WRITING ABOUT WITCHCRAFT IN WALES

I was delighted to talk to the Cymmrodorion Society about Welsh witchcraft. Rather than repeat the arguments of my book, I’ve taken the opportunity to respond to some questions from Dr Rupert White, editor of the journal of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, The Enquiring Eye.

How did you become interested in Welsh witchcraft?

I came to witchcraft studies by way of social anthropology. My university teachers included Lucy Mair, who had written a very good global survey of witchcraft, Witches (1969), and Godfrey Lienhardt, whose book Divinity and Experience (1961) explored religious experience building on the work of Evans-Pritchard. At the same time Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) appeared. This extraordinarily wide-ranging book was an ethnography of early modern English society and at the same time drew comparatively on the work of social anthropologists, mainly in the Durkheimian tradition. It inspired me to find out more about Welsh witchcraft, and I was fortunate to gain a University of Wales Fellowship in the short-lived and greatly missed Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Aberystwyth. With the Fellowship I was able to pursue research in the National Library of Wales, immersing myself in the extraordinary and voluminous records of the Court of Great Sessions. Two books were eventually the result of this research: first, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales (The History Press, 2008), a survey of witchcraft and of magical specialists from about 1500–1850; and secondly, Welsh Witches: Narratives of Witchcraft and Magic in 16th- and 17th-century Wales (Atramentous Press, 2018) which published my annotated transcripts of the legal record of witchcraft accusations, including slander cases. Welsh Witches was as complete as I could make it – since publication I have only found one additional slander case in the plea rolls. In A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales I felt it was important to take the witchcraft narrative beyond the usual cut-off of 1736, the date of the repeal of the witchcraft statute. Witchcraft beliefs change over time and in 18th-century Wales there was a marked and challenging transformation in belief expressed by the development of cursing wells.

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