10

WITCHES AND ANIMALS

DURING THE LATER twentieth century, historians interested in early modern English witchcraft beliefs and witch trials became increasingly aware that these contained a feature which apparently set them apart from those of most of the Continent: a widespread tradition that witches were assisted in their evil deeds by demons in the form of animals.¹ These beings usually formed a close attachment to individual witches and functioned as their allies or servants. They were most commonly described in contemporary sources as ‘spirits’, ‘imps’ or just ‘devils’, but quite often as ‘familiars’, and modern scholars have generally settled on the term ‘animal familiar’ to distinguish one. They were agents and instigators of witchcraft, whose intentions and actions were almost wholly malevolent, and although they most frequently took the form of dogs, cats and toads, they could also appear as ferrets, hares, hedgehogs, mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, weasels, polecats, snails, snakes, calves and different kinds of bird and insect. In other words, they usually chose the shapes of commonly found beasts which could easily escape notice, though occasionally more monstrous alternatives, formed of blends of different kinds of natural creature or of animals with humans, were adopted. Some individual familiars could assume the appearance of a range of animals, as well as shape-shifting to that of a human.

The formation of their relationship with witches was the most frequently attested English version of the diabolic pact which represented a central feature of the pan-European construct of the demonic witch underlying the early modern trials. By extension, they were an equally important aspect of witchcraft beliefs in the English colonies in America. Most English cases of witchcraft made no reference to them, but they were still prominent in an important minority, and especially in published accounts of trials, which helped to shape the image of witches in the public mind, and later in the minds of historians. As sustained and large-scale research into the early modern trials began in the 1970s, it was noted that the English fondness for imagining animal familiars was as yet completely unexplained;² but discussion of the matter did not really begin until the year 2000. What has resulted since could not really be termed a debate, because no clearly defined schools of thought, with steady adherents, have developed. Instead, a growing number of people have made contributions, but some have either suggested several possible explanations for the animal familiar at once, as alternatives, or else moved from one to another over time. Moreover, few of the historians concerned have directly addressed each other. None the less, a number of different ideas have emerged. One is that the animal familiar developed from the tradition of learned ceremonial magic, and its fondness, attested since its first appearance in ancient Egypt, for summoning spirits to serve the magician.³ Another is that it grew out of fairy tradition, especially from the figure of the household helper spirit, and from the claims often made by service magicians to have been taught their skills by the fairy folk.⁴ It is certainly true that fairies, as has been seen, played much the same role as helpers in some Scottish witch trials as the animal familiar in English equivalents (though they rarely acted as destructive agents of the witch in the way of the familiar). The person who has taken this association furthest has naturally been Emma Wilby, who has suggested that they represented alternative versions of the same being, and that both descended from a pre-Christian, animist, view of the world, connected to shamanistic practices.⁵

As more contributors entered the debate, so the proposed explanations multiplied. Another was that the animal familiar should be related to a whole broad range of folkloric phenomena, from Wilby’s shamanistic helper spirits to the animal mascots of pagan deities and followers of saints. All of these phenomena needed instead to be put under the general, and very widespread, folk motif of the ‘grateful animal’, of which the familiar was one aspect.⁶ It was also argued, in riposte to the derivation from fairy lore, that the animal familiar belonged instead firmly in a demonic framework, being derived from the satanic imps of the Middle Ages.⁷ Other interpretations were more multifaceted, such as that which termed the familiar the result of a combination of the tradition of the ceremonial magician’s servitor spirit with an increasing (and yet also therefore controversial) English fashion for real animal pets, and with the belief that witches were assisted by demons.⁸

It is unlikely that any major new primary sources for the early modern English belief in the witch’s animal familiar now remain to be discovered, and the discussion of its origins has thrown up so many possible explanations, some general and some specific, that it is equally unlikely that any more can be suggested. None the less, it is possible that the broader and deeper perspectives adopted for the present book may still add something to the discussion, and also something concerning the perceived relationship between witches and animals in a global and Continental European context. The structure of the whole work, of contracting concentric circles of vision, will be reproduced in miniature now in an attempt to achieve that outcome.

The Global Context

From the earliest systematic scholarly studies of early modern English witchcraft beliefs down to the recent work just surveyed, parallels have been drawn between the tradition of the animal familiar and associations between witches and animals in the extra-European world.⁹ None of these parallels have, however, been pursued in any sustained or relatively comprehensive fashion, and the size of the ethnographic database assembled for the present book now permits such an exercise. It reveals three different ways in which witches have been associated with animals around the globe, which often overlap but are also commonly distinct from each other: that witches turn themselves into animal form; that they employ real animals to accomplish their deeds; and that they make use of spirit servants which take animal form. These will now be considered in turn.

