The Horrific Discovery of a Real-Life Witch: Elizabeth Sawyer, fact and fiction

1621 was a very bad year for Elizabeth Sawyer. She was a poor widow, living in Edmonton, England, but in that year, she was tried, convicted, and executed as a witch. During her imprisonment, an opportunistic young witch chronicler, Henry Goodcole, came to interview her; his interview survives to the present day, in the form of a pamphlet, which he entitled The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer. Because, for him, it was indeed quite wonderful, even if, for her, it was catastrophic.

Of course, Goodcole’s use of “wonderful” meant something closer to “astonishing” than to “splendid” in 17^th century English parlance. But still: he’s having a grand old time with his narrative, long after Elizabeth Sawyer was executed.

Goodcole tells us that there had been a long-standing suspicion that Sawyer was a witch—a suspicion that coalesced when some very young children and cattle suddenly died. To test whether Sawyer was possibly a witch who might have killed these innocents, people plucked thatch from her roof and burned it. Without ever being told who plucked the thatch, Sawyer somehow knew, and would show up at their homes to harass them about it—as though they were called or compelled by the burning thatch.

Now, color me stupid, but if you were at home, and saw some jagweed ripping your roofing off your dingy house, wouldn’t you follow them to find out what they were up to?

Goodcole recognizes that this test is “slight and ridiculous,” but whatever: the shit worked. Once Sawyer was apprehended, and Goodcole could observe her, he noted her tiny, crooked, broken physique and her desperately pale appearance. So, in all probability, Ms. Sawyer was a disabled, malnourished woman. Goodcole also notes that, at her trial, Ms. Sawyer loudly denounced and swore at her accusers, thus reconfirming that the Devil had possession of her, and of her tongue. Eager to gather more evidence, the judges hear tell that Ms. Sawyer has a mark somewhere on her body; three noble matrons of the town are brought in to search Ms. Sawyer’s body. But she, being clearly possessed by Satan, behaves “sluttishly” toward them. Even so, the woman manage their full-body search, and they discover a little-finger sized growth, just above Elizabeth’s anus. This growth resembled a suckled teat.

An ass-nipple?? LORD HELP US. That bitch must die.

And die she did, because no one doubted she was a witch in league with Satan after a long nipple was found on her butt. Allegedly.

But before she died, she made her confession, which Goodcole recorded. Lovely chap that he was.

Allegedly, Ms. Sawyer said to Goodcole that Satan had entered into her because of all her swearing.

(Fuck.)

Allegedly, Ms. Sawyer said to Goodcole that the Devil would torment and/or kill any Christian or beast that she set her eyes on harming, and that he would report back to her within a week of his having completed his task. She supposedly said that she had killed many people and beasts. But fascinatingly, she disavows having killed Ms. Ratcliefe, which was the crime for which she was specifically on trial.

Ms. Sawyer went on to specify that Satan came to her in the shape of a dog. He instructed her to give him her body and soul, which she did, sealing the pact by allowing the dog to suck her blood. Yes: from the ass-nipple.

Ass-nipple wet-nursing Satan-Rover is, generally speaking, not a good look for a 17^th century English Christian woman. So, yeah, she was executed.

End of story.

Except, not at all end of story. Because very soon thereafter, three relatively well-respected poets—including Thomas Dekker—picked up on Ms. Sawyer’s story and based The Witch of Edmonton on it.

The play The Witch of Edmonton changes everything. Most importantly, it changes the world around the witch. In Goodcole’s account, Elizabeth Sawyer is a deformed, dangerous old hag, in a world that is otherwise good and innocent, a world that deserves to be purged of her, because it is a world of God. In the play, the world is broken, immoral, corrupted, and desperate—long before we even meet the witch, whom the play calls Mother Sawyer.

The play centers, narratively, on a secretly-married couple—Frank and Winifride—where the woman is pregnant. But Frank must abandon Winnifride, temporarily, because his father wishes him to marry another woman, whom he does not love. Rather than be honest, as his name would urge him to be, Frank sequesters his pregnant wife, Winifride, and bigamously marries this other woman, Susan, too.

Mother Sawyer doesn’t even appear until the second act, and she is depicted in a decidedly sympathetic way. She asks why her townspeople would, “throw all their scandalous malice” upo her, guessing it’s because she is “poor, deform’d and ignorant…like a bow, buckled and bent together.” She notes that many people call her a witch, and that, in their casting accusations at her, they teach “how to be one: urging that [her] bad tongue (by their bad usage made so)” will curse their cattle, their grain, and their people.  

“This, they enforce on me.” Now that’s fucking interesting. This they enforce on me. These three playwrights who made this play are explicitly recognizing that the practice of witchcraft just might possibly be an emergent property of—or maybe better even to say a reaction against—the patriarchal social controls that would defame, diminish, and demonize poor, disabled women. Huh.

Immediately after this plangent and surprisingly savvy account, Mother Sawyer is physically attacked by a man, who strikes her for collecting “rotten sticks” on his property to warm herself with. She responds to his physical violence simply by cursing him. Her cursing only reconfirms for him her witchy status. Because, of course, he’s already made up his mind that she’s bad news. The whole town is already convinced that she’s bad news, and a liar, and dangerous. It doesn’t matter that he hurt her first; what matters is that she defended herself at all. The town is already convinced that, if some man hurts her, and she fights back in any way, it only reconfirms

A.    That she deserved it and

B.    That she is some kind of witch.

(If you aren’t thinking of Amber Heard yet, you should be.)

