Dan Snow's History Hit - Witches of St Osyth

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

In March 1582, a number of women from the small Essex village of St Osyth were hanged for the crime of witchcraft. Several others, including one man, died in prison, in what was a shocking and highly localised witch-hunt. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Professor Marion Gibson, who offers revelatory new insights into the personal histories of those who were denied the chance to speak for themselves.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

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Not Just the Tudors. Professor Susanna Lipscomb is at the helm, as always. She's talking about the women who in March 1582 from a small Essex village were hanged for the crime of witchcraft. There was a shocking, highly localised witch hunt in St. Osworth in Essex in that year. Susanna's going to talk to Professor Marion Gibson, who's dug into the personal histories of those who've been denied the chance to speak for themselves. Enjoy. In 1582, the small coastal Essex community of St. Oseth was torn apart by accusations of witchcraft.

was torn apart by accusations of witchcraft. Trials followed, and no fewer than 15 people were investigated for witchcraft. Two were eventually hanged. The circumstances in which the accusations occurred are in some ways the classic scenario of witchcraft. We have neighbours falling out, accusations of physical harm done through magic, women the target of the accusations. And yet, the case also complicates and challenges some of the ideas about witchcraft that historians hold dear. It suggests that some of the things we have written off as myths aren't so legendary after all.

of the things we have written off as myths aren't so legendary after all. Within weeks of the executions, pre-trial materials were published in a pamphlet called A True and Just Record of the Information, Examination and Confession of All the Witches Taken at St. Oseth in the County of Essex. It noted some of the details of the investigation conducted by the magistrate and local landowner, Brian Darcy. The case became notorious. The names of the witches' familiars are even mentioned in Macbeth. So why haven't you heard of it? Well, we shall set that straight today. My guest has written all about it and brings it to life for us here.

Above all, she makes us think differently about how important it is to feel history as well as analyse it. I'm delighted to be joined by Marian Gibson, Professor of Renaissance and Magical Literatures, what an amazing title, at the University of Exeter and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Professor Gibson is author of The Witches of St Osseth, Persecution, Betrayal and Murder, a powerful, intelligent and beautifully written book which was published in December 2022. Professor Gibson, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. Absolutely delighted to be speaking to you. I'm very interested in the stories of people accused of witchcraft in the past, and your book is a wonderful evocation of many of the sort of central questions and themes

and also a very heartfelt look at some of the people involved. And so it's great to have a chance to talk to you about it. Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. It's been something I wanted to write for 25 years, which is a very long time to be thinking about a book. So that sense of engagement with the people is a really long-term one for me. Absolutely. When did you first come across the story then? And what persuaded you that it would be a book?

I'd always thought so, to be honest. I came across it as an undergraduate. So I studied at Exeter University. And in my final year, we did a module on witchcraft and magic, which obviously had some consequences for me. And one of the things we were given to read was a photocopy, this being, you know, the 1990s, of one of the witchcraft pamphlets, one of the news pamphlets about witches. And it was this one. It was The Witches of St. Oseth.

And I sat down and started reading it. I could not stop thinking about it. I wanted so much to know about these people's worlds. And I was so struck by the idea that here were the voices of ordinary women. We hardly ever get those from the past. And it was such a joy to be able to hear what they were saying. Obviously, it's mediated. You know, there are problems with it. They were being accused of something terrible. But they were also telling me about their ordinary lives and their children and stuff that had happened in their world.

And I really couldn't get enough of it. And I'd been waiting really ever since to get back into the archives to have the time and the grant money to do it. And this is the result. And it's a wonderful result. So let's start with the place, St. Othus and its environs, the villages around it. I was recently in Clacton-on-Sea, which is exactly this sort of territory. And you talk actually in your book about doing kinesthetic empathy and the sense of doing what Richard Holmes has called footprint research, walking in the footsteps of these people. And the geography and the economy and the recent history of this place is so important to what transpires. So can you set the scene? Definitely. This is a low flat coastal land with huge skies and big flat fields and no hedges. It feels like a canvas on which, you know, you could paint this big ground story, but it's also

kind of bleak and desolate. And you can imagine the east wind whipping in into these really quite poorly built flat board houses. And you can imagine the rain wind whipping in into these really quite poorly built plat board houses. And you can imagine the rain sousing in off the sea. It's a really atmospheric place. And it really helped me to go and visit it, actually. You know, it's a long break from the period when I discovered it as an undergraduate, this story, through to going back to St. Osith. And when I did, it was the place that made me think I had to write it. It was in the early modern period, a place that had quite a lot of riches in the medieval period, because

there was a big abbey there, subsequently called the Priory, sold off during the course of the Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries. And it was on its way down because those contacts that the monastic foundation gave it had died, it was on its way down because those contacts that the monastic foundation gave it had died, trade was changing, things were on the move. So it was a poorer place than it had been and people were poorer there. And I imagine that they felt that dislocation that so many communities did feel in the wake of the Reformation. So not only did they live in a bleak and fairly inhospitable place, there was also, I thought, a kind of cultural bleakness about the period that they lived in. And obviously what happened to them then, the way they tore their community apart, seemed to me to come out of that. So the landscape

was important. And the intersection with the history was where I found the story waiting for me. And it did feel like it was waiting for me, I must say. It wanted me to tell it. That's wonderful. I love it when history feels like it's calling to us in that way, which sounds a bit mystical, but I do think there is something there. I do. I think some stories want to be told and some people from the past are just, if not actually crying out to have their stories told, then there's a sense of injustice about what happened to them. And you feel like you want to put something right as well as you can. I absolutely concur.

