Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Witches

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

What comes to your mind when you think of a witch? Broomsticks? Black cats? Warts?Early modern witchcraft expert, John Callow, is Betwixt the Sheets with Kate to explain the history behind the stereotypes we have today.They also chat about the Bideford Witches, the last three women to be hanged for witchcraft in England, as well as the misogyny in witch trials throughout the ages.You can find out more about John's work here.*WARNING this episode includes naughty words*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Seyi Adaobi.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes an archive clips from The Witch's Curse 1962. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello there, my lovely betwixters. It's Kate Lister, jumping in with your fair dues warning. Fair do's. We are talking about adult themes in an adultery way. We're covering witches, which is inevitably going to mean torture and general horrendous treatment.

And swearing, obviously. But this is your fair do's warning, so if that is not your cup of witch's brew, then please sit this one out. For everyone else, buckle up. Let's do it. Now I can continue on my struggle. Struggle. Against whom?

Against what? Against evil. But what evil? Witchcraft and a curse. What do you think of when you think of a witch? Do you think of the sexy Halloween witch that we all wanted to dress up for when we were students? Maybe that was just me. Or do you think of a stereotypical witch with the hooked nose,

an old woman living alone with a cat in a cauldron? Although now I'm a bit older, this actually sounds much more appealing than the sexy witch. However, where did this stereotype come from? And how does it stack up against the very true story of the Biddeford witches? The last witches to be hanged in the UK. Well, today, betwixt the sheets, we're going to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob. Good thing. Bye. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister.

In 1682, three women from Biddeford Devon were executed in Exeter. What was their crime? Witchcraft. Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards were amongst the last people to be executed. in the UK for this particular crime. Today I'm joined by John Callow to find out what these women were supposed to have done. What was their story? What happened to them? And did they indeed metamorphosis into an animal and develop teats on their body for the devil to suck?

Unlakely. Thank you for joining me betwixt the sheets. The cauldron is bubbling. Let's dive in. Hello to John Callow joining me betwixt the sheets. How the hell are you? I'm very good, thanks, Kate. It's a little bit hot out there.

It is swelteringly hot. My God. But you're coping all right? Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah, it's just a matter of getting the dog out early in the morning and late at night. And yeah, just playing it by year. See, that's exactly the right approach. My approach has just been to lie on the floor in a towel winging incessantly.

That's been my whole approach. But we're not here to talk about such things. We are here to talk about, at which case that I hadn't really, I wasn't all that familiar with, the Bidford witches. So the Bidford witches are the last three women we know hanged for witchcraft or the crime of witchcraft in England. And it's really late. It's 1682, which is more the age we think of as the Enlightenment and modernity rather than anything to do with the Middle Ages. Do you know, if you want to start a fight, go into a medieval conference and say that the witch burnings were medieval. It was almost all into this early modern enlightenment period, wasn't it?

Absolutely. It's far later than people. think that actually what the judiciary and the medieval period were really, really relaxed about witchcraft and magic or comparatively so. And really the first modern witchcraft trial, or the first one that's really well sourced, is Joan of Arc. But the thing we think of, you know, and Joan of Arc went to the stake as a witch and a transvestite. That's what they got her for. And the two things were, for all kinds of misogynist reasons, sort of linked together. but the classic witch trials we think of are incredibly modern. It's the reign of Elizabeth I first through to about the time

of Charles II or James the second where the big hunts took place. This is a huge question. But what was going on? Because he said that the Middle Ages and the medieval period had been quite relaxed about witches, which I sort of like that idea of like casual witchcraft and everyone's just kind of like, don't worry about them.

It's just casual witchcraft. But like what happens to make it go from, yeah, Betty down the end of the road, she is a witch, but don't bother her, to burn the witch or hang the witch, I should say, in this country. Like, what was going on? Well, I think lots of things. I think the breakup of medieval Christianity, you've got the refamation. So suddenly, if you get this picture in your head that the last pagan kingdom in Europe

is up there in the Baltics, it's Lithuania in the early 14th century, and when the Crusaders go in and basically kill or convert everybody, that's the end of that. So there are no pagans sculling around. Everybody is pretty much homogenous within the Catholic Church. Of course, there's a Greek Orthodox Church in Byzantium, but that's a different story. So everybody is of one faith and creed. Now that breaks apart with Martin Luther. And if you can imagine that everything he thought was true,

