ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that witchcraft prosecutions were made between people who knew each other intimately. Very few accusations were made against people who lived far away. As shown in Map 9, only fifty out of 460 indictments at the Assizes for bewitching property or persons placed victim and witch in different villages. Only five accusations occurred over a distance of more than five miles. Thus accusations seem to have been limited to the area of intense relationships between individuals. The power of the witch was limited to a few miles. As Reginald Scot argued, their power reached as far as their social contacts, which was not far: ‘for their furthest fetches that I can comprehend, are but to fetch a pot of milke, &c.: from their neighbors house, halfe a mile distant from them’.1 The Essex pamphlets give abundant evidence that witch and victim were linked in many ways. They even, occasionally, show that suspect and accuser were living next-door to each other. For instance, a man in 1645 was told that his sick wife ‘was cursed by two women who were neere neighbours to this Informant, the one dwelling a little above his house, and the other beneath his house’, the house being on a hill.2 A contemporary map of Stock Common in 1575 shows the house of the notorious witch Widow Sawel, and next-door that of her victim’s father, Roger Veale.3 Only very detailed research will show exactly how close were the houses of victim and witch and whether they tended to be in the village or outlying farms. Preliminary research on the village of Hatfield Peverel suggests that those involved in prosecutions not only lived in the same village, but came from the same part of the village.