Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England: Continuity and Evolution in Social Context

Abstract

C ^^^ ometime between around 687 and 700, a distraught father brought his . ^^ raving son, in a wagon, to the island of Lindisfarne, where the holy relics ^^^ of Saint Cuthbert were kept. According to the author of the Life of Cuth bert, the boy, wearied by the torments of a demon, was prone to succumb to bouts of screaming, weeping, and self-mutilation. A priest named Tydi had been unable to put the demon to flight, so he advised the father to transport his son to the relics. At that point, Many people despaired of being able to secure any remedy for the miserable boy, but a certain man of good and pure faith who was moved to pity, placing his trust in God and entreating the help of St. Cuthbert, blessed some holy water and sprinkled in it some dirt from the ditch in which had been poured the bath water of the body of our holy bishop after his death. Once the boy tried the holy water, he desisted from his babbling that night.1 Almost a thousand years later, an Essex teenager named Katheren Malpas was likewise adjudged to be sorely afflicted by demons. According to the testimony her grandparents gave in Star Chamber, Katheren's torments began on Candlemas Eve, 1621, presaged by several bouts of hideous screaming that left her lame. Over the subsequent months, Katheren often appeared to succumb to terrible fits that seemed all the more horrifying to those who saw her, by virtue of their violence and the fact that they rendered her corn