Why did witches confess?

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1:04Why did hundreds of ordinary people confess to being in league with the devil in the 17th century? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Marion Gibson takes us back to the witch trials of the 1640s and reveals the real identities and stories of those who were accused. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Marion explains why so many of these seemingly ordinary individuals actually agreed to the witchcraft accusations. You begin the book with the story of a man called Megs, or as we later discover, Henry Maggs.

1:37He was a man who, during the 1640s, came to a witchfinder to be checked for signs of witchcraft voluntarily. For this, he was hanged in 1645. Why did you decide to open the book with this example? How does it set the tone? I thought Henry Maggs was really important because I'd known his name from an account by the witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins, who calls him Megs. And there's just this kind of flip comment about, oh, this man Megs a baker, he came to be tested for witchcraft and we hanged him for his trouble.

2:09Ha, ha, ha. And I just thought that was such a horrible way for somebody to be remembered in history. So I set out to look for the real Henry Maggs, as he turned out to be called, and tell his story in a way that would be more from his point of view, would treat him with dignity and respect and kind of give him back his voice. So one of the things the book aimed to do, really, was look for the victims of witch trials and see if we could tell the story as they might have wanted it to be told, rather than listening to the witchfinder sneering at them and saying how he had trapped them and how clever he was.

2:44So I wanted to tell Henry's story as a place to start for the reader, so that they knew, this is what I'm going to do, this is the kind of person you're going to meet, and you're going for the first time to hear from them. Yeah, it's really brilliant. It gives us a lovely entryway into what the book is trying to do. OK, so we're in the 1640s in Britain. Can you set the scene for us? What kind of context are these supposed witches operating in? It's a pretty horrible context. So we're in the middle of a civil war. Britain is tearing itself apart. You know, there's civil war in all of the four countries

3:17that make up the British Isles. And it's a terrible time. There's not only battles going on, but there's economic dislocation, which you can imagine is often a result of war, as we see today. There are refugees moving around Britain and relocating to new places and needing immediate help, immediate charity, somewhere to live. Many of them are wounded because they've come from battle zones. It's astonishing to think from the Britain that we live in now that once upon a time, Britain was much more like a place like Lebanon, for example,

3:50where there is just continued civil war, constant killing. So it's a terrible time to be alive. And I think it really influences the witch trials because people are bound in that situation to be anxious and miserable and frightened. And all of those emotions feed into witch trials and witch accusations, as you can imagine. And that's something that we're hopefully going to come on to talk about. So against this tumultuous backdrop, how did the witch hunting actually start in 1640s Britain?

4:22Where do we see it first? There's been witch hunting in Britain for quite some time, you know, for about 100 years, people have been looking for witches. But the temperature does seem to rise in the 1640s. And one of the first cases that I talk about in the book is a woman who was actually shot on one of the Civil War battlefields at Newbury in Berkshire as a witch. So you can see immediately the connection between civil war and witchcraft. And she's picked on because there's a group of soldiers who were hungry and tired after a long march and they go foraging for food.

4:53And they see this woman floating on what appears to them to be a plank on a nearby river. And they think, my goodness, you know, she's walking on water. What is this? She must be a witch. And they drag her off to their commander. And after an interrogation, he actually has her shot. And then from that point onwards, there seems to be more and more interest in this society across Britain in witchcraft. So that's in Scotland, we see a big trial in 1644, where some women are actually shut up in a church by the church authorities. And some of them are tortured in order to get

5:27stories of witchcraft out of them. And then in 1645, this moves further south and we get a really big witch trial, which involves hundreds of people. So it seems to be a moment when this catches on and catches fire and everything takes off. And it's quite a difficult thing for us to imagine today, isn't it? This concept that people would see a woman and think that she's floating or walking on water. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about what kind of religious and cultural landscape these people are operating in, which allows them to come to the belief of witches.

6:00It's a very religious world. It's a very magical world. So these people are kind of steeped in the idea that there are angels and devils in the world. There are spirits. And on top of all of this structure, of course, it's God and the devil. And they think if you're not on God's side, you might be on the devil's side. So it predisposes them to think that there might be witches out there. And a lot of the time it's women who are suspected. So if you look across the whole history of the witch trials in Europe from the 15th, the 18th century, about 75% of the

6:31cases that we know about are where women are accused. So there's a big predisposition to accuse women. And that does seem to be because women tend to be associated a bit more with the devil. You know, Eve in the Bible is the one who commits the first sin and eats the apple off the tree of knowledge, which she shouldn't have done, and then gives it to her husband, Adam. And it seems that there is a lot of suspicion of women throughout this whole early modern period. And these things seem to come together in the 1640s when society is under tremendous strain. They seem to reach for those