The belief that witches can shift their shape into that of beasts has been recorded in every inhabited continent of the world, being particularly common in some regions. One of these is the Americas, and especially Central America.¹⁰ Another is a swathe of Central Africa, from Sierra Leone to Tanzania and Mozambique.¹¹ A third is South Asia, consisting of India, Nepal, Burma and Thailand, with an extension eastwards through Indonesia and New Guinea into Melanesia.¹² In some cases, found in each of these regions, it was thought that any animal form could be employed. More often specific species were named, though these varied widely between cultures, and could be either wild or domestic. They often tended to be of kinds associated with the night, when witchcraft was supposed to be most active, or to be dangerous and predatory by nature, to suit the working of harm, or to provide witches with powers of flight or rapid movement, to enable them to range across wide distances or accomplish their work speedily. Where witchcraft was thought to be a communal matter, worked by groups who met together secretly for ghastly rites, the animal shape could provide a convenient means of transport to the meeting place. Among certain peoples the bestial connection could explain some of the characteristics attributed to witches: for example, the propensity credited to witch societies across much of Central Africa, to dig up and eat human corpses, may have derived from their affinity with hyenas. Sometimes the witch’s own body was thought to transform into an animal, but more often that body was expected to lie asleep at night while their spirit went forth and took animal form. This belief is so widespread among societies that have never been considered to possess shamans, that it may be coupled with the fact that most classical, Siberian, shamans were not thought themselves to take on animal shape, to render shape-shifting in itself valueless as an indicator of shamanistic beliefs and practices. A further accompanying belief, found across the range in which witches were believed to shift shape, was that to kill or injure a witch in altered form would inflict the same damage on the witch’s normal body; such an act was, in story, one of the most common ways in which witchcraft could be countered.

Some peoples set the idea that witches could take animal shape among more complex systems of the belief. The Kuranko of Sierra Leone thought that witches, whom they called suwagenu and believed were always women, had this power and used it to work their malicious harm on other humans: the death penalty was imposed for those convicted of it. They also, however, believed that certain men called yelemaphent-iginu had the same power, and were respected for it even when they used it to destroy the crops and livestock of enemies; some even boasted of it.¹³ A range of such patterning can be found across the whole Central American zone in which shape-shifting was a common concept. In one nation of the region, Mexico, the Tzotzil thought that everybody had a soul that took animal form which differed according to rank – the rich and powerful had jaguars, the poor rabbits – but only magicians could consciously activate that soul and use it for practical effects. Witches, moreover, had a second animal soul, of another species, and combined the two to work their evil deeds.¹⁴ The Tzeltal, more simply, believed that everybody was born with a detachable animal soul and that magicians could learn to use it, but healers chose to do so for good, and witches for bad, purposes.¹⁵ The Tlaxcalan spoke of two types of magician who could shift shape into an animal one. The first was the nahuatl or nakual, who could be of either sex and could use the ability to work harm or to play harmless tricks, acquiring it by tuition. The best could impersonate up to five kinds of animal, and they were not much hated or feared, as metal charms could ward them off. Hatred and fear were reserved for the tlahuelpuchis, people, mostly female, who took animal form, especially that of birds, to inflict damage on other humans, especially by sucking the blood of babies. They were utterly evil and their powers were innate.¹⁶

The second kind of traditional relationship between witches and animals, that which involved a supposedly real animal, could take various different related forms. One was that the witch used an animal as a steed in order to travel to meetings or to inflict harm. The beast concerned was usually one that was itself a danger to humans, their livestock or their crops, such as a tiger, alligator, hyena or baboon, and this belief was found scattered across most of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India.¹⁷ More widespread was the idea that witches employed specific kinds of animal to accompany and assist them in working their deeds, and often as agents to carry out their wishes. This was recorded across most of Africa and south-east Asia, extending eastwards to New Guinea, and also in the south-western USA. The animals involved here were usually nocturnal, and often one specific species was employed, such as the owl, hyena or snake.¹⁸ Among some peoples witches were said to work with a more eclectic range. In the Sudan the Azande spoke of bats, wild cats and owls, and the Mandari of cats, owls and hares, while the Dinka included dark-skinned snakes, owls, nightjars, scorpions, toads, frogs and wild cats.¹⁹ The Lubara of Uganda associated witches with jackals, leopards, wild cats, bats, owls, snakes, frogs and toads.²⁰

Most accounts of the witches’ relationships with these helpers did not specify whether the animals concerned were casually swept up and employed for tasks, or whether they were particular individuals that served a witch regularly and repeatedly. Occasionally, however, it is clear that the latter situation obtained, and the creatures concerned were effectively maintained as pets. Some Australian tribes suspected members who kept cats or lizards in their homes of sending them out to injure neighbours while they slept.²¹ A woman from a Nigerian people, living in the North African port of Tripoli at the opening of the twentieth century, had a formidable reputation as a service magician, and had a snake, a hare and scorpions in her house, which she was said to send out against her enemies.²² Tribes in the Roro district of New Guinea believed that witches used snakes and crocodiles to murder people, and that the snakes were kept in pots in their homes: most deaths by snakebite were attributed to these animals.²³ The anthropologists who recorded the stories about the animal assistants of witches generally used the early modern English term ‘familiar’ when speaking of these creatures.

