You're Dead to Me - The Witch Craze (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Revisit the dark days of the European Witch Craze when one book turned the world upside down and a disgruntled patriarchy murdered thousands of innocent women. Greg Jenner's guests are comedian Cariad Lloyd and historian Prof Suzannah Lipscomb.Produced by Dan Morelle Script and research by Emma Nagouse, assisted by Eszter Szabo and Evie Randall Radio edit by Cornelius MendezA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

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Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might also have heard my Radio 4 series, Homeschool History, although that one's mostly for the kids. So how do my podcasts work? Well, when I whip them up in my witch's cauldron, I like one part funny, two parts fact, plus, of course, eye of nude. You need the eye of nude. In case you've not heard You're Dead to Me before, every episode I'm joined by an expert historian who's top of the class

and a comedian who's a class act. And today we're donning our pointy hats, buying a black cat and going for a magical broomstick ride back to the early modern era, to Europe, to explore all things witchy. And joining me in History Corner, she's a superstar historian and broadcaster, a professor at the University of Roehampton and author of six books, including Witchcraft, a Ladybird expert book, handy, and you'll have seen her on the telly loads of times, including the BBC Two's comedy panel show Insert Name here.

It's Professor Susanna Lipscomb. Hi Susanna, how are you? I'm very well, thank you very much for that. Thank for coming in you are a witch expert but uh burn her burn her sorry but that's one of the things you do it is i'm also know a bit about henry the eighth but today it's all witches all witches all of the time and in comedy corner she is a comedy renaissance woman a comedian a writer an actor an improv wizard uh you'll have seen her on QI, Have Got News For You, Murder and Success, Phil, Peep Show, and she is the host of the award-winning and surprisingly funny podcast about death, Griefcast. It's Cariad Lloyd. Hello.

Hello. Do you love witches? I love witches. Oh. I'm a big witch fan. I wanted to be a witch when I was a teenager. Really? And I did that teenage girl thing of thinking, maybe I am.

Susie, who's your witch icon growing up, pop culture? It is Roald Dahl's grand high witch. She was absolutely terrifying. So terrifying. It's so evocative and you really thought you could walk down the street and any woman might be a witch. Yeah, because it was good because you'd grown up with just black hats and cats and broomsticks. And when you read the Roald Dahl, you're like, it could be anyone. Like it's not, she won't signify to you that she's a witch.

She will look like a normal person. All right, well, this is the bit where we talk about the pop culture legacies. So this is called the So What Do You Know? Where I list all the things that people at home probably know about the subject. So, what do you know? As a kid, people might have grown up on Megan Mogg, Mildred Hubble, Hermione Granger, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax. Then you've got your Macbeth, Weird Sisters, your Game of Thrones, Melisandre, who's popping out a sort of murderous cave baby made of smoke.

Weird. Historically, we've got the witch craze. Everyone probably has heard of the Salem witch trials. There's Good Omens. Then you've got Little Mix, Black Magic, Pop Banger, one of my favourites. Witchcraft is really potent in pop culture. It's all around us. It's something that we find both alluring and glamorous and also creepy and horrific. But where does it come from? Why are we so obsessed with it? Where do we start with witchcraft? Because, I mean, we're talking about the European witch craze.

That is when? So we're taking us back to between about 1450 and 1750. But if we're really zeroing in, it would be 1560 to about 1650, so about a century across Europe and it's a period in which witches are perceived to be especially dangerous. As a result of that, they are persecuted

and prosecuted and then executed in large numbers. There'd been witches before that, obviously not real witches, but there'd been people Whoa, whoa, whoa! Okay, maybe there are people who thought themselves as witches. Yeah, don't slander they'll get you, Greg. Yeah, there's a quick joke. I mean, that's the really fascinating thing about this, is to what extent we

are talking about something that is in reality or these people are alleged witches. And we know they're alleged witches because as far back as ancient Greece. The earliest case I found is from 330 BC. You can see witchcraft beliefs throughout history. Okay. Why do people suddenly get concerned? We were talking nearly 600 years ago.

