Usually, a witch is represented as an ugly old woman, with a black dress, black cloak, and a black pointed hat. This looks remarkably like the Welsh national costume. Why is this? Were the welsh unpopular in England?
1.) Cite that this is the Welsh National Costume? I’ve never heard this before. (But, being American, we don;'t hear an awful lot about the Welsh)
2.) I’ll bet being ugly isn’t part of the Welsh National Costume.
3.) Pieter Brueghel (and others before him) depicted witches with the pointy hat and riding on a broomstick. No Cloak. The prints couldn’t tell you the collor of the costume. Would a Dutch artist care about Welsh costuming?
No, it’s an old northern English lady from the early 17th century, specifically one named Anne Chattox. Her archrival was Elizabeth Demdike.
Chattox was a clothing thief (this when clothing was much more expensive) and one item she was accused of stealing was a man’s hat of the sort popular in the late Elizabethan era (but battered and old so it had lost its shape and almost inverted), and this is the witch’s hat of today. She was also accused of enchanting a broom for flying. She was hanged for witchcraft along with several other members of her family and a rival family in 1612.
Because King James VI & I was extremely interested in witches (wrote [or had written and put his name on]) books on the subject himself and because witch trials were always interesting, the trials in which Demdike was involved became very famous. There were lots of pamphlets on the subject and engravings of her and “Old Demdike” became indelibly linked to “witch” in the public mind.
I can see where the OP is coming from, but the similarity isn’t all that close - Welsh national costume does seem to consist of an old-crone-style dress and shawl, but the predominant colour is red. The hat is a bit witchy, I suppose, but it’s really more like a tapered stovepipe hat than a pointy, witchy one.
Not by me.
From their literature, you might think so. There’s that rhyme “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a Thief.” In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins makes a crack about Eliza’s father’s having Welsh blood being responsible for his dishonesty (a remark Colonel Pickering chides him for). And the term “welshing” for not paying up on a debt or a bet comes from that being a supposed trait of that nationality. So it looks to me as if the Welsh were stereotyped as cheap crooks. That doesn’t obviously play into the “witch” image, though.
Such hats have only been specifically associated with Welsh women since the mid-nineteenth century. It is in fact one of the classic examples of an invented national costume.
This is what the National Museum Wales website has to say on the subject.
As for English anti-Welsh prejudice, yes, this did exist, being one of the more obvious variations on the vibrant and venerable tradition of English xenophobia. But this had nothing to do with how witches were protrayed.
I bungled my post a bit by confusing Mother Chattox and Old Demdike (both hanged during the Pendle Witches trials). It was Anne Whittel “Mother” Chattox whose depictions made the traditional witch hat and broom famous. She died in 1612, there were accounts of her with illustrations immediately upon her death, but it was the Victorian era when she became super famous (even if her name wasn’t known) due to the image of her in romantic novels and histories.
The hat: she was said to have stolen it and other clothing (as mentioned, clothing was a lot more expensive then and one of the most stolen items) from a local family and was prosecuted for it. She was found not guilty (allegedly through using witchcraft of course), after which she immediately started wearing the buckled hat in public as a sort of “neener neener!”.
The hat is basically a battered version of the buckle hat associated with Puritans. Imagine this one with its shape lost and its top flattened til it’s almost pointy.
As I recall, Shakespeare has some insulting takes on the Welsh, and plenty of dialogue in which characters are insulted by being compared to the Welsh.
And included the three witches in Macbeth due to the Pendle witches.
Er, no. Macbeth is known to have been written by 1611, as Simon Forman saw it then, and it almost certainly dates from several years before then. In other words, before the Pendle witch case of 1612.
It is true that the play may subsequently have been revised to increase the supernatural elements following the Pendle case. But that wasn’t why he had originally included the witches.
It was in the director’s cut.
I knew there was a reason I kept this old postcard. So one day I could gain the respect and admiration of my fellow Dopers, or something.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26870187@N02/2871284120/in/photostream/?rotated=1&cb=1221858854147
http://www.flickr.com/photos/26870187@N02/2870451759/in/photostream/
That’s fantastic! I absolutely approve.