suddenly people are saying there isn't, that there's a whole fabric of saints and ideas about purgatory and the afterlife and the primacy of the Bible that weren't there before. So you've got an enormous jar in crisis of faith. At the same time, society is beginning to break down in terms of new forces coming in. So charity is changing, the way the poor are dealt with. And now that's part of the Reformation as well, that it's no longer about good works getting into heaven. So that all of a sudden the poor are basically left on the scrap heap and there aren't the monasteries around anymore that would have helped them or taken them in. So that's a big problem. I think the other really, really big problem that is fighting its way out, and I think this is the key to Biddeford,

is ideas about God himself, that we're moving from an age, and there is this thing that nobody has really kind of explained, but there's a watershed around about the middle of the 17th century where we go from the early modern to the recognisably modern in terms of the way folk think. Now that's for a whole number of reasons. But one of the most important is the way that God is seen. So before we have the idea of very much the Old Testament God, who intervenes all the time 24-7, throws thunderbolts around, all those kinds of things, is there. By about 1700, 1715, we've moved to this idea of the transcendent God,

who is sort of absent without leave. It's sort of almost the modern Church of England idea that God at one point for the Jewish people and at the time of Jesus was very involved in human affairs, but he seems to have rather disappeared. And he doesn't intervene all the time. So if you're fighting a rearguard action to say that we believe in a God who is there with us

every day, every night, everything is a providence, if you stub your toe or fall down a foxhole, that's a little judgment on you. If we're fighting that rearguard action, what we really need to do to persuade people that God is with us 24-7 is to have this idea that there is a sort of holy war going on between God and his arch-rival, the devil. Oh, that's clever. Oh, I see. Ideas are thrown back onto the duality, because if you've got a religion that says everything is black and white, you look for the bad stuff, you know? Other religions don't have it in that way,

but certainly Christianity in its various forms does. And so this idea of holy warfare becomes more and more important. And it's not coming from village level. The stuff we're seeing in the late 17th century isn't stuff. The people coming up with these charges are not rather deaf people who are labourers. They're the people. They're the people. that people in the elite of society. So it's people like Glanville, who's a member of the Royal Society. And the king himself, right? Well, actually, Charles I second is kind of absent without leave in the way he thinks about things. The Stuart monarchs are not big into witchcraft. Charles the First was dead against it. What about James? Jamesie boy? Didn't he write demonology?

That's earlier. That's James the Six and First. And you're dead right with that. At the start of the Stuarts, he writes the classic witch hunting tract, and that is by somebody who is, in many ways, incredibly modern. So Jamesie Boy, he writes demonology, and he's

the king, writing about witches. Well, exactly, and he did this, not because it was somehow esoteric or not because it was a nine days wonder, because he felt he had to do so. He felt he had to comment on all the leading affairs of Europe, and he felt,

the threat from witches was particularly real and apparent to him. He felt he'd been targeted by a satanic conspiracy. He thought that the witches meeting at North Berwick. And if you think, actually, what Robbie Burns is doing in Tamashanta is a satire about all this, but he's actually taking the meeting of the witches at the ruin Kirk out of James' work. James does believe that the witches met

and this ruined courtyard at North Berwick just outside Edinburgh, that they sacrificed a cat, that they called up storms to stop him picking up his bride from Denmark, and that they were there as this undercurrent in society, and that his great rival, the Earl of Bothwell, was in league with Satan to get rid of him. So there are these terrible trials that James unleashes across Scotland in the 5090s. And even when he becomes king of England as well,

you know he hits the jackpot after Elizabeth dies. His demonology is republished in England in his collective work so he doesn't abjure it, he doesn't want to distance himself in any way. And then what happens is it gets popularised. There are these little advices. They're called the Advices of Jurymen to England, which are kind of your sort of Swatter's book

if you get called to do jury service. And what it says you look for in a witch is basically what James says. you need to look for. So it's a deeply misogynistic book. Oh go on tell me I want to know if I qualify right here we go. Well hold on to your hat and your broomstick he goes through and he says that women preponderate you know that if you're looking for your perpetrators they're going to be women there's only one male witch to a hundred women now he says this because eve was more susceptible than Adam to the wiles of the devil taking the forbidden fruit

and he goes into this enormous passage about women being, what could we say, for a family audience. Oh, we're not a family audience, just get it out. So they cannot be sexually satiated in the way that a man can, but their capacity for amor and for pleasure makes them incredibly dangerous and open to the wilder Satan. So James has this whole sort of dumping ground on women as a gender. He codifies magic, where it comes.

