Gwen ferch Ellis: The first woman in Wales to be sentenced to death on charges of witchcraft

Mari Ellis Dunning

When I picture it, I imagine the day was overcast, grey as ash, an ominous weight hanging in the cool, Welsh air. I imagine Gwen could hear the steady clip-clop of the horses’ hooves as the men approached. Perhaps her heartbeat quickened at the sound of their voices. What we know for certain is this: the group, led by William Hughes, Bishop of St Asaph, came to arrest Gwen, carting her away to Flint castle for questioning…

Gwen ferch Ellis, whose name, in keeping with Welsh tradition translates as Gwen daughter of Ellis, languished in gaol until October 1594, when she was hanged, becoming the first woman in Wales to be sentenced to death on charges of witchcraft.

Not a huge amount is known about Gwen ferch Ellis’ early life. What we do know comes from her deposition which focusses on the allegations against her. Nevertheless, she is a figure worth writing about for numerous reasons — her case reveals a huge amount about the nature of belief in supernatural harm within early modern Wales. At its core, Gwen’s story is a tragic showcase of how a typical soothsayer lost her life at the gallows, branded a witch.

Gwen was a childless woman in her forties, twice widowed, defined repeatedly in her indictments as a ‘spinster,’ indicating that she made her living through the spinning of yarn. Like many early modern women, particularly in Wales, she also sold salves, had ‘acquired a reputation for healing and charming,’ and had achieved financial independence through these means. Her speciality was in curing sick cattle and children, as well as soothsaying and finding lost or stolen goods.

Gwen came to the attention of the courts when a written charm was found in the parlour of Gloddaith, the home of distinguished gentleman Thomas Mostyn. Her renown as a healer, as well as her association with a gentry woman called Jane Conwy, who Mostyn was reputed to have quarrelled with, caused suspicion to fall on Gwen. Because the charm was written backwards, it was believed to have destructive rather than protective uses, the implication being that Mistress Conwy had employed Gwen to bewitch Mostyn’s manor.

As suspicion around her grew, Gwen was encouraged by friends to run, but refused to do so, insisting she had done no wrong. Whether this decision was a matter of pride, or an ill-judged belief that she would ultimately be found innocent — after all, prior to her arrest, it was highly unusual for a woman to be put on trial in the Welsh courts — we cannot say.

However, the evidence shows that several people came forward to leverage further accusations against Gwen, enabling magistrates to build a case against her, with testimony suggesting that she was responsible for the sickness and maiming of several men in her community.

Three formal indictments were laid against Gwen: the first ‘for bewitching Robert Evans by breaking his arm,’ another ‘for bewitching Lowri ferch John ap Ieuan, […] who had lost use of her limbs,’ and the final one ‘for murdering Lewis ap John by witchcraft,’ (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.32)

Ironically, the original incident — the alleged curse that was found in the home of Thomas Mostyn — seems to disappear from the record, and did not form part of the evidence submitted to the courts. It was enough, however, to draw attention to Gwen, and set a series of events in motion that ultimately led to her judicial murder.

While much is known about the Elizabethan period, far less can be definitively understood about women’s lives during this time. As Sara Mendelson states, ‘[W]hile female testimony appears to offer direct access to women’s own voices, the historian must be constantly aware that every spoken word by a woman was recorded and edited by male officials.’ This is true of indictments, and the words recorded during the witch trials.

This erasure of women’s voices is indisputably evidenced within the deposition of Gwen ferch Ellis, during which she admits to regularly using charms, taught to her by her sister, Elizabeth ferch Ellis. Prompted by the bishop, Gwen goes on to recite the words used while charming, which are recorded verbatim in Welsh, until the bishop’s clerk seems to grow tired and simply notes that she had continued to recite many other words and ‘tedious sentences,’ (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.29).

Because of this utter disregard for Gwen’s words, we will never know the complete wording of this charm, though what we do have of it can tell us much about the culture of healing magic during this time period.

For example, Gwen’s charm, and many others like it, shed light on the popular oral religious culture that lay outside of orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism. In a charm reminiscent of a prayer, she invokes the spirit of the three Marys, (‘y Tair Mair’), as well as the holy ghost (‘a’r ysbryd glan’), and asks for deliverance form ‘the evil thing of hell [Satan].’

Charms and curses

Both charms and curses across Wales contained Christian references and quotations taken from the Bible, and in many written charms, there are small crosses scrawled in the margins, indicating the need to perform the sign of the cross. Religious artefacts found by bailiffs in Gwen’s home — a bell without a clapper, and a brass carving of Jesus Christ — which were looked on with much suspicion, further reveal the connection between the prayerful world of charming and pre-Reformation religious practices in Wales (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.29).

