The Late Seventeenth Century

so it is unlikely he would have copied a text with so many errors.27 Also, Somers’s legal training would have made him well aware that any hidden treasure belonged to the Crown and not to the owner of the land, although knowledge of a law does not ensure compliance.28 The Sandys family did have multiple individuals who attended New College at Oxford, and their debts might have led some of them to delving for treasure—but certainly others in the same area would have had the same motivations. Thus, it is likely we may never know the author.

Of the people mentioned in the manuscript as sources for its material, the most notable was William Hodges, to whom the copyist attributes an anti-witchcraft procedure dating to November 18, 1652. This could have been the William Hodges, DD, of Exeter College, Oxford, who served as the Rector of Ripple from 1643 and Archdeacon of Worcester from 1645 until his death in 1675. I have not located any of Hodges’s papers with this procedure, however.29 The manuscript also refers to a “Master Boney” as a source of incantations. A husbandman named Boney Gelfe of Ripple is mentioned in the Worcester quarter session rolls in 1620, but this was at least half a century before the book’s composition.30

The Late Seventeenth Century

In many ways, the seventeenth century was a crucial time for British magic. The greatest number of surviving magical manuscripts survive from this period. Further, the Civil War and the Protectorate brought about a pause in Crown censorship, leading to the official publication of several books, including Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1650); the Fourth Book falsely attributed to him, compiled with the Heptameron and other treatises (1655 and 1665); Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature (1655 and 1660), attributed to Paracelsus; a partial edition of the Ars Notoria (1657); and a new edition of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft, expanded with more incantations and magical lore (1665). Afterward, such publication slowed until the nineteenth century, making these works prized possessions in the libraries of cunning folk and other practitioners and aficionados of ritual magic for centuries.

Many of the practices described in these books were prohibited under the Witchcraft Act of 1604. If a person called up or interacted with an evil spirit, removed any person or portion thereof from their graves, or injured or killed anyone with magic, the penalty of the law was death. Using magic for the discovery of treasure, the discovery of lost or stolen items, or the injury of cattle or goods would lead to a year’s

27. Sachse, Lord Somers, 14. 28. Dillinger, Magical Treasure Hunting, 12–13. 29. University of Oxford, Alumni Oxonienses, 2:724. 30. Bund, Worcester County Records: The Quarter Sessions Rolls, Part II, 721.

imprisonment, with four sessions on the pillory, with death for repeat offenders.31 Although most practitioners would have been aware of the law, it was only occasionally enforced, and then usually against purported witches and not cunning folk. Between 1663 and 1699, 144 witch trials are recorded in our surviving records; although no records survive in most cases regarding the outcome, the lack of documentation of executions makes it likely that most of the accused were acquitted.32

Witchcraft and magic did serve a broader purpose for the religious: proof of the existence of the Divine. To fend off a perceived tide of materialism and atheism, authors such as Joseph Glanvil (Saducismus Triumphatus, 1681) and Richard Bovet (Pandaemonium, 1684) marshalled numerous accounts of witches, devils, fairies, ghosts, poltergeists, and other supernatural beings to establish the existence of a spiritual world. Even those who did believe were more likely to distinguish between magic and witchcraft as existing phenomena—as the Bible proclaimed—and the relevance of these beliefs to their lives. By the end of this period, the elite hardly took charges of magical practice seriously. In 1676 to 1682, the French court was shaken by the “Affair of the Poisons,” in which accusations of poisoning, Black Masses, and other blasphemous practices reached the highest levels of the nobility. Nonetheless, the British attitude toward these events was mainly befuddlement, and some of those charged in France sought refuge across the Channel.33

Coupled with the hesitance of the believers was the critique and ridicule of sceptics, through which “magic would increasingly come to be associated with the ignorant, the marginalised and the ill-educated.”34 This association was not necessarily based in fact. James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth, was found to be in possession of “a manuscript of spells, charms and conjurations, songs, receipts, and prayers, all written in his own hand” at his execution in 1685.35 Goodwin Wharton, a member of Parliament, carried on a long-term relationship with a cunning woman named Mary Parish, seeking treasure with magic and eventually becoming the King of the Fairies without ever viewing these beings.36 Nonetheless, labelling magic as a lower-class amusement for the childish and unintelligent proved to be an effective strategy for discrediting its practitioners.

31. Statutes of the Realm, 5 Eliz. c. 16; ibid., I Jac. I c. 12. See also Newton and Bath, Witchcraft and the

Act of 1604. 32. Maxwell-Stuart, The British Witch, 295. 33. Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, 188–93. 34. Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, 184. 35. Great Britain Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Third Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 41. 36. This is a vastly complex situation, on which see Clark, Goodwin Wharton, and Timbers, The Magical

Adventures of Mary Parish.