Brigade of Witch-Hunters

The Brigade of Witch-Hunters is an armed force created by a foolish king to hunt witches and wizards. In “Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump,” it gives the king’s hostility practical force: its members pursue the hidden magical population with ferocious black hounds. Yet the Brigade’s authority is also turned against its own deception. When Babbitty’s exposure leads to the king’s humiliation and a promise of protection for witches and wizards, the tale converts an instrument of persecution into the measure of the kingdom’s change.

Formation and Purpose

The king establishes the Brigade by ordering the head of his army to organize witch-hunters and providing them with a pack of ferocious black hounds. This military force accompanies his effort to monopolize magic: proclamations are issued in every village and town seeking an instructor, even as genuine witches and wizards hide from the Brigade. The arrangement places the king’s desire to acquire magic alongside the coercive power used to suppress those who already possess it.

The Brigade’s pursuit is not an abstract threat. Its hounds make concealment necessary for the magical community, and the fear of capture shapes the circumstances in which the king’s search for a magic teacher proceeds. A charlatan with no magical ability can exploit the king’s ignorance and claim the advertised position, while the people the Brigade is meant to find remain in hiding.

The Charlatan’s Deception and the Public Display

Once the charlatan realizes that he cannot provide real magic, he tries to leave the palace. The king forbids him to go, warning that the Brigade will hunt him down with its hounds; he must instead perform magic for the assembled lords and ladies the next morning, on pain of execution if anyone laughs. The threat shows that the Brigade serves not only as a means of finding hidden witches and wizards but also as leverage for enforcing the king’s demands.

Trapped, the charlatan appeals to Babbitty, a washerwoman whose wand and magically self-washing laundry reveal that she is a genuine witch. He threatens to denounce her to the king’s hounds unless she helps him. Babbitty agrees to perform the spells unseen from a bush while the king takes credit for them. The Brigade remains close to the performance, and its captain eventually supplies a test intended to expose whether the king’s supposed powers are real.

After the king has impressed the crowd with the feats Babbitty performs for him, the captain brings forward Sabre, the largest witch-hunting hound, who has died after eating a poisonous toadstool. He asks the king to bring the dog back to life. Babbitty does not raise her wand: no magic can restore the dead. When the dog remains lifeless, the audience begins to suspect that the earlier feats were tricks, putting both the king’s display and the charlatan’s deception in danger of exposure.

Pursuit and Reversal

To escape blame, the charlatan points to Babbitty’s hiding place and accuses her of blocking the king’s magic. The Brigade of Witch-Hunters immediately sets off after her, releasing its hounds. Babbitty flees; at a low hedge she vanishes from sight, and the king, the charlatan, and the courtiers find the hounds gathered around a bent, aged tree on the other side.

The charlatan claims Babbitty has become the tree and urges the king to cut it down. The king orders an axe brought, and the tree is felled to the approval of the assembled courtiers and the charlatan. The Brigade has helped turn the accuser’s false story into an apparent spectacle of royal power, but the charlatan’s position collapses when the cackling stump declares that no witch or wizard can be killed by being cut in half. It challenges the king to test the claim on the Grand Sorcerer. The Brigade’s captain is eager to do so; faced with this prospect, the charlatan falls to his knees, begs for mercy, and confesses his deception before he is taken to the dungeons.

Consequences and Significance

From the stump, Babbitty warns that every act of harm the king inflicts on witches and wizards will feel to him like an axe stroke in his own side. The king falls to his knees and promises an immediate proclamation protecting all witches and wizards in the kingdom and allowing them to practise magic in peace. The stump insists that he must also make amends to Babbitty. The resolution makes the change more than a retreat from the king’s failed performance: it promises both public protection for a persecuted community and redress for the witch endangered by the king’s agents.

The tale does not describe the Brigade’s later organization or state separately how its members respond to the promised proclamation. Its narrative function is nonetheless clear: the force initially created to find hidden witches becomes the visible means by which persecution threatens Babbitty, while the king’s eventual promise reverses the policy that gave the Brigade its purpose. The episode’s moral reversal reflects the larger collection’s concern with the limits and misuse of magic: the king cannot acquire magical ability by command, and coercive authority cannot make the impossible possible. Here, the pursuit ends not in Babbitty’s capture but in a pledge that witches and wizards may live and practise without the king’s persecution.