The Accidental Rise of the Pointy Witch Hat

A Woodcut, Around 1720

The image is simple enough to describe in one breath: figures airborne on broomsticks, each topped with a tall, tapering hat, printed in a woodcut included in a book called The History of Witches and Wizards^3,4. It is, as far as the record shows, the first clear picture of a witch wearing the hat we would recognize today³.

That date is the strange part. By 1720, England's major witch panics were long over. The last confirmed execution for witchcraft in England happened in Exeter in 1685⁸. The woodcut's hat shows up roughly thirty five years after the hangings stopped, not during them, which runs against the assumption that the hat was something accusers pointed to in court.

It wasn't. Surviving English assize records from Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Surrey, and Sussex between 1559 and 1625 (extending to 1688 in Kent) show witchcraft was a rare charge, well under 2 percent of roughly 19,000 indictments, and the case files focus on alleged acts, familiars, and confessions, not costume⁸. Historian Laura Kounine, who studies early modern England at the University of Sussex, says flatly that in the 16th century 'everyone wore a hat, not necessarily a pointy hat, just any hat,' varying by social and marital status rather than occupation or suspicion¹. Striking period depictions of accused witches, such as Albrecht Durer's Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (1501-02) and Hans Baldung Grien's The Witches' Sabbath (1510), show women bare-headed with loose hair, itself a marker of supposed moral disorder, not hatted at all¹.

So if the hat wasn't evidence at the trials, it had to come from somewhere else, and pointed hats had already been doing other cultural work in Europe for centuries.

Conical and pointed headwear is old. Bronze Age graves have produced gold conical hats decorated with astronomical symbols, likely tied to priestly or ritual authority^1,2. In classical antiquity, the Phrygian cap marked out 'Asians' or 'barbarians' in Greek eyes, and in Rome a related cap, the pileus, became a symbol of a freed slave's liberty². None of that is witch imagery. It is simply proof that a pointed hat was already a loaded visual object long before anyone used it to mean sorcery.

The meaning that mattered most for the witch hat's later history came out of medieval anti-Jewish law. Beginning in the twelfth century, European Christian art increasingly showed Jewish men in a pointed cap, the Judenhut⁶. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 ordered that Jews be made visually distinguishable from Christians, though it left the exact form to local rulers: German-speaking regions adopted the pointed hat, while England generally used a badge instead^5,9,2. From there the hat metastasized as a mark of suspicion. A late-fourteenth-century law in the German town of Seligenstadt forced the pointed hat onto usurers and onto Christian women involved with Jewish men, and the practice spread to men convicted of sorcery, heathenism, and theft across German-speaking Europe². A Hungarian law in 1431 even required first-time sorcery offenders to wear 'peaked Jews' caps' in public¹⁰. By the time pointed hats start showing up on devils, ogres, and folkloric dwarfs in early modern German imagery, the association between the shape and imputed evil was already well worn².

England complicates a tidy Judenhut-to-witch-hat story, though. Clothing historian Abby Cox points out that England marked its Jewish population mainly with badges, not hats, which weakens a direct line from Judenhut to the specifically English, specifically black witch hat that later became global shorthand^9,3. Cox instead points to a homegrown English quarrel: the Quakers. George Fox's Society of Friends, founded after the English Civil War, preached women's equality and direct experience of God, and was treated as heretical and socially alarming in the mid-1600s, the same years English witch panics peaked^9,3. Quaker headgear became a flashpoint of ridicule, even though Quakers did not actually wear pointed hats themselves^5,11. The theory holds that as Quaker fashion aged out of style, it got folded into the broader visual vocabulary of religious deviance that painters and engravers drew on when they pictured witches. It is a plausible contributor, though thinner on direct evidence than the Judenhut strand^5,3.

Then there is the explanation most people reach for first: the alewife. Alewives were women who brewed and sold ale commercially, a trade that was dominated by women in England before the Black Death and persisted into the 17th century¹². The popular version says alewives wore tall hats to stand out in crowded marketplaces, kept cats to guard grain from mice, and used broomsticks and cauldrons in their trade, and that male brewers taking over the industry smeared them as witches to push them out¹³.

Kounine calls the direct alewife-to-witch connection 'a bit of a myth,' created in hindsight rather than documented at the time¹. Smithsonian's own editor's note on a widely shared 2021 piece making this claim says multiple scholars disagreed with its framing and conclusions, and that the magazine corrected several factual errors after publication¹³. Women certainly brewed ale, and the hat and cauldron were ordinary kitchen and market gear of the period, as Kounine notes, 'everyone had a cauldron, that's what people were using to cook'¹. What is missing is any documented chain showing that a standardized tall alewife hat specifically became the witch's costume.

What finally locked the image in place was print and illustration, well after any of these medieval disputes. English prints through the eighteenth century kept giving witches tall, sometimes broad-brimmed hats, building toward a recognizable silhouette^3,14. Victorian and Edwardian children's illustrators standardized it further, pairing the pointed hat with dark clothing, a broom, a cauldron, and exaggerated features^1,7. An 1899 illustration in Gems from Mother Goose shows a hatted witch flying on a broomstick, part of that wave⁷.

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, gave the Wicked Witch of the West a tall conical hat in its illustrations, and when MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz in 1939, costume designer Adrian put Margaret Hamilton in the same shape, rendered in black^5,3. From there, Halloween costuming, theater, and advertising did the rest, carrying the hat around the world as instantly legible shorthand for 'witch,' detached from the Judenhut regulations, the Quaker controversies, and the alewife's brewing stool that had all fed into it along the way^5,1.

The woodcut from around 1720 turns out to be less a record of what accused witches actually wore and more an early snapshot of an image already being assembled from other people's hats.

Timeline

1. Bronze AgeGold conical hats with astronomical symbols are made in central Europe, likely tied to priestly authority¹
2. 12th-13th centuriesEuropean Christian art increasingly depicts Jewish men wearing the pointed Judenhut⁶
3. 1215The Fourth Lateran Council orders Jews to be visually distinguishable from Christians; local regions decide the form, hat or badge^5,2
4. Late 14th centuryA law in Seligenstadt extends the pointed hat requirement to usurers and others, and the practice spreads to men convicted of sorcery²
5. 1431Hungarian law requires first-time sorcery offenders to wear 'peaked Jews' caps'¹⁰
6. 1689/1693Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World circulates witchcraft imagery around the Salem trials^8,4
7. Around 1720A woodcut shows figures on broomsticks in conical hats, the earliest clear witch-hat image^3,4
8. 1685The last confirmed execution for witchcraft in England takes place in Exeter⁸
9. 1899An illustration in Gems from Mother Goose depicts a hatted witch flying on a broomstick⁷
10. 1900L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is illustrated with a conical-hatted Wicked Witch^5,3
11. 1939MGM's film gives Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch the now-iconic black pointed hat^5,3

Pictures