as Edmund became a progressively more complex figure to John – as he evolved from a priest-like saviour into someone whose power had darker, more dangerous and more transgressive aspects.
Unfortunately, John had allies anxious to support him and follow his lead. He and Anne were not the only children at Cleworth Hall. There were also three girls that Nicholas had taken into the household as companions for his children – two sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth Hardman, who were 14 and 10 years old, respectively, and Elinor Holland, aged 12. John’s behaviour now affected Anne and the other girls as well, and soon all five children were having fits that involved barking and howling and collapsing as if dead. Even in Anne’s case it is unlikely that these involved actual seizures. The idea that they were being attacked by demons had seized the children’s imaginations and entangled them in a complicated mesh of fantasy, collaboration, fear and mischief. But there was now a catastrophic complication. Edmund became romantically involved with Margaret Byrom, a relative of John’s mother, who had been staying with the family for the Christmas festivities. It seems that at first Nicholas simply failed to notice this unthinkable relationship. But not surprisingly Margaret began to suffer from faintness and other stress-related symptoms that would later be interpreted as supernatural in origin.
At the end of January, Margaret was ‘sorely frightened with a terrible vision. It appeared to her, lying in bed […] like a foul black dwarf, with half a face’.19 She fled Cleworth and returned to her mother’s home at Salford – and Edmund went with her. For Nicholas, who had spent months struggling to understand and deal with John’s behaviour, Margaret’s behaviour suddenly made everything clear. There could be only one explanation for Edmund’s hold over her – he had bewitched her. And therefore, he had also bewitched John. Edmund was arrested. A day or two later, there was an attempt to pressurize Margaret into making a statement against him by engineering a confrontation between them. But as she sat waiting by the fire,
she saw a great black dog, with a monstrous tail, and a long chain, open mouth, coming apace towards her, and, running by her left side, cast her on her face hard by the fire.20
When Edmund was brought in, Margaret collapsed and could not speak. Edmund was sent to Lancaster Gaol to await trial, but on the way, he was taken back to Cleworth Hall to collect some clothes he had left there.
[The children] went at him all at once, attempting to strike him. […] And if they had not been forcibly restrained, the witch would have been in great danger, for they were as fierce and furious against him as if they would have torn him to pieces.21
However, a month later, when a justice of the peace came to take formal statements from them, the children all refused to testify. Their anger towards Edmund had erupted purely out of a sense of personal betrayal and of John’s sense of being doubly betrayed. It was the fact that Edmund had abandoned him for Margaret that made John willing to believe that Edmund had bewitched him.
But Edmund’s arrest did not solve the children’s problems. On the contrary,
they had all and every one of them very strange visions and fearful apparitions, whereupon they would say, ‘Look where Satan is. Look where Beelzebub is. Look where Lucifer is. Look where a great black dog is, with a firebrand in his mouth.’22
At his trial, Edmund was charged not with bewitching Margaret, but with using witchcraft to harm John and Anne. Nicholas was the main – in fact probably the only – witness. Edmund was fiercely defiant, but in this conflict, there could never be any doubt who was going to win. The only question was the sentence. If the victims of witchcraft survived, the law at that time – the 1563 Act against Conjurations, Enchantments, and Witchcrafts – prescribed not the death penalty but a year’s imprisonment. But then Nicholas ‘called to mind the making of the circle’.23 According to the 1563 Act, ‘If any person […] use, practise, or exercise, any invocations or conjurations of evil and wicked spirits […] every such offender […] shall suffer pains of death as a felon.’24 At his execution, Edmund apparently ‘confessed that […] all which Master Starkie had charged him with was true’.25 This seems unlikely, but it was obviously very important to Nicholas to have a confession to take back to John, to prove that it was Nicholas, not Edmund, who was his real saviour. On John Dee’s advice, Nicholas had asked for help from a well-known Puritan exorcist named John Darrell. He arrived at Cleworth, along with his colleague George More, a few days after Edmund’s death and came to the conclusion that Margaret Byrom (who had been brought back to Cleworth) and the children were all actually possessed by evil spirits, and so too was one of the Starkies’ servants, Jane Ashton, who had barked and howled when the justice of the peace had tried to question her about Edmund.
The exorcisms involved over 30 people praying incessantly over the victims for several hours. Although the others rid themselves of their evil spirits by vomiting, John gnashed his teeth and was ‘so miserably rent, that abundance of blood gushed out, both at his nose and mouth’.26 Even after the spirits had been cast out, they continued to menace their hosts, appearing ‘sometimes in the likeness of a bear with open mouth, sometimes of an ape, sometimes of a big black dog, sometimes of a black raven with a yellow bill’.27 However, on one crucial level the exorcism had restored order. Everyone involved now knew that the victims were caught up in a straightforward battle between good and evil – and that the source of the evil was Edmund Hartlay’s magic.