The other thing we should do in terms of scene setting is think about the legal context, because the cases you've investigated are from the early 1580s. But the law against witchcraft, dated from 40 years earlier, had been recodified a couple of decades beforehand. So perhaps we ought to talk about what the law at this time, this isn't the 17th century, what the law at this time regarded as a witch and who had the authority and powers to investigate and punish anyone who was found guilty. So this is an act of 1563 that the people were being prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1563. And it laid out

a new definition, really, what witches were. This wasn't about the more medieval definition of the witch as somebody who might be some kind of traitor, somebody on the fringes of the court who was maybe practicing astrology or predicting the death of the monarch or something like that. This was a definition that focused explicitly on people in villages like St. Osith and the little villages around it, people who were thought perhaps to be harming their neighbours in some way. So the penalties that were laid out for harming your neighbours were two. One was being hanged, and that was what happened to a number of the people involved in this story of witchcraft. And that was what happened to a number of the people involved in this story of witchcraft.

And the other one was imprisonment and the pillory four times in different market towns around your locality. But of course, prison in those days was a particularly hideous punishment because you were more than likely to die there of jail fever or plague or something horrible, you know, some epidemic that swept through the overcrowded, miserable, underfed jail population. That happened too to some of the people involved in our story. So what they were convicted of was harming their neighbours in just the same way as if they'd stolen from them or murdered them. So it was a felony that they were convicted of and they were therefore put to the punishments that were prescribed for that nearly under this 1563 Act. So let's start the story with the events as they unfolded in St Joseph in 1581, as you do in your book.

You tell the story chronologically, and it starts with disability and with tragedies and with the facility with which one could get a bad, or as it was called in the time, a naughty reputation in a village. Would you begin as you do in your book with Grace and Ursula and Anas et al? Yeah, it's a compelling story, isn't it? It starts with Grace Thurlow, who is a servant, and she works at St Osith Priory, the big formerly monastic foundation up the road that's now been converted into a fine house for the Darcy family. And she works there. We don't know quite what she did, but she's some kind of domestic servant. And in late 1581, her little boy,

Davy, he's really quite a toddler. He's only a small child. He falls ill and he's got this strange illness. She says he's strangely taken which is often a kind of euphemistic way of saying i think he's bewitched and she says his hands are turned backwards so i've never quite been able to work out what that affliction is is it some sort of convulsive thing what is it he seems to be in some kind of pain anyway and she calls in her neighbor a woman called ursley kemp and ur Ursula has a reputation for being able to heal people magically so she comes in and she does this spell over Davy she says oh good child how art thou loaded meaning you know how you're loaded down you're carrying something here and she says

this over the little boy and then she goes out of the door and then she does the same thing another twice so it's you know the magical power of three, I think, is important here. And it seems like she's carrying the spell out of the house. And this works. So Grace is pleased. Ursula is pleased. Ursula is going to get paid. Davy seems a bit better.

And then Ursula tries to deepen her connection with the family. Grace is pregnant with her next child. And so Ursula thinks, oh, it would be quite useful to be able to be the person who's paid to look after this new mother and perhaps also mind the baby when it's born. And Grace is also lame. And Ursula's thinking, well, this is also good medical work here. Ursula knows a spell for curing lameness. And she tells us about that in the course of her trial later on. So it all looks pretty promising, but then a really terrible thing happens. And that is that when Grace has her baby, she puts their new baby in the cradle.

And about six months after the baby is born, the cradle overturns in some kind of horrific accident and the child falls out of the cradle and she dies. And so the women who were building this relationship with each other are suddenly shattered apart from each other because Grace starts to think, maybe it's Orsley, maybe it's Orsley's witchcraft. You know, she knows how to unwitch people. If she knows how to take spells off, what if she knows how to put them on as well? What if I've offended her? And it becomes obvious that Grace hasn't been paying Ursula, that the women have been falling out quietly over the course of these six months since the baby's birth.

And so Grace goes to her employer, the Darcy family at the big house, and she accuses Ursula of witchcraft. And you make the point that there's a vacuum at the big house and the lack of female authority there may be one reason why this case builds up. Actually, you're painting a picture of a situation that implies that across the country, there might have been equivalent accusations. But if you have somebody who's sufficiently in charge enough to take

stock of the situation and to deal with it properly, we would never have a record of it. I do wonder if things would have been different had the situation at the big house been different. Lord Darcy is really quite young. He's not married. The household feels like it's kind of teetering, particularly since this is a Catholic household. So they're under a lot of pressure in other ways too. And they seem to have called in an older male relative, Brian Darcy, who was a junior branch of the family, to deal with this. And I do wonder if Grace had gone to her mistress at the house, you know, Lady Darcy, somebody who was responsible for her work and whom she trusted and worked with.

