Alice Kyteler
Dame Alice Kyteler (1263 – later than 1325) 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. 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 ("maleficarum") against their fathers and of favouring her first-born son, William Outlaw. In addition, she and her followers were accused of: Trial. Richard de Ledrede, 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 wrote to the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Utlagh (Outlaw), demanding that she be arrested. Using the decretal "Ut inquisitiones" (1298), designed to protect the faith, Ledrede demanded that secular powers concede to church wishes, and this point of law became a thorny issue throughout the trial. Kyteler was related to the Chancellor (he was probably her first husband's brother) and he asked the bishop to  drop the case. A delay in proceedings (the Chancellor insisted the accused be excommunicated 40 days before arrest) allowed Alice to flee to Roger Utlagh. Ledrede accused Utlagh of harbouring heretics, but a commission cleared him of any wrongdoing. The Bishop then charged Alice and her son, William Outlaw, with the crime of heresy. William was a powerful man and was related to many of the ruling classes, he called upon his friend  Sir Arnold le Poeur, a Senior Official in Dublin, who had the Bishop thrown in prison in Kilkenny castle. On Ledrede's release, he renewed his efforts  to have Kyteler imprisoned. Alice and her accomplices were accused of and investigated on seven accounts: After some months of stalemate, one of Kyteler's servants, Petronilla 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 came to light, especially when examining the contents of her  confession. In Ledrede's retelling of Petronilla'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 ("Robertum filium Artis"), 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 ... Petronilla 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 ("praedictus daemon tertius"), in the form of three black men ("aethiopum") each carrying an iron rod in the hand. This apparition happened  by daylight ("de die") before the said Dame Alice, and, while Petronilla herself was watching, the apparition had intercourse with Alice. After this disgraceful act, with her own hand she (Alice?) wiped clean the disgusting place with sheets ("kanevacio") 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. Petronilla 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. Significance. 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 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 (1316–1334). 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 (nomine Robin Artisson) 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. A musical version of "The Stone", based on Nolan's book premiered in Kilkenny in 2011. Robin Morgan wrote a novel, "The Burning Time" (Melville House, 2006; ) 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" (Virago, 2002). "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 abbot.