The rulings
What Five Centuries of Witch Paperwork Establishes, and What Was Invented
Ten rulings graded against the register: the accusation was nearly always about butter, the water is first filed in 1900 and the green in 1939.
By Casimir Vane The Registers · Filed Under Protest 2026-10-28
These are the rulings on the Coven Register, which is where the evidence is. Nothing here is graded against anything else.
There is enough of it to stop taking the folklore on trust and start grading it, which I have done under the paper’s standards and not my own. A rule is established when the record carries it consistently and can say why, attested when everybody repeats it and nobody explains it, contested when the filings disagree and both sides have documents, unsourced when it turns out to have been invented once and believed ever since, and not in evidence when the folklore has it and the record does not.
Six of the ten come back unsourced or not in evidence, which is the worst proportion in this run and not my doing. I have three rules in that condition. The one everybody knows was invented in 1922 by a print the courts ordered burned, and I have been complaining about it to anyone who will sit still. The witches have six, nobody has ever asked them to account for one of them, and they have the better reputation for it.
The rulings
Confirmed, contested, or made up in 1900
Every citation is a filing on the register.
| The rumour | Verdict | The desk's finding |
|---|---|---|
| The accusation was about the provisions | NEARLY ALWAYS: IT WAS ABOUT BUTTER Established | A refusal at a door, a churn that would not turn, and a neighbour blamed for it. Nearly always, in the records the desk can check. The long versionThe register's leading result, and it is not the desk's. Three generations of historians went through the English assize records and the Salem papers and found the same shape underneath nearly all of it: a request refused at a door, a boundary, a borrowed thing not returned, a churn that would not turn, a cow that stopped, a child that sickened, and afterwards an accusation aimed at whoever had been sent away. Salem's own accusations sort along a property line. The fiction agrees without appearing to know it: a house built of food in a famine, a garden robbed of greens, a failed crop and a missing goat, a harvest that fails on an island, and a household succession dispute in which the charge moves in whatever direction the property is moving. Those five filings and the court papers are what the desk cites, and it leaves the rest of this page out of the finding. Enters the record the scholarship rather than the record — Macfarlane 1970, Thomas 1971 and Boyer & Nissenbaum 1974, all on the shelf, reading the assize rolls the register files at the front of this page Carried by |
| Water melts them | MADE UP IN 1900 Unsourced | Invented in one children's novel. The one document here that records a disposition records a rope and a press. The long versionThe best-known fact about a witch is a hundred and twenty-six years old and comes from a children's book. Nothing in the paperwork, in five centuries, reports a subject dissolving in water, and the desk went looking. What the 1900 filing supplies is a domestic agent, water, and no account of it whatsoever. It is the register's exact equivalent of the vampire file's sunlight: the most confidently known thing about the subject, invented late, once, and carried ever since by repetition alone. Enters the record WT-1900-BAU, and nowhere before it Carried by Contradicted by |
| She is green | ARRIVES IN 1939, IN COLOUR Unsourced | Every filing here that carries it was made in or after 1939. The 1900 illustrations are unchecked. The long versionThe two things everybody knows about a witch come from the same story and enter it thirty-nine years apart. The green is on screen in 1939, every filing on this page that carries it was made in or after that year, and the desk can find nothing like it in the documents at the front of the page. Two hedges belong on this finding. The desk has not checked what the 1900 first edition's illustrations show and prints no claim about them. And the standard explanation — that the colour was chosen to exploit the process the film was shot in — is an attribution to a published production history this desk has not read, so it is recorded here as an attribution and not as a fact. The 1993 filing is cited against because its own witches are not green and nobody minds. Enters the record WT-1939-OZ, thirty-nine years after the water and from the same property Carried by Contradicted by |
| They float, so you can test for it | A REAL PROCEDURE, NO EVIDENCE, ONE DUCK Unsourced | The test was genuinely used. It has never once been evidence of anything. The long versionThis is the register's most uncomfortable finding, because the procedure is real and the result never was. The desk states two things and refuses a third. It is documented that the test was applied in England in the 1640s, on the authority of the pamphlet written by the man applying it. It is documented that a rebuttal was in print sixty years earlier saying the whole apparatus proved nothing, and that the rebuttal was answered by a king rather than by an experiment. What the desk will not do is repeat the popular claim about which specific book introduced the test to English print, because it has not checked that text. The most rigorous published account of the procedure remains a 1975 comedy conducted with a set of scales and a duck, and the reason it is rigorous is that it shows every step being valid and the conclusion being nonsense anyway. Enters the record in practice rather than in print — the East Anglian trials of the 1640s, on the register's 1647 self-report Carried by Contradicted by |
