The Besom: History of the Witch's Broom

The besom is two things at once, and conflating them makes a muddle of the history. One is a domestic object woven so tightly into the symbolism of thresholds, birth, marriage, and household protection that its magical career requires no witchcraft at all. The other is an icon assembled by Church authorities, inquisitors, and demonologists over the course of the fifteenth century — a vehicle for the heretic-witch flying to her Sabbath.

These two threads run in parallel for centuries. They cross-pollinate, but they do not merge. Keeping them separate is the job of this page.

What a Besom Is

The word comes from the Old English besma, meaning broom. A besom is a bundle of twigs or plant stems — traditionally birch, heather, broom plant (Cytisus scoparius), or gorse — bound around a handle of ash, hazel, or willow. The craft was sufficiently specialized that professional makers had their own occupational title: a broom squire.

The choice of materials was regional and seasonal rather than mystically prescribed. Birch was used across northern and eastern Europe for its flexibility and fine sweep. In the Germanic tradition, birch twigs were commonly bound around an ash handle with willow withies. The broom plant itself gave the object half its common English name.

A besom is not the modern upright broom with a flat head and synthetic bristles. It is rounded, tapers to a rough cylinder, and sweeps best by swinging laterally across a hard floor or a hearth. That shape, and the handle protruding from the centre of the bundle, is precisely what generated its charged symbolic life.

The Threshold and the Hearth

The broom’s magical career begins inside the house. In folk traditions across the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, the broom was an active participant in household protection: hung above doorways, laid across thresholds, and set by the hearth as a guardian object. The underlying logic was consistent — the threshold is the point of vulnerability, the place where the outside world pushes against the inside world, and the broom, as an object that sweeps and repels, was a natural threshold-keeper.

Laying a broom across a doorway was understood to prevent unwanted visitors, spirits, and ill will from crossing into the home. In Balkan folk tradition, the broom was regarded as something close to a domestic spirit in its own right — a living presence with enough invested authority that breaking one, treating it carelessly, or leaving an old broom on the road invited specific misfortune. Old brooms were kept in attics; they were not simply discarded.

One recurring custom links the broom explicitly to birth. Prior to childbirth, women in various European traditions swept the threshold to prepare the way for the new spirit’s entry and to clear the space of anything hostile. The gesture ran in two directions at once: purification and welcome. That same bidirectionality — sweeping out harm, sweeping in good — is the structural logic behind ritual cleansing of a space before any working, which is why the besom remains useful to practitioners today for exactly that purpose.

The hearth connection is equally deep. The broom that sweeps the hearthstone is also the object that tends the fire’s boundary. In practical terms: embers escape, ash spreads, the liminal zone between the flame and the room needs constant management. In symbolic terms: the hearth was the home’s sacred centre, and the broom was its caretaker.

The Wedding Jump

One of the besom’s most durable folk uses has nothing to do with purification or protection: it is the wedding broom, the object a couple jumps across as part of a marriage rite. This custom appears in multiple European folk traditions and was noted among Welsh Gypsy communities by the folklorist Alan Dundes, who recorded that a couple jumping over a broom placed in a doorway constituted the marriage; jumping backward over it again signified divorce.

The jump-broom wedding survives in modern Pagan handfasting ceremonies, where it is generally glossed as a symbol of the couple’s new household — which is accurate in spirit if not in every detail. The broom-jump was a threshold gesture in a literal sense: it enacted the couple’s passage from one social state to another, using the threshold object to mark the crossing.

Before the Icon: The Canon Episcopi

The image of a witch riding a broom through the night sky is so established that it feels ancient. It is not. The earliest written references to witches flying on brooms or staffs date to the early fifteenth century.

The intellectual precondition was older. Around 906 CE, an ecclesiastical text known as the Canon Episcopi — attributed to Regino of Prüm — addressed the growing problem of women who claimed to ride at night on “certain beasts” in the train of the goddess Diana. The Church’s official position, enshrined in this text and repeated for centuries afterward, was clear: these women were not actually flying. They were suffering from diabolical delusion. The devil was deceiving them into thinking they traveled by night; any such “confession” was a symptom of bewitched imagination, not evidence of supernatural transport.

This skeptical baseline matters, because the authorities who later began prosecuting witch-flight were working against it. The Canon Episcopi did not suppress the idea of night-flight — it codified it, giving it canonical form while insisting on its unreality.

