Woman healers of the Seventeenth Century, by Leslie Wilson

A Young Lady called Henrietta Boyle, Christian Friedrich Zincke, Wikimedia 

If you think about women in medicine in the past, the chances are you'd think first of all of midwives, and yet, four hundred years or so ago, women were playing an active role in medical care. The philosopher Hobbes said he much preferred 'an experienced old woman' to the 'most learned and inexperienced physician.' Nowadays, people speak perjoratively of 'old wives' tales,' and yet medical research often confirms views that doctors used to dismiss (like getting a cold if your feet get wet).

Far from being amateurs, the women had access to medicines handed down from generation to generation, with proven efficacy. Sir Ralph Verney, writing to his wife in 1647, advised her to give her child 'n phisick but such as midwives and old women, with the doctors approbation, doe prescribe; for assure yourselfe they by experience know better than any phisition how to treat such infants.' Women cured lame legs, brought down swollen arms, worked as oculists.

spearmint, once used to cure watering eyes

Some of these were paid, but others, notably aristocratic ladies, did the work for no pay. One of these was Madam Springett, the mother-in-law, from her first marriage, of the early Quaker Mary Pennington, and I can't do better than to quote from what her daughter-in-law wrote about her in later life.

'She kept several poor women employed in summer, simpling (gathering herbs) for her; and in winter procuring for her such things as she wanted in surgery, physic, and sore eyes. She had excellent judgment in all these, and admirable success; which made her famous, and sought unto out of several counties, by persons of the first rank, as well as those of other classes. She daily employed her servants in making oils, salves, balsams, drawing of spirits, distilling of waters, making syrups and conserves, lozenges and pills.

 melissa officinalis, calming herb and good for digestion

She was so famous for taking off spots and cataracts from the eyes, that Stephens, the great oculist, sent many to her, when the case was difficult.. She cured.. many desperate burns, and cuts, and dangerous sores that came by them.. One very remarkable cure of a burn I shall mention. A child's head was so burnt, that its skull was like a coal: she brought it to have skin and hair, and invented a thin pan of beaten silver, covered with bladder, to preserve the head in case of a knock or fall.'

People came hundreds of miles to consult Madam Springett, and stayed in the area while she dealt with their case, sometimes for months. She could have twenty patients to see in a morning.

Being a lady of substance, she never took a penny for these services, though she did make wealthy patients buy the ingredients for the medicines.

What is clear from the above account is that Madam Springett relied on the expert knowledge of her female herb-gatherers, and also must have trained the servants who made up the medicines. I wonder if some of them subsequently set up as healers on their own account? I would also love to have the details of her cures for cataracts.

eye-bright, for eye problems!

Doubtless some of the illnesses went away of their own accord, and the placebo factor may also have been involved. But dermatological conditions, for example, are notably tricky to treat. I have found myself, through trial and error, that witch hazel is better for the inflammation I get from some mosquito bites than any steroid creams or anti-histamines, and many herbal 'house remedies' remain unattested simply because the big pharma companies aren't interested in testing or developing them.

In those days, you had the choice between a woman who had spent years observing illness and the effects of various herbal substances on them, or a doctor who had trained in what was largely a theoretical discipline, based on 'humours', and eager to let pints of blood from already weakened patients, literally bleeding some of them to death. The women healers were arguably the more scientific of the two.

The doctor's visit, Jan Steen, (Google Art Project)

Women (particularly aristocratic women) also functioned as bone-setters, so when one of the villagers in my novel 'Malefice' broke his leg, Alice Slade, the local 'cunning woman' was called in to set it, because the lady of the manor was in childbed.

However, even in Henry VIII's reign, legislation was being passed to restrict women's work in this respect. As with midwifery, the male doctors formed professional associations and excluded women, though of course household and herbal remedies continued to be practised, but this was more and more confined to the women's own families and friends.

In addition, as the eighteenth century progressed, more and more villages were removed from proximity from the great houses. Blenheim and Nuneham Courtney spring to mind. The lady of the manor must have been similarly cut off. She might still sally out to visit the poor, but only to dole out broths and advice. In Capability Brown's centenary year, it's worth considering how his landscape gardening quarantined the gentry from their 'inferiors.' If you want to see how it used to be, before Brown, Kent et al started holding their noses at the whiff of a cottage, go to Chastleton House in Oxfordshire. It's almost shocking to see how cheek-by-jowel the village is with the great house. Madam Springett's local patients, in such a set-up, would have found it an easy walk to the doctor.