Perhaps this could have been worked through in a different way. But as it is, Brian Darcy comes in and he seems to be a man with a bit of a mission. He gets very excited when he questions Ursula Kemp about this suspicion that she's a witch. And unfortunately, he also gets the idea that it'd be a great idea to lie to her, of course it would, to try to get her to confess. And she does. But I think, have things been different at that big house? Again, this might have been a different story. Yes. And Brian Darcy is one of a sort of man that we're quite familiar with from this period, aren't we? Matthew Hopkins is the most famous, Pierre de Lancre is another. People who do get quite excited by these stories of witchcraft.

But before we come to him, I wanted to ask you one of the questions that is most often put to me when I talk to people about these sorts of things. They say, can we map witchcraft accusations onto those who practiced as cunning women and men. So these gifted healers who work with herbs and prayer and sometimes magical powers, perhaps. And this is pretty uncomfortable. And I often say, well, we just don't really have enough evidence to do that kind of analysis. And historians have tried to sort of step away from the idea of the witch as a midwife or a healer. But at the center of this story, we do have a cunning woman and you mentioned the names of several others, some of whom weren't accused of witchcraft. So can we make a link,

do you think? What do we make of this? I think we can. Yeah, like you, I was really conscious that historians had moved away from the idea that everybody accused of witchcraft was a healer or a midwife. And you know, there are a number of articles talking about this and saying, well, this really isn't true. But in this case, yeah, it actually is true. She was a healer. You know, she tells the magistrate about the kind of spells she uses. We actually, as far as we're ever going to see her in action,

actually unwitching somebody and promising services to other people who subsequently accuse her of witchcraft. It's hard to see how that could be more evident a link. And as I went on with this, and yes, I did discover quite a few other cunning people, magical healers, service magicians in the villages around Sir Osith. I did begin to think, have we gone a bit far with this, actually? Have we moved too far from saying that there is a link between cunning or healing practices and witchcraft accusations, because it's so strong here, it doesn't seem like that is a shouldn't be talking about witches as women, specifically women. Perhaps I shouldn't be talking about them as midwives or healers. In this case, they are all of those things. There's only one man accused during the course of the trials, and a number of those accused are healers.

So I started to think about if the historiography has pushed us a bit far. Clearly, it's important not to take the line that 100% of the people involved conform to particular stereotypes. And stereotypes are a pernicious thing. It's really important not to endorse them. But at the same time, where there is good evidence that there might be a grain of truth in them, and sometimes more than a grain of truth, I think it's right to say that there is. So this is a book that kind of unpicks some of the arguments really about how it's not all about healers and midwives and it's not all about women because actually I think it is. Yes, it's certainly true that witches could be male as well as female, but we do have a link

here, don't we, to this sense of female power, I suppose, and magical power that speaks to the religious environment of the time. So I guess we should ought to bring Mr Darcy, as it were, back into the story. Did you discern anything that explained his motivations when conducting the investigation? What do we know of his religious views? And can we talk about the link to French demonology? Yes, his religious views are a bit confusing, to be honest. It is not entirely clear what he believed out of so many people in this period. If I had to put money on it, I'd go for Protestant rather than Catholic, because he stands out for the rest of his family in some way, and he's more socially successful

and successful in the legal system than I would perhaps expect him to be if he was an obvious recusant. But I'm not really sure, and nobody is really sure. He certainly was interested in French demonologists. There's a preface at the beginning of a printed account of this witchcraft trial with which Darcy was involved. of this witchcraft trial with which Darcy was involved. And it talks about the French demonologist Jean Baudin. It talks about his book on witches from just a few years before this trial. So I think that Darcy and perhaps some of the other people who were involved in the case with him have been reading this recent demonology and thinking, aha, we could put some of this into practice. Because

Bowdoin has some specific suggestions. He does say things like, it's absolutely fine to lie to witches because, hey, of course, they're witches, aren't they? They're not at all innocent until proven guilty. There is an assumption that they are guilty. So, of course, it's fine to lie to them because that's one of the few ways that you will actually get them to confess. If you tell them everything will be all right and they won't be punished, they will confess and God's work will be done. And he says things as well about questioning their children, which is another thing that Darcy goes on to do. So when he has a suspect in front of him, quite often he will summon their children, you know, little boys of nine and six and little girls of eight. boys of nine and six and little girls of eight and ask them what kind of animal familiars their parents keep and get them to speculate and get them to fantasize about what these animals might

be because in his view this is all totally justifiable in fact it's really the latest good practice you know this is a manual for how you question witches and it seems to me obviously there's a wider picture which you will never know because we can't see what else was going on in Darcy's life but I think he's a man who has become fascinated by the investigative processes of demonology and I think he's looking to make a bit of a name for himself in finding this knot of witches that he suspects exists right under his nose in his home village. I think that's one of the things that motivates him. And then he publishes or has published for him this really quite lengthy pamphlet account, a news pamphlet account of the case. I think he wants publicity. I think he wants to be known for this and he wants his name to go down in history, as it has,

as a man who found a group of witches and had them prosecuted. So I think his motivation is kind of legal, possibly to some extent religious, but I think it's more about police work really for me than anything else. Now, some of the answer to my next question might be bound up with what you've just said, but why do you think Ursula confesses? It's hard to say, isn't it? Again, it's one of the big questions, isn't it? You've encountered it, I'm sure, too.

