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St Andrew's cross carved in fireplace to prevent witches from entering a house, displayed in Ryedale Folk Museum

Witch posts are an architectural feature of houses from rural north Yorkshire. They are wooden posts, found near a house's fireplace and decorated with carvings, particularly a St. Andrew's cross. According to Yorkshire folklore, they protect a house from witches.

Description

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Witch posts are wooden posts, originally found on the inglenook near a house's fireplace.[1] Twenty examples are known, with all but one coming from the North York Moors; the exception is from Rawtenstall in Lancashire.[2] The posts were apparently erected in the second half of the 17th century. A lintel from a farmhouse in Glaisdale, apparently made from a repurposed witch post, has the date 1664 carved into it; the Lancashire witch post is inscribed 1691.[3]

Witch posts are decorated with carvings, including a St. Andrew's cross at the top of the post.[4] They are often carved with a number of horizontal lines.[5] An example from Glaisdale has a flower motif between two St. Andrew's crosses, and is inscribed with the initials EPIB; one originally from Scarborough and now in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has heart motifs.[6] Though often said to be made of rowan wood, where they have been checked they have been found to be made of oak, like other timbers in the house.[7] The posts are often re-used as lintels.[4]

There are witch posts in the collections of the Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole and Whitby Museum, both in North Yorkshire, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.[2]

Function

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Witch posts are commonly believed to have had a protective function against witches.[8] Mary Nattrass, one of the first to research witch posts, interviewed a stonemason from Egton in the North York Moors who said that they prevented a witch from travelling through the house and out up the chimney, and thus gaining power over it.[9] Carved posts with a similar function are known in Wales, where phallic or hermaphroditic figures are carved on either side of a doorway,[4][7] and the Netherlands, where posts called steipelteken carved with saltires are known starting in the sixteenth century.[10]

This apotropaic interpretation of witch posts has more recently been questioned. The historian of witchcraft Owen Davies describes it as "riddled with problems".[7] Nineteenth-century books on Yorkshire folklore do not mention witch posts. The first known use of the term was by John Christopher Atkinson, the vicar of Danby, who donated a witch post to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1893; in his letter accompanying the post he described it as "the (assumed) witch post ... so far there is no actual evidence of its original intention".[7][4]

Rather than protection against witches, Peter Walker has suggested that the posts were intended to identify the household as Catholic recusants who had hosted the priest Nicholas Postgate.[4] Others have doubted that recusants would want to advertise their illicit behaviour with witch posts, which would have been both very obvious to any visitor to the house and semi-permanent where other examples of recusant identifying marks are both more temporary and more easily deniable.[8][11] Christiane Kroebel alternatively proposes that the carvings were entirely ornamental.[12]

References

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  1. ↑ Angus 2018, p. 57.
  2. 1 2 Angus 2018, n. 1.
  3. ↑ Nattrass 1962, pp. 263–266.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Kroebel 2016, p. 56.
  5. ↑ Hayes & Rutter 1972, p. 87.
  6. ↑ Hayes & Rutter 1972, pp. 93, 95.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Davies 2015.
  8. 1 2 Hoggard 2019, ch. 7.
  9. ↑ Nattrass 1962, p. 256.
  10. ↑ Angus 2018, p. 68.
  11. ↑ Angus 2018, pp. 68–69.
  12. ↑ Kroebel 2016, p. 57.

Works cited

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  • Angus, Bill (2 January 2018). "The Apotropaic "Witch posts" of Early Modern Yorkshire: A Contextualization". Material Religion. 14 (1): 55–82. doi:10.1080/17432200.2017.1418477.
  • Davies, Owen (2015). "The Material Culture of Post-Medieval Domestic Magic in Europe: Evidence, Comparisons, and Interpretations". In Boschung, Dietrich; Bremmer, Jan (eds.). The Materiality of Magic. William Fink. pp. 379–421.
  • Hayes, R. H.; Rutter, J. G. (1972). Cruck-framed Buildings in Ryedale and Eskdale. Scarborough: Scarborough and District Archaeological Society.
  • Hoggard, Brian (2019). Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. La Rochelle: Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781836959687.
  • Kroebel, Christiane (2016). "The Whitby Museum Witch Post: a Reconsideration". Forum: The Journal of Council for British Archaeology Yorkshire. 5: 55–58.
  • Nattrass, Mary (1962). "Witch Posts". Gwerin: A Half-Yearly Journal of Folk Life. 3 (5): 254–267.

Further reading

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  • Ford, Joseph. 1953. Some reminiscences and folk lore of Danby Parish and district. Whitby: Horne & Son.
  • Nattrass, Mary. 1956. "Posts and Early Dwellings in Cleveland". Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 39 pp.136–146.
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