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Home , Barway, East Anglia, Matthew Hopkins, Stretham, Wimpole

‘The Wonderful Discovery of Witches’ Unearthing the : and in Seventeenth­Century

David Barrowclough

ABSTRACT Consideration is given to how elements of the occult: , magic and sorcery may be identified in the archaeological record. Working definitions of occult terminology are established before proceeding to propose a new approach, which triangulates data from historic and folkloric sources with archaeological evidence, to establish contextual narratives that stand for the past. Excavation of an occult ritual site at , is presented to demonstrate how the approach works in practice. Archaeological evidence, combined with local folklore and historic accounts of spells and sorcery, identify the site as the locus of occult activity performed by cunning folk, or ‘white’ witches, during the seventeenth­century.

KEYWORDS OCCULT, CUNNING FOLK, , WITCHCRAFT, SPELL, MAGIC, SORCERY, FOLKLORE, EAST , ELY, SEVENTEENTH‐ CENTURY, GRIMOIRE, PENDLE WITCH TRIAL, , JOHN STEARNE.

INTRODUCTION The occult world of witchcraft and magic has had a particularly compelling place in the popular imagination from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories. Witchcraft’s basis in historical fact rests on the seventeenth‐century witch‐trials, most infamous of which were the Pendle witch‐trials at Lancaster Castle in (Poole 2011); and the prosecutions pursued by Matthew Hopkins, the self‐styled ‘Witchfinder General’, and his colleague John Stearne in (Gaskill 2005). Although popularly enthralling academics have largely avoided serious analysis of the occult, notable early exceptions being the folklorist Eric Maple (1960), who published articles on two nineteenth‐century cunning men in East Anglia, and Alan Macfarlane (1970); but it was only relatively recently that the historians Ronald Hutton (1999), Jason Semmens (2004) and Malcolm Gaskill (2005) have given this subject the serious treatment it demands. Archaeologists have been even more reticent in their approach, perhaps because archaeological evidence of witchcraft is hard to identify and confirm. The ephemeral nature of sorcery rarely leaves permanent traces susceptible to archaeological excavation. Identification of the material culture of occult practices is generally confined to the recovery of : witch bottles, shoes and occasional mummified cats found built into the thresholds of dwelling houses where they served to ward off evil spirits. The discovery of symbolic objects forming a possible at Barway, close to Ely in the Cambridgeshire fens therefore represents a unique opportunity for a combined archaeological, historic and folkloric study of the practice of witchcraft during the seventeenth‐ century.

DEFINING AND IDENTIFYING THE OCCULT Before proceeding to the discovery it is necessary to clarify the terminology used in popular discussions of the occult, as it is often used loosely and interchangeably in popular literature. The term ‘occult’ is used here to encompass the various practices of ‘witches’ and ‘witchcraft’, ‘Cunning Folk’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Magicians’, ‘Sorcery’ and ‘Spells’. The major distinction is between those who used their alleged powers and abilities for good, and those who devoted them to evil. The latter are referred to as ‘witches’ or ‘black witches’, to distinguish them from the ‘Cunning Folk’ (Macfarlane 1970, 130), to whom the term ‘white witch’ is sometimes applied, whose principle function was to do good, often by acting as the village healer

1 or ‘blesser’. Witches were believed to derive their powers through a pact with the devil, and to be responsible for the ills, and even deaths, of those that crossed them. A feature of the witch, who could be male or female, was the satanic ‘’, who came to them in animal form.

