An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Garters as Witches’ Signs

As far back as 1892, a French writer, Jules Lemoine, in La Tradition, noted the importance of the garter as a sign of rank among witches. He wrote: “Les mauvaises gens forment une confrerie qui est dirigée par une sorcière. Celle-ci a la jarretière comme marque de sa dignité”. (“The bad people [witches] form a brotherhood, which is directed by a female witch. This woman wears a garter as a mark of her dignity.”)

Margaret Murray quotes this passage in her Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 1921): and in her later book The God of the Witches (Faber, London, 1952), she advances the remarkable theory that the foundation of Britain’s premier order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, had its origin in the Old Religion of witchcraft. She believed the Plantagenet king, Edward III, the founder of the Order of the Garter, to have been certainly a sympathiser with witchcraft, if not an actual member of the cult.

We tend today to look upon a garter as a piece of feminine frippery, connected in the mind with can-can dancers and Edwardian belles. But of course the garters of long ago were not frilly things made of elastic. They were long laces or strings, which were bound round the leg and tied; and they were used by men as well as by women.

Margaret Murray has suggested that the significance of the garter in witchcraft is the real explanation of the old story of how the Order of the Garter came to be founded. The story goes that when King Edward III was dancing with a lady of his court, either the Fair Maid of Kent or the Countess of Salisbury, her garter fell to the floor. The lady was embarrassed; but the King gallantly picked up the garter, saying “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame to him who thinks ill of it”), and tied the garter upon his own leg. This incident gave him the idea to found the Order of the Garter, with twelve knights for the King, and twelve for his son, the Black Prince, making two thirteens, or twenty-six knights in all.

The number of thirteen was given further significance by the King’s regalia as Chief of the Order. His mantle was ornamented with the figures of 168 garters, which, with the actual garter worn on his leg, made 169, or thirteen times thirteen.

The above incident of court life seems a very trivial one for this noble Order to have been founded upon, unless it had some inner significance. But if the garter that the lady dropped was a witch-garter, then the whole episode assumes quite a different aspect. Both the lady’s confusion and the King’s gesture are seen to have a much deeper meaning than in a mere pretty story of courtly gallantry. She stood revealed as a leading witch; and he publicly showed his willingness to protect the Old Religion and its followers.

Further evidence of the importance of the garter as a witches’ sign may be seen in a rare old wood-engraving which is found as a frontispiece, in some copies only, of a sixteenth-century book about witches, Dialogues Touchant le Pouvoir des Sorcières et la Punition qu’elles Méritent (Dialogues about the Power of Witches and of the Punishment They Deserve) by Thomas Erastus (Geneva, 1579).

This picture shows the interior of a witch’s cottage, set in some remote place among woods and hills. Four witches are in the act of departing on their fabled broomstick-flight to the Sabbat. Two of them have already flown up the wide cottage chimney; while a third, before she departs, is binding one leg with a garter. A fourth witch, broomstick in hand, awaits her turn; and outside, unknown to them, a man spies upon their proceedings through the keyhole.

The artist evidently accepted the story about witches flying on broomsticks; but he mingled with his fantasy a detail of fact, namely the garter. Artists who drew pictures of witches in the old days often did this, because they were depicting the popular notions about witches, which were a mixture of actual knowledge and fantasy.