Why? Why didn't they confess? If they haven't done any of these things, they're not put on the rack. They're not subjected to, as we know, some later English witches were, the kind of thing that Matthew Hopkins and John Stern do in the 1640s, where they keep people awake and essentially break them down by sleep deprivation. So as far as we know, none of that was done to the witches. Brian Darcy certainly doesn't describe it. He says he lies to them. So he's actually quite upfront about ways in which he's deceived them and which other people might judge him for,

which indeed subsequently they do. But he doesn't say, oh, well, they're also innovated in this way, or I did something terrible to break down their resistance. So I don't think he did. I think she responds as she does, and perhaps other people respond as they do too, partly because of that big imbalance of authority here. There are women in a wholly male staffed judicial system she's marched up as the other suspects will be later on in the case to darcy's big house which is a really big sprawling house that is still there today taken in to see him and there he's sitting there with his scribe and other people are there too we don't know quite who they were but at one point it says a list of other people who were present here as well. I think she's put under the kind of social pressures that can actually be really powerful. You don't always need physical torture.

You don't always need intense psychological pressure or sleep deprivation to make people fall in with what you want them to say. And I think it's to do with that. I also wonder, because Ursula does practice healing magic, if she is at some level convinced that she is capable of witchcraft. She says at one point to Grace, she says, I can unwitch, but I can't witch. But I do wonder if she does begin to think or has thought in the past, well, you know what, I did stray over the line, you know, I was angry with Grace. I did say some sharp words. Maybe she actually did curse her. We can't say that she didn't. So it might be because of all of those factors. Again, it's always speculative, but I do think it's worth speculating because

we do need to explain as far as we can what happened, why people confessed to witchcraft when our view is that they could not have been witches. And I think that there's something so sort of psychologically sensible in what you're saying, because one of the things I've become convinced of as I've got older is that that sense of narrative that we have about ourselves, whether we feel guilty or not about something, is picked up by other people. And so if she did have some sort of residual feeling of straying over the line, perhaps I did that wrong, then that is something that I feel like other people are able to discern. like other people are able to discern. And also, as you say, it's going to make her much more likely to go along with the suggestions that are being put to her, as opposed to somebody who thinks, no, I'm absolutely innocent and therefore denies it, which we also see in this case. We do. Yeah, I think age is actually really helpful as a historian. It may be personally

uncomfortable or pleasing, but when you've got 50 years on this, it actually does begin to look a bit different, doesn't it? You're no longer thinking, well, it could be this or it could be that. You've had 50 years of experience about how authority works and how gender imbalances in authority work in particular. And some of these things do feel quite familiar, don't they? And I think this is one of them, the sense that pressure is an insidious thing and power is an insidious thing. And so often power flows down the same channels then as it does now. And really how much has changed? That was one of the real bothers about the book. And it's led me on to writing the next book, which is a bigger history

of 13 trials across 700 years, a silly thing to do in some ways, because it was really hard and a really big project. But it came out of this sense really of thinking, actually, how much has changed? You know, if I were in Ursula's position, if you were in Ursula's position, wouldn't you feel the same pressure? If the powerful man in his furs and silks by his warm fire, if he says to you, no, you are a witch, aren't you? Are you sure you wouldn't say that you were? Because I'm not sure anymore. Because at some level, he is giving you external validation or otherwise he's saying, yes, this is what I make of you. This important person who's the closest thing to God

you've ever seen is saying who you are. You can see, yes, I think you're right. That might well have been powerful. I think it might have been powerful. Yeah. And I think the ways in which those sort of systems don't change over time ought to make us pay a bit more attention to them. I think one of the things I wanted to do with the book was just listen a bit more to feeling. Historians don't always want to do that. We like big data. We like reasoned arguments. Of course, we like all of those things and they are rightful things. But sometimes just what you feel about a text is important too, and your sense of connection to it, or that nagging feeling at the back of your mind that actually you do recognise this you do know how this works it was quite a personal book in that

way it did feel like a bit of a summation of all the stuff I'd learned since I first read the pamphlet and that was 25 years of watching women essentially confessing to things which maybe they shouldn't have confessed to maybe they shouldn't have confessed to. Maybe they shouldn't have said, I'm so sorry, but, or, oh, you know, let me help you with that. Or all of those things that they do tend to do even now. Ursula does all of those things, doesn't she? So she confesses and her testimony sparks this witch hunt in and around St. Osith, which leads to 13 other women and one man being investigated by Brian Darcy. Do you have a sense that Ozy is trying to shift the blame onto others, or is the explanation more complicated than this?

I do think it might be that, yeah. Ozy doesn't really come out of this as a heroine, because unfortunately she does go on to name a lot of other people and she in particular has this really fascinating strategy where she has this friend Alice Newman who is her neighbour and is the godmother to Ursula's illegitimate child who is also not to be forgotten in this story because she has a pre-existing reputation in her village because of this illegitimate child who is now eight. But she turns on the child's godmother, Alice Newman, and her supposed friend and says that this is all Alice's fault. So she says, yes, I did have these animal familiars,

but I shared them with Alice and she sent them. She kept them at her house. I gave them to her and she sent them. We discussed, of course, who to send them to and that kind of thing. But really, this is her fault. She's the active agent here. And things go on from there. And then she names a number of other women as well in the village who she thinks are responsible for these witchcraft crimes. It does feel like somebody who has said too much, who has confessed too much and knows that she's gone too far and has thought, once Darcy has sent her away, about how she could possibly reconceptualise this story maybe to make things look a little bit less bad for her.