There's that sort of key century you've mentioned, 1560 to 1660. Why is it this particular moment that suddenly people really start? Well, that's the big question. Is it like the Beatles? It's just like right time, right place. Great haircuts. Yeah, everyone's like, yeah, you know what? We're all into this.

There's so many arguments about what it could be, socioeconomic context, whether you're thinking about ideas about women. One particular explanation is that this is the time of the Reformation, so it's a time when people are particularly concerned about living in the end days and this kind of sense of apocalyptic angst means that they see the devil everywhere. So he's at the forefront of their minds as never before. So the Reformation would be sort of a religious conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism and various sects in that?

Yes, the rise of Protestantism as a kind of schism in the church between Catholics and Protestants. People are concerned about their souls and they're concerned about what's the right way to live and who is the opposite of that. And so witches are obviously the ultimate opposite. Cariad, have you ever heard of the Malleus Maleficarum? Malefin, malefialim.

No, but it sounded like you'd cast a spell. I haven't heard of it. It sounded a bit like the Mabinogion as well. It's through me slightly. It's not that. But you're speaking Welsh. I'd love to speak Welsh. I can't speak Welsh.

Oh, I do even mention a canary. Neither can I. That's what that means. Is that you saying I can't speak Welsh? I can't speak Welsh. Oh, I do even mention a canary. Neither can I. Is that you saying I can't speak Welsh? I can't speak Welsh, yeah. Malleus Maleficarum is kind of like a best-selling book. Oh, really? It's second only to the Bible in terms of sales.

Malleus Maleficarum means the hammer of the witches, and it was published in the 1480s. It was written by a German Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer, who Professor Malcolm Gaskell has described as a superstitious psychopath. And it argued that witches existed, basically, and that they worked for the devil. And it gave you tips on how to find them and how to exterminate them. One of the key things that makes it important

is that he reproduces a papal board, so an order by the Pope at the beginning of the book, which says that witches are heretics. And so it looks like he's acting for the church that he's their official spokesman but in fact he's someone who's jumped up and puts himself in this role as an authority figure surprise surprise guys it's happened quite a lot in history absolutely it does but also i mean it comes out in 1487 printing's been around for like 30 years very nice uh hammer officarum. Very nice. Hammer of the Witches. Good name for

a heavy metal band. Yeah. Anyone fancy starting one? So it's hugely significant, has a massive knock-on effect. Germany is kind of one of the hubs, isn't it, where the witch craze has a lot of heat, if you pardon the pun, and it sort of radiates out. And what's really interesting about something like this being put in print is that you've got people who are of elite status who are reading this and that facilitates a really crucial shift that makes the witch craze possible in that once elites start to believe it it starts to move into law and that's the thing that makes it possible to prosecute witches literally at trial and therefore to execute them so before it wasn't illegal no

they were just like oh there are witches but what do they do? They're just out there doing their thing. That's right, so it became illegal in England in 1542, Scotland in 1563, and across Europe at various times in the 16th century. So literally the government at the time believed it so much, they were like, well, we better enshrine this into law. Isn't that amazing? To stop these women. Was there some way that women were becoming more powerful,

that that made that patriarchal society panic? It certainly... She should be a historian. This is brilliant. This is certainly a period in which the patriarchy is becoming very anxious. Yeah. But what were women doing? It's not like after the war where you're like, oh, they've all got jobs.

This is an era where we suddenly get women on the throne. Oh, that's interesting. You get Mary Tudor, the first English queen. And then Elizabeth. You've got Jane Grey for nine days. In Scotland, Mary, Queen of Scots. Yep. the throne i mean so you get mary tudor's the first english queen yeah and then elizabeth you got jane gray for nine days in scotland mary queen of scots in france of course there have been a couple of queens who are sort of ruling on behalf of sons and so on that's so interesting i've never probably thought of that because elizabeth does her own marketing campaign so well but of course the repercussions of that must be that men sort of, we better not let that happen again, guys. Like, she one got through.

