Are We the Daughters of the Witches They Couldn't Burn?

Herstorical spoiler alert: it's not quite so cut and dry. And hi, it's been a while :)

Hello to you, lovely reader, and a warm welcome to all the new readers 👋🏻

Well, well, well. It feels like an age since we were last here, so I hope that this newsletter finds you happy and well.

What’s been going on, I hear ye ask?

Well, get ready for this because it’s been a pretty wild ride over the last 12/18 months, and the last six of those were probably the most intense.

So, in summary: I’ve got divorced, become a single parent, lost my Dad and become an orphan, tried to keep my financial shit together, had an ego death (or 10), had my heart smashed, explored my sexuality, supported my daughter through an autism diagnosis and a transition to high school. All washed down in the last 2 weeks with a Covid chaser. LOVELY.

TL;DR: When you step away from toxic situations (willingly or unwillingly), there is pain, of course, but there is also a really beautiful opportunity to get to know yourself. And I’m not messing around here, folks. I mean really know yourself, like who you are when it’s finally safe for you to drop all the masks.

As part of that unmasking, I’ve been doing a lot of deep diving into my conditioning and limiting beliefs. You might be thinking, hang on a minute, Kaye, this is sounding a lot like psychology, not herstory. What’s going on?! But …. unmasking has actually anchored me even further into the past as I’ve uncovered and navigated the beliefs that I inherited, both about myself and what’s possible for me. And, as we’ve already discussed, epigenetic inheritance is a very real thing.

Once you start to hack away at the beliefs and ideas that (it turns out) were never yours to begin with and that serve no purpose in moving you forward, you can put new ones in place. Well, that’s the plan. That’s what I’m trying to do now.

As I’m doing this work, I’m approaching my day-to-day world in a very new way. It’s a new kind of curiosity, matched with a new type of analysis. It’s like Kaye’s Brain 2.0 😂😅 But here is the really unexpected thing: I’m noticing things in history that I’ve never noticed before. Crucially, these are things that cannot be unnoticed. This leads us nicely to the juicy history bit …

Revisiting the Witch Trials

It’s pumpkin spice. It’s crunchy leaves. It’s the season of the witch, as they say. So, of course, I’ve revisited the witch trials this month, but with a whole new pair of eyes.

I have many issues with the popular representation of the witch trials in Europe, which is probably best summed up by this quote that I came across in an article from the Irish Examiner just this morning:

“They weren’t witch trials, they were femicide. You had healers, you had midwives, you had women with money, women who enjoyed sex, women who talked too much, women who were too loud. That’s who was murdered.”

There is so much to unpack here, and I’m not going to do it now. Instead, I want to draw your attention to another archetype in the witchcraft story. Primarily, women are depicted as the victims of persecution (and let me be clear – I’m not debating or belittling that). Women are also sometimes seen in their role as the accusers. But what we need to talk about is women as the searchers.

Yes, the women responsible for finding the ‘physical evidence’ of witchcraft. The women who ‘searched’ the bodies of accused women, thereby providing the evidence that sent so many to their graves. These women worked alongside male figures of justice. Whatever way we slice the cake, the searchers propped up this system of persecution.

Who were the searchers and why do we need to talk about them?

You already know what I’m going to say … the evidence is sparse for searcher women. I’ll be straight with you. However, we do know about quite a few of them in England. I’m drawing here on the research done as part of a brilliant thesis by Shannon Lundquist, which I recently discovered. Read it here.

Lunquist looked at the witch trials in Essex, which were initiated and led by the notorious Matthew Hopkins between 1645 and 1647. She argues that women searchers “had power that requires attention and analysis that they have not yet received” - and I could not agree more.

Searchers typically consisted of older, married women who had children. They were respected for their experiential knowledge of the female body and its processes. In addition, they did not fall under the suspicions of anybody within and beyond their community. Their reputations were immaculate. Women always searched women (and likewise men searched men) because it was deemed inappropriate for a man to search a woman and vice versa.

