Witch Bottles

If I were renovating an old house and a sealed seventeenth-century bottle fell out of the chimney, there was a time when curiosity would have got the better of me.

I have now researched witch bottles and would like to formally withdraw that position.

Archaeologists advise anyone who discovers a possible example to leave it where it is, if possible, photograph its position and resist the temptation to clean it or remove the stopper. The location is part of the evidence, and whatever remains inside may be even more important. Considering the contents can include human urine, hair, nail clippings, pins, needles and rusty nails, I feel this advice also has benefits outside archaeology.

What interested me most, however, was discovering that the familiar explanation for these bottles is slightly too neat. They are often described as charms hidden in houses to keep witches away, and some may have served a protective purpose. The surviving seventeenth-century written accounts tell a more specific story. Again and again, the bottle appears after somebody is already believed to have been bewitched. The person is ill, exhausted or suffering in a way that those around them cannot explain, and the bottle is prepared as a treatment intended to turn the harmful magic back upon whoever sent it.

That makes it less like a lucky charm and rather more like a prescription.

Admittedly, the prescription contains urine and nails, but medicine has had its phases.

THEY DID NOT CALL THEM WITCH BOTTLES

The name came much later.

Research into the surviving texts has found no early-modern use of the phrase witch bottle. The earliest known appearance of the term dates to an 1845 museum catalogue, long after the seventeenth-century period most closely associated with the practice. A contemporary phrase is much better.

In 1691, the New England minister Cotton Mather called it the urinary experiment.

There was no possibility that I was opening an entire shelf on old rituals and withholding that from you.

The wording is funny to us, but it also tells us something important about how the practice could be understood at the time. An “experiment” was not necessarily a laboratory procedure in the modern sense. It could mean a treatment known through use or experience even when its workings could not be fully explained.

Researchers have identified thirteen surviving early accounts of this remedy, nine from England and four from New England. All thirteen describe it in relation to healing or counteracting bewitchment rather than simply burying a bottle in advance in case a witch happened to turn up later. Around a hundred archaeological examples containing relevant ingredients were known when the written evidence was reassessed.

That changes the picture considerably.

Someone was suffering, somebody thought witchcraft might be responsible, and this was one of the things they could be advised to do about it.

FIRST, FIND AN ORDINARY BOTTLE

Many surviving examples are made from Bartmann stoneware, the heavy brown German jugs with a bearded face moulded around the neck.

They were produced around Frechen, near Cologne, and traded widely across early-modern Europe. They were not manufactured as magical equipment. They were domestic containers which might previously have held drink or another liquid before being given a second and much stranger job. Later English stoneware was used as well, and a smaller number of glass vessels have been identified as possible examples.

I like that detail because it makes the practice feel much more domestic.

There was no requirement to visit somebody selling specialist occult equipment. A household bottle could be emptied, repurposed and filled according to whatever version of the remedy was being followed.

Then came the patient.

NOW ADD THE PATIENT

The ingredient that appears most consistently in the written accounts is urine belonging to the person believed to have been bewitched.

Pins, needles and nails were commonly added, sometimes bent before they went into the bottle. Archaeological examples have also produced hair, nail clippings, thorns and other personal or sharp materials. MOLA describes urine with metal pins or nails as the most characteristic combination, although the contents vary considerably from bottle to bottle.

The urine was not there because seventeenth-century medicine had decided the whole thing was not unpleasant enough. The treatment belonged to a much wider world of sympathetic and so-called magnetic medicine, in which substances taken from a person's body could remain connected to them. In accounts of the urinary experiment, the bewitched person's urine was also understood to contain or carry something of the witch's harmful influence. What happened to the substance could therefore affect the person believed to have caused the illness.

The sharp objects intensified that retaliation. The bottle was not merely hiding the witchcraft somewhere safe. It could be intended to hurt whoever had sent it.

JOSEPH BLAGRAVE PROVIDED INSTRUCTIONS

In 1671, astrologer and physician Joseph Blagrave included the remedy in Astrological Practice of Physick, a book promising treatments for diseases and infirmities arising naturally or through sorcery and witchcraft.

His instructions were wonderfully direct. The patient's urine was to be sealed in a bottle with three nails, pins or needles and a little white salt, then kept warm. Blagrave believed that this would torment the witch and make urination extremely difficult. He even incorporated the position of the Moon into his explanation of when the treatment would work most powerfully.