In England itself, of course, the term had actually been applied to an evil spirit that had taken animal shape, and such entities also appeared in witchcraft traditions in the extra-European world. Worldwide, as has been said, most societies have believed that magicians gained or augmented their special powers by working with spirits, and those which assisted witches were usually thought to be malevolent in proportion. Often these took human shape, often in a diminutive size, and occasionally manifested as hybrids of human and beast. However, among certain peoples they were thought to appear as animals, and specifically as those species locally presumed to assist witches in a physical and natural form. The distribution of this belief may have extended much more widely, because researchers reporting on native cultures often failed to make clear whether the animal servants and allies of witches were real creatures or spirits; and indeed their informants may have been unsure. However, where it is made explicit that the beings concerned were conceived of as spirits, and independent of the witch’s own person instead of being projections of it, the reports congregate in two regions. One was a broad zone across Central and Southern Africa, from Zaire and Tanzania south to the Cape coast.²⁴ The other was the island fringe of eastern Asia, in New Guinea and the Philippines.²⁵ The belief is also, however, recorded among the Nez Perce of the north-western United States, who held that certain malevolent tutelary spirits, especially in the form of rattlesnakes, blue grouse and badgers, sought out susceptible human beings and assisted them in becoming witches.²⁶

It was rare for anthropologists to make any detailed study of traditions regarding animal familiars among the societies they studied, but a few have emerged. Several tribes of Cape Province believed that their witches, who were always female, had a large bestiary of such beings, but above all a supernatural ‘storm bird’, which could become a handsome youth and make love to the witch. Other favourite forms were snake, baboon and wild-cat spirits, small hairy man-like creatures and reanimated human corpses. To these societies witchcraft was essentially an act of female vengeance directed against males, above all for marital infidelity.²⁷ It is clear that they had a general idea that spirits were the usual agents of this revenge, and often appeared as animals, but in practice there was a very wide range of forms which the spirits were regarded as taking. These were apparently derived from individual perceptions or fantasies of witchcraft at work, which turned into parallel traditions co-existing under the same broad umbrella of belief: such an effect would explain the variety of shapes taken by the early modern English familiar. A similar pattern is found northward in Zimbabwe, where every witch was expected to have a number of familiars, most commonly in the forms of ant-bears, hyenas, owls and crocodiles. The nature of the relationship between these and the witches was thought to vary, from a functional and emotionless to a close and affectionate one.²⁸ Again, a basic idea was recounted in different ways, not just by different tribal cultures but also by individuals within those.

It is clear that the distribution of beliefs regarding relationships between witches and animals across the world heavily overlapped in places, but the three main forms did so relatively rarely. Rather, like the map of societies that greatly feared witchcraft, that believed in it without great fear, and that did not believe in it, that of different traditions embodying those three relationships tended to form a patchwork across regions. After all, they were to an extent functionally exclusive: a witch who could transform into animal shape had less need to employ an animal, while one who had a ‘real’ animal as a servant had less need to retain a spirit in the guise of one, and so forth. However, there are some clearly recorded cases of peoples who articulated more than one of these traditions. The Amba of Western Uganda thought that witches both turned into leopards and used leopard familiars.²⁹ The North American Navaho held that witches took animal form, but that each was also allied with some aspect in the natural world: the sun, owls, snakes, etc.³⁰ In Zimbabwe Shona witches allegedly both rode hyenas and kept familiars, while those of the Gă of Ghana rode snakes, used them as agents or turned themselves into them.³¹ The Nalumin of New Guinea likewise thought that witches could either become animals or else befriend them, and this was also true of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, and the Tonga-speakers of South Zambia.³²

