The Daily Telegraph - Saturday

James Sharpe

Historian who broke new ground studying witchcraft and how violence evolved through the ages

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PROFESSOR JAMES SHARPE, who has died aged 77, was a social historian of early modern England who wrote about crime and punishment, witchcraft and violence.

His 650-page history of violence in England, A Fiery & Furious People, was chosen by the Telegraph as a Book of the Year in 2016. The title was the chronicler Froissart’s descriptio­n of the mob that ran amok in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Sharpe’s book looked back to a time when “endemic violence” was part of everyday life, and, drawing on an astonishin­g variety of archives, examined the history of English violence from riots to 18th-century highwaymen, and from executione­rs to 20th-century serial killers, charting the steep decline in overall levels of violence.

He showed that average annual homicide rates in 13th-century rural England were 20 per 100,000 of population; the equivalent figure in England today is 1.15 per 100,000. Life for the medieval English peasant was more dangerous than for Mexicans today. Oxford, where the murder rate in the 1340s was 120 per 100,000, was particular­ly prone to violence, pitching town against gown, students against college servants and student groups attacking other student groups.

In contrast to today, when most murderers are close relations of their victims, people in the Middle Ages were much more likely to be killed by strangers. Murders within the family occurred at about the same level as they do today.

Statistics could give a false impression, however. The high murder rate in the

Middle Ages was due in part to the fact that without the benefits of modern medicine, victims of violence were more likely to die; and the superficia­lly significan­t nearly fourfold increase in serial killings between 1960 and 2006 was entirely due to the activities of one man: Harold Shipman.

Neverthele­ss, Sharpe observed some interestin­g trends. In the 19th century, for example, the expansion of the life insurance industry led to a rise in murder for profit. In a disturbing number of cases, parents took out insurance on their children and then killed them; 20 per cent of victims of homicide in the Victorian period were aged under 12 months.

Sharpe’s study went up to the wave of rioting that broke out in English cities in

2011, sparked by the shooting and killing by police of Mark Duggan, who was being investigat­ed for involvemen­t in gangland crime. Given the historical background, Sharpe observed drily, the fact that the riots seemed so shocking tells us something about the sheer orderlines­s of English life today.

James Anthony Sharpe was born on October 9 1946 in Lewisham, to James, a labourer, and Margaret, a cleaner. From Colfe’s School in Blackheath he read history at Oxford, staying on to take a doctorate under Keith Thomas, author of Religion and

the Decline of Magic (1971), a landmark study that set the agenda for decades of scholarshi­p on the history of popular religion and supernatur­al beliefs.

In 1973 he was appointed lecturer at the University of York, which he helped to turn into a leading centre for social history. He retired as professor in 2016.

He began as a historian of crime in the 16th and 17th centuries, delving into court records to publish a series of books in the 1980s. But it was as a historian of witchcraft that he became best known.

Instrument­s of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550-1750 (1996) showed that belief in black magic was remarkably persistent during the period. Science and the Enlightenm­ent may have led the educated social elite of the 17th century to dismiss such beliefs as superstiti­on, but poorly educated, marginalis­ed, mainly rural communitie­s continued to believe.

Sharpe did much to put flesh on the bones of those accused of witchcraft, their accusers, and those who sought them out for trial and punishment, notably the self-proclaimed Witchfinde­r-General, Matthew Hopkins, who in the 1640s led the biggest witch-hunt ever staged in England, covering most of East Anglia and the East Midlands and producing at least 100 executions between 1645 and 1647.

Sharpe argued that underlying the bloodletti­ng was the collapse of government during the English Civil War. Trials of “witches” had been declining for decades because of scepticism on the part of government and courts. But fear of witchcraft among ordinary people remained strong and burst into the open at a time of civil strife. Hopkins stepped into the vacuum.

Sharpe remained unconvince­d that any of the people he had “met” through his source material “were any more stupid than I or the generality of people I encounter on a daily basis”, and he rejected the modern tendency to dismiss witch persecutio­n as evidence of the barbarity and ignorance of past ages. In a century that had witnessed Auschwitz, it was more important than ever to understand the social and psychologi­cal forces that give rise to horrendous happenings.

His other books included The Bewitching

of Anne Gunter (2000), about a 17th-century girl who, under pressure from her abusive father, simulated possession by the Devil to accuse neighbours of being witches but was unmasked as a fraud. And while researchin­g Dick Turpin: the Myth of the English Highwayman (2004) he became sceptical that the place marked with a gravestone in York really contains the robber’s remains.

In 1993 Sharpe married Krista Cowman. She survives him with their two sons.

James Sharpe, born October 9 1946, died February 13 2024

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 ?? ?? Sharpe: his research into Dick Turpin, right, cast doubt on the robber’s final resting place
Sharpe: his research into Dick Turpin, right, cast doubt on the robber’s final resting place

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