Enid Porter, in her Folklore of East Anglia (1974), records a story told her by a Willingham resident in 1967 of Miss Disbury of Willingham, who died around 1901. Like Bet Cross of Longstanton, Miss Disbury had power over horses, and also over other animals. Once, when two villagers were driving some cows past her house, the cows stopped and refused to move. The villagers surmised that Miss Disbury had bewitched them, and knew that they had to draw her blood in order to break the spell.
‘So I goes up to her house, knocks on the door an’ says: “Can you let me have a match, Miss Disbury?” Well, when she goes inside… to fetch it, I gets out my shut-knife, opens it… when she comes back and hands me the match I give her a slash across the wrist… then I runs like hell. But those cows moved all right after that.’
The jocular tone, usual in stories of how people got the upper hand of witches, belies the innate cruelty of this common practice of ‘blooding a witch’.
Jabez Few, of the same village, who died in the 1920s, kept some white rats which the villagers called his ‘imps’ (familiars). Evidently regarded as a wizard, he seems to have been a mischievous old man who delighted in living up to his reputation by playing tricks with them. Once he took them into the Brewers’ Arms and those in the bar said they heard them running up and down stairs, but, when the door at the foot of the staircase was opened, no sign of the imps could be seen.
One day Jabez put one of his imps in Connie Todd’s bedroom and it couldn’t get out, so someone said to old man Dudley—it was his house that Connie lodged in—‘You must get a big tom-cat and he’ll get it out.’ So Dudley shut a big ginger tom in the room. Presently there was a terrific noise of fighting and when the door was opened there was fur all over the floor and the cat was flying up and down the curtains. But that imp was still somewhere about and it just couldn’t be got rid of.
Someone else then told Dudley he’d have to get a stone jar, put clippings from a horse’s hoof in it, along with the legs of a toad, then put the bottle on the fire, and, if it didn’t break, then the spell would. Dudley got the jar all ready, but just as he was going to put it on the fire someone called at the house and he had to stop. He told the visitor what he was doing and why, calling Jabez every name under the sun and swearing that one day he would shoot him. Somehow, Jabez heard what he said, for about twenty minutes later he came up to the house, gave a loud whistle, and the imp came out ‘meek as anything’.
This tale of the stone jar seems to be a variation on, or perhaps a confused memory of, the use of witch bottles from the latter part of the seventeenth century on. Glass bottles and, later, jam jars or even tins were used, but the classic witch-bottle up to the eighteenth century, when it was no longer made, was the kind of German stoneware jug or bottle with a bearded mask known as a bellarmine or greybeard. They are most often found in the eastern counties, especially in Suffolk, usually placed under thresholds and hearthstones, probably as standing charms to prevent the entrance of witches (as with other anti-witch devices, doorways and chimneys were the places most often protected). However, witch bottles were also used for the process of ‘drawing a witch’, when witchcraft was suspected but the perpetrator unknown. The bottle would be filled with the victim’s urine, nail-clippings, pins or nails, and sometimes other bits and pieces, and brought to the boil on the fire. The witch would be irresistibly drawn to the door of the house where the spell was performed. Some also thought that the witch would suffer terribly during the boiling and thus be forced to lift the spell, or that, if the bottle burst, the witch would die.
As to Jabez’s imps, it was generally believed that familiars were hard to get rid of when the time came for their owner to die, unless a relation was prepared to accept them. Enid Porter… says that his nephew had to take his imps and go and stand in running water with them. Running water being inimical to witches, the ‘imps’ immediately scuttled off and were never seen again.
The stories told at Willingham reflect common beliefs concerning both CUNNING MEN (p.260) and WITCHES (p.280): similar ones were told at Horseheath and at Canewdon, Essex, and Loddon and Sheringham, Norfolk.