comes from what it can do. He goes into fairy belief. He goes into hobgoblins. He goes into lots of weird stuff. And the difference between village magic, the sort of thing we associate today with witches, and high magic to do with the kind of sorcerers we think of, maybe when we think of somebody like John D. or Shakespeare's Prospero. So ironically in that period, you've got Prospero, who Shakespeare writes into the stage, who James would have thought would have been the worst thing ever. Whereas MacBethers, witches are a little bit lower down. And you can see as well, who is the great witch dramatist? It's William Shakespeare. He sticks witch after which after which. Yes, he does. And this, you know, again, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, his Joan of Arc in Henry

the 6th is a witch. She raises storms. She raises tempests. She's in league with the devil to defeat Talbot and the English. So we've got a culture that is beginning. incrementally to take on the witch as a terrifying figure. The king says it, the Bible says it, if you're educated, and you've read the classics, lots of Roman and Greek authors talk about witches as well. So almost everything you read says that witches exist. And if you're in the period, we're talking about in the 1680s, one of the things that the elites, the high Tories, the Anglican churchmen who are writing all these things to justify which belief, hammer on about again and again and again

is if you take the witches out of the Bible, where do you stop? What's an interesting theological point, I suppose? Well, if your whole society is geared to the literal truth of the Bible and the Bible says there are such things as witches. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, right? Exactly, the Leviticus, and then you've got the witch of Endor

who conjures up the shades for King Saul on the eve of his last battle. You've got this very powerful belief system. and if you challenge it, you're in lots of trouble. I'm really interesting that idea that you can't prove the existence of God. That's much harder to do. But you can attempt to approve the existence of evil by locating witches and that that in some way is an affirmation of faith.

I think that that's fascinating. So what they're looking for is horny women, basically. With cats. Well, sometimes, I mean, we do have. I mean, England's great, and in some respect to Scotland, but mainly England. It's great contribution to witch theory. It's not seeped in devils or Satan himself, as continental Europe and Scotland are. What it has is these little familiar spirits.

Cats, dogs, fleas, lions in Biddeford, they have pigs, they have jackdores, they have magpies, they have all these little creatures, these little imps who go about and do their bidding. So that's where we get the kind of archetypal witch's cat from. And if you think about it, and this is the thing that gets the Biddeford witches into trouble, what do these little animals do? They steal, they beg for food, they're in unexpected places, they try and gain entry into houses, pretty much like the three beggar women in Biddeford were doing themselves.

So the operation of the animals, their daily round of looking for food, mirrors that of the poor women themselves in the town. So tell me about these women and then we'll talk about their little familiars. Biddeford, it's in Devon, we're in Biddeford. What happens to kick this off? Well, what happens is, again, to go back to familiar spirits, we have a magpie rasping and tapping at a window and getting in. That's it?

That's what begins it. It gets in at the window, probably looking for a shiny object. It's a stricken house of a merchant family of shopkeepers. And Grace Thomas, who's the... unmarried sister of the woman of the house had taken sick to a bed in the chamber. Her friends thought dying overnight, the magpie comes around, it startles them where they're cleaning up the bedchamber, and of course it flies from end to end terrified before they get it out. Now, when they're calming down, and they've, you know, they've got all this under control,

as they're rehashing the story downstairs, there's a scrapping and a scraping from just behind the door of the house and they fling it open and there is Temperance Lloyd, the beggar woman obviously eavesdropping Now if she'd have only stopped to explain Things might have gone really differently But she runs off

Down the High Street And of course again They associate the presence of the woman With the bird Something has been trying to get in It's the beggar woman, it's the bird The bird is name of the devil The poor woman is a witch

So that's what kicks it off. How old is 10 Prince Lloyd? Who is she? A lot younger than people used to think she was. She was a woman at that point in her 60s. A lot of the pamphlets say she was a lot older into her 80s. But if you think about she'd been in receipt of charity, i.e. she'd been in absolute poverty for just over 20 years.

