Alice Kyteler and the First Witchcraft Trial in Ireland with Molly Aitken

In County Kilkenny, Ireland, in an early year of a century not too long before our own, Alice Kyteler was accused of witchcraft. But the story doesn't end there. This week, Molly Aitken—author of BRIGHT I BURN—is here to tell us a tale where the more things* change, the more they stay the same. (*Men) Read Molly's books:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2204198/molly-aitken/ This month's bonus episode on Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121131515?pr=true LINKS! for fire relief and mutual aid:https://5pmlucky.substack.com/p/direct-fundraising-for-los-angeles Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2204198/molly-aitken/https://5pmlucky.substack.com/p/direct-fundraising-for-los-angeleshttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  Dear Beelzebub, I just can't get my cauldron to stop rusting every time I wash it. Is cast iron for me. Signed, Alice.

• 0:24Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I am your host, Sarah Marshall. And today, we are learning, naturally, about medieval witch Alice Kyteler with Molly Aitken, author of Bright Eye Burn, a novel about Alice. I wanted to do this episode because I, as so many of us are, am fascinated by witch trials and by witches, witch hunts, and the fact that a witch hunt is not, as so many people have attempted to claim in America the last few years, what it feels like to be accused of something by women, but in fact, a fascinating, and it would appear not entirely over, historical

• 1:06Sarah Marshall?

  movement based on attempting to separate women from power and property by accusing us of being pure evil. This is one of the episodes when we go deeper into the history than the 90s. We will be in medieval Ireland, but the story, the characters, and the gender dynamics are, in my opinion, something that could just as easily happen today. And so, this is an episode for you if you are a witchy person, if you are supportive of the witches in your life, and also if you just sometimes like to go, good for her. We also, of course, have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and on Apple Plus subscriptions. And our bonus this month is about my favorite cookbook, Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cookbook,

• 1:51Sarah Marshall?

  an early 60s icon of regular, old, survival house wifery, and what it is like, in a very candid way, To try and feed your family or yourself despite everything else going on in the world. It's one of my favorite books. It has, in my opinion, truly good recipes and I got to talk about it this month with our dear friend of the show, Sarah Archer. So if that's your kind of thing, I hope you join us for it. And finally, we are finishing up our January Massive Seance shows, me and the gang from American Hysteria. And we'll be doing our Massive Seance, our live podcast show slash history lesson slash Fleetwood

• 2:35Sarah Marshall?

  Mac tribute concert in Los Angeles at the Regent Theater on Friday, January 24th. We hope you can be there. And more than anything, we are thinking about LA, a place that we love and hold dear and home, of course, to our show's beloved producer, Carolyn Kendrick. If you look in this episode's description, we have links in there for you for fire relief and mutual aid resources. We hope you check them out.

• 3:05Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our intro. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing into this year with us, whatever it may bring. Here is your episode.

• 3:23Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About the Show, where we talk about what a witch hunt really is and how it is not, as some people seem to think, men being hunted by witches. And with me today is Molly Aitken. Molly, hello.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Hello. Thank you for having me.

• 3:39Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you so much for being here.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It is a pleasure.

• 3:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm so happy to be here with you in this dark time of year, talking.

• 3:51Sarah Marshall?

  We are recording this the day after Election Day, which I think is worth mentioning because, you know.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 3:58Sarah Marshall?

  It's worth knowing why people sound the way they do. I tend to suspect that you're going to tell me a story that is going to be. Relevant to some ongoing trends that we're thinking about today, maybe.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there are characters in this story which are definitely, um, let's say, repeated somewhat in history.

• 4:21Sarah Marshall?

  So you have a book out. Tell me about that and kind of what topics you've maybe been working on previously in your career and who we're talking about today.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have a book out, Bright Eye Bone, which is about the first woman who was ever accused of witchcraft in Ireland. Alice Kyteler. It's a case that not many people really know about, specifically outside of Ireland. I mean, we do. We have like the gossip about her in Ireland, I suppose, like she would be like a tale that people tell, kind of like a warning to women to not be like her. You know, as Catholic schoolgirls. And that was because she was accused of killing her four husbands.

• 5:06Sarah Marshall?

  Is it fair to say that she's a figure who like kids are afraid of? Or is she more defanged than that?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Do you know what? I don't think that she's well enough known.

• 5:15Sarah Marshall?

  Interesting.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And this is like part of the problem with Irish history generally. We don't talk about the women much. She's one of the few women who we actually do talk about. And it is a very like negative portrayal. I think the children who do know about her are scared, like me.

• 5:33Sarah Marshall?

  Were you scared of her as a kid? Or did it just, did it creep you out?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I was.

• 5:37Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  And then when I was older, I was like, this is intriguing. I had just got married as well. When I started writing the book. Every time one of her husbands died, she became much richer. So the landscape at that time in Ireland, it was like about a hundred years after the Norman invasion. English people, French as well, Welsh had all settled in Ireland. But it wasn't like a kind of. Chill settlement, like, I'm sure you know, but like, the way empire works, but, you know, there was a lot of warfare with the native Gaelic. It was a very kind of rocky period.

• 6:19Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  But she was born to a family of merchants. They had money, they were money lenders, so bankers of the day. And she just kept marrying these men who were also money lenders and they had so much money, so much money. And there's something that in that, like, usually, men are the ones who are maybe getting more gain out of marriage and she kind of flipped it somehow.

• 6:44Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And found her way with it.

• 6:46Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and I wonder, would it make sense to start off with kind of like, what is the story? In a nutshell, like, as you learned it as a kid.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:54Sarah Marshall?

  As you feel like it was, you know, taught to girls of your age. And then what is the story that you have found, having now gone back to the source?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to like, set the scene, it was like Catholic Ireland, Irish school, quite traditional. You know, there was nuns knocking around. You you get the vibe. And one of our teachers just sat down and told us about this terrifying figure from history. A woman called Alice Kyteler, who was the first woman, she said, who was like a known witch, a known witch in Ireland.