Can you guess what percentage of witches were men in Iceland? Iceland, as we know, is very gender equal. Yes. So I'm saying 50%. They are very progressive. They were considerably more woke than that. Oh. 92% of witches were men.

Wow. It's fair to say, certainly in England and Scotland, most of the cases are women, but not all of them, isn't it? Yeah, something like 90%. So there are two periods in British history where in the 1590s in Scotland and in the 1640s in East Anglia and Essex, where there are particular large numbers of witches tried and executed. And the figures are high in terms of women.

So 90% in Essex for example but across Europe there are various places Russia's another place where there's a lot of male witches Normandy lots of male witches

and so witches here and New England is a joy as a woman who's always described as a female comedian to hear the phrase male witch to be like yeah

how does it feel to be a male witch they're like I'm just a witch I'm just the same as the women why do I have to be a male witch Cariad have you, I'm just a witch. I'm just the same as the women. Why do I have to be a male witch? Cariad, have you ever heard of the Diabolic Pact?

I think it's called Brexit. These days. No, in the context of the 16th, 17th century Diabolic Pact. All right, well, Susanna, can we hear a bit more about what this was? So this is a pact with the devil, that you have been beguiled by Satan's promises of wealth or power or whatever it is, and have chosen to renounce your baptism and offer the devil your soul and he appeared perhaps in the form of a goat or a toad or yeah i read old witch trials and they would say you know she saw him in the form of a bird and it was the devil and they would say like i saw her talking to the bird you

like some poor woman just chatting to a black bird and something like she was talking to the devil and that's also the idea of witches familiars isn't it the idea of them having like a black cat or some animal which is a particularly english idea we don't really see it much in europe actually but the only ones obsessed with black cats are so lame isn't it we're like yeah throw the cat in it was probably something to do with that but hollywood's picked it up so i guess it's gone global now through hollywood culture because because the culture of witchcraft in england spread to new england so, because the culture of witchcraft in England spread to New England, so therefore the American version of witchcraft is the English one, really.

It's not just a fear of the devil in the world, but a knowledge that he's in the world. So there's the idea that the devil definitely exists, he's definitely in the world, and these women are in league with him. But they're not demons themselves, are they? They're ordinary people. But why is it that women are susceptible rather than men?

It's this idea that women are susceptible rather than men it's this idea that women are much more susceptible to sexual sin and therefore the devil can tempt them more easily which goes back to eve and the apple exactly in the garden of eden so there aren't male witches but women are the ones who have less willpower exactly like they're weaker they're vulnerable yeah we see the witch craze take off in england sc, Wales and Ireland. Scotland's a separate country at this point. But why is there a difference? One of the reasons that some historians have given is the Little Ice Age, which sounds like a sort of DreamWorks animation for kids,

but it's the opposite of global warming across the world. There's a really significant drop in temperature from about 1560. So temperatures drop. By the time we get to 1607, there's the first frost fair on the Thames, so the ice is thick enough. Also, just throw in the fact at the time, you've got one in four harvests are failing. And it's not like people can pop to the supermarket. You've got, you know, your harvest fails, people are hungry. If two harvests fail in a row, there's famine. In the 1590s, there's a terrible period where it rains pretty much for four years. And so crops are

destroyed. And sort of these conditions are and then you know add in plague recurring every 16 years warfare you know sprinkle that in yeah you've got a situation where you feel like somebody's got to be to blame for these conditions that is so fascinating because it does sound like now of like things are out of people's control when things are far away people can get on with their own lives and at the moment you can see it's creeping into people's literally their street so they start panicking and they start looking to blame and you see all these other societal problems so you can see at the moment they're like what harvesters fails it keeps raining also laura down the road is a little bit strange and actually since she moved to the

village the crops failed like you're just looking for something there's no logic and they didn't even have scientists not to listen to unlike us who have them and we don't listen to them and there's a really great historian called Robin Briggs who wrote particularly about this, the fact that it really comes down to these navel-y relations and you've got to look at the interactions of people with each other. What, like, this might be jumping ahead, did it just sort of stop?