3. The Magic
This was a tragedy that grew out of the nature of magic and the nature of the hold it exerted over those involved in its practices. And at its heart was a circle ritual. It would be easy – particularly in view of John Dee’s reproof – to take the attitude that Edmund made a fatal mistake when he went beyond the use of the charms and herbs that might seem more appropriate – and far safer – for a folk-magic practitioner. But, as we have already seen, the Christian charms used by people like Edmund in fact constructed for them a persona resonant with spiritual power. Magic was a spiritual belief system, whether it involved Edmund mixing vervain and peony or John Dee constructing the Seal of God. The influential sixteenth-century magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote: ‘The very original, and chief worker of all [i.e. God] doth by angels, the heavens, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals, and stones convey from himself the virtues of his omnipotency upon us.’28
Emma Wilby, in her groundbreaking book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,29 has demonstrated that the animal-shaped spirits of the witch trial records in many cases represent powerful visionary experiences that were a crucial part of folk magic. The spirit encounters of village and small-town magical practitioners could be every bit as complex and varied as – and often remarkably similar to – those that resulted from the experiments of an educated magician like John Dee. At the heart of John Dee’s magic was The Sworn Book. His copy still exists – manuscript Sloane 313 in the British Library. The Sworn Book was written in the early thirteenth century by the magician Honorius ‘in collaboration with an angel called Hocrohel’30 and claimed to be the ultimate summary of the art of magic. It was a product of the Medieval Renaissance, when contact with the Arab world led to an extraordinary upheaval in the way many thinkers viewed the universe – a conviction that the universe was a complex and mysterious puzzle crying out to be engaged with, explored and investigated.
Europe’s first scientists such as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were inspired to study phenomena such as light and magnetism using the combination of observation, reasoning and experiments that would become the ‘experimental method’ of modern science.31 But science had a rival, sister discipline, equally passionate about engaging with the universe in the same spirit of individualistic scrutiny, but with a different emphasis: the discipline that The Sworn Book calls ‘the science of wisdom’ – magic.32 Magic sought to explore the creative spiritual forces that lay behind the natural world – and not through deliberately distanced observation, but through establishing a relationship with them. It relied upon the human mind’s capacity for engaging with reality through poetic metaphor – making it both a philosophy and a psychological phenomenon. The Sworn Book gives detailed instructions for circle rituals to invoke the help of spirits and describes the various spirits and their areas of expertise – accounts that are often eerie and disturbing:
They have antlers like deer, claws like griffins. They bellow like mad bulls. […]
Their bodies are […] huge and terrifying […] with talons in the manner of dragons, and their heads have five faces; one is of a toad, another of a lion, the third of a serpent, the fourth of a dead man lamenting and grieving, the fifth of a man beyond comprehension.33
The spirits who appeared to John Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelley, usually took human form, but not always:
Now he is become like a great wheel of fire. […] He thrust out his hands on the sudden, and so became like a wheel full of men’s eyes. […] Now there is a great eagle, which is come, and standeth upon it. […] She hath two monstrous eyes: one like fire red; her right eye as big as my fist, and the left eye, is crystal like.34
As one of the spirits, Galvah, herself explained, ‘Angels […] neither are man nor woman. […] I am a beam of that wisdom which is the end of man’s excellency.’35 Significantly, The Lenkiewicz Manuscript includes incantations for making exactly this kind of contact with spirits among its love spells and descriptions of magic stones:
I bind thee thou sprite N [name], by these three words + tetragrammaton + anatemate + anatematevethe + and by all that belongeth to these three words. Also I conjure, charge, adjure and bind thee, N, that thou come and appear in this stone of crystal and give me a true answer of all things that I shall ask thee of.36
The Dorset magical practitioner John Walsh was arrested after it was discovered that he had a ‘book of circles’. He admitted that he used one of the rituals ‘to raise [his] familiar spirit […] [who] would sometimes come unto him like a grey blackish culver [pigeon], and sometimes like a brended [speckled brown] dog, and sometimes like a man in all proportions, saving that he had cloven feet’. John would then ask the spirit ‘for anything stolen, who did it, and where the thing stolen was left’.37 However, when John wanted to know whether one of his patients was the victim of a curse, he consulted a different kind of spirit, which might seem more obviously folkloric in origin – fairies. But these, too, were complex and dangerous beings. John met them at ancient burial mounds, and says, ‘There be three kinds of Fairies, white, green, and black. […] The black Fairies be the worst.’38 The young Cornish healer Ann Jefferies was given her miraculous powers by the fairies, but only after they had made her so ill that ‘the long continuance of her distemper […] almost perfectly moped her, so that she became even as a changeling’.39
