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Witches and Midwifes: The story of Agnes Sampson

An analytical essay about the connection between witches and midwives with a focus on the life and trial of Agnes Sampson.

Published onApr 25, 2023
Witches and Midwifes: The story of Agnes Sampson
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Understanding why witches were connected to healing, especially the practice of midwifery, is an important question within the broader topics of witchcraft and understanding gender roles in early modern Europe. During the witch craze of the early modern period, there was a correlation between how people viewed midwives and their healing practices as closely related to witches and witchcraft. In my paper, I will seek to understand why there was such a correlation and how that correlation related to how the role of women in society, specifically as healers outside the household, was changing. I will be building upon the other author’s work on witch trials, using both primary and secondary sources to understand better how women healers, specifically midwives, were perceived by the general public. As a guide to understanding the questions asked, I will focus on the trial and execution of Agnes Sampson.

Life of Agnes Sampson

A supposed drawing of Agnes Sampson as a witch. From Clan Carruthers

Agnes Sampson was a woman who lived in Scotland during the early modern period. Very little is known about her life other than her accusations of being a witch, which she was convicted for and executed in 1591 along with other women, Eupham M’Calyean and Barbara Napier .1 What is known about Agnes Sampson is that she was a midwife and someone who was known for being able to help the sick in the town.2 Almost nothing is written about her family, only that she did have some kids and that the devil, only began to appear to her after her husband died.3 The devil in early modern Scotland was viewed as “an external figure that Convinced morally weak people (mostly women) to renounce their baptisms, enter into a domestic pact, and commit atrocious crimes.”4 The fear of the devil and its manifestation of the unknown and pure evil is a defining aspect of the trial and eventual execution of Agnes Sampson. It is noted that “Sampson was a grave, matron-like woman.”5 Focusing on how she acted and the negative stereotypes of women, specifically older women, is important to understanding how the witch trials operated towards women. To understand these negative stereotypes, Martin Luther states in the first sentence of his table talk, “What Satan is not able to accomplish by himself he brings about by means of evil old women.”6 Linking old women like Agnes Sampson to the devil and witchcraft, in the popular imagination, dooms all women like Sampson and highlights how her fate was sealed as soon as she was accused. The other key aspect of the trial of Agnes Sampson is “while Napier and M'Calyean belonged to the upper class of society.”7 Highlighting how the two other women tried at the same time as Agnes Sampson were of a higher class indicates the classism also present during the witch trials. The poorer woman was saddled with most of the blame, while the richer women were given fewer and slightly less serious charges, and Napier was able to escape the accusation with her life.8

Trial and Confession of Agnes Sampson

The trial of Agnes Sampson is important because not only was it documented heavily, with her confession fully written down, but also because it involved the king. King James VI oversaw not only the trial of Agnes Sampson but the other accused witches as well. James was interested in ensuring that the accused witches were dealt with accordingly. Robert Chambers states in his book Domestic Annals of Scotland, “and, indeed, there can be little doubt that what he now learned fonned the groundwork of his subsequent work on Demonology.”9 The king’s focus on witchcraft demonstrates the state’s involvement in understanding and dealing with witchcraft. The state’s role in hunting witches indicates that there was a wider fear of witchcraft other than just in spiritual terms. It indicates how gender roles were changing and that rulers felt they faced an existential threat. This idea is highlighted by how Agnes Sampson was also accused of using the weather to thwart the queen of Scotland from arriving in Scotland. By blaming witches, the king can give the people a place to put their fears and worries onto. And the women accused of being witches happened to be the “grave and matron-like women” who also happened to be the same people that worked closely with children and the sick.

The confession of Agnes Sampson. From The National Achieves UK (Catalogue ref: SP 52/47 f. 14i).

Agnes Sampson’s confession highlights several interesting aspects of the witch trial process. Perhaps the most interesting part of the confession is how Sampson views the devil. Sampson states she sees him as “that the devill appeirit unto her somtyme like ane blakman, somtyme like ane dog, and somtyme like ane turse or ruk of hay.”10 Describing the devil as a black man shows the racialization that was beginning to happen in early modern Europe. As Europeans conquered new land and brought back enslaved peoples, they created racialized hierarchies with them at the top. With white people becoming the best racial group, it makes sense that they would be viewed as closest to God. By contrast, people who are not white must also be closer to the devil. This idea of the devil being black was evident in the American colonies during this period by Puritian figurines. 11Agnes Sampson plays into this racialization and demonstrates how pervasive it became so soon into the colonization period.

Another fascinating aspect of Agnes Sampson’s confession is her confessing to using her witchcraft to help women while she was a midwife. Sampson states, “sche did put inchantit powder or muilds maid of the dryit joints of deid bodeis in ane clout under som wemens bed feit to releive them of the dolour of their birth.”12 The connection between midwifery and witchcraft is most evident in this part of her confession. Sampson is using parts of dead bodies and enchanting them to help women through the pain of childbirth. Compared to the science used by Isabel Grasscoft, a midwife a century after Sampson in England, there is much more of a mystery involved in Sampson’s midwifery.13 This mystery is what the church and state feared. They did not accept that midwives could help pregnant women, and if the childbirth was unsuccessful and either the child or mother died, the midwife was seen as at fault.