Rodney Needham, the social scientist quoted near the beginning of this book, listed possession of an animal familiar or the ability to assume animal shape as one of the factors that constitute the ‘steady image’ of the witch worldwide.³³ It is easy to see why, although there are some areas of the globe – much of the Americas away from the central zone, for example – in which the association of witches and animals seems less strong, and some peoples in regions where the association does exist among whom it also seems weak or absent. Nevertheless, it is found so widely on the earth, among human societies with no contact with each other, as to represent one way in which humans who believed in witches thought easily and spontaneously about them. Even if ethnographic parallels for the English witch’s familiar are reduced to the most specific possible, of a regular relationship made between a witch and a spirit in animal form, who acts as an assistant and agent, they are found across a broad span of the planet which includes three different continents, although representing a minority of the societies that have believed in witchcraft, within each. The obvious question to be posed at this stage is how far the continent not yet considered in this survey, Europe, matches up to this pattern, and the answer is that it fits it perfectly. All three of the main divisions of belief in a connection between witches and animals are represented in the early modern trial records. The idea that witches could transform into animal shape is found across most of the Continent. In Poland people accused of witchcraft confessed to such transformations, cats and pigs being the preferred species.³⁴ At the northern extreme of Norway, in most cases where women confessed to raising storms to sink boats, they claimed to have changed into sea mammals, fish or birds to do so.³⁵ In much of Western Europe, including Lorraine, France and that Spanish-ruled area of Burgundy called Franche Comté, they were especially thought to turn into wolves, in which shape they could inflict especial harm; though other animal shapes were also recorded.³⁶ In Italy they were believed to prefer to look like cats.³⁷ Basque witches were reputed to be very eclectic in their choice of species, as were those of the Balkans, from Croatia southwards.³⁸ These stories troubled early modern demonologists sufficiently for them to debate the implications at length, generally concluding that the apparent change had to be a demonic delusion.³⁹ The belief that witches shifted shape into animals, especially dogs, cats and hares, was also strong in most parts of the British Isles.⁴⁰ It is certainly an ancient one in Europe, being recorded in the Roman Empire, and in the British Isles from the twelfth century, as has also been noted.

The use of ‘real’ animals as aids to witches is a rarer feature of the trial testimony, but there is the tradition of wolf-riding in the western Alps that has been cited, and the much broader one of the animal steeds of the women who rode to join ‘Diana’ in the canon Episcopi. That of the spirit-familiar is also present, of course, though seemingly confined to England. The only case approaching a Continental parallel consists of the toads kept by witches in Basque tradition, as recorded on both sides of the Franco-Spanish frontier, in the early seventeenth century.⁴¹ The toads were allegedly each given to a witch when the latter made the original pact with Satan, and kept like pets, some being dressed by their owners in coloured clothes. This makes them sound demonic, but there is actually no apparent trace in these accounts of the animals being used as agents of witchcraft. From a passage that mentions them being ‘pastured’ by children at the sabbath, it sounds very much as if they were kept for the poison which could be secreted from their skin.

In a global perspective, therefore, it would have been strange either if some part of early modern Europe did not have a popular belief in an association between witchcraft and evil spirits disguised as animals, or if this belief had been held by most Europeans. To find that it was a fervently held tradition found in one part of the Continent, in this case among the English, is in fact exactly what an enquirer should expect in the worldwide context. Such a conclusion to the present enquiry, however, would be to shirk the problem of how this belief fitted into the unique European context of a blending of old ideas of witchcraft with a monopolistic and strongly dualistic religion. Nor would it answer the question of why England in particular had that form of the belief. To seek answers to these issues it is necessary to employ the second of the contracting foci of this book, the specifically European.