7:03old truisms, you know, oh, women are a bit of a problem in society. Of course, they don't have as much authority as they do now. Almost everything is run by men. This makes them vulnerable. And then, you know, people start thinking, well, probably the devil's people are out there. You know, everything's so bad. It must be Satan behind all of this. Who can we find that is on his side? And they start pointing to people who they think are witches. Yeah, we get this really dangerous conflation of belief in the devil and witches and this politically troubled landscape that just come together in the worst way. So we have the Newbury

7:38witch in 1643 and the Midcalda witches, which you also mentioned. What were these initial witch investigations like? What sort of things were these women being accused of doing? It's all about their working with the devil. So sometimes a witch accusation can start off by a fairly simple neighbourly dispute. You did this to me and, you know, my cow died and I don't like you. It can grow from that sort of route. But in this period, it seems to be a bit more focused on

8:09the authorities actually going around looking for people who they think are on the devil's side. So you don't always need that kind of accusation, although sometimes you do get it. The kind of things they're suspected of are working with the devil, having met him, you know, initially, as you do, and made some sort of pact with him. So the devil has maybe asked for their soul and body or their allegiance. And they've said, oh, yes, that'll be fine. I want some power. So yes, I will go along with that. I will make a pact with you. And they're usually accused of that. And

8:41sometimes they're accused of having a little demonic familiar, the animal familiars that we hear a lot about in witch stories. Sometimes they're thought to have those. And that's kind of the devil's representative in their life. So they're maybe thought to give some blood to the familiar spirit in order to seal their pact with the devil and reward the familiar spirit for doing nasty demonic things to their neighbours. And quite often, they'll be searched for that sort of mark on their body. You know, the people will think, oh, well, you know, if you've given some blood to this demonic animal, there must be some sort of sign. There must be a mark on your body

9:14that we can find that will show you're a witch. So they can be strip searched, they can be interrogated in all sorts of ways. But also, they're looking for physical evidence. And often, they're also thought to, in some way, be working with other kind of spirits too. So maybe they're thought to be working with fairies, who people often think are evil spirits in this time. Or maybe they think that they're actually quite Christian. You know, they're just saying Christian prayers over a sick neighbour, something like that. But people will look at evidence of that and say, well, you're not a proper cleric. You're not a clergyman. What are you doing messing around in

9:49the supernatural world? You must be in contact with the devil. Right, we're going to interrogate you and see if you're a witch. And quite often, of course, the answer is, well, yes, you are a witch. And we're going to have to try you now. And during those interrogations, were these witches confessing? Were they agreeing to these accusations? Very often. It's really difficult to explain, isn't it? But a lot of pressure is being put on them to do that. So in addition to maybe a physical body search, which, you know, for people who live in a world where you don't see a lot of naked flesh on a daily basis, it's a very invasive and terrifying

10:24process. But in addition to that, you've also got other questioning techniques. So people are maybe kept awake for a long period of time, or they're told to stand on a stool and not go to sleep and try and balance on that for hours and hours on end. And that breaks people's resistance down and they do end up confessing. But even if they're not tortured in that kind of way, I mean, that would class as torture now. Even if they're not put under that kind of pressure, sometimes they will confess anyway. And I wonder if that's related to the social situation they're in, the war, their fear

11:00of everything. And they're feeling that somehow, you know, they must be sinful, they must be guilty. The minister at church tells them all the time that they must have committed some sort of sin and they should be really wary of the devil and they should apologise for their sins and do penance for them. And I think a lot of us, even today, we sort of carry around this sense that we must have done something wrong if there's something wrong in our lives. And I think that prompted a lot of people to confess. So yes, a lot of them did agree. They went along with this idea that they were witches. And maybe some of them were users of magic. Maybe they used magic in healing processes.

