Dan Snow's History Hit - The Last Witches of England

Episode Date: September 27, 2021

In 1682 three women, Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susannah Edwards, from the town of Bideford were tried and hanged as witches. They were convicted on flimsy evidence, including an incident where a magpie, supposedly a symbol of the devil, had spooked the wife of a local merchant. Indeed, the authorities at the time cynically allowed the trial to go ahead to avoid invoking the ire of the local population. The three women would be the last people to be executed for witchcraft in England and their deaths are an illustration of the swirling religious, political, class and social tensions of the seventeenth century. John Callow joins Dan for this episode of the podcast to tell the tale of the Bideford Witches and their fate. They discuss why accusations of witchcraft were so prevalent in this period, why women were the primary targets and what changed legally and socially in the following years that meant that these were the last women executed for witchcraft.

Everybody, welcome to Dantanow's History Hit. In 1682, at the Exeter Assizes in the West Country of England, there were witch trials. The Biddeford Witch Trials. They resulted in hangings for three women, Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards. Needless to say, folks, the evidence against them was pretty hazy. In fact, it was pretty much non-existent. It involved, and I joke you not, the widow of a prosperous Devon merchant being frightened by a magpie appearing at the window of her house and assuming that it was an emissary of the devil sent by one of her neighbours. Yep, well, weeks later, those neighbours were dead. They were the last women that we think, the last well-documented cases of women being executed for

witchcraft in England. It is a wild story. What was going on in the 17th century with witches and witchcraft trials? I've talked to Susanna Lipscomb and others in the past about this upsurge of witchcraft accusations in this period. But today I'm talking to the very brilliant John Callow, who's written really widely on witchcraft. He's a perfect guide to take us through this bizarre subject. If you wish to listen to these other podcasts without the ads, that's the good thing, without the ads, for a very small subscription, you can do that. It's a wonderful thing. You get a historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, where you can listen to all these podcasts about the ads. But you also, I mean, this is where it just too good to be true. You also get unfettered access, unlimited access

to hundreds of history documentaries. We've more going up all the time. We've got two a week going up at the moment. We're about to increase that because things are going pretty well. So we've got Netflix for history on there. We've got all these episodes of the podcast about the ads. Please head over to historyhit.tv and subscribe today. And if you do that, you'll get 30 days free when you subscribe. So you can check it out for free. There you go. But in the meantime, everybody, here is John Callow telling us about the last witch trial. Enjoy. John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Oh, it's a pleasure. It's wonderful to be with you. Why was the 17th century such a time of witchcraft trials? What was going on there? Well, there were lots of things, really. I think with witchcraft trials, the popular imagination seems to root them a lot earlier. But as you say, it's the 17th century where they become really pressing. And the century falls really into two halves. The first half, which was one of intense religious crisis and turmoil, typified by the Thirty Years' War, whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant, really did define you.

The second half of the century we think of as the beginnings of the Age years war, whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant, really did define you. The second half of the century we think of as the beginnings of the Age of Reason, the beginnings of the European Enlightenment maybe, the age of Locke and Boyle and Newton. So the fact that the witch trials erupt and straddle this divide is really quite something. There are lots of reasons, I think. Changes in the way charity was given to the poor, religious changes, and changes actually about the way that God was seen. As the world started to open up and God began to be removed from human affairs, a lot of people got worried about it. And one way to defend the belief in God, and one way to make God still relevant to day-to-day happenings, was to look for the presence of the devil, to look for signs and portents and the working of demonic magic in

everyday life. I'd never thought about that. That's fascinating. So tell me about these particular women, and why is it women? Well, that's a really big question. It's not all women. Somewhere about 20 to 25% of all people across Europe convicted and executed were actually men. But women, because we can't discount misogyny, it is a patriarchal society. It is a very top-down society. We do have a Judeo-Christian culture that talks about Eve being the fount of evil. We do have the Bible as a thing that everybody read that has female

witches in it, most notably the witch of Endor. But I think more than that, and cross-fertilising with that and promoting it, is the simple fact that witchcraft is a domestic crime. The butter doesn't churn, the baby sickens in the cradle, the cattle go sick or lame in the fields. So if you're looking at a crime scene, who are going to be the people around? Poaching is a male crime. Witchcraft, because it affects the hearth and the home, and when suspects are looked for in the hearth and the home, tends to be associated with women. And there's no police force in that period. So how are you getting done for witchcraft?

Well, you're getting done effectively by the information of your neighbours. That's what the tensions that erupted into the Biddeford witch trial and almost every other non-political witch trial were about. Tensions over people begging, as happened in Biddeford, exchanges with neighbours, curses, hard words, all of those kinds of things that could lead to complaint. And it's wrong to think of witchcraft trials happening in an instant. Very often the tensions, very often the rounds that contribute to them have been boiling on for maybe 10, 15, 20 years. So Temperance Lloyd, the archwitch as she was described in one of the Biddeford pamphlets, had been run in to the local authorities in Biddeford three times before she was actually convicted and

executed in a period that ranged from 1671 up to 1682. So that's slightly more than a decade. So people get the name of a witch for whatever reason, the ability to look at people in a slightly disconcerting way, to have a scolding tongue, to have a bad reputation. And that tag sticks. And in times of tension, in times of breakdown, in times when somebody's really got it in for you, that's when you get shot to the authorities and bad things can happen. Right. And the other thing about the 17th century is it's a time of climate crisis, political upheaval. So do you think these are women who are bearing the brunt of just very, very tough times? In large measure, yes. We can say, though, that almost every time is a time of dislocation and horrible things happening. It depends where you look. The thing about the