The European Context

All over the world, traditional peoples have frequently visualized evil spirits as taking the visible form of fierce, menacing and predatory animals, or of hybrids of those with human shapes. The peoples of ancient Europe and the Near East were no exception, as any glance at the demons represented in Assyrian art in museums, or the underworld monsters in that of the Egyptians, will confirm. The Roman tendency to identify the demonic strix as owl-like is another manifestation of this. The habit carried over naturally into Christianity, so that its Satan and his minor devils were habitually portrayed in word or image as possessing visual traits from a range of repulsive creatures. The tradition was established by the fourth century, when Athanasius’s Life of St Anthony recounts how its hero was beset by a demonic mob which swarmed round him disguised as lions, bears, leopards, bulls, vipers, cobras and wolves.⁴² These images carried over into the high Middle Ages, to inform portraits of Christian heretics meeting to worship Satan and his minions. One of the earliest such groups to be identified and suppressed, at Orléans in 1022, was described a couple of generations later as worshipping the Devil as he manifested in one animal form or another. By the twelfth century this was a commonplace of accounts of heretical rites, the favourite shape ascribed to the demon who presided over them – either Satan or a subordinate – being that of a cat.⁴³ This trope persisted through out the later medieval period as a routine aspect of accusations of heresy, in the British Isles as elsewhere: those against Alice Kyteler in Ireland in the 1320s included having an attendant devil who appeared variously as a cat, shaggy black dog or black man.⁴⁴Unsurprisingly, along with so many other standard features of medieval stereotypes of heresy, it was a trope carried over into the construction of the new image of the satanic witch religion in the early fifteenth century. In the earliest dated manifestation of that, the account by Hans Fründ of the Valais trials of 1428, Satan was said to appear to the witches at their meetings in the form of a black animal, such as a bear or ram.⁴⁵ The Errores gazariorum agreed that the animal chosen was black, but thought a cat to be his most favoured species.⁴⁶ This idea was found also in the earliest recorded trials associated with the new image of witchcraft. The woman executed at Todi in 1428 allegedly confessed that she had joined the revels of witches riding on Lucifer, who took the form of a goat or fly.⁴⁷ A man tried in the Pays de Vaud in 1438 claimed after torture that witches rode to the sabbath on a (presumably demonic) black bull or colt, to venerate the Devil himself, who moved between the shapes of a man, a cat and a lizard.⁴⁸ The idea that those travelling to the sabbath rode animals, which seem for practical reasons to have been disguised demons, is also found in another famous early text to describe the new stereotype of witchcraft, Martin le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames, written in 1440–42. That describes the steeds as having the form of black cats or dogs.⁴⁹ The riding of a demonic animal was from near the beginning an alternative and lesser form of locomotion to the anointed stick for getting witches to their meetings. These early trials in the western Alps also contained the idea that witches were assigned a personal devil as a helper after swearing allegiance to the supreme one, or even made the original pact with such a minor demon; and these too could take the shape of beasts. They had individual names, those described at hearings in the diocese of Lausanne during the 1440s, 1450s and 1460s being called Mamiet, Figuret, Perrot, Raphiel, Usart or Rabiel, and described as appearing as black cats and dogs, foxes or birds.⁵⁰ As considered in a previous chapter, riding on animals, which in at least some cases were thought to be transformed demons, remained one of the standard ways in which witches were supposed to get to the sabbath during the major period of early modern trials. During that period some Continental demonologists considered the rationale behind the taste of demons for shape-shifting. Nicholas Remy, in Lorraine, thought that there were practical reasons: as dogs, they could attend on witches without automatically arousing suspicion; as horses they could carry them to the sabbath; as cats they could get into houses to work evil for their human allies; as wolves they could kill livestock for them; and they enjoyed appearing at sabbaths as goats because their rank smell added to the diabolic atmosphere.⁵¹ Pierre de Lancre, near Bordeaux, was more theological, suggesting that confessing witches described the Devil as taking so many forms that he was clearly a compulsive shape-shifter, as part of his general hatred of order and stability. De Lancre confirmed that the animals ridden to satanic rites could not be real beasts but were transformed devils, as they usually flew through the sky while the species concerned were not designed by nature to do.⁵²

It may therefore be suggested that the idea of attendant demons, which had special relationships with individual witches and took animal shape, was actually built into the new stereotype of satanic witchcraft from the very beginning. As the sabbath was central to most Continental European concepts of witchcraft during the early modern period, however, and most witchcraft was thought to be transacted there, the main purpose of the servitor demonic animal was to transport the witch thither. In England, where the sabbath was not central to images of witchcraft, the relationship ended up as being conceived differently, and how this happened must be the final stage of enquiry in this chapter.

British Perspectives

The concept of the demonic animal made a considerable impact on both the early modern British kingdoms, but in different ways. Highly educated Scots imbibed the idea of witches riding on such beasts, so that Alexander Montgomerie could make witches travel on pigs, dogs, stags and monkeys in the poem of around 1580, discussed before, in which he satirized fairies as satanic. This idea does not, however, seem to feature much in records of actual trials. By the late seventeenth century some Scots were starting to acquire the English concept of the animal familiar. When a group of Presbyterian rebels assassinated Archbishop Sharpe of St Andrews in 1679, a bumble bee flew out of his tobacco box; one of his killers called it his familiar, but then had to explain the meaning of this to some of the others.⁵³ Again, the idea does not seem to have surfaced in actual trials during the short period that remained until they died out. Scotland embraced the notion of demonic animals enthusiastically in a different form. When the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft is searched under the heading ‘animal devils’, forty-four different cases show up. All, however, refer to Satan himself, or much more rarely his demonic minions as well, appearing to humans in animal form, both to seduce them into witchcraft initially and to return to do their bidding.⁵⁴ None seems to have settled into a domestic or nurturing relationship with a witch as was believed to happen in England. None the less, the number of them serves as a reminder that the standard relationship imagined between a witch and a spirit guide in early modern Scotland was with the Devil, or one of his demonic minions, in human or bestial shape. Encounters with fairy-like beings were rarer, and the clearest contrast between the Scottish and English concepts of the dealings of witches with spirits is not between a fairy and an animal familiar, but between a more intermittent and a more intimate partnership with a demon in animal form.