• 7:33Sarah Marshall?

  The other ones had flown under the the radar till then.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Sarah Marshall?

  Literally.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was definitely some before, but we didn't have any proof about it, you know what I mean?

• 7:44Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  And she like, she painted her as this old hag, like that way that you think of witches, like very stereotypical.

• 7:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Which is an imagery that has been created much later, but um, anyway.

• 8:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  And she also was kind of saying, like, you know, she made these potions, she was poisoning people. And she killed her four husbands. And you can imagine all those girls kind of sat there sort of like, oh my god, it's terrible. It was also a very terrifying teacher who was.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Which helped, helped a lot. And I think I kind of conflated the two.

• 8:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right? Because you're getting like a visual demonstration.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:28Sarah Marshall?

  That you can merge with the story.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. Those are the best storytellers.

• 8:33Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so she's an ancient hag who killed four husbands through witchcraft. What was the motive other than witchcraft? Was it just evil? Or does it matter?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you all of the accusations, which were extremely detailed. But actually, before I go there, I should probably like, set the scene a little bit more.

• 8:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. So where are we? And what's, what's going on?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So she married these four men. They were all wealthy for different reasons. Before they died, all of them would quit claim, which means like sign over all their earthly goods, all their money to Alice and her son from her first marriage. Even though they all had children from previous marriages. And then soon after, they would die. And this was something that, over time, you can imagine the stepchildren didn't, didn't like her much, you know?

• 9:42Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:43Sarah Marshall?

  If you're cutting a lot of people out of a lot of money, then...

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's when they start to care.

• 9:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, feels risky.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  So actually, when she married her second husband in 1302, her and her second husband were briefly tried for having killed her first husband. But that case was thrown out, partly because they both had such influential and powerful friends within Ireland at that time. And after that, they just like went, went about their business. It doesn't seem like anything else was kind of said about it, certainly nothing that we have in court records or in history. She married again and again, and then in 1317.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  A new bishop came to Kilkeny and he had been in France, in Avignon with the Pope. And this was a time of flux within the Church's understanding of witchcraft. Understanding is a kind word to give to it. There are views on witchcraft, should we say.

• 10:49Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So before about thirteen fifteen, the views of the Church about witchcraft was that it was mostly benign.

• 10:56Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  It became a legal matter if maleficium was involved. And maleficium was like the intent to do harm to others.

• 11:06Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  But then this changed.

• 11:08Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  What happened was that they decided that all witchcraft was a crime. All witchcraft was heresy.

• 11:16Sarah Marshall?

  Can I ask, like, how long had the Church been around? And was their previous approach to it based on, to any degree, on a sense of like, we're coming into witchcraft's turf and we have to tread a little lightly for a few hundred years?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  There's nothing that I've seen. It was just that they would sometimes bump up against legal cases, where someone would bring a thing to a court and be like, this woman is the reason that there was a storm and their ship sunk.

• 11:47Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm, mm hmm.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  And in the earliest cases, I think the earliest one is around ten ninety, the Church was just like, their vibe was like, this is annoying. Like, why are you bringing this to it? Like, we don't care about witchcraft.

• 12:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right. They're like, we have other stuff to do, whatever that is.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Like, we don't care. This is just like women doing things, like, can you not?

• 12:09Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  And so it just, it did seem like they didn't have like a huge opinion about it.

• 12:14Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  So the Pope in Avignon, he seemed to be like getting a little bit antsy about witchcraft. His opinion was that they were out to get him.

• 12:23Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  To me, this just seems like a guy who was like weirdly nervous about women, but sure.

• 12:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. If you get someone into the highest office who's weirdly nervous about women, something could occur.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, is it feeling familiar?

• 12:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  The new bishop who came to Kilkenny had been with this pope and he had seemingly really enjoyed this kind of new turn against witchcraft.

• 12:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Now, I should say 10 years before, so 1307, the church had burned at the stake of the Knights Templar in France.

• 13:04Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And what is interesting about that is they were accused of things that were kind of related to witchcraft. They were accused of denying Christ and spitting on his cross, obscene kissing.

• 13:21Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Now, can you imagine what that is?

• 13:24Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I have guesses.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:26Sarah Marshall?

  Is it boy, boy?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we don't know. We can only guess at it.

• 13:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, right. Yeah. Cause we can't ask these people.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  There are details about like where it was and it seems like it might have been around the penis area. So that's, that's a possibility, but we don't know for sure.

• 13:44Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it's a nice area.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:46Sarah Marshall?

  It does feel like there is um, a well-known trick by this point of like finding out someone is gay, not liking it, and throwing in accusations of witchcraft or devil worship just to kind of make your point stick.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:02Sarah Marshall?

  Or to kind of, I don't know, I've just been thinking about that extra the past little bit.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 14:08Sarah Marshall?

  And how it does feel like that is currently a very, a big part of politics in America, in the United States of feeling so oppressed by someone else's gender or sexuality that in order to convey the depth of your feelings to somebody who doesn't care about that, you just have to accuse them of, of any old horrible satanic crime you can think of.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:35Sarah Marshall?

  Because. It's all you can do to put them in the correct dehumanization bucket, I guess.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it dehumanizes them. And also, you don't need any real factual evidence.

• 14:46Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  It's like throwing a slur at them. Because how do you prove witchcraft or Satan? Like, there's no proof, really.

• 14:55Sarah Marshall?

  How do you prove a negative in this case? Like, you, it's kind of like, yeah, it's a really great way to tarnish somebody's name in a way that can't be disproven.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:03Sarah Marshall?

  Because you just can't prove the absence of Satan, you know? I will never be able to prove that to people about myself, and I have to live with that.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so they were also accused of wearing a belt with a strange idol inside it, made of a cat and a head with three faces.

• 15:27Sarah Marshall?

  I love to think that this is a time traveler who just came back wearing like, you know, Levi's. With a, like, some weird logo. But, okay, what do you make of this? Is this case specifically kind of, is this a turning point for the church, do you think?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Sarah Marshall?