Did people just go, oh God, sorry about that, it's embarrassing. I just burnt someone yesterday. What was I thinking? Did everyone sort of wake up from a hangover? Oh my God, we burnt five of them. What were we doing? Oh, that's so embarrassing. I just burnt someone yesterday. What was I thinking? Did everyone sort of wake up from a hangover? Like, oh my God, we burnt five of them. What were we... Oh, that's so embarrassing. Yeah, there's a change of mentality.

There's a different attitude that arises towards the use of evidence, for example. I mean, one of the interesting things is at this time, this is being prosecuted under law, so you've got to prove it. And generally speaking, if you want to prove a crime against somebody in Europe, you have to have two witnesses.

But the thing about witchcraft is there doesn't tend to be witnesses because, of course, the devil's sneaky like that and he hides all the evidence. So then you need a confession. And so then it's whether you believe confessions, particularly if they're extracted under torture or not. So it's changing attitudes towards the law, amongst other things. So there's a thing called swimming, which was not popping down to your local Lido for a splash.

It was dunking. But it's this sort of logical puzzle where they are looking to prove evil or innocence using water. And again, it's a British tradition particularly. It's something that James VI comes up with. Oh God, we're so bad at inventing torture. We're awful at it. I mean, we're brilliant at it, but awful. It's not the dunking chair. You know, we often think bad at inventing torture. We're awful at it. I mean, we're brilliant at it, but awful.

It's not the dunking chair. You know, we often think of the ducking chair. That's actually for also women, but the scolds, the women who are speaking out of turn. Oh God, I would have got that. We all would have got that. You and your opinions, yeah. We all would have got that.

But swimming is when you, it's called an ordeal, as you say, for testing for witchcraft. And an alleged witch is stripped naked. Her thumbs or his thumbs are tied to that his toes and then they're dipped into a river and if they're innocent they're thought to sink and then hopefully be pulled out in time by ropes and if they're guilty it's thought that the waters will reject them as they have rejected their baptism and so they will be thrust up out of the water

and they will float so baptism inversion really it's the idea that the water will say, no, you're not holy, out you get. Did the water ever reject anyone? Did anyone ever literally go, wow, that water just spat that woman out? I don't know. He had a bit of gas that day, you know, the floating around. I don't know. Some people are quite buoyant. Yeah, yeah, too.

We are buoyant as humans. So the logic of it essentially was to try and prove it using nature. People presumably drowned in the process. Yes, and so quite often if you were innocent, then you might drown. Yeah, it's pretty horrible. God, the logic behind that. Very much the Monty Python logic, isn't it, in Holy Grail. If she weighs the same as a duck, she's a witch.

There is a difference, though, between England and Scotland in terms of execution. You've mentioned burnings. Yes. Which one do you think does the burning? Scotland's colder. Do they go for burning? Heat up a local village at the same time? Correct answer for probably the wrong logic.

It is Scotland. Susanna, why does Scotland burn witches and England hangs them or crushes them? Across Europe, quite a lot. In Spain for example, they'll also burn them whereas in New England, like England, they hang them and it's basically about what you think the crime is so if you think the crime of witchcraft is heresy then

you need to burn them whereas actually if it's maleficium is the technical term so doing harm with magic and that's a crime under law then you are hanged like a murderer or a thief at a time wow it's so weird isn't it because you have to believe that magic is real. Yes. To believe that that woman is guilty of it. And that in itself, if you believe in magic, surely isn't that, in a way, not a Christian act to believe that that... I know it's perfectly orthodox at the time.

In fact, there's a verse in Exodus that people cite all the time that say thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Now, critics of that challenged the translation from the Hebrew, but at the time it was orthodox doctrine to find and search out witches. Oh my God. So many issues. So many issues. Get a better translator next time, guys.

