Disability in Royal Courts

 

Welcome to my latest blog post. Last week I looked at the interesting life of Jeffrey Hudson, the 17^th Century court dwarf. This week I have decided to examine the royal court more closely and see why so many disabled people could be found there. Unlike some of my other posts, I will not be focusing on any particular time, person, or place. Instead, I will be talking about royal courts throughout time. The king (or queen) had an important role to play in the makeup of the royal court, obviously, so I will begin by surmising why they chose disabled people.

Kingship and Disability: Are there Similarities?

I’m going to start by stating the obvious. Throughout history kings and queens have been powerful people. The disabled people who served in their courts on the other hand were the lowest of the low. How then could there be any similarities between the two? In many Christian countries, kings were thought of as being close to God, as well as being good and just. Therefore, it was important for them to be surrounded by positive energy. I wonder did they try meditation? You may remember from previous posts such as The Curse of The Evil Eye and Disability vs The Evil Eye, that the Greeks and Romans believed disabled people were able to ward off evil by just being their plain old deformed selves.

As usual, I am attacking this topic with gigantic brush strokes, but I am fairly confident that the overall point is solid. As you would expect, rulers, whose job it was to inspire confidence in their people, did not want to be plagued by evil spirits. Now that I think about it, I don’t think anyone would want to be plagued by evil spirits. To stop this from happening, the ruler would fill his/her court with deformed people to literally surround themself with protection.

The Role of Religion

So, that strategy of surrounding yourself with deformed people seemed to work well against the evil eye. However, why did the practice continue after popular belief in the eye faded? Part of the answer is probably that deformed courtiers became commonplace and they just forgot why they were there in the first place. Another probability, which is quite depressing, is that the deformities themselves were seen as funny and entertaining to look at. As the monarch was the most powerful person in their kingdom, it was only fair that they had the coolest stuff, right? If the coolest stuff happened to be people with physical abnormalities, then so be it.

There were more important reasons why monarchs from the Medieval period onwards filled their courts with disabled people. While the evil eye and evil spirits were not very prominent, God certainly was! When it came to disabled people in royal courts, God was front and centre in the minds of monarchs. For a long time, the Christian churches held vast amounts of power in Europe. As such, if a monarch wanted to be successful, they needed the support of the church.

I don’t think I have touched on this before but being charitable towards disabled people was important to the church. Therefore, by including disabled people in their courts, monarchs would gain the approval of the church, as they had rescued the disabled person from a life of poverty. This was certainly true for Jeffrey Hudson who I discussed last week.

The Role of the Fool

There were also certain qualities which some disabled people possessed, which meant that it was important they stayed close to the monarch. This is best seen when looking at court fools. Their role was to entertain the monarch and their guests by telling jokes and generally clowning around. It has been argued that court fools were actually people with intellectual disabilities. You see, people who now would be diagnosed with intellectual disabilities were referred to as ‘natural fools’, predominantly in the Medieval and Tudor periods. They were thought to be insensible of their actions, or more generally incapable. This gave them an aura of innocence and pureness. They were deemed to be untainted by the ills of humanity and closer to God than anybody else.

If in ancient times, deformed slaves could protect the ruler from evil, Medieval and Early Modern monarchs could be brought closer to God by the disabled people in their court.

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Next time, I will be writing a post on a different topic. I am going to leave it as a surprise! I guess you're going to have to come back to discover what it is.

 

                                                The Wheelchair Historian

 

Further Reading

Lipscomb, Suzannah, ‘All the King’s Fools’, Published in History Today Volume 61 Issue 8 August 2011, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/all-king%E2%80%99s-fools Accessed: 5^th March 2021.

Maitland, Karen, ‘What was life like for a court jester?’ https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/what-was-life-like-for-a-court-jester/ Accessed: 5^th March 2021.

Trentin, Lisa, 2011. ‘Deformity in the Roman Imperial Court’, Greece & Rome, 58, No. 2, 195-208 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41306156 [Accessed: 19th November 2017].

 

Disability and Witchcraft

 

Welcome to my latest blog post. Last week I discussed the idea of maternal impression and how women were blamed if their child was born with a deformity. This week I will be looking at something else women were blamed for, witchcraft. Specifically, I will try to see if there is a connection between disability and witches. It is a disability history blog after all!

Who Was Accused of Witchcraft?

I don’t know about you, but when I picture a witch in my head, I usually see an elderly woman that is ugly or perhaps deformed in some way. I therefore assumed that making a connection between disability and witches would be simple. However, this has not been the case. For starters, not everyone who was accused of witchcraft was a woman. Also, middle aged, rather than elderly women were the biggest demographic. Women past a childbearing age were a popular target.

