ABSTRACT
Analysis of the Essex prosecutions, however, and particularly comparison of death and sickness in the sample villages with known cases of witchcraft, has shown that witchcraft was suggested as a cause of misfortune in only a small proportion of the accidents occurring during our period. This poses the problem of why people blamed certain misfortunes and not others on witches. Several possibilities have already been ruled out. Although there was sometimes an emphasis on the strangeness of an event, for instance, when a woman was suddenly covered by lice which ‘were long, and lean, and not like other Lice’,3 strangeness, in itself, was not enough to produce a suspicion of witchcraft. Likewise, witches were not merely sought when there was a gap in contemporary medical knowledge or when a death was particularly sudden, painful, or unexpected. It is true that individual witchcraft only explained particular, as opposed to general, misfortunes. While witches, in theory, were believed ‘to raise winds and tempests’ and cause ‘thunder and lightning’, the actual court prosecutions show that they were only blamed for specific damage.4 But the variety of the damage blamed on witches, and the many misfortunes which were not attributed to
their power, suggests that there was another, determining, factor. This factor, it will be argued, was the relationship between witch and victim.