Also, poor Alice is drawn into this and so are the other women who Leslie accuses. And were each of the women, or each of the individuals in this case, accused of the same offence? Have they all committed witchcraft in the same form or manner? And what can we learn from the different sorts of people who are accused? Yeah, they were all pretty much accused of the same kind of witchcraft. So that 1563 Act is specifically looking for harm of neighbours and their children and their animals. And that's the kind of territory that all of these women are accused in so it is about yeah i made the neighbor's baby sick or i killed his cow that kind of thing they are all accused of that but they are quite different types of women in

some way some of them are really quite old so jo Joan Peachy, for example, seems to be a much older woman. She talks about coming to the village 40 years before and she's clearly much older than Ursula, who has an eight-year-old child. And there's another young woman, Alice Glasscock, and then there's an older farmer's wife. That woman's called Elizabeth Bennett. She seems quite well off. You know, she has her own farmhouse. She talks about baking her own bread and doing various tasks. She's got some animals that she feeds in the course of her story. So I think they are, in many ways, quite different women, which I think, again, draws our attention to the fact that what links them is that they are women. There's not a totally clear economic picture here. So we're not really saying,

oh, look, these are all older women. They're all seen as burdensome to society in some way. They're economically unproductive. That kind of stereotype doesn't really seem to be working here. In some cases, you can see elements of it. But in other cases, we seem to be looking at rather more prosperous women. And then as the hunt spreads out to other villages, we're also looking at a man, we're looking at a married couple where husband and wife are both accused. And then in other villages, we go back to people a lot more like Ursula, the last person to be accused. And this witch hunter is a woman called Annis Heard, who also has an illegitimate child, at least one. It seems to be something of a scandal in her home village, rather than the way that Ursula Kemp is. But again, you know, a younger woman,

somebody who stands out a little bit from the traditional stereotype. So I think they are quite different from each other in various ways, actually. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And you've mentioned the familiars, these animals, the spirits that assist them in some way, and Ursula and some of the other alleged witches refer to them. Can you say a bit more about these and how you think we should make sense of why a number of people gave testimonies referring to what we assume were fictitious beings? People ask me a lot about this one, because I talk a lot about familiars, obviously,

because there are lots of them in this witchcraft trial. And I still don't have an answer as to why I think people tell stories of these creatures. And it's one of the great questions, isn't it? Why, and particularly why in English cases, even as against Scottish cases, for example, why are people so fixated on the demonic animals? Or it could be particularly an Essex thing. It could be an East Anglian Essex idea. It's certainly very strong there. Yeah. I mean, you do encounter it in other places. The famous Lancashire Witches of 1612 talk a little bit about magical animals, but they're

not obsessed in the same way that these Essex people are in the 1580s. So yeah, we have all sorts of demonic animals that are imagined here. Urzi talks about demonic cats. Later on, there's also a demonic lamb that she talks about, which is really weird because the lamb is so traditionally a symbol of Christ and of purity and innocence and all of those things. But up note, as they say, she has a demonic lamb. When she's going round some of her neighbours' houses, presumably in reality, but then subsequently in order to accuse them of witchcraft, she says that she sees things like ferrets. There's a ferret sticking its nose into somebody's cooking pot, she says, which could actually be true. There's maybe a ferret or maybe a rat or something

has gone into somebody's farmhouse and is busily eating their dinner. It could be that, couldn't it? But then on the other hand, how do you get from, I saw a ferret in somebody's house and they were doing a perfectly ordinary ferrety thing to this was in fact Satan. And that means that this person has made a pact with that demonic animal and is in fact a witch. And I still can't really answer that one. There's lots of theories about what they might have been. And I'm not really sure any of them completely covers it. They have a really folkloric feel to them. There's a sort of puss in boots, Jack and the Beanstalk thing. I met a magic animal and it gave me three wishes and I could

do anything I wanted. So I took revenge on my horrible neighbour and killed his cow. You can see how that might work in somebody's head. But when it comes to actually confessing it to magistrate, I really don't have any answers to that. And in some cases in these stories, also, it was clear that something else was going on with the familiars and that something was that they were much more like ghosts and they were like animals they came in human form in human shape and their names match the names of some of the children whom other families involved in the witch hunt had sadly lost in previous years and that feels a bit more explicable really you know if you think that the ghost of a dead child comes to you in dreams, for example,

that seems to make a lot more sense than my neighbor gave me a demonic cat and I used it to attack farmer so-and-so. But it's just such a vexed area, isn't it? And I'm also struck by that idea of wish fulfillment, that if the devil gave these people such power, you'd think they'd do something bigger with it, really. I mean, it could be the devil's a liar. He promises he's going to give you chests of money and coins, and then he doesn't. They disappear when you touch them, all that sort of story. But the goals, what is achieved with this huge amounts of magical power

always seems to me the question that's not asked. Why are they not saying, well, why did you not do more? You've got the father of lies here. Why are you not able to kill the whole village or whatever? Or I want riches, I want a bigger house. I want the plague that's been haunting the village to go away. It's never any of those things, is it? It's always really, really petty. And that seems to be part of the sense that witches are incredibly petty and vindictive people. And you hardly have to so much as give them a crossword and they'll immediately hex you and your whole family. It is very possibly. And I think there's always this sense that they are kind of underachievers, that they're judged for all sorts of other things in their lives. You don't have enough money, you don't have enough power,

