After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Last Witches of England

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

This is the dark history of the last people to be executed for witchcraft in England. In 1682, Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards, from the town of Bideford in the South-West of England, were tried and hanged as witches. They were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence under the cynical eye of uncaring authorities. Their fates encapsulates the turmoil of the seventeenth century and its deadly consequences.Our guest today is John Callow, author of "The Last Witches of England" and friend of the podcast - check out John's previous appearance on our episode about the Pendle Witches.Edited by Tom Delargy, Produced by Sophie Gee, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ 

Hello and welcome back to After Dark. Now today we're concentrating on a really interesting and dark history and it's the story of the Witches of Biddeford. It's a really eye-opening, quite painful story of the last witches of England and I think Maddy has an insight for us to get us started. It's high tide in Biddeford Harbour on the estuary of the River Torridge in North Devon. The day's ships are unloading, and sweating men are moving raw materials and luxury items from the vessels to the foreshore. They're working hard, heaving crates into the warehouses, while the sound of merchants haggling over the last prices of the day drifts on the salt-tinged air. As the sun begins to dip, the streets start to empty. Residents weave

away down narrow cobbled streets to their homes, dragging carts behind them, and journey-worn travellers settle down to fireside inns and the promise of a good meal. All is quieting, but keep a watchful eye. Look, there at the cat slinking across the cobbles. There's something unusual about it. It moves oddly, and when it turns to look at you, you feel its eyes pierce your own. It sees you. pierce your own. It sees you. Look again. There, a magpie sits atop the low harbour wall. You feel an unexplained prickle on your skin. On the surface, this is an ordinary place, one used to the challenges that come from living, existing on the edge between land and sea. There are diseases brought in on ships, tavern brawls with strangers

who afterwards lope off back aboard their ships. There are pirates if you head out far enough into the waves. But lately there's been a new threat. It's rumour, really. Whispers at the water's edge, in the church pews, in the marketplaces. Witches, some are saying, have arrived in Biddeford. Now, if this isn't prime after dark material, then I don't know what is. And to help us navigate our way through this history, we have John Callow with us, who is a historian, visiting senior fellow at the University of Suffolk and author of The Last Witches of England, as well as Witchcraft in 16th and 17th Century Europe. John, welcome and thank you for being here today.

It's a pleasure. So, John, let's start with an obvious question. Who were the Biddeford witches? What time period are we in here? Well, when we think about witchcraft, we tend to think of it being rooted in the Middle Ages. The fascinating thing about Biddeford is that it's remarkably modern. This is the reign of Charles II, early 1680s. This is the age of Newton, the stirrings of modern science. And yet we've got this last big trial of witches in England. So there are three women. There could have been five women, of which more later. But the three who are our main characters are Temperance Lloyd,

who was a Welsh immigrant into the town, Mary Trembles, who came over from Ireland, and Susanna Edwards, who was the only native of the seaport. Interesting. I love those names. I know. It's such a gorgeous name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have these three, possibly more women.

What are they supposed to have done? Why are they accused of witchcraft? Well, they are supposed to have run the whole gamut of the sort of things people, and predominantly women, were accused of for the crime of witchcraft in the late 16th, 17th centuries. So it's bewitchment of individuals, visitation of disease, of conducting pacts with the devil, of raising storms, of causing death and blindness and havoc in the home. So they got them for

everything. It was a long long list you mentioned there when you were talking first about this is kind of after when we might expect some of these things to happen and we know about demonology and charles the sixth and first but we've moved on you know a couple of reigns and interregnum since then and what purchase does witchcraft have in this particular period of time in time well funnily enough it's got a growing purchase because those people in rooted in the universities in the royal society which we always think of as a bastion of european enlightenment are fighting a desperate rearguard action about which belief to put it simply it was caught up with the way people perceived God in an age when God dominated human affairs. In a way, I think it's very,

