Imp

Ten men stood in a room in Essex and watched a woman who had been kept from sleep for four nights. A quarter of an hour before each arrival she told them what was coming and what shape it would wear, and then called them in by name. Holt came first, like a white kitten. Then Jarmara, a fat spaniel with no legs at all; she clapped a hand on her belly and said she kept him fat because he sucked good blood from her body. Vinegar Tom was a long-legged greyhound with the head of an ox and broad eyes, and when he was ordered off to the place provided for him and his angels he turned into a headless child of about four, went half a dozen times round the house and vanished at the door. Sack and Sugar came like a black rabbit. Newes came like a polecat. The man writing all this down was Matthew Hopkins, who printed it in 1647 in a pamphlet answering the judges of assize for Norfolk, and who called every one of them an imp.

The word had a gentler few centuries behind it. In Old English an impa was a graft, a slip of a plant pushed into new wood, and the verb impian, to graft, is cousin to the German impfen. Chaucer uses it of trees: of feeble stock come wretched ympes. Falconers took it up for a repair, since to imp a hawk was to splice sound feathers into a broken wing so the bird would fly straight again. From plants it moved to people the way scion did, and meant a young member of a good family. An epitaph cut in 1584 in the Beauchamp chapel at Warwick calls a dead boy the noble Impe Robert of Dudley, son of the Earl of Leicester, and means no harm by it whatever. What soured the word was a run of phrases: imp of Satan, imp of the devil, imp of hell. Child of evil, in short. By the seventeenth century an imp standing alone was a small demon, and more particularly the small demon a witch was supposed to keep.

The keeping is the whole of it, and the earliest full English account is eighty years older than Hopkins. A pamphlet printed in London in 1566 reports the examinations at Chelmsford, where Elizabeth Francis said she had learned the art at twelve from her grandmother Eve of Hatfield Peverell, who told her to renounce God, to give of her blood, and handed her the thing in the likeness of a white spotted cat. She was taught to feed it bread and milk, to call it Satan and to keep it in a basket. It answered her in a strange hollow voice she came to understand by use. It brought her twenty-eight sheep, black and white, into her pasture, and the sheep in the end all wore away and she could not say how. Every time it worked for her it wanted a drop of blood, which she gave by pricking herself in one place and then another, and where she pricked there stayed a red spot that was still to be seen at her examination. When she had kept it fifteen or sixteen years she carried it in her apron to a poor neighbour, Mother Waterhouse, in exchange for a cake. Waterhouse paid it in chickens and blood, and it ate the chickens so clean she could find neither bones nor feathers afterwards; when she needed the wool from the pot it lived in, she prayed over it and kept it as a toad instead. Agnes Waterhouse was hanged.

In 1604 Parliament put the arrangement into statute, and did it with six verbs. It became a felony to consult, covenant with, entertaine, imploy, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose, and the penalty was death without benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Feeding is the verb that did the work, because feeding leaves a mark. The searchers went over a suspect’s body for a teat in an unusual place, on the reasoning that such a thing was insensible and would feel neither pin nor needle nor awl thrust through it. Hopkins added a third test of his own: a witch who heard he was coming would put her imps out to others to suckle, so the teats were found dry and flat against the flesh, and the women watching had only to leave her alone a quarter of an hour to see them drawn out full again. Probatum est, he wrote, which is the sound of a man who has stopped asking. He was fastidious in other directions, refusing any confession got by torture, by flattery, by impossibility such as flying in the air or riding on a broom, or by putting the words in a prisoner’s mouth, and he gave the shape of that last one himself: you have foure Imps have you not? Yes, saith she. In his own hundred in Essex, twenty-nine were condemned at once.

The same small servant turns up on the Continent in a glass. The Grimms printed it in their Deutsche Sagen of 1816 as the spiritus familiaris, kept in a well-stoppered little bottle, looking not quite like a spider and not quite like a scorpion and never once holding still. Set the bottle down where you like and it is back in your pocket. It brings great luck, shows where treasure lies buried, makes its owner loved by his friends and feared by his enemies, holds him firm as steel and iron in war and keeps him clear of prison, and unlike a gallows mannikin it wants no feeding, no washing and no clothes. The catch is at the end: whoever still holds it when he dies goes to hell with it, so it has to be sold on, and it will only ever sell cheaper than it was bought. A soldier who paid a crown for one threw it at the feet of the man who sold it to him and hurried home, and found it in his pocket when he got there; the Danube would not keep it either. In the longer tale a horse dealer from Augsburg loses eight horses in a few days, is sent to a house where old men sit at a round table and greet him by name, and comes away with a little box and a guided hand where he signed a great book. Outside the door he finds a leather sack of three hundred ducats. Afterwards, wherever he sets the box on the ground, a light rises out of the earth in the places where money lies. His wife, frightened, opens it one night; a black buzzing fly goes out through the window; the horses die or are stolen, the grain rots on the floor, the house burns three times, and he ends by killing her with a knife and shooting himself. The Grimms never once call the thing an imp. English readers did that later, and the join shows.