you're not educated enough. But the witchcraft crimes that they're accused of seem like part of that. Even when you had a chance to do something, you didn't even take that chance, did you? It feels like they can't win. And let's talk about what we don't have here. And this could, of course, be a feature of the law that Brian Darcy and the extended legal authorities aren't looking for it. But we don't have covens. We don't have Sabbaths. We don't have anything that we'll have in the Basque country 30 years later, or that we'll have in the great German trials. There are all sorts of things that we would expect to see were we on the continent that we don't have here. No, indeed. There aren't these grand Sabbaths where everybody gets together and sings

and dances and sacrifices babies and all this kind of thing. There's none of that. The closest you get is that little collaboration between people like Ursula and Alice, which Alice denies anyway. She says this is a figment of Ursula's imagination. The closest you get is that sense that people might have shared a few demonic familiars, possibly. And it's interesting that if Brian Darcy is interested in French demonology, he doesn't push it. So it doesn't seem to me that he's trying to plant ideas in people's heads. I think he's more responding to what their natural inclination is to tell him. He puts the pressure on, but then he waits to see what comes out. He doesn't immediately say, did not 200 of you assemble to curse the king or whatever, which is one of the things he could have done. And he doesn't. Again, it's all speculation. Again,

we're not sure. But for my money, that tells us something about what the ordinary Essex people whom he's questioning really did believe. And they weren't that interested, I don't think, in big demonic conspiracies. And they weren't that interested in the idea of mass gatherings or conspiracy theories to undermine Christianity or one sect or another. I think they were much more interested in this neighbourly friction that you get referred to continually. And I do think they were interested in healing. I think a lot of it goes back to this kind of economy of magical healers in the district and perhaps they're competing with each other. Perhaps they're seen as hurling spells at each other, spells and counter spells. I think that's what motivates them and that's what Darcy gets

out of them when he presses. I mean, the crucial question with these things is always, how do we explain them? What are the explanations for why accusations proliferated? And we've already got one obvious example here with Ursula, the friction with Grace, the being put in under pressure and then confessing. And do you feel that this is why it proliferates as well, that we can find it in these neighbourly tensions and these moments of difficulty in people's interactions with each other? I think so. I think that it's those interactions that are at the heart of this. I think the way that people relate to each other in these communities must have felt under pressure. And some of that, I think, is to do with those arguments about charity that people like Keith Thomas and Alan McFarlane had back in the 1970s about people in precisely these localities, especially in McFarlane's case,

where he writes about witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex. I think some of it is about that sense that the resources are shrunk in this community, that there isn't enough to go around, that people are literally arguing over a shilling's worth of cheese or, you know, the yield from a particular cow. It feels like that's what's driving this. And to that extent, it is about economic and religious changes. So those two kind of big theories do map quite well onto this case, I think. It's just that there's also all this other personal stuff going on. And I think it's important to pay attention to both of those, if you like. Because I got the impression that actually these cases complicated the Thomas McFarlane

model of somebody who's poorer, asking for money, being denied, muttering, then they assume it's witchcraft when something bad happens. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Did you feel that actually, whilst it totally corroborates it in some instances it actually

also makes us question that model and people have questioned it a lot over the last 50 years but it provides a new way of questioning it as well? Yes I do I think paying attention to the detail is really important so those big theories they don't always pay attention to the exact detail. So in some cases, yeah, there is no sense that somebody has asked for the loan of a piece of leather or some butter and been denied and then gone away muttering. And subsequently, the person who's refused in that gift or loan has been cursed, apparently, as they see it. You don't get that story at all. In some cases you do, and in some cases you don't. The conflict seemed to be about other things in a lot of cases, medicine, childcare, concerns about people's behaviour and sexual history, stuff like that. So I think it corroborates the sort of underlying picture that poverty is really important here,

and relative levels of poverty and relative levels of entitlements and wealth and so on. But it also suggests that what you have to do is wherever possible, listen closely to what you're presented with as the voices of the accused and the accusers and try to get a sense of how they relate to each other and what their family structures are. Do they have history with each other? All of those kind of things. That seems to be as important as looking at a big theory, which says, aha, it's all about economics or aha, it's all about religion. How crucial was Brian Darcy's role in making this into a coordinated and fairly large scale persecution?

It's hard to say, isn't it, if he hadn't been there, what would have happened. But the fact that so many people are accused, and that he seems to have shepherded the whole thing up to the Assize Court in Chelmsford, and then had commissioned and to some extent participated in the writing of this big news pamphlet, which runs to 100 pages, is really lengthy. The sense that he's really invested in all of that is important, I think. And I think that does suggest he had a lot of agency here. And that perhaps if he hadn't become involved, things would have gone very differently. You know, other magistrates didn't pursue cases with so much vigour. And it's hard to imagine another magistrate, for example, Lord Darcy, a teenage Lord Darcy's a magistrate as well. If it had gone to him, I went through the case and I found out quite a bit

about his family background, his circumstances and what I could about him. I still didn't like him because look at all the harm he did. And I think it is his responsibility. Yes, he did do his job as a magistrate. He reported the people to the authorities as he should have done and had them charged all the time. But my goodness, he really sought them out. And he lied to the suspects and he questioned their small children. And then he wrote a book about it, but I can't really forgive him. What did this mean for you as a historian of these events? Given that he's involved in the writing of the true and just record, the ironic name given to the pamphlet, how did you read it against the grain? Can we talk about the sources that you used for this? Yes, they were really crucial. I used really quite obvious