very hard for us to understand today. So the idea of a God who intervened directly in affairs was almost proved by the idea of a devil who intervened in human affairs. And you can't have one without the other. You can't have one without the other. And if you think about the idea of a devil who intervened in human affairs. And you can't have one without the other. You can't have one without the other. And if you think about the sort of literature people were reading, you've got the Bible, the Old Testament, you've got the Witch of Endor, you've got the Curse of Leviticus,

the way it was translated, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. So the fundamentalist argument was always, if you start peeling witch belief away from Christianity, where are you going to stop? And that provided the cutting edge of this period. So which pamphlets and books, after going really quiet in the 1630s, begin to flourish again in our period, the 1670s, 1680s? Is there something about the 17th century, thinking of the absolute chaos and trauma of that century in the earlier decades and the fact that we've got civil wars we've got London burning to

the ground all of this absolute catastrophe is there something in people's minds in the aftermath of that where they're looking out more for supernatural danger for reasons why these things may have happened and sort of it's all tied into that aftermath. Well, I think you're right. I think the 17th century has always fascinated me because it's a great melting pot. The individuals we're meeting who are leaving records, you only have to think of Samuel Pepys beginning his diary in 1660

until 1669, are recognisably modern in one level. Remarkably so if you read Peep's diary. Absolutely. And that, when you're talking about the trauma of the century, you have, I think, you can't get away from this fact that there was a cultural watershed in the middle of it that divides the modern from the early modern. You look at somebody like Bacon, for instance, with his diary,

or there was a London draper called Wallington writing before the Civil War. You get nothing in the sense you get out of Pepys. It's all about their souls. It's all about the imminence of God and religion. There's no biography. Pepys is all about the humanity, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes of new things.

And himself, arguably. But that's also the key to it. It's the triumph of the individual, that suddenly you have individual biography in a way that biography wasn't rooted before. And that's one of the problems when we come to the three witches, the three women of Biddeford, that they were never really allowed to tell their own stories.

We're dealing with three pamphlets and a ballad to a borrowed tune that suggest really not so much things about their own lives, but what they were expected to do and say and be. And as you say, this comes out from an incredibly traumatised century. It's the Little Ice Age, so the Thames is freezing at this period. It's the Little Ice Age, so the Thames is freezing at this period. We've had the Thirty Years' War, religious war, tearing the heart out of Europe. So things were not really the same again. And yet at the same time, you've got the opening up of North America, the beginnings of modern philosophy with Descartes and modern science. So all of these things are contending,

and we come out of that century very differently than we entered it. So let's try and put a bit of flesh on the bones of these three women then. So we have discussed that there's a tension drawn on them and you said earlier that it's kind of for the plethora of things that one might expect that they're taken up for.

What brings them to attention in the first place? Why are they the subject of this focus? Poverty and gender. Those are the easiest things to root out of it. That they were friendless. So Biddeford, as you said in your wonderful introduction, is a place of contrast. It's a boomtown.

It's made itself phenomenally rich on the Atlantic trade. Fortunately, not slaves yet. The slave trade hasn't kicked in. But in terms of Biddeford, it's tobacco from Virginia. It's pottery going out the other way. It's a major maritime centre. It's got the Newfoundland cod fisheries. So all these consumer goods are coming in.

In our period, it was the second largest entrepot, the place where the most amount of tobacco came in, outside London. Really? So it's rivaling Bristol and it's rivaling London. So there's phenomenal amounts of wealth, but there's no social security. There's no net for the people at the bottom. but there's no social security. There's no net for the people at the bottom. And as the great writers of the late 1960s,

1970s on witchcraft pointed out, charity had collapsed in the period we're looking at. So the traditional safety nets have all gone and these three women are thrown back upon their own resources to beg. There are a few charities that we could talk about that they reach out to, but they are defenceless. In a patriarchal society, they have no male protector. And that, in a sense, is what makes them stick out from, you know, their sisters on the streets of Biddeford. And there were large numbers of beggars.

