ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century, witchcraft was often the safety valve society used to explain society’s many misfortunes. The most common targets of witchcraft were poor, widowed, “relict” (post-menopausal) women, particularly those with contentious dispositions who operated outside of the normal gender and social boundaries of behaviour. Witches forsook God and consorted with the Devil, who entered into a covenant written in their own blood and sent a “familiar” to suckle from a “third nipple”, a blemish that was commonly sought on the witch’s body as proof of her consortium. Once the covenant had been consummated through suckling, the Devil arranged vengeance on the witch’s behalf. This richly detailed story of widow Sutton and her daughter Mary was, therefore, entirely consistent with the early modern stereotype. Widow Sutton was poor and unpopular, and her daughter Mary was a lewd woman with three bastard, disrespectful children. The women confessed to consorting with suckling familiars, taking on animal forms (a sow and a beetle), and directing their maleficium, or evil deeds, towards Master Enger’s cattle, his horses, his servants, and finally his son, in the process bringing about perplexity, lameness, languor, and death. Various tests were conducted on Mary – who was quite violently handled in the process – to confirm their suspicions: drawing blood from her, which helped to revive the servant, and subjecting her to both trial by water (this was possibly the first time the “swimming test” was reported in an English source) and the searching of the body for the third nipple. These tests proved that Mary Sutton, was a witch and she and her mother were subsequently brought to the assizes, convicted, and executed. Whether or not the Suttons were witches, they certainly breached the boundaries of behaviour that were expected of women and poor people at this time, and the community was brought back to balance by the removal of these women from society.