In his book Daemonologie, King James I writes:
Sundry witches have gone to death with that confession, that they have been transported with the Fairy to such a hill, which opening, they went in, and there saw a fair Queen, who […] gave them a stone that had sundry virtues, which at sundry times hath been produced in judgement.40
Significantly, though, he also describes fairies as ‘spirits, which by the Gentiles [were] called Diana and her wandering court’.41 In her analysis of the Isobel Gowdie witchcraft case, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Emma Wilby argues that Isobel consciously saw herself as allied with a Queen of Elfland who was an evolution of a pre-Christian Nature Goddess.42 The idea that the spirits encountered by magical practitioners had their roots in ancient mythology is supported by magical texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A ‘Prayer to Selene’, the Greek Moon Goddess, includes the lines:
Three-headed, you’re Persephone, Megaira,
Allekto […] who shake your locks
Of fearful serpents on your brow, who sound
The roar of bulls out from your mouths, whose womb
Is decked out with the scales of creeping things […]
Bull-headed, you have the eyes of bulls, the voice
Of dogs.43
Another spell, addressed to the ‘Ruler of Tartaros’, describes her as ‘dog-shaped, spinner of Fate […] dragoness, lion, she-wolf’; and it goes on:
I’ll speak the signs to you:
Bronze sandal of her who rules Tartaros,
Her fillet, key, wand, iron wheel, black dog.44
Thus, these spells are not only significantly similar to the descriptions of spirits in The Sworn Book but are also evocative of the black dog who haunted Margaret Byrom, John Starkie and the other children in the Starkie household. However, one of the most striking accounts of a Black Dog encounter occurs in the statements taken by Nicholas Starkie’s uncle Roger Nowell from Alizon Device, a teenage member of the family of magical practitioners at the centre of the 1612 Pendle witchcraft case. Alizon’s description of her first encounter with the spirit vividly establishes the eerie, sexually charged connection that is forged between them:
There appeared unto her a thing like unto a Black Dog: speaking unto her […] and desiring her to give him her soul, and he would give her power to do anything she would: whereupon [she] being therewithal enticed, and setting her down; the said Black Dog did with his mouth […] suck at her breast, a little below the paps [breasts], which place did remain blue half a year next after.45
Crucial to the link is the spiritual essence that the Dog draws out of Alizon, but which then gives her access to his magical power.46 Alizon’s reckless pride in her relationship with a spirit is echoed in a dangerous admission Edmund made at his trial. Finding himself suddenly accused by Nicholas of using ‘invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits’,
Edmund stiffly denied it, and stood out against him. And he told him to his face that he should not hang him, let him do what he could. For the Devil had promised him that no halter would hang him.47
When Ann Jefferies was about to be arrested,
the fairies appeared to her and told her that a Constable would come that day, with a warrant to carry her before a Justice of the Peace and she would be sent to jail. She asked them if she should hide herself. They answered, No, she should fear nothing, but go with the Constable.48
It would seem that Edmund had received some similar reassurance from a spirit. Of course, saying ‘fear nothing’ is not the same as saying that nothing bad is going to happen. But it was part of the very nature of spirit encounters that they could make magical practitioners careless of their personal safety. They were the ultimate magical experience – and through them practitioners expressed their allegiance to magic’s alternative vision of the universe.49 Magic was not irrational – magic was anti-rational. It was a series of techniques – such as scrying and the use of charms and incantations – specifically devised to enable the intuitive and creative aspects of the mind to achieve precedence over the rational. In Daemonologie, King James I dismisses fairies as a delusion created by the Devil and condemns magical practitioners for their ‘curiosity’ and ‘restless minds’.50 Magic took people to a place where the normal rules did not apply, where the assumptions of the established social order were irrelevant. For those who experienced it, it was psychologically liberating, even when it involved exploring aspects of inner experience that were mysterious and dangerous. But in an authoritarian society based on simplistic concepts of good and evil it would always seem a threat.
Conclusion
Right from the start, John Starkie was suffering from the symptoms of a ‘restless mind’. But he not only had a natural tendency to find magic intriguing, he was also attracted to it precisely because it was a challenge to authority and fed into his struggle to assert his individuality within a family that was very much part of the Establishment. That was what Edmund offered and symbolized to John. Edmund might have been wary of allowing Nicholas to witness him invoking spirits, but that does not mean that he would (or could) have hidden from John the crucial role that spirits played in magic. On the contrary, magical practitioners envied children their openness to the spirit world and often employed them as scrying assistants.51 Ultimately, however, John would be convinced that magic was not a transformative vision of the universe, but delusion and chaos – a path not to liberation, but to possession.
