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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter V: Traditional Witchcraft

Witch Bottles: History and Archaeology of a Counter-Spell

Witch bottles explained: the stoneware jars of urine, pins and nails hidden in English houses against witchcraft, their seventeenth-century sources and finds.

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A witch bottle is a container, most often a seventeenth-century stoneware jug, filled with items such as bent pins, nails, urine, hair and nail clippings and then heated in a fire or hidden beneath a hearth, threshold or wall to counter witchcraft. It was a form of counter-magic: the bottle was believed to turn a witch's spell back upon her, causing her pain until she lifted it or revealed herself. Several hundred witch bottles have been found in England, especially in East Anglia and London, and they are among the best archaeological evidence for everyday belief in witchcraft.

What Is a Witch Bottle? Contents and Containers§

Archaeologists use the term for any sealed vessel deliberately filled with sharp objects and bodily materials and concealed in a building, or occasionally buried in the ground nearby. The classic form is a brown, salt-glazed stoneware jug, with a bearded face moulded on the neck, imported from the Rhineland. From the eighteenth century onwards small glass bottles, including phials, were used instead, and some nineteenth-century examples are ordinary household bottles.

Recorded contents include:

  • Iron pins and nails, often deliberately bent, sometimes in large numbers.
  • Urine, which has been detected chemically in several sealed examples.
  • Hair and nail clippings, presumably from the bewitched person.
  • A heart shape cut from cloth or leather and pierced with pins.
  • Other items such as thorns, glass, brimstone (sulphur), salt or written charms.

Bottles are usually found upside down, under hearths and floors, by doorways or within walls, the points through which harm was thought to enter a house. Ralph Merrifield's pioneering survey, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (1987), established the pattern, and later research by Brian Hoggard and others has catalogued many more examples. Their distribution is concentrated in eastern and south-eastern England, with smaller numbers elsewhere in Britain and a few from colonial North America.

Bartmann Jugs and the "Bellarmine" Name§

The stoneware jugs most often used were made in great numbers at Frechen and Cologne and exported across northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as everyday containers for wine, beer and other liquids. German potters called them Bartmann ("bearded man") jugs after the stern bearded mask applied to the neck. In England they were commonly known as "Bellarmines", a name popularly connected with the Catholic controversialist Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), supposedly as a Protestant joke; the link is traditional and its origin uncertain.

Why these jugs were favoured is debated. They were cheap, common and strong enough to survive heating and burial. Some scholars suggest that the grim face added to the bottle's power, perhaps representing the witch or a guardian, and some vessels also bear medallions that may have seemed meaningful. Others think their prominence simply reflects how common they were in seventeenth-century households and how well they survive in the ground. When stoneware imports declined, glass took their place without any apparent change in the underlying idea.

How Witch Bottles Were Thought to Work: Sympathy and Counter-Magic§

The logic of the witch bottle rests on the early modern belief that a witch who harmed someone established a magical link with her victim. The victim's urine, hair or nail parings carried that link. By sealing them in a bottle with pins and nails and heating it, the household believed it could transfer the pain back along the link to the witch: she would suffer, particularly in passing water, and would be forced to remove the spell, to come to the house, or to reveal herself. Burying the bottle under the hearth, where it would be kept warm, prolonged the effect.

This was not witchcraft in the eyes of those who used it but defence against witchcraft, a category of counter-magic widely practised and often recommended by cunning folk, the village magical specialists described in folk magic. Clergy and learned demonologists nevertheless frequently condemned such remedies as superstitious or as themselves relying on the devil. The broader history of harmful magic and its remedies is told in maleficium, curses and protective magic and protective magic.

Witch bottles belong with other forms of concealed household protection found in old buildings: shoes hidden in walls and chimneys, dried cats, written charms and carved ritual marks such as the hexafoil or "daisy wheel", whose making is described in the spellbook entry daisy wheel hexafoil mark.

Witch Bottles in Seventeenth-Century Writings§

Written sources confirm the archaeological interpretation. The astrologer-physician Joseph Blagrave, in Blagrave's Astrological Practice of Physick (1671), describes stopping up the bewitched person's urine in a bottle with nails, pins and needles and setting it to the fire, as one of several ways to make a witch suffer and so free the patient. He presents this as a well-known remedy.

