The Witch
It was known as The Common. A piece of land like any other you might think, but to me, it was my world. Each stone, each dip, each tree in the woods, each riffle in the stream, each blade of grass and haw-berry was a star in my universe, and that is where my mind drifts now as my body is scraped and torn, just as the plough tears through the skin of the earth.
I hear the moans of other women in the cells next to mine. The rawness of their voices are swallowed by the hard walls. I look at my hands, my body, and they are unrecognisable to me, filthy, bloody, broken. I begin to welcome the noose that awaits me tomorrow, along with the four other women trapped here, enclosed in these walls, these walls that have seen horror and blood and breaking. This body is not mine, my body was strong and free, it was fair and I remember the feel of it as I worked with my godsipps, my chosen family of women.
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As a child I would help my mother on The Common, gathering firewood from the dappled woods and washing the clothes in the stream, icy cool even in summer, herons stalking its banks and kingfishers dipping and swooping over the flow. There were always many people around on The Common, with many women, talking, laughing and working. I grew up with the other daughters of The Common, blissful in my little world, and then he caught my eye.
We married one fine afternoon in May, the sun shining, the hawthorn blossoming at the edge of the woods, a wreath upon my head. My godsipps were with me, as we were always for each other. I was a beautiful bride, I could see it in his hazel eyes, in the joy that made him so handsome. Everyone came to The Common for our wedding celebrations, and there was dancing, singing and drinking through the night, an exuberant celebration of life and love woven with the mournful cry of the owl and feral howl of the wolf. I felt as fertile and beautiful as the earth itself that night, a May Queen adorned with blooms and endless possibilities.
I took my place as his wife on The Common. He would fish and coppice, while I gathered the gifts of the earth to feed us and keep us warm. The summer months were abundant, and the winter saw us sharing whatever we had. We both took care of the pigs, watching them snuffle up the acorns and beechnuts in autumn, a simple happiness in sharing a life with many beings. We didn’t have much, but we were content. The Common was our world, our universe, and whatever we couldn’t pay for, we would receive from the body of The Common.
It was a joy to be out on the land, under the sky, by the water every day. I worked with the other women on the common, my friends, my sisters, my mother, my aunts. We could feel the changes of the seasons in our blood and bones. I knew each bird by its call, and there was a robin that would come to sit on my shoulder when I took time to sit against my favourite old oak tree. I could find community and solitude on the common, solemnity or laughter, whatever my heart desired. We knew all the plants to use as medicines, and we took care of each other.
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I’m pulled from my reverie by the creaking of hinges, causing me to shudder involuntarily. I use one hand to hold up my torn bodice, my old breasts streaked with blood and muck. There was no water to drink, never mind clean myself, and no-one to mend my dress, no needle and thread to weave some dignity around myself. He stands there, a sick, hungry look on his face. His eyes gleam a dull iron-grey, his fingers playing with the ugly cross around his neck. I wonder if he wishes he could crucify us, instead of just hanging us. My empty stomach heaves at the thought of his hard, narrow, probing fingers on me, the revolting pleasure creeping across his face as he finds a way inside me, inside my mind, under my skin. His skin is clean, his shirt pure white. He is evil. He walks towards me purposefully, a smile on his over-ripe lips. The moon shines through the bars, full and silver, which takes me to a place inside, to a place not even he can reach.
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The moon ruled our lives, the cycles telling us when to plant, to harvest, to hunt, to dance and make merry. The moon allowed us to keep track of the mysterious cycles of blood and new life inside ourselves, so that those of us that didn’t wish for a babe could keep her blood running. The full moon was a chance for us women, me and my godsipps, to gather on the common. Around a fire, we would laugh, cry, drink, dance, sing and tell stories. It was freedom and power and pulsing life. But that didn’t stop the tremors of disquiet that started to ripple through us as the world around us changed.
News came through the tinkers and the travelling merchants that stopped by The Common. Other commons were disappearing, swallowed by ravenously rich men, commoners excommunicated from their world. They put up fences while the people slept, in the deep of night when not even the foxes were awake to see. A new day arrived and worlds had fallen away beneath ditch and hedge, like a disease spreading across the body, rotting it, stealing pieces away. We usually gathered on The Common every day anyway, it’s true, but now we gathered with more purpose, with a desire for the comfort of our place and our people around us, a mutual assurance that it wouldn’t happen to us, to our world.
Preachers came. There had been some occasionally, they were generally good for a laugh if crazy, or could be politely nodded to until they went away if not. We had our own priest on The Common, and he was good enough for us. A decent sort, though with a tendency to get a little handsy if he’d had too much to drink. But then the preachers started to come by more often, spewing hate and vitriol, a poison that seeped into the earth beneath our feet. They despised women, they despised the poor. And what was The Common but that?
We continued to meet, always, celebrating ourselves and the earth that fed us, clothed us, doctored us. The hate would not separate us from each other, and from our world. We stood strong together, and they hated us for it. We were the beating heart of the common, the strands that wove our community together. But they wanted the land, and they wanted us apart.
Then one morning, it happened. We awoke to find fences laid over The Common, an infection that had flared badly overnight, tendrils seeking fresh flesh. I saw the fence running up to the marshy corners and around the edge of the woods, grazing the apple tree where my husband had first touched my arm, then skirting the bend in the stream where I had dived in one snowy morning as a child for a dare, then ended up in bed with a chill for a month. I saw our pigs in the distance on the field, unreachable now, and then across to more fencing. On the other side stood one of my godsipps, her face just a smudge, yet I could feel the shock and pain and grief roll off her as clearly as if she were gripping my arm and whispering furiously in my ear.
