Vinegar Tom and the Witchfinder

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Manningtree, Essex, late October

Halloween, in this country, keeps bad company with witches, and the witches of Manningtree keep the worst company of all. The village sits on the Essex side of the Stour, a flat, reedy stretch of country, and it was here, in the spring of 1645, that an elderly woman named Elizabeth Clarke was examined by a self-appointed witchfinder called Matthew Hopkins. Under questioning, and after days without sleep, she is recorded as naming a household of spirits who attended her: Holt, Jarmara, Sack and Sugar, Newes, and one called Vinegar Tom.

The pamphlet that followed two years later, The Discovery of Witches, printed in 1647 under Hopkins's own name, is where Vinegar Tom survives. He is described there as something like a greyhound, long in the leg, but wearing the head of an ox, with a long tail and wide, watchful eyes. When the examiners pressed him to show himself plainly, the account says he would not stay, but went out of the room in a flash of fire, the way a damp log spits and is gone. It is a strange, specific image for a document written to convict, and it has outlasted the trial by a long way; the woodcut of him, horned and grinning, is one of the few pictures we have of an English familiar spirit at all.

What Vinegar Tom was meant to be doing for Elizabeth Clarke, the pamphlet does not much trouble to say. Familiars in this literature are companions more than servants, fed on blood from a teat kept somewhere private on the body, visiting in the shape of toads, mice, dogs, or, in his case, something between a dog and ox that no farmer would have recognised from his own byre. Hopkins and his colleague John Stearne worked this coast and the counties around it for two years, in the unsettled stretch of the Civil War when authority was thin and fear was not, and the confessions they extracted, under duress that the courts of the time allowed to pass unremarked, sent a great many poor and elderly women to the gallows. Elizabeth Clarke was among them.

I find no evidence that anyone in 1645 set Vinegar Tom's appearance against the turning of the year, no local habit of watching for him at Samhain or All Hallows as one might watch for the Wild Hunt or a will-o-the-wisp on the moss. The trials ran through spring and summer, by the court calendar, not the autumn one. But the English Halloween, however it is kept now, with its lanterns and its doors left on the latch for whatever might be abroad, sits on the same old ground as this story: a season when the boundary between a familiar hearth and an unfamiliar visitor was thought thinnest, when something with an ox's head and a dog's gait might reasonably be let in by the fire rather than turned away at the door. The soul cakes and bonfires of Samhain and All Souls belong to an older and kinder bargain with the dead than Manningtree ever struck with its living. Still, it is in this part of the year, the nights drawing in over flat Essex water, that a reader goes looking for Vinegar Tom, and finds him waiting in the woodcut exactly as he was left: horned, long-tailed, and already halfway into the fire.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.