Of Witches and Midwives

by Sam Thomas

For many years, historians knew one of two things about midwives in pre-modern Europe. If you asked medical historians, they were decrepit old crones, with no medical training. They were untrained, lived on the margins of society, and probably dabbled in witchcraft.

If you asked (some) women’s historians, they would agree that midwives practiced witchcraft, but in this account, they were the distant heirs to a pre-Christian religion, practitioners in an early modern Earth-Mother cult. These rebellious figures rejected the Church’s authority, and for their trouble were often burned at the stake.

Both of these accounts are complete bunk.

Malleus Maleficarum

The connection between midwives and witchcraft dates back to the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for Hammer of Witches), written in 1486 by two Dominican inquisitors, Jacob Spernger and Heinrich Kramer. In Malleus, Sprenger and Kramer offer lurid accusations that midwives murdered newborn children and sacrificed them to the Devil.

While Malleus has influenced generations of historians, it is less clear that it had much influence on its readers. Kremer’s behavior at a witch trial in 1485 so outraged his fellow-inquisitors and a local bishop that they came to the defense of the accused witch, and the Spanish Inquisition(!) warned its inquisitors not to take it too seriously. More significantly, when historians have studied witch trials, they find midwives not among the women accused, but testifying for the prosecution! While thousands of women were tried for witchcraft, only the tiniest handful were in any way connected to midwifery.

If midwives weren’t witches, who were they? Just because the medical historians were wrong about the witchcraft, were they right that midwives were poor old women who lived on the margins of society?

Wrong again.

It turns out, they were not much different than women in England. Many midwives were quite well-off, often referred to with the honorific “Mrs.”, and we know that the wife of the Lord Mayor of Chester practiced midwifery. Letters written on behalf of Martha Baker describe her as “a Gentlewoman of great Judgement & skill,” and the will of Bridget Hodgson of York includes large cash gifts and refers to her family’s coat of arms. It is not uncommon to find midwives married to Anglican ministers, which is hardly the mark of poverty and disdain.

That said, poor midwives did exist. Court documents describe Anne Doughty as “very poore & hath very small employment,” and say that Johanna Thompson “is very low and poore in the world.” In some cases, there is evidence that women receiving poor-relief were encouraged to take up midwifery in order to reduce their reliance on public funds.

It thus seems that midwives were young and old, rich and poor, married, widowed, and even spinsters.

Once we have figured out who midwives were, the question then becomes What did midwives do? Sure they delivered children, but in a world before anesthetics and instruments, how did they do this? What was it that made midwives different from the other women who helped mothers when they were in labor? For that and more, you’ll have to come back next month! (Cue cliff-hanger music.)

Further reading:

David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 1 (1990): 1-26.
 
Hilary Marland, ed., The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London, 1994).

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Sam Thomas is the author of The Midwife's Tale: A Mystery from Minotaur/St.Martin's. Want to pre-order a copy? Click here. For more on midwifery and childbirth visit his website. You can also like him on Facebook  and follow him on Twitter.

So you say you want an execution...

by Samuel Thomas

Writers of historical fiction love executions. From Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, to Nancy Bilyeau’s The Crown, to my own The Midwife’s Tale, authors cannot resist the lure of the gallows or (even better) the stake. Such moments provide drama, and tell the reader something important about the world our characters inhabit.

Unlike today’s executions which usually take place in a private (and bizarrely medical) setting, early modern executions had all the trappings of a civic ritual. Prayers were said, sermons preached, speeches delivered, all with the goal of setting the world right after a terrible murder. The blood of the victim cried out for justice – an eye for an eye – and the executioner provided it. 

 But the symbolism went further than this.  In many cases, a murderer was executed not at the prison, but at the very scene of the crime. In 1668, Thomas Savage murdered his fellow servant, and after his conviction, he was hanged from a gibbet built in front of the house where he’d committed the crime. What better way to close the book on a murder?

Executions thus were morality plays in which the Crown saw justice done and overawed its subjects with the power of life and death. Given this public setting, it was important that everyone played their part. The condemned was supposed to confess to his crime and confirm that the execution was just. The crowd were supposed to bear witness to justice and the power of the government.