In her confessions, Agnes Sampson states that the Devil only began to appear to her after her husband died.14 Sampson states in her confession about how the devil convinced her to become a witch:

bidding her be of gude cheir and leive of that cair for her children, promising that gif sche wald serve him sche nor they sould lack nothing. And being movit with her povertie and his fair promisis of riches and revenge of her ennemies, tuik him for her maister and renunceit Christ.15

The fear of poverty for her children and herself and the “revenge of her enemies” explain why Sampson would be seen as a witch. As a widow with children, unable to afford to feed them and having enemies would be an easy person to demonize by her neighbors, especially if a child died in her care as a midwife that the community thought could have been saved.

The Wider World of Witchcraft

William Shakespeare writes in Macbeth Act 4 Scene 1, “Finger of birth-strangled babe Ditch-deliver'd by a drab.”16 The scene is one in which the witches are making a potion to continue to torment the king. By talking about the finger of a dead baby, Shakespeare invokes the idea of a midwife who has turned into a witch and is using the baby she has killed for her cauldron. The play’s setting in Scotland during the time of King James VI shows how much of society at the time revolved around witchcraft and the hysteria it invoked. As evident in Shakespeare’s play, the all-encompassing fear of witches helps highlight the connection between witches and midwives. There was no need to explain to the audience that the witches were midwives. Instead, it is assumed the audience knows this. Shakespeare is stereotyping the witches into jobs many in his audience already believed they worked in. So it is no wonder why Agnes Sampson was singled out as a ring leader of the witches. Sampson fit all of the stereotypes of witches developed during this period by writers like Shakespeare, who were helping to perpetuate them.

To better understand the connection between midwifery and witchcraft is to understand the role of a midwife in the early modern period. In Samuel Thomas’ essay “Early Modern Midwifery: Splitting the Profession, Connecting the History,” he highlights the spectrum of midwives in the era.17 Thomas describes how some midwives got licenses to perform their practice, which highlights how there was a distinctive medical part of the profession but also an equal if not more so important social aspect of the profession.18 The societal role of midwifery in this period is crucial to understanding how they became accused as witches. During the period after the brunt of the witch trials in the later 1600s and early 1700s, there was a push to professionalize midwifery. To get a license to become a midwife, a woman had to have a reference from the local population. An example of this is Isabel Grasscoft had a letter written that stated, “ [she] is a woman well skilled & knowing in the art of Midwifery & duly qualified for her science & industry to take upon her the office of a midwife . . .”19 The use of the word “science” in their letter shows the profession’s change from one of unknown to one of science. The move toward science highlights the end of finding midwives as witches and more akin to that of nurses and other healers. Glasscoft work after the Salem witch trials and at the end of the wider witch trials that plagued Europe helped highlight how the times changed. A growing sense of professionalism took root in the British Isles at the turn of the century. No longer was science distrusted and feared but instead accepted and seen as new knowledge.20 As The growing societal change that is often referred to as the Enlightenment or the Scientific Revolutions only a short generation after the execution of Agnes Sampson for witchcraft indicates a societal shift that catches glimpses of the old connection between witches and midwives that while no longer part of legal or religious customs but still apart of the popular imagination.

A drawing of a group of witches communing with the devil. From the Wellcome Library (The history of witches and wizards: giving a true account of all their tryals in England, Scotland, Swedeland, France, and New England; with their confession and condemnation)

Conclusion

There is a connection between midwifery and people that were seen as witches. During the height of the witch trials, there was a fear that some midwives were communing with the devil and taking away their children for nefarious purposes. The story of Agnes Sampson is a sad story of an accused witch whose only crime was being a poor widow with kids. Sampson’s story does show how witches were tried and that their sentences were already predetermined. Her story is not uncommon for those accused of witchcraft and is part of a larger stereotype of witches created during the witchhunts. These stereotypes of witches being widows or divorced older women who practice healing arts, most notably midwifery, continue into the modern day and show how the engendering of women within cultural stereotypes still haunts our modern storytelling and is linked to a past that must be broken.

Works Cited

Edward J. Blum. “Was Jesus a White Man and the Devil Black?” Aeon, April 8, 2013. https://aeon.co/essays/was-jesus-a-white-man-and-the-devil-black.

Michelle Brock. “Experiencing Satan in Early Modern Scotland.” Critical Survey 23, no. 2 (2011): 26–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41556415.

"James VI: February 1591," in Calendar of State Papers, Scotland: Volume 10, 1589-1593, ed. William K. Boyd and Henry W. Meikle (Edinburgh: His Majesty's General Register House, 1936), 456-480. British History Online, accessed April 11, 2023, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/scotland/vol10/pp456-480.

Martin Luther, “Table Talks,” (WA TR II, no. 1429,), 98.

Robert Chambers. “Reign of James VI: 1585-90.” In Domestic Annals of Scotland, from the Reformation to the Revolution, 214–16. Edinburgh, Scotland: W. & R. Chambers, 1858.

William Shakespeare. Macbeth” in the Shakespeare Navigators. Ed. Philip Weller. Shakespeare Navigators, n.d. https://shakespeare-navigators.com/macbeth/T41.html

Samuel S Thomas. “EARLY MODERN MIDWIFERY: SPLITTING THE PROFESSION, CONNECTING THE HISTORY.” Journal of Social History 43, no. 1 (2009): 125. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685350.

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