Turning away from Scotland, the English-style animal familiar is, unsurprisingly, recorded in the parts of the British Isles under English control and influence. Belief in it manifested among Protestant settlers in Ireland during the seventeenth century, and in an Elizabethan Welsh tract and an Elizabethan Welsh trial.⁵⁵ England itself was, however, the stronghold of the tradition, although there too Satan and his minions often manifested in human form instead or as well. Moreover, its concept of the animal familiar seems on present evidence to be an innovation of the Tudor period, because there is no certain reference to it in any known medieval source. A mid-fourteenth-century chronicle commences with a horrific story of how Eleanor, queen of Henry II, had murdered her husband’s famous mistress Fair Rosamund, almost two centuries before, by paying a sorceress to use a pair of toads to suck the wretched girl’s blood out through her breasts.⁵⁶ There is no sign, however, that these were other than genuine animals. Conversely, when individuals were accused for political reasons of consorting with the Devil or a devil, the latter was often said to have manifested to them in animal form, because (as said) medieval demons frequently did. Such a charge was Christian business as usual, whether it was levied against the Earl of Cornwall in the thirteenth century, a man accused of Lollard heresy in 1409, or the rebel leader Jack Cade in 1450.⁵⁷The apparent complete absence of the early modern English witch’s familiar from late medieval records, which are reasonably good for trials for magic at all levels of society, may argue against the idea that it was a long-established folk tradition.

The earliest definite references to the animal familiar are usually thought to occur in two now well-known documents from the early sixteenth century. The first is a charge against a Yorkshire service magician in 1510, of keeping three beings like bumble bees under a stone and calling them out one by one to give each of them a drop of blood from his finger. This was intended to damn him as a Satanist after he had been arrested for genuine complicity in a scandalous attempt, involving local clergy and a former mayor of York, to find buried treasure by magical means. The accusation was made not by a churchman but a lay witness, a common man, and the accused utterly denied it. The court was not much interested in it, while convicting the magician and his accomplices on the treasure-hunting charge.⁵⁸ The second case was heard in Somerset in 1530, in which suspicion was cast upon a woman for being a witch because, among other signs, a toad was seen in her house.⁵⁹ This is not an absolutely foolproof testimony to belief in an animal familiar, as there is a slight chance that the toad was thought to be a genuine one, kept to milk its venom, but the likelihood is that it was indeed viewed as demonic. It is therefore probable that the keeping of demons in bestial form and a pet-like relationship was credited to magicians across England by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, at the latest. It is absolutely certain that by the first quarter of the century (at the latest) the ancient tradition of the magician’s servitor spirit had been combined in England with the equally venerable one of the evil spirit in animal form, to produce a genuinely popular belief that wicked magicians kept demons disguised as beasts, whom they fed on their own blood. Naturally enough, this idea went straight into English witch trials almost as soon as they were made possible by the parliamentary act of 1563, which criminalized magic and imposed the death penalty both for use of witchcraft to kill humans or livestock and for the invocation of evil spirits, for any purpose (and orthodox Elizabethan Christians would have regarded any spirit conjured by a magician as at least potentially evil). Moreover, the idea went as swiftly into the popular literature, which publicized trials and helped to form opinion with regard to what a witch should be. The very first of these pamphlets to survive, and perhaps to be published, concerned three women tried in Essex in 1566, who confessed to sharing a demon that variously took the form of a cat, a toad and a dog, and carried out their wishes.⁶⁰ It is apparent from the accounts given that they elaborated their portrait of this being in successive confessions, which informed and encouraged each other; or else that their interrogators or the author of the pamphlet performed this work.⁶¹ One woman described how the demon, in cat form, was normally fed bread and milk, but that for each evil deed it committed for her, it required a drop of blood as sustenance, and each prick inflicted on her to draw the blood left a red mark. Another agreed that it had required the blood for most missions, but also was fed a chicken in reward for the killing of animals. It is clear that a basic set of ideas was being elaborated in different ways which derived from individual imaginations, sometimes converging and sometimes not; much as in the case of the stories from Cape Province and Zimbabwe.