References:
The Working Life of Seventeenth Century Women, by Alice Clark
Experiences in the life of Mary Pennington (written by herself) with preface by Gil Skidmore,  Friends Historical Society.
Malefice, by Leslie Wilson, reissued on Kindle May 2016

FLINTS, CLAY, MUD AND WITCHES ... by Leslie Wilson

When I set out to write a novel about a witch in the seventeenth century (choosing the time that a local witch, from Waltham St Lawrence, was prosecuted and hanged, it wasn't just important to do the historical research, as I've described in a previous blog (Who were the Witches). I had to do what every writer needs to do, to inhabit the world of my book.

Whitchurch St Leonard, my fictional village, lay in the chalk country of the Thames Valley, where pockets of clay alternate with chalk and gravel, and flints lie everywhere in the soil, as local vernacular building attests.

flints and clay

I have all three in my garden, so when I wrote the first chapter, where the witch's daughter and son-in-law bury her covertly in the churchyard, I had an idea of what they were contending with. They were digging into an existing grave, but all the same:

'Hard work,' says Margaret, Alice's daughter, 'even digging into ground that's been turned before. Flints stop the spade, and the clay's heavy.'

I know all about that, when the spade hits a flint, which could be small, or it could be eighteen inches wide, gnarled, knobbly, and weirdly beautiful, but you don't appreciate that when you're sweating and struggling, trying to find where it ends and get a purchase on it. The strain of that work has written itself into the aches and pains of my poor arms, shoulders, and back. Some things don't change, though I've never dug six foot down into a grave.

The Bell, Waltham St Lawrence, rubble-filled walls.

Opposite my house is a 16th century farmhouse, and while I was writing Malefice, the friend who used to live there took me upstairs and opened a door set into the wall, that led to a cupboard. Inside there I could feel the fill in between the timbers: chalky rubble, horsehair, twigs and rags; the texture of the past. In the days before such houses were lime-washed, their white surfaces must have been much rougher than nowadays, and scratchy, as I described when Margaret remembered pressing herself to a house wall, the day Royalists and Parliamentarians fought in the village street.

bluebells scrambling up an ancient road edge, Kent

Where you can easily find remnants of the past is in the woods, on the bridle paths that were once roads, often deeply sunken with the passage of time. Paved with flints, very often, in this country where it is the local stone, and walkable in dry weather in spring and summer, often mired and squelchy in winter. That's what travel used to be like, and you can get a sense of it still, even if you're wearing high-tech walking shoes or boots.

'You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes..'
(Rudyard Kipling, The way through the woods)

Flints paving an old road.

What you don't have is the danger. Recently we walked down Pack and Prime Lane, which leads to Henley from Rotherfield Greys; it was a haunt of footpads, and the packmen who used it had to pack their pistols with powder and prime their flints before they entered. Of course now, it's just beautiful woodland, heaven for dogs. But it was along those laborious, hazardous roads that Margaret tramped, fleeing the village that used to be her home, her thoughts travelling back to her mother's past, and her own.

'Rain and mud, and the road slithers under your feet, you stumble over the huge soft ruts… I wish it wasn't raining.. The people we meet talk about thieves, highway robbers, trying to frighten country bumpkins on the nove who are good for a laugh.'

Once, in the late eighties, I was driving on the A4 a friend at dawn; coming back from a night watch at Greenham Common, and over the Berkshire fields was a thick layer of mist. The picture stayed in my head for a few years, till it was time to use it for Malefice.

'That morning,' says Simon, the village drunk, 'the mist lay in the air like milk in water, can't get drunk on milk, here I am, poor rat-catcher, sober as the devil. Milk in water, and the trees stood out of it, under the trees you fumbled your way, but if you climbed a hill to look for the King's men, you could see the bare black branches fingering out of the whiteness.'

Day after day, when I've walked my dog in the w

inter, I've seen drops of melted frost on the sloe bushes, something Alice yearned for when she was shut up in a stinking seventeenth-century jail. 'She shut her eyes and tried to see blackthorn twigs like gnarly claws in the morning mist, each grasping a small clear bead of water.'

