C. F. Dunn is the author of The Tarnished Crown Series: Wars of the Roses historical fiction set in Medieval Europe.
“Double, double toil and trouble” — Shakespeare’s famous refrain from Macbeth — remains one of the most recognisable lines in Western literature. When it was first performed in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare was drawing on a long tradition of folklore and belief that his audience would have immediately understood. Even if some of the finer details escaped them, they knew the framework: witchcraft, prophecy, and the unsettling idea that unseen forces might determine human fate.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and many still imagine witches as medieval figures — women ducked, pricked, and burned amid cries of superstition. In truth, the great witch hunts of Europe belong not to the Middle Ages but to the Early Modern period, from the sixteenth century onwards. From a medieval perspective, witchcraft as we now think of it was relatively uncommon. The frenzied persecutions of later centuries would have seemed alien to most people of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.
In fifteenth-century English law there was no specific statute making witchcraft a capital offence. The Church regarded it largely as a form of heresy — a spiritual error, not a criminal conspiracy. It was not until the Witchcraft Act of 1542 that England paved the way to criminalise witchcraft as punishable by death. Before then, most cases resulted only in fines, penance, or public admonition.
The meaning of ‘witchcraft’ in the Middle Ages also differed from the later concept. The boundary between magic and medicine was fluid. Healing practices incorporated charms, incantations, astrological timing, and a range of -mancies — divination by fire (pyromancy), by names (onomancy), or by reflections in mirrors or water (scrying). Medieval healers drew on classical learning, Christian devotion, and folk wisdom alike. A prayer could be as powerful as a potion, an amulet as trusted as a relic.
This was not sorcery in the later, sinister sense, but an expression of a worldview in which the divine and natural worlds were deeply intertwined. The medieval cosmos was one in which the supernatural existed alongside the physical — a realm of possibilities where God, angels, and spirits could all play a part in human health and fate.
By the later Middle Ages, however, witchcraft and divination began to intersect with politics. When accusations touched those close to the throne, the implications became far more serious. The Church might have seen such practices as misguided or at worst, heresy; the state viewed them as potentially treasonous.
Terminology was crucial. ‘Witchcraft’ often implied healing or protection and was tolerated to a degree. But necromancy—a form of divinationthat involved summoning the dead to foretell the future — crossed a dangerous line. When divination involved predicting the monarch’s death, it fell under the crime of “compassing or imagining the death of the king”, one of the key clauses of Edward III’s Treason Act of 1352. Necromancy became not only a spiritual threat but a political weapon.
An infamous example is that of Eleanor de Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester. Accused in 1441 of “treasonable necromancy” for attempting to divine the death of Henry VI, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Her alleged accomplice, Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye, was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Eleanor’s real offence, however, was more political than supernatural: she denied the allegations of necromancy and treason, but admitted to having sought potions to help her conceive a child with her husband, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, whose proximity to the line of succession made him many enemies.
Eleanor’s case was not unique. Similar accusations were levelled against Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield in the early fourteenth century, and later against Jacquetta of Luxembourg and her daughter Elizabeth Woodville, queen to Edward IV. Each was a figure of power and influence, close to the throne and a focus for political attack. When an enemy could not be defeated in open conflict, an accusation of sorcery could prove equally effective and more difficult to defend.
In 1477, the Oxford scholar John Stacy, a man with previous form and known as a magnus necromanticus (great sorcerer) and astrologer of repute, was accused of “imagining the king’s death by necromancy.” Under torture he implicated Thomas Burdet, a member of the household of George, Duke of Clarence, brother to King Edward IV. It was perhaps no coincidence Burdet was also a main suspect in the penning and deployment of seditious writings that questioned Edward IV’s legitimacy and his right to rule — as well as that of his heir.
The oft quoted, but unsubstantiated Prophecy of G has also been linked with subversive writings supposedly foretelling that Edward IV’s rule would be followed by someone with a name beginning with G. As Edward’s son and heir was another Edward, the prediction in itself was treasonable.
It might have been an unfortunate coincidence for the hapless duke that his name was George, or perhaps convenient for those who would malign him before — or after — his death. Whether the Prophecy of G was merely apocryphal, the reference to it in later writings nonetheless reflected a common perception that the power of divination could — and did — exist.
When Clarence publicly defended Burdet and questioned the justice of his trial, he drew attention to himself. His criticism of royal authority and his association with alleged necromancers were enough to throw his loyalty to the Crown into question. Nor did Clarence hold back from accusing Edward of using the black arts to “poison his Subgettes, suche as hym pleased”.
Were accusations of witchcraft and necromancy simply cynical tools to eliminate rivals? At times, perhaps, yet they also reflected genuine belief. When Henry VI heard predictions of his own death, he did not dismiss them as nonsense or political machinations; he ordered his astrologers to investigate. To medieval minds, the natural and supernatural were interwoven. The heavens, the body, and the soul were all thought to lie under divine influence — and, by extension, vulnerable to darker forces.
The fear of the dark arts in late medieval England was not born of ignorance but of imagination — the conviction that unseen powers could alter the course of events. To “imagine the king’s death” through necromancy was not simply treasonous speech; it was a symbolic act that might disturb the divinely ordered world. The real danger from divination in the later Middle Ages was not the village healer or the cunning woman, but the whisper of sorcery at the heart of the royal court.
Notes
The question of magic and politics in England during the later medieval period challenges my ability to encapsulate such a myriad and vast subject in so short a blog. For the curious, there are many useful works available, including the few listed below:
Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages by Hilary M. Carey, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992
‘Medieval necromancy, the art of controlling demons’ by Sebastià Giralt. View via Sciencia.cat: https://www.sciencia.cat/temes/medieval-necromancy-art-controlling-demons
Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer, Cambridge University Press, 2021
‘Thomas Burdet of Arrow, MP for Warwickshire in 1455, and the execution of George, duke of Clarence’ by Simon Payling: https://historyofparliament.com/2022/08/02/thomas-burdet/
‘Witch Hunts in Medieval England: The Trial of Walter Langton’ by Kathryn Walton: https://www.medievalists.net/2021/03/witch-hunts-medieval-england/
Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England by Francis Young, Bloomsbury, 2020
