Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognizing it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burnt so much that she allowed herself to be caught no fewer than forty-seven times in various disguises.

A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban


Any reader of Harry Potter knows that witches should not be stigmatized for their magical abilities, unless they use them for wicked ends. But the attitude in history towards witchcraft has been overwhelmingly negative, and often used as a means of persecuting women in society. Accusations of witchcraft were particularly widespread in the 17th century.


Back in 1621, the three daughters of a famous English scholar called Edward Fairfax became ill and his youngest daughter, Anne, died. The two surviving sisters then accused some local women of practicing witchcraft and causing Anne’s death. The women were taken to trial at the local assizes (old English county courts). Fairfax wrote a manuscript, setting out his case for the prosecution: A Discourse of Witchcraft as it was Acted in the Family of Mr. Edward Fairfax of Fuystone.


Fairfax pursued his argument against the accused by describing the witchcraft performed against his daughter. He drafted the manuscript as a way of giving credence to his belief that local witches plotted against his daughter, ultimately killing her. He documented the accused women’s behaviour in great detail.


Fairfax described cavorting with devils, big black dogs, people struck dumb, and wax effigies. Often the devil appeared in the guise of a witch’s familiar (accompanying demon) – a cat or sometimes a bird or something even stranger. The account was later published a century after it was written (the original has been lost, but it was copied and distributed among interested scholars), and the printed book had additional numbered illustrations to accompany Fairfax’s text. The witches are depicted as old and hunched, carrying a stick alongside their familiars: birds, goats, a many-legged sort of fish-cat and the devil himself.


The illustrations in Fairfax’s book established the image of the bent-over, haggard witch that endures to this day. In the 17th century and beyond, women were often disenfranchised and vulnerable within wider society, along with the disabled and mentally ill. They were easy targets and that’s what we’ve seen in the iconography of witchcraft ever since: the witch with a walking stick is really a vulnerable old woman.


The women accused by Fairfax were tried twice, but, despite his best efforts, they were acquitted each time. His daughters eventually admitted that they had invented their dreams in which the witches were performing dangerous acts and trying to kill Anne. It was possibly no surprise that, in this male-dominated society, they had done so to get the attention of their father.


Regardless, Fairfax stood by his book as the truth of what had happened. The accused women’s ordeal has been credited as one of the last gasps of the witchcraft trials that plagued England that century, and made infamous legends of historical figures such as the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. Hopkins had stalked the fenlands of England’s East Anglia during the English Civil War in the mid-17th century, and took advantage of the upheaval to execute around 300 women between 1644 and 1646, charged with making covenants with the devil.


But perhaps the most infamous witch trials of all happened fifty years later across the Atlantic, in the village of Salem, Massachusetts…

In 1693, the year the Salem witch trials ended, a book was published called The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New England, written by Cotton Mather.


Mather was a major influence in the frenzied witch hunt that broke out in February 1692, when two girls – nine-year-old Betty and eleven-year-old Abigail, daughter and niece of Salem’s new reverend respectively – became ill and started to have fits. A doctor was called. His diagnosis was bewitchment. Two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged, others died in prison and one man was pressed to death by rocks. Mather was a pastor and a prolific writer, who graduated from Harvard when he was only fifteen years old. He was a highly educated man. He studied hybridisation in corn, lobbied for smallpox inoculation and wrote over four hundred books and pamphlets. He even authored a children’s book.


By 1692 he had already published writings on the dangers of witchcraft. He’d even taken a young woman, whose mother had been hanged as a witch, into his house, so he could closely observe how witchcraft manifested itself.


Mather was a respected member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony where Salem was situated. The area was populated by Puritans – a devoutly religious group that had emigrated from England. They wished to ‘purify’ the Church of England of its Catholic practices, and the New World they found themselves in was a harsh one. With smallpox spreading and the Native American peoples hostile towards them, there was a struggle to maintain their pious, ordered religious community.


Mather represents a period of time in New England that was rife with hysteria and accusation. There were many natural phenomena occurring that could not be explained: bad harvests, freak storms, flooding and drought all left people stumped as to their cause. As a devoutly Puritan minister with authority and influence in the community, whose father had also been a minister, Mather thought it was his responsibility to find a reason for these various disasters.