  Are people being burned at the stake over this?

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:46Sarah Marshall?

  So it's using sort of like accusations and circumstantial evidence to kind of prove that somebody needs to be burned alive?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:54Sarah Marshall?

  Doesn't seem good.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Historians believe that the king of France at this time was trying to get money from them. So there was like a financial element to it as well. But, anyway, the bishop, whose name beautifully, was Le Dred.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:18Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, JK Rowling.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  It seems like one that you might want to change, like.

• 16:25Sarah Marshall?

  I know.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:27Sarah Marshall?

  You don't want people to see you coming from that far away. But then also, you know, you might be like, well, this guy's name is Le Dred. He must be really even-handed with a name like that. You know, I'd really try and work against it.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:38Sarah Marshall?

  Not in this case.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  No, surprisingly not.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  So he he came to kill Kenny and he had this in his mind, like, we have an account of the witch trial case against Alice, and the most likely author of it is La Dred.

• 16:57Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  And there's a kind of energy in it that he's just really into accusing women of things, but also that he's really into torture.

• 17:07Sarah Marshall?

  Uh huh. Well, that's fine.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10Sarah Marshall?

  Find a proper outlet for it and make it your work, you know?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  Get some safe equipment and uh do it in your free time, in your free time.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we get this vibe that he's like, come with a mission.

• 17:24Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  And like, he wants to find heretics, he wants to find a witch.

• 17:28Sarah Marshall?

  Well, when you're a stake, everything looks like a witch.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And surprisingly, like, people didn't like him for it. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

• 17:40Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. I'm excited to get to that part. Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So he came with this mission, this holy mission, we should say. I'm bearing in mind that witch trials had barely happened before this.

• 17:53Sarah Marshall?

  Huh.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And not officially, anyway, that we have like records for.

• 17:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  There's like a couple of other cases, but nothing on the scale of this one.

• 18:03Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. And where are the other cases? Are they in in Europe?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yes, they're all in Europe.

• 18:09Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  So there was one in Denmark in ten ninety, and this was where women were accused of sinking ships.

• 18:19Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And this seems actually to crop up a couple of times in witchcraft history within Scandinavia. There's a lot of like witches sinking sinking boats.

• 18:31Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, hasn't it occurred to these people that there's a lot of weather where they live?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  So there were cases before, but it wasn't the hot cool thing yet. Like that would take off much later.

• 18:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right. It's like, you know, we have these songs that are kind of, you can hear the beginnings of rock and roll.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Sarah Marshall?

  But it's not Buddy Holly, you know?

• 18:54Speaker 01

  So we have all these stepchildren, which have been like disenfranchised. They're lacking the money that they had expected to get from their wealthy fathers. And in thirteen twenty four, Alice Kyteler's last final husband, husband number four, is sick and he's like properly sick. His nails are falling out. He's kind of got like a yellowish pallor. And now, based on these descriptions, we think that it was arsenic poisoning. So her husband appears to be dying from arsenic poisoning. And the stepkids, they go to the bishop and they say,

• 19:34Speaker 01

  we think our stepmom is poisoning our dad. And, and we believe that she's using witchcraft to do this. And we believe that she did this with all her previous husbands.

• 19:49Sarah Marshall?

  Do you think they felt they need to bring witchcraft into the mix in order to get someone to take it seriously?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, because there was no way to really prove murder. There was no toxicology reports. Who knows for sure? Again, we're talking about a long time ago. But there was that time when she was accused of killing her first husband. And the case was thrown out. So possibly they were thinking about that as well.

• 20:15Sarah Marshall?

  Right. I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, well, arsenic and husband poisoning generally, because it's a, I find that field very interesting. No, wait. But to my understanding, and I think this is based on, on two books, which I've read in the past. One is Women Who Kill by a writer, I think named Anne Jones. And one is Ladykillers by Tori Telfer. And I think both of them get into this concept of like, you know, there was this. Long period where you couldn't really test if someone had died because they had been poisoned. And especially a period, you know, much later than when we're talking about, but when the first

• 20:55Sarah Marshall?

  kind of commercial rat poisons were made available and when it was suddenly very easy to get poison that you could kill somebody with, but there wasn't really the widespread forensic testing to determine that that had happened when it was really kind of, it was kind of a free for all for a minute there. But I just hope I never marry someone who dies mysteriously because this is making me look really bad. But I find husband poisoning very interesting because, and again, this is a point Tori Telfer makes, I think we underrate how scary it is because it seems like a lot of the time when you would poison a spouse or, you know, a husband in these cases, and that was frequently, I think, it's something I find a lot more sympathetic because

• 21:38Sarah Marshall?

  it is often, I think, something that you would do to escape potentially a bad situation or just because it was the only way to get any kind of economic freedom, that you would often have to poison someone continually over a long period. And that is a really fucked up thing to do. And in many ways, I think it can be more cold blooded than just, you know, killing someone fast. Did arsenic work that way? I mean, what is your kind of speculation about what was going on and sort of your understanding of this whole area?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I agree. I am also fascinated by husband poisoning.

• 22:18Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, it's just so interesting.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  So arsenic, in the case of Alice's husband, he took weeks to die. It's interesting because it is this, like you say, this repetitive thing where it's adding the poison to the food day after day after day, and also tending them while they are sick.

• 22:41Sarah Marshall?

  It's weird.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  And pretending that you care that they are sick.

• 22:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Which is really, really messed up.

• 22:49Sarah Marshall?

  It is the creepiest thing. I would rather kill me some way else, please. Thank you. If anyone's listening to this and thinking about it.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it seems like one of the worst ways to die in fact, because it's long drawn out, it's painful.

• 23:05Sarah Marshall?

  It's psychologically manipulative, which you always like to avoid.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Ideally, yeah. Yeah. And it takes a certain type of person to have the stamina.