There were 60, 70 in the John Dole book getting their receipt of payments every quarter day. So there is this shifting populace of the poor in the city, in the port rather. And the other thing to say is they were united by old age. They were elderly. How interesting. Yes, thinking about what unites them and thinking about earlier fears around witches and earlier witch trials and we

think in popular culture this image of the witch living maybe on the edge of the village in the woodland the thing that makes her other to people is that she exists on the edge and she behaves differently and in this society it's falling to the bottom of the heap. And also, as a woman, losing any power you might have through your appearance, through your fertility, through the relevance, quote unquote, that you might have to men in your society. Once that is lost, that's what unites them as being othered. Absolutely. Absolutely. And in terms of the simple facts, it's interesting what you say about where they lived. The Victorians came up with a wonderful sort of chocolate box illustration

of the cottage they were supposed to have lived in at the top of the town where you could overlook the port. Now, they didn't live together. There's nothing to unite Temperance Lloyd with her two sisters, with Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards, although Edwards and Tremble's begged together. Now, if you think about this, it makes perfect sense because it protects you from violence,

it protects you from all kinds of abuse if you have this sort of rough sisterhood on the streets. And you can share the things that you are able to gain. And that's what brings, certainly, Mary and Susanna down, that they squabble over what little they have, the bits of tobacco, the scraps of meat that they're trying to beg from a seaman's wife. And the other devastating thing for them,

picking up from your introduction about the quayside in Biddeford, the acts of these people begging, scavenging, look very like the acts of animals who scavenge. So there's lots of stuff in the city records about people's pigs running riot on the quayside, upsetting the tobacco jars, all this kind of stuff. The magpie who plays such a key role in the story, again, is a scavenger, a predator, something that pries into people's affairs, that is unsettling. So it's almost the idea that these animals replicate the behaviour of the witches, and because the English have this particular fascination with familiar spirits...

It's almost exclusively in English. Almost exclusively English that this you know one of the one of the ideas I did read once was because the English loved their pets we have familiar spirits now I think that's pushing the envelope a bit far but the English do have this idea of the demonic other that comes in in the form of a little creature, you know, famously the Matthew Hopkins print of the witch with all her familiars, you know, Griselda Greedy Guts and Toby and Sack and Sugar and all these kinds of things.

But you can see even in their names, Sack and Sugar, these are elite things. Commodities. Yeah, commodities, consumables. And that's what the witches are going for. They're asking for a bit of tobacco to put in their pipes. They're disrupting that capitalist system that's beginning to really take off that international trade

and the wealth that's built on it. Absolutely. They don't sit within it because they've been the losers in very different ways. One of the things that's striking me, John, is that you're really painting a really clear picture of what it might have been like on the ground for these women. And then you mentioned earlier that there was ballads and some pamphlets.

Can you tell us how those lives that you just described, where you're looking at poverty or looking at homelessness, are that differed from the details that were in the ballad potentially? Because I have a feeling that homelessness alone, poverty alone, scrapping alone may not have, yes, it would have put attention on them, but it might not have condemned them. So what's in those ballads and those pamphlets? It's the association with the devil that condemns them, the idea of a demonic pact, the idea that they can harness this preternatural force

that is outside human cognition. That can upset the order of the world. So these pamphlets were written to sell. The ballad is interesting because it's reworked. There's quite a famous 17th century tune called Fortune My Foe that was always used to denote kind of otherness, and they rework the words to really talk up, you know, the completely demonised witch who can conjure up storms

and throw lightning bolts and all this kind of stuff. The main tract or pamphlet we go back to is really, really useful, though, because it contains the verbatim cross-examination of the women in Biddeford. Now, we don't have the trial record in Exeter that condemned them, but we have the pre-trial information of their neighbours. And this is completely vital for the business of history. You can actually capture their words. And gives you an insight into a community whose words would presumably otherwise have been lost. These are people who wouldn't necessarily survive in the historical record today.

