Unmasked, city that hanged witches for more than century
CATHEDRAL city was gripped by a dread of witchcraft for more than a century, according to new research.
Exeter in Devon was the last place in England where women were hanged for practising the dark arts in the 1680s.
But these were just the last in a series of executions which began as early as 1566.
Exeter may even have been one of the first places to sentence a witch to death, historian Mark Stoyle reveals.
New evidence reveals that between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and Charles II in 1660, more than 20 women and men were accused of being witches or sorcerers and denounced to magistrates.
Many were believed to possess “familiar” spirits – demons in the shape of small animals, like rats and toads, which unleashed their powers to “waste” livestock and humans on the witches’ behalf.
A parliamentary statute of 1563 first decreed that those convicted of using “conjurations, enchantments and witchcrafts” should suffer the death penalty.
“It’s long been known that Exeter witnessed the last English witch executions,” said Professor Stoyle, of Southampton University.
“In 1683 three elderly women from North Devon – Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles – were hanged. In 1685 another Devon woman, Alice Molland, was sentenced to death.
“What we didn’t realise before was that further alleged witches were also executed in Exeter over the preceding 100 years.
“The world- famous witch trials at Salem, in colonial America, have been the subject of many books and films, as has the mass witch- hunt led by Matthew Hopkins – so- called Witchfinder General – in East Anglia between 1645 and 1647.
“Yet it’s rarely appreciated there were many other centres of witch prosecution in Tudor and Stuart England as well.
“In Exeter, there was a long succession of indictments and prosecutions in the 16th and 17th centuries, which resulted in many unlucky women and men being banished, imprisoned or sent to the gallows.”
The deep roots of witch belief in the city are revealed in a new book by Prof Stoyle, Witchcraft In Exeter: 1558- 1660.
Sourced from old court records, manuscript chronicles and registers of births, marriages and deaths, it charts the progress of each case.