She's an abandoned woman, her kids and her husband, high-tailed-off. They're part of a Welsh settler community into Biddeford. who come to mine the coal, and she's left behind for whatever reason. So hard labour, poverty, not enough to eat, no warmth. So you can see it's tait and its toll. When Justice North, who's one of the great villains and his brother, come to write down the story of the Bidford witches,

they talk about them looking like the archetypes. They say, if an artist wanted to find three more decrepit, broken-down, garrulous women in the whole of the nation, He couldn't have done any better to find these three women, Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles. Oh, so that's Temperance Lloyd. She hasn't aged well, she had a hard life, and she hangs out with magpies, apparently.

Who were the other two? How did they get roped into this? Well, the other two, there's nothing actually to associate temperance with the other two. What you do find in this world of haves and have-nots, whether rich are getting richer and the poorer, getting a lot. poorer is that very often it doesn't take two minutes thought to come to the conclusion why this may be the case very often women begged together it protected them from rape it protected them from other kinds of physical insult and abuse so you see this in the poor books for Biddeford that very

often poor women were hung around in twos or threes temperance lloyd was quite clearly the most articulate, the most striking. She's always referred in the pamphlet literature as the Great Witch, as being audacious, as being perfectly resolute in her dealings. Now that's a bit of a projection on her, but she's seen as the sort of the main one. The other two women, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles, knew each other quite well and may have begged together. Susanna Edwards is the one who had the furthest to fall. She's the only one who's born in Biddeford. She may even, even, even though she was illegitimate, which was a big kind of thing to carry around with you in that period, bearing in mind this is a Puritan sea trading town.

She makes a pretty good marriage to a local guy, she has a family, so she's doing all those kinds of things that women are expected to do during that period. Unfortunately, the plague comes along, finishes her husband, takes away a couple of her kids, and very, very quickly, without a welfare state, she's thrown back a... upon the parish and the poor rate very, very quickly. So she's somebody who was reasonably comfortable, who just through no fault of her own, through sheer ill luck, is literally beggared. Mary Trembles is the one we know least about,

because she's more or less silent. She's a damaged individual. She was the child of beggars, who had probably come from the north of Ireland. Again, there were a Protestant family, but she'd probably known no comfort for a whole life. So her parents are begging in Biddeford. She's more or less what you call a professional beggar.

She's unmarried. So you can see what begins to frame these women is none of them have a family network and none of them have a male figure that they can reach out to for support. Now, it didn't have to be a husband. I know we do look, you know, it was a very patriarchal society. But they don't have a recourse to any man in any kind of authority who could speak up for them. They're super wonderful that night. The whole story is one of vulnerability, actually.

Were they all homeless? Well, there's a beautiful Victorian picture, a lovely watercolour, of supposedly the witch's house, and this idea was they all lived at the top of the town, but the place is far too grand for the cottage that they showed on them. There is some evidence to suggest, you can't see the three women living together. I think there is some evidence to suggest that Temperance Lloyd

probably had kind of some lodgings at the top of the town, because the eeriness with which people thought she could sort of overlook or see their doings, if you look at Bitterford, it's really steep. So if you're living at the top, you could pretty much see what was going on without any recourse to magic. We know she supposedly meets the devil on Gunnerstone Lane when she's carrying a burden, and that's an incredibly steep slope to get up even today. You get out of breath if you leave the little art centre and head up the hill. So if she was walking up there, it tends to suggest she lived.

at the top. The other two may have lived together. Their habitation did get raided by the parish constables and it was so meagre when they looked for evidence. All they found was a little scrap of leather with little pinpricks in it that they thought was to do with magic, to do with image magic, that that was actually the skin of Grace Thomas that they were pricking out with thorns or needles to create all her woes. So these are women on the margins of society. They beg for the moment. meager things. Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles are brought in because they fall out with the woman of a household when they go begging for a quote a little meat and a bit of tobacco. They scavenge. That's how they survive. And oh bless. So like they really have nobody that could possibly stand up for

them and they are already going to be quite stigmatized living. I mean homeless people are still stigmatized today, aren't they? Let alone back in the 17th century. So, So poor old temperance has been linked to a magpie flying around a room. How do the other two get dragged into this? They've just pissed off this woman by saying, can we have some meat? Yeah, it's sheer bad luck, and it's part of this, is it's not simply men against women. It is a group of much older, very, very poor,

childless in the sense they don't have kids with them anymore, although Mary Trembles didn't have kids of any kind. So they're childless, they're old, they're poor, ranged against, if you like, another in-crowd of young, relatively wealthy women with kids. So there are all these kind of gender tensions. Now, I'm not taking misogyny out of it because it operates on a whole different level.