The 1451 Illustration

The earliest known visual depiction of a witch on a broomstick appears in a manuscript copy of Le Champion des Dames — The Defender of Ladies — a long poem by the French poet Martin Le Franc, written around 1440–42. A 1451 illuminated manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, contains two small marginal figures barely three centimetres tall: one woman sits astride a broom, the other on a plain white stick. Both wear headscarves identifying them as Waldensians — members of a twelfth-century Christian reform movement that the Church had branded as heretics, partly because they permitted women to preach.

The inscription above the illustration reads Des Vaudoises. Editors Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, in their documentary history of European witchcraft, describe this as “the first such illustration in the pictorial history of witchcraft.” The illuminator was Peronet Lamy, likely from Savoy, working in the shadow of the Valais witch trials that had run from 1428 to 1447. His two women do not look monstrous or deformed. They look ordinary — their transgression invisible, readable only through the broom and the headscarf.

Why was the broom the vehicle rather than a horse, a chair, or a forked stick? Because the broom was already the defining object of the domestic woman — and the witch-as-flying-woman was, in the Church’s construction, the domestic woman’s inversion. Domestic authority turned outward and upward, toward the sabbath rather than the hearth. The phallic shape of the handle compounded this: riding a broom was also a legible symbol of female sexuality unrestrained, femininity and domesticity gone wrong. The Church read the broom-between-the-legs as an indecency; later demonologists made it explicit.

The Staff-Anointing Motif

Two years after the Le Champion des Dames manuscript, in 1453, a priest named Guillaume Edelin — Prior of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, an Augustinian and Doctor of Divinity — was arrested and tried for witchcraft after publicly arguing that it was impossible for witches to fly on brooms. His confession, extracted under torture, became the first recorded personal claim of broomstick flight. He eventually repented but was imprisoned for life.

Edelin’s case points to the most important documentary source for the flying-witch belief: trial confessions, almost all obtained under duress. These confessions cluster in the mid-to-late fifteenth century and follow a template that appears to have been guided as much by the questions the inquisitors asked as by the experiences the accused described.

Into this template comes one specific detail that connects the broom to the flying-ointment tradition. The fifteenth-century theologian Jordanes de Bergamo wrote that “the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.” The ointment and the staff appear together. The broom is the vehicle for the substance; the substance is what does the work.

Johann Weyer, the Dutch physician who published De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1563, engaged this material more carefully than most. He discussed the ointments and attributed their effects to natural pharmacological causes rather than demonic action — a rationalist intervention in an era still executing people for exactly this. Weyer’s list of ingredients includes plants from the nightshade family: henbane, deadly nightshade, mandrake. Applied to mucous membranes — rubbed onto a stick straddled between the legs — the alkaloids in these plants could produce powerful sensations of flying, warmth, and ecstatic transport. The experience might be genuine. The sabbath was not.

Reginald Scot, writing The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, was the era’s most systematic debunker. He quotes French demonologist Jean Bodin’s descriptions of the sabbath dance — witches dancing with brooms held aloft — and includes a flying-ointment recipe attributed to witches. His entire argument is that flight is impossible, the confessions are extorted by “inhumane terrors and tortures,” and the prosecution of alleged witches is both irrational and unchristian. He is, nonetheless, our best single documentary source for what the ointment recipes contained and how the imagery circulated in the sixteenth century.

The Broomstick Among Other Vehicles

The broomstick, it should be said, was never the only vehicle in the trial testimonies. Ronald Hutton notes in The Witch that the accounts of witches traveling to sabbaths variously cite animals, baskets, reeds, chairs, and forked staffs alongside brooms. What the broom had that the others lacked was symbolic legibility. It was recognizable. It lived in every household. It connected to an entire web of existing folk belief about the object’s threshold-crossing properties. The inquisitors settled on it; the illustrators drew it; and by the sixteenth century it had crystallized into the image that has not shifted since.

Sweeping, Not Flying

What a practitioner working with a besom today is working with depends entirely on which thread they pick up.

The threshold customs — laying the besom across the doorway, sweeping outward before a working, placing it by the hearth, treating it as a resident guardian — are old, widely attested, and cross-cultural. The logic behind them (repulsion, boundary-marking, the broom as the object that moves things out) is coherent and does not require a mythological scaffolding to function. Ritual sweeping before a working is documented far earlier and far more broadly than the flying-witch image; it requires no ointment, no sabbath, and no inquisitor to make sense of it.

The flying-witch icon is a product of the fifteenth century, built from trial confessions, theological anxiety about heresy, and the specific semiotic valence the Church assigned to women who used domestic objects for unauthorized purposes. It is a compelling image. It is also a constructed one, assembled under institutional pressure within a narrow historical window.

Both threads are present when you pick up a besom. The question worth asking is which one you mean to work with.

Cross-references: flying ointments; apotropaic marks; cleansing a space.