When I was writing Malefice, I was still able to pick up the phone and ask my mother-in-law about farming things; she's gone now. My mother-in-law had really made butter, and I needed to understand about it, because spoiling the butter was something witches did. She did me proud. 'Winter's the best time,' she told me, 'in summer, it just runs through your fingers.' I gave that line to Judith, whose butter the witch Alice supposedly spoiled.

'But what I should have done,' says Judith, 'I should have put the red hot poker in the cream, that day I knew the witch was spoiling the butter..'If you're here,' I should have said, 'have at your eye.' I might have blinded her.' I didn't know that was what you did, and to be sure, it did seem strange when I found out. Surely, the red hot poker wouldn't do the cream much good? But probably you only did that when the butter was already spoiled, and you wanted to get your revenge on the witch.

The Past is another country - and yet there are parts of it that I recognise. What that world of more than three and a half centuries ago shares with ours, still, is a whole lot of imagery, stories, that live in our heads still, even though we've overwritten them with a lot more information. But some of the imagery, I'm convinced, is to do with how the human brain works, and it's hard-wired into us.

witches giving babies to the Devil: Wellcome Trust

Think of the phenomenal success of films like The Exorcist. Possession by evil forces, people with supernatural powers to do harm, people who have an animal alter ego, still rampage through fantasy novels and films, and probably computer games, too, though I don't play them. Have you never looked in a mirror when you've been all alone in the house, and had a frightening fantasy that you might see something terrifying standing behind you?

What was going on in my head when, having done all the research and the reading, I sat down and wrote Malefice, hardly aware of what was going on, just kept typing, and then came out of something like a trance and read what I'd written? It wasn't just stuff from my personal subconscious and image-store that swam up and directed the story, that's for sure.

 To get Malefice on Kindle, go to amazon.co.uk

Who Were the Witches? by Leslie Wilson

'Who are the witches, where do they come from?

Maybe your great-great-grandmother was one,

Witches are wise wild women, they say,

There's a lot of witch in every woman today.'

We used to chant that at Greenham Common, and maybe that's why, when I was wondering what to write a novel about in the late eighties, I thought: 'I'm going to write about a witch.' People are very fond of asking writers how novels are born: in this case, it came in this bald sentence.

It was going to be about an English witch, I thought, indeed, one from near my place of residence, so I went to the Local History section of the library and asked if they had any material about actual local witch prosecutions. They came up with one, the unpromisingly-named Mabel Modwyn, of Waltham St Lawrence. The record describes her as:

'widowe abact 68 years old arraigned for witch craft at Redding 29th Feb: and condemned on the 5th of March, 1655. Shee lived at ye south-wist cornr. of lower Innings in ye cornr. next to Binfield" She was buried in the churchyard at Waltham.

The librarian couldn't understand why I was so delighted with this information, when it was so scant, but it gave me a place to visit, and a date. And the next entry in the small typed and hand-bound book of extracts from the Parish Register was the story of a suicide who was secretly buried in the churchyard by her son and her female relations (I think I've got that right.) I felt I had the spark of a story there. My witch should be buried secretly, too. There was a question, however, as to why Alice Slade, the witch of Whitchurch St Leonard (I really couldn't stay with Mabel) might have been forbidden burial in the churchyard, when it wasn't a problem with Mabel. The Vicar would have to be involved.

Research taught me that England hardly ever experienced anything like the Great Witchhunt of seventeenth century continental Europe and Scotland. The notable exception is Matthew Hopkins's Essex witchhunt, in the course of which a staggering 200 or so witches (men and women) were hanged. So who was the English witch?

Three women examined in the case of the witches  of Belvoir

Well, the witch was usually but not invariably female, and most often old and annoying (though not invariably). There were many old women and some men who actually found it very useful to have the reputation of being a witch, because people were reluctant to offend them and would let them have a cup of flour or some 'yeaste to make beere', when they needed it. However, this useful strategy could, under certain circumstances, tip into catastrophe for 'witches' when they suddenly found themselves formally accused, or just murdered. What is striking in these cases is the way in which often the 'witch's' offence was the result of some offence against her: her bees had been stolen, or she had asked to hold a child, or had been refused that 'yeaste to make beere.' She might then mutter something or even strike the offender, and if some catastrophe occurred in that household, she would then be blamed. I built Malefice round the narratives of Alice Slade's accusers, and the reasons for her supposed magical assaults were the commonest reasons cited for a witch to have taken maleficent revenge on her neighbours.