If this was the goal of the play, however, in many cases the actors or the audience went off-script and improvised an entirely new drama, with a much more opaque meaning. The first place that the meaning of an execution could go wrong was with the crowd, for many executions had all the dignity of a three-ring circus.  Peddlers strolled through the crowd crying their wares, and many in attendance treated the execution as an opportunity for eating, drinking and socializing.

One pamphlet from 1696 shows a preacher delivering an execution sermon, while behind him see not only the condemned offering up his last prayers, but a magician performing on an adjacent stage. (In this case it seems better to be the opening act than the headliner.) In other cases, government officials explained their decision to publish the condemned prisoner’s final words by saying that the crowd was too loud for anyone to hear him. 

If a festive crowd (and magician) could get an execution off on the wrong foot, the condemned could make things worse. In many cases, Catholics those condemned for treason proved the most difficult to control. Some Catholics claimed to die as martyrs to the Church (rather than traitors to the Crown – a vital distinction at the time), kissing each step of the ladder as they climbed it, and in one case kissing the executioner himself! Once on the scaffold, they would use their final speeches not to affirm the justice of their execution, but to defend the Catholic Church.

In cases such as these, the crowd or even the presiding officials could get involved, once again robbing the event of its solemnity. In 1591, judge Richard Topcliffe attacked one prisoner saying, “Dog-bolt Papists! You follow the Pope and his Bulls; believe me, I think some bulls begot you all!” Not to be out done, the condemned replied, “If we have bulls [for] our fathers, thou hast a cow to thy mother!” Other prisoners taunted the crowd (who naturally gave as good as they got), or even engaged in raucous religious debates.

If executions were meant as awe-inspiring ceremonies that demonstrated the government’s power, many did not get the message, and we can only wonder what those involved made of such events.

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Sam Thomas is the author of The Midwife's Tale: A Mystery from Minotaur/St.Martin's. Want to pre-order a copy? Click here. For more on midwifery and childbirth visit his website. You can also like him on Facebook  and follow him on Twitter.

Age Ain't Nothing but a Number

by Samuel Thomas

In an earlier post (here) I noted that, despite the popular perception that most people in the pre-modern world died young, in the seventeenth century nearly 10% of the population was over the age of sixty, which – by most accounts – is when one became “old.” But, as the saying goes, age ain’t nothing but a number. What was old age like in the past? To answer that question, we need to get behind the numbers.

The most interesting thing about old age in the early modern period is that one could “grow old” several times. The first phase of old age was known to contemporaries as “green old age.” This was a time, usually when a person was in his fifties or sixties. While the body might have begun to decay, it was a time of generally good health and continuing activity.

In his sixty-first year, Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood traveled over 1,000 miles on horseback over extremely difficult terrain, delivered 135 weekday sermons, and attended forty religious fasts. When he was sixty-eight, he logged 700 miles, eighty-two sermons, and another forty fasts. Other men and women had a similarly pleasant experience of old age, as their children married and started lives of their own, or they found spiritual peace that had eluded them in their youth.

It is here worth noting that an individual’s experience of old age is closely tied to wealth and gender. A man who spent his entire life working in the fields would grow old much sooner (and more painfully) than a gentleman or aristocrat. Part of what allowed Heywood to enjoy his green old age was that (by lucky accident) he’d inherited an estate in Lancashire, so he did not have to worry about money.

Thanks to their role bearing children, many women also aged earlier than men, regardless of their social status. In contrast to the popular image of labor being fraught with peril, a woman had only a 6-7% chance of dying in childbirth (over her lifetime, not per birth). But the fact is that in the pre-modern era, a woman might become pregnant a half-dozen times, and this could take a terrible toll on her body. 

The lot of the poor, aged and female was a hard one.

Whatever a person’s social status, green old green old age faded to brown and the elderly grew weaker, sicker and less likely to recover from illness.  In extreme old age, physical decay became a central fact in a person’s life, as it became more difficult to see, hear, breathe, and walk.  Along with these physical challenges, many elderly people suffered from memory loss and melancholy. In 1699, at age sixty-nine, Heywood described his condition in touching detail:

My wind grows exceeding short, any little motion puts me out of order – my chapel is near me, but when I walk to it (as yesterday) my wind so fails me that I am forced to stand and get new breath, before I go into my pulpit. When I go up to my chamber, my breath cuts, that I am forced to sit a season in my chair to breath me. When I lay down in my bed I pant a considerable time and cough and oftimes my waters comes from me with motion.

