SAWYER, ELIZABETH

The case ot Elizabeth Sawyer in 1621 was among the most well publicized in early-seventeenth-century England. The judicial records other case have been lost, so the m;un source on the case is the pamphlet by the Reverend Henry (jor)dcole, which appeared shortly after Sawyer’s execution, The Wonderfull

Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch (1621). Goodcole was the chaplain of the jail at Newgate, where Sawyer, a Middlesex felon, was being held pending execution. Like many Newgate chaplains, Goodcole supplemented his income with sensational pamphlets based on criminals’ confessions. The Wonderfull Discoverie was the last in the scries of Elizabethan and Jacobean witchcraft pamphlets; the next pamphlet would he published 22 years later, in the vastly different circumstances of the English Civil War.

Goodcole’s pamphlet described how Sawyer, who had been suspected to be a witch for a long time, was convicted of the murder of Agnes Ratcleife, who had struck one of Sawyer’s sows that was eating her soap. Ratcleife on her deathbed supposedly had charged Sawyer with her murder. The trial included a search for the witch’s mark, found near Sawyer’s aiaus. The jury of women that found the mark, overcoming resistance by Sawyer that Goodcole did not detail, included two women simply pulled in off the street by court officials. According to Goodcole, the evidence of the witch’s mark had a strong effect in swinging the jury to conviction.

The second half of the pamphlet is Sawyer’s confessioia in the form of a dialogue with Goodcole. Goodcole placed great emphasis on Sawyer’s penchant for oaths and blasphemies, which provided the Devil with his first access to her. Interestingly, Goodcole allowed Sawyer’s denial of having murdered Ratcleife, as well as her admission of another murder of which she had been acquitted, to go uncontradicted. The principal interest of the confession is Sawyer’s description of her relationship with the Devil, who had come to her three times a week in the form of a dog, sometimes black and sometimes white. The Devil is described in terms very like a familiar, and the pamphlet represents a transitional stage in the English idea of a familiar spirit, as familiars were becoming more diabolical. Because Goodcole, a clergyman, was possibly more familiar than Sawyer with the idea of Satan as the cause of witchcraft—he claims his first question to Sawyer was how she came to have familiarity with the Devil— it is not clear how much of this came from Sawyer herself.

Such was the iiaterest in Sawyer and witches that the same year saw the production of a play based loosely on Goodcole’s account written collaboratively by William Rowley (15851-1642?), John Ford (1586-1640?) and Thomas Dekker (1572?-1632), titled The Witch of Edmonton.

REFERENCES: Marion Gibson, ed. Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 2000; John Ford, Thomas Dekker and William Rowley. The Witch of Edmonton. Ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge. Manchester and New Yt)rk: Manchester University Press, 1999.