When I typed disability and witches/ witchcraft into the search engine beginning with g and ending in oogle, I didn’t find what I wanted. Most results related to the 2020 movie, ‘The Witches’, which I will discuss later, but not much on actual witch trials and disability. All is not lost as there are small clues that link the two together. Historically, on the surface, accused witches and disabled people were similar (and I don’t mean they were both ugly!). Both groups were different from the rest of their community and were usually outcast as a result. Accused witches and in some cases, disabled people, were persecuted due to their differences.

Deformed Witches

The best example I can find connecting disability to witchcraft is from England, during the Lancashire Witch Trials of 1612. It turns out that one of the accused witches actually was deformed. One of the accused was a woman called Elizabeth Device. The court clerk Thomas Potts recorded the trials in a book called The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster. A fascinating work if you ever get a chance to read it. It was published in 1613 though, so can sometimes be tricky to understand. Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes… the deformed witch! Sorry. I mean woman wrongfully accused of witchcraft. Potts describes Elizabeth’s appearance as follows:

    ‘This odious Witch was branded with a preposterous marke in Nature, euen from her birth, which was her left eye, standing lower then the other; the one loo∣king downe, the other looking vp, so strangely defor∣med, as the best that were present in that Honorable As∣sembly, and great Audience, did affirme, they had not often seene the like’.

This deformity may help to explain why she was accused of witchcraft. Witches were believed to be in cahoots with the Devil. The Devil would leave a mark on the witch which proved she worshipped him. Therefore, any unusual mark on the woman’s body could be used against her in the trial. Elizabeth’s deformity was a clear indication that she was involved with the Devil.

The fact that she had the deformity since birth may explain why some of the others were accused. You see, Elizabeth’s mother, Elizabeth Southern, alias “Old Demdike”, as well as two of Elizabeth’s children, Alison and James Device were also accused of witchcraft. I didn’t read this anywhere, but maybe the fact “Old Demdike” gave birth to a deformed child, who in turn had children, condemned them all. That is just my own theory though. Who needs concrete evidence anyway? I know people in charge of witch trials certainly didn’t!

 

Are All Disabled People Inherently Evil?

This is part of a much larger topic that I will cover at some point in the future. For now, let’s just focus on witches. Throughout history there has been a connection made between being evil and being disabled in some way. Thank goodness that is all in the past, right? RIGHT?? WRONG!!! The 2020 movie ‘The Witches’ has brought the topic back into the public’s imagination. In the film, the Grand High Witch has deformed hands and feet and is designed to be scary. This has rightfully annoyed people with limb differences as it is basically saying that they should be feared. This is the exact attitude that we should be moving away from, not putting in movies.

As you can see, some accused witches were disabled which most likely drew attention to them.

To keep up to date with my latest blog posts, you can like my Facebook page, or follow me on Twitter. You can find them by clicking the relevant icons in the sidebar.

Next time, I will move away from monsters to examine the court dwarf Jeffrey Hudson.

                                                            The Wheelchair Historian

Further Reading

Hardy, Tim, ‘The Discovery of the Lancashire Witches 1612’, https://www.invisibleworks.co.uk/the-discovery-of-the-lancashire-witches-1612/ Accessed: 19^th February 2021.

Howlett, Daniel, George Mason University, ‘"Being Something Hard of Hearing": Disability during the Salem Witch Trials’, Stevens C Prefunction (Hilton Chicago), Saturday, January 5, 2019 https://aha.confex.com/aha/2019/webprogram/Paper26924.html Accessed: 19^th February 2021.

Kranking, Emily, ‘The History Behind the Ableist Themes in 'The Witches'’, November 17, 2020 https://themighty.com/2020/11/the-witches-limb-differences-disability/ Accessed: 19^th February 2021.

Metzler, Irina, ‘Disability, Witches and the Middle Ages: Some Mythbusting’, Thursday 10 Oct 2013 https://irinametzler.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/disability-witches-and-the-middle-ages-some-mythbusting/ Accessed: 19^th February 2021.

Potts, Thomas, The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster (London, 1613), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18253/18253-h/18253-h.htm Accessed: 19^th February 2021.

Sparks, Doug, ‘5 Facts You Didn’t Know About The Salem Witch Trials’, Published October 30, 2017 https://www.mvmag.net/2017/10/30/salem-witch/ Accessed: 19^th February 2021.