‘Involuntary Witches’: The Case of Lee & Snigg
‘Respresentation of the inner state of a man, who is a servant of sin, and suffers the devil to reign within him.’ Image by Johannes Gossner.
In 1832 an article titled ‘Anecdotes of Witchcraft in Wiltshire’ appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The piece was copied from a manuscript of 1686 penned by an unnamed individual, but now identified as Sir James Long of Draycot Cerne, a village a few miles from Chippenham in the north of the county.
At the time the persecution of witches in the English courts was waning, and members of the Royal Society, the pre-eminent scientific foundation in the country, were starting to challenge such supernatural ideas. Long was a fellow of the Royal Society, but one who still believed in witches. Not only this, but he was afraid of them and their power. Long’s beliefs would have been widely shared among the rural communities around Chippenham. In the manuscript, he argued that those who entered into demonic pacts and were taught by those spirits, resulting in harm to people or animals, deserved the full severity of the law, up to and including execution.
But there was a type of a witch who Long felt deserved compassion, although close interaction with them was to be shunned. These were ‘involuntary’ witches; individuals who were naturally witches; people whose natures had been corrupted by ‘atrabilis’, a melancholy temperament associated with an excess of black bile, ‘or something that I understand not, so that theyr [their] looks, when fixed upon a living object many times, destroyes it by a certain poison very contrary to purpose of those miserable people.’ Should these natural witches look upon an individual or animal it could die. Thus, they could cause harm to their own children, although more often it was their cattle which would ‘pine away and die’. Long gave two local examples of this type of witch. They were both men, Lee and Snigg. Their condition was widely known in the community, and it had brought disaster to both.
Lee was a farmer at Christian Malford, a village located a few miles to the west of Long’s home. Lee had a good farm, and he was hardworking. But his cattle died, and those of his neighbours that he had ‘fixedly looked upon’. No one would rent his land, and his livestock continued to ‘pine away and dy [die].’ Thus, Lee was reduced to poverty. Snigg, who Long only referred to by his nickname, lived in a place that bordered Christian Malford. Long neglected to say which village this was although hints in the text suggest it was either Sutton Benger or Seagry. Snigg’s livestock could not thrive, nor could his family. Thus he, his wife, children, oxen, cows, horses and pigs were all too lean. The only animal to thrive on Snigg’s farm was a dog, which kept itself out of Snigg’s gaze in the barn where he had ‘learned’ to eat beans and thereby had become fat.
These men's lives, from Long’s testimony, appear to have been ruined not only by their inherent witchcraft but by people’s reaction to them. Although they did not face prosecution the community’s fear of them created isolation and poverty. It had repercussions too, not merely for themselves but also for their families. Most of those identified as witches and who were prosecuted were women. Would the treatment of Lee and Snigg have been different if they had been women? Women were identified as more susceptible to demonic forces and thus more likely to be witches. There is no suggestion that Lee and Snigg had been bewitched, but rather that they had drawn misfortune to themselves because of their own inherent witch natures.
There is much we do not know about Lee and Snigg. Long does not provide sufficient information to research their backgrounds and potentially those factors that might have caused people to view them with suspicion. Maybe Lee and Snigg suffered from social awkwardness, unusual appearance, or simply had the misfortune of being present when tragedy struck repeatedly. Their stories reveal a fascinating dimension of early modern witch beliefs that goes beyond the stereotypical witch hunts and trials. These involuntary witches occupied a troubling middle ground— they were objects of fear and isolation rather than legal prosecution, yet victims of their own purported supernatural nature.