When something is unexplained, today we might look for an explanation. But in the past it was the devil making bad things happen on Earth. People thought that these bad things showed themselves through what some people did. They believed that witches had evil powers given by the devil and so were opposite to the good powers given by God.

Things have changed a bit since then as the whole idea of witches is taken less seriously by many people.

It would not have been good news to be called a witch in the past.

In Anglo-Saxon times witches were fortune tellers.

But the Medieval world changed all that and the world became full of superstitions. By Tudor times witches are in Shakespeare's famous play Macbeth written about 1603-7.

Shakespeare makes them dark and threatening through their clothes, which are called 'filthy'.

The 3 weird sisters (witches) actually start the play. Here they are:

[An open place. Thunder and lightning. Enter three Witches.]

The Three Witches are at a witches' haunt. They begin adding many foul things to a bubbling cauldron ("scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, witch's mummy, maw (mouth) of shark, root of hemlock…") and so on, and as they do this they chant the most famous witches lines ever written:

"Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble."

A witch pours in baboon's blood to cool the mixture, then more witches arrive and begin to to sing and dance round the caldron, to enchant it.

So here we have witches dancing, cursing, bringing up ghosts and foretelling the future. They are filthy and ugly and tell the future, but the future news is always bad.

Now you have everything about a witch that has come down to us – all from one of Shakespeare's plays.