11:34Maybe they had actually said a few nasty words to their neighbour, which sounded a lot like a curse. And so they were very apt to agree with the minister or the magistrate or whoever was questioning them and say, well, yeah, actually, I think I am a witch. Yeah, it's quite a shocking thing, isn't it? That actually, these people were confessing and agreeing to having done these things. And you're right to point out that as much as that sounds surprising to us, we have to think about the kind of psychological phenomenon that's going on here. Often these people are being tortured and perhaps even when they're not. If a person in a

12:05position of authority is telling you that you've done these things, you might be inclined to agree. You might. And a lot of these people are quite poor. You know, Henry Maggs is a baker. He's just an ordinary man. The women who are accused in Mid-Colder just seem to be ordinary widows and wives. They're not people who are well educated. They're not people in positions of power in their society. And as you say, you know, if a powerful man comes to see you and there he is in his velvets and his silks and his ruff and he's writing things down and maybe you really know him. He's a magistrate or he's a

12:38minister in your community. And you know he's important. So if he says to you, you know, Marjorie, you're a witch, you might well say, well, yes, sir, if you say so. I must be a witch. You can see how there's this temptation to just fall in with what the authorities want you to say. Yeah, absolutely. So from Mid-Colder and Newbury, how did the witch hunt spread? When and where do we see it becoming a mass witch hunt in Britain? The mass witch hunt really kicks off in Essex and there is a young man called Matthew Hopkins and

13:12his slightly older friend John Stern. And they start to suspect that in the little riverside town of Manningtree, there are witches. And they're joined by some other accusers from the community and they arrest some women. They get some people in and start to question them. And in the adjacent village of Lawford, there's a clergyman called John Eads. And he starts to question some women from his community, Anne and Rebecca West, and they start confessing to witchcraft. And from those

13:43roots, from those origins, the whole mass witch hunt seems to grow because the women in Lawford and Manningtree start saying, yes, we are in league with the devil. Yes, we do have animal familiars. And unfortunately, they also start naming other suspects because they're prompted to do so. Because one of the questions you would ask a witch if you were a magistrate or a minister is, well, are you working with anyone else? Are you part of a witch conspiracy? And unfortunately, they fall in with this narrative and they start naming other people and the witch hunt spreads and it moves to

14:16other villages. And then the witch hunters move to other villages and they start interrogating people there. And very soon, the whole witch hunt is moving across eastern England. It spreads up into Suffolk and Norfolk and the Midland counties. And off we go. We have a mass witch hunt.

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15:04I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about some of the people who were accused at Manning Tree. So Anne and Rebecca West, for example, those were names that particularly stuck with me when I read the book. Do you want to tell us a little bit about their stories? I do. Yeah. So they're mother and daughter. They live at Lawford, which is this little village near Manning Tree. Anne is a widow. And Anne has been on trial for witchcraft before. So there are some records of her being taken off to the big criminal court before. And she's accused by some people called Thomas and Prudence Hart. And Thomas

15:35thinks that Anne has killed his sow. This is a couple of years before the big witch trial. And he takes her off to court and he thinks, so this is fine. We're going to get rid of this woman. You know, she's done this terrible thing. She's a witch. But she's actually let out of prison. She's acquitted. And eventually she's allowed back home to Lawford. So she comes back to the community. And you can imagine Thomas and Prudence must have been horrified. This woman knows that they've accused her of witchcraft. They still believe her to be a witch. And she's right there in the village with them. And so it's no surprise, really, that in 1645, when people like Matthew Hopkins and John

16:10Sterner starting to ask questions around the villages there, that they accuse her again. And this time, it's a really tragic circumstance. Prudence Hart has had a miscarriage. And she has the miscarriage in church, right in front of the minister, John Eads, as far as we can tell. She starts feeling pain in the church. She goes out into the churchyard and the lane outside. And there, really tragically, she loses her baby. So it's a horrible thing that has happened. And you can see why the hearts are so upset. And naturally enough, because they've previously accused Anne West of

16:44witchcraft against them, they think, oh, well, she must be responsible. So they turn on her again. And they turn on her daughter, Rebecca West, who has also had some kind of falling out with Prudence heart. Rebecca admits that she's an enemy of Prudence when she's questioned. Rebecca's probably about 30. She seems to be unmarried. She's probably worked as a servant. It seems that she's lived in another village. And that's probably because she's been in service there. And then she's come back to live with her widowed mother. They're probably quite marginal in society. They're pretty poor. They do seem

17:19to be quite religious people, which is interesting. So they don't seem to be in any way problematic from the point of view of people thinking they're Satanists. But maybe they have a slightly different religion to other people in their community. This is a period when there are a lot of different religious sects. They might possibly have attended private church services. There's clearly some tension around that sort of area, too. So they're really perfectly positioned to be suspects. And John Eads and some of the magistrates in Manningtree question Rebecca. And she starts confessing. I think they put all sorts

17:52of pressure on her, as I was saying just now. And she starts saying, well, yeah, we are witches. Yes, we met with some of the people in Manningtree who are also being accused of witchcraft. Yes, my mother is a witch. And they're all sent off to the Assizes and imprisoned in Colchester Castle, waiting to be tried in the big criminal court. And there they're questioned a bit more. Matthew Hopkins actually follows Rebecca to Colchester. And then he questions her there as well. So he's really starting to build evidence against these two women. And that means he's also building evidence against other people who they accuse.

