Grizzel Greedigut: A Name ‘No Mortall Could Invent’

Abstract

Matthew Hopkins, England’s most notorious witch hunter, rested his reputation on his experience in confronting the supernatural. To this end, he greatly exaggerated the intensity of his first encounter with an accused witch, Elizabeth Clarke. In Hopkins’ account, Clarke mentioned a familiar named Grizzel Greedigut. But earlier publications show that this did not happen, and that Hopkins appropriated the name from the dubious confession of another woman, Joan Wallis. Today, we have largely accepted Grizzel Greedigut as a bizarre, nonsensical name, but it would not have been all that absurd at the time. Grizzle often described grey animals, and Grissel was a fairly popular name, an abbreviation of Grisilde. Greedigut meant ‘glutton,’ and was the name English colonials used for the American anglerfish. Without knowing more about the name’s historical context, we fall for Hopkins’ cynical ploy to maximize the strangeness of his encounter.

Keywords:

• witch’s familiar
• Matthew Hopkins
• animal name
• onomastics
• witchcraft

Acknowledgments

This work was presented at the SQUID 13 conference at the Graduate Center, CUNY, in April 2018. Dedicated to my wife Rebecca.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wilby (2000, 287–288) earlier noted the similarity between many familiar names and the names of fairies in English and Scottish publications, but it is not demonstrated how substantially these differ from general, non-supernatural naming elements. For example, permutations of Tom, Brownie, Ball, and Jill are listed. A corpus of historic pet names would be useful for this sort of comparative research, but, to my knowledge, none exists.

2 A good listing of familiars’ names appears in Serpell (2002, 175). Barbara Rosen (1991, 396) lists only familiars mentioned from 1558–1618, predating the Hopkins-helmed witch hunts.

3 Jim Sharpe (2001, 323n1) provides a guide to the many relevant manuscript and print materials, and Malcolm Gaskill (2005) provides the best modern account of Hopkins’ brief but bloody tenure.

4 At the time, the legal year in England began on 25 March. We know from other sources that the incident Hopkins relates took place on 24 March (Gaskill 2005, 49). Because he was using Old Style dating, Hopkins indicates this as happening in ‘March 1644.’ For the sake of fluency, I use New Style dating throughout this article.

5 Spelled Sacke and Sugar in the frontispiece.

6 In the pamphlet’s frontispiece, these names appear as Ilemauzar, Pyewackett, Pecke in the Crowne, and Griezzell Greedigutt.

7 The full title is A true and exact Relation Of the severall Informations, Examinations, and Confessions of the late Witches, arraigned and executed in the County of Essex.

8 In addition to The Discovery of Witchcraft, they are named in the following sources: a. Holt (Hoult): Stearne’s testimony (T&E 1645, 4); Edward Parsley’s testimony (T&E 1645, 6); b. Jarmara: Hopkins’ testimony (T&E 1645, 2); Stearne’s testimony (T&E 1645, 4); Edward Parsley’s testimony (T&E 1645, 6); and in A Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (Stearne 1648, 15) as Jermarah.; c. Vinegar Tom: Hopkins’ testimony (T&E 1645, 2); Stearne’s testimony (T&E 1645, 4); Edward Parsley’s testimony (T&E 1645, 6; d. Sack and Sugar: Stearne’s testimony (T&E 1645, 4); Edward Parsley’s testimony (T&E 1645, 6)

9 It’s unclear if the two women were related.

10 Accessible here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14015/14015-h/14015-h.htm

11 I consulted scans of the original publication through Early English Books Online (EEBO). The document is also reproduced in Rosen (1991, 344–356).

12 Raunds and Keyston (Joan Wallis’s hometown) are less than five miles apart. That Arthur and Joan each reportedly kept a familiar with the same name in such proximity seems to indicate that this was not a particularly unusual moniker in this area during the first half of the seventeenth century. Whatever sort of animal Arthur’s Grissill was, it was almost certainly dead by the time of Joan’s trial over 30 years later.

13 I consulted scans of the original document through EEBO, which requires users to log in. A transcription of the text is available through the EEBO Text Creation Partnership at http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A09118.0001.001.

14 Quoted in Peter Boswell’s Treatise on the Poultry-Yard (1841, 94).

15 For more on the diffusion and reprinting of Scottish publications in England, see Blakeway (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Pentangelo

Joseph Pentangelo is a PhD candidate in Linguistics and a student of Medieval Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. His research interests include language documentation, historical linguistics, witchcraft, and folklore.