Typically witches and cunning folk had their roots in their local community, were poorly educated and often barely literate, and the distinction between the two was often unclear. These ‘wise’ men and women were often viewed ambivalently, considered as capable of harming as of curing. As a consequence many of those who found themselves accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth‐century were cunning folk who had fallen foul of their community. Both witches and cunning folk practised their mysterious art through sorcery, by casting spells, which often involved complex rituals during which incantations based on formulaic recitals of special words were given. Rituals may also involve particular objects, or the sacrifice of animals; whilst incantations often invoked elements of a pseudo‐Christian liturgy, invoking the holy trinity through garbled cod Latin. For example, following the arrest of Peter Burbrush, a blacksmith from Ely, in 1647, he described a spell he had been taught in order to become a witch, which draws heavily on deviant Christian symbolism:

‘W[he]n a man came to the sacram[en]t, let him take the Bread and keepe it in his Hand & after y[a]t he hath drinke the wine to goe out w[i]th the bread in his Hand & pisse ag[ains]t the church wall at which time he shall finde somthing like a toade or ffrogge gapeinge to receive the s[ai]d Bread and after y[a]t ye Party should come to the knowledge how to be a witch’ (Gaskill 2005, 266).

Such was the confusion in the popular imagination between witches and cunning folk that Reginald Scot noted that, ‘At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, “she is a witch” or “she is a wise woman”’ (1584).

In contrast Magicians came from a narrower segment of literate society, taking as their guide the occult stories from classical literature, and the various pseudo‐scientific grimoires, books of magic. Grimoires had existed in Europe since classical times, with further examples being produced during the medieval period, they had however remained expensive hand written items confined to a select few. The advent of printing changed this, but as most were written in Latin their circulation continued to be restricted to the scholarly magicians. Within the pages of the occult texts were the alchemic formula for transforming one substance into another, and for practising necromancy, whereby the dead, or at least their ghost, could be summoned from the afterlife. First appearing in the sixteenth‐century, and developing throughout the seventeenth, were popular English translations of the grimoires including, Albertus Magnus’ Book of Secrets (1604), James Freake’s translation of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1993), the English astrologer Robert Turner’s translation of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy (1655), and most influential of all, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Although an essential tool of the magician some cunning folk began to obtain these books, perhaps as much to impress their clients as to study their spells. Indeed for some the primary reason for owning them may have been cosmetic, and they may by reason of illiteracy have been unable to make use of any of the magical ritual contained within.

For all these reasons the identification in the archaeological record of the various occult practices is fraught with difficulty, with each occult practitioner developing their own individual rituals, often spontaneously, albeit that they deployed established symbols such as the circle. As Hutton has pointed out, cunning folk and witches ‘appear as a remarkably heterogeneous collection of individuals, divided by at least as many characteristics as those they had in common’ (Hutton 1999, 98). Archaeologically speaking the difficulty has parallels with that experienced in attempting to identify religious behaviour in the material record. One approach would be to attempt to develop a checklist of features, the presence of which would point to a site being classed as occult in nature. Features that one might identify are:

o The use of a restricted range of material culture o The use of non‐local or rare material o The structured deposition of material culture o The choice of prominent location within the local landscape o The siting of the site in relation to a prominent landscape feature or cardinal/lunar alignment o The effort required in constructing the site in terms of labour/time/resources employed o Absence of an obvious utilitarian function for the site

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Although seductive, as with the identification of religion (Renfrew 1994), a tick‐box approach is ultimately self‐defeating, creating a set of rules to which there are as many exceptions as examples. The way forward is not to devise a checklist of features presence or absence of which might indicate the occult. Instead I suggest that a better approach is to triangulate archaeological evidence with that from historic sources and folklore in order to construct the case for the occult. Such an approach is essentially contextual, and sensitive to the heterogeneous nature of the data. This approach is best illustrated in practice.