18:23And then what happens at the trial when they finally get there? Were they found guilty? Yes, they are. Anne is, certainly. And I'm afraid that she is executed. There's something odd about Rebecca. It's either that she wasn't put on trial or that she was put on trial and acquitted. The records aren't quite clear. We don't know what happened. Historians have always suspected that because Rebecca chooses to give so much evidence against other people, maybe she is somehow spared or let off. Something like that happens. As far as we know, she wasn't executed. But because the witch

18:58hunter spread so far across Essex by this time, about 28, 29 people from other villages, all of them women in this case, are put on trial. And a good number of those are convicted. There are about 19 convictions, something like that. And of those, maybe 15, 16 people are hanged. So it's a really big, striking witch trial. It's in the news. People are publishing news pamphlets about it. And by then, the witch finders have also moved on to Suffolk where they're looking for new witches. So it just

19:30becomes this kind of media frenzy, basically. And that really helps the witch hunt spread further afield. It is really striking. And as much as today, we do really want to focus on pulling out the stories of the people who were accused of witchcraft. We've mentioned there the two witch finders who really came to prominence in Manningtree, Matthew Hopkins and John Stern. Who were they? And how did they end up in these positions of what came to be authority? Matthew Hopkins is the son of a Suffolk clergyman. And when he's a fairly young man, his mother marries an Essex clergyman. She's widowed and

20:05she moves to Manningtree in Essex. And she marries the clergyman there. So he's a pretty religious young man. And his family does seem to be quite troubled by illness. His brother John dies really young from some kind of disease, which is probably TB or some kind of lung condition like that. So he's probably had quite a difficult life. But he also seems to have this burning conviction that it's his destiny to be a witch finder. He starts thinking that people are meeting near his house for which

20:36meetings for Sabbaths and meeting with their animal familiars. And for him, it all seems to flow from that. John Stern is another Suffolk man. He's a married man. He's got quite a big family. He's in many ways a more sort of conventional, stable looking figure. But he too seems to get very excited by this idea that there are witches in his community. And he has a range of methods that he wants to use for testing them. And he and Matthew get together and they decide that they're going to deprive the suspects of sleep. They also have some other ideas about what they're going to do to them. But that

21:08seems to be the main one. They're going to deprive them of sleep, keep them in constant motion so they can't fall asleep, and wait for their animal familiars to come to them all the time, bullying them and questioning them and watching them. And they rope in other villages from Manningtree and Lawford to do this. And that's what really kicks off the trials and gets stories flowing out of the suspects. That seems to be their motivation. They want to be witch finders. They don't have an official position. They're not recognised by the government in some way. Matthew titles himself witch finder general at one point, and he seems really excited by this title. I suspect he was

21:42quite egotistical, difficult sort of young man, but he's really pleased to be called the witch finder general. It's not an official position, but they become these kind of self-appointed moral police of the communities that they go into. Yeah, I mean, witch finder general, now it sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But at the time, he obviously was very pleased with his title. Was Stern the person who introduced the sinking and floating test as well? Yeah, he's certainly very keen on that. It's something that's being used in witch trials before. So you throw the accused suspect into

22:12water. If they sink, they're likely innocent and you pull them out. You don't leave them to drown. Although, of course, you know, in certain circumstances, that'd be really dangerous. And people did drown sometimes during this test. But more dangerously, if you float, then that means you're guilty. Because, you know, how could you do that? It must be the devil helping you. People don't really understand about swimming and floating, and they don't have a good sense of the physics of how water works for the human body. So if you float, they pull you out, and then they start interrogating you to see if you really are a witch. So he's very keen on this test. The Essex magistrates tell him he

22:46mustn't do it. So he allegedly doesn't use it in these cases. But certainly as he moves on through Suffolk and Norfolk and Northamptonshire, and some of the Midland counties and the Fenn counties, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, he does use this test. And of course, it's just another way of putting pressure on people. You know, if you're partly tied up and you're thrown into water, wearing really very little, maybe a sort of shift, everybody's standing around pointing and shouting, and you're drowning in front of them. It's very likely that if you're pulled out,

23:18you've got very little presence of mind left, and it makes it much more likely that you will then confess. So as the witch hunt and the witch finders, as you've mentioned, spread into Suffolk and Norfolk and beyond, I wonder, can we trace the type of people who are being accused of witchcraft? Do they fit a certain profile? Or was it totally random in each locality? On the whole, they do fit a certain profile. They tend to be poorer people. Very many of them are women, in some cases, 100% of the accused people in a particular town, like Framlingham in Suffolk,

23:51say they are all women. And they're people who show up in parish charity records as well. So they're probably seen as something of a drain on their community. And people in the circumstances of war, in the circumstances of economic crisis, people tend to get angry with those who they see as a drain on effectively their taxes and the state. So a lot of them fall into that category. But there are outliers as well. So for example, another Suffolk victim from the village of Branderston is a clergyman, which is quite astonishing, isn't it? Yeah.

