As historians of early modern England have come to appreciate the place of the social in the political and vice versa, so witchcraft prosecutions have been seen as products of the exercise of authority, discretion and decision-making in local communities. In 1991 Annabel Gregory published an article in Past & Present, which, using a case from the Sussex Cinque Port of Rye, focused attention on such an interpretation, with special emphasis on factionalism. Now, with Rye spirits, she has expanded the story to book length.
Gregory's tale is long and complicated, and, as she admits, occasionally baffling. The narrative runs backwards and forwards, involving many people about whom we know little. Much of the 20,000 words of documentation appears to be ‘an aimless collection of anecdotes about spirits, buried treasure, unneighbourly opinions, and … accusations of black witchcraft’ (p. 3). Nevertheless, Gregory has done a good job of making sense of it.
In the summer of 1607 Thomas Hamon, a rich merchant and mayor of Rye, died suddenly, followed by other strange misfortunes, which led some to suspect the witchcraft of Anne Taylor, a middling healer, and her tenant, Susan Swaffer. It is a central concept of the book that merchants and middling sorts formed opposing factions, and that hostility between them explains subsequent accusations. A more immediate catalyst, however, was Swaffer's feverish visions of human-shaped, adult-sized spirits, or ‘fairies’. Somewhere between diabolic familiars and ghosts, these entities were enticing as well as menacing, and Swaffer allegedly left gifts for them.
That winter, both women were interrogated about entertaining demons. Taylor fled, leaving Swaffer to be tried and condemned, though she was never hanged. A plan to indict Taylor was thwarted by a judge who argued that Rye's charter did not allow it to try statutory offences, the legislation behind which only mentioned county commissions of the peace, not urban corporations. To townsmen, this was yet another attack on their liberties – just the sort of encroachment that Hamon had successfully resisted. After Taylor's apprehension, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports asked that she be bailed. At her trial in December 1608, she refused to plead – an open challenge to the authority of the mayor and jurats (aldermen).
Rye's heyday had been the first half of the sixteenth century, after which its fortunes waned as the harbour began silting up. Rye spirits, then, is a study of how economic vitality sustains political power, and how, in decaying ports like Rye, recession drained it away and sparked conflict between interest groups. Crisis descended in the 1590s when the economic gap widened between middle-ranking artisans/retailers and the mercantile elite, polarising them politically. Between 1576 and 1582, all Rye's mayors had been artisans; after 1583, down to 1607, every one was a merchant. By this time, however, mercantile prosperity had greatly contracted, turning a sense of triumph over the middling sorts to paranoia about their political resurgence.
It was significant, then, that the merchants should especially mourn Hamon's death, and that Anne Taylor, a middling sort who married a gentleman and had freemen on both sides of her family, was accused. She symbolised the wider threat to merchants' fading supremacy. There was also a religious dimension. Puritanism was most strongly represented by the middling sort, whereas the merchants were more traditional in faith. Thomas Hamon, while not Catholic, was no Calvinist either. By the 1570s Rye had become ‘fervently godly’ (p. 83), from which point contention occurred less between Catholic and Protestant than between shades of Protestantism – a familiar outcome of the Reformation around the country. Different values were placed on ‘good lordship’ and ‘good neighbourliness’, as radical and nostalgic visions of English communal life did battle. These visions were indirectly linked to anxieties that, Gregory argues, encouraged witchcraft accusations.
Most extraordinary is the way that, in a town like Rye, which enjoyed something close to judicial independence, magistrates could lavish so much energy on a witchcraft trial. Similar cases heard by the county assizes generated a few pages of written evidence, and were dealt with in minutes. Rye produced a fat dossier of testimonies, like those found in continental archives where inquisitorial procedure required thorough investigations. As Gregory observes, ‘there is just nothing comparable in English court records’ (p. 44). There is a sense here of a town bottling up conflict and venting it internally so as not to appear disunited and weak. ‘In this little semi-autonomous enclave, inhabitants needed to sink their differences to combat intrusions from outsiders’ (p. 222).
In its sheer breadth and depth and detail, then, Gregory's story has a European feel to it, if only because English records are generally too sparse for such a reconstruction. She deserves praise for her close reading of conflicting versions of events, and her ability to extract a comprehensible story. Her unbuttoned, conversational style, with its first-person asides and second-person questions, will annoy some readers, who may feel that Gregory's ‘cultural prejudice that clouds my vision’ (p. 70) – regarding Anne Taylor's puritanism – is one of those things historians should overcome. Others may wish that a tighter editorial grip had been exerted on the discursive prose. Full analysis of Rye's significance for the history of witchcraft would have been preferable to the rather self-indulgent concluding essay, which inter alia discusses religious fundamentalism in a way that is not especially helpful to either historical or contemporary understanding.
The great strength of Rye spirits, however, is two-fold. First, it reaches deeply into the thicket of English religious and political conflict before the civil wars, demonstrating seamless links between the temporal and metaphysical worlds that shaped seventeenth-century mentalities. Second, it reminds historians of witchcraft how important were the contingent and convoluted machinations of the ‘politics of the parish’. Accusations were, after all, rare and difficult to initiate, requiring a coincidence of circumstances favourable to accusers, above all political clout, to get anywhere. Even then, as the Rye case shows, the chances were that the suspects, so labouriously arraigned before the court, would walk free.