But that is the essential dynamic and the squabble going on in Biddeford that focuses around charity or not providing charity for them. And it does spread because we get two other. There weren't just the three Bidford witches. There were five. So we get Mary Beer and we get Elizabeth Caddy who were also brought in for questioning.

But what they have is families. They've got husbands to speak for them. They've got money. They've got kids. So they're not locked up immediately and examined in the local jail. they're not taken by the mob questioning, they're effectively bailed and allowed to remain at home.

And their cases are dismissed really, really quickly and brushed under the carpet. So it's a whole thing about haves versus have-nots. I think that's really important what you said. You can't take misogyny out of the witch trials, but it's too simplified to say it was just men-hating women. It just wasn't because women were a part of these accusations as well. And also I read somewhere that in Iceland, 90% of the witches who executed there were men.

And it was the same in Russia. Yeah, and similarly actually in Sweden, that in Sweden, and you can see the impact of books going back to King James' demonology and the stuff that was coming out of Denmark. Swedish witches were almost always men to begin with. And then when you get the science of demons, demonology coming in, they begin to look at prosecution in a different way and the gender ratio flips.

They start running in women within 20 odd years. So you can just see that the judiciary have a loaded idea. They look for particular suspects. And when you look for something, Buffer moons or foul, you tend to find it. You do, absolutely. That's fascinating. So these women are accused.

A couple of others were accused and then their husbands went, excuse me, and they went, oh, all right. We've got money. Yeah, we know you. Yeah, we'll invite you to a candlelight supper and then they were allowed to go. That's a pretty good metaphor for what happened actually, yeah. But what were these poor women accused of doing?

Right, so they've got a range of charges against them. It comes from killing a local fire. And this is stuff that builds, particularly against Temperance Lloyd, because she'd been running for Witchcraft before in 1671, more than 10 years before, 1679, and then 1682. And one of the interesting things about witchcraft trials It's very often it's like, you know, in the States today, three strikes near out. Most people who hang for the crime had been brought in numerous times before.

I didn't remember that. The averages work out really, really oddly. That it tends to be the third time you're in big trouble. It's just like our first offence will probably just get away with a caution and a course that you have to go on. Or an acquittal, you see. So this thing has been simmering. So Temperance Lloyd has got a name for herself as a witch. Yes, do.

And if you think about the thing about begging, If you've got absolutely nothing else going for you, fear is the last thing in your armoury. Fear stops somebody attacking you. Fear maybe means a difference between somebody throwing you a penny or not throwing you a penny, and you can use this to your advantage. And I think temperance probably did, actually.

That's interesting. And it links to modern things we could maybe talk about later about, you know, modern ideas of aggressive begging because unfortunately nothing much has changed. So she gets a name for being a witch that's hung around her neck like a millstone for 11 years. So the charge sheet begins to grow. She killed a local farmer. It's alleged.

She caused a maid to go blind while she was churning milk. She'd attacked Grace Thomas, caused her sufferings, caused her to be bedridden. She was capable of raising storms. She caused a young lad to fall from the rigging of a ship. and then there is the other thing that is added on to the charge sheet against the women that they were in league with the devil they'd met with the devil they'd become his servants and you see there's this whole idea that when you sign your satanic pact with the devil when you become a witch when as far as the english saw it you get your little imp or familiar spirit

your whole physiognomy changes you're no longer completely human you grow supernumerary teats so your little imps can suckle. I've heard about these teats, these witches teats that normally crop up in the genitals. Exactly. That they're discovered by people trying to prove that they're witches. And this is what happens to the three women, a bit of it, certainly to temperance and probably to the other two. And if you can imagine today being strip searched with a mob watching, it's going to be traumatising to anybody. Where, in terms of, this is how appalling things were. When temperance is searched in 1671, she doesn't have one of these polypses or teens. But of course, 10 years later, she's a lot older. So pre-cancerous growths,

very often associated with women who've had kids, are there in the elderly. And lo and behold, when they strip searcher in the jail at Biddeford, and it's women who do this, you know, it's midwives who do this. So again, that's another myth. midwives tended not to be witches. They tended to be the people detecting witches, albeit for the sake of men. They find these little polypses, these things where the imps were supposed to suckle. Now, if you think about it, you've completely dehumanised these women already. Because if they're no longer fully human, if they've become something else, then it doesn't really matter so much what you do to them. They're not your sister. They're not a part of the community. They're people.

who have not only condemned themselves to a wrong path in this world, but they have completely ruled themselves out of any chance of salvation in the next. And that was a pretty scary thought for a man or a woman in 17th century England. I'll be back with John in just a few. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the move? without the bra.