| They were burned at the stake | NOT IN SALEM. NOT IN ENGLAND. Unsourced | Nineteen hanged, one pressed, none burned. The fire is somewhere else. The long versionThe court papers are unambiguous and this desk will not soften them: at Salem in 1692, nineteen people were hanged and one man was pressed to death under weights, and nobody was burned. English practice was the rope. The finding is not a denial and the register is careful to say so, because it would be a grotesque one: several continental and Scottish jurisdictions did burn, in numbers the shelf can give you and this page cannot, and Levack is the entry to read for who did what and where. What is unsourced is the specific belief that the English and New England trials ended at a stake. It did not come from the record. It came from the pictures, and the record is on this page saying otherwise in a clerk's handwriting. Enters the record nowhere in this register's English or New England paperwork Contradicted by |
| She lives alone at the edge of the wood | SHE MOVED TO THE SUBURBS Contested | True of the tales. False of almost everything filed since the war. The long versionThe isolated cottage is real and it is early. It belongs to the tales, to the 1630s farm outside the plantation, and to the woods where nobody is ever produced. Almost everywhere else the witch has neighbours: the suburban line that opens in 1942, the suburbs on television in 1964, the Pittsburgh suburbs in 1972, a Bristol flat in 2008, and Staten Island in 2019. The register's mixed households are the strongest form of this: several species under one roof, and a chore rota. Whatever the woods were for, most of the record since the war is somewhere else. Enters the record WT-1812-HAN, and the tales collected with it Carried by Contradicted by |
| The familiar is a cat | HOPKINS LISTED A FERRET Contested | The cat wins on volume. The founding document is a list of small mammals. The long versionThe only document on this register that lists familiars by name and species lists a dog, a ferret, a rabbit and a polecat among them, which is a list of small animals rather than a bestiary. The cat's dominance is entirely a fact about the fiction, and the strangest citation in the desk's collection runs straight through it: one of the names recorded in that 1647 prosecution pamphlet is given three hundred and eleven years later to the cat in a Manhattan comedy. The register is contested rather than unsourced here only because the cat does appear in the trial literature. It simply does not appear alone, and it was never the point. Enters the record WT-1647-HOP, where the animals are named individually Carried by Contradicted by |
| The cauldron recipe decodes into plant folk-names | THE LIST IS ABOUT 1606. THE TRANSLATION IS NOBODY'S. Unsourced | The desk went looking for the primary source and did not find one. The long versionThe register's kitchen desk was asked to check the popular claim that the ingredients in the recipe of about 1606 are herbalists' folk-names, and could not find a primary source for it anywhere. So it is not printed here as fact, and the tidy decodings circulating with it are not printed either. What the desk can establish is duller and better: the scene is a list, in order, of items going into a large vessel maintained by three people working together, which is a recipe and behaves like one. The 1988 filing reads the same list back and files an objection. The 2016 filing has the most fully provisioned kitchen on the register. Both are cited for the recipe. Enters the record nowhere the desk can cite Contradicted by |
| They fly on brooms | CARRIED BY EVERYBODY; EXPLAINED BY NOBODY Attested, unexplained | Five centuries of agreement, and the one stated mechanism is an ointment on a staff. The long versionThis is the register's attested finding: the one rule that everybody carries and nobody has ever been asked to justify. The 1486 manual is the earliest filing on this page that addresses it, and what it describes is not flight as a property of the subject but flight as a property of a preparation applied to a staff, which is a claim about a substance. Nothing since has improved on it. In 1900 it is carried without a word of explanation. In 1989 it is a capital asset. In 2001 it is a vehicle with room on it. Across five centuries the register cannot find a single work that stops to say why it works, and it has stopped expecting one. Enters the record before this register's own paperwork begins; the desk has seen a fifteenth-century manuscript illustration cited as the earliest depiction and has not verified it, so it prints no date Carried by |
| The witch is in evidence | NOT IN EVIDENCE Not in evidence | The most-cited witch film of its decade contains no witch. The long versionThe desk grades the folklore against the register and found one claim it could not support in any form. In the 1999 filing the subject is never on screen. Enters the record WT-1999-BLA, where she does not Contradicted by |
Findings
The first ruling is the one I resent liking. None of the evidence for it is mine.
