Women, Witchcraft and Magic in Anglo-Saxon England

A Livestream Class with Linda Sever

Sat at 10:30 am in The Esoteric Alcove

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The Anglo-Saxons took witchcraft seriously. They legislated against it in secular and ecclesiastical law codes, they preached against it in homilies, they condemned it in Penitentials, handbooks for priests, setting out various kinds of sins and punishments.

Anglo-Saxon witchcraft in the conversion period was still intrinsically linked to its heathen past, a past that showed that women were allowed more spiritual and magical powers than they have had under Christianity, up to the present day. Because of the lack of written information from this early period, all we can do is look to early archaeology, art history and literary sources for evidence.

The first part of this talk will discuss and assess some of this evidence Linda Sever has gathered, which connects Anglo-Saxon women and any kind of supernatural dealings outside of religion. We will examine some of the spells and magic that were legislated against and, therefore, evidence for their practice.

The second part will assess the few recorded (and earliest) individual cases of witches and witchcraft, along with their fates. These are the earliest recorded examples of witchcraft trials on record in England.

At a time of religious change, it is understandable that a woman, in particular, would find inadequate the new socially accepted rules of behaviour, and call upon the old gods, whom the churchmen considered demons and create a “heathen” ritual or concoct a magical brew or magically causing a bout of lumbago in a man. The male ecclesiasts, with their Penitentials in hand, fought valiantly against such customs, which no doubt they didn’t understand, and may have even reinforced them by trying to eradicate them.

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