Through Gwen’s charm, I am reminded of Luce Irigaray’s words: ‘Nor let us forget, that we already have a history, that certain women have, even if it was culturally difficult, left their mark on history and that all too often we do not know them.’ Gwen ferch Ellis was one such woman. It’s worth remembering that the majority of women of lower rank could neither read nor write, and I wonder if the ‘X’ scrawled at the end of Gwen ferch Ellis’ indictment, (a tangible ‘mark’ which she left on history, as Irigaray says) which stands in for her signature, can be taken wholly legitimately if she was uncertain of the words she was claiming as her own.

While Gwen was not a stereotypical witch figure — poor, socially isolated and dependent on charity — she was a prime candidate for accusations of witchcraft due to her financial independence and knowledge of lay healing practices. As Kirsten J. Sollée argues, for women in the early modern period, the ability to heal, combined with financial and physical independence, was often looked on with suspicion: ‘armed with knowledge of herbology, biology, and, in particular, reproductive health, these predominantly poor, peasant women were easy targets for accusations of sorcery.’

We find evidence of this conflation of reputation for both healing and harming in Gwen’s deposition, taken after her arrest in 1594. The bishop asked Gwen if she had ‘ever used witchcraft or charming to help or hurt man or beast?’ (Welsh Witches, p.43). Gwen replied without elusion that in addition to her salves, drenches, and plasters, she had used charms to good effect for the last decade.

While unlicensed midwives and healers were commonplace across the British Isles, women like Gwen ferch Ellis, with an intimate knowledge of medicinal practices, pain relief and women’s reproductive health, drew suspicion within the shifting social structure of the early modern period.

In Europe, this era saw a gendered conflict described by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English in Witches, Midwives and Nurses as a ‘power struggle,’ in which the rise of ‘scientific medicine’ coincided with a deliberate eviction of women from the realm of healing they had inhabited for centuries. During this time, ‘lay healers […] were frequently targeted as ‘witches.’ The rebranding of a profession founded on curing and helping those in need, as something aligned with malice and harm, played a significant role in the unfolding of the witch trials.

Midwives and healers 

Historically, midwives and healers have been charged with the mysterious, liminal spaces between birth, life and death. Given human propensity to fear the unknown, as well as a longstanding societal fear of powerful women, it follows that these women were seen as troublesome, marginal figures, often feared, sometimes persecuted.

As Gilbert and Gubar speculate in The Madwoman in the Attic, ‘If as nurse and comforter, spirit-guide and mystical messenger, a woman ruled the dying and the dead, might not even her admirers fear that […] she could bring death?’ What we begin to see, then, is an era in which women’s livelihoods were both under threat, and the cause of suspicion and accusations, sometimes leading to their incarceration and even death. Gwen ferch Ellis was the first Welsh victim of this cultural shift.

Admittedly, given that the convicted person’s occupation was often not recorded, it is impossible to say with any certainty that the majority of accused and persecuted were healers of some form, and I will not attempt to make such an argument. However, there remains an inescapable association between witches and midwives in Europe, and it is pertinent to note that the fifteenth century witch-hunter’s guidebook, The Malleus Maleficarum, proclaimed ‘No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives.’

It seems probable that women’s power to heal, to intuitively know the body and the female reproductive system due to lived experience and generational knowledge, (as previously mentioned, Gwen learned her skills from her sister), in ways men could not understand, fed into the church’s desire to repress and control the spread of this intrinsic knowledge. Ehrenreich and English argue that the ‘witch-healer’s methods were as great a threat […] as her results, for the witch was an empiricist,’ (Ehrenreich and English, p.17.)

In a ruling system that insisted on the reality of immaculate conception, faith-based healing and divine intervention, anyone who suggested otherwise, who contradicted the religious narrative, however indirectly, was surely to be perceived as a threat. Perhaps for this reason, the equating of healing magic and harmful witchcraft came about.

John Demos describes the typical profile of the accused witch and speaks of the ability to heal and the ability to harm as intimately related. ‘Clearly, the wisest course in early modern community life — especially for a woman — was to blend in and not to seem too openly self-assertive. To be, or to behave, otherwise was to open oneself to suspicion of witchcraft.’

Self-assertion

With her knowledge and skills, Gwen did not, as Demos puts it, ‘blend in,’ and appears to have carried a level of self-assertion, knowledge and power that perhaps appeared threatening to those around her. We see this in her refusal to run following formal accusations, and the forthright way in which she openly admitted to her practices and recited her charm.

Gwen’s indictment reveals her reputation as a soothsayer had been formed over many years. Several years before her arrest, Gwen was visited at home by bailiffs who insisted they had seen a huge black fly, bigger and uglier than any fly they’d ever seen, which they surmised was ‘her devil by the which she worketh mischief’ hovering on top of a drink she had given to them (quoted in A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.33). Despite the concept of familiar spirits not being hugely prevalent in Wales, the men were certain this fly was Gwen’s demon, the implication being that she was, indeed, a witch.

