Why Wales Escaped the Witch Trials: How Fairy Belief Protected an Entire Nation

Written by Simon Williams

Here is a question that has fascinated me ever since I began researching Welsh mythology seriously.

Why did Wales escape the witch trials?

Not entirely, it is true. There were accusations. There were occasional trials. But the scale of what happened in Wales compared to what happened in England, Scotland, and across continental Europe is so dramatically different that it demands an explanation. While England was executing hundreds of people for witchcraft and Scotland was gripped by repeated waves of state-sponsored hysteria that claimed thousands of lives, Wales remained, by any comparative measure, remarkably quiet.

The legal framework was identical. Wales came under English law following the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543. The same statutes that made witchcraft a capital offence in England applied in Wales. The same courts operated. The same judges presided. And yet the numbers are starkly different.

I believe the explanation lies not in the legal system but in the supernatural one. Specifically, it lies in the Welsh belief in the Tylwyth Teg, the Fair Family, and the way that belief structured how Welsh communities understood and responded to misfortune.

This is one of the arguments I find most compelling in my research, and I explore it in depth in my book Welsh Myths and Legends: Fairies, Hounds and Holy Wells, available on Amazon here: https://amzn.eu/d/0dBHSPl0

The Anatomy of a Witch Trial

To understand why Wales escaped the worst of the witch trials, you first need to understand how those trials typically began.

The mechanism was almost always the same. A misfortune occurred in a community: a child fell suddenly and seriously ill, a farmer's cattle died unexpectedly, a healthy adult developed a wasting condition with no apparent cause, a household was plagued by relentless bad luck. These events were real. The suffering they caused was genuine. And in a world without germ theory, without veterinary medicine, without the diagnostic tools that we now take for granted, the people experiencing these misfortunes had no rational framework within which to understand them.

What they did have was a framework of supernatural explanation. And in England, Scotland, and much of continental Europe, the dominant supernatural framework for explaining unexpected misfortune was witchcraft. Someone had done this. Someone with supernatural power, almost always a woman, almost always already marginalised within the community, had caused the cattle to die, the child to sicken, the crops to fail.

Once that explanation took hold, the consequences were catastrophic. The accused was identified, arrested, tried, and in the majority of cases executed. The community felt that justice had been done, that the supernatural threat had been neutralised. Until the next misfortune, when the cycle began again.

The witch trial was, at its core, a mechanism for converting communal anxiety into individual persecution. It needed a victim. It needed someone to blame.

The Welsh Alternative: Blaming the Fairies

In Wales, the same misfortunes occurred. Children fell ill. Cattle died. Crops failed. Households were struck by what felt like sustained supernatural malice. The suffering was identical.

But the explanation was different.

When a Welsh farmer's cattle dropped dead in the night, the most natural response was not to look at the marginalised woman who lived at the edge of the village. It was to look toward the hollow hills, the ancient mounds, the dense woodland valleys where the Tylwyth Teg were known to dwell. Those damn fairies again.

By attributing misfortune to the capricious Fair Family rather than to a human neighbour, Welsh communities performed an act of social protection so effective that it is difficult to overstate. They removed the human scapegoat from the equation entirely. There was no one to accuse, no one to arrest, no one to try, and no one to execute. The source of the misfortune was supernatural, and the response to it was supernatural.

That response came not from a court of law but from a local specialist: the cunning man, or the swedrig, the charm lady. These were respected members of the community who understood the ways of the Tylwyth Teg and could offer remedies, rituals, and protective charms designed to restore the balance that the fairies had disrupted. They were not feared. They were consulted, much as one might consult a doctor or a solicitor today, because they had specialist knowledge that the ordinary community lacked.

The mythology of the fairies, in this sense, functioned as a social safety valve. It released the pressure of communal anxiety without requiring a human victim. And in doing so, it protected the most vulnerable members of Welsh society, the elderly, the eccentric, the socially marginalised, from the violence that those same categories of people experienced in England and Scotland.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The contrast in documented witch trial activity between Wales and its neighbours is stark.

England experienced thousands of accusations across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Essex witch trials of the 1580s and 1640s alone resulted in dozens of executions. The Pendle witch trials of 1612 in Lancashire sent ten people to the gallows. Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witchfinder General who operated in the 1640s, was directly responsible for the execution of more people for witchcraft in England than had been executed in the previous hundred years combined.

Scotland was, if anything, worse. The Scottish witch trials were state-sponsored at the highest level, with King James VI personally involved in the interrogation of accused witches. Estimates suggest that between three thousand and four thousand people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland between 1560 and 1727, a per capita rate of execution significantly higher than almost anywhere else in Europe.

