Analysis: The Witch of Edmonton offers a socio-economic commentary on the hypocritical and gendered roots of the witch phenomenon
On April 14th 1621 Elizabeth Sawyer of Edmonton, England was charged with the use of witchcraft in the murder of her neighbour Agnes Ratcleife and executed days later, on April 19th 1621. As early as that summer, but most certainly by December of 1621, the tale of her death was being dramatised in a stage production called The Witch of Edmonton.
Elizabeth was a poor spinster and the typical example of a woman who fell victim to the so-termed 'witch-craze'. However, the quick memorialisation of her story reveals a commercial appetite for witchcraft culture, which created a folklore at the same time as the authorisation of witch legislations and executions. This play reflects that the cultural demand for witches was not unique to the late twentieth century upsurge in teen dramas, like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed, but also occurred when women were actually vulnerable to being accused, indicted and hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth Sawyer was arrested under the primary charge of using witchcraft to kill her neighbour Agnes Ratcleife. Ratcleife fell fatally ill one evening and according to her husband’s account she was extraordinarily vexed and tormented, foaming at the mouth and distempered. This sickness lasted for four days before she died. Ratcleife did not allow the assumption that she had contracted the bubonic plague, typhus or even the English sweats, which were all common diseases in that period, as according to her husband she firmly stated that "if she did die at that time … that Elizabeth Sawyer her neighbour … was the occasion of her death."
This death-bed accusation was enough evidence to have Sawyer investigated. Especially, given a previous dispute between the two women, when Ratcleife claimed to have witnessed Sawyer attack her "sowe … for licking up a little soape." It may be safe to assume that the "little soape" is the pig’s fat that was used to make soap, and while the context of the term "licking up" is uncertain, it may be in reference to a now obsolete phrase "to lick the fat from a person's beard." This was used to describe cheating a person out of what was rightfully theirs, or taking credit for their work. Arguably, this is Ratcleife’s use of the term because she would have lost a valuable source of income with the loss of the pig, the pig fat and any piglets that could have been produced.
Despite the clear financial basis of the women’s dispute, Ratcleife’s witchcraft accusation dominated the village’s perception of Sawyer. They used an old custom to prove Sawyer was a witch, which involved burning a piece of the suspect’s thatched roof to draw them out of their house without being called. Then, the court had three women search Sawyer’s body for marks of the Devil. These women claim to have found a third nipple on Sawyer’s chest, which was a common sign of witchcraft. Sawyer later confessed to being a witch and was hanged for the murder of Ratcleife.
That same year Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley dramatised this event in the play The Witch of Edmonton. Interestingly, the authors use Sawyer’s experience to hold a mirror to their audience through an ambitious confrontation with the socio-economic roots of witchcraft. The play removes Ratcleife, the primary witness of Sawyer’s witchcraft, from the plot entirely to base their depiction of witchcraft on a rather progressive paradox; that the village’s presumption of Sawyer being a witch actually drove her to witchcraft. The "poor deformed and ignorant" Elizabeth is beaten by her neighbour, and when she asks for help it is the Devil who answers. The Devil appears as a black dog and he offers "out of my love, / To give thee just revenge against thy foes" which initiates Sawyer’s transformation into a witch.
Interestingly, because the Devil-dog has dialogue the production had to dress a player (actor) in a dog costume. The choice to stage the Devil as a dog fed into the belief of a witch’s familiar, their animal companion. This fuelled the creation of a popular witchcraft culture that spread beyond elite publications to the everyday lifestyle of the lower, middle and upper class theatre goers.
The play employs Sawyer as a literary instrument to create a near caricature of the typical witch. The spinster is now a deformed hag, and the witch’s familiar, which was an aspect of witchcraft unique to the British Isles, is the Devil.
Most importantly, Elizabeth Sawyer becomes Mother Sawyer the Old Witch of Edmonton in a final blow against the ‘witch-craze.’ Motherhood was a primary function of women in that society, they existed only to "beare children, and guide the house." Therefore, witches were a perversion of the mother; witchcraft was taught from mother to daughter, and the witch’s third nipple fed demonic spirits in an imitation of breastfeeding. This shows that not only did attributes of maternity transmigrate to the witch form, but parts of the maternal body were also known as means to disguise traits of witchcraft.
Overall, the authors accomplished an impressive feet in The Witch of Edmonton. Firstly, they memorialise Sawyer in popular culture as a story, not just a historical event. Then, they contribute to an apparent hunger for witchcraft media that perhaps, in its fictionality, softens the gruesome reality of the executions. Lastly, and most progressively, The Witch of Edmonton offers a socio-economic commentary on the hypocritical, gendered and impoverished roots of the witch phenomenon.
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