• 23:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  To poison someone like this, like.

• 23:19Sarah Marshall?

  It does. Yeah. Cause it's a, yeah. And it is like, and then if you change your mind, then it's too late, I would assume.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:26Sarah Marshall?

  There had to have been some women throughout history who like started poisoning their husbands and then were like, oh, never mind. And then it was just, he just never knew why he, yeah. And it was just that, you know, just that weird element that one time.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  With Alice Kyteler specifically, we don't know a hundred percent if she killed all her husbands. Now, it does seem quite likely that she was poisoning her last husband.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  But there's no way to know for sure. But my, my interpretation is that she probably did.

• 24:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, this is kind of my favorite type of story where it's like, look, did she do something terrible? Probably. But did she do the hundred other things we accused her of? No. And

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:16Sarah Marshall?

  You know, we still deserve to know what happened.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Like personally, I feel like the way that she is remembered in Ireland is still, has that flavor of misogyny, which we just love. Just love.

• 24:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  But yes, I can tell you what the charges were that were laid against her, if you like.

• 24:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So before I go into them, I should say that they're like. Wildly fantastical. There hadn't really been anything this like imaginative. That we had seen before. But there was also someone who clearly had a theological understanding. Who was authoring, let's say, these accusations. Which is why historians really believe that Liddred was the author of them. So there were seven charges. I should say they were not only brought against Alice. They were also brought against her accomplices, which was ten other people. Including a couple of men, but she was like the prime, she was the prime one. They were just marginally involved.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  So number one, denying the power of Christ on the church. So they're bad Christians. They don't attend mass, you know, terrible.

• 25:32Sarah Marshall?

  It's just insecure behavior on the part of the church to be so bothered by that.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure like plenty of people were doing the same thing. Number two, sacrificing living animals to demons. And scattering their body parts around crossroads. And that is quite interesting because it's like crossroads is like that liminal space.

• 25:55Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, that's interesting to me because it's like a crime or a charge where intent. Is like one hundred percent of the law because you could also kill animals and distribute them as a butcher. And I'm sure people were. So it's about thought crime, I guess, is what that shows.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Three is asking demons for advice on witchcraft. I'm guessing maybe Alice didn't know enough, so she needs some help.

• 26:22Sarah Marshall?

  Dear Beelzebub, I just can't get my cauldron to stop rusting every time I wash it. Is cast iron for me. Signed, Alice.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  I meant number four, having carnal relations with a demon.

• 26:42Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Called Robin Artisan or Robin, son of art. So we're getting very specific here.

• 26:49Sarah Marshall?

  Robin, son of art.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's got a name.

• 26:52Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And it was alleged that he often took the form of animals while they were, you know, having their carnal relations.

• 27:01Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  A cat or a dog specifically.

• 27:04Sarah Marshall?

  Cats have barbed penises. That can't be fun. I don't know why that's my response.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  That's horrendous. Yeah. Or he would take the form of an Ethiopian.

• 27:14Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, there's racism within that, of course.

• 27:18Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:19Sarah Marshall?

  They're like, it's terrible. He turns into an animal or.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:23Sarah Marshall?

  Someone from Ethiopia. No.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 27:27Sarah Marshall?

  Ladred.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Ladred.

• 27:29Sarah Marshall?

  The worst.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  We'll ladred you.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  And then they say she's enthralled to the power of this demon. And that would have been like very frightening to people within this society, like to us, like, you know, demons were like, whatever. But people within medieval society would have heard about demons and and these types of things happening in other places.

• 27:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  You know, the way gossip spread back then.

• 27:53Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  And so and so it would feel like a real threat. It's kind of like demon element.

• 28:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  So again, I think Ladred knows what he's doing here in adding this to the accusations. And also what is interesting about this demon here in this context is that it was the first time someone was charged with actually having sex with a demon.

• 28:18Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Before that, no one had been charged with having sex with a demon, as far as we know.

• 28:23Sarah Marshall?

  You know, it's not like I would have said that I thought no one had been charged with that before this conversation, but I I never thought about it. And now I'm, I don't know, it's just really nice to know when the first one happened.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there was plenty more after, plenty more after this, but that was the first.

• 28:41Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Yeah. And the idea of like sex with demons or just the sort of the sexual aspect of the witch in our growing mythology is, um. Is saying too many things to name, I guess. But yeah, it's very interesting.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It is. I think particularly with Alice, because when she was accused, she would have been in her early 60s. I imagine at that time, the thought of like an older woman having sex would have been quite horrifying to people.

• 29:15Sarah Marshall?

  As it is today to so many men.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, true, true.

• 29:20Sarah Marshall?

  And yet I can't imagine anyone who could be better at it, you know, because you'd certainly have had time to learn exactly what to do.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:29Sarah Marshall?

  It's also really interesting to me that so consistently in our kind of modern depictions of these stories and just like even the crucible, you know, which is, I think, a really, in a way, like a really great depiction of the Salem witch trials, but it is an ahistorical one. And one of the things that it does, which is a kind of a hacky move, is to age up Abigail Williams and the accusing girls from kind of tween to sexually mature, young hotties. You know, and then in other kind of popular depictions of Salem, specifically, I'm thinking, you know, because the people who were accused were generally older women, like post-menopausal, senior citizens. You don't see that in a lot of fictional depictions.

• 30:13Sarah Marshall?

  And we usually now are, you know, if we have an old witch, it feels like we often want to have it as somebody who needs the blood of the young to achieve her beautiful young form. But then we get to look at her for the whole movie and see her be all young and hot and know that she's motivated by her desire to be young and hot at any cost. And why would she want that?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:35Sarah Marshall?

  Even if it's the only way we can stand to look at her. Why do women want to be young and hot? They're so stupid. That's the subtext to me.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. And it's been going on for 700 years at least.