Lincoln has the most famous imp in England and the weakest claim to one. High on the north side of the Angel Choir, built between 1255 and 1280, a carving about twelve inches tall sits cross-legged between two arches with both hands on its right leg: thick-set, hairy, horned, bovine-eared, cloven-hooved, grinning at nobody in particular. For six hundred years nobody called it an imp. John Carter’s 1780 survey of the cathedral’s sculpture passes it over entirely and notices only a figure on the south porch that locals called the Devil on the Witch’s back, looking over Lincoln, and the proverb behind that one is older still, in print by 1562. The name arrived in 1897, in a fourpenny pamphlet printed by Boots of 281 High Street and written by Arnold Frost, a pen name for G. T. Hemsley. Frost said his version had never appeared in print, and that a sixty-year-old North Lincolnshire man had told it to him five or six years earlier, having heard it from his father. In that version there is a bishop, a wind sent by the Virgin, and a devil who ducks inside the minster for shelter and dares not come out. There is no carving in it at all. The carving is Frost’s own flourish, at the end of his ballad, where the devil hops up without a limp and at once takes shape as the Lincoln Imp, sits atop the column and grins at the people who gaze so solemn. He knew the dates did not work, and dealt with the problem in a footnote suggesting the devil had simply moved to the handsomest part of the building as each new part went up. The second edition, five months later, added two more versions from sources he declined to name and admitted were not Lincolnshire, and one of those is where the second imp comes from. Within a decade the story had a jeweller behind it: James Ward Usher of Lincoln, looking for a novelty, registered a design in the 1880s and sold the imp as brooches, cuff links, spoons and thimbles until letters addressed only to the silversmith who makes and sells the Lincoln Imp found their way to his shop. In 1908 a correspondent in a folklore collection for the county set down the obvious doubt in print, that no evidence had yet come forward that the quaint figure in the minster was ever meant for the devil at all.

Two things commonly said about imps are worth marking as arrivals rather than inheritances. One is that they were lonely creatures who played pranks to win human friendship and lost it by carrying on. The other is that they were bound into swords, rings and crystal balls and granted wishes like a genie. Neither has a source in the older record. The first circulates from uncited modern encyclopedia text; the second collapses, when followed, into Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of 1891 about a bottle and a soul.

What an imp can do follows from what it is, which is small and owned. It fits through a keyhole or a crack in a wall, which is the point of the kitten and the polecat and the fly. It takes whatever shape the errand needs. It spies, reports, spoils milk, lames a man, kills a hog or a cow or a child on instruction, and it works for a drop of blood or a chicken. In its German form it does not fetch and carry at all but simply tilts everything in its owner’s favour, showing him the buried coin and turning aside the arresting hand.

The limits are just as plain, and most of them come from the ownership. It must be paid, and paid in the currency it wants. It can be lent, bartered for a cake, or sold on, and the German sort must be sold on or it takes its owner with it, and never for more than he paid. It has no reach beyond its master’s malice and no more courage than his: Mother Waterhouse sent hers again and again against a tailor she had fallen out with, and it came back each time and told her it could not touch him, because the man was too strong in his faith. And once loose, it does not simply return. Joan Waterhouse set one on a twelve-year-old girl who had refused her bread and cheese, and it went on haunting the child afterwards, because, as the women explained to the court, they could not call him in again, not having let him out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an imp?

An imp is a small, lesser demon of English and Germanic folklore, best known as the familiar spirit a witch was accused of keeping. In the English witch trials an imp wore animal shape, ran errands for its owner, and was paid with a drop of her blood. The word originally meant a plant graft in Old English and only came to mean a small demon in the seventeenth century.

Where does the word “imp” come from?

It comes from the Old English impa, meaning a graft or young shoot, with the verb impian, to graft, related to German impfen. The word passed from plants to people, meaning a child or young member of a noble family, as in a 1584 epitaph at Warwick calling a dead boy “the noble Impe Robert of Dudley.” The demonic sense grew out of phrases like “imp of Satan” and “imp of hell,” meaning a child of evil.

What did an imp do for a witch?

It acted as servant, spy and weapon. Accounts from the Chelmsford trial of 1566 have a familiar called Satan bringing its owner sheep, killing livestock, laming her husband and killing her child, always for a drop of blood or a chicken in payment. Matthew Hopkins recorded five imps called in by name in Essex in the 1640s, including Holt, Jarmara and Vinegar Tom.

Was the Lincoln Imp an ancient legend?

No. The carving in Lincoln Cathedral dates from between 1255 and 1280, but the legend attached to it is Victorian. The name and the story of the imp turned to stone first appear in a pamphlet by Arnold Frost published in Lincoln in 1897, and the detail of the stone figure was Frost’s own addition to a wind-and-devil tale he had been told orally.

Can an imp be got rid of?

Not easily, and the older accounts describe transfer rather than destruction. An English familiar could be handed on to a neighbour or sold, and the German spiritus familiaris kept in a bottle had to be sold cheaper than it was bought or its owner went to hell with it. One Chelmsford witness told the court that an imp once let out could not be called back in.

Related Entries

Familiar, Witch, Satan, Hobgoblin, Hob, Boggart, Puck, Goblin, Brownie, Black Shuck, Mandrake, Kobold, Heinzelmännchen, Puk, Djinn