presumably otherwise have been lost. These are people who wouldn't necessarily survive in the historical record today. Absolutely. There's a great feminist writer writing in the early 1980s who says that the only real way we can accurately get at women's speech patterns and true feelings in this period is through their trial records and unfortunately also through the witch trials. Because although what they say, of course, you know, there's a tendency to want to please your interrogators or your cross examiners. So we can't take it as being unloaded. But we do get the things people wanted to talk about and the things that people concerned them. And otherwise, as you say, what would we have for these women we'd have very little you know scribblings in the trial records that are preserved at queue in the public record office and a couple of things

in the town register that just records that the women were hanged that would be it so what did the neighbors say then i'm always intrigued by that because it's you know it's quite damning to go against your neighbor in such a way, although not necessarily if there's poverty involved and there's begging involved. What are they saying they're seeing then? Well, they're feeling fear and they're seeing disruption. So Temperance Lloyd, who one of the ballad accounts, one of the pamphlet accounts, refers to as the Grand Dam of the Witches,

which is a wonderful expression, I think. That's the title of a novel, right? It is, isn't it? It brings up all kinds of things. It's just unfortunate. When she tries to show concern for her neighbours, it comes across as a bit odd, overdone, aggressive. So she's the sort of thing, you know, in the words of Tony Blair,

that we talk about aggressive begging. And this gets her into so much trouble she falls foul for instance there are ins and out groups and if you look at the people who are accusing the witches they tend to be mainly younger wealthier women with families so it's not strictly a male against female. It's haves and have-nots in a class society. So, for instance, Temperance Lloyd, one of the things she even refers to it on the steps of the gallows. And, you know, you get this flavour coming back to the pamphlets, the energy and drama of the time.

You imagine this elderly woman. Her two sisters are swinging above her on the gallows. She goes to mount the steps, and then the sheriff of Exeter stops her and pulls her back and says, recount your story again, because they were desperate to get, inverted commas, the right confession out of her. So in her last minutes, she has to rehearse this,

and she comes back to this thing about what possibly she could have done and what she didn't. So she says, well, I couldn't have made a boy fall from the crow's nest of a ship. I don't have that power. I can't raise storms. A child did take an apple from me and died and that links you into the occurrence that precipitated part of her fall that on the rare occasion this is why she's so unfortunate her brief good luck destroys her life somehow she gets some apples to sell windfalls she'd stolen them off the you. Somehow she gets some apples to sell. Wind falls, she'd stolen them off the, you know, whatever.

She gets some apples. She was given them maybe. She tries to sell them in the marketplace at Biddeford and a young mother comes past and the child steals an apple and runs off with it. And that's her downfall. That's her downfall because she goes after the child. Oh, gosh.

And the young mum thinks it's a great joke. Yeah. You know, just go away, without realising that that's all temperance Lloyd had. And, of course, the child sickens and dies shortly afterwards. So her curses are construed as leading to the other event, the misfortune, the power of words. Wow.

Let's talk a little bit about how witchcraft is proved, what evidence there is in this period. Because you're saying there that Temperance almost believes that she could have had some power and that she possibly might be responsible for at least this apple-related child death. So how are people presenting evidence in this case in particular and how difficult or easy is it to give evidence of presenting evidence in this case in particular? And how difficult or

easy is it to give evidence of witchcraft in the 17th century? You have King James's demonology, that's number one, which goes into the advice for jurymen. So if you think like today, if you're doing jury service, you get almost a crib sheet of what you can and can't do. Once witchcraft seeps into the advice for juries, then it's something you've got to take really seriously, that culturally this was something that existed. It's on the statute book. It's the big problem at the end of the period rationalists have