In the same year a service magician from Dorset told a church court that he had learned how to break bewitchment from fairies, but how to trace stolen goods from a familiar spirit which he had called to him in a classic rite of ceremonial magic. It had appeared to him at times in the form of a dog, and had to be given a drop of his blood in order first to bind it to him. Once engaged, however, it only required the gift of a chicken, cat or dog in sacrifice once a year. He added that witches kept toads as familiars, and used them to harm people, while he only employed his powers for good.⁶² So, the same complex of beliefs was being articulated across southern England, in different contexts, in the years during which the trials for witchcraft were commencing. For a couple of decades it remained unstable: in 1579, for example, the sister of one of the Essex women tried in 1566 allegedly confessed that when she first acquired her familiar, in the form of a small, rough-coated white dog, she sealed the bargain not by giving it blood, but bread and milk alone. In the same year, an alleged confession of a witch in Berkshire made drops of blood the central recompense to familiars owned by different women, but milk and breadcrumbs were added as additional forms of regular sustenance.⁶³ Even in the 1580s, although the blood-sucking motif persisted as a familiar’s reward, the demonic animal was fed more regular foodstuffs, such as beer, bread, cheese, cake and milk, as well. The Essex confessions are remarkable for their degree of domestication of the familiar, the creatures usually being kept like pets in pots or boxes in the home, lined with wool.⁶⁴ Trial narratives of the 1580s also at times afford additional insights into how images of the animal familiar were built up in particular cases. One such is that of Joan Cason, in the northern Kent market town of Faversham. Those who witnessed against her claimed variously to have seen her familiar in the form of a rat, cat or toad, or heard it as a cricket, but when Joan herself came to confess she settled on a rat and humanized it and related it to her own life by giving it the face of her now dead master and lover.⁶⁵ A sufficiently imaginative witness, once convinced that a person was a witch, could start to see animal devils everywhere: one boy from Burton-on-Trent in the northern Midlands, thinking himself bewitched by six women, identified their respective imps as taking the forms of a horse, dog, cat, fulmer petrel (a kind of seabird) and two different species of fish.⁶⁶

In the course of the late 1570s and the 1580s, the expected act of giving blood to a familiar slowly became more regular in the reports, as an ongoing and sometimes even daily tribute to it, rather than a reward for specific acts or a rite to seal the initial making of the relationship.⁶⁷ By 1580 the idea had appeared that the sucking was taken from the same part of the body each time, and that the act would leave a permanent mark, which, if found on a suspected witch’s body, could provide evidence in favour of the charges against her or (far more rarely) him.⁶⁸ As has long been recognized among specialist scholars, this notion blended with the belief, by then widespread in Europe, that when making the initial pact with a witch, the Devil or a devil put a special mark, like a brand, on the person’s body. By 1600 British demonologists were expressing the concept as one of the proofs that could be used to determine guilt in a charge of witchcraft.⁶⁹

In the ensuing decades it took an especially influential form: that the mark took the shape of a special teat to suckle the familiar, often concealed in or near the genitals. The spread of these ideas seems to have been fitful and patchy, with initial regional variations. It is tempting to regard the south-east as their main point of generation and diffusion, but less easy to prove. Certainly the concept of the special teat or teats was prominent there by the early seventeenth century. It provided crucial evidence in a celebrated trial at Edmonton, just north of London, in 1621, and was a central feature of England’s biggest witch-hunt, the major series of East Anglian trials in 1645–7, propelled by the team of witch-finders led by Matthew Hopkins.⁷⁰ However, the body of a woman accused of witchcraft at Warboys, on the edge of the Huntingdonshire fenland, in 1593, was noted as having a teat on it after she was hanged, and it was implied that this was proof of her guilt.⁷¹ When the women were accused by the boy from Burton-on-Trent in 1597, local justices ordered a picked group of other women to search the suspects for ‘marks’, and those homed in on ‘teats’ and ‘warts’ as damning examples.⁷² Bedfordshire women tried in 1613 were convicted of suckling imps from teats on their thighs, and suspects in Northamptonshire were automatically searched for such marks in the previous year.⁷³ The importance of them was therefore grasped early in the North and East Midlands. By contrast, during the famous trial at Lancaster in 1612 which was the largest in the nation until that date, it is clear that the notion that each witch received a personal attendant demon in animal form, which sometimes sucked blood from its human ally, was firmly established in that area, but not that of searching the accused for a visible spot left by the action. Instead, the blood-sucking had retained its earlier Tudor status as a special act intended to seal the original compact between familiar and witch: once that was made, as in early Elizabethan Essex, the demonic animals were fed such food as humans enjoyed.⁷⁴ By 1621 in neighbouring Yorkshire, however, it was considered imperative to inspect suspects ‘for marks upon their bodies’.⁷⁵ This procedure became routine in that county during subsequent decades, and was central to the next big trial at Lancaster in 1634.⁷⁶ By the mid-seventeenth century it was seemingly a regular procedure across most of the nation, and features prominently in the last English trial definitely to result in an execution, in Devon in 1682, and the last to result in a conviction, in Hertfordshire in 1712.⁷⁷ None the less, some confusion remained regarding the significance of suckling a familiar. Even in the Hopkins cases, which were part of a concentrated and programmatic campaign, some people still thought that the blood was taken as a drop at the original making of the relationship, and some that it was a regular tribute. Nor is it clear from these confessions whether regular suckling was thought to be for sustenance or as reward for services, and whether other food needed to be given to familiars as well.