Unfortunately, that meant accusing a number of young women who ranked much lower than him in the strict social hierarchy of being in league with Satan. The reasons why family, neighbours and acquaintances were accused have been debated many times over the centuries. Fear and paranoia played their part, but so did financial exploitation. In these close-knit communities, many people had related to each other and an accusation of witchcraft was a convenient way to bypass a line of inheritance. The misogyny of the period ensured a son never accused a father. Accusations of witchcraft were a way for societies to control what they viewed as ‘disruptive’ female behaviour. What often started as an opportunistic way of getting a woman out of the way became a cultural contagion with little or no rational explanation.


We now look back at the events in Salem with horror at the terror and pain of the victims, anger at the arrogance of the prosecutors and incredulity at the superstition from another age. But even while the trials were happening, there was controversy – The Wonders of the Invisible World reflects this. Even as he voiced great discomfort with the court’s admission of spectral evidence (testimony from dreams, ghosts and visions), Mather defended the court’s verdicts (as long as they were based on the testimony of human witnesses, however disingenuous).


Mather’s determination to keep the supernatural out of the courtroom can’t excuse his hypocrisy in defending the witch trials. They were already coming to be seen as a blemish on American society. His explanation of how it was legitimate to execute the witches shows he already understood that history would not look kindly on his actions and the tragedy that he contributed to. And it certainly hasn’t.

Another tragic example of the hysteria surrounding witchcraft is the case of the Pendle witches and the Lancashire witch trials of 1612 – probably the most famous witch trials in English history. Nineteen people were accused of practicing witchcraft and the majority of them were hanged.


But The History of the Lancashire Witches, published in 1825, over two hundred years after the trials, painted a very different picture of witches to those of Edward Fairfax and Cotton Mather.


The witches this book portrayed looked like strange bony birds with spindly legs, large beaky noses and angular cloaks that looked like wings. The book actually sought to liberate these figures from the myth of being evil, dangerous creatures and showed them in quite a jolly new light: funloving people that liked to ride about on broomsticks!


As every school-age wizard knows, the fact that we fly on broomsticks is probably our worst-kept secret. No Muggle illustration of a witch is complete without a broom [. . .] broomsticks and magic are inextricably linked in the Muggle mind.
Quidditch Through the Ages


The witches were also notable in this book for riding their brooms the ‘wrong way round, with the bristles facing forward. It’s only recently that we’ve seen the bristles facing backward in illustrations of witches riding broomsticks. The rider looking over the bristles of this domestic item suggested an inversion of power, a world turned upside down, women all-powerful over men. Depicted in this way, they symbolized everything that men then feared.


Several boys about Harry’s age had their noses pressed against a window with broomsticks in it. ‘Look,’ Harry heard one of them say, ‘the new Nimbus Two Thousand – fastest ever –’ Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone


Few charmed objects are more closely associated with the Western image of the witch than the broomstick. In 20th-century Devon, Southwest England, during a full moon, a local woman called Olga Hunt took a colorful broomstick and leapt around one of Dartmoor National Park’s most famous landmarks, Haytor Rocks. Many a camper was alarmed, while courting couples almost had heart attacks.


It’s hard to imagine what Hunt thought she was up to. Did she really think she was flying? Was it about getting kicks by frightening people? Or in her mind was she engaged in something else?


Olga’s broom was not a typical collection of twigs, nor a fancy Nimbus Two Thousand. It drew from a broader tradition – with its colorful appearance it resembled a maypole. It linked back to ancient practices with roots in pagan fertility rites that fed the superstitions of the 16th- and 17thcentury witch hysteria in Europe. It obviously has phallic symbolism and, like the broomstick portrayed in The History of the Lancashire Witches, it was transformed from a harmless domestic object into something socially disruptive.


There’s no getting away from the fact that the image of the witch on her broomstick has often been reproduced and reworked by men. But Olga Hunt reclaimed it in the 20th century for her own mischievous, subversive ends. Though the exact reasons for her jumping among the rocks remain obscure, it certainly looked a lot of fun.