Often, women were paid for their services as a searcher and their work involved often travel. In April 1645, Frances Mills travelled from her home in Manningtree in Essex to a nearby town to search Margaret Moone, who had been accused of witchcraft by a local man called Henry Cornwall. Mills, alongside Mary Philips and several other local women, stripped Margaret Moone and searched her body for marks. Witch-hunters believed that certain marks on the body proved a covenant with the devil. The marks, usually described as “teats,” demonstrated that the witch had familiars (called “imps”) that suckled her.

The next day, Mills testified before two local justices that she had found three of these teats on Margaret Moone’s body. She further testified that she knew that these marks were not ‘pyles’ (haemorrhoids), which they resembled, because she was bothered with ‘pyles’ and knew the difference between them and witches’ marks. This evidence was enough to step up the prosecution. Margaret Moone would later ‘confess’ to having “12 imps” and was executed.

Frances Mills also searched another Essex ‘witch’ called Margaret Clarke. Clarke was accused by a local tailor called John Rivet of ‘bewitching’ his wife (whose name I could not find). Unusually, Clarke immediately confessed to being a witch, but she refused to name her fellow witches. As part of the investigation, Clarke was searched. On the evening of 21^st March, 1645, Frances Mills and three other women - Grace Norman, Mary Phillips and Mary Parsley – were employed by the local justices to travel to Margaret Clarke’s home and search her body for marks. They found three witch marks and then watched Clarke for three consecutive nights to see if her ‘imps’ would come and suckle. Eventually, a sleep-deprived Margaret Clarke implicated other local women. For example, she claimed that a woman called Anne West introduced her to witchcraft because she felt sorry for her: Margaret Clarke was 80 years old, living in poverty and had a physical disability. The prosecutions continued. In July 1645, Margaret Clarke was found guilty of witchcraft and executed.

A contemporary depiction of Elizabeth Clarke (on the right) being watched for evidence of witchcraft. The animals in front are her “imps.”

Power Dynamics and the Witch Trials

Shining a light on the searchers (as far as we can, in terms of records) is important work because it adds another dimension to our understanding of both this period but also of women’s history, in general. Whether we like it or not, power dynamics have existed and continue to exist between women. Typically, these dynamics are identity-based. They centre(d) on age, class, race, etc. These power dynamics are as much a part of women’s history as any accompanying narratives.

What we see in the modern world is a reclaiming of the witch dynamic, typically as part of a feminist rebranding, but when you write back in the contributions and experiences of the searchers, the ground underneath that narrative gives way.

What I find interesting is why this feminist reclamation happened in the first place, and I think the answer lies in the origins of women’s history as a discipline. In Britain, women’s history is about ready to celebrate its 40^th birthday. Even so, many of the institutions of British women’s history are even younger. The Women’s History Network only got going in 1991, which is wild when you think about it. Women’s history was borne of women’s political struggle for greater rights. Once you understand this, you realise that it was birthed in resistance. It was oppositional from day one, and that determines where and how we place our academic attention.

The political climate that birthed women’s history in Britain should be remembered and honoured (and I’d love to talk about this in more depth in the future), but for us to create a truly woman-centred narrative also means disentangling the stories from patriarchy and patriarchal systems. It’s time to let the herstory speak for itself.

So, let’s return to the title of this post, which I’ve seen on so much merch over the last couple of years: “We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn.”

Well, with all this in mind, I’m proposing a rewrite:

“We are the daughters of the women who prosecuted, accused but were also murdered for being ‘witches’ We are the daughters of a system that ties women into knots by creating harmful power dynamics between different groups of women.”

Okay, so it won’t win any prizes for being catchy but at least it’s accurate.

I’d love to hear what you think about the themes covered this week, so please hit reply and let me know. As always, I appreciate you sharing this post with anyone who wants to support woman-centred history.

See you next time,

Kaye x