In 1823 in the town of Taunton in Somerset, three women stood accused of assault against a woman suspected of witchcraft. Elizabeth Bryant, a 50-year old mother, stood with Elizabeth her 22-year old daughter and Jane, her 15-year old daughter, all accused of a violent assault on an older woman. Elizabeth had another daughter who was not involved in the case, as well as her husband. The family lived in Wiveliscombe in Somerset.
The Bryant family became affected by a relatively common condition that appears in court records of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: fits. Many of these fits were similar to what we understand today as epilepsy, or shaking fits where the person might become temporarily unable to speak or hear others. On this occasion though, Elizabeth Bryant said that her daughter jumped up and sang, dancing and acting as if she was playing a fiddle. She would become afraid, talking anxiously of a witch. The mother sought advice from someone in the community who said they knew about magic, called Baker. This Baker told Elizabeth that her daughter was affected by an evil spirit, and to break its hold, she needed to carry out a spell, swallow a pill and say a prayer. To finish the ceremony, it was then necessary to draw the blood of a witch. Elizabeth Bryant became convinced that the witch that had caused her daughter to become ill was Ann Burgess, a 68-year old woman living in their community.
Elizabeth quickly spread word that Ann was a witch, and Ann understandably confronted her in person about the rumours swirling in their close-knit village. But instead of defending themselves, Elizabeth and her two daughters quickly grabbed Ann, dragging her to the floor. Fetching a sharp iron nail, Jane pulled out the woman’s arm while the other two women held her down. A bystander came in, hearing the cries and commotion and managed to drag the women away from Ann. In the trial, it was said that other people who had also gathered at the doorway were afraid to intervene, believing that Ann was indeed a witch, as the local gossip stated, and might cast a spell on them in turn. Ann told the jury at court that the attack on her arm lasted an agonising 10 minutes, an excruciatingly long time to have been held down and scratched with the point of a nail.
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| Wiveliscombe today, Derek Harper / 5-7 The Square Wiveliscombe / |
Mr Justice Burrough, listening to the case, found Elizabeth and her daughters guilty of assault, with a passing sneer to the ‘wizard’ named Baker. ‘Tell him’, said Burrough, ‘that if he does not leave off conjuring, he will be caught and charmed in a manner that he will not like’. All three women received a sentence of four months’ imprisonment in the county jail.
This is a rare example of an accused witch not being punished and her attackers instead being found guilty of a crime. It also demonstrates that while we often consider the ‘witchcraft craze’ as something that happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sorcery was believed in and action was taken on it as late as the early nineteenth century too.
You might also like The Witchcraft Case of Amy Duny, Bury St Edmunds in 1662, The Witches of Reading, Berkshire and Elspeth M'Ewan, the 'Witch' of Balmaclellan, Scotland.
Source: George Borrow, Celebrated Trials, and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence, from the earliest records to the year 1825. Knight, London. 1825. via archive.org.
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