The Folklore of Discworld
a wicked old woman, they said, and had ‘powerful books with a deal of evil written in them’. She lived alone and in poverty, and was crippled with rheumatism, but nobody would help her dig up her potatoes for fear of what she might do to them. When she went to the farm to buy milk, the farmer wouldn’t let her pass the gate in case she bewitched the cows, so she had to stay in the road and yell until somebody heard her. There came a time when people realized that they hadn’t seen her around for a couple of weeks, so the Rector called at her cottage and found her sick in bed, too ill to move. The man who told her story to the Sussex County Magazine in 1943 remembered how it all ended:
The workhouse people came next day and took her away. One of the head men stayed behind to sort out her belongings. She hadn’t much furniture, but they found a pile of books. My neighbour, who was very fond of reading and very curious as well, asked the official if he could have them, or at least read them, but we said it wasn’t right, and anyway we didn’t want anyone else learning the secrets and playing us up – Betsey Shadlow was trouble enough – and we asked the workhouse chap to burn them. He looked at them, and said they wererubbish anyway. It’s a strange thing, but when they came to set fire to all the unwanted stuff from the cottage along with those books, we lookers-on saw green flames coming from the fire!
The Baron’s notion that the thing to do with witches is to throw them into ponds must be one of those thought-particles drifting through the multiverse and taking root in any suitable mind. It echoes a practice once common in many countries of the Earth, the ‘swimming test’. It began in the Middle Ages as a way of discovering whether someone was or was not a witch, and reached its peak in the first half of the seventeenth century. The suspect would be tied up, hands to feet, and thrown in. It was believed that if she was guilty, water, being a pure and holy element, would reject her, and she would remain floating on the surface; if she was innocent, she would sink – and, hopefully, someone would haul her out before she drowned. Though popular, this was not actually legal, and the vast majority of lawyers and church leaders refused to accept it as evidence in court. One famous writer who did believe in the test was King James VI of Scotland and I of England, who linked it with the idea that witches had rejected the Christian faith in which they had been baptized:
So it appears that God hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous impiety of witches, that the water shall refuse to receive into her bosom those who have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and wilfully refused the sacred benefit thereof.
There came a time when all laws against witchcraft were dropped, and people could no longer take a woman to court if they thought her spells had harmed them. So, remembering the old ways, village mobs sometimes took matters into their own hands by ‘swimming’ her themselves, not as a test but as a punishment. Evenin Victorian England, there were one or two cases where people died of this, by drowning or by pneumonia. In view of the Baron’s decree, it is fortunate that Miss Perspicacia Tick is good at untying knots with her teeth and swimming underwater, and can lurk under the weeds, breathing air through a hollow reed. 9
W ITCHES H AVE A D UTY
As in Lancre, so on the Chalk a witch has a duty to her land and her people. It is because young Tiffany Aching has an instinctive ability to accept responsibility, to cope with threats to herself and others, that she is a natural born witch. As the kelda of the Wee Free Men tells her: ‘Ye’re the hag noo, the witch that guards the edges and the gateways. So wuz yer granny, although she wouldnae ever call hersel’ one.’
Granny Aching had lived and died as a shepherd. The chalk and flint were in her bones, the sky was her hat and the wind her cloak. All spring and summer she stayed out on the hills, sleeping in her old wheeled shepherding hut, which could be dragged across the downs to follow the flocks. Tiffany knew (probably by reading The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales ) that any old woman who lived in a house that moved about must be at least slightly a witch. She was sure of this, even though she had never heard of Mrs Gogol, the swamp-witch in Genua whose hut paddled along on duck’s feet, let alone Baba Yaga in
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