24:22Yeah, that always surprises people. So what, he's a clergyman? Isn't he supposed to be on the side of the accusers, the person looking for these demonic people in his community? But no, he isn't. He's a chap called the Reverend John Lowe's. And he seems to have been quite a turbulent clergyman. He's having a lot of quarrels over the 40 years before the witch trial with his parishioners. And he's taking them to court, you know, he's fighting them over land and buildings. He's accusing them of moral crimes. And so when a woman is accused in the early years

24:53of the 17th century, about 1615, in his community of witchcraft, he defends her. And that turns out to be a really fatal mistake, because people start thinking, well, he must be a witch too. Oh, and I fell out with him, you know, over this legal case or whatever. And then my child died. And he gets accused and he gets thrown into water by Matthew Hopkins and others in his community. And he gets kept awake, we believe, and tortured and run up and down in his house until he's

25:23extraordinarily tired and he's ready to confess. And then he does confess. And at that point, you know, really, he does seal his own fate. So even when he goes to court, by which time he's recovered from all of this torture, and he says, I'm not a witch, and he tries to defend himself in court, he is unfortunately convicted by the jury. And he's hanged, he's hanged in Bury St. Edmunds. And you can imagine the shock of that, you know, people are quite used to the idea that there may be some poor women who are hanged for witchcraft. Unfortunately, that is what happens a lot in this period. It's the kind of stereotype. But on this occasion, they go along to the execution.

25:56And one of the people being executed is a clergyman. And I think that must really send shockwaves through their society so anyone could be a witch. Oh, my goodness, it could be anybody. It could be you. It could be me. It could be him. And Henry Maggs, too, is quite a respectable figure in his Norfolk community. So by the time Matthew Hopkins and John Stern get to Norfolk and Henry Maggs is accused, it's become quite a common thought that anybody can be a witch. And Henry Maggs is a church warden. So he too is somebody who's been chosen by his community to be part of their religious

26:27leadership. But he too is accused, searched for witch marks, the evidence that he's given blood to familiars. And he's hanged. So there are outliers. The stereotype is broadly true that most of these people are women, often older women, often poorer women. But there are a whole range of other people who get drawn in as well. And this, again, was one of the things that drew me to these trials, this sense that anybody could be accused. People were quite willing to turn on essentially figures of local authority. And the fact that clergymen and church wardens are being drawn into

26:59these trials does seem really surprising. And you've mentioned as well that actually there were some people who defended the accused. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about those people that were kind of pushing back against witch accusations. They were. And some of the cases later on in the book that I write about, for example, a big witch trial that was held in Newcastle in 1649-50, some of the people there actually stepped forward to defend those who were accused. And I think it's really worth telling their stories as well, because it gives us some hope, actually. It gives us a bit

27:31of a role model for what we might do if we think there's something unjust happening in our own community, our own society now. So there are two people that I pick out there. And one of them is the deputy governor of Newcastle at the time. And here's a man called Paul Hobson. And he brings a specific agenda to this witch trial. He's been asked to stage it by the city magistrates, and he has to do that. But he's a bit religiously different to them. He's Baptist, so he's a member of a new religious sect. And he has himself actually been persecuted in the past for his religious beliefs.

28:03And I think he does bring a sort of particular emotional angle to this witch trial, which is that it is possible to be falsely accused, and it is possible to be persecuted for something you haven't done. And so when he's asked to help stage the witch trial, he actually picks out one of the women who is being tested, in this case, by a witch pricker. So somebody who is searching you for witch marks for evidence that you've given blood to familiars by driving a pin into you and seeing if there are any spots on your body that don't apparently feel anything, because this is said to be a hallmark of a place where the devil has touched you. And he picks out one of the women in this