These seventeenth-century trials afford further insights into the ways in which the people involved, or those presenting their views in pamphlets, struggled with the concept of the animal familiar. At times this idea blended with the essentially different one that a witch could change shape into an animal or send out her or his spirit in animal form: at King’s Lynn in 1616 it was recorded that a woman there had sent one of her imps in the appearance of a toad to invade the house of a man whom she disliked. A servant caught it and put it into the fire, where it took an unnatural fifteen minutes to burn, in which time the alleged witch was screaming in pain. The woman was also accused of attacking victims herself disguised as a cat or a ‘great water dog’.⁷⁸ The alleged witch from Edmonton confessed to suckling the Devil in the shape of a large black dog or a small white one, but was anxious to insist that the white ferrets seen about her house were nothing other than real animals.⁷⁹ One interrogated at Framlingham in Suffolk during the Hopkins trials can be seen struggling to satisfy her questioners (and, given Hopkins’s methods, her torturers) by referring to what sounds like real experience, before giving in to the theological imperatives demanded by them. She was recorded as saying first that ‘about a year since, she felt a thing like a small cat come over her legs, which scratched her mightily. After that she rubbed and killed two things like butterflies in her secret parts.’ At this point, however, she allegedly succumbed and provided what was urged upon her by stating that ‘Another time when spinning, a polecat skipped into her lap and promised that if she would deny Christ and God, he would bring her victuals.’⁸⁰Another woman questioned at the same town during the same witch-hunt seemingly added vivid and idiosyncratic corroborative detail to get her statement accepted and the process ended, saying that she ‘had seven imps like flies, dores [beetles], spiders, mice etc, and having but five teats, they fought like pigs with a sow’.⁸¹ A young girl in Northumberland in 1645, accusing somebody of having sent a spirit against her, claimed that it had appeared variously as a dragon, bear, horse and cow, and while in these forms had somehow managed to wield a club, staff, sword and dagger upon her (the same girl also declared that she had been visited by angels, in the form of birds the size of turkeys, with human faces). Clearly the individual imagination (or visionary facility) ran riot at times among witnesses as well as those under interrogation.⁸² In view of all this, it must be significant that the idea of the animal familiar none the less does not seem to have put down deep roots in popular folklore, because by the nineteenth century it had mostly contracted into East Anglia, to become a distinctive regional tradition there. That of the mark left by suckling largely evaporated once it was no longer of value as legal evidence after the law against witchcraft was repealed in 1736. By contrast, a belief in witches themselves, and in their ability to shift shape into animals, remained a vibrant aspect of popular culture all over England and Wales until the twentieth century.⁸³

It is time to sum up, and most contributors to the recent debates seem to emerge with honour from such a process.⁸⁴ A comparison with beliefs in non-European societies certainly does establish the English animal familiar in a recurrent worldwide pattern. As a tradition it is indeed ultimately rooted in ancient animist ideas, though only in the attenuated and remote sense that it derives ultimately both from the servitor spirits of ceremonial magicians and the very widespread human disposition to give evil spirits in particular bestial characteristics. There is no good evidence in the sources that it was especially a popular tradition, detached and remote from the ideological systems of people in general. This conclusion is reinforced both by its apparent absence from medieval records and its later disappearance from modern folklore across most of England and Wales, but is based also on the close association between demons and animal disguises in mainstream medieval Christian culture. Those who have emphasized the demonological origin of the familiar deserve credit here, as they do when considering that the raw imaginative materials from which the animal familiar was constructed were all present in the stereotype of the conspiracy of organized demonic witchcraft from its fifteenth-century beginning. Those who have looked for an origin point in the servitor spirits of ceremonial magic score with the point that one direct root of the English concept lies in the evolving idea, widespread by the 1500s, that magicians compacted with their servitors with drops of their own blood. None of these considerations, however, fully explains why the English (and Welsh) ended up with their particular, and unusual, concept of the witch’s familiar. It may be, after all, that the reason relates to an attitude they had developed to pet animals, which set them apart from other Europeans and from the Scots; but there seems to be a lack of solid comparative evidence on which to base such a conclusion. In the last analysis the problem may actually not be susceptible to resolution, save by the observation that across the world different peoples have evolved different belief systems concerning magic and witchcraft which seem to have no obvious relationship with their political, social, economic and gender structures. In the case of Britain, the early modern English and Scots drew on a common stock of late medieval and older European ideas about demons, and came up with strikingly different variations upon it, which diverged further with time. This may be simply what human beings do, as one aspect of identity formation.