Sharpe James - The Bewitching of Anne Gunter

E VEN PARED to its essentials, the story is a fascinating one. In the summer of 1604 a young woman called Anne Gunter, then aged about twenty, fell ill. She recovered quickly, but her symptoms, or something very like them, returned in late October of that year, and this time they persisted. Anne lived with her parents, a gentleman named Brian Gunter and his wife, also called Anne, in the small country parish of North Moreton, some twelve miles south of Oxford. The parents, concerned by her illness, called in doctors, but they were unable to find a satisfactory explanation for her affliction, and suggested there might be supernatural causes. Anne was by this stage showing the symptoms that the age considered indicative of demonic possession or of witchcraft: she had fits during which she writhed and contorted; she fell into trances or comas; she vomited and voided foreign bodies, especially pins. And, as was so often the case, she called out against her supposed tormenters as she suffered her fits before an ever expanding audience of fascinated spectators. She named three women as witches: Agnes Pepwell, who already had a reputation as a witch, her illegitimate daughter, Mary, and Elizabeth Gregory, her principal tormentor, who was the wife of a yeoman farmer called Walter Gregory and, on many accounts, the most unpopular woman in North Moreton.

Agnes Pepwell ran away, but Mary Pepwell and Elizabeth Gregory were tried for witchcraft at Abingdon in March 1605. They were acquitted. Matters might well have ended there, but Brian Gunter decided to re-open the case, or at least to gain sympathy at the highest level, by arranging a meeting between his daughter and the King, James I, when the monarch visited Oxford University in August 1605. James had a reputation as a witch-hunter, and Brian Gunter was building his hopes on this when he brought Anne before him. The plan misfired badly. James was in a sceptical mood, while the ecclesiastical politics of the Church of England meant that in 1605 there was a body of extremely influential Churchmen, including the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, who were far from credulous about instances of witchcraft, demonic possession and exorcism. The King passed Anne to the care of Archbishop Bancroft, who in turn put her in the custody of his chaplain, Samuel Harsnett, who had already been a propagandist for the sceptics in earlier cases of supposed demonic possession. By October Anne had confessed to James that she had simulated bewitchment at her father's instigation, to further a feud between him and the family of the chief of the accused witches, Elizabeth Gregory. The feud had begun in 1598, when Brian Gunter had inflicted fatal injuries on two of the Gregorys at a football match.

Probably under Bancroft's guidance, proceedings were initiated at the Court of Star Chamber early in 1606 against Brian Gunter and his daughter Anne for falsely accusing the three women. The dossier resulting from these proceedings, which makes this quite simply the best-documented English witchcraft case, contains the evidence of over sixty witnesses and comprises several hundred pages. Many of the witnesses described how Brian Gunter gave his daughter a mixture of sack, or sherry, and sallet, or salad oil. The father claimed it was for his daughter's good; Anne claimed it was to make her fits all the more believable. It is Anne's version of what happened, here as elsewhere, that ultimately convinces.