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wherever you listen to your podcasts. thing that I do see, I mean, I don't know if I'm glad to hear it, that's not the right expression, but at least Temperance has got an interesting rap sheet there, which covers murder and blindness, because some of the witch trials, it's stuff like they turned a bottle of milk sour, or they made a dog bark loudly, and it's just like, first of all, that's shit witchcraft, isn't it? If you were a witch and you were in league with Satan, you've got a big enough budget to do something bigger than that. Well, that again is a tragedy about Biddeford, that if you think about,

it, witchcraft is seen as a female crime because the bad stuff happens around the home. Of course. If you think about poaches, that is a male crime. Yes. Because they're out in the countryside, who's taking the hairs off the heath, etc. You look for a fellow with a gun. If you think of a crime scene kind of drama, if the child takes sick in the cradle, if the butter refuses to churn, if your animals start dying, you look for the people

who are around and women by and large tend to be around the hearth and the home so that gives you another set of suspects that as you say the tragedy in bidderford and the thing temperance law absolutely lashes out about is the fact that what they're doing or what they're being accused of doing is pretty lame stuff by and large and in fact some of the demonological writers say that this is because the devil has no real power because he can't be so. seem to be a proper rival to God. So all the devil can do is convince witches that they do the bad stuff when actually it's sort of stolen power of providences from God

that is actually reeking it, that the devil is somehow nicking a little bit of power to do all of this from the Almighty. So it was noted at the time then that people were going, this is a crap spell. And that was, wow, that was the logic. Because they're being conned. So it's really sufficient. sophisticated double-think all the time. It's kind of Orwellian. And the other thing is, a lot of the people who

believed in witch-hunting thunder about this, that people start to notice that the people being brought in as witches are melancholic, or people we'd say today who had depression. So there's the argument to get them off at the time. These could be simple delusions because these people are unhinged, because of poverty, because of illness, because of senility. So what do people are, you know, James 6 and 1st say, yes, they are poor and miserable because they're the most unlikely people anybody would ever think had any power from the devil. Wouldn't the devil go to the rich and the famous? That's what we'd expect. But because he's so can he, he goes to the poor. And the depression is one symbol of a slide towards the demonic. Wow. That is some mental acrobatics to just

And that's what they were fighting with. That's why it's so pernicious and persuasive. And like any true sort of ill shooting through a society, that's why it is so effective and so deeply unpleasant and abhorrent because it's not irrational. It's a solipsism. No, there is a logic. There's a logic it's solipsistic. It goes around in a circle. You've got to buy into all the guff. But there is a logic. Yeah. Wow. So what happened to these poor women. I'm going to guess they didn't meet a very happy end and they weren't acquitted. Well, no. The first thing they do that temperance doesn't do in 1671 is they admit they guilt. Now, the mob, which is a big mistake, you know, if you've gone that far, you're in trouble.

So temperance is taken in by the constables, then the mob get hold of her and they run her down to the local church. They embarrass the local minister actually doesn't want to be anywhere near. and they kind of twist his arm into making him instruct her to say the Lord's Prayer. And she fluffs the lines. And this again is another little proof. Now if you think about it, this is a woman who's got obeying mob behind her who's being shoved around the streets and dragged about, and she's then expected to perform this perfectly.

Added to which she was Welsh, how good is her English as a second language possibly. Also the impact of age, but also the impact that she came from a Puritan background, and it's a case whether the new wording of the new prayer book that the Anglican church had got actually fitted with what she'd learned as a girl in Wales. So for these whole reasons, she fluffs her lines, and it's seen as another proof. The witch marks are seen as proofs, their confessions. People eavesdrop on particularly Susanna and Mary when they're in the lockup and hear them squabbling with each other. So there's enough to send up a report to Exeter for the Assizes to actually get a trial.