sources in many respects. Parish records, for example, the parish register, which lists all the marriages of the individuals concerned and the children and so on. I used manorial records so that I could try to trace which fields they were leasing from the manor and what uses they put them to, I looked at deeds and found some names there that I recognised. I looked at wills. So it wasn't really revolutionary in any way. But what did surprise me was that people hadn't looked at these. these. And I remember when I first thought about this case back in the 1990s, I thought really right away, oh, I want to know more about these people. But that isn't really what historians do often, or certainly not what they did in the early 90s. It was much more about looking for a big theory, looking for the bigger picture, which is, of course, really important. But it does seem to me if you don't know the detail of the individuals you're dealing with, because you haven't looked at the parish register, for example, and seen, you know, they had a child and then this child died and they had another child and then their sister got

married. And if you don't know all of that stuff, then can you really hypothesise? Can you really draw the big conclusions from these cases if you don't know the people as individuals in as far as you can determined obviously by record survival i did come to love these documents too i found them really inspiring and i've gone on to do more work with them we've talked about matthew hopkins a bit and the project i'm doing at the moment is a leverhulme one which is about hopkins and stern and i'm trying to do the same thing for that witch hunt as I've done for the St. Osith one, looking at those records and trying to piece together the individual lives of the accused and accusers at the emotional level and the economic level, as well as the bigger picture stuff. I think that's really important. And as you say, at one level, obvious, but interesting

that it's something that people haven't done. I think sometimes we associate parish registers with family historians who are not professional historians, but who are amateurs. But say what? What they're looking for may be their own individual family, but that's fine. That's the kind of history. And they often have a tremendous emotional attachment to it, which is one of the things I

think we could probably learn a bit from. That sense of really caring about individuals in the past and imagining them as people who were like us. And, you know, in some cases are actually related to us. I don't see that as a different kind of history, really. I see that as the same kind of history, part of the same picture of practicing history. Can we say something about the working of the trials in this case? For example, who acted as the judge and how the jury was chosen and how the trial was conducted? One of my surprising things about it was the location. I hadn't really thought about that before. And again, that was about actually walking the streets of, in this case, Chelmsford and

thinking about where this thing happened. They were tried in an open-sided courtroom, which was essentially the market crosshouse, one of those big wood-pillared structures that you get in the early modern period with a gallery above and a roof on top to keep the market traders dry. So the space masses, a lot, are within that space, the judges would assemble. So judges would ride down from London. They would go on circuits, as they call it, around districts to use their legal expertise in judging criminals or supposed criminals from the provinces. So there would have been a judge who was drawn from this panel of London experts who'd written down, especially to Chelmsford, to do the judging. There'll be all the county magistrates, including people like Darcy and his friends. There would be a grand

jury. So just like the American system now, this time, English courts would have had a grand jury that looked at indictments to see whether they were worth proceeding with before they went properly to trial. And then there would have been a petty jury as well, the 12 good men and true that we used to thinking about. And yes, of course, they were all men in those days. So it was a really complicated structure. And it would have been a horrible experience for the accused who would have been dragged into this bustling and essentially open environment with people crowding around. people crowding around. Imagine if you went to Chelmsford on market day and also you got to go and see a witch trial. How excited would you have been? And how much noise would you have made? And how much would you have wanted to peer at the accused and harass them as they went into court? It must have been a horrible experience for them. But I do think the other side of that is look at the complexity of it. Look at the number of people involved. You need an enormous number of jurors to be on all these various panels. It's a big investment of time and money

to get the judges there and get all the magistrates together on all of this. I do think that they were trying as far as they could to do justice. They only spent a very short time in reviewing each case. You could be 10, 20 minutes, historians have estimated, where somebody's on trial for their life, which is a terrifying thought. And these people were brought up in front of a jury. Somebody other than the judge made a decision. There was the prospect of reprieve, even if you were condemned to death. Some people would be acquitted and some people were acquitted in the course of the trials. I think they were trying to do the best they could. It was extremely flawed and it was undoubtedly a hideous experience for the accused. And even the accusers would,

I think, have found it very intimidating. But I guess by the standards of their time, they were trying to apply the 1563 Act the best they could. In 1585, so just after these events, we've got Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft published, which shared his scepticism about what he thought was a rational persecution. Do you think that the fact that the jury in Chelmsford did not find everyone guilty proves that Scott's views were widely held? Or should we explain the verdicts in another way? Does it come down to what you've just been saying about trying to ensure justice and therefore some may be guilty and some not?

The way I think about it, I think is that it's kind of experimental. I think everybody's finding their way in individual cases with this. Darcy's kind of made up his mind. These are all guilty. You know, I've used Bodin's theories. This is why I think I'm going to take this to trial

and they're all going to be convicted and it's all going to look great. But it doesn't actually, it doesn't work out that way. Some people are acquitted. Some people are reprieved. Some people spend quite a bit of time in jail afterwards as the system grinds and people try to work out what's best to do. So yeah, I think Scott's scepticism must have been more widely shared than perhaps we think. People do tend to portray Scott as a lone voice, but that does seem unlikely. It does seem likely that other people also had questions from whatever perspective about whether it really was just to find so many people guilty of witchcraft and to execute them on the basis of that.

