FAMILIARS

“…shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit: or shall consult, covenant with, entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose…”

Under the first section, that offence was punishable by death as a felony. The words “to or for any intent or purpose” matter: no harm had to be shown. The same section separately made death the penalty for witchcraft by which a person was “Killed, Destroyed, Wasted, Consumed, Pined, or Lamed”.

A second section covered lesser offences: using witchcraft to say where treasure or lost goods could be found, to provoke unlawful love, to destroy cattle or goods, or to hurt a person “although the same be not effected”. The penalty was a year’s imprisonment and the pillory once a quarter, and death on a second conviction.

The word “familiar” does not occur in the Act. It speaks of “evil and wicked spirits”. It created no category of animal familiar, and it put no animal on trial.

Transcript: The National Archives, “The 1604 Act Against Witchcraft” ↗. Transcript © John Levin for The Statutes Project, CC BY-SA 4.0; spelling lightly modernised.

1 · They made an invisible allegation observable. A neighbour could say they had seen an unusual cat, dog, toad or mouse enter a house or sit beside the accused. A pact with the Devil became testimony about a visible encounter.

2 · They made care look like evidence. The Act’s own verbs, “entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward”, are also the verbs of keeping an animal. Feeding, sheltering or rewarding a creature could be read as supporting a spirit. This is the strongest thread on this page.

3 · They tied the accusation to the body. Searchers looked for a mark where a familiar was supposed to have fed. Matthew Hopkins describes a woman “searched, by women” and “found to have three teats about her”. See The Discovery of Witches.

4 · They made agency transferable. A familiar could be said to act for the accused: carry a message, harm a neighbour, sicken livestock. A misfortune could then be traced back to a person through a creature.

Helen Parish describes the presence of the familiar in the witch trials as “an almost uniquely English phenomenon”. She also notes the reverse: the witches’ sabbat, common in continental trial records, was “almost entirely absent from the English narratives”.

Jesse Arseneault and Rosemary-Claire Collard read animal trials and witch trials together, as two ways of policing what they call reproductive crimes. That is one interpretation among others, not the explanation for either practice.