Anne Armstrong’s piece of cheese was also a way of appealing to be believed, marking her innocence of witchcraft. Cheese had long had a destiny-deciding role in distinguishing guilt from innocence in the bread and cheese ordeal or “holy morsel” (Motif H 232; Thomas 1971, 218). Only the innocent could swallow it, while it choked the guilty. As a symbol of the body of Christ, bread’s role makes sense in an ordeal appealing to divine judgement; but there was less scriptural justification for the use of cheese in that context. Apuleius, however, shows that cheese had the power to choke and decide men’s fates before the full establishment of Christianity, and there are very early references to the bread and cheese ordeal to detect a thief (Eckstein 1927–42, 41033–4). Anglo-Saxon law made provision for it and, although it fell from judicial use after 1215, it lingered in popular custom into the early modern period (Kittredge 1928, 238). In 1618, Jane Bulkeley distributed pieces of cheese to an assembled group in order to discover a thief (Thomas 1971, 220). In William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (Act 4 scene 1), the witch exclaims: “Let ‘em eat cheese and choke” of her false accusers. The fatal power of ordealic cheese has left a linguistic trace in the expression “hard cheese” meaning “bad luck,” which is exactly what a dry, old piece of “choke-dog” cheese would be if one’s life depended on
swallowing it.