But at the same time, I also think the system is set up to convict people to a large extent. So while some will be acquitted and some will be reprieved, in a sense, it kind of demands that the assize ends with some hangings. That's what it's for, really. So yes, it's an attempt to do justice justice but it also is quite a punitive system and it implies a certain outcome and hideously that must have been part of the experience the entertainment if you like of going to a trial the other good people of Chelmsford tramped off to the gallows at the end of the day to see the criminals hanged and it's something that hasn't changed in society we do still persecute we do still pick on outsiders.

We do still scapegoat people and we are encouraged to do so by our supposed leaders. And this is something that also hasn't changed, the sense of public spectacle, public shaming, trial by media. These are all things that we recognise quite well, I think. Yes, that's very insightful. Well, finally then, I'd like to pick up on this idea that you've

alluded to a couple of times about feeling history. And one of the moments of your book that made me stop and catch my breath was when you told the story of that baby girl, Joan, falling out of her cradle. I'm just going to read a little bit, just a couple of lines, so that listeners get a sense of your writing. Only a few going to read a little bit, just a couple of lines so that listeners get a sense of your writing. Only a few months after her birth, Joan fell out of her cradle and injured herself badly. She died three days after the fall. Pause for a moment, reader, to let the shock of the little girl's death sink in. History without empathy is only ever half a story. And I was struck also by your comment that the pamphlet about the case

was a history of unfeeling and your choice to use four names, Christian names as it were, when talking about individuals, which you say forces us to confront the humanity of these historical subjects. And I've clearly got a sense from our conversation that this was very important to you. Do you feel that taking this approach does make us confront the humanity of the past? Why do you think it matters to do this? In other words, do you think it helps us write better history? Yes, I do actually. It was a key moment for me writing that because I'd read that story of Ursula and Grace in different forms, you know, in different ways in books over many years. And when it came to telling it myself, there was this moment when I thought, you can't just pass over that. That's huge. That's a huge thing that's

happened and really tragic. It's not just a statistic. These are not data units. This is a child that falls out of its cradle and dies and its mother is distraught. So I thought it was important to focus on that. And I also think writing during a pandemic was probably important. I was struggling to get this written as the world was falling apart around us. And it became far clearer to us than it has been for some time, I think, just how vulnerable and frightened we can be. We're all so powerful and clever, aren't we? But what about when it really goes bad and we're not really sure what's going on and we are worried about our own mortality and that really matters, I think. And I thought, well, if we can fail this now with all the

healthcare and all the technological power and all the kit that we've got to deal with it now, goodness, what would it have felt like if you were an Elizabethan villager? You'd have felt the same human emotions, but within a context where you were in reality far more vulnerable. It transformed the way I thought about history, really, this pamphlet. I'd always wanted to tell this story, but when it came to actually telling it, I realised I had to tell it a new way. And would it be too much of a spoiler to say what in the end happened to Ursula? It's what you'd expect to happen to her, Ursula, actually. She is found guilty, and she and the other people who are found guilty in the course of this trial

are marched or carted up the street towards where the gallows stood in Chelmsford and I'm afraid she's hanged there I think she's probably buried there too it turned out during the course of the research that there was a field of prehistoric barrows next to the site where the gallows stood, which was marked on an early map. And I think that from looking at other places where this happened, that would be exactly the sort of place where the victims of judicial executions would be buried. So I suspect she's still there somewhere. I suspect she's still there with the other people who were convicted of that assizes. And she and the prehistoric dead are lying together in that field outside Chelmsford, which is important and was a chilling and eerie thought to end the book on.

And that leaves us with one more tragedy, because the story started with a mother who lost a child and it ends with a child who loses a mother. Yes, it does. So her little illegitimate son, he's lost his mother. She's been taken away and killed. And that happened to lots of people. You look at the Hopkins cases that I'm writing about at the moment, it happens again. It happened an awful lot. She would have been taken away as a Colchester prison, imprisoned there, and then she would have been brought back to the Assizes at Chelmsford and killed there. And so she never came home. And his godmother, Alice, also did not meet quite the same fate, but also disappeared for quite a long period of time.

What happened to Thomas? I so much wanted to trace what happened to the children of the victims of the witch hunt, And I couldn't find them. I would so much like to find them. Maybe they turn up somewhere in parish overseers' accounts. Maybe they turn up somewhere as vagrants or something like that. I don't know. And I almost don't want to know, but at the same time, I do want to know, because those kinds of events have a long legacy. And I wanted to tell that story too, in a way, going back to the Hopkins cases 60 years later, and some of the same ethnic communities, including St. Osith, is kind of a way of going back to have another look and see if there is

any more to say. And so difficult with a name like Thomas. Well, thank you so much for introducing this case to us and for writing a beautiful book. I'm looking forward to your work on the Hopkins and Stern cases. But for the time being, my listeners should rush to get a copy of The Witches of St. Osith, which is just a really wonderful evocation of the past with all its tragedy, which of course is manifold, but so important to connect with. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad you liked it so much. And thanks to my producer, Rob Weinberg, my researcher, Esther Arnott, and Joseph Knight, who edited this episode. And thanks to you for listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit.

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