THE LAST WITCHES OF ENGLAND

Three women are forsaken by their community Author John Callow Publisher Bloomsbury Academic Price £25 Released Out now

On an August day in 1682, three women condemned as witches were led to the scaffold in Exeter. Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles lived on the margins and died in disgrace, convicted of the most deplorable acts by the social class on which they had relied for charity. These women in their 60s or 70s – immortalised as the ‘Bideford Witches’ after the prosperous town they lived in – were the last people known to have been executed for witchcraft in England. Their tragedy is presented with erudition and compassion by John Callow, who has built on generations of scholarship and studied important primary material including parish papers, charity records and court proceedings to document the lives (and afterlives) of Lloyd, Edwards and Trembles. As, respectively, an abandoned wife, a widow and a single woman, all living in poverty, they had few avenues of support open to them when they became the subjects of community suspicion and fear.

Callow, rightly, makes no attempt to provide a simple explanation as to why these women were targeted, instead weighing up potential factors including a decline in the middle classes’ sense of duty to the poor, a power vacuum in local governance, and the idea of a minority group turning on another. The Last Witches of England is an important work of social history that presents valuable insights into the workings of life, death, and belief in a cosmopolitan 17th-century town.