The tragedy of local witch-hunts

Ronald Hutton explores two excellent studies which show that many of those prosecuted as witches were simply unpopular and vulnerable neighbouring people

The Last Witches of England

A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition

John Callow

Bloomsbury Academic 2021

Hb, 333pp, £25, ISBN 9781788314398

The Ruin of All Witches

Life and Death in the New World Malcolm Gaskill

Allen Lane 2021

Hb, 336pp, £20, ISBN 9780241413388

These two books have so much in common that they can readily be treated as two aspects of a single enterprise. Both are the work of very able and experienced historians, who write with a flair and colour that make the results accessible to any sort of readership. Both provide detailed case studies of local witch-hunts in the late 17th-century English world. John Callow examines the case of three women from Bideford, Devon, who became the last people definitely known to have been put to death in England for the alleged crime of witchcraft, in 1682. Malcolm Gaskill looks at the first witch-panic in American history, at Springfield in the new colony of Connecticut, in 1651, which resulted in several people being thrown under suspicion of witchcraft and a wife and husband being tried for it in Boston. Both of them were eventually acquitted, and while the wife then admitted to killing her own child and died of disease in prison before she could be hanged, the man was released and made a happy and prosperous later life.

Both books are based on the most detailed research, into exceptionally good local records, and reconstruct expertly the slow accumulation of fears, resentments and suspicions among neighbours which took years to reach the stage of formal accusation. In so doing, they join a succession of such academic studies published in the past few decades which provide a very credible picture of how an early modern witch-hunt could develop, sharing common traits with these two works.

One such is a heavy emphasis on most charges of witchcraft as generated from below in society, by ordinary people who came to believe that uncanny misfortunes that had afflicted them, especially lingering and mysterious illnesses or freak accidents, were the result of magic wielded against them by malicious people in their community. A corresponding feature is that the individuals who came under suspicion were those who made many others feel threatened and uncomfortable. At Bideford the

They believed their misfortunes were the result of magic by malicious people in their community

victims were three quarrelsome old women who lived by begging, at a time when charity in the town was diminishing. At Springfield they were a mentally disturbed wife, who actually initiated local fears of witchcraft by accusing others of it, and her spouse, a withdrawn, solitary and cantankerous man noted for threatening his fellow townsmen.

The two cases also have in common that they got to court because to some extent the accused cooperated with the charges. At Bideford all three accused provided long and detailed confessions of practising Satanic witchcraft, either in the deluded belief that these would satisfy the authorities and earn mercy, or because the fantasies concerned gave them a novel sense of empowerment. At Springfield, the demented wife both initially confessed to being a witch, in league with the Devil, and consistently accused her hated husband of being one.

Their stories help prove the point that in both Old and New England during the period when witchcraft was a crime, those on trial for it who kept their heads and denied the charges were likely to be acquitted or have their sentences quashed.

In the examples studied here, the suspicions were allowed to spiral out of control and the cases got to court not because the authorities were witchhunters but because they were weak or negligent. At Bideford both the magistrates and the parish clergyman stood aside and handed over investigations to the accusers, and at Springfield the town’s boss had been accused of heresy himself and his grip on power was slipping. The Bideford women were hanged because the royal judges, faced with their confessions, were unwilling to cause public anger by discounting them. They and the couple at Springfield were not pagans, folk magicians, feminists or cultural nonconformists: they were simply unpopular, isolated, antisocial and vulnerable personalities, in communities where seemingly uncanny misfortune struck inhabitants regularly and where people believed deeply and genuinely in the power of magic.

Some individuals involved in the Bideford prosecution may have been misogynists, one was a clergyman and two were professional physicians, but these identities were not general factors in the cases. The latter were not male persecutions of women, because women had crucial roles in generating the accusations, reflecting their own concerns. Nor were they attempts by new-style professional doctors to suppress traditional healers and midwives, because none of the accused had anything resembling such a role. In both towns, the religious nonconformists were among the most prominent witch-hunters.

Excellent local studies such as these bring us closer to understanding the reality of witchcraft beliefs and accusations in the early modern English world than we have ever been before.

Callow ★★★★★

Gaskill ★★★★★