What happened to the accused witch (I'm saying her for convenience) was far less clearcut than in the Continental witchhunts, where the unfortunate victims were tortured until they confessed and then burned. The English witch might be acquitted; many witches were. If she'd been convicted by an ecclesiastical court, she might have to do penance in a white sheet, and then could return home. If she was convicted by the Assize courts, she might be put in the stocks.

However, if she was condemned to death, she would be hanged, not burned, though under English law you could be burned alive for murdering your husband (petty treason) and also for coining, if you were a female. I don't know when people stopped being burned for heresy, though I believe the practice, contrary to the impression I grew up with, continued under Elizabeth the First.

It shows how rare witch prosecutions actually were in England that one judge told an accused witch that she would burn, only to be publicly corrected by his clerk. I assume that the judge had never had another such case come before him in his career.

The English witch was very seldom a cunning person or white witch. It did occur that a person came before the courts accused of black witchcraft after a previous prosecution for 'white witchcraft' but it is rare in the court records that Alan Macfarlane examined. Cunning folk carried out healings and found lost property, but most importantly, they pointed the finger at witches or at least witchcraft as the source of someone's problems. They were largely distrusted by the ecclesiastical authorities, who believed they drew their power from the Devil, though churchwardens and clerics were sometimes cunning folk! But they were considered to do good, and relied on in England, and often their evidence was accepted in a witchcraft prosecution in a court of law. 'They played an important part in both spreading and directing witchcraft beliefs,' Macfarlane says. This pattern continues in Africa, where the witch-doctor will identify unfortunate people as witches. Where the cunning person was prosecuted as a witch, he or she had become the victim of a practice that s/he had actually encouraged.

witch's 'familiar'

Alas, therefore, if I was looking for a feminist heroine when I wrote about a witch prosecution, I didn't find her. Even the cunning woman was no good candidate, because her accusation might cause the death of some harmless, if weird, old woman. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to write about the lives of obscure women, so often sidelined in history, about the kind of things that might happen to them, and about people's attitudes to perceived female power. And so Alice, my witch, was one of those cunning folk 'gone bad', and it became important to find out why the community that had relied on her suddenly turned against her. The story of this witch prosecution was thus the story of relationships gone wrong, of an outsider whose utility to the community failed, about the 'criminal' being persuaded that she had in fact committed a crime. I was helped by a psychotherapist friend who had travelled in Peru and told me that in the small places he visited he could believe the plot of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' because it was 'a different kind of reality.' Going to Cecil Sharp House and reading broadside ballads of the time showed me what kinds of images lived inside people's heads at that time.

At a time when fits, strokes, plagues, and the sudden and terrifying diseases of livestock and children could strike without warning or explanation, when the devil's existence was official (and not just one devil, there were dozens of different ones, all with separate specialities), when night-times were truly dark, and only lit by flaring torches and weak candles and rushlights, and the shadows danced on the staircase when you went up to bed, people looked for supernatural explanations (nowadays some people blame immigrants for all the ills of society, and actually, the narrative is the same; clear these bad people out of the way, and society will be healed. See Theresa May's speech at the Tory Party conference.) A different kind of reality, but driven by psychological forces that are still with us. Injury produces anger, and then it's natural to want someone to blame.

Hansel and Gretel

And there was something else I recognised. I found stories of people who said a witch would visit them at night and sit on their chest so that they could not breathe. Sometimes they saw demons flitting about too. Now I knew what this was, for I had experienced it. My mother had, too, though neither of us actually saw demons. It was sleep paralysis. My mother felt that a person with whom she was in destructive conflict was actually attacking her; she dealt with it by having a crucifix blessed by a vicar and placed in her bedroom, when it left her.

What I experienced was a terrifying sensation of suffocation (I didn't personalise it), and though I cried out for help, I couldn't wake up or make a noise. It felt as if I was dying. However, after a few years this would change  into a sense of being on a high cliff and about to fall. I dealt with it by, in my sleep, spreading my arms and launching myself out into the void, when I flew. I had a vivid view of the landscape beneath me which I can still remember (in colour.) The flying was exciting, and after a while the sleep paralysis left me altogether. I was having therapy at the time, and had acquired a shortlived lucid dreaming facility (when you can direct your dreams). In both my mother's case and mine, it was stress related, but I met a woman who suffered from it who got very angry with me for saying so (in a day school about witch prosecutions, which I ran).