with removing it because the law says there are witches. So you can't say nonsense, however bad the evidence is. It's also strengthened at this period by this thing called spectral evidence. So if your witness says they can see a spirit, you know, over your shoulder, or the spirit is doing something, think of Arthur Miller and the crucible, the court scene. That's fine. We can admit that as evidence. Now that, I think, destroys any sense of empiricism. This comes to hurt the three women at Exeter. Part of the evidence we think that is used against them is this thing that they're supposed to have known things that happened outside their jail cell, doors banged, and they were supposed to have done that. When the judge's coach went over the drawbridge into Exeter Castle, the horses

refused to go any further and it took a great deal of prompting to get them. And this was seemingly proof that the witches had literally jinxed the horses to stop the operation of justice. So there are all these things. And then there is the evidence of these women's neighbours that bad stuff happened after they ran into these women in the streets or in their homes, or they had some kind of visitation or, you know, misfortune. So it's what we today would think of as circumstance. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn. Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves.

Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I want to touch on something you're talking about, these different strands coming together to work against these women. On the flip side, in terms of the 17th century, let's say, what is the doubt around claims like this?

Because we sometimes just believe that, oh, they believed in witches, that's it. But actually, was there another side to this where people were saying, well, of course there's no such thing as witchcraft? Well, belief in witches was a very recent thing among the elites. As I said to you at the beginning, it's not something rooted in the Middle Ages. I mean, Joan of Arc is the most spectacular

early witch charm, and it's there in Shakespeare. When Shakespeare casts Joan, she is a witch who manages to defeat Tolbert because she's in league with the devil. That is effectively what she's burned for at Rouen, and the Parliament of Paris has to come up with a lot of intellectual juggling to get her to that point in the university. In terms of Middle Europe, Denmark, and Britain, such as it exists in the 17th century, then the witch statutes are incredibly recent. They make it on in the Elizabethan period.

The great hothouse for writing witch tracts is late 16th, early 17th century. You've got King James VI and I, who's one of the great authorities, and he's writing against sceptics. He's writing against Scott and Veya, who he literally damns with his pen, and he says these people don't believe it. They're in league with the devil. Is that a watershed moment, thinking about elites in Britain, well, in England and Scotland as it was then, in terms of taking on that belief, if the king is writing it, you have to subscribe to it to a certain level.

Would you say that's true? Yes, effectively. I think all you need to know is when London printers are running out editions of the king's collected works after he ascends to the English throne as well as the Scottish throne, they include demonology within the king's book. They don't redact it. They don't seek to hide it. James has no problem about this. So there is royal sanction. There is an increasing amount of legal evidence. Once you start running these people through the courts, there's past

precedence that is used again and again and again. And John Webster, who's one of my absolutely favourite 17th century people, is the one who really bursts the bubble on this. And he just says it's a solipsism. It's building falsehood upon falsehood upon falsehood. You're just thinking within this closed system, can we move beyond it? So there's plenty of scepticism. But actually, the irony is, it's not rooted in the universities or the Royal Society or the elites. Webster is completely outside. He's a man of the people. He'd been a revolutionary during the Civil War. He'd hung out with the diggers and the levellers and all this kind of thing.

He's a marginal man, and the elites write against him, and academics still do, because he doesn't fit. And the whole story is not one about a close fit, that the Enlightenment happens, but it doesn't quite happen in the functional, step-by-step way, top-down. We think it did. And it's not reflected in the law and other institutions. Absolutely. Webster sounds like you'll have to come back, John,

and do a whole other episode. In terms of the reality of what actually happened with these women, how close can we get to that? Obviously, as we've said, they were othered, they were beggars, they were pushed to the margins of their communities. Yeah. What was really going on here? Well, we've got to go back to the sources,

and sources can be read in different ways. Somebody coming along in 100 years will probably look at my book very differently than the evidence in a different way. That's the fun of history. But I think we always have to go back to what there actually is. And we're lucky. There's the survival of the John Andrew Dole book, which gives you a wonderful insight into the poor of Biddeford. So you can see how people topple out, how people, there's a wonderful guy as well, who was probably from an African heritage, who you see making his way up on society.