In the case of Meg Shelton, archaeological evidence takes the form of a large boulder placed over her alleged grave at St Anne’s Church, Woodplumpton in Lancashire (Figure 1). That Meg Shelton was a real figure is confirmed by the historic sources, which tell us she was crippled, and accused of the theft of basic staples from her neighbours, as a result of which she became an outcast known as the ‘Fylde Hag’. History records that she, like other men and women who failed to conform to society, was accused of witchcraft, and branded variously as the Singleton or Woodplumpton witch. Folklore provides us with several instances of her alleged powers, which focus on an ability to shape‐shift, taking the form of an animal in order to sneak into her neighbours farms to steal food in various fanciful ways. It further provides an unconvincing account of her death, crushed to death between a barrel and a wall, following which she was said to have twice dug herself out of her grave to haunt her neighbours, prompting them to finally bury her head first down a vertical shaft capped‐off by a large boulder to prevent her rising from the dead any more (Fishwick, 1891). Whatever the truth of the various accounts, the material evidence in the form of her grave, marked by a large boulder, attests to the historic accounts in which she is named as a witch. Unfortunately, we rarely have such rich accounts to work from, but as the excavation at Barway in Cambridgeshire demonstrates, we may still be able to identify occult sites in the archaeological record, and even unpack something of their meaning.

Figure 1. Meg Shelton’s grave, marked by a large boulder, St Anne’s Church, Woodplumpton. Lancashire. The spot is marked by a sign which reads: ‘The Witch’s Grave: Beneath this stone lie the remains of Meg Shelton, alleged Witch of Woodplumpton, buried in 1705’.

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THE OCCULT AT BARWAY What is taken to be an occult site, most likely the remains of a magic circle, were discovered on the tip of Barway a small fen island approximately three miles south of Ely, Cambridgeshire in the East Anglian Fens at Grid Reference TL 5440 7564 by the landowner Philip Randall (Figures 2, 3 & 4). His family had farmed the land for several generations during which time they had reliably recorded and reported a number of archaeological finds (Barrowclough 2013; forthcoming 2014). The island is seen today as a small rise, only 4m above sea level, above the black earth of the peat fens, however prior to their drainage it would have represented an island of dry land set in a flooded landscape. Seventeenth‐century accounts describe how for half the year the waters of the , which are now canalised and flow c.150m away, separated the from Cambridgeshire. The wetlands were gnat infested and associated with malarial illness, and the people considered to be uncivilised, independent‐minded and especially prone to belief in witches (Porter 1958).

Figure 2. Location Map showing the relationship between Barway, Ely and the other sites mentioned in the text.

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Figure 3. Aerial photo showing Ely with the location of the cathedral marked (central white box). Barway lies to the south (lower white box), and is shown in detail (inset box, with the archaeological site marked in red). The R. Great Ouse runs approx S­NE, shown as a black line. Top the cathedral seen from Barway.

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The aerial view (Figure 3) shows the eastern side of the Isle of Ely. Barway lies in the drained fen, marked by the white box at the bottom of the figure, with the River Great Ouse, seen as a sinuous black line, close by. The same area is shown enlarged in the box inset to the left, with the archaeological site, shown in detail in Figure 4, marked in red. Within the red box can be seen an area of darker green, the trees of an orchard that partially cover the higher ground. The lower ground, once peat fen, but now drained agricultural land stands out as the black fields. Standing at Barway and looking north across the flat fen the view is dominated by the cathedral at Ely, shown at the top of Figure 3.

