In an 1883 article ‘Magyar Folk-Lore and Some Parallels’, co-authored by Lewis L. Kropf and Wm. Henry Jones, the latter (very likely the antiquarian Reverend William Henry Jones) shared personal tangents about folklore, back when folklorists could do that sort of thing. One of them concerns the small town of Kirton in Lindsey (often called Kirton Lindsey), in North Lincolnshire, and goes as follows:

‘A servant we had from the neighbourhood of Kirton Lindsey, North Line. told me when her mother was confined [pregnant], a man in the village “witched her,” so that she could not move in bed, nor could the bed be moved until the man came and “unwitched her”, and that one night as her father and brother were out they saw a cat in front of them which the father knew to be the witch. Whereupon he seized it and “hammered it with a stone.” Next day the wizard was found with his face all tied up, and shortly afterwards died; this the girl assured me had happened quite recently.’

Not only does this story conform to the tradition of witches turning into small animals, such as cats or hares, but it also contains a male witch, whose kind are in the minority in folk tales. Despite the cat here being a vehicle of evil, Jones later notes that black cats are considered good luck in Lincolnshire, and claims that being approached by one is sure to win you good fortune. See Wm. Henry Jones, and Lewis L. Kropf. “Magyar Folk-Lore and Some Parallels.” The Folk-Lore Journal, vol. 1, no. 11, 1883, pp. 354–62.

Contemporary witch anecdotes from Lincolnshire are recorded as late as the early twentieth century by Ethel Rudkin and James Alpass Penny, among others, and are geographically widespread. Popular belief that malevolent witches walked and bewitched among us demonstrably continued, in some areas, until less than a century ago, though it had been far more widespread in the previous century – and, of course, earlier than that. We have included only a small selection of stories concerning witches on this map, for two reasons: otherwise they would risk overwhelming it; and most are only really short memorates, relatively few of which have led to folk tales that endure in our times. Exceptions include the witches of Belvoir and the story of Byard’s Leap, both of which have much older origins, and are very different from one another: the former is, at heart, a horrific true story with fillips, and the latter is a tale of preternatural heroism in which a witch is the vanquished nemesis. Other examples on this map include ‘Crazy Kate’ at Manwar Rings near Swineshead, Fan o’ the Fens, and the Tetford witch, all of which have more in common with the story given above.

ANNA MILON; ADDITIONS BY RORY WATERMAN