Definitely. There's a really famous case called the Pendle Hill Witch Trials. Can you tell us about that story? Because it's a really complicated one, isn't it? It is. And it's big in this country because of so many people involved. So it's not huge numbers by comparison to Europe or indeed to Salem, but 12 people are accused, 10 women, 2 men.

11 of them are tried and 10 are found guilty and executed. So it's in Lancashire in 1612. And it starts with a young girl called Alison Device who said that she had harmed a peddler because she tried to buy pins off him, he wouldn't give them to her. And then he fell down and had a stroke. And she believed that she had done it because she thought she'd sold her soul to the devil. And this is a kind of family tradition because her mother also was accused of witchcraft. Her grandmother, who's known as Old Demdyke, is accused of witchcraft.

And she said she'd sold her soul to the devil 20 years before. So there's very much this culture of women who were probably cunning men and women thinking that they could do this damage to somebody. It's a pretty complicated story. What would you sell your soul to the devil for, Cariad, in return for riches on earth? Constant supply of green and black chocolate.

That's quite a low sale price for your soul. Dude, it's pricey. It's pricey, that green and black. Cost of chocolate, absolutely. Yeah. I think I'd probably go for Rhythm Guitarist Metallica. That's my... Oh, really?

Oh, OK, I see. I went low, yeah. Now you've said that, yeah. If I'm going to burn in eternity, then I at least want to play Glastonbury with Metallica. I'd be full of chocolate. All right. I'd smell delicious.

But, I mean, the Pendle Hill Witch Trial Play Glastonbury with Metallica. I'd be full of chocolate. I'd smell delicious. But the Pendle Hill Witch Trial is a case where you see a community essentially turning on itself and it blows up into quite a big thing. But there are case studies where it gets a bit farcical and almost falls apart, really. There's one called the Salmsbury Trials. Again, Lancashire. So same year, 1612. And this one doesn't quite produce the same outcome. No, this is an interesting one.

So in the Pendle witch trials, again, we have a daughter accusing a mother. There's a nine-year-old girl called Janet Device who gives evidence against her mother and brother and sister. And as a result of this, apart from old Demdike, who dies in a cell under Lancashire Castle, the rest of them are hanged. And one gets off at Gallows Hill. But with the case with Salisbury, we have another young girl, a 14-year-old girl called Grace, who's accusing people of witchcraft. But it turns out that actually she has been coached. A local Catholic priest called Thompson

has forced her to incriminate her Protestant, her Anglican relatives. And what's interesting here is that the system of justice finds this out. And so the three accused women are set free. One of the most famous books about witchcraft is written by quite a famous guy. You might have heard of him, King James I. His book is called Demonology. Right. And he really believes, doesn't he, Susanna? He's really into it.

Yes, so he has had encounters with witches himself, he thinks, in the 1590s. Oh, sorry. That's when Macbeth gets written. It is. Yes, thank you. I knew I knew something else. Yeah, yeah. And so he writes this book, Demonology,

which is the only book about the subject by a reigning monarch. Until Elizabeth II gets in there. Oh, yeah. You never know. And it's about the reality of witches, but also fairies and demons and werewolves. And in fact, I'm sure that some of the people who wrote the True Blood series or whatever

had read it because there's things in it about glamouring your victims and there's all the culture that comes out in later series. And it's written to refute scepticism. So it's an argument between two people and he says he writes it because of the fearful abounding at this time of these detestable slaves of the devil.

And it's a bestseller. It is really potent in terms of affecting people's ideas about things. And the most famous associated case, probably, or person associated with witchcraft in England in the 1600s is Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. Have you heard of him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His story is a weird one because he's sort of self-appointed. He's totally self-appointed, yeah. Literally, he says, I'm the Witchfinder General. Have you heard of him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. His story is a weird one because he's sort of self-appointed.

He's totally self-appointed, yeah. Literally he says, I'm the Witchfinder General. Towns in East Anglia and Essex pay him to find out if there are witches in their community and to help them deal with it. So he makes a lot of money off finding witches in the time of the English Civil War. So the reason he can get away with it is because it's the time of anarchy. And what are his techniques?