• 30:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the fact of her age, I guess, is just interesting to me because it feels like she'd accumulated, I'm sure, a good amount of power with all that money.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, boy. Well, how much do we know about this trial? Like, what's the sort of state of the records?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Well, we have this one very detailed account that we think is written by Ladret of the accusations and then the trial. And then there are some kind of like little pieces of notes about the trial as well. But mostly, it's just from this one account written by him, which I find quite frustrating in general when it comes to women's history, because so much of it is told through the lens of men and often men who hated women.

• 31:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And are there sources that you've looked at where you're sort of, you're not able to take a frontal approach? And you have to sort of work your way in sort of through the back door, in a sense? Like, I'm thinking of just, you saying that makes me think of Laurel Thacker, Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, which is, you know, a book kind of reconstructing the life of this midwife in colonial Maine named Martha Ballard. And that it was sort of this text that had been overlooked by male historians until Ulrich worked on it, because they had sort of seen it as like, well, it's just this list of like where she's going every day and what she does and who owes her money and sort of the weather and labor and delivery.

• 32:19Sarah Marshall?

  There's not really anything there and that it took, in this case, a female historian to see the something that was there. And I wonder if there's been anything, especially in the process of writing this book, that has involved having to be a little bit crafty in terms of how you use your sources.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think in general, women's history is so fragmented because often women didn't write. Or if they did, they didn't have time.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Especially within like medieval Europe, the people who were writing were the clergy. Which obviously there's always men. And they were the ones who could kind of like put their feet up more and just write stuff. Like Le Dred loved to write, like he was kind of poetic, like he used to write songs. He liked himself in that way, like I think he saw himself as an artist in some sense and. And I think this was like his magnet, like his his great show. Yeah, and you really feel that within these accusations because. It's very descriptive, you get like this kind of hubble bubble toil and trouble.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Which there had been nothing like this before, so you feel like he had a lot of imagination to create it. But this was really all that I had about the trial. It was nothing from women. Nothing from Alice, but it was very difficult, it was very difficult to imagine what Alice's life would have been like. There were some things like it was an extremely violent time, you know, there was. Constantly these wars between the native Gaelic and the settlers, the Anglo Norman settlers. So that kind of made me feel like, you know, people are used to death a lot more. And so does that make your attitude to killing your husband.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Different. I don't know, like I don't have the answer, because I think some people would just say like, no, like.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  And I've I've spoken to like, you know, other history nodes who have been like, no, like it feels the same. But I do wonder that if you're in a very violent climate. And people are dying from diseases all the time and like children die really young often. Do you have like a different attitude to death? And I think probably you do.

• 34:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:50Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know that one of the weird things about today, and especially in kind of the non-rural United States, which is where most people live at this point, is that like death is all around, but we're very shielded from having to see it or encounter it, you know?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:05Sarah Marshall?

  Most people don't die at home. Most people don't, aren't in the room with somebody when they die. Most funerals are, you know, closed casket or cremation, which is, you know, not that we have to necessarily bring kids to look at a dead person. I'm not saying that that's great. There does seem to be a lot of sad coming of age literature about it. But I feel like it was just much more typical historically. Not that our ancestors were particularly happy.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:32Sarah Marshall?

  Like, I don't think that we need to be eating like them or doing very many things like them. But I guess in terms of kind of what we're evolved for, I think that it was normal for people to kind of grow up seeing death because you would have to hunt for subsistence. And then as things got started, you would grow up in some kind of an agrarian setting where there would be animal slaughter and there would be, you know, just in a raising livestock. Like, there's a lot of uncontrollable stuff and like, things go wrong, you know? Animals die in ways that you can't predict and isn't your fault. And I think that there was just sort of, like, in a normal, healthy way and sort of, you know, not living in

• 36:13Sarah Marshall?

  times of colonization and conflict even, because sort of in daily life in the 1300s, that there, yeah, would just be probably, I would imagine, a greater sense of sort of the cycle of life and death. And is that effective mitigation at a trial where you're accused of killing your husband? No. But like, I do think that we, the idea that we have today that kind of It is this wild injustice for anyone to die ever is hard to imagine people having in the Middle Ages.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  They absolutely didn't feel that way about it.

• 36:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Because if they did, I don't think they could go on as well.

• 36:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Well, and then, you know, to get into the fact of how many people had babies and children who died and how that was effectively the norm. And I don't think that people felt things less because of how, how hard things were, but I think that that amount of grief felt as something that is kind of statistically average. Yeah, that like that does change people. And I don't know what that's like, but it has to be different, I think, from what things are like now.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:18Sarah Marshall?

  Speaking in, in political context, it is like, there's so much death and trauma, I think, that goes with pregnancy and abortion and desired pregnancy and miscarriage and birth, you know, that whole area of life where there is so much grief that I think people don't know how to talk about and that there is very little space for conversation for.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:39Sarah Marshall?

  It's important to me to encourage people to whatever extent possible. The fact that grief is all around us means that it's something that we get to share with each other and become more connected to each other by finding ways to talk about. And I think having a seat at the table for grief and pouring out a little cup of wine for it, but nothing too expensive, it's going to be good for all of us.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think actually, when you were talking about bringing it to the present and to now, you know, the cycle of pregnancy or, or not, women, I think, perhaps have always been more connected to death in some way. I mean, I'm not a man, so I don't know. But even like if you're going through your monthly cycle and you're not pregnant and you're not planning to, you're kind of aware of this, like I could have. Had a child and I I didn't. Yeah, it's something that is always present for us, even now. And that's that's good. That's healthy in a way, but I think in the past specifically and even now, men were afraid of that, that women had this.

• 38:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I I do believe that. And I do think that, you know, historically, I tend to speculate that that is where some of the witchcraft accusations came from

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 38:56Sarah Marshall?

  and still come from, right?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:59Sarah Marshall?