The archaeological site plan (Figure 4) shows four pits, 1‐4. The distance from Pit 1 to Pit 2 was 100 yards, and from Pit 1 to 3, and Pit 1 to 4, 50 yards each. Pits 1 and 2 lie on a northernly alignment, which looks towards (Figure 3). Pits 3 and 4, run east‐west in line with Pit 1, and each are equidistant from it. Pits 1 and 2 were each associated with packing stones and capped with a copper lid (Figure 5). Pit 1 lies 100 yards north of Pit 2, both are circular in plan and both are partially filled with large stones, each the size as a man’s fist. It was the accidental discovery of the first pit that drew Randall’s attention to the site, as stones of this size are rarely found on his farm. Indeed he expressed the opinion that it would probably take about half a day to search out enough stones to match those in each pit. What is more the stones are arranged within each of the pits so as to fill only the northern semi‐circle, as shown in Figure 5. Above the stones, and partially capping each pit was a copper disc c.15 cm dia. In the case of Pit 1 the disc was circular and thus would have completely capped the stones, but that found in Pit 2, which must have originally started out as a circular disc, had been bent over so as to form a semi‐ circle. It had not been placed over the pit as one might expect in order to cap the unpacked half of the hole, instead it had been carefully placed with the straight edge facing south, Figure 5. Further investigation revealed two more pits, 3 and 4, running east‐west in line with Pit 1, and each 50 yards equidistant from it. In each of these pits was a shoe. The shoes were small, suggestive of having belonged to a woman, dating by their style to the seventeenth century. This dating is approximate but consistent with what is known of the site. In particular, Pit 2 lies beneath a well established orchard, predating the Randall family’s ownership of the farm, precluding a date more recent than the early 1800s. No other features or artefacts were found, but it is noteable that continuing along the line of sight from Pit 2 to Pit 1 lies Ely Cathedral (Figure 3).

Figure 4. Site plan showing the location of the two pits, 1 and 2, and of the shoes, 3 and 4. The distance from Pit 1 to Pit 2 was 100 yards, and from Pit 1 to 3, and Pit 1 to 4, 50 yards each. Pits 1 and 2 lie on a northernly alignment which looks towards Ely Cathedral (Figure 3).

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Figure 5. Pits 1 and 2, plan and section views, with copper lids below.

Pit 1. North: plan and section views (top) 2. Pit 2. South: plan and section views (top) showing how the northern half of the showing how the northern half of the pit was packed with stones. Below, pit was packed with stones. Below, the copper disc which capped the pit. the semi­circular capping plate.

DISCUSSION Excavation at Barway has revealed a site without parallel in Britain, resulting in an interpretative challenge. Archaeologically the excavated features and material culture are noteworthy. Construction was simple, drawing upon a restricted range of material culture: a pair of shoes, two copper discs, and a supply of stones, set within four shallow pits. Set against this simplicity was the care and attention that had gone into the selection of rare, and non‐local, materials. The stones packed into Pits 1 and 2 would have taken several hours of labour to find over an extensive area, and may have been collected in the days prior to the digging of the pits and then brought to the site. The copper discs must also have been acquired in advance and brought to the site, introducing the possibility that the disc from Pit 2 may have been bent into shape in the convenience of a workshop or home, rather than at the site itself. The pair of shoes must also have been brought to the site in the knowledge that they would be left there. All this implies considerable forward planning.

The careful packing of Pits 1 and 2, is intriguing, and it is an open question as to whether the southern half of each pit was deliberately left empty, or whether it had been filled with some sort of liquid or organic material that had not survived, whatever the answer it is clear that the deposit, along with that of the shoes in Pits 3 and 4, was carefully placed in a patterned manner. The power of patterns in the material record to reveal past actions has been successfully identified in many studies of structured deposition (Hill 1995), and is re‐confirmed once again here. Of further significance is the selection of a site in a liminal location, set between land and water with uninterrupted views of Ely Cathedral. The significance of location is further emphasised by the careful alignment of the pits according to the cardinal points North‐South, East‐West, which underlie the non‐random setting. A considerable amount of effort must have gone into the search for a suitable location, in addition to the time taken in seeking out suitable stone, transporting them to the site, locating the copper discs and digging the pits. All this suggests that the site was constructed with a specific purpose in mind, but there is no obvious mundane activity, such as burial of rubbish, to explain it. Several aspects of the site, which having been brought together in such an apparently pre‐planned way, suggest an occult interpretation, but archaeological evidence alone is insufficient to establish this. Consideration must therefore be given to the available historic records and folklore, in order to triangulate the data.

