“Well, Pot?” asked the trembling wizard as the sun began to rise.

The pot burped out the single slipper he had thrown into it, and permitted him to fit it onto the brass foot. Together, they set off back to the wizard’s house, the pot’s footstep muffled at last. But from that day forward, the wizard helped the villagers, like his father before him, lest the pot cast off its slipper, and begin to hop once more.

ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
on “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot”

A kind old wizard decides to teach his hard-hearted son a lesson, by giving him a taste of the local Muggles’ misery. The young wizard’s conscience awakes, and he agrees to use his magic for the benefit of his non-magical neighbors. A simple and heartwarming fable, one might think — in which case, one would reveal oneself to be an innocent nincompoop. A pro-Muggle story showing a Muggle-loving father as superior in magic to a Muggle-hating son? It is nothing short of amazing that any copies of the original version of this tale survived the flames to which they were so often consigned.

Beedle was somewhat out of step with his times in preaching a message of brotherly love for Muggles. The persecution of witches and wizards was gathering pace all over Europe in the early fifteenth century. Many in the magical community felt, and with good reason, that offering to cast a spell on the Muggle next door’s sickly pig was tantamount to volunteering to fetch the firewood for one’s own funeral pyre.¹ “Let the Muggles manage without us!” was the cry, as wizards drew further and further apart from their non-magical brethren, culminating with the institution of the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1689, when wizardkind voluntarily went underground.

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among Wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbors by chasing them away from the wizard’s cottage, catching them, and swallowing them whole. At the end of the story, by which time the Pot has consumed most of his neighbors, the wizard gains a promise from the few remaining villagers that he will be left in peace to practice magic. In return, he instructs the Pot to render up its victims, who are duly burped out of its depths, slightly mangled. To this day, some Wizarding children are only told the revised version of the story by their (generally anti-Muggle) parents, and the original, if and when they ever read it, comes as a great surprise.

As I have already hinted, however, its pro-Muggle sentiment was not the only reason that “The Wizard and the Hopping Pot” attracted anger. As the witch hunts grew ever fiercer, Wizarding families began to live double lives, using charms of concealment to protect themselves and their families. By the seventeenth century, any witch or wizard who chose to fraternize with Muggles became suspect, even an outcast in his or her own community. Among the many insults hurled at pro-Muggle witches and wizards (such fruity epithets as “Mudwallower,” “Dunglicker,” and “Scum-sucker” date from this period) was the charge of having weak or inferior magic.