  This fear also of women working as midwives and women having this sort of power

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 39:04Sarah Marshall?

  that the growing sort of male dominated medical field was trying to take back or to take, you know, they'd never had it to begin with, but to take for the first time. And yeah, I think sometimes witchcraft as an accusation is a way of naming the feeling of like, you know, more than us and we don't know why and it scares us.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And actually, like, within medieval Europe, there was like medical men who were trying to explain the body and women. And I have something here which says women menstruated because they lacked the bodily heat to quote, dry up the bad humors in them, humors being blood, phlegm and bile.

• 39:48Sarah Marshall?

  So men are just full of dried blood. Where do they keep that?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:52Sarah Marshall?

  Use your head.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  They were also a bit confused about it because menstruation was also seen as a good thing because it would nourish an embryo during pregnancy and menstruation produced breast milk. Who knew?

• 40:05Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Yeah, I I love that they're just kind of like, uh, it's, uh, this is the thing I thought of today and it's and it's how the uterus works now. I thought of it and I'm pretty sure that's it.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:17Sarah Marshall?

  We haven't come up with dissection yet, so.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and then again, I'm just thinking now, like, it goes back to. Uh things that women did for themselves, but also witches in medieval period were often women and men, I have to say that they were sometimes men.

• 40:38Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Who would give people abortions.

• 40:42Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  And that is interesting because for the most part, before it became like illegal to practice witchcraft. They were just, as you had said earlier, like they were providing healing.

• 40:55Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  And you know, they were probably a lot smaller than these medical men who, I'm putting like air quotes here. Who had their opinions about how to heal people, but like most of these witches had like herbal knowledge. And were like giving people quite simple cures for things, but they could also give an abortion or. Give you poison, poison your husband.

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

  You know, it's just good to have a responsible licensed poison dealer in the neighborhood. Better to have it and not need it than vice versa or whatever.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:31Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so it's the trial of the sanctuary.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:35Sarah Marshall?

  The fourteenth sanctuary.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yes, thirteen twenty four.

• 41:38Sarah Marshall?

  Reading this guy's record of his own prosecution slash persecution, like, does he feel that he did a really good job or?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  I mean, you get the sense from reading it that he's really arguing his case.

• 41:54Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Because he must have known that he was kind of pushing the bounds of what was legally possible at that time.

• 42:03Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  You also had this kind of push for power between the church and like the rulers of Ireland at this time.

• 42:13Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And both of them didn't like each other because both were powerful and they weren't particularly connected. And this becomes like much more relevant later in the case because after Alice is accused. Then the Irishman.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Big, powerful Irishmen kind of stand up and defend her. Some of them, the relatives of her dead husbands. So the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Outlaw, was probably her brother-in-law from her first marriage. The Sentinel of Kilkenny, Arnold Lepore, was a relative, probably a cousin of her last husband. And he actually really went out to bat for her, to his own detriment, really. Initially, he kind of asked Le Dred to kind of drop the case, and Le Dred was like, no.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  This is my special case and I really like it. I put a lot of work into it. And and then Arnold Lepore imprisoned Le Dred in Kilkenny Castle and was like, you can't leave until Alice's trial is dropped. And Le Dred was actually quite clever about this. He asked for the host to be brought into him. And then he could say that Arnold Lepore was holding Christ. As well as, as well as the bishop. And that was, that was illegal.

• 43:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my god.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  And so Arnold Lepore was then forced to release him, but actually Le Dred refused to leave until his vestments. His fancy shiny clothes, you know, were brought to him. And a crowd had kind of come and he basically had a parade out.

• 44:07Sarah Marshall?

  Optics.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  And so he was really like, I hate to admit it, but like, you know, he he thought about what he was doing in that case.

• 44:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Because the people of Kilkenny kind of turned to him. He had like suspended the church within Kilkenny as well while he was in prison. Like, you know, no one could go to church. And that's quite terrifying at that time, if you can't. To church.

• 44:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You've cut the phone line to God until you can have your way. Wow.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I think Alice got caught up between these two powers. And it became this struggle that she would not have anticipated most likely. And honestly, no one could have anticipated this case. I'm sure her stepchildren, when they brought the case to the bishop, would have had no idea where it would lead.

• 44:58Sarah Marshall?

  They had no idea it was exactly what he was looking for. It would seem. This is such a silly cul-de-sac that I just have to ask because I'm so curious. Because like in my experience, taking communion in Episcopalian churches in the United States anyway, it's like the host is always just this little like round wafer that they make in like a factory in Rhode Island. What was it in the 13th century? Did you just have a piece of nice rustic bread?

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, basically.

• 45:29Sarah Marshall?

  It's what I've always wanted.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  So I think it was like actually better quality.

• 45:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  What you were getting in your childhood, yeah.

• 45:37Sarah Marshall?

  So, okay, so like, I don't like this guy, but he's very clever.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Unfortunately.

• 45:42Sarah Marshall?

  He's clever. He's, what is the thing my dad used to say? Cunning as a shithouse rat.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And this case became a real blueprint for the later trials that happened in Europe. And then they then led to the trials in Salem. So he was really setting out a blueprint for how to do this.

• 46:04Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I actually didn't tell you all of the accusations.

• 46:08Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  They get more mad. They get more mad.

• 46:11Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  So number five, holding nocturnal meetings in the church without permission. Like today, it'd be like a group of women with wine, like chatting shit about their husbands.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  In this case, they were excommunicating their husbands in the church after hours. And this is like this idea of like women subverting the power of the church and the marital relationship. Like really terrifying. Yeah.

• 46:39Sarah Marshall?

  Fascinating.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Six, using the skull of a robber to mix up potions from multiple ingredients, including the clothes of unbaptized baby boys, worms.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Animals that they sacrificed the hair from the arseholes of children, fingernail clippings from dead people. And all of this was said to kind of corrupt their husbands, Alice's.

• 47:12Sarah Marshall?

  First of all, that can't have been an existing statute. And second, it's like, if there's one thing I know about a large group of women, it's that we're gonna cut some corners if we all have to bring in ingredients for a big soup. You're gonna get the easiest thing available and the fingernails of dead people is not that easy.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:30Sarah Marshall?