There is considerable evidence for belief in the occult during the seventeenth‐century in England, and in particular in East Anglia and the Isle of Ely. The seventeenth‐century was a time of considerable political and religious turmoil, driven by Puritan religious zeal, which led to Civil War and the attempted eradication of any practice or belief thought to resemble Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church was

7 attacked for its doctrine of transubstantiation because it was considered a type of sacramental magic. There remained a strand of English popular culture that clung to the old certainties of the centuries old religion, and to the protective and healing power of religious relics and holy objects. Crosses and rosaries were used in occult ways to offer protection, rendering them powerful tools in the arsenal of cunning folk and witches (Carr‐Gomm and Heygate 2009, 329). These beliefs were perhaps strongest in the more remote parts of England, as Walton observed: ‘popular magical beliefs persisted tenaciously, and charmers and folk‐healers remained much in demand, perhaps especially in the areas of strongest Roman Catholic survival’ (Walton 1987, 45). The link between the occult as practised by cunning folk and witches, and pseudo‐religious texts has already been commented upon, but is underlined by the historic accounts of the Pendle witch, Chattox, whose charm for mending soured drink suggests a close relationship between traditional religious beliefs in Pendle Forest: it invoked the Trinity, ‘Father, son and Holy Ghost’, the ‘five wounds of our Lord’, and included five paternosters and five aves’ (Peel, E. and Southern 1969, 31‐2), and was accompanied by the act of placing two sticks across the dish of milk so as to form a cross (Poole 2011, 14‐15).

The rural counties of East Anglia were an ideal hunting ground for those seeking out evidence of witchcraft. Between 1645 and 1647 Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne interrogated as many as three hundred men and women, resulting in the cruel deaths of more than a hundred convicted witches (Sharpe 1996, 129‐30). Matthew Hopkins was no stranger to Ely as his father, James, had lived in , just north of the city (Figure 2) with his wife, and she, following his death, had moved into Ely to be close to her daughter (Gaskill 2005,15). Hopkins began the witch‐hunt in 1646 before being struck down by Consumption leaving John Stearne, a native of Bury St Edmonds to conclude the investigation in the following year. In all seventeen people were accused of witchcraft in the small communities on the Isle of Ely, with additional ‘large confessions’ extracted in the villages of March and , and a further nine accused by Hopkins at King’s Lynn further down the River Great Ouse (Gaskill 2005). The point here is not the spiteful small‐minded accusations levelled at the often down‐at‐heel defendants by their neighbours, nor the alacrity with which those charged at defending justice sought to subvert it, such shameful behaviour is all too often a feature of these fen communities today. Instead it is to illustrate how familiar the entire community was with the intimate workings of the occult. What is striking is that the accounts of the trials make no effort to explain the background or methods of witchcraft as it was taken as read that these were widely understood, and that the casting of spells were, if not a daily occurrence, certainly as regular a part of life as the ploughing of fields and harvesting of crops. The popular currency of the occult was confirmed by the folklorist Edith Porter who found ample evidence of a continuing tradition of cunning folk living and working in the Cambridgeshire fens in the nineteenth and twentieth‐ century stories that she collected (Porter 1969).

Name Date Residence Court Verdict Ellen Garrison 1646 Upwell Ely Not guilty Ann Green 1646 Littleport Ely Not guilty Ann Disborough 1646 Ely Ely Not guilty William Watson 1647 Sutton Ely ‐ John Bonham 1647 Sutton Ely Not guilty Bridget Bonham 1647 Sutton Ely Not guilty Margaret Moore 1647 Sutton Ely Sentenced to death Adam Sabie 1647 Haddenham Ely Not guilty Thomasine Read 1647 Haddenham Ely ‐ Joan Briggs 1647 Haddenham Ely Not guilty Elizabeth Foot 1647 Ely ‐ Joan Salter 1647 Stretham Ely ‐ Robert Ellis 1647 Stretham Ely ‐ Dorothy Ellis 1647 Stretham Ely Died in custody Thomas Pye 1647 Ely Ely Not guilty Joan Pigg 1647 Wisbech Ely ‐ Peter Burbush 1647 Ely Ely ‐ Figure 6. Those accused of witchcraft by Hopkins and Stearne from the small communities on the Isle of Ely. Based on data from Hopkins 2005.

