iThe Greenwich bellarmine
London, late 17th century · c. 1670s
Builders in Greenwich found an unbroken salt-glazed bellarmine jar buried upside down. Analysis showed bent nails and brass pins, a leather heart pierced by a nail, nail parings, hair, urine and traces of sulphur. It is one of the few sealed examples ever studied, and its contents match printed recipes of the period closely.
Uses: bellarmine stoneware jar, bent iron nails, brass pins, nail parings, hair, urine, sulphur
Recorded in: Alan Massey, report in British Archaeology (2009) on the bottle found at Greenwich in 2004
iiBlagrave's heated-bottle counter-charm
English astrological medicine · 1671
Blagrave, a Reading astrologer-physician, described stopping a patient's urine in a bottle with nails, pins and needles and setting it near the fire. The heat was believed to torment the witch and force the spell to break. Here the bottle is an active counter-attack rather than a quiet ward.
Recorded in: Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick (London, 1671)
iiiLater glass bottles and the colonial crossing
Britain and English colonies in North America · 18th to 20th century
After stoneware bellarmines fell out of fashion, small glass phials and bottles took over, often holding pins alone or pins with hair and liquid. Hoggard's survey records examples into the twentieth century, and similar bottles have been excavated at early colonial sites in America, showing the custom travelled with settlers.
Recorded in: Brian Hoggard, Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft (Berghahn, 2019)
History
Witch bottles belong to a wider English habit of hiding protective objects in houses, most of them dated between about 1600 and 1750. The classic container was the bellarmine, a salt-glazed stoneware jug from the Rhineland stamped with a bearded face. Bottles were usually buried under hearths or thresholds, the points where people believed harm could slip into a home. Printed recipes, including Joseph Blagrave's of 1671, show that educated physicians as well as village cunning folk recommended them against suspected witchcraft.
Most finds turn up broken or empty, which makes the bottle unearthed in Greenwich in 2004 unusually important. Alan Massey, a chemist then at Loughborough University, led its analysis and published the results in 2009. The historian Brian Hoggard has spent more than twenty years recording witch bottles and other concealed charms across Britain, and his 2019 book gathers the evidence into a gazetteer. His work shows the practice lasting far longer than the witch trials themselves.
Sources
- Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft · Brian Hoggard, 2019
- Opening a Witch Bottle (Archaeology magazine feature on the Greenwich find) · Archaeology Magazine, 2009
- The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic · Ralph Merrifield, 1987
