Do witches really wear black pointy hats?
The iconic pointy witch hat we see today (tall, black, with a wide brim) is mostly a modern invention from the 18th–20th centuries, but it has some surprisingly deep and varied historical roots. Here’s where it really comes from:
Medieval “dunce caps” and outcasts
In the Middle Ages and early modern period, people who were considered heretics, quacks, or outsiders were sometimes forced to wear tall, pointed hats as a mark of public shame.
Jewish men in some parts of Europe were required to wear pointed “Jew hats” (judenhut), and accused heretics during the Inquisition sometimes wore similar tall conical hats (coroza) in Spain and Portugal. Over time, these “shame hats” got visually linked to anyone accused of witchcraft.
Women who brewed and sold ale (common before industrial beer) wore tall, pointed hats to stand out in crowded marketplaces so customers could spot them from afar. They also often kept cats (to kill grain-eating mice), used big cauldrons, and marked their homes with brooms or ale stakes outside. When the male-dominated brewing guilds pushed women out of the trade, propaganda portrayed these alewives as sneaky, untrustworthy, and eventually as witches. Their practical tall hats became part of the stereotype.
Welsh folklore and rural fashion
In rural 18th-century Wales and parts of England, women commonly wore tall, black felt “Welsh hats” (similar to steeple hats) as everyday fashion. When Victorian illustrators needed a visual shorthand for “old-fashioned country woman who might know folk magic,” they borrowed this very real style of hat.
Quaker women and anti-Quaker satire
Some 17th–18th century Quaker women wore plain, tall hats. Anti-Quaker cartoons exaggerated them into absurdly tall, pointed shapes to mock them as ugly or sinister—again feeding the visual
stereotype.
Victorian children’s books and theater (the final nail)
By the 19th century, illustrators like John Tenniel and companies producing pantomime costumes combined all these elements into the now-classic tall black witch hat. The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (with the Wicked Witch of the West’s hat) cemented it forever in pop culture.
Okay, but what were alewives?
Alewives were women in medieval and early modern England (roughly from the 13th to the 18th centuries) who brewed and sold ale as a common household trade. Before the rise of large-scale commercial brewing, ale production was often a domestic activity tied to baking bread—both used similar yeast fermentation processes—and it was predominantly women’s work. These women would brew small batches at home using ingredients like barley, water, and herbs (hops weren’t widely used until later), then sell the ale from their homes, at markets, or door-to-door to supplement family income. In urban areas like Oxford, alewives were regulated by local authorities, who inspected quality and set prices to prevent overcharging or adulteration.
The term “alewife” could refer to both the brewer herself and sometimes the keeper of an alehouse. They often used practical tools and symbols that later fed into cultural imagery: large cauldrons for boiling the wort, broomsticks hung outside as a sign that fresh ale was available (similar to a pub sign today), cats to control mice in grain storage, and tall, pointed hats to make themselves visible above crowds in busy marketplaces. This visibility was key for attracting customers in an era without modern advertising.
Now, regarding the connection to witch stereotypes: There’s a popular narrative that alewives’ decline in the brewing industry was driven by accusations of witchcraft, as male-dominated guilds and brewers sought to eliminate female competition by portraying them as witches—linking their cauldrons to potion-making, brooms to flying, cats to familiars, and hats to the iconic witch’s headwear. This story suggests that during the European witch hunts (peaking in the 16th–17th centuries), alewives were targeted, ostracized, or even executed, contributing to the modern Halloween witch archetype.
However, recent historical research largely debunks this as an oversimplified myth. While women did dominate early brewing and were gradually pushed out by economic shifts—like the introduction of hops (which required larger-scale operations that favored men and guilds), stricter regulations, and the professionalization of the trade—there’s little evidence that witchcraft accusations were systematically used against alewives specifically. Witch trials targeted a broad range of people, often the poor or marginalized, but brewing women weren’t disproportionately accused. The visual parallels (hats, brooms, etc.) likely emerged later through folklore, satire, and cultural exaggeration rather than direct causation. The real “infuriating” story, as some historians put it, is one of everyday sexism: women were excluded from guilds, denied access to capital and training, and relegated to unlicensed, small-scale brewing as the industry grew.
In essence, alewives represent a fascinating slice of women’s economic history in pre-industrial Europe, and while their imagery may have influenced witch tropes in popular culture, the direct “witches were alewives” link is more legend than fact.
Fast forward to present day and the pointed witch hat is now planted firmly in western culture especially around Halloween. Real witches today have mostly embraced the hat and wear one sometimes. A recent modern folklore is also that the pointed hat serves to direct and intensify energy from the witch’s mind into the heavens .
There are now many different styles of hat including the ones below.
So in short: the pointy witch hat isn’t ancient pagan symbolism or anything mystical—it’s a mash-up of real historical hats worn by marginalized or practical women (alewives, Welsh countrywomen, religious minorities, etc.) that got exaggerated and demonized over centuries until it became the Halloween cliché we know today.
