The Witch and Her Cow-Sucking Bag: Saving Souls in the Fourteenth Century
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- 2 days ago
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John Manley │ University of Kent
Lo heer a tale of a wicche
Þat leued no bettur Þan a bicche
[Behold! Hear a tale of a witch
That lived no better than a bitch]
Using profane language whose meaning was no different from today, these are the opening lines of an early fourteenth-century story that, believe it or not, was a work of religious instruction aimed at steering ordinary people away from sin.
The Tale of the Witch and Her Cow-Sucking Bag is one of the exempla, or improving stories, in Handlyng Synne, an early fourteenth-century work which, notwithstanding its religious theme, anticipated by almost a century Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in its scurrility, subversion, social comment, and entertainment. Its author Robert Mannyng (c.1275-c.1338) has been described as a patriarch of English writing and a pivotal figure in the transformation of the English language into a form that modern readers can recognise. Handlyng Synne was a key text in a flowering of English religious writing in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that, it can be argued, helped pave the way for the later rise of English as an acceptable vehicle for popular literature, such as The Canterbury Tales.
By the way, if you are not familiar with reading Middle English, remember that the letter thorn þ represents the modern th; yog ȝ represents y or g; and u represents u or v. Also, reading the text out loud can help you capture its meaning.
Mannyng, a Gilbertine canon, or monastic priest, from Sempringham Abbey in Lincolnshire, began writing Handlyng Synne in 1303. It was a pastoral work, aimed at guiding people away from sin and instructing them how to confess their sins and cleanse their souls. Handlyng Synne is part of the flowering of religious instructional literature that grew out of reforms to the Church ordered by the Fourth Lateran Council held in Rome by Pope Innocent III in 1215. Lateran IV’s 71 dictates or Canons set out a new template for a closer pastoral relationship between clergy and laity. Priests were now required to educate parishioners in the creed of the church. They were also instructed to attend more closely to the spiritual needs of their flocks so that, rather than just condemning the sin and punishing the sinner, they should examine the circumstances of the sinning. They should become like spiritual doctors and counsellors to their parishioners' souls, the better to consider what remedies to prescribe for the penitent and how to steer them away from sinning in the future. Meanwhile, the laity were required to assume greater personal responsibility for their own salvation. Canon 21, Omnis ultriusque sexus, compelled ‘Everyone of either sex’ to make confession and receive communion at least once a year at Easter.
This new partnership in salvation between clergy and laity prompted the production of many new instructional texts on confession, contrition, and penance throughout Catholic Europe. Up to about 1260, these were mostly in Latin and were largely intended for the guidance of priests. In England, bishops from Salisbury and Winchester in the south to Carlisle, York, and Durham in the north, and from Lincoln in the east to Exeter in the west, instructed priests to educate their flocks in the tenets of the Christian faith. In 1281, Archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham ordered priests (in Latin) to explain to their flocks the fundamentals of faith four times a year in their everyday language or vernacular: in lingua materna laicis exponere teneantur.
To satisfy that programme of instruction, the second half of the thirteenth century saw an explosion of vernacular texts for both clergy and laity. These pastoralia were intended both to be read by the literate and to be read aloud to the unlettered. Many of these earlier texts were in Anglo-Norman, or French, for the spiritual improvement of the educated or the gentry. One of these is the mid-thirteenth century year-round cycle of sermons, the Miroir or Évangiles des Domnées, which was written by Augustinian canon Robert de Gretham for the private instruction of a noble patroness named Aline, which was intended to lure her away from her usual reading of popular romances, or ‘Chancon de geste’. More significantly, however, this was followed by a wave of instructional literature in English, so that by the early fourteenth century written English had been firmly established as the principal vehicle for spiritual education. This included from the North of England a comprehensive work of instruction now known as The Northern Homily Cycle, as well as a Middle English translation of Gretham’s Miroir, and Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne. Mannyng himself, though Cambridge-educated and thus learned in Latin, chose to write both his surviving texts in English, including the secular work The Chronicle or The Story of England.
In his prologue to Handlyng Synne, Mannyng explains that he wrote in English because his work was aimed not at the learned but at the unlettered. He wrote that it was for ‘lewed men’ who knew neither Latin nor French; for people who enjoyed ale, tales, rhymes, and idle talk; and who, without proper and effective instruction, might fall into sin and villainy: so that they may be persuaded:
To leve al swyche foul manere
And for to kun knowe þer ynne
Þat þey wene no synne be ynne.
[To abandon all such foul ways
And to know therein
That they expect to be in no sin.]
Much of the structure and content of Handlyng Synne is based on the Anglo-Norman text Manuel des Pechiez or Handbook of Sins, attributed to William de Waddington (c.1260). This is a penitential work for the laity advising how to prepare for confession and avoid sin, using improving stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints. But Mannyng did not just translate the Manuel. By using everyday English, he was making the text available to a wider and less socially elevated audience. Moreover, he substantially rewrote it, altering the style of the work into a compendium of advice, teachings, and entertaining tales populated, not with Waddington’s apostles and saints, but with recognisable and relatable characters, illustrating their sins and remedies for sin, and adding several exempla of his own devising, including The Tale of the Witch and Her Cow-Sucking Bag.
Mannyng uses the rhymed octosyllabic verse which was characteristic of the romances popular in the period, including those enjoyed by Gretham’s patroness Aline. This suggests he meant his cautionary tales to be read out aloud like a sermon or like a poem in a tavern. It has been argued that he may have been Sempringham’s hostillarius – the canon in charge of the abbey’s pilgrim hostel – and that he wrote the text to be read aloud to pilgrims attending the shrine of the Gilbertine Order’s English founder, St Gilbert. As with Chaucer, Mannyng's tales include recognisable characters rooted in everyday life, like corrupt tradesmen, lazy and incompetent clergymen, and impatient and avaricious executors. In this way his stories are not only more engaging and relatable for his audience, but they also highlight to his audience how venal, how shameful, and how obvious to others their sinning might appear in the here and now, as well as warning of the everlasting consequences for their souls.