17th century, though, is all of this, and certainly the mid-17th century, all of this is tied up in a big bundle. You get the loads of Biddeford goes through the Civil War, then it goes through plague. It goes through, as you rightly say, the mini Ice Age. This is precisely the time the Thames is freezing up and we have the wonderful frost fares that so enlightened and enlivened Stuart, England. an enlivened Stuart, England. So it's an odd mixture. And the fascinating thing I think about the Biddeford case is that Biddeford is a boomtown. It's an Atlantic port. It threatens to eclipse Bristol for the American trade. Its citizens had far more in common with people in the American colonies at the Chesapeake than they actually did with folks in Lancashire or Suffolk or even Kent for that matter, because communications were so good and rapid. So tobacco, fortunately at that period, the slave trade hasn't risen its ugly head. Tobacco is enriching the town and it's a boom town. And that means there are haves and there

are have-nots. Traditional charity breaks down, and our three women of Biddeford, Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles, are right at the bottom of the pile, who lose out on absolutely every score. They're completely marginalised. So I think that shake-up of society, where the rich do really well and the poor do really badly, is also underpinning the witch trial dynamic. So Biddeford's a boom town. Tell me about these women. Who were they and how on earth did they get into this situation? Well, the three Biddeford witches are the poorest of the poor. They're marginal, Dan, in every conceivable manner. They're marginal in terms of their gender,

they're women in a patriarchal society. They're women on their own. Their families have either left them. In the case of Mary Tremble, she was a spinster. The other two had liaisons and kids, but the menfolk had left them about 20 years before the trials. They're marginal because of their age. They're elderly. But above all, they're marginal because of their poverty. When you look at the trial records and the accounts of the North Brothers, the judge who wrote everything down, he overestimates their age. He's talking about these women, saying that they're absolutely ancient. They haven't got a tooth between them. They look like something out of the pages of Shakespeare. He says if an artist had to draw a witch, you would find no better archetypes than

these three hags. But actually, Temperance Lloyd was only barely 60, and Susanna Edwards was a little bit younger. So a hard life of unremitting grime had borne all of them down, prematurely aged them. They had the hatred of their neighbours over simmering rows over poverty. They were just unfortunate. And I think what turned them into witches was the fact that they couldn't beg in an acceptable way. They tended to colour their begging with curses, with rows took it too far and I think it may even be in Temperance Lloyd's case that actually once she began to get herself a name as a witch she found it helped in getting charity off others and she profoundly unnerved people one of the stories about her it's almost like something out of the Disney cartoon. She got lucky and she'd been able to

glean a little basket full of apples and the child of a rich young woman stole one of the apples and walked off the quayside. So the old woman ran after, remonstrated with the mum who laughed in her face because of course to the young mother a matter of a hate knee or whatever the apple was was absolutely nothing but to temperance lloyd it meant the difference between going hungry so she curses and what happens lo and behold the child sickens and dies and it's seen as her being the person who actuated this so it's poverty and incredible bad luck that gets into the scaffold, coupled with the fact that they don't deny it. At no point do they say no to the questioning. If they'd have ever just either said nothing or mounted some sort of defence or not fallen out with each other,

then they might have been saved the tragedy. That was not the inciting incident, was it the child falling, or was it just a whole miasma of allegations? There were a raft of allegations over a decade. The trigger really is over Grace Thomas, who's a relatively well-to-do spinster who takes sick from some sort of nervous disease in the winter of 1681, beginning 1682 and she is disturbed or the servants of the house are disturbed she's had a sleepless night she fears she's dying and the servants are terrified because a magpie comes tapping and rapping at the chamber window and gets in and it flies around and of course the scarer they get the scarier the bird gets until it finally flits out

and over the course of the day and then being unsettled the thing of the magpie or as they say the thing in the appearance of a magpie meaning possibly a familiar spirit or an emissary of the devil grows and grows and grows as bad luck would have it just as they're discussing this, just as the invalid has been calmed down, just as the family is taking stock, they hear something outside the window, literally eavesdropping, and Temperance Lloyd sticks her head up. They shoo her away, but she becomes fixed in their mind, and her appearance and the bird's appearance become really uncanny so they shifted this idea of the shape-changing woman and things get worse you know a child's doll is found on the bed and that's seen as a symptom of image magic that temperance lloyd could have put there herself

so it magnifies and magnifies and magnifies and it has to be said it's magnified also by the physicians in the town who actually say when they can't come up with a remedy for the ailments of a group of youngish women who are suffering, they say, well, have you thought about witchcraft? And from there, people begin to freelance justice. They look to bring in witch hunters from the West Country. And at that point, the authorities have to act because they're not going to have justice privatised. And at that point, it becomes really serious

how they keep hold of a town that's politically and religiously split from top to bottom. And of course, these towns, they become famous during the Civil War, don't they? But they are very split along religious grounds as well. They're utterly split. If you think this is a period where the Whigs and the Tories are at each other's throats, this is Monmouth country. The town fathers are always looking for Monmouth supporters. In fact, after the Rye House plot, they arrest some poor old soldier thinking he was one of the conspirators

and send him off to London. And it's only when this poor fella gets to be examined by Charles II and they realise that the person they're looking for actually had two eyes rather than one, they realise they made a horrible mistake. So the town is split. You've got a seething religious underground who are very strong. The dissenters in Biddeford are really, from the time of the Civil War onwards, or slightly before then, the majority. They're the natural governors. They've got the money, they've got the contacts in the Carolinas, they've got the settlements at the Chesapeake, they've got the wealth. But everything Charles II does bars them from power and drives them underground.

So Biddeford is really a seething microcosm of all the stuff good, bad and indifferent that's happening in restoration society. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the last witch trials and executions in England. More after this. Hello. If you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated witch trials and executions in England. More after this.