The Anglican clergyman Joseph Glanvill, in Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), a collection of witchcraft cases intended to refute sceptics, includes an account in which a husband, advised by an old man, put his afflicted wife's urine, pins and nails into a bottle and set it by the fire, with consequences that were attributed to the suspected witch. Such stories circulated widely and show that the practice was known across social classes.

A related idea appears in the "witch cake" at Salem Village in 1692, when a neighbour advised making a cake of rye meal mixed with the afflicted girls' urine and feeding it to a dog, in order to reveal the witches. The minister Samuel Parris condemned the act from the pulpit as going to the devil for help against the devil. The event formed part of the chain of accusations described in the European witch trials and their colonial echoes. Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic remains the classic study of this world of popular counter-magic.

The Greenwich Witch Bottle and Other Archaeological Finds§

The most fully studied example was found in 2004 during excavations in Greenwich, London. Unusually, the stoneware bottle was still sealed and contained its original liquid. Analysis by a team including the chemist Alan Massey, published in 2009, used X-ray and CT scanning before the bottle was opened. It contained bent iron nails and brass pins, a nail driven through a leather heart, hair, fingernail parings, possible navel fluff, brimstone and urine. Chemical traces in the urine suggested that the person concerned was a smoker. The bottle has been dated to the later seventeenth century.

Other finds illustrate the range of the practice. Bottles have been uncovered beneath floors in houses in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Hertfordshire and London; in churches and churchyards; and occasionally in rivers and ditches. A few have been found in North America, including colonial Pennsylvania, showing that English settlers carried the custom with them. Owen Davies's research on nineteenth-century England shows that cunning folk still prescribed witch bottles in some areas into the Victorian period, and that the urine-and-pins remedy survived as rural lore into the early twentieth century.

Interpretation is not always simple. Some bottles may have been concealed for other protective purposes, and some deposits are hard to date. Archaeologists now record such finds systematically when old buildings are restored, and museums, including the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic at Boscastle, hold examples.

Witch Bottles in Traditional Witchcraft and Modern Practice§

In twentieth-century folklore revival and modern witchcraft, the witch bottle changed character. Practitioners of traditional witchcraft, who seek inspiration in the cunning folk and the rural charms of early modern Britain, adopted it as part of their repertoire of household protection. Wiccans and other modern Pagans make witch bottles as general protective charms for a new home, often with rosemary, salt, red thread, pins and other ingredients, rather than as a weapon against a named witch. A version of the practice as now commonly made is described in the spellbook entry English witch bottle for protecting a home, and a related modern charm in protection spell jar.

This shift reflects a broader change. Early modern users believed that a specific neighbour was harming them and that the bottle would hurt her; modern practitioners generally reject any intention of harming others and frame the bottle as a symbolic boundary for the home. Such charms are part of religious and cultural practice and are no substitute for practical, legal or medical help when a household faces real danger.

For historians, witch bottles are valuable because they record the private actions of ordinary people who left few written traces. They show that fear of witchcraft reached into the foundations of homes and continued long after the courts stopped hearing witchcraft cases.

Frequently asked questions§

What is a witch bottle?§

A witch bottle is a vessel, usually a seventeenth-century stoneware jug or a later glass bottle, filled with items such as pins, nails, urine and hair and hidden in a house or heated in a fire. It was intended to counter witchcraft by turning the spell back on the witch.

Why did witch bottles contain urine?§

Urine, hair and nail clippings were thought to carry a magical link between the bewitched person and the witch. By sealing them with sharp objects and heating them, the user hoped to cause the witch pain and force her to lift the spell.

Why are they called Bellarmine jars?§

The stoneware jugs often used were known in England as "Bellarmines", a name traditionally connected with Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, perhaps as a Protestant joke about the bearded face on the neck. In Germany, where they were made, they were called Bartmann or "bearded man" jugs.

What should you do if you find a witch bottle?§

Historically significant finds should be left as found where possible and reported to a local museum or archaeological service, which can record and date them. The contents may include sharp objects and old bodily materials, so they should not be opened or handled carelessly.

Sources and further reading§