Wales, subject to English law and sharing a border with one of the most active witch-hunting regions in Britain, recorded fewer than forty prosecutions across the entire period of the European witch craze, with only a handful resulting in execution.

This is not a small statistical variation. It is a completely different pattern of social response to supernatural anxiety. And the most persuasive explanation for that difference is the one I have already outlined: the Welsh supernatural worldview simply did not produce the conditions in which witch trials could take hold.

The Red Fairies: When Myth Masked Human Reality

One of the most dramatic illustrations of how Welsh fairy belief handled what other cultures might have processed as witchcraft is the story of the Gwylliaid Cochion, the Red Fairies of Mawddwy.

In sixteenth-century Merioneth, a community lived in absolute terror of beings described as monstrous, red-haired, supernaturally strong, and possessed of secret underground lairs in the Great Dark Wood. The terror was real. The danger was real. People were being robbed, threatened, and occasionally killed.

But the explanation was supernatural. The Red Fairies were not human criminals. They were creatures of the Otherworld. And as long as that explanation held, the community's response was shaped by the logic of fairy belief rather than the logic of criminal justice.

In reality, the Red Fairies were a band of displaced outlaws, men and women driven to banditry by war and poverty, who had deliberately cultivated the supernatural mythology around themselves to keep locals from challenging them. They fostered the rumours of their own monstrous nature because those rumours kept people at a safe distance.

The story eventually ended in blood when the outlaws murdered a judge in 1555, but what is significant is how long the fairy mythology held. A community experiencing genuine threat reached instinctively for a supernatural explanation that kept the source of the threat at arm's length, just as a community experiencing illness or crop failure reached for the Tylwyth Teg rather than a human scapegoat.

The instinct was the same. And in both cases, it was the fairy belief that shaped the response.

The Cunning Man and the Swedrig: Wales's Alternative to the Witch-Hunter

The counterpart to the witch-hunter in Welsh supernatural culture was the cunning man or the swedrig, the charm lady. These figures are worth examining closely because they illuminate exactly how the Welsh system worked in practice.

Where the witch-hunter's role was to identify a human source of supernatural malice and bring them to justice, the cunning man's role was to identify the supernatural source of the problem, usually the Tylwyth Teg or a specific offended fairy being, and negotiate a remedy. The remedies they offered included protective charms, ritual cleansings, specific offerings to the offended fairy, and practical advice about how to restore the balance of the household.

These specialists were not feared or persecuted. They were respected. They occupied a recognised and valued social role. The community knew who they were, sought them out willingly, and paid them for their services. They were, in the most literal sense, the Welsh equivalent of a medical professional: someone with specialist knowledge of a complex and dangerous system who could help you navigate it safely.

This stands in complete contrast to the figure of the wise woman or healer in English witch trial culture, where the same kind of specialist knowledge, knowledge of herbs, remedies, and supernatural forces, was precisely what got you accused of witchcraft. In Wales, that knowledge made you a valued community asset. In England, it could get you hanged.

The difference was not in the knowledge itself. It was in the supernatural framework that surrounded it. Welsh fairy belief created a context in which supernatural specialists were helpers rather than threats, and in which the source of misfortune was always the Otherworld rather than a human neighbour.

What This Tells Us About Mythology

I want to step back from the historical detail for a moment and make the broader argument that I think this evidence supports.

Welsh fairy belief was not naïve superstition. It was a sophisticated system of social organisation that produced measurably different outcomes from the supernatural belief systems of neighbouring cultures. The fact that Wales avoided the worst of the witch trial violence is not a coincidence. It is a direct consequence of a worldview that located the source of misfortune in the supernatural world rather than in the human community.

This is what I mean when I say that mythology is never merely stories. Stories have consequences. The stories a community tells about why bad things happen shape how that community responds when bad things happen. Welsh mythology told its communities that the world was full of capricious, powerful supernatural forces that needed to be negotiated with carefully. English mythology, increasingly shaped by a particular strand of Protestant theology, told its communities that the world was full of human agents of Satan who needed to be identified and destroyed.

Both were stories. Only one of them was producing mass executions.

The Welsh storytelling tradition, maintained and transmitted by the Cyfarwyddiaid across generations, was doing something that no law, no court, and no government policy could have achieved: it was keeping people alive by giving them a different way of understanding their world.

That is the power of mythology. And it is why I wrote Welsh Myths and Legends: Fairies, Hounds and Holy Wells.

Get your copy on Amazon here: https://amzn.eu/d/0dBHSPl0

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