Witch Mother/doctor

[ashton_albright]

In my story I have a witch that in effect took care of a village right around the turn of the first century in England (1000 a.d. or c.e.).  I have been trying to find if there was any honorifics entitled to that position.  I found the term witch mother once, but it was in reference to another time period.

Was that even something they would

Comments

[sollersuk]

You clearly mean first millennium, not first century!

You won't find much about witches because people weren't interested. Everybody used charms and potions, usually the same charms that their ancestors had used for centuries but with the words Christianised to remove references to pagan gods.

In Europe in general, Christianity in Late Antiquity had been much kinder to witches than Pagan Romans had been; as long as no demons were invoked, Christians often gave them shelter and protected them from the death penalty. If people had been actually invoking demons, though, all bets were off; and as long as the spells were Christianised, they wouldn't be invoking the only kind of "demons" in local tradition (i.e. the former gods). For many centuries even the Devil wasn't much of an issue; he is mostly a figure of fun, with stories about saints making a fool of him.

Ann Hagen's "Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink" will give you a tremendous amount of information about lifestyle. There's not a lot about growing up, apart from children in monasteries, because on the whole the writers of original texts weren't interested; you might get something useful from the Life of Alfred, but that's about boys, and members of the royal family at that. For anything else, archaeology is more informative; children would be dressed like adults in accordance with their rank. Outside the landowner class (Anglo-Saxon England didn't have a nobility in the later sense) children would become productive members of the household from the age of about 3, so life would be much like that of adults. The main thing a girl would do was learn to spin using a drop spindle; right up to the introduction of the spinning wheel centuries later, that is what she would be doing if she wasn't specifically doing something else - and even then it took up so much of the day that "spinster" (= woman who spins) was the term for an unmarried woman. "Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England" by Penelope Walton Rogers would be useful as things didn't change a great deal between 700 and 1000; this would give you information about what people wore and the techniques of weaving that she would learn.

Mannerisms: the best I can offer you is also from archaeology. Anglo-Saxon women often wore purses attached to their belts with useful bits and pieces in them, often including old, and often broken, Romano-British women's brooches. These might be lucky charms or they might even be heirlooms as it now seems that they would have had a fair number of Romano-British ancestors.