While this sort of community-centric speculation was common enough, Wales saw no ‘witch hunt’ in the traditional sense, and the courts were disinclined to prosecute those accused of witchcraft. Gwen’s case was truly exceptional — she was one of only five people sentenced to death on charges of witchcraft between 1594 and 1655.

The reasons for Wales’ unique outlook on witchcraft and the nature of supernatural harm are nuanced and multifaceted. While fear of and belief in witchcraft was palpable in sixteenth and seventeenth century Wales, this fear tended to remain on a domestic level, playing out in arguments amongst neighbours and family members.

This, alongside other factors such as the prevalence of unreformed popular religion, the cultural reliance on wise-women and soothsayers, and the ubiquitous influence of old beggar women, meant witchcraft was less poised to be brought to the attention of the courts, and that it was often dismissed when it did, very occasionally, come to trial. By far the majority of cases in which someone was accused of being a ‘wits’ were brought by fellow members of the community, neighbours, relatives and in many cases, individuals with financial and personal reasons to bring forward accusations.

In fact, Welsh trial records indicate that there was no accurate terminology for witchcraft in the Welsh language, with many, like Gwen, accused of ‘Certain diabolical acts called in English ‘witchcraftes, charmes and enchauntments,’ (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.74). The term ‘witch’ does not appear formally until printed in William-Salesbury’s Welsh-English dictionary in 1547, and is not referenced more than once in trial records until the 1590s, following Gwen ferch Ellis’ conviction.

Language acculturation

Over the next century, the language used in Welsh discourse shows significant English acculturation, with records and slander cases revealing that ‘wits’ and ‘witsh,’ borrowed from the English word ‘witch,’ were almost invariably used in colloquial speech, (A History of Magic and Witchcraft, p.24), suggesting that ‘the English witch-figure was becoming internalised in Wales.’

The majority of cases occurred in Breckonshire, Montgomeryshire and Pembrokeshire, borderland ‘areas most susceptible to external influence,’ (Hutton in Welsh Witches, p.8). With an estimated five hundred hangings in England and thousands of deaths in Scotland, it would have been unavoidable for Welsh people to absorb some of the ideas and concepts creeping like shadows over the border, particularly in light of the ‘campaign to bring first generation Puritan piety to Wales.’ (Though admittedly, Wales remained stubbornly resistant to Christian practices for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.)

With their protection spells and blessings, the church in Wales partook in practices that could be described as magic and witchcraft, and in Wales, there was a ‘strong medieval tradition of cursing by clerics.’ (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.56). ‘The reformed Church coexisted with a vigorous unreformed popular religion dominated by petitionary prayer (including the blessing and cursing inseparable from witchcraft beliefs), death rituals and respect for the saints,’ (A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, p.138).

In keeping with the religious beliefs in Wales, concerned with residual elements of Catholicism, petitionary prayer, blessings, pilgrimages and rituals, witchcraft in Wales didn’t conform to the concept of a devil-worshipping anti-religion seen elsewhere. Instead, it was grounded in an intrinsic belief in charming, cursing, soothsaying and magic, and the ability of these things to harm and to heal. Over the years, Gwen ferch Ellis had earned a reputation for both healing and harming, and was said to have avenged injuries.

Anti-witchcraft treatise

An anti-witchcraft treatise published at around the same time as Gwen’s conviction emphatically argued against the concept of ‘white’ witchcraft and healing magic. Though charmers were in greater demand in Wales than physicians, the text argues that remedies provided by cunning men and wise women were ungodly, harmful witchcraft. Dau Cymru yn Tarring reveals a school of thought about the collision of ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic which coloured Welsh perceptions of the supernatural and may well have played a part in Gwen’s conviction.

Hilary Bourdillon suggests that ‘it was not so much the type of healing being practiced by the wise-woman which laid her open to the accusations of witchcraft, but the fact that she was an unlicensed healer,’ (Bourdillon in Witches, Sluts, Feminists, p.40) However, there is evidence that, in Wales, many saw wise-men and wise-women as indispensable within their communities.

Gwen ferch Ellis’ story speaks to the nature of popular magic in late-sixteenth century Wales, and shows how a charmer and soothsayer could become redefined as a witch. Devastatingly, had Gwen confined her magic and charms to the villagers around her, she would likely have escaped the notice of the authorities, but the transgression of having allegedly cursed a nobleman sealed her fate, and brought her life to a tragic end at the gallows.

Mari Ellis Dunning is the author of Witsh, available to buy here.