Now, in terms of trial procedure, it's really different to what we think of today. You don't have a defence lawyer. In terms of the Assizes, that's where a couple of judges come down from London and try batch cases. Some of these cases were heard in remarkably short time. The first case for Ten Prince Lloyd in Exeter in 1671 when she's run in, she was probably only in the courtroom for ten minutes. Because if you look at the number of people who were brought through in that day, assuming they sat even six hours,

you do the maths and you divide it up and work out that it was probably five, ten minutes per hearing for some of these people. So in all of these cases, it's not what we think of. We don't have a trial record of Exeter, so we don't kind of know what had gone in an advance. What we do have is the record of the pre-trial meeting where, if you like, the bureaucrats get together and do the horse trading. And it was at that the two other suspected witches were kind of let go. And the justices of the peace for Biddeford, a guy called Thomas Gist, basically threw. and Hill was the other one, Thomas Hill. They throw the three women in modern parlance under the wheels of the bus.

You know, take them, fine. I think in defence of the people at Biddeford, they just wanted them gone for their community so things could quieten down. It wasn't a foregone conclusion that they would hang. And I think this is the rub of it. They taught themselves by admitting it. I mean, what else could any judge do if they've said guilty? And again, you've got this framing where we know the mob was out against them in Exeter.

There are stories that when the judges, horses and carriages rolled up into the drawbridge towards Exeter Castle, the horses suddenly stopped and wouldn't go over the drawbridge. And the mob fixed on this that the witches had by magic enchanted the horses so their trial couldn't take place. Well, I don't need any more proof. That's absolutely. Well, horse whispering, there we go. So there are all these reasons that the mob is against them. Now, the guilty verdict comes in from Judge Raymond,

who is seen as the villain of the piece, with some justification. But then they had a right to appeal. And it's very often in which cases where on appeal the convictions are not quashed, but they're kind of thrown into the long grass. So you end up doing your time, jail eventually basically the death penalty isn't carried out and you can go on your way that there are grounds for appeal this doesn't happen to the biddeford witches and it happens because lord north writes i think one of the most deadly unpleasant political letters you could ever wish for so bearing in

mind he's the other judge in the circuit course he could save these women he could give a nod and a wink it doesn't matter What a prick But well exactly Yeah a massive one A massive one on all kinds of levels And what he says in this letter To the Secretary of State

And this shows you What a so-and-so he was He says You and I are gentlemen of the world We're learned We're not like the mob We don't believe in all this witchcraft stuff This is all nonsense

These women are You know And he trots out the thing About them being garrulous And elderly And beneath his contempt or disdain. But he says, you've got to realise, though, how this is going to play in public opinion. Things are difficult for the king, who's Charles II. The country at this time is tottering on the brink of

revolution. You've got Monmouth in the West Country, who eventually challenged and lost for the crown. You've got the Republicans gathering arms. You've got people slipping in and out of Holland. You've got Biddeford, which was pretty much a Republican town from the back of the Civil War. All the kind of people who supported the English Republic are still there. And what he's saying is we've got to teach them a lesson. No. We've got to quiet in the country down.

Let's throw these women to one side because that will shut the model. So he knew. He didn't even believe they were witches. No, not for a minute. That is horrible. Exactly. So it's the perfect bit of unpleasant. real politic from this Tory grandee who has made

his name as a political judge and what was happening at this time before the revolution of 1688 to 89 Charles 2nd and James 2nd hit on this very very cunning plan which was to politicise the judiciary. You see it

today the best analogy would be why have the rights to women in America to abortion been overturned because Trump and his friends packed the Judiciary. This is what Charles II and James II do in England in the 1670s and 1680s. So they appoint people most famously like Hanging Judge Jeffries in the West Country, who have come up through this ultra-royalism after the civil wars who are servants of the Crown,

and they will deliver any judgment the Crown wants, and that's what Lord North does. Wow. So they were hanged? They're hanged on 25th of August 1682. All English witches hang, they don't burn, they burn in Scotland, they burn in Germany, they burn in the Isle Man, they don't burn in England because English common law is different for the actual crime or witchcraft. So they go to the gallows but there's a rub in the tail. It doesn't go to plan. One of the features in Biddeford had been the appearance of witch hunters. And one of these characters out to make a name for himself, the Reverend Han, turns up at the scaffold and a cute. uses them again, but he doesn't get what he was. They're already with their necks in the news. What's this prick doing saying that are witches, we know, that's why we're here. But what he wanted to do was make his name uncovering the plot

so he could publish a pamphlet saying he detected them and finished them. You know, this was his X-Factor moment, if you like. So what happens, and this is the terror of it, they save temperance for the last act because she is the grand dam, the big one. The headliner. The headliner. So if you can imagine this, her two mates have gone up the ladder before her. We know that Mary Trembles was so terrified.