An individual’s ability to cope with the challenges of extreme old age varied with social status. The wealthy obviously lived in greater comfort than the poor. A few years after this, Heywood found himself unable to walk the few steps to his chapel, so he paid two men to carry him in a specially-built chair. Obviously this was a luxury which most of his neighbors could not have afforded.

But old age was not just a physical event. For some in early modern England (particularly the puritans), it could be seen as an event of cosmic significance.

Sam Thomas is the author of The Midwife's Tale coming soon from Minotaur/St.Martin's. You can learn more at his website, like him on Facebook (or in a coffee shop if you run into him there), and follow him on Twitter.

The Reformation and the English People

In an earlier post, I got pretty deep into the weeds in the historiography of the English Reformation, outlining two very different views of religious change under the Tudors. In a nutshell, you had one view which said that the Reformation was a “bottom up” event, driven by popular disgust with the Catholic Church. This view has largely been overtaken by more recent arguments that the Church was in fine health, and if not for the dynastic troubles of the Henry VIII and his descendants, England would have remained Catholic.

What this latter view cannot explain, however, is how the English went from being a Protestant nation to a nation of Protestants. (The phrase is Christopher Haigh’s.) It is one thing to change doctrine, but it is another to change hearts and minds, and there can be little doubt that in the long run the Reformation was a resounding success.  How did this happen?

One answer to this has been offered by Ethan Shagan in his book Popular Politics and the English Reformation. In this book, Shagan traces the myriad ways in which the English people participated in the Reformation and (deliberately or not) helped to advance the Protestant cause. A few examples will illustrate Shagan’s argument.

Over a period of months in 1540-41, the Cistercian abbey at Hailes in Gloucestershire – which had been formally dissolved some months earlier – was pillaged of nearly everything of value: windows, doors, ceiling timbers, lamps, locks, even the abbey’s beehives were taken. What makes this even so interesting is that it was not done by rapacious agents of the Crown, but by English men and women living around the abbey. (Indeed, the government was furious about the theft, for once dissolved, the abbey’s goods belonged to the Crown.)

What makes this event particularly interesting is that Shagan’s analysis demonstrates that this was not a Protestant project. Records show that many of those who participated in the plunder were Catholics who overcame any religious qualms they might have had, and joined their Protestant neighbors in ransacking the abbey.

While one explanation for this is mere hypocrisy, Shagan offers a more sensitive interpretation. In order for a Catholic to tear the lead roof off the chapel or remove a stained-glass window and steal the iron bars supporting it, he would have to believe that the space was no longer sacred, that whatever holiness had once resided in the church had now gone. But who had the power to do such a thing? Who had the authority to say, “That was a church, a place of holiness, but now it is not?” The answer is clear: The Crown.

Thus, when Catholics pillaged the abbey, they implicitly acknowledged that the Crown (and not the Papacy) had the authority to decide what was holy and what was not. That is no small thing, and the destruction of Hales is hardly exceptional: whether it was by participating in the destruction of religious houses, or the enthusiastic pursuit of monastic lands, the English people proved willing participants in the physical dismantling of the Catholic Church.

A similar example of this kind of behavior can be found in disputes between priests and their parishioners. While conflict at the parish level could be over doctrine, more prosaic disputes were far more common. The priest was obliged both to discipline his flock and to collect tithes, and not everyone appreciated these efforts.

While disagreements between priests and parishioners were not new in the sixteenth century, the Reformation provided parishioners with a new weapon against priests, for they now had a potential ally in the government. Parishioners could go to a government official, accuse their priest of religious unorthodoxy, and have the offending minister removed. The Crown, of course, was eager to assert its authority over the clergy, and took every advantage to demonstrate their new-found power. What makes this strategy important was that you did not have to be a Protestant to use it. A devout Catholic saddled with a rapacious or lewd minister could appeal to secular officials (again, not the Papacy but the Crown) for his removal.

