8♥ The Witch Cake · Reversal
A witch cake was made of two things: flour, and the water of the person who had fallen ill. It was baked on the household’s own hearth like any other bread, and never meant to be eaten. What made it a cure rather than a loaf was that it was made out of the patient. Whatever had got into them had got into it.
From there it could go one of two ways.
Laid back onto the body, it worked on the sufferer. In 1616 Edward Drake, of King’s Lynn, had a daughter sick in a way nothing had touched, and rode out to a cunning-man about her. This was no ordinary illness, he was told: the woman responsible would have consumed the girl’s heart, and much longer would put her past saving. The quarrel behind it had begun over a hen, which Drake had never heard in his life.
The instructions were exact enough to be printed the same year. Flour from the bakers, mixed with the girl’s own water instead of any other liquid, baked on the hearth. One half laid to the region of her heart, the other to her back directly opposite, so the two sat facing each other through her. An ointment, a powder and a written charm went on top. If she had not amended within six hours, there was “no health or recouery to be looked for.”
And say nothing to anybody, because the woman who had done this “would know any thing.”
Drake rode home. His daughter lay next door to Mary Smith’s, and as he came down off his horse Mary Smith was leaning over her shop window, watching him arrive. She cursed him as he passed, then told his daughter her father had been to see a wizard.
He had been told to keep it to himself. He had not yet got through the door.
Put in the fire instead, the same cake worked the other way about. It stopped being a medicine and became a summons. Whoever had laid the sickness on would feel the burning herself, past bearing, and come to find out what was being done to her. The remedy walked up the path and knocked.
In West Yorkshire, in 1683, a physician called Dr Thornton arrived uninvited at the house of Judith Higson, whose son had lain a long time in bed, swollen in the throat, unable to stir, looking, she said, as one affrighted. Thornton said it was no natural distemper: the boy had been hurt by an evil tongue. And he would prescribe nothing at all until the water had been tried by fire. Wheat meal, the boy’s own water, some of his hair worked in, and stumps of horseshoe, made into a cake and put on the fire.
Higson balked, though not at the strangeness of it. No words were to be said over the cake at all, and she thought a thing that worked without words might still be a charm. She walked to two ministers and asked. They told her it was no way of God, and sent her to fasting and prayer instead.
The fire was never lit. Nobody came up the path. What Judith Higson wanted from that cake was never really medicine: she wanted to stand in her own doorway and see who arrived.
Sources
Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Man, 1616), p.53. J. A. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001), pp.53-54, pp.114-115, printing The Rev Oliver Heywood B.A. 1630-1702; his Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (Brighouse, 1882-85), vol.4, pp.53-54. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.109-110.