Witches & Charmers

Magic on the Island had two sides, and the words for them kept them apart. A witch was a butch in the English spoken on the Island, a term John Rhys heard at Surby about 1890 and took for a local form of bewitch, setting the Highland Gaelic buidseach beside it. The charmer was another figure altogether. A. W. Moore, in his Folk-lore of the Isle of Man of 1891, called them fer-obbee and ben-obbee, men-charmers and women-charmers, who used herbs, fasting spittle, charms and incantations to cure disease and to undo the spells of fairies and witches alike. All of them, Moore wrote, were more or less suspected of dabbling in sorcery on their own account, but because their powers were on the whole used for good they were tolerated. Those powers were held to be hereditary, passing from a man to a woman and in the next generation from a woman back to a man.

The most famous were the Teares of Ballawhane in the parish of Andreas. John Feltham, touring the Island in 1797 and 1798, noted only that the family had long held valuable medicinal preparations which they distributed to the poor. Joseph Train met the doctor himself, a little man far advanced in years, in a slouched hat and clothes of undyed loaghtan wool, and was told that farmers would hold back their sowing for days rather than put seed in the ground without his blessing. Before the two men spent an evening together at Port St Mary, Mr Kelly of Castletown made Teare swear that he never called evil spirits to his aid. A charmer near Kirk Michael, of whom Rhys heard, gave fishermen a packet of herbs to boil and sprinkle over their boat, and told them plainly that he could not put the fish into their nets but could remove whatever mischief stood in the way of their luck.

Charms & Protective Plants

Most protection was domestic and seasonal, and much of it was aimed at the cattle. William Kennish, a Maughold man writing in 1844, described Old May Eve, the eleventh of May, when each horse was stalled, the cows were called home before sunset and the sheep were brought down off the mountain into the yard. The yellow bolugh was strewn along the cow-house floor and round the threshold, and the young men made crosses of rowan and tied them to each cow's tail and round the lintels of the byre, in case the bolugh charm should fail. Train gave the Manx name a year later, and added that a piece of iron was fixed with the cross over the door of every dwelling house, stable and sheepfold. Moore recorded that the crosses of cuirn, the mountain ash, had to be made without the aid of a knife.

Rhys found the crosses still being made on Old May Day and exhibited one at a meeting of the Folk-Lore Society. William Cashen of Peel remembered the crosh cuirn behind the door of every cottage in his youth, renewed each May Eve, and put into every fishing boat, where it stayed hidden until the following year. The boats had remedies of their own. George Woods, visiting in 1811, was told of fishermen who came home with an empty boat, blamed a witch, and burned bundles of dry heath or furze through every part of the vessel to drive the charm out. The bolugh of Kennish's poem, which William Harrison glossed as mugwort, is the same plant that was gathered at midsummer as the bollan bane.

Caillagh, Witches & Wise Women

A caillagh was an old woman, and the word had come to mean a hag or witch. The Caillagh ny Groamagh, the Old Woman of the Gloominess, was a weather figure. The Anglo-Manx Vocabulary of 1924 made her an Irish witch thrown into the sea to drown, who floated to the Island and came ashore on Candlemas morning to gather sticks for a fire, and Gill was told in 1929 that a hollow near the top of Ballagilbert Glen below South Barrule was where she had fallen trying to step from Barrule to Cronk yn Irree Lhaa. The weather rule is older than the figure, since Moore gave the Manx sayings for St Bridget's Day in 1891 with no old woman attached. The Caillagh ny Faashagh was a prophet. Harrison in 1873 called her a Manx Mother Shipton whose name was already only a name, and recorded the sayings put in her mouth about the Quirks of Slieau Whallian and the smithy chimney in every house. By 1911 Sophia Morrison had made her a goat-shaped wizard living in a quarry.

Witches proper took the shape of a hare. Rhys was told that no greyhound could catch a witch-hare unless it was black without a single white hair, and that no shot but a silver coin would pierce it, and that on the Island, unlike Wales, men as well as women could take the form. Kennish's poem has a Manxman whose gun has misfired tear the silver studs from his wrist-bands, load them and wound the hare in the thigh, and a hag seen hobbling away at daybreak with a trail of blood behind her. Berrey Dhone belongs to the north-east. Moore printed the ballad in 1896 from Robert Gawne's manuscript and was told that it recalled Margad-y-Stomachey of Cornaa in Maughold, a woman as strong as two men who drowned an ox called Berrey Dhone in a pool of the Cornaa river before flaying it. His informant's father had seen her as a boy.

Witchcraft Before the Law

The Island dealt with witchcraft through the church first. Under the Spiritual Laws a suspect was presented to the Chapter Quest and held in the Bishop's prison while a jury of the parish inquired, and was handed to the Lord's gaol and court only if a notorious fault was proved. In November 1616 Margaret yne Quane of Lambfell in Kirk German was committed to Castle Rushen for charms tending to sorcery and witchcraft, on the sworn examinations of divers persons. Neighbours stood bail for her and for her son John Cubon at ten pounds each. The church court found both guilty that December and delivered them to the Lord in February. At the Head Court of 3 June 1617 the Deemsters heard the church's proceedings read, but for their better satisfaction consulted the twenty-four Keys, who advised a further trial by a jury drawn from every sheading but Rushen. Mother and son were each found guilty and sentenced to be burned, and John's share of Lambfell fell to the Lord by his death and passed to John Cotter.

A month before the trial the moar of Kirk German had presented Phillip Costen for drawing blood from Margaret, from John and from Phillip Cubon. The court released him from every charge, because he said he had done it in defence of his life or to avoid the harm their witchcraft might do him. The record gives the act and the reason and says nothing about why drawing blood should help. Rhys, collecting on the Island about 1890, was told that if you drew a witch's blood, however little, she lost the power of harming you, and that people had formerly acted on it by giving a slight scratch on leaving church.

The cases Moore later printed from the church records run milder. In 1638 Jony Tear was cleared, and those who had slandered her were made to ask her forgiveness before the congregation. As late as December 1843 a trespass jury met at a half-way house in Marown to ask witnesses whether they had witched a farmer's cattle, and found against the midwife with five pounds in costs, while the people assembled gave three cheers in derision. Train printed the case in 1845, beside the story of the barrel, with the remark that suspected witches were now differently treated in the Island.

The Barrel on the Hill

The best-known Manx witch story is the spiked barrel on Slieau Whallian, and its printed history can be followed step by step. The earliest version is George Woods's of 1811, told to him by a Peel man on the road to St John's. It has an unnamed hill two miles from the town, a single woman whose offence Woods could not discover, and the word murdered. Joseph Train copied the passage in 1845, gave the hill its name and added that many others had suffered there. Henry Jenkinson's guidebook of 1874 made them persons of both sexes for the visitors climbing from St John's station. Rhys heard the tradition at St John's about 1890 with nothing else attached to it, and in 1911 Sophia Morrison joined it to the loss of the Peel herring fleet and to a bare track down the hillside called the Witch's Way.

The records leave no trace of such a custom. The procedure the Spiritual Laws laid down ran through presentment, the Bishop's prison and the Lord's court, and the one capital case read for this site ended in a sentence pronounced at Castle Rushen. A practice repeated over years would have left charges and entries in books that recorded every sixpence, and there are none. A single killing by neighbours would leave nothing, so the silence weighs against the custom and not against the woman Woods was told about. Every account close to the ground has one woman, and the plural rests on a single sentence of Train's that a guidebook enlarged.

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