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In the nineteenth century, a ritual known as the toad bone rite became popular, particularly in East Anglia but also in other areas of the country, amongst both cunning folk and members of magical organizations such as the East Anglian Society of Horsemen. Originally based upon an ancient southern European magical practice documented by Pliny, it had later been described in the works of Cornelius Agrippa (trans. 1993) and Reginald Scot (1584), and read by several literate cunning folk. Although there were many variations, the ritual typically involved the killing of a toad or frog, having its flesh stripped from the bones by ants, and then throwing the bone into a stream at night. It was believed that this would grant the practitioner, who was known as a Toad Man, the ability to perform certain magical tasks.

Cunning folk were likewise essential to the preparation of charms, witch bottles and dried cats built into the threshold of houses. Most common of all these objects were shoes concealed in floors or walls as at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, where a man’s shoe was found under the floor dated to 1742 ( Evening News 1.3.2014 ). It has been suggested that the shoes were fertility charms following the folk tale of the ‘Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe’, and popular traditions of attaching shoes to the car of a newly‐wed couple (Merriifield 1987). But the interpretation favoured by most scholars is that they protected the occupants of the building against evil influences (Carr‐Gomm and Heygate 2009, 328). It has been suggested that an unofficial fourteenth‐century English saint, John Schorne, may have been the source of the belief that shoes had the power to protect against evil (Hoggard 2004; Merrifield 1987). Schorne was said to have succeeded in trapping the Devil in a boot. Schorne's use of a shoe to capture or repel a troublesome spirit may have called upon an existing belief in the power of shoes and other garments to either attract, repel, or ‘lay’ such spirits (Manning 2012).

If this goes some way to explaining the significance of the shoes buried in Pits 3 and 4, folklore might also help account for the brass discs in Pits 1 and 2. One interpretation is that the discs represent the different phases of the moon, which in folk tradition had potent meaning. There was a belief that working rituals at the time of different phases of the moon can bring about physical or psychological change or transformation. These rituals have historically occurred on or around the full moon and to a lesser extent the new moon. These beliefs are found in two nineteenth‐century accounts. In Charles Leland’s , or the Gospel of the Witches (1899) we find a reference to Witches gathering for lunar rites:

‘Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month and when the moon is full, ye shall assemble in some secret place, or in a forest all together join to adore the potent spirit of your queen, my mother, great Diana. She who fain would learn all sorcery yet has not won its deepest secrets, them my mother will teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown. And ye shall be freed from slavery, and so ye shall be free in everything; and as a sign that ye are truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites, both men and women also...’

The folktale of the Buried Moon or The Dead Moon (Jacobs 1894) was collected by Mrs. Balfour (1891) from the neighbouring fens, which has been taken as evidence of a legacy of moon worship (Briggs 1967; 1976). The story goes:

‘Once upon a time, the Carland was filled with bogs. When the moon shone, it was as safe to walk in as by day, but when she did not, evil things, such as bogies, came out. One day the moon, hearing of this, pulled on a black cloak over her yellow hair and went to see for herself. She fell into a pool, and a snag bound her there. She saw a man coming toward the pool and fought to be free until the hood fell off; the light helped the man make his way to safety and scared off the evil creatures. She struggled to follow until the hood fell back over her hair, and all the evil things came out of the darkness, trapping her under a big stone with a will‐o'‐the‐wyke to sit on the cross‐shaped snag and keep watch. The moon never rose again, and the people wondered what had happened until the man she had rescued remembered and told what he had seen. A wise woman sent them into the bog until they found a coffin (the stone), a candle (the will‐o'‐the‐wyke), and a cross (the snag); the moon would be nearby. They did as the wise woman said, and freed the moon. From this time on the moon has shone brighter over the boglands than anywhere else, and the evil things were chased from the Carland’.