What ties these examples together is that in each case, English men and women began to act like Protestants, even if they had no particular affinity to Protestant doctrine. They accepted the power of the government to confiscate monastic lands, to de-sacralize holy sites; in short, to govern the religious life of the nation. They might use the new order to their own advantage by stealing a monastery’s property or by buying its land, and they might even say, “Better that I have it than the heretic on the throne.” But whatever the case, every time a man or woman collaborated with the government to the detriment of the Catholic Church, they helped to shape and advance the Reformation. And once the people began to act like Protestants, the road to getting them to think like Protestants became much clearer.

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Sam Thomas's debut novel The Midwife's Tale: A Mystery will be published in January 2013 by Minotaur/St. Martin's press. He can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and his very own website. 

Gossip in Early Modern England

by Samuel Thomas

In today’s world, whether it is used as a noun or a verb, the term “gossip” has universally negative connotations. Gossips spread rumors of dubious veracity, and are often considered the very opposite of what a friend should be. But such was not always the case, for in early modern England “gossip” had additional and sometimes contradictory meanings. In this post I’ll briefly outline origins and changing definitions of “gossip” and in a later post I’ll try to rehabilitate gossip’s reputation and make the case for it’s importance to a well-ordered society.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word “gossip” comes from 1014, but its meaning would have no resonance today, for “gossip” referred to a child’s godmother or godfather. The spiritual kinship between the child and the godparent extended to the child’s birth parents as well, making them “siblings in god.” And here is where things get really cool: “gossip” is short for “god-sib” which is itself an abbreviated form of “god sibling.” Thus your gossips were the women and men you chose as godparents for your child – gossips were your closest friends. (According to the English, the Irish chose wolves as their gossips. As one historian noted, this idea is as interesting if it is false as if it is true.) Intriguingly enough, this meaning of the word – including its inclusion of men as gossips – endured into the late 19th century.

In the seventeenth century, “gossip” began to refer to the women who attended a woman during labor and delivery of a child, or at her recovery (or lying-in) afterwards, and here we can begin to see the word taking on its negative connotations. Prior to the eighteenth century, childbirth was women’s business, and a central occasion for women’s sociability. A woman gave birth not in the presence of doctors and nurses (whom she knew not at all), but her friends and neighbors. Such gatherings of women made some men very nervous, and they spilt a great deal of ink voicing their anxiety. In ’Tis Merry When Gossips Meet (1602) and its sequel A Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), Samuel Rowlands describes the meeting between a widow, wife, and spinster in which the three women exchange complaints about their husbands, and the widow offers the other women advice on how to manipulate their spouses.



While there is no denying Rowlands’s misogyny, his description may not have been entirely off the mark. Writing later in the century Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, describes just such a gathering in terms Rowlands would recognize:

as is Usual at such Gossiping Meetings, their Discourse was most of Labours and Child-beds, Children and Nurses, and Household Servants...at last they fell into a Discourse of Husbands, Complaining of Ill Husbands, and so from Husbands in General, to their own Particular Husbands.

When Cavendish ( ever the defender of patriarchy ) reprimanded the women for their disrespectful carriage, they turned their guns on her.

the ladies being before Heated with Wine, and then at my Words, with Anger fell into such a Fury with me, as they fell upon me, not with Blows, but with Words, and their Tongues as their Swords, did endeavour to Wound me...it hath so Frighted me, as I shall not hastily go to a Gossiping-meeting again, like as those that become Cowards at the Roaring Noise of Cannons, so I, at the Scolding Voices of Women.

(This episode also makes clear we should not imagine these gatherings as occasions for sisterly resistance against patriarchal oppression. Rather they were the scene of as much infighting and competition as characterized society in general.)

In the early modern period, then, the term “gossip” could refer any number of things, ranging from a child’s godfather, to a woman’s closest female friends, to a woman who spread scurrilous rumors about her neighbors. While some might find such imprecision frustrating, to my mind it simply speaks to the richness of early modern English and the ability of the common folk to define words in terms that were useful to them.


Sam Thomas's debut novel The Midwife's Tale: A Mystery will be published in 2013 by Minotaur/St. Martin's press. He can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and his very own website.