There is quite a lot happening here. We have medicine, astrology, witchcraft, bodily fluids and supernatural retaliation sitting together in what was presented as practical healthcare.

The temptation is to divide all of this into boxes labelled medicine, magic and superstition, but seventeenth-century people did not always arrange the world that neatly. Blagrave did not publish his urinary experiment in a book of spooky household entertainment. He included it among methods for treating sick people.

That is why I think calling these objects charms on their own misses something. Someone could believe they were receiving medical treatment.

THEN JOSEPH GLANVILL GIVES US THE BIRD

Joseph Glanvill has already appeared in the Archive because he wrote about the Drummer of Tedworth, and apparently, he has decided to follow us onto another shelf.

In Saducismus Triumphatus, published in 1681, Glanvill included an account connected with William Brearly, formerly of Christ's College, Cambridge, who had lodged with a family in Suffolk. The woman of the house had been ill for a long time and was said to be troubled by something shaped like a bird which fluttered close to her face and prevented her from resting properly.

An older travelling man heard about her condition and announced that the bird was a “dead spright”. He advised the woman's husband to put her urine into a bottle with pins, needles and nails, cork it tightly and heat it by the fire.

This went about as well as you might expect from the phrase heat a tightly corked bottle of urine and metal beside the fire.

As the bottle warmed, it began to move. The husband tried to hold the cork down with a fire shovel, but the stopper eventually flew out, and the contents erupted with a noise Glanvill compared to a pistol. Hot urine, pins, needles and nails went with it, while the unfortunate woman remained unwell.

The travelling man returned and concluded that the first attempt had been too easily defeated. His second instruction was to prepare the bottle again but bury it in the earth rather than heating it.

According to Glanvill's story, the woman recovered. Sometime afterwards, another woman arrived at the house in distress and accused the family of killing her husband. The dying man had supposedly confessed that he was the wizard responsible for the original bewitchment and that the buried remedy had killed him.

I am not offering this as evidence that a bottle of urine killed a wizard.

What the story gives us is much more useful. It shows what the people repeating the account believed the treatment was supposed to do. The harmful magic was connected to the sufferer, the bottle acted upon that connection, and the affliction was returned to its alleged source.

It was counter-magic used as medicine.

ARCHAEOLOGY FOUND THE BOTTLES

The written accounts would be interesting enough on their own, but people have also found the objects.

More than a hundred potential examples were known when MOLA launched its major research project into the practice. They have been recovered from houses, inns, colleges and other buildings, as well as archaeological sites, churchyards, ditches and riverbanks. Inside buildings they appear with striking frequency in three places: beneath floors, under thresholds and around hearths or chimneys.

Those locations have encouraged the idea that the bottles were protective charms placed at vulnerable points in a house, particularly doorways and hearths. That interpretation may be correct for some finds. The difficulty is that the written evidence describes buried or heated bottles as treatments for people who were already believed to be suffering from witchcraft.

A bottle beneath a hearth could therefore be protecting a house, treating somebody inside it, or serving a purpose that we can no longer reconstruct.

The object does not come with instructions attached, that is why context matters so much.

THE HOLYWELL BOTTLE WAS BURIED WITH CARE

A bottle found during archaeological work near Shoreditch in London gives us a particularly good example.

The stoneware vessel dated from roughly 1670 to 1710 and had been deliberately buried beneath the floor of an eighteenth-century building. Someone had lifted the floor tiles, dug a substantial hole near a doorway in the basement or latrine area, placed the bottle upright inside it, filled the hole and re-laid the tiles. Archaeologists could see from the altered alignment that the floor had been disturbed.

Inside the damaged vessel were around sixty fine bent copper-alloy pins, rusty nails and a small piece of material that may have been wood or bone.

Whatever the person who buried it believed, this was not rubbish accidentally swept under the floor. They made a hole for it, then they put it there deliberately. It was covered again, and that physical act is part of the evidence.

THERE IS ONE IN CAMBRIDGE WITH A NOTE

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge holds a seventeenth-century Bartmann jug from Burwell, Cambridgeshire.

