Europe's inner demons

It was when some unforeseeable, unaccountable disaster occurred that people looked to maleficium as an explanation. But whereas mysterious illnesses and deaths, or sudden impotence in marriage, could happen to anyone in any stratum of society, some kinds of disaster were peculiar to peasant life. There were accordingly some beliefs about maleficium, and also some techniques of maleficium, that flourished amongst the peasantry in particular. Here again the fifth chapter of the Corrector provides valuable insights. The confessor’s questions show that peasants often practised sorcery to improve their own position at their neighbour’s expense. Swineherds and cowherds would say spells over bread, or herbs, or knotted cords, which they would then deposit in a tree or at a road-fork; the object being to direct pest or injury away from their own animals and on to other people’s.⁽¹⁷⁾

A woman would use spells and charms to draw all the milk and honey in the neighbourhood to her own cows and bees, or else to appropriate other people’s property for herself.⁽¹⁸⁾ This is the reality behind Runeberg’s sweeping generalizations about “magical exchange”;⁽¹⁹⁾ but they constitute only a small part of the world of maleficium. Even amongst the peasantry of the early Middle Ages, centuries before the full stereotype of the witch came into being, it was recognized that the motive for maleficium was often sheer malice. The Corrector

refers to women who actually boasted that they could remove or kill chickens, young peacocks, whole litters of piglets, by a word or a glance.⁽²⁰⁾

Other sources, older than the Corrector, refer to another, more dreaded form of rural maleficium. People claimed to be able to conjure up storms which would ruin the crops. This kind of maleficium too was commonly thought of as being directed against a particular individual: the eighth-century law of the Bavarians fixed the fine to be paid to anyone whose crops were damaged in this way.⁽²¹⁾

But at times storm-making could become an organized racket. The sixth-century laws of the Visigoths deal with tempestarii who were touring the countryside, intimidating the peasants; people were paying them to spare their fields and blast the next man’s instead. It was decreed that a storm-maker should get 200 lashes, have his head shorn and be paraded through the villages of the locality in this shameful condition.⁽²²⁾ Around 820 Agobard, bishop of Lyons, noted that almost everybody — nobleman and commoner, town-dweller and peasant — believed in the supernatural powers of storm-makers; but naturally it was the peasants who paid them to save their fields from magical storms.⁽²³⁾

Anglo-Saxon penitentials of the eighth century treated the activities of the tempestarii as familiar sins that everybody knew about; and so does the Corrector

.⁽²⁴⁾ And if in the later Middle Ages the laws took little cognizance of storm-making, it continued to be widely believed in and occasionally practised. Elena Dalok, who was arraigned before the commissary of London in 1493, freely boasted that she could make it rain at will — just as she could kill people by cursing them.⁽²⁵⁾

From later sources we know the technique that was used to produce storms: it consisted of beating, stirring or splashing water. A pond was ideal for the purpose, but if none was available it was enough to make a small hole in the ground, fill it with water or even with one’s own urine, and stir this with one’s finger. There is no doubt that these things really were done — but in addition, storm-makers were often credited with the ability to fly. Later evidence on this point is abundant — even in nineteenth-century Switzerland it was still customary for peasants to deal with a storm by laying a scythe on the ground, cutting edge uppermost; the object being to wound the storm-witch and deprive her of her power.⁽²⁶⁾ But there are hints of similar beliefs already in the early Middle Ages. Again according to Bishop Agobard, peasants believed that tempestarii magically removed the crops from the fields and carried them away on cloud-ships, to sell in a mysterious land called Mangonia.⁽²⁷⁾