Three centuries after Guernsey's courts were burning witches, the same Royal Court heard a witchcraft case in 1914. The complainant was a farmer's wife from the north of the island who had lost cattle in the autumn of 1913 and went looking for an explanation. Aimée Lake read teacups, interpreted dreams and sold protective packets. The accounts differ in detail. One version has Lake placing a curse on the woman and demanding £3 by the end of the month, on pain of death. The other describes packets bought for £3 10s. Both agree that when the authorities looked inside the charms, the ingredients were ordinary kitchen items: Poulson's cornflour, Paisley flour, brown starch, salt and baking powder.
She appeared on 28 January 1914 before the Bailiff, William Carey, and Mr G. E. Kinnersley. According to newspaper reports quoted by the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, she offered to repay the money and said people "visited her of their own free will and were normally satisfied with the results they got when she read their teacups." She was twenty-eight weeks pregnant and nearly collapsed when she was found guilty. The sentence was eight days in prison.
The case is often described as Guernsey's last witch trial, which is true in spirit if not strictly in law: the charges combined fortune-telling and fraud with the old language of witchcraft. It belongs on this map because it shows that the beliefs MacCulloch recorded in the 1870s, of cattle bewitched and cured by paid "désorceleurs", were still strong enough on the eve of the First World War to put a pregnant woman in the island's gaol.
Comments