  Like Ina Garten would say, like, live fingernails are fine, probably.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like a lot of effort.

• 47:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Liddred like sits down and rubs his hands together and just starts listing the evilest objects he can think of. And then he's like, that's pretty good.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it all has the feel of someone who's just like plucking things from the air and being like, oh, genius. Okay.

• 47:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I'm so creative. And also, it's just like, isn't the husband killing enough? Like, I, well, I guess they don't have enough evidence, so they have to accuse her of a bunch of like, really wild stuff that they also don't have evidence for.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:07Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  There's no evidence. There's no evidence here. And then finally, number seven, which is probably the truest of the accusations, is that she killed her husbands to make money for herself and her son.

• 48:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, the one recognizable motive, really.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, it was said in the kind of the trial notes that her house had been found with a box of potions, which had then been sent as evidence to the bishop that she was killing them. When this box was sent to him, her husband was dying in bed from what we now think is arsenic poisoning. So that was like the one where you're like, yeah, this is what possibly she actually did, but the rest was wild invention. Why would she do any of those things? She was an incredibly rich person. She didn't need to be bewitching her husbands.

• 49:00Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  They were dying anyway.

• 49:03Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, and like, if you want to bewitch your husband, you just get a new bra, you know, you don't have to go to all that trouble.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  An element of the case that I loved was that Alice was said to have had a pipe, an ointment beside her bed. And this has been interpreted as a dildo and lube.

• 49:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  How dare a sixty year old woman be enjoying herself?

• 49:36Sarah Marshall?

  Also, a pipe. It's like, my first thought is like, oh, smoking some weed. I don't know.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think they like, they didn't really have the words for it at that time.

• 49:47Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah, gosh. It is just, yeah, it's like, the most we can say is that she perhaps killed a quarter of her husbands. It's really not bad.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, there does seem to be this like, general horror about an older woman's sexuality. Like, it's very sexually focused.

• 50:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  And in some ways, I feel a bit like, wasn't the dread like secretly into her? Because this was like, the first time a woman had been accused of having carnal relations with a demon. A lot of it is to do with kind of like, you know, sexual wiles and like, seducing men. And it's just, it's interesting that that is his focus in this case.

• 50:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What do you make of that? I know everything we can do is speculate, but what is your speculation?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  I mean, at that time, the view of sex was that it was for procreation. And there was a lot of shame tied up in it. So perhaps it was that he was just like, this is the most shameful horrendous thing that I can kind of accuse her of.

• 50:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  But from my reading, and this is just my reading of his trial account.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  It seemed like he was getting some kind of pleasure out of the description.

• 51:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Because it is just so, it's almost poetic. He was really getting into it. He was really getting creative. In some ways, it feels like a fantasy.

• 51:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you do, I don't know, get the feeling that like, that men, especially in these kinds of repressive religious power structures, they cannot express a healthy sexuality because they've bought into a profession or a culture that doesn't allow them to do it, or just kind of an expression of religion. And so it makes total sense to me that we have this man who can't stop thinking about women having sex with demons and then has to punish us for it.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:48Sarah Marshall?

  Classic case.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he had like reached the heights that he could possibly reach and yet he can actually, you know, experience sex or pleasure with another person.

• 52:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And so I think there's like some repressed anger there because he was like relentless in this case. And this is something that people at that time who were commenting about it were like, why won't this guy just let it go?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And to the point where it's like, this is not good for him.

• 52:19Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  He should just let it go.

• 52:21Sarah Marshall?

  So what does a trial involve at this point? How do you convict someone of the demon sex and everything else?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  It's probably gonna go the way that you expect.

• 52:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  But what happened was Alice kind of got the hint that things weren't going well and she left. She took her servant Petronella's young daughter and they went to Dublin because she was like, oh, things are going good here.

• 52:48Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And all the other people who had been accused were imprisoned, including her son.

• 52:54Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  And La Dred tortured her servant, who was a woman called Petronella of Me. And you get the sense when reading about this torture that he fed her the accusations.

• 53:08Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And she kind of gave them back to him. You know, you know, the way torture works.

• 53:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, right.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:15Sarah Marshall?

  One of the most efficient things about torture is that you can get someone to say basically whatever you tell them to.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So she confessed and that was all he needed.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  And she was the first woman in Ireland who was ever burned at the stake. She was just unfortunately connected to Alice in this way. She was her servant and

• 53:39Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I guess she she didn't have the wealth

• 53:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  to leave in the way that Alice did. But I I do find it interesting that Alice took Petronella's daughter with her.

• 53:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  It suggests that there was some kind of connection there. And we can only speculate what that was, but

• 53:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:58Sarah Marshall?

  Like the actual, the very visible horror there is, in this case, leaving your servant co-defendants behind to deal with it and then using someone and then torturing someone and seeing their life as disposable in that way in order to prove the story that you've invented about a witch that you want to take down.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, who is too rich and has too many powerful male friends for you ever to really take her down.

• 54:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right, right.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  So you take your anger out on this poor woman. So Petronella was burned in November the third.

• 54:37Sarah Marshall?

  Jesus.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Twenty four, so just over seven hundred years ago.

• 54:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:43Sarah Marshall?

  So yeah, we're talking on November sixth. Did you do anything a couple of days ago?

• 54:47Speaker 01

  I know there was a big, celebration is probably the wrong word. But in Kilkenny, they've been honoring Alice, actually.

• 54:57Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  For the last week, which I think is really lovely. There's been theater play and just lots of talks and things. And unfortunately, I couldn't get over there for it, but it has been honored. And I think her history, the opinion about her in Kilkenny has shifted a little bit.

• 55:15Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  But everyone has always felt bad for Petronella, I have to say.

• 55:20Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Even when it happens, people were horrified. The commentary at the time was horrendous. Like, they were just couldn't have imagined that something like this. Would have happened.

• 55:33Sarah Marshall?