28:38lineup, and he says to the witch pricker, I don't think you've tested her properly. You've said that you can tell who witches are, because they're old and ugly. This woman is quite young, and she seems quite modest, and I don't know what you're doing here. And he forces the witch pricker to test her again. And this time, the witch pricker backs off and says, oh, no, I don't think this one is a witch. And she's actually released. And I think people like him are really quite important. And his example does seem to inspire other people, because we know about the Newcastle Witch Trial, because it was written about by another Newcastle man called Ralph Gardner later on in the 1650s. And he also makes

29:14the point that he doesn't think a lot of these people were guilty. And so he writes this denunciation of them after the witch trial has happened, which says, yeah, I don't think these people were witches. I think this was tyranny and persecution, and we should stand up against this kind of thing. And I think those are quite inspiring examples. And I think they do help to bring the period of the witch trials to an end over time, absolutely not immediately. But over time, I think those sorts of voices being raised about injustice are really important. Yeah, those voices of pushback are certainly important in telling the story of how the witch

29:46trials eventually declined in Britain. Do we have any examples, though, of people who were accused of witchcraft and survived them, were acquitted? And what would life have been like after that, actually? Would they have been accepted back into the community that had just accused them of being a witch? Yes, we do have examples. I talked about Anne West earlier, who was accused earlier in the 1640s and was acquitted and sent home. And it does look from her experience as though, actually, no, they're not really accepted back into the community. It does seem to be very difficult for

30:20people to accept that once they've decided somebody is a witch, that in fact a jury has decided that they're not, and that is the outcome, and they have to go along with this. I don't think they do go along with this very well. There's another case in the book that I talk about, a young woman in Cornwall in the later 1640s called Anne Jeffries. And Anne is fascinating, and she's in her early 20s, so she's in that sense not a particularly stereotypical witch. And she decides that she's seeing fairies. She actually comes forward voluntarily to people in her community and says, well, I've started

30:51seeing these fairies, and they're giving me these prophecies, and they're giving me healing abilities. I think Anne probably thinks she can make quite a good living out of this, and this is something that will make her valuable in the community. And maybe she actually does have these visions. You know, she sees herself as a kind of religious mystic. She thinks the fairies are associated with God, so unfortunately she tells everybody about this. But in the climate of the 1640s, that's a pretty dangerous thing to be claiming. And so she is accused of witchcraft. She's questioned by the magistrates and clergymen, and they say, you know, these fairies, you know,

31:23they're not really fairies, they're evil spirits. You are a witch, you are causing trouble in your community with the aid of these evil spirits. We are going to put you on trial as a witch. So they take her off to the criminal court, the assizes, and they put her on trial. And we don't know exactly what happens, but she does appear to be acquitted. She says, I went to the assizes, you know, I went before the judge and jury. But yet we know she comes back afterwards, so that must mean she was acquitted by them. And she lives to a ripe old age. I don't know what happened in that community. It does seem that she was a lot more accepted

31:55than Anne West. I'm sure suspicions pursued her for a lot of her life. And even later on in her life, she's very reluctant to talk about her witch trial, because she assumes that people are just going to turn on her again. But I also think maybe in the West, as opposed to the East of England, which is where most of the cases happen that we've talked about already, there's a higher tolerance of magical belief. People do seem more inclined to think those fairies, they actually are fairies. They're not evil spirits and devils. So I wonder if she goes back into a community that thinks,

32:25oh, yeah, we did get this wrong. And it was just the magistrates who were saying she was a witch. And actually, you know, we thought she was all right. I think probably her youth helps as well. Sometimes juries are a bit reluctant to convict younger people if they can put forward a good case for themselves. And Anne was a very articulate young woman. And yes, she did come back. So there are some good news stories in the book as well. It's not a kind of doom fest. What I've tried to do is look at a whole range of cases from right the way across Britain, and from right the way across the whole range of outcomes that might happen. And also look at people who sometimes defended the

32:58accused witches and stepped in and did something that was a bit more charitable. And she's one of those cases. The book offers a really nice sense of variety, I think, in that aspect that we do get to see different outcomes of the trials and a real range of people who are being drawn into them. And actually, that's something I wanted to pull out because the records from these British witch trials show us that all of these people that were accused were ordinary individual people. And yet, there are also some similarities in their confessions, aren't there? I wondered if

33:31you wanted to talk a little bit about that and explain why we might see that pattern. Yeah, they do tend to end up confessing the same things. And I think this is about how they are questioned. So if you're a magistrate or a minister, you are looking for people who have witch marks on their body, where they've given blood to familiars, and you're looking for people to accuse other people. If you keep hammering away at this for long enough, a lot of people are going to fall in line with this type of story. So it tends to entrench the stereotype of the witch. And we

