Alice Kyteler


Dame Alice Kyteler was the first recorded person condemned for witchcraft in Ireland. She fled the country, but her servant Petronilla de Meath was flogged and burned to death at the stake on 3 November 1324.

Life

Kyteler was born in Kyteler's House, County Kilkenny, Ireland, the only child of a Flemish family of merchants settled in Ireland since the mid-late thirteenth century.
She was married four times, to William Outlaw, Adam le Blund, Richard de Valle, and Sir John le Poer.
  1. First husband c.1280–85 – William Outlaw, merchant and moneylender of Kilkenny. Son: William Outlaw, was mayor of Kilkenny in 1305. Daughter: Rose?
  2. Second husband Adam Blund of Callan, moneylender
  3. Third husband : Richard Valle, a landholder of County Tipperary. After Valle's death c.1316 Alice took proceedings against her stepson, Richard, for the recovery of her widow's dower.
  4. Fourth husband John Poer.
In 1302, Kyteler and her second husband were briefly accused of killing her first husband. She incurred local resentment because of her vast wealth and involvement in moneylending. When her fourth husband, John le Poer, fell ill in 1324, he expressed the suspicion that he was being poisoned. After his death, the children of le Poer and of her previous three husbands accused her of using poison and sorcery against their fathers and of favouring her first-born son, William Outlaw.
In addition, she and her followers were accused of:
, Bishop of Ossory, sought to uphold the laws of the church and morality. When the case was presented before him in 1324, he began his larger project of addressing witchcraft.
Ledrede made initial attempts to have Kyteler arrested, and Kyteler called on the assistance of powerful friends. The bishop was jailed and questioned by Sir Arnold le Poer, Seneschal of Kilkenny. On Ledrede's release he renewed his efforts to have Kyteler imprisoned.
The bishop wrote to the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Utlagh, demanding that she should be arrested. Ledrede's use of the decretal, designed to protect the faith Ut inquisitions, demanded that secular powers should concede to church wishes, and this point of law became a thorny issue throughout the trial. Kyteler was related to the Chancellor and he asked the bishop to drop the case. A delay in proceedings allowed Alice to flee to Roger Utlagh; Ledrede accused him of harboring heretics, but a commission cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Alice and her accomplices were accused of and investigated on seven accounts:
After some months of stalemate, one of Kyteler's servants, Petronella de Meath, was tortured, and confessed to witchcraft. Her confession detailed her involvement, along with Alice's, in six out of seven of the above listed crimes. It would seem, although her testimony was likely forced and unreliable, that the accusers gained most of their information from this confession. Although the testimony did implicate Kyteler to performing heresy, questions concerning Petronella's credibility come into light, especially when examining the contents of her confession. In Ledrede's retelling of Petronella's confession, he writes:
On one of these occasions, by the crossroads outside the city, she had made an offering of three cocks to a certain demon whom she called Robert, son of Art, from the depths of the underworld. She had poured out the cocks' blood, cut the animals into pieces and mixed the intestines with spiders and other black worms like scorpions, with a herb called milfoil as well as with other herbs and horrible worms. She had boiled this mixture in a pot with the brains and clothes of a boy who had died without baptism and with the head of a robber who had been decapitated... Petronella said she had several times at Alice's instigation and once in her presence, consulted demons and received answers. She had consented to a pact whereby she would be the medium between Alice and the said Robert, her friend. In public, she said that with her own eyes she had seen the aforesaid demon as three shapes, in the form of three black men each carrying an iron rod in the hand. This apparition happened by daylight before the said Dame Alice, and, while Petronella herself was watching, the apparition had intercourse with Alice. After this disgraceful act, with her own hand she wiped clean the disgusting place with sheets from her own bed.

It is said Kyteler fled to England. She appears no further in contemporary records. The Bishop continued to pursue her working-class associates, bringing charges of witchcraft against them. Petronella de Meath was flogged and burned at the stake on 3 November 1324. Petronella's daughter, Basilia, fled with Kyteler. Kyteler's son, William Outlaw, was also accused inter alia, of heresy, usury, perjury, adultery, and clericide. William "recanted" and was ordered to hear three masses a day for a year and to feed the poor.

Chronology of events

In the late thirteenth and fourteenth century, heresy was considered as evidence of the struggle with the devil, with the "dangers" of witchcraft voiced by the papacy in Avignon.
Pope John XXII listed witchcraft as a heresy in his bull Super illius specula. Kyteler's was one of the first European witchcraft trials, and followed closely on the election of this pope.
Kyteler's case appears to involve the first recorded claim of a witch lying with her incubus. Annales Hiberniae state that:
Ricardus Ledered, episcopus Ossoriensis, citavit Aliciam Ketil, ut se purgaret de heretica pravitate; quae magiae convicta est, nam certo comprobatum est, quendam demonem incubum concubuisse cum ea... – that is, that Kyteler had intercourse with a demon named as "Robin Artisson".

Literary references

"Lady Kyteler" figures in William Butler Yeats' poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":

But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon

There lurches past, his great eyes without thought

Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,

That insolent fiend Robert Artisson

To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought

Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

The Stone, a novel about the times of Alice Kyteler, was published in 2008, written by a Kilkenny woman named Claire Nolan. of The Stone, based on Nolan's book premiered in Kilkenny in 2011.
Robin Morgan wrote a novel, The Burning Time about Alice Kyteler.
A short story by Emma Donoghue, 'Looking for Petronilla', tells the story of Alice Kyteler and her maid. The story appears in the collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits.
The Kyteler Witch, is a novel that explores the relationship between Petronella de Meath and her employer Lady Alice Kyteler, written by Candace Muncy Poole, 2014.
The trial is mentioned in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose in a conversation between William of Baskerville and Abo the abbott