  Was this a public execution that people left records of?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. A contemporary of Liddred, Friar John Quinn, wrote, "It was not seen or heard from times past that anyone in Ireland before her suffered the legal penalty of death for heresy." And later, Arnold Bepoer said in Alice's defense in Dublin, "That, you know, we are not a country of heretics. We are a country of saints and scholars." Basically saying like, "We cannot allow this man to like sully our good Irish name, in a sense, by like letting this case go ahead."

• 56:21Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and you just, you don't want to be a country that burns women.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:25Sarah Marshall?

  I would think.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  And actually, because this kind of horrified people so much, we didn't really have many other cases like it. There are a few, but it's literally a handful. And in comparison to the rest of Europe, England, Scotland, it is really very, very little. And I think part of that is because of how horrifying people found what happened to Petronella was.

• 56:53Sarah Marshall?

  My understanding of the sort of American legal system and our sense of morals is that we have, maybe it's from having this sense of being in a giant country and having more capacity to have more people be not our problem, that like, I think we visualize it or are encouraged to visualize it as like a certain number of the people sharing this country with us belong in prison or burned at the stake and we just have to wake up every day and find them and assume that they're there. As opposed to like, I don't know, seeing that as actually kind of a very poor review of us as a whole, if so many of us are disposable in that way.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Part of the reason why they made that choice as well, of course, it was because it was so horrifying and terrible what happened to Petronella. But also it was because people didn't like Liddred.

• 57:48Sarah Marshall?

  Seems like he might have been a bit of like a difficult customer and so on.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  You know, later on, he would go on to like accuse the bishop in Dublin of trying to murder him. And then he was called, he was called then to court in Dublin and he fled the country.

• 58:08Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  He fled to England and was, you know, um, discommunicated for a number of years. And he eventually did come back to Kilkenny, but then the people of Kilkenny tried to get him out again by claiming that he was senile. And he was old at this time, but it also seemed like they just didn't want him around.

• 58:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I love these stories in history of just like men who show up in the historical record because they did manage to get something done. But generally were acknowledged by everyone to be too annoying to be allowed to hang around.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  I love that. And yeah, this is a classic case of that. Like he was just, he was an irritating, but a dangerous guy as well. And I think we were aware of both.

• 58:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  So after Alice was accused and she then like fled to Dublin. And then eventually she realized that things were not going well and she left and we just kind of like disappeared from history. There's some like folklore in England that maybe suggests she was there, but it also seems like it was invented much later. So we don't know for sure. But her son, William Outlaw, was put in jail by a dread. And to get out, he had to admit his guilt.

• 59:26Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And you get this sense that the dread was kind of covering his back with that. He was definitely like pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for the church to do at the time. So he told William, like to get out of jail, you have to do penance, which was hear mass three times a day for a year. Go on a pilgrimage, feed the poor. And time goes by, but the dread then calls William back and is like, yo, it doesn't seem like you're doing this enough. Like, it doesn't seem like you're sad enough about this.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I wanna see more pain. And so he told William that he needed to pay to re-roof the cathedral, which William then did. And this doesn't sound suspicious at all, does it? Like, you're gonna come back, I'm gonna take more money from you. And there was actually some other, some other money change channels as well.

• 1:00:19Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  So you get the sense that like, the dread is like, being paid off. Yeah. But then ironically, after redoing the roof of the cathedral, it fell down, it collapsed in thirteen thirty-two, presumably from like, the weight of this new lead roof and destroyed the cathedral.

• 1:00:39Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  And I just feel like there's some kind of poetic justice.

• 1:00:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Cause that was, the cathedral was where like, Le Dred did his like, his Sunday Mass. It was like his place of work.

• 1:00:52Sarah Marshall?

  It's literally structurally unsound.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, this thing of seeing these trials unfold and sort of deciding what you think happened and then getting, getting women to confirm the crimes that you've invented for them to have committed. That also feels like the struggle in culture for, to be able to grow up as a girl sort of into womanhood and to be given the tools to understand that you have the capacity to exist outside of a male psychodrama. You know, that like, men are always gonna wanna make you a character in the story they're telling to themselves about themselves, but that that isn't really you. And that the fact that they think that is their business, and sometimes they make it your business because they have too much power. But that they shouldn't be able to. What they think is just, it's just their own problem.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I love that, actually, because I think with Alice, she has been for so long, this character in Le Dred's story of her. And that was another reason why I wrote it. I wanted her to be the character of her story.

• 1:01:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Molly, just yeah, thank you so much for this conversation and for spending this day with me talking about everything. Just yeah, tell us again, what is your book? Where can people find it? What else can people find of yours? Or any of that? Any recommendations you have to, you know, just it doesn't have to be, I feel like self-promotion is hard for authors. So if you want to throw in like, you know, a favorite dessert or something, I would welcome that as well.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Okay, so my book, Bright Iburne, is in all good bookshops, which is every bookshop.

• 1:02:39Sarah Marshall?

  That's true.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  I also have another book that came out years ago called The Island Child. You can check that out, too. One book that I used for research, which was amazing, was The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages by Catherine Harvey. I recommend everyone reads it. It's brilliant.

• 1:03:03Sarah Marshall?

  Amazing.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Favorite dessert? I like a plain cake. Is that something that you do?

• 1:03:09Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Like an apple cake? Or just like, like a, a basic cake?

• 1:03:13Sarah Marshall?

  No, I feel like that's a foreign concept to me, but I feel like, yeah, I actually, there's like this YouTuber who's like an Irish woman who runs a bakery, who has like this series called like Things People Have Said to Me. And one is someone being like, can you get me something traditional, but I don't like apples and I don't like any of the things that you have that are traditional?

• 1:03:41Sarah Marshall?

  And that was our episode. Thank you so much to Molly Aitken for being our guest. And of course, if you liked this episode, be sure to check out her work, including her novel, Bright Iburne. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing help. And thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. We'll see you in two weeks.