So. Soon, Mother Sawyer meets another man, who overhears her reciting the Devil’s Pater Noster. He greets her with “Good morrow,” and wishes in an aside that he might have misheard what she was praying. Her response is, “Ill morrow to thee, and all the world, that flout a poor old woman.” Her curses aren’t random, coming out of nowhere, driven by malice. Her curses—as in the previous scene—are driven by revenge, and a desire to defend herself from a world that “flouts” her in her old age.

I think our seventeenth-century audiences would have been feeling quite uncomfortable already, feeling sympathy with a woman of the devil. Awkward.

But the young man she’s speaking to appears to be…unfazed. He says to her, “Witch or no witch, you are a motherly woman.” Mother Sawyer, understandably, given the history of abuse she has endured suspects that he will simply turn on her to “spurn” and “beat” her, as the man’s father does. The young man replies in embarrassment, “My Father? I am asham’d to own him. If he has hurt the head of thy credit, there’s money to buy thee a plaster.”

Now, this young man does need a boon from her, so he’s trying to get something out of her, but the fact remains: he treats her with kindness and basic respect, evincing far more disgust at his patriarchal and abusive father than at this old, poor woman. The favor he asks of Mother Sawyer is to make his love interest—Kate the Yeoman’s daughter—fall in love with him. He says of Kate that he expects she’ll be a witch someday, too. Almost as if he admires witches. Almost as if he thinks of witchcraft as the natural, evolutionary path for passion-engendering women. Huh.

Mother Sawyer is then out of much of the rest of the play, until her trial scene. At this scene, a Justice asks her if she’s a witch, and she denies it, saying, “I am none. None but these base curs so bark at me. I am none. Or would I were: if every poor old woman be trod on thus by slaves, revil’d, kick’d, beaten, as I am daily, she to be reveng’d had need turn witch.”

Ok, Thomas Dekker and friends. I’m catching feelings about you lot right now. I’m feeling like I want to introduce you to my other friend, Franky Hutchinson. Thom, are you, like, maybe, slightly, just a little bit…calling out the patriarchy for demonizing old woman? Are you, like, maybe noticing that witchcraft allegations are often just a way of terrorizing old women, who have already been terrorized by a society that doesn’t know what the fuck to do with them?

From there, Mother Sawyer goes on to ask whether or not it’s ok for all the other evil people of the world—not witches, but charlatans, profiteers, opportunists who prey on others’ weaknesses—to do the wicked things they do. The justice responds, with stunning honesty, “Yes, yes, but the Law casts not an eye on these.”

Truer words, ne’er spoke.

Sawyer responds—verily channeling the Furies from Aeschylus’ The Furies: “Why then on me, or any lean old beldame? Reverence once had wont to wait on age. Now an old woman, ill-favour’d grown with years, if she be poor, must be call’d bawd or witch.” It used to be, says Mama Sawyer, that people treated old women with reverence. Now, a poor, old woman will be dehumanized and debased. 1616, eh? Sounds like 5^th century BCE Athens. And the playwrights know that, saying a few lines later, “I know now she’s a witch and dare no longer hold conference with the Fury.” Yep, the Furies rear their nasty woman heads again!

Amazingly, Mother Sawyer is allowed to go home and pray. This time.

But the play’s sympathy with Mother Sawyer has its limits: we do see her giving such to her dog-Satan-familiar. We do see her asking the dog to pleasure her sexually: she asks him to make her “old ribs to shrug for joy of thy fine tricks…let’s tickle.” Soon, the has her dog-Satan-lover curse her neighbor, Mrs. Ratcliefe.

Meanwhile, the original malefactor of the play, the bigamist Frank, has killed his second wife in order to be with Winifride. He has laid the blame on others, but he is eventually paid back, and is executed for murder. He is universally mourned, and he repents fully for his sins. Even the father of the wife Frank killed—Susan’s father—forgives him whole-heartedly. Meanwhile, Mother Sawyer has also been arrested again, and tried and convicted, and stands for execution. She is not mourned, even though she, too, repents.

So, Dekker’s play takes Goodcole’s merciless, misogynist, condemnatory account of the real-life human woman Elizabeth Sawyer, and he, along with his co-authors John Ford and William Rowley, converts that account into something thorny, difficult, complex, and ambivalent. The play certainly doesn’t make Mother Sawyer a heroine, but it also doesn’t make her a single-minded villain. She’s to be pitied and feared, both. We are made to see how her witchcraft is a by-product of the pervasive scorn in which poor, disabled old woman are held by society. We are made to see how the men in the play trigger Elizabeth Sawyer’s ire by their criticism and violence. We are made to see how men are clearly accountable for Sawyer’s decision to surrender herself, “body and soul,” into the power of the devil.

Mother Sawyer is a monster, but she’s a monster more in line with the Furies than with her fictional near-contemporary Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth runs riot because of changing forces in her own body. Mother Sawyer runs riot because she is abused time and again. She is a victim, that is, long before she is a monster. And in that sense, she is very much like the Furies: Aeschylus’ uber-monsters are monsters because their “ancient privilege” is docked and maligned by Apollo and Orestes; they are in a rage because they feel debased, humiliated, and disrespected. The Witch of Edmonton is, at bottom, a restaging of that ancient idea, but in a modern, highly juridical context, in which execution and not incorporation into the polis is the only available solution.