He's on the parish for relief. He's getting the dole in the 1660s. By the 1680s, he's made it. He's okay. He's on the half tax. He's taking the loyal oath to King James, all this kind of stuff. So you get this sense of social mobility both ways in this very vibrant economy.

So we've got that. So we've got an index of poverty. We've got the pretrial record in Biddeford, how the local magistrates, the justices of the peace interrogated these women. Of course, what we don't know is if they were maltreated. We don't have torture in English law, but we do have the search for the witch mark. When he was saying about how do we detect witches, the idea of a mark, a blemish, something that the little familiar suckles is searched for. It's searched for by other women under the direction of the medical profession, but we don't know how many people watched as Temperance Lloyd was strip searched. You can imagine how evasive that is for anybody, particularly when there's a baying mob.

One of the accounts we have is when the mob literally marched her to the church and disturbed the reverend, who was completely taken aback by this, didn't know where to put himself. And they tried to make her recite the Lord's Prayer in front of him. And, of course, she stumbled over the words. She might have stumbled over them because she was from a Welsh background and English wasn't her first language.

That's a possibility. We don't know. It could have been that she was frightened out of her wits. It could have been, and I think it's quite likely, she had the onset of senility. And if you think about examining old women, what are you going to find? You're going to find more blemishes. They can't find the witch mark in an earlier case in 1671. Eleven years later, lo and behold, they can find it. So we've got the bedrock of evidence that comes from the pretrial reports that are preserved in one of the pamphlets, the pamphlet literature, which is, it's there to make a buck, it's there to entertain, which is then as now sell. That's the reality of society and then lastly we

have a wonderful and a wonderfully chilling letter preserved in the state papers at the public record office to the secretary of state from one of the two trial judges right which literally throws the women under the bus or the horse cart. Who was the author of that story? This comes from Lord North. Okay. There were two judges. It was a circuit court at Edinburgh.

That means you save a bit like today. When I did my jury service, it was basically a circuit court up in Lancaster where the Pendle witches made their last stand. Because of the volume of cases, you'd have two judges. So Judge Raymond tried the witches. Judge North sat on his shoulder. And North and his brothers are incredibly erudite.

They're insiders. They are closely allied to the King and the Tory party. And the letter North sends from the West Country to the Secretary of State a guy with an amazing name Leoline Jenkins which is terrific imagine the big wig you know it says it all doesn't it he writes to Jenkins and he says and I'm paraphrasing of course you and I you know we're men of the world. We know there's nothing in this. But the mob are at the women's heels. We've got all this trouble with the Duke of Monmouth sowing sedition.

There are Republicans in the West Country. We think there's a revolt coming. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. And that's the key to it, that a lot of witches in this period get off on appeal it was almost three strikes and you're out if you look at the percentage temperance lloyd's misfortune again is this was a third strike but for her sisters it was their first so there was no reason that they couldn't have an acquittal you look at the case of Isabel Gowdy in Scotland in the 1660s, where there,

the court papers go up to the Privy Council of Scotland in Edinburgh, and they hand down a totally different verdict. They look at the appeal and they say, you've done brilliantly. You've done amazingly detecting, you know, this really bad canker in your society at all. Dern, we think you're terrific. However, you might want to think about this. If this woman is depressed, if she wants to self-harm, and it goes through 13 get-outs, and, of course, her statement says, kill me, I deserve to die. Yes, I'm depressed.

So you can see the give and take in a sophisticated society. But the Scots are saying a quit at this period for reasons of state around Charles II. And Charles II, believe you me, was not the merry monarch. J.M. Barrie cast him as Captain Hook for very good reasons. There's a cruelty to his regime that is overlooked. And this is a regime tottering on the edge in 1682. And I'm afraid these women are the collateral. So it's a chilling letter because of its absolute cynicism. You mentioned earlier, and I think this is fascinating because here we are, 2024, we're talking about these three women. You mentioned that in a hundred years time, your book may be interpreted in different ways or some of the some of the primary sources.