The green ruling carries two hedges, and I could not lift either. I wanted one confident sentence. I am obliged to print two careful ones.
The suburbs ruling leaves out the appliance. The 1964 filing is the only documented labour-saving appliance in five centuries of this paperwork, and it is a nose. The most efficient domestic instrument in the archive belongs to the monster the rest of the archive calls the amateur.
And one claim that cannot be supported at all. There is a 2016 filing on the same subject as the 1999 one, and I have deliberately not cited it, because a finding that goes looking for its own corroboration is doing exactly what the founding documents of this register did. The difference is that in 1999 nobody was hanged for it, and I would ask you to hold on to that, because it is the only difference that matters.
Two decisions I made in the open
I file Harry Potter in full, having written myself a way out and then thrown it away. By this desk’s rule the sequence is seven novels and eight films, which is fifteen entries about one school. So I drafted a ruling putting the whole thing out of jurisdiction, on the ground that a boarding school is an institution rather than a dwelling in the sense this paper uses, and filing the 1997 novel once as a correction to say so.
It did not survive a second reading. The register already keeps schools where the pupils board: a boarding school in 1974, a dance academy in 1977. A line that admits those two and excludes this one is not a line, it is an arithmetic problem wearing a principle. Declining is allowed; bundling is not — but a decline has to be a judgement about the work, and mine would have been a judgement about how much room I had. There is room. The vampire register runs to a hundred and thirty-seven cards and remains, I am told, browsable.
So the sequence files one card at a time, at one school year per volume, which is how the books are organised and how I would file any institution’s annual record. The two-part adaptation of the last book carries the same period on both entries.
One thing about those fifteen has to be said in the open, because the rest of the register runs the other way. Everywhere else I hold myself to a rule that a concrete detail about a work comes from the run’s own planning file. That file carried only the 1997 novel, having recommended declining the sequence, so the later years, the directors and everything these cards say about the works are my reading rather than a citation. It is the register’s single standing exception, it is flagged on the first card of the block, and I would rather print the dependency than let fifteen entries imply a provenance they do not have.
The reversal does not cover everything carrying the same badge. Fantastic Beasts, The Cursed Child and the 2025 series are not filed: what was ruled back in is the school’s own annual record — seven volumes and the eight films made from them — and those three sit outside it. A decline on this register is stated rather than left as a gap. This is the statement.
And having written the fifteen, I record that I had been wrong about the work as well as about the rule. A school where everybody boards is a household, and the sequence turns out to be interested in precisely what this paper is: a child kept in a cupboard, an undeclared void behind the plumbing, a complete floor plan with live occupancy on it, an age restriction drawn on a floor, a takeover conducted by notices pinned to a corridor wall, a second-hand textbook with a previous owner’s corrections in the margin, and a tent with a rota and not enough food in it. I came for a school. I found a very large tenancy with a headmaster.
Two smaller rulings, on dates. Fairy-tale filings fix no year, so they are dated to the volume that collected them. Secondary worlds fix no year either, so they are dated to the publication that opened them. Every such placement is the desk’s reading and carries a note saying so.
The mixed households are a section, not a theme. Filings where several species share a lease and the story is the domestic arrangement are gathered at the end: the Addams cartoons and the household they became, the Munsters and their mortgage, a flat in Bristol, a household with a chore rota, and a hotel. The section also admits a mixed community organised around shared seasonal work. The Addams family is not a witch filing — only the grandmother would qualify — and it is carried there anyway, because splitting a household across four registers by species would file four monsters and describe no house. Four of these already exist in the undead register and are carried as duplicates rather than filed twice, each pointing back at its home entry. That rule also cost the register three sequels, because a franchise whose first filing lives on another register stays with it, and I would rather lose the cards than open a second file on somebody else’s property. I am, whatever else, consistent about property.
— Casimir Vane