She had to be strapped onto a donkey to get her there. Fuck. Because she was putting up a fight and wouldn't go and screaming. So she's the first one to go. Susanna Edwards goes next. So Temperance Lloyd is in the last. last minutes of her life with these other two poor women swinging above her head, and then they stop her at the foot of the ladder, and they have another go at her.

Come back down, we want your full and frank confession, and she pulls a bit of a flanker, even under DRS, that what she says is, yes, I might have cursed a child, and the child afterwards died. You know, this was her bad luck all through, her life. She'd had a little basket of apples and the rich child had stolen an apple and she said words after it and a few weeks later the child died so she's haunted by this but she says I was incapable of raising storms I couldn't make the boy fall from the mast of a ship and never thought about this for a minute and they go on and on about this and she denies it so in a way the witch hunters and the pamphleteers didn't get this idea of the full-on satanic conspiracy that they'd wanted.

And the mob were kind of denied the full performance that they thought they deserved. And in that twist in the tale, I think, is the beginning of the rehabilitation of the Biddeford witches. And there's a brilliant quote by one feminist writer about this that says, you know, unfortunately, we know far more about the words of marginalised women in the 17th century from which trials than we do from any other source because it's the only time they could speak relatively freely. Wow. I don't think that was always the case,

but in the last five minutes of her life, Temperance Lloyd and Susanna Edwards, who hits back as well, are able to free themselves and actually mount the former defence they were denied under the law. It's such a sad story and unfair. And then I don't know what to do with the anger because they're gone and everyone's gone and it's just really shit.

But if I can ask you one question before it, I have to let you go. I can't keep you here all day. Do you see echoes of any of this in our modern society because we love to think that, oh, we're past this, we're so far away this, but do you think that we're still living in the shadows of some of this stuff?

I mean, we're not stringing up witches, but... No, but I think it doesn't take you two minutes thought to think of other groups escape-goated within our society, that the poor and the marginalised, the people making their way across the channel in little dinghies, that we're open, I think, to similar waves of persecution that are just underneath the surface. You don't have to look very far to look for the most recent criminal justice act, you know, the bans that are being put down on public assembly and protest and all those kinds of things. And I think the thing to remember is we're in a

weird kind of tension. For anybody who is interested in modern revive witchcraft, there is a palpable tension between the legacy of the enlightenment which is being kicked to pillar to post which is rational which is religiously tolerant

which is free thinking which says witches had no power this was a great crime and some of the more new agey things that say actually these things did have effect, magic does work. So there's a bizarre tension that it's only ironically, through the establishment of enlightenment values through our society, that people can have religious freedom today or can self-designate as witches and frequently do take on this sort of anger. I mean, the marvellous de Numer actually is that

for women who had no comfort, probably no laughter, no system. in their own lives. The way the Bid of Witches have been commemorated since the 1990s has been predominantly through laughter celebration songs of the grand witches tea party that Jackie Juno threw in the grounds of Exeter Castle where they were tried, or the little guerrilla actions that were done by a local group of witches to commemorate them, leaving bundles of flowers to a spot where they were hanged, which is no opposite a garage actually, it's by a bus stop. and agitating for a memorial plaque. You know, it's ironic that the only monument to women in Biddeford is to the witches.

No other women are commemorated. Oh, I'd even thought of it like that. That's so complex. So it's all about women's commemoration, I think. But actually, and here is where I would kind of tease out for you, the silver lining and the thing to defray the anger, that if you think about all of this terrible story, we're not having a podcast today with you to talk about Lord North.

We're not talking about the Secretary of State who didn't give them the pardon. We're not even talking about Charles II necessarily. Still less the judiciary in Biddeford or the people who hunted them to the gallows. We're celebrating and remembering the three poor women of Biddeford, whose lives tell us more about society and a far more interesting. and redeeming than any of those of their persecutors. Oh, John Callow, that is the most perfect place to leave it. Thank you so much for joining me today to tell this story.

Well, it's been a great pleasure. Many thanks for having me. It's been great to talk to you. Any time. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to John for sharing your encyclopedic knowledge about this case. He was fascinating, wasn't he?

If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.