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He won’t let me be, this man of the cloth. Ropes bind me to the chair, binding my body, ditches pressed into wrists and ankles. The pain and humiliation is too insistent, the screams of the other women too exposed and brutal. I find tears running down between my breasts, a fresh stream washing away all before it. He wants me to confess. I have refused him every step of the way. Even with all of this, what could he do to me that hasn’t already been done? I have already had everything taken away from me. But no, I refuse to give him what he wants, I am not a witch. He says that I am evil, that I am in league with the devil, I must be tamed. What is left to tame? This broken heart? This broken body? But my spirit remains my own. He wants that too.
He’s broken some of the other women, thinking that if they confess and give him what he wants, let him extract what he desires, then perhaps he will leave them something of themselves to hold onto. But I know the heart of man, and when he gets a taste, he will only take more and more, until everything is gone. It is a small thing, the defiance of an old woman and her bent and crumbling body, but that is what I have left, and he won’t take it from me.
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We fought back then too. My husband, my godsipps, all the men and women and children of The Common, we tore down their fences, filled in their ditches, ripped up their hedges, their lines of enclosure laid across the body of our world. It was exhilarating and painful, tearing off a bandage, exposing the tender skin beneath. Our world was scarred, but she was free again.
It didn’t last for long though. Soldiers came, and killed. They killed my husband and many others, and enclosed The Common again. We laid our dead and our hope to rest, filling the little churchyard, on a midsummer day as bleak as winter. No tears would fall though, I was hollowed out. My heart lay dead in the cold earth, and my soul was beyond reach, woven into the trees, the stream and the field of The Common, paradise lost.
I stayed in our little cottage. Where else would I go? I tried to work wherever I could, but I couldn’t earn enough coin to pay rent and feed myself. My godsipps came and gave me what they could, but they were hardly better themselves. It was lonely, so desperately lonely, shut off from The Common. Our festivities through the year were muted, and in the long, icy winter I became sick. I didn’t have enough firewood, and I was so hungry, it felt as if my body were consuming itself. I started to beg neighbours for a few sticks of wood, a crust of bread. Swallowing my pride since I had nothing else to swallow, I found a way to survive.
The preachers came more and more often then in those dire days, their bile and hate grew more and more. They told us that women were sinners, that we were dangerous, lascivious, immoral creatures. I saw the way they looked at the girls and younger women, eyes like black holes, waiting to be fed.
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I see the same eyes on him. Cruel, pitiless, and endlessly hungry. His eyes on my old body are almost worse than his fingers. He pokes me again with his iron spike, provoking a cry from me, against my will. A smile crosses his face, hard and unyielding, his full, sensual lips disgust me. A thin trickle of blood joins the other tracks on my arms, but just a trickle. I feel empty, drained, just as they drained the little marshy corner of The Common by the beaver dam, hunting and killing them too. I remember the bitterns that would stop by there, so long ago. I wonder what happened to them?
I am tired, so tired now, as if the soil of my heart is depleted, all the goodness harvested and taken away. I can see the light in his eyes and he sees my strength fade. He pushes down on my wrist, making the rope bite deep, but I summon my failing energy and stop from crying out. The forge-flames flare in his eyes, a bitter rage that burns inside him, threatening to burn us all. I hear the piteous cries of the other women, cries like he has wrung from me, and I remember those voices laughing, so long ago.
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The changes were slow, but I witnessed them. Our community fell apart without The Common. The men were angry, disempowered, impotent. The Church started pushing its way into our lives more and more. Our priest disappeared to be replaced by a hard, cruel man, who would spit with fury at the loose morals of women, daring to leave the house, daring to speak, daring to choose what they would do with their bodies, and how, and when. The younger men listened, as well as the bitter older men, and slowly, slowly, things changed.
Godsipp became gossip, a bad word. Instead of being sisters, they were chatterboxes, women that couldn’t keep secrets, that spoke ill of each other and everyone else. Inane, mindless talking of no importance. Women were to be kept at home by their husbands. If you didn’t have a husband, then you were even worse, no-one to keep you in check. My godsipps became just wives, those that still had husbands, isolated in their houses, no common to share work and joys and sorrows. Others died, quietly and alone.
The priest fumed and frothed. Women should be at home, having babies and taking care of their husbands and children. That’s all. The midwives and healers, those that knew how to stop women getting pregnant, and what to do if she did, became objects of fear and revulsion. Nothing left to us, not even the earth of our bodies. And it wasn’t just midwives and healers. Old women and beggars, all the unwanted, became feared as well.
My neighbours, them and their parents before them having known me for decades, began to turn away from me. My skin turned as dull as grass in winter, my limbs bare frozen branches, stark and jagged. It wasn’t only me. There were a couple of us left, old widows that had somehow survived the hunger and the cold and the disease.
And then it came; the terror of witches, the iron spike and the noose and the flame. It had ebbed and flowed around us before, times of suspicion and a cold, creeping stream of fear that infected the village, but now it was a river in full spate, scouring us all before it. The young men of the village, with their fresh young wives, bodies held by the house, by the church, minds held by their husbands, were only too happy to rid themselves of us.
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And so here we are, alone and walled in. Our bodies are not our own, our world is not our own, only filthy, bloody and broken. These men, these men of justice and religion have taken everything from us, and now I hear they take ships to spread their wanton cravings. They enclosed The Common, enclosed our hearts, our souls, our bodies. And tomorrow, they will enclose our last breath of life in a noose.