34:01kind of think we know what witches were accused of doing. Quite often, what we're looking at is just what the questioners thought witches are doing, and which the poor suspects then end up confirming. There's one particular example that really struck me when I was reading the book. And that's in the trial of Elizabeth Bradwell. And you write about the fact that there's a lack of reference in the trial documents to her having sex with the devil, and that that type of confession would suggest that Matthew Hopkins was less involved in that case. I wonder if you want to talk about that a little bit. I think sometimes you can also tell by absences who's doing the questioning. So unfortunately,

34:37Matthew Hopkins does seem to be obsessed with the idea that women are witches, and that as part of their working with the devil, they're packed with him. They don't just give blood to their familiars. They actually, as you say, have sex with the devil. They become the devil's mistress, the devil's lover. And that confession is drawn out of women across a lot of these trials. And you can see, I think, his influence in that. You know, once people know to ask the question, did you have sex with the devil? The answer is very often going to be yes. It's such a shocking question to be asked, isn't it? And people are very upset about that. And they will often tell

35:11all sorts of stories about how, no, actually, they were married to the devil. And so it was all okay. I think they're trying to respond to this sort of shame and guilt that they feel about being asked the question. And they end up confirming that, yes, they did have a relationship with the devil. But in some cases, as you say, and Elizabeth Bradwell is one of them, that doesn't come up at all. And that is a bit odd. So she's a woman from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk who is accused. And we know that Matthew Hopkins did question some of the suspects in that case. He was brought in by the town authorities to find witches in Great Yarmouth. And unfortunately, he did. But the town authorities had already got

35:46started on looking themselves. And I think a lot of the people in those cases are questioned by two ministers who are working on the cases. And I think they're probably not so interested in that. I think they're looking more for kind of religious nonconformity and supposed witchcraft attacks on neighbours. And that's what you tend to get in the confessions there. So sometimes when you look at confessions from a particular community, you can imagine, and it is only a guess, but it's an educated guess, what kind of questions they're being asked and therefore who questioned them.

36:17That's a really interesting idea that actually we can trace the witch finders potentially through the confessions that we read. So we've seen the witch trials grow and spread throughout the 1640s in Britain. But how and when did the witch trials start to decline? When do we start to see the end of them? Yes, towards the end of 1647, the really big witch trial of Eastern England and the Midlands does seem to be over. And that seems to be for a variety of reasons. There have been so many accused people.

36:51John Stern writes in in his account of the trials that he thinks he was responsible for having about 200 people executed, which is astonishing figure, isn't it? Yes, scary numbers. And when you think of all the people who were not executed and who were charged and who were quitted or who were questioned, that spreads across hundreds and hundreds of people. So quite rightly and understandably, other people who are not as convinced as Stern is that the world is full of witches start asking questions about, you know, are these people really all witches? Can there possibly be this

37:25many witches in Britain? This is a bit odd, isn't it? People also start asking questions about the motives of the witch finders, especially Hopkins and Stern, because they do charge for what they do. So when they're asked to a community like Great Yarmouth, they're going to need to be put up in a hotel, basically. They're going to need to be paid for the food for their horses and for themselves. And they're going to need to pay people to search the suspects for witch marks. So the costs tend to start racking up in different communities. And again, people really have an eye on their taxes and

37:57what's being done with them. And they start to think maybe a witch trial is not such a good investment and they don't want to spend money on this. And plus, they're also concerned about whether the supposedly guilty people actually are guilty. And Hopkins also falls ill during this period and he actually dies in 1647. He's still a really young man. He's in his mid-twenties. And it seems quite likely that he's killed by whatever it was that killed his brother, maybe tuberculosis, which does tend to run in families and often kills younger people in this period. So he's taken out of the

38:28picture altogether. And I think that really helps to bring a decisive end to the witch hunts in which he and Stern were involved. But they do go on across the rest of Britain. There's a big witch hunt in Scotland in the 1650s. So unfortunately, this witch hunt does have longer term implications. It has echoes. It has ripples that carry on right across the period of the Civil War. And hundreds more people are accused and executed, often undocumented. So, you know, we come across stray references to a witch trial about which we know nothing else. So, yes, they do come to an end in part.