Crucial to this transition, of course, was Nicholas’s view of what was happening to his son – of what John was becoming. Nicholas was forced to watch his relationship with John being steadily undermined by John’s relationship with Edmund. And John seized on those aspects of magical belief that he could use to challenge his father and command Edmund’s attention. And so, for Nicholas, John’s natural rebelliousness evolved into something devilish. Nicholas had been betrayed not only by Edmund but also by John. John had been contaminated by Edmund’s evil. This demonization of John’s experience of magic was effective enough to convince John as well, not only at the time but for the rest of his life. Thirty-seven years later, in 1634, John Starkie had succeeded his great-uncle Roger Nowell as justice of the peace for the Pendle area. Rumours reached him that a young boy called Edmund Robinson was claiming that he had witnessed a gathering of witches – among them Alizon Device’s younger sister and half-brother, Jennet and William. John and his colleague Richard Shuttleworth had Edmund brought in for questioning and eventually sent 17 people to Lancaster to be tried for witchcraft. All were found guilty but were reprieved by the judge; but by the time an outside investigator had arrived, 4 had already died in the appalling conditions in Lancaster Gaol – Jennet Loynd, Alice Higgin and John Spencer and his wife.52 Gaol records show that two years later Jennet Device was still in prison – her fate, and that of the other suspects, is unknown.53
That is surely the worst horror of all – that Nicholas had turned John into someone who would eventually be responsible for the deaths of at least four people.
Notes
1John Darrell, A True Narration of the Strange and Grievous Vexation by the Devil of Seven Persons in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). The sources for this case are this pamphlet by the exorcist John Darrell and another by his colleague George More, titled A True Discourse Concerning the Certain Possession and Dispossession of Seven Persons in One Family in Lancashire (spelling modernized) (London: n.p., 1600). Both pamphlets begin with a brief account of what happened before the exorcists’ arrival, based on information from Nicholas Starkie. There are reprints in John Ashton, The Devil in Britain and America (London: Ward & Downey, 1896); and Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
2More, True Discourse.
3Darrell, True Narration.
4More, True Discourse.
5Ibid.
6Unpublished manuscript from the library of the Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz. After his death in 2002 it was auctioned and is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (ms V.b.26 (2)).
7More, True Discourse.
8Albertus Magnus, attrib., ‘First Book, “Of the Virtues of Certain Herbs”’, in The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus (London: n.p., 1604).
9Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London: n.p., 1584), book 12, chapter 9.
10British Library MS Sloane 962; published in Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (spelling modernized) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 93.
11Darrell, True Narration.
12Ibid.
13Jonathan Lumby analyses the connection between the two cases (The Lancashire Witch-Craze (Lancaster: Carnegie, 1999)).
14More, True Discourse.
15Ibid.
16John Dee, A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits, ed. Meric Casaubon (London: n.p., 1659); Honorius of Thebes and the Angel Hocrohel, Liber Iuratus Honorii, ed. Gösta Hedegärd (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2002). The artefacts are on display at the British Museum.
17Darrell, True Narration.
18More, True Discourse.
19Ibid.
20Darrell, True Narration.
21More, True Discourse.
22Ibid.
23Ibid.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Darrell, True Narration.
27More, True Discourse.
28Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, ‘Book One, Chapter 1’, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake (London: n.p., 1651).
29Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2005).
30Honorius and Hocrohel, Liber Iuratus, 61; my translation. For the date, see Robert Mathiesen, ‘A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from The Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes’, in Conjuring Spirits, ed. Claire Fanger (Stroud: Sutton, 1998) 145–47.
31A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).
32Honorius and Hocrohel, Liber Iuratus, 66; my translation.
33Ibid., 127, 143; my translation.
34Dee, True and Faithful Relation, 232.
35Ibid., 13.
36Unpublished manuscript from the library of the Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz. After his death in 2002 it was sold at auction and is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (ms V.b.26 (2)).
37Anon, The Examination of John Walsh (spelling modernized) (London: John Awdely, 1566).
38Ibid.
39Moses Pitt, letter to the bishop of Gloucester, published as An Account of One Ann Jefferies (London: Richard Cumberland, 1696).
40King James I, Daemonologie (spelling modernized) (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1597), third book, chapter V.
41Ibid.
42Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic, 2010).
43Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Volume One: Texts, trans. E. N. O’Neil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91.
44Ibid., 78.
45Thomas Potts, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster (London: W. Stansby, 1613), R3v.
46For more on the Pendle case and early modern magic, see Joyce Froome, Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2010).
47More, True Discourse.
48Pitt, letter to the bishop of Gloucester.
49See Wilby, Cunning Folk.
50King James, Daemonologie, third book, chapter V; first book, chapters III and IV.
51See, for example, John Aubrey, ‘Visions in a Beryl or Crystal’, in Miscellanies (London: John Russell Smith, 1721).
52John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London: J. M., 1677), Appendix; John Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1634–1635 (London: Longman, 1864), 77–79.
53Susan Maria Ffarington, ed., The Farington Papers (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1856), 27.
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