How have these women impacted at different points in history? Have they been received and analysed by historians, by experts, by the public? Because I would imagine it's changed over the decades and centuries. It's changed an awful lot. I mean, for the first case, they're a seven-day wonder. So the pamphlets and the song comes out. They're the stuff of street corner conversations in London and in Biddeford. It's a live thing. It's a wonderful irony of history. And this story is so full of ironies. So they're a seven-day wonder. They're a core celeb. Then they're forgotten. There is an 18th century history of Biddeford, which is wonderful, which talks about which beliefs still persisting in the area.

Now, when Daniel Defoe goes to Biddeford at the beginning of the 18th century, he gets nothing of witchcraft. He's just fascinated in what he's fascinated in. He's fascinated in the commerce. He's fascinated in the bridge, which he thinks is the best thing ever because it's so long he's fascinated in the new buildings and he's fascinated in religious tolerance because the other side of our story in Biddeford is because of the revolution of 1688 to 89 all the people who'd been marginalized in the town who were the majority, are now back in power with religious toleration.

Charles II and James II are gone, and there's this new world. That's what interests Defoe. There's a wonderful Victorian newspaper account that talks about one of the lanes having a bad name because it was a horn to witches. So there's a folk memory, actually around a butcher shop of all things, down by the quayside. But there's this idea that this is where the witches hung out

and did their bad stuff. But condescension, forgetfulness, right up to the 1960s and late 1960s, early 1970s, where academia starts getting really interested. Keith Thomas's wonderful book, The Decline of Magic, McFarlane's wonderful study of the home counties and the home circuit trials, and then Jim Sharp, who was brilliant as well.

So we get this academic engagement. We then get the engagement of feminists and environmentalists so in terms purely of Biddeford you get Frank Gent's wonderful little account of the trial from a local historian who's lived there who's passionately engaged knows the area and then you get the recovery of the women at the time of green and common the peace camps by a new wave of predominantly women who were interested in feminism ecology banning the bomb all the stuff that would seem to me to make perfect sense and they take these women up where they're suddenly not figures to be feared they're figures to be celebrated so when we get the move to pardoning witches, for instance,

we get, first of all, a commemoration of the women on the side of Exeter Castle. And then we get a grand witches tea party thrown in their honour in the grounds, which is, you know, attended by people who identify with them, see them as positive people who didn't get a fair hearing and the greatest irony of all is the three women of Biddeford are still the only women publicly commemorated in Biddeford the rest of the statues are men you know and Tarka the otter but an animal before women yeah well I mean that tells you a lot doesn't it it does as lovely as that novel is so they've shape-shifted really to mean different things to different people over the decades and the centuries while we have you here john i'm just wondering what you think about

pardoning witches in our current age because it's still a debate that i think is still going on in scotland there's been a campaign for it for a long time. You've brought so much nuance to the story today, thinking about the complexity of the 17th century world and that it's not necessarily the binary adversarial atmosphere that we might imagine, and certainly binary in terms of the sort of gender war around witchcraft. So with that nuance in mind, do you think campaigns like that are useful today? Do you think it's something that we need to spend more time thinking about? I think anything that makes you think about groups who've suffered oppression or have been marginalised is healthy. Sometimes it can be less healthy if you dwell on the mawkishness and the suffering. I think there's another agenda to be had about witchcraft that

almost, to use my friend Rachel Holmes's expression, it almost becomes torture porn. But the narrative is always, I know we didn't burn in England, but the woman ends up on the bonfire. You know, it allows people to focus on the victimhood rather than making the positive steps that transcend the victimhood and move you beyond that while remembering. I think in terms of the specificity of pardoning, anything that keeps those things alive is positive. I think there is a counter argument, and you know, the Biddeford witches are significant because when there was the final repeal of the witchcraft acts under the post-war Labour government the three women are cited in parliament by the guy introducing the bill. Now for people who've been forgotten