39:01They do falter. But they also then kick off somewhere else as well. Talking of that spread then, while these trials were petering out in England, they were continuing elsewhere. You mentioned Scotland. But people listening might also be familiar with the idea of the Salem witch trials in the 1690s. How do we see this legacy spreading? It spreads right across the world. It's amazing, isn't it, that these events that we're talking about in England and Scotland can have these impacts 3,000 miles away. And of course, that is

39:34because colonists go out to what they think of as the new world, to the eastern American coast, from exactly the communities that hold the witch trials. So we've got specific examples of people going out from Framlingham in Suffolk and from Great Yarmouth. And unfortunately, they and their descendants carry with them the idea that the world is full of witches and that they ought to be hunted. They're often people who are referred to as Puritans. So people are quite godly, people who are on the more radical wing of the church or are separated entirely from the Church of England

40:05and want to go out and live in America in order to have religious freedom to practice their own beliefs. And they take with them the idea of witchcraft because this group of people, the Puritans, are really, really keen on the idea that the devil's people are rife in the world and they ought to do something about them. And we get the Salem trials coming out of that. There's also trials in Connecticut. There's trials in Virginia. So unfortunately, the colonists carry with them the sort of stories that they'd heard in Suffolk and in Essex and in Northamptonshire and in Newcastle and Cornwall. And they propagate the witch trials around the world.

40:38It's really important, I think, then to have these British witch trials in a more global context. And actually, for our listeners, if you'd like to find out more about the Salem witch trials specifically, we've got a brilliant podcast series about this, which you should definitely have a listen to. It's called Salem Investigating the Witch Trials, and I'll pop a link to it in the description below. You can listen to it ad-free on the History Extra app or wherever you get your podcasts. But back to the British witch trials. Beyond their immediate spread to America and the continuation of them in Scotland, do the trials of the 1640s have a modern legacy

41:14or any modern parallels, do you think? I think they do, yes. I think when we see people being scapegoated and blamed for everything in our communities today, there is an echo of the witch trials. Because you do find it's often poorer people or it's people who are perceived as outsiders who are picked upon. And of course, we still have problems with misogyny in modern society. And any woman in public life will tell you what it's like to be on the receiving end of accusations, which are really very odd indeed and seem to come from conspiracy theorists and people who think

41:48that women are generally a problem. There is, I think, an echo of a witch trial every time you see somebody accused of something that's highly unlikely that they've done and where they're sometimes accused of being in conspiracy with others to do it. So, for example, the QAnon conspiracy theory is really keen on the idea that there are Satanists in American politics and lots of democratic women are in fact Satanists. And that seems to be a really direct parallel with the witch trials of the 1640s. I think they do have a legacy of suspicion and finger pointing and

42:18blame, which isn't actually justified, but which is very easy to whip up into hysteria and for people to get on board with, particularly in times of economic crisis and war. And I think we see all of those things today. So, I think we still live in a society where, in a sense, we hold witch trials. In the face of modern divisions, this is certainly an important history to keep in mind. Of course, there have been lots of books written about this history, quite a few of them by you, actually. So, I'd like to finish by asking, what's different about this book? What do these stories of witches

42:54and their trials, grounded in local British landscapes, add to the history of witchcraft? I think part of it is about their locality. What I tried to do in each community that I studied was go to the place and get a really good sense of what that specific place is like, talk to local people, try to draw on their knowledge of exactly where things happened and exactly what had changed over time and was that building there or was that the place where this conversation happened between the accused and the accuser? So, I tried to be really,

43:24really specific and granular about writing about each community. But I also always try to bring to my research a sense that these are real people. So, like with Henry Maggs, I wanted to rescue him from being just an anecdote, a joke by a witch finder and give you back the real man so that you could think about the awful thing that happened to him and grant him some dignity and try to work out who he was before somebody called him a witch. And I think that's what's distinctive about what I

43:56do. It's not that other historians don't do it, but I really put it at the forefront of what I do because I do have this sense that we kind of owe these people something. Yes, they're dead and gone and there's nothing that I can do for them, but at least we can try and tell their stories in a way which is empathetic. And I want to give the stories back to the people who live in those places as well. Often people come to a talk with me saying, they'll say, I didn't know there was a witch trial in my village. I've never heard of this. So I'm trying to make sure that people know what happened in their locality and hopefully to empower them to ask more questions, go along to their local archive,

44:31maybe see if there is something that happened in their community that they don't know about. There's so many stories still to be told. You know, this is just a sample of that big witch hunt. Absolutely. I think your book offers a really good entranceway into that local history and an opportunity to learn about these people as ordinary people rather than just witches. Thank you very much for talking to us about it today. It's been really interesting. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

44:58That was Marianne Gibson speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Marianne's latest book, Witchland, is out now and it contains lots more stories of the ordinary people who were accused of and curiously admitted to practising witchcraft.

45:20Thank you all for joining us. Thank you. lange.