I seen this discussion on this board once before and couldn’t understand why it was even a question.
Of course she was a witch, its obvious that she was a witch, the very joke is that she is a witch. The whole point of the joke is that those stupid meaningless tests actually did catch a witch.
The phrase “Its a fair cop” is what a career criminal would say when they have been caught bang to rights, it is equanimity that they have been caught and acceptance about what follows. It is what the guy in the bank vault says when the alarms are ringing and he is surrounded by the police. It is what a witch would say when the common witchcraft tests of the day say that she is a witch. And since she is a witch they must be right.
The confusion is that English apparently has two "cop"s : one means to take, seize, grasp-- it does not mean “head” (even in expressions such as “cop [yourself] on”). But there is an (unrelated?) word “cop” (cf “cob”), as in ball/mass of thread, spider (aka (atter)cop), top of a hill, etc., which is related to Kopf.
Exactly this. We’re taught in history classes that really horrifying, stupid, illogical tests were used to, essentially, justify the killing of many completely innocent women.
The joke here is that the woman really was a witch… and even admitted being a witch once she’d been properly tested in a manner that she accepted as being completely fair & correct.
Plus, the very obvious fact that she had turned at least one nice young man into a newt! (at least temporarily)
Of course, this is the whole point of the scene, and since it hasn’t been addressed I think it should be called out that this is an example of perfectly logical reasoning giving incorrect (or at least unsupportable) results due to false premises (e.g. that witches burn because they are made from wood, or that a witch-shaped mass of wood would weight the same as a small aquatic bird).
Of course, the witchcraft trials in Early Modern Britain (and elsewhere in Catholic-controlled Europe) was an outshoot of the various Inquisitions, where manufactured evidence and twisted logic were used to convict people of various and often absurd complaints (“The turn’d me innu a newt!”), stirring up a moral panic that fed the end goal of driving people toward the Church. The actual King Arthur, if he existed at all, would have lived in the post-Roman, pre-Norman Celtic Britain, and so the concept of ‘witches’ in the modern sense did not exist, even among the Roman Britains who lived among the pagan Celtic and Saxon tribes.
The nose and the hat would be like if the arresting officer forced me to wear a striped jumper and carry a bag marked “swag”. Naturally I’d complain to the judge, but when the bank’s CCTV shows a perfect view of me robbing the place, I’d accept that I’d been caught.
The witch gave up because Bedivere’s science was impeccable and she was caught.