effectively for 300 years then Ben Bradshaw the Ex MP, championed the cause of their pardon, I think about 10, 15 years ago now. So it's been a live wire. I think in terms of who you're pardoning, it becomes difficult because you cannot make restitution for somebody who's dead and gone. who's dead and gone. I think what you can do is tell their stories in a way that literally enlightens. And that sense of the pardon stands as a bulwark to all kinds of intolerances. If you think about the modern pagan community, ironically, they're benefiting from an enlightenment disbelief in witchcraft. But once that's kicked away from them and you enter a world of fundamentalisms,

they're as dead and gone as Temperance Lloyd and Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards. I think it's a really important reminder that history is not a stagnant thing that belongs in the past. Yeah. That this legacy of this history, and you come up against it a lot in public history, don't you? We're like, well, no, that was in the past yeah that this legacy of this history and you come up against it a lot in public history don't you were like well no that was in the 17th century we don't

need to do anything with it now and that may very well be the case nonetheless we do and we will and we will bring it with us in some way and and people may argue different things about it but this is not a this is not necessarily over just because it happened in the 17th century. And we all have a stake in it today. And people have a stake in it, for right or wrong, however that actually muddies the past in a historical sense, there is no full stop. Well, that's the fascinating thing about history,

and that's why it's there to be valued and treasured. That's why it's not purely the preserve of academics yeah it's something there that's literally to liberate if we handle it in the right way and i'm all for muddying the past because you contend with the received wisdoms you get past them so the story about biddeford as you say is far more nuanced i think far more interesting than a simple right and wrong, that the shades of grey are the things to be explored and understood. But I think that reflects to our humanity, and I think there is a danger in the moment

where arguments are simplified, where history isn't regarded in any way, shape or form. People think they're the only new thing under the sun. You know, all that's in the past. And also, sometimes the way I'd say in the national curriculum history is taught, it's taught in a way that actually others the past, that it's all seen as being dreadful. We have Nazis, we have concentration camps. These things need to be understood. But the sense, more broadly, that the past was always worse than the present, I think is a very dangerous idea, because it leads us into this sort of cultural and societal superiority. The idea that medieval people never bathed is not true.

Exactly. Or if we take going back to Defoe, walking through the streets of Biddeford and recording what he saw, he came to the town at a point where the witch fury had burned itself out. And, you know, people were now not talking about it. At a time when the Industrial Revolution hadn't hit. So you've got wind power. So we haven't destroyed the planet yet. There's an ecological balance. Now, you know, and it's a big set aside. But if we ignore the exploitation of

other peoples and Africa and resources and all those kinds of things. You have a society that is beginning to reap the benefits of a consumer economy. Things are getting nicer. The last great smallpox epidemic burns itself out by 1698. So you haven't got the depredations of industrialisation. Things are getting nicer. the depredations of industrialisation, things are getting nicer. Things are getting freer. You know, there's toleration. So, you know, when Voltaire comes to London, he's absolutely amazed by the Quakers. He spends most of his time writing and talking about them because this is off the wall. There are women preaching. What on earth is going on? So we get a society that is recognisable but very different. And I'd suggest no better but no worse. Just worse in different ways.

I think the thing from the Biddeford story that's going to stay with me is just the power that words can have. Thinking about temperance, going to the church, being dragged to the church and being forced to recite the Lord's Prayer. And when she can't, that's a condemnation in its own right. And of course, saying the Lord's Prayer is akin to saying a spell. There is a power attributed to it. And I think that's something we can definitely take into our own modern world of social media and culture wars,

that words do have real impact in the world. Thank you, John, for bringing that to our attention. So fascinating. I think it's a good place to end a lesson for us all absolutely there's lots in this story and i would encourage people first of all to go and buy john's book yes um but but to read more broadly around this case in particular i think it has some nuance that i wasn't aware of and i'll certainly be thinking about thank you for listening to After Dark. Please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We really appreciate it. It helps people to find

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