In the nineteenth‐century re‐telling of this story we find reference to the Christian cross as we did in the spells cast by the Pendle witch Chattox, and the same burial under a stone that befell Meg Shelton (above). The origins of the belief lie in the classical world where Greek and Roman literature witches,

9 particularly those from Thessaly, were regularly accused of ‘drawing down the moon’ by use of spells (Ogden 2001). The trick variously served: to demonstrate their powers (Virgil Eclogues 8.69); to perform a love spell (Suetonius Tiberius 1.8.21) or to extract a magical juice from the moon (Apuleius Metamorphoses 1.3.1). In the writings of the ancient Roman poet Horace (Epode 17) we find these words spoken by the witch Canidia:

‘... must I, who can move waxen images and draw down the moon from the sky by my spells, who can raise the vaporous dead, and mix a draught of love lament the effect of my art, availing nothing upon you?’

The triangulation of archaeological data, historical accounts and folklore all point to Barway being the site of occult activity associated with the casting of spells. As we have noted, the construction of the site is unusual as spells were usually cast without the need for complex constructions. The investment made in the site, in terms of planning and construction, suggest an unusual level of sophistication beyond what is normally expected of cunning folk. It implies that the power at play was something larger than the regular charms and that accounted for the bread‐and‐butter of cunning folk. The structured elements of the Barway site are more akin to the necromancy spells described in the grimoires, and more usually performed by magicians, particularly those who were members of the Christian clergy, but as we have already seen, they were not beyond the scope of the more ambitious wise man or woman. The heterogeneous nature of occult practices make it impossible to distinguish between the work of the cunning folk and the magician, and similarly, between spells cast for good and those intent on harm. That said, the powerful spell that demanded the unusually sophisticated site, has as its primary candidate necromancy.

Necromancy is a practice involving communication with the dead either by summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily for the purpose of , imparting the means to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge (Figure 7). The Biblical is supposed to have performed it (1 Sam. 28), and it is among the witchcraft practices condemned by Ælfric of Eynsham (955‐ 1010). Ritual practices commonly associated with necromancy could be quite elaborate, involving magic circles, , and incantations linked to the phases of the moon, day and time and the burial of objects or images (Kieckhefer 1998). The necromancer might also surround himself with aspects of death, often wearing the deceased’s clothing, and consuming foods that symbolized lifelessness and decay such as unleavened black bread. These ceremonies could carry on for hours, days, or even weeks, leading up to the eventual summoning of spirits. Frequently they were performed in special places that suited specific guidelines. Additionally, necromancers preferred to summon the recently departed based on the premise that their revelations were spoken more clearly. This timeframe was usually limited to the twelve months following the death of the physical body; once this period elapsed, necromancers would evoke the deceased’s ghostly spirit instead. Enticing as it may be, we cannot be certain that necromancy was practiced at Barway, but the evidence does point to occult activity of some sort.

CONCLUSION Investigation of the site at Barway has served to advance our knowledge and understanding of a poorly understood area of seventeenth‐century popular culture: that of witchcraft and the occult. This study demonstrates the potential offered by archaeology to investigate occult practices when interpreted in conjunction with historic texts and folklore records. This triangular approach is potentially available for the study of all historic periods, although it is likely to be most appropriate to the study of periods from the seventeenth‐century onwards where the written record tends to be much richer than the preceding centuries.

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Figure 7. Engraving of occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley "in the act of invoking the spirit of a deceased person"; Astrology 1806 Ebenezer Sibly.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Kate Morrison Ayres who first introduced me to Philip Randall, and to Philip himself for sharing the find with me. Dr Mary Chester‐Kadwell created figure 1, the location map from which the text has benefitted. All three of whom discussed the find and its possible interpretation with me, as did Prof Robert Williams whose interest in Ghosts added an extra dimension. Funding for the study came in part from the Heritage Lottery Fund. All errors and omissions are my own.

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