The jug was found built into the corner of a chimney in an old house. A surviving handwritten label records that it came from “under or beside fire hearth” and had contained miscellaneous pieces of iron. Modern analysis dates the vessel to the mid-to-late seventeenth century and considers both the contents and its place of concealment consistent with reuse as a witch bottle.

I love finds like this because the archaeology is not relying on somebody remembering what their grandmother once told them about an object in the attic.

We know where the bottle was found. We know it had contained iron. We know it began life as an ordinary domestic jug, and at some point, somebody put it beside a hearth and built it into the house. What we do not know is their name or who they were trying to help.

WHICH MAKES RENOVATING OLD HOUSES MORE INTERESTING

These objects survive partly because they were meant to disappear.

A bottle could remain beneath a floor or inside a chimney while generations of owners lived above it without knowing it was there. Its purpose could be forgotten within a family long before the building itself disappeared.

Then somebody renovates the fireplace three hundred years later and a brown stoneware jug falls out. This is also why archaeologists would rather people did not immediately open them. MOLA asks finders to leave suspected examples in place where possible, photograph the position, avoid cleaning them and leave any cork or stopper intact. Once a vessel has been removed from its original setting or emptied, information that survived for centuries can disappear in minutes.

I now know enough to obey those instructions. I would, however, be obeying them from several feet away.

THIS WAS PART OF HEALTHCARE

This is the part of the subject I find most interesting.

The people using these remedies inhabited a world in which domestic medicine, religion, astrology, folk belief and practices that we would now describe as magic could overlap. Illness did not always have one category of explanation, and treatment did not need to belong neatly to one professional system.

Most healthcare still happened in and around the home. Family members, neighbours and local practitioners passed treatments between one another, and remedies could be written like recipes: take these ingredients, perform these actions and expect this result.

The urinary experiment fitted into that environment surprisingly well.

Researcher Ann-Sophie Thwaite found that every surviving early text describing the remedy presents it as a form of healing. The authors did not all approve of it, and some religious writers condemned the practice precisely because they believed using counter-magic was spiritually dangerous. The important point is that the people discussing it understood that somebody was trying to cure an afflicted person.

That is a much more interesting picture than dismissing the bottle as something frightened people buried because they were superstitious. They thought they were doing something useful.

THE MEANING DID NOT STAY THE SAME

Over time, bottle traditions broadened and changed. Some later objects are better understood as protection against harmful forces, while others appear to belong to completely different magical traditions. Researchers are now much more cautious about assuming that every concealed bottle served an identical purpose simply because it was found in an old building. MOLA's project deliberately allows for both ritual protection and the “prepared cure” documented in the seventeenth-century texts.

Then there is the Pitt Rivers Museum bottle.

It is a small, silvered glass flask collected near Hove in Sussex in 1915 by archaeologist and folklorist Margaret Murray. The woman from whom it was obtained said that the bottle contained a witch and warned that opening it would cause “a peck o' trouble”. It remains sealed.

The museum itself points out that this is not the same tradition as the early-modern urinary experiment. It belongs to a much later piece of English folklore in which the witch herself was imagined as confined inside the bottle.

I appreciate the scholarly distinction. I also think the museum should continue not opening these things - there is no need to test everything.

WHAT THE BOTTLES LEAVE BEHIND

Rituals are often difficult to recover because actions disappear. A person says words, performs a gesture, leaves something at a doorway or throws something into water, and unless somebody records what happened, the moment is gone.

Witch bottles sometimes leave us the action in physical form.

Someone collected a patient's urine. They found nails, pins or needles and added them. They sealed the vessel, heated it, buried it beneath a floor or placed it beside the hearth. In some cases, they arranged the house around it and left it where nobody was meant to see it again.

That secrecy matters to me.

These objects were not necessarily displayed for neighbours or visitors. The person making one did not need an audience. Some bottles remained hidden so successfully that the families living above them forgot they were there.

Three centuries later, we can disagree completely with the explanation behind the remedy while still recognising the situation that produced it.

Somebody was ill or something frightening was happening. The people around them did not know how to make it stop, then somebody offered them a treatment.

Find a bottle.

Use something belonging to the patient.

Add the pins and nails.

Seal it.

Put it somewhere it can do its work.

The explanation belongs to another world. The impulse behind it does not feel very distant at all, and if one ever falls out of my chimney, I am taking a photograph, calling an archaeologist and leaving the urinary experiment exactly where I found it.