The invention of the witch

I've been intrigued by the story of Alice Kyteler and the witchcraft allegation of 1324 for a long time, partly because it's another one of these stories from medieval England that has not received the attention it deserves, and also because it intersects with lots of my other interests around women's voices — popular religion, histories of persecution and cruelty, and the role of written material in creating historical circumstances and historical precedents. Alice Kyteler was a woman in early 14th-century Ireland in the town of Kilkenny, which was then part of the Norman English colony in Ireland. She was accused of witchcraft, along with a group of other people there. Ultimately, what drew me to this story was that we have one written account of it – so part of the historical record is around the role of a written piece of evidence – but also because this allegation led to the burning of one of the accused women.

The allegation of witchcraft took place in the town of Kilkenny in 1324. Kilkenny, at this point, is the second town of Ireland after Dublin in the English colony there, but it's also very much a frontier zone. It's an entirely English town, but about 10 to 15 kilometers away the Gaelic Irish population was living and had earlier been expelled from Kilkenny, and this is really the very edge of the English Norman area of control. Alice Kyteler was one of the wealthiest people in medieval Ireland, and in 1302, again in 1305, and around 1316, she'd been involved in various allegations around expropriating money from her stepchildren and other financial irregularities.

In the later 1310s, the colony was hit by a series of disasters: the Scottish invasion, which was very disruptive and very violent, famine, an affliction of the animals and various kinds of social tensions. At the same time, a new bishop arrived in Kilkenny, a man called Richard de Ledrede from Avignon. He was directly appointed by Pope John XXII, and it was he who accused Alice Kyteler of witchcraft.

This is a very well established fulcrum or moment in a transformation of the church's thinking about heresy and magic. Other historians have written about this in a lot of detail, that the papacy in Avignon at the time, particularly led by John XXII, developed an idea of heresy which embraces magic and an idea of magic which is itself inherently heretical. The difference here is that earlier magic had been understood as being wayward if it was malicious in intent — an error, but ultimately a kind of fantasy, a mirage induced by the devil. Under the papacy of John XXII, it actually comes to be seen as a diabolical pact that the magician or the witch makes with the devil, and the magic is itself efficacious; it can harm. We see this being tested in the trial of the Knights Templar, and in part some of the trials in Languedoc at the time, but it really achieves its first form around witchcraft in Kilkenny, in the trial of Alice Kyteler and her group.

In the trial record, the activities that Alice Kyteler and her group are accused of are absolutely the standard kind of allegations that have subsequently become identified with witchcraft. At the time, they were not standard at all. She is accused of meeting at a crossroads with a group in secret. At this crossroads, they made various spells and potions in the skull of a robber and used the dead bodies of babies that had not been baptized. They also met with a devil, a demon called Robin, and he sometimes appeared as a cat, as a black dog or as a black Ethiopian African man, whom they worshipped, whom they made false church services with, mocking the ceremonies of the church, and whom they tried to harm other people with.

At the time of the trial, her fourth husband was said to be ill, lying in bed, poisoned by Alice. His fingernails had fallen out; his body hair had fallen out, signs of poisoning, and he had found a bag of magical ingredients and preparations, which he'd given to some friars who then accused her of magic. At the heart of the allegation is financial jealousy and arguments about an inheritance. Had she poisoned her first three husbands? Possibly. If that were the case, why wasn't she tried for homicide, for murder? There is jealousy; there's spite; there's envy. She's incredibly wealthy. She's also of Flemish origin, so she might have been considered something of an outsider, but at the heart of this, I think there is a disputed inheritance, and the witchcraft allegation is applied to her as a disruptive, rich woman who has taken something that other people think she shouldn't have.

We're right, at this point, to talk about the invention of the witch, because the witch, as she is subsequently identified, including her gender as a woman, really crystallized at this point. There had been many different previous kinds of witch all the way back to ancient Greece. In the Hebrew Bible – where you can read about the Witch of Endor and other kinds of sorcery and prohibitions on sorcery – and then right up to the early 14th century, we find people being accused of witchcraft. There is a kind of flurry of accusations around witchcraft in 1302, in the English city of Exeter. Often, in the very famous trial accounts of the Inquisition that Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie wrote about in Montaillou, people will be accused of different kinds of magic, involving herbs, spices and food, as well as poisoning or bits of bread and wax effigies. There’s a kind of witchcraft circulating at this time. What isn't yet established, and what really crystallizes in Kilkenny, is the identity of the witch. In the historiography of witchcraft, historians of witchcraft talk about the kind of standard image of the witch as it crystallizes in the 15th century in The Hammer of Witches, which is a very famous inquisitorial handbook for identifying and prosecuting witches.

The story unfolds in a very complicated way, which the account written at the time goes into a lot of detail about, because Alice is first accused of witchcraft, and she is defended by the legal authorities at the time – who also happened to be related to her. She does something very clever, which is to counter the allegation of witchcraft by accusing Bishop Richard de Ledrede himself of slander, and he himself ends up being imprisoned for a couple of weeks in Kilkenny. We get this quite long process of allegation and counter-allegation, during which time Alice seems to be at large. Eventually, the other Irish bishops agree to support Bishop de Ledrede's allegation, and Alice is put in prison, first in Kilkenny and then in Dublin. From Dublin, probably in Dublin Castle, Alice escapes, and we don't know where she goes. She escapes by being well connected; she has married into some of the richest and most influential families in Ireland at the time, Norman families, and she disappears – probably to England, but we don't know where. She effectively goes legally unpunished, but obviously she had to give up her wealth, her standing, and her life. And that’s a very intriguing — and very shocking — moment, really, that she disappears.

One of her co-accused, a woman called Petronilla of Meath, is prosecuted and burnt in Kilkenny on November 3, 1324, and this date seems to be chosen because it coincides with the festival of Halloween – All Hallows – but also with the pre-existing Irish festival of Samhain, which is also a kind of festival of bonfires. It's a festival of meeting the souls of the dead, and it's what then contributes to the modern understanding of Halloween. It's a moment when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and the souls of the dead are likely to reappear from purgatory.

The witch didn't always exist in a readily identifiable stereotype, and this moment in 1324 is a crucial moment of that stereotype coming into being. One of the reasons I'm working on this case is because people often say to me, ‘There were witches all over the place in the Middle Ages,’ and that's not true at all. The witchcraft burnings, the great persecution of witches, really takes off and takes place in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

I'm very troubled, having spent so much time thinking about witchcraft, that the witch not only remains very much a presence in modern ideas, a modern repertoire of stereotypes, but witchcraft trials are still taking place in the world today. In Papua New Guinea, there have been people burned in the last few years for allegations of witchcraft. Also, the witch, somehow in Western culture, has been rehabilitated as a children's character, and, at Halloween or with various children's cartoons and books, the idea of the good witch, the nice witch.