The experience, and the hallucinations, are prevalent nowadays, and they are not connected with mental illness. Some poor people suffer lifetimes of bad nights as a result.

I'm not about to pronounce on what causes sleep paralysis for other people than myself and my mother, but one can see how easy it was to be convinced it was a direct attack from an enemy. My mother's and my experience brought the 'different kind of reality' very close to home.



The most influential studies I used, when writing 'Malefice' were Alan Macfarlane's 'Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England,' and Keith Thomas's 'Religion and the Decline of Magic.' Also Alice Clark: 'The Working Lives of Seventeenth Century Women.'

There is a school of witch studies nowadays that relates the witch cases to psychology and culture. I read one of these books, but it was too Freudian for me. I have no problem with psychology, but what I like about Macfarlane's study is that it gives me a solid grounding in the reality of historical witch prosecutions.

MUSIC WHILE YOU WORK, by Leslie Wilson

Music affects me in two ways when I’m writing. Firstly, there’s the music that actually occurs in the novel – a lot of Django Reinhart and Louis Armstrong in Last Train from Kummersdorf . When I was writing Saving Rafael, I had a cd called ‘Berlin by Night’ which contained popular music from Germany in the Nazi period. Not, I hasten to add, Nazi songs, but songs ranging from ‘Lili Marleen’ to disguised jazz, given a German title and lyric to make it more acceptable to the authorities. It has ‘Es geht Alles Vorüber’, the smash hit of the end of the war, the one that people played over and over again. Its message: ‘Everything passes, everything goes by, and every December is followed by May’ annoyed Propaganda Minister Goebbels – not martial enough – but that made no difference. My mother associated it, bitterly, with the letter she got telling her her first love had been killed in action – but she did have her Maytime after all, when she met my British father.

I listened to that cd over and over again, and composed the ‘theme lyric’ for the novel, in slight imitation of a terribly shlocky number that had me frankly laughing my head off. Jenny, in the novel, knew it was trash, but because it was playing the first time she realised Raf was interested in her, it got terribly important to her.
And yet – the scene where my young hero reaches across the table and starts playing with Jenny’s fingers comes, not from any of those contemporaneous songs, but from Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto (in D Major, I believe). I’d been wondering how to write that scene just before I was taken abruptly into hospital to have a tumour taken out of my spine. The second night after my surgery, I had a dreadful moment when I woke up and thought: ‘Somebody’s in pain,’ and then realised it was me – just as authors describe in many novels, and I always thought they’d made it up! But the thing that made me cry was that I thought I’d lost my novel. I got some more opiates from the nurses, calmed myself down – they were dealing with an emergency in the room and the last thing they needed was an author agonising – and then the next morning I was listening to the Tchaikowsky on my personal stereo and suddenly I was in the Café Kranzler again. I’d found the novel! Such a relief, because honestly, it was an awful moment, and I realised how important a companion the novel I’m working on is to me.
Tchaikowsky wrote the concerto as a love-letter to a young violinist – who didn’t reciprocate his affection – but it is the most passionate, flirtatious, wonderful bit, and the part of the slow movement I was listening to was just like someone playing with their loved one’s fingers. I had something to write on, so I reached out – I had to lie flat in bed – and scrawled it down.
There’s a jazz cd by Abdullah Ibrahim called ‘Water from an Ancient Well’ that my brother gave me, that I played over and over again while I was writing Kummersdorf.
 Music so often releases something in me, and it’s vitally important to me for that reason. I can’t imagine writing without music. If I didn’t have any of the machines that are our personal musicians nowadays, I’d have to sing for myself, or relearn to play the piano and play every morning, as Jane Austen did. Perhaps that would be better, who knows?
But I’m a twentieth/twenty-first century writer, though I write historical fiction. My childish imagination was fired by ‘Music and Movement’ and by the stacks of wonderful glossy records, ‘78s, that lived in our house in Kendal – my parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I guess these were left over from a YMCA jumble sale, since my Dad worked for the YM and the house was a YM house. We lived over the office. Anyway, I have wonderful memories of my brother and me, on wet Lake District days, putting on The Night on Bald Mountain, and dancing excitedly to it. And that music surfaced years later when I wrote my novel about a witch persecution in the 17th century, Malefice.