Handlyng Synne fulfils Archbishop Pecham's requirements on religious education, with sections on each of the ten 'commaundementys', 'þe seuene dedly synnes', the 'sacramentes seuene', the 'poyntes of shryfte', and the 'gracys'. But Mannyng's tales are not didactic or prescriptive: he does not steer the laity solemnly towards spiritual enlightenment and virtue. His stories are funny, engaging, entertaining, often scurrilous, and at times subversive.
The Tale of the Witch and Her Cow-Sucking Bag is designed to illustrate the first commandment, 'Þou shalt haue no god but one'. Mannyng uses the story to teach not only that readers or listeners should believe in God, but that they should abandon all other beliefs that might be contrary to the Creed of the Church: even if they can see with their own eyes that they are real and effective. In the story a witch, who had enchanted a leather bag to steal the milk from the local farmers’ cows, was summoned for trial before the bishop. At the bishop’s command, the witch demonstrated the spell, sending the bag flying off to suck the milk from the cows’ udders. The bishop then tried to replicate the spell using the witch’s exact words: but he failed. The witch explained that he had failed for the simple reason that he did not believe in the spell; and that, if he had believed as she believed, the bag would have gone and sucked at the cows:
‘Ȝe beleue nouʒt as y do.
Wolde ʒe beleue my wrdys as y,
Hyt shulde ha go and sokun ky …
For þou mayst seye what þou wylt,
But þou beleue hyt, else all is spylt.’
[‘You believe not as I do:
if you believed my words as I do,
It should have gone and sucked the cows …
Because you can say whatever you want,
But you should believe it, otherwise all is spoilt.’]
Mannyng spells out explicitly that belief is at the centre of this story. Belief in God is the key to salvation, and harbouring beliefs outside the teachings of the Church is sinful and perilous for one’s eternal soul. Indeed, the bishop does not punish or condemn the witch either for her witchcraft or for stealing milk. Instead, he commands that she should no longer believe or act as she had done, even though it was clear that her belief made her craft real.
Þe bysshop comaundyd þat she shuld noght
Beleue ne werche as she hadde wroght.
[The bishop commanded that she should not
Believe any of the works that she had wrought.]
Moreover, Mannyng warns the faithful that, however ardently they might proclaim their Christian faith, it will avail them nothing if they do not really believe what they profess to believe.
Heyr mow we wete, beleue wyle make
Þere þe wrd no myght may take.
Þe bysshop seyde þe wurdys echoun,
But beleue þer yn hadde he noun.
Nomore shall hyt auayle þe
Þat beleuyst nat þere beleue shulde be.
[With this may we know belief will succeed
Where the words have no power.
The bishop said the words, each one,
But belief therein had he none.
No more shall it avail you
That believes not where belief should be.]
I feel that Mannyng’s words on the veracity of belief contain a subversive twist; the bishop’s failure to make the spell work because of his lack of belief could be interpreted as a warning that people should beware of priests whose insufficient faith in God and the Church might invalidate their celebration of the mass or render worthless any sacraments conferred by them. There has always been fierce debate in the Church over the legitimacy of masses and the efficacy of sacraments conferred by priests whose inadequate belief might manifest as laziness, incompetence, or wickedness. Gretham’s Miroir and its Middle English translation also debated this issue, coming down on the purist’s side, quoting scripture that, ‘Ne wicked tre ne may bere no good fruyt’.
The very words Mannyng uses in this story seem to confirm this interpretation that a priest’s lack of belief would invalidate the mystery of any mass he said. The liturgy of the mass celebrates Christ rising from the dead; but Mannyng points out that, even though the bishop said all the right words, his lack of belief meant the bag lay still as though it were dead and would not rise.
Ryght as she dede, he dede al weyl.
Þe sloppe lay stylle as hit ded wore:
For hym ne ros hyt neuer þe more.
[Just as she did, he did all well.
The bag lay still as if it were dead:
For him it did not rise nevermore.]
The Tale of the Witch and Her Cow-Sucking Bag and Handlyng Synne illustrate how the pastoral reforms of Lateran IV helped refocus the Church towards a way of saving souls that demanded the collaboration of the laity in their own salvation. This meant providing people, even those at the lowest levels of society, with texts that they could understand and engage with. For a talented and entertaining communicator like Mannyng, that meant wrapping up the serious didactic and prescriptive salvational content of a penitential text in entertaining and engaging 'talys and rymys' featuring situations and characters that his 'lewed' or unlettered audience could relate to and which they 'wyl bleþly here' [‘will eagerly hear’].
Further Reading:
Washington DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.236. Digital copy available at: https://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0053/html/folger_ms_vb236.html.
Robert Mannyng, Robert Mannyng of Brunne: Handlyng Synne, ed. by Idele Sullens (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983).
Ryan Perry, 'Robert Mannyng and the Imagined Reading Communities for Handlyng Synne', in Pastoral Care in Medieval England: Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. by Peter Douglas Clarke and Sarah James (Routledge 2019), pp.159-82.
Catherine Rider, Magic and Religion in Medieval England (Reaktion Books, 2012).
John Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500, A Reader, 2nd Edition (University of Toronto Press 2008).
John Manley is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kent researching thirteenth and early fourteenth century pastoral writings. After receiving a BSc in astrophysics from Leicester University, he spent four decades as a reporter and editor for Reuters, Agence-France Presse, and other global news organisations before obtaining a history BA and MA and embarking on his PhD.
