In July 1901, at Forkhill petty sessions in County Armagh, a Catholic tenant farmer was fined for assaulting a fellow Catholic whom he believed was taking the butter from his cow by magical means. According to Sneddon and Fulton's study of witchcraft in the Irish press, the farmer was particularly aggrieved because he had paid substantial fees to cunning-folk to cure his cows.
The case is typical of the assaults that brought witchcraft belief before the magistrates in this period, where the accuser, not the suspected witch, usually ended up in court. The butter witch, said to draw the goodness from a neighbour's milk by charm, was a stock figure of rural Ireland.
It is a reminder that cunning-folk, fairy doctors and charms for the cow were still part of ordinary country life in South Armagh at the start of the 20th century.
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