Later laws, more permeated by Christian influence, no longer recognize the stria herself as a reality, but they show quite clearly that belief in the stria was still widespread. The laws of the Alamanni, which date from the first halt of the seventh century, decree a fine for a woman who calls another a stria.(9) The last of the Germanic codes, the laws of the Lombards, which was promulgated by King Rothar at Pavia in 643, also warns against this kind of slander.(10) Indeed it goes further: “Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving-maid or female slave as a striga, for it is not possible, nor ought it to be at all believed by Christian minds that a woman can eat a living man up from within.”(11) The belief that was being attacked here reappears in Charlemagne’s capitulary for the Saxons, in 789: “If anyone, deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary amongst pagans, that any man or woman is a striga, and eats men, and shall on that account burn that person to death or eat his or her flesh, or give it to others to eat, he shall be executed”.(12) From this it emerges that at the end of the eighth century the still largely pagan Saxons not only believed in cannibalistic strigae, but were themselves accustomed to eat them — doubtless as a way of neutralising their supernatural destructive power once and for all.
Nor is the evidence wholly confined to the laws. So little German literature has survived from the early Middle Ages that it would be unrealistic to expect vernacular texts to set alongside Ovid and Apuleius. Nevertheless there is one revealing passage in the translation which the Swiss monk Notker Labeo (c. 952-1022) made of that curious fifth-century encyclopaedia, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae. Commenting on the fact that certain savage tribes were supposed to practise cannibalism, Notker remarks that “here at home”, witches are said to do the same.(13)
The notion of cannibalistic witches, then, was familiar to many of the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages. Moreover the linguistic evidence suggests that, like their Roman precursors, these creatures were imagined as flying at night. The Latin of the early medieval laws is, admittedly, fairly debased — and nevertheless the clerics who wrote it must certainly have known that striga was derived from strix, and that a strix was something that flew about, screeching, in the dark. If they had not wished to convey this idea they could very well have used the term malefica, which also meant “witch” but had no bird-like associations.
In any case, by the beginning of the eleventh century there is firm evidence that in parts of Germany the image of the cannibalistic woman often, if not invariably, included the ability to fly about at night. It is to be found in the fifth chapter of_Burchard’s Corrector, which has already afforded us such valuable insights into the maleficium beliefs of the early Middle Ages. One of the questions proposed in this penitential reads as follows:
Have you believed what many womer, turning back to Satan, believe and affirm to be true; as that you believe that in the silence of the quiet night, when you have settled down in bed, and your husband lies in your bosom, you are able, while still in your body, to go out through the closed doors and travel through the spaces of the world, together with others who are similarly deceived; and that without visible weapons, you kill people who have been baptized and redeemed by Christ’s blood, and together cook and devour their flesh; and that where the heart was, you put straw or wood or something of the sort; and that after eating these people, you bring them alive again and grant them a brief spell of life? If you have believed this, you shall do penance on bread and water for fifty days, and likewise in each of the seven years following.(14)
This passage has several points of interest. It expounds the fantasy of the cannibalistic night-witch in much greater detail than any earlier Germanic source. It confirms the hint which the Lex Salica had dropped some five centuries earlier, that night-witches were imagined to move and act collectively, and to cook their victims before eating them. Above all it supplies strong evidence that in Germany the figure of the cannibalistic night-witch belonged to the world of traditional folkbeliefs.
Two and a half centuries later this was still the case. In the midthirteenth century a poet from the Tirol mocked these same popular beliefs about cannibalistic night-witches. Jokingly, he says that he has gone from university to university, in many countries; nowhere has he heard any scholar lecture on these uncanny beings. Indeed, he adds, it would be a wondrous thing to see a woman riding on a calf or a broomstick or a poker, over mountains and villages. For himself, he could never believe it, whoever might say it, unless he saw it with his own eyes. It is also all lying nonsense that a woman can cut out a man’s heart and put straw in its place.(15) The Englishman Gervase of Tilbury, who around 1211 wrote a book of table-talk for the delectation of the Emperor Otto IV, was also familiar with the idea that certain men and women fly by night through vast distances, enter homes, dissolve human bones, suck human blood, and move infants from place to place. It is true that he gives St Augustine as his authority; nevertheless, he is clearly reflecting a contemporary belief, for he also says that physicians attribute such ideas to nightmares.(16) And anyway there is nothing in Augustine that could have served as a source.
Because the night-witch was known to the Romans also, it has often been assumed that the Germanic peoples must have taken the idea from them; or more precisely, that wherever the night-witch appears in a medieval text, it is due to the influence of Latin literature.(17) Yet the balance of evidence is heavily against this view. The earliest written Germanic law, the Lex Salica, treats the night-witch as a reality — and no Roman law ever did that. And later laws, which deny the reality of the night-witch, are clearly directed not against the sophisticated fancies of literati raised on Ovid, but against beliefs which were so deep and widespread amongst the common people that they were liable to express themselves in insults and violence. Down to the thirteenth century, it was the educated elite who, in the name of Christian doctrine, rejected the night-witch; while the common people continued to believe in her. And one can go a little further. Burchard’s penitential shows that some women assimilated the belief so completely that they imagined themselves to be night-witches. It condemns such women— not for doing harm to others but for indulging in a pagan superstition. What they were really doing was living out, in their dreams, a collective fantasy or folk-belief that was traditional amongst the Germanic peoples.