Civilization, Medieval; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 1066-1485
Another instance of the use of magical ceremonies with evil intent is
alluded to fifty years later, when John Knight, chaplain, complained that
he had been arrested and committed to the Marshalsea for going with the
servants of 'the Lord Straunge' to search the house of Alice, wife of John
Huntley, 'which of long tyme hath used and exercised the feetes of
wychecraft and sorcery,' in Southwark. They went into 'an house called the
lasour loke in Suthwerk in Kenstrete' (a hospital founded originally for
lepers, but by this time used more as an almshouse or infirmary) 'and
there found dyvers mamettes for wychecraft and enchauntements with other
stuff beryed and deeply hydd under the erthe.' The circumstances are very
similar to those related in the case of an old woman turned out of the
almshouses at Rye in 1560 for using magical ceremonies, including the
burial of pieces of raw beef, to the intent that as the beef decayed away
so might the bodies of her enemies, though it is possible that in the case
of Alice Huntley the objects had only been buried for secrecy.
Five-and-twenty years later, in 1502, a still clearer case of the use of
'mamettes' or images occurred in Wales. The bishop of St. Davids, having
vainly remonstrated with Thomas Wyriott and Tanglost William for living
'in advoutre,' imprisoned the woman Tanglost and afterwards banished her
from the diocese. She went to Bristol, and hired one Margaret Hackett,
'which was practized in wychecraft,' to destroy the bishop. Tanglost and
Margaret then went back to Wyriott's house, and in a room called, most
unsuitably, Paradise Chamber, made two images of wax, and then, possibly
thinking that a bishop would take more bewitchment than an ordinary
mortal, sent for another woman, 'which they thought cowde and hadde more
cunning and experiens than they,' and she made a third image. The bishop
was not a penny the worse for this 'inordinat delying,' but ordered the
arrest of Tanglost for heresy; Wyriott intervened by getting her
imprisoned through a trumped-up action for debt, in order to keep her out
of the bishop's clutches, and the bishop had to invoke the assistance of
the Court of Chancery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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