The witch's familiar in English trials of the 16th and 17th centuries

Among the peculiarities of the witch hunt in England, the figure of the familiar stands out: a spirit believed to take animal form in order to serve the witch. While in the trials of continental Europe the judges focused on the pact with the devil and on the sabbath, in English courts cats, dogs, toads, mice and ferrets recur insistently, described as the domestic companions of the accused. The documents that mention them are numerous and allow us to trace the development of this belief.

The Chelmsford trial of 1566

One of the first documented cases concerns the women tried at Chelmsford, in Essex, in 1566, described in a pamphlet printed the same year. Elizabeth Francis stated that she had received from her grandmother a white spotted cat named Sathan, which she supposedly fed with bread, milk and a few drops of her own blood. She later passed it on, it was said, to Agnes Waterhouse, who was condemned and executed.

The trial took place under the witchcraft law of 1563, passed during the reign of Elizabeth I. The tale of the cat Sathan already contains the typical elements of the English model: an animal with a proper name, a relationship of mutual nourishment, and the passing of the familiar from one woman to another, often within the same family or the same small village community.

Pendle and the Act of 1604

In 1604, under James I, a new law made it a serious crime even to feed or reward an evil spirit, giving legal weight to the figure of the familiar. A few years later, in 1612, the trials of the so-called Pendle witches were held at Lancaster, recounted by Thomas Potts in a volume published in 1613.

According to that account, the elderly Elizabeth Southerns, known as Demdike, had a familiar called Tibb, which appeared sometimes as a boy and sometimes as an animal. Testimonies, some given by a nine-year-old girl, Jennet Device, contributed to the conviction of several people. The case shows how heavily family and neighbourhood conflicts weighed in the construction of the accusations.

Matthew Hopkins and the names of familiars

The most intense phase came during the Civil War, between 1645 and 1647, when Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne led a vast campaign of accusations in eastern England. In his pamphlet The Discovery of Witches, of 1647, Hopkins lists the names of alleged familiars, such as Ilemauzar, Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown and Griezzell Greedigut, remarking that they were names no mortal could have invented.

The frontispiece of the pamphlet shows two women surrounded by animals, among them a dog, a rabbit and a creature of unusual shape. The accused were kept awake and watched for days, waiting for the familiar to appear: in such conditions any animal that entered the room could become evidence. Hopkins's methods were criticised even by his contemporaries.

The familiar reveals a great deal about the society that imagined it. In villages where pets were often the only company of old and poor women, an affectionate bond with a cat or a dog could turn into suspicion. Read today, the records of the English trials tell above all of loneliness, social tension and collective fear, rather than of the powers of supernatural creatures.