Quotes from Keith Thomas

It would be tempting to explain this long survival of magical practices by pointing out that they helped to provide many professional wizards with a respectable livelihood. The example of the legal profession is a reminder that it is always possible for a substantial social group to support itself by proffering solutions to problems which they themselves have helped to manufacture.

Among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia, for example, it is said that to find a beehive with honey in the woods is good luck; to find two beehives is very good luck; to find three is witchcraft.

At the baptismal ceremony the child was, therefore, exorcised (with the obvious implication that it had previously been possessed by the Devil), anointed with chrism (consecrated oil and balsam) and signed with the cross in holy water. Around its head was bound a white cloth (chrisom), in which it would be buried if it should die in infancy.

The fourteenth-century preacher, John Bromyard, used to tell the story of the shepherd who, asked if he knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied, 'The father and the son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.

When a man was found dead at the well in 1630 after having made scoffing remarks about its supposed powers a local jury brought in a verdict of death by divine judgement.74

THE belief in lucky and unlucky days goes back at least to classical times. The Romans had their dies nefasti, and similar concepts were widespread in China and the ancient East. Indeed the idea that certain days are, for some occult reason, propitious for certain actions, and others inappropriate, is to be found among most pre-industrial peoples. It

This year in sowing too early I lost (the Lord being the cause thereof, but that the instrument wherewith it pleased him to work)… the sum of £10 at least, so exceeding full was my barley with charlock, in all likelihood by means of that instrumental cause, the Lord my God… being without doubt the efficient cause thereof.12

When starvation threatened, the poor were capable of using violence to secure food for themselves, but they made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time and showed no interest in attempting to change the structure of the society in which they found themselves. Unlike

For this is man's nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bring prosperity and adversity, there will he worship. George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers (1587), sigs.B4v-C1

In the hundred and fifty years before the great visitation of 1665 there were only a dozen years when London was free from plague.

If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.

Great claims were made for the healing value of the royal touch. The surgeon, Richard Wiseman, testified to having witnessed hundreds of cures, and asserted that Charles II healed more sufferers in one year 'than all the surgeons of London had done in an age'.

The stubborn reluctance of the lower sections of the seventeenth-century population to forgo their charmers and wise men resembles the unwillingness of some primitive peoples today to rely exclusively upon the newly introduced Western medicine.

There is inevitably a chicken-and-the-egg character to any debate as to whether economic growth produces its appropriate mental character or is produced by it. Most sociologically-minded historians are naturally biased in favour of the view that changes in beliefs are preceded by changes in social and economic structure.