Dan Snow's History Hit - Witches

Episode Date: August 24, 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 via his website johncallow.co.uk.WARNING this episode includes some strong language.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.

Hi there History Hit listeners. I probably don't need to tell you about this because everyone already appears to be listening to it, looking at the chart position. But History Hit's got another podcast out called Betwixt the Sheets. It's with Kate Lister, brilliant historian. She's been on this podcast many times. It's a history of, I don't know, sex, scandal, society. The stuff that intrigues Kate Lister with her wonderful mind and will certainly intrigue you too. It's going crazy, everyone's listening to it, everyone's talking about it. Join the gang. Betwixt the sheets, wherever you get your pods. Hello there my lovely Betwixters, it's Kate Lister jumping in with your

fair dues warning. Fair dues. We are talking about adult themes in an adulty way. We're covering witches which is inevitably going to mean torture in general. Horrendous treatment. And swearing, obviously. But this is your fair dues 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 stereoty Halloween witch that we all wanted to dress up for when we were students? Maybe that was just me. Or do you think of the 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 rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button.

Let the boss eat your rice! Let the boss eat your rice! Let the boss eat your rice! Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so done. Goodness, I have nothing to do with it, do I? over the 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?

Unlikely. Thank you for joining me betwixt the sheets. The cauldron is bubbling. Let's dive in. So 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 ear. See, that's exactly the right approach. My approach has just been to lie on the floor in a towel, whinging incessantly. That's been my whole approach. But we're not here to talk about such things. We are here to talk about a witch case that I hadn't really, I wasn't all that familiar with, the Biddeford witches. So the Biddeford witches are the last three women we

know hanged for witchcraft or the crime of witchcraft in England. So, 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 in 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 the first through to about the time of charles the second of james the second where the big hunts took place this is a huge question but what was going on like because you said that the middle middle ages and sort of the medieval period have been quite relaxed about witches which i sort of like that idea of like casual witchcraft and they're kind of just everyone's just kind of like oh don't 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 reformation 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 were no pagans sculling around everybody is pretty much uh homogeneous within the catholic church of course there's a'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 you 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 recognizably 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 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. 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. So 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 that the people coming up with these charges are not rather daft people who are labourers. They're the 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 II is kind of absent without leave in the way he thinks about things. The Stuart monarchs are not big into witchcraft. Charles I was dead against it. What about James, Jamesy Boy? Didn't he write demonology?

That's earlier. That's James VI and I. 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 jamesy 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 ruined kirk out of James's work. James does believe that the witches met in this ruined kirkyard 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 1590s, 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 collected 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. 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 100 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 okay that's all right 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 wiles of satan so james has this whole sort of dumping ground on women as a gender he codifies magic where it 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 Dee 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 Macbeth's 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 witch after witch in his plays. Yes, he does. And this, you know, again, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, his Joan of Arc in Henry VI 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, the 1680s, one of the things that the elites, the high Tories, the Anglican churchmen who are writing all these things to justify witch belief, hammer on about again and again and again, is if you take the witches out of the Bible, where do you stop? Well, it'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, 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 interested in 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 respects 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 jackdaws 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 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 bed chamber

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 eaves. 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 Namasaria, the devil. The poor woman is a witch. So that's what hashtag science

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 hightail it off they're part of a welsh settler community into bidderford who come to mine the coal and she's left behind for whatever reason so hard labor poverty not enough to eat no warmth So you can see it's taken its toll. When Justice North, who's one of the great villains, and his brother come to write down the story of the Biddeford 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 are 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 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 where the rich are getting richer and the poor are 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 beg 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 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. has a family so she's doing all those kinds of things that women are expected to do during that period and fortunately 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 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 Tremble 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, they're a Protestant family, but she'd probably known no comfort for her whole life long. So her parents are begging in Biddeford. She's more or less what you'd 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, 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 vulnerable, aren't they? Exactly. 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 Biddeford 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 Gunner stone 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 center 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 most meagre things. Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles are brought in because they fall out with the woman of a household when they go begging for, quote, a little meat and a bit of tobacco. They scavenge. That's how they survive. And, oh, bless. So they really have nobody that could possibly stand up for them. And they are already going to be quite stigmatised living. I mean, homeless people are still stigmatised today, aren't they? Let alone back in the 17th century. 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 Tremble's 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 in 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 biddeford 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 They're not taken by the mob for 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 there, because 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's 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 by fair 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 uh excuse me and they went oh we've got money yeah we know yes yeah we've got we'll invite you to a candlelight supper and then they were exactly 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 is very often it's like you know in the states today three strikes and you're out most people

who hang for the crime had been brought in numerous times before. I didn't remember that. And the averages work out really, really oddly that it tends to be the third time you're in big trouble. It's just 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, it does. 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 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 onto 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 traumatizing 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 a 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. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. One 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 poachers, 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 Biddeford 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 seen 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 or providences from God that is actually wreaking 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 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 like james the sixth and first 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 canny, he goes to the poor. And the depression is one symbol of a slide towards the demonic. Wow. That is some mental acrobatics to justify that one. 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 there. 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 gonna 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 their 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 it 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 a baying 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 they're confessions people eavesdrop on particularly Susanna and Mary when

they're in the lock-up 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 Temperance Lloyd in Exeter in 1671, when she's run in, she was probably only in the courtroom for 10 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 advance what we do have is the record of Exeter so we don't kind of know what had gone in 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 throws, and Hill was the other one, Thomas Hill, they throw the three women in modern parlance under the wheels of the bus. 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 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. 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 witch 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 in 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. 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 realize 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 a pretty much a republican town from the back of the civil war all the kind of people who'd 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 quieten the country down. Let's throw these women to one side because that will shut them up.

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 1889, 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 1889, Charles II and James II 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 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 royalroyalism after the civil wars,

who were 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 of Man, they don't burn in England because English common law is different for the actual crime of 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 had

to make a name for himself the reverend ham turns up at the scaffold and accuses them again but he doesn't get what he wants they're already with their necks in the noose what's this prick doing saying there 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 oh i see right and finished them you know this was his x factor moment if you like right so what happens and this is the terror of it they save temperance for the last act because she is the grand dame 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 because

she was putting up a fight and wouldn't go and screaming so she's the first one to go susannah edwards goes next so temperance lloy Lloyd is in the 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, 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 i never thought about this for a minute and they go on and on about this and she denies it i'm matt lewis and i'm dr alan or yonaga and in gone medieval we get into the greatest it. murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So in a way, the witch hunters and the pamphleteers didn't get this idea of the full-on satanic conspiracy that they 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 that 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 marginalized women in the 17th century from witch trials than we do from any other source because it's the only time they could speak relatively freely. 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. Wow. It's such a sad story and unfair. And I don't know what to do with the anger because they're gone and everyone's gone. But if I can ask you one question, 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 who are scapegoated within our society that the poor and the marginalized 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 revived witchcraft there is a palpable tension between the legacy of 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. 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 marvelous denouement actually is that for women who would know no comfort probably no laughter no sisterhood in their own lives the way the bit 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 the spot where they were hanged which is now 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 never thought of it like that that's so complex so it's all about women's commemoration I think 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 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 bidderford or the people who hunted them to the gallows we're celebrating and remembering the three poor women of bidderford whose lives tell us more about society and are 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. Anytime.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to John for sharing your encyclopaedic 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

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