As well as the swimming, ducking people, checking the water, what else is he looking for? So he is interested in whether people have made a deal with the devil, and he tries to find out the truth of that by sleep deprivation. Oh, my God. So he takes his victims, walks them up and down for three days, or has people do it,

because, of course, he's sleeping, for several days at a time. And, you know, there's an 80-year-old woman, Elizabeth Clarke, is the first victim, because they believe at the time that pain is a guarantor of truth. Normally, in England, torture is not used. It's not common under law. But it is used in Europe, and there you've got, you know, the rack and strapado, which is where you're held up by your wrists behind your back, or so stretching the body or compressing the body thumb screws or used in scotland for example but sleep deprivation is a particular english form of torture um that is used to do it slightly different here it's more psychologically damaging and more horrific in the long term oh god yes i know about it at the moment yeah have a three-month-old um

as a result of that of course you get lots of people who will denounce others that's the thing about anything it's just so out of it i'm a chronic insomniac and the longest i've gone without sleep is five days and on day five i became hysterical and just giggled at everything i found a bottle of ketchup so funny i was just crying with laughter you are a dream audience but exactly i should have been not for your own mental health I found a bottle of ketchup so funny, I was just crying with laughter. You are a dream Edinburgh audience. Exactly, I should have been in your... Not for your own mental health. That's so awful.

Hugely powerful, isn't it, lack of sleep? Yes. Have you ever heard of witch's marks, Cariad? Witch's? Marks. Marks? Or marks of the devil. Oh, yeah, that rings a bell.

Like, on them? On their house? I'm really guessing there. Both forms of witch's marks, actually. Spot on. Yeah, so that was another Matthew Hopkins speciality so looking for a sign of the devil

again if they've made a pact with the devil he's probably put a mark on their body didn't they used to blame birthmarks exactly moles, some sort of skin tag and it was said to be in some secret place which you know guess what it's not just looking under the armpits you know it's

going to be looking between a woman's legs In your pants Matthew Hopkins, tell us a prize and it was thought the place was insensible to pain so they would stick needles in to try and find out what the part was but it's also actually I think really important is there's something here going on about old women and body

shaming and because quite often they're saying that this mark is a teat from which the the devil can suck or whatever so basically if you've got any kind of protuberance on your body or you know genitalia particularly that's going to be used as an example of the devil's mark what a horrible man oh my god humans are so weird aren't they it's like an interesting comparison isn't it of like when you see people going hysterical about a band or a boy band or that sort of thing how and how it can be contagious and i'm sort of glad that like people can express that further that way because you can see how easily humans just decide that people are other like it's so easy and it comes like you know and the power of the group as you

say you get a community who say that person's a witch and you you can do something as a group that you wouldn't do as an individual. Nobody wants to be in the court, the one person in the corner everyone's pointing at. So everyone decides to stay in the group by going, oh my God, thank God it's not me, because I actually did sleep with the devil last night. So then when they're pointing, all the problems are one old lady and you can see all the justification. Well, it's just one old lady.

She's got no family. Like this is fine. I thought she was a bit weird and grumpy anyway who's the last witch executed in europe our last official witch is a woman called anna goldie who was executed in glazerus in switzerland in 1782 she was pardoned by the swiss parliament in 2007 it's a miscarriage of justice that's not very helpful really really. It's a bit late, but we'll take it, we'll take it. When it stops varies greatly. I mean, the Dutch Republic, they stop in 1609, and that's well before Matthew Hopkins, you know, well before

Salem. So it really varies. And then legislation, interestingly, peters out after people stop believing. So it's not actually that the law is repealed and then the trial stop, it's that the trials stop and then the law changes to reflect that. Wow.

You know that law about the witches? It's a bit embarrassing, isn't it? Actually, nobody believes in it anymore. Imagine that. It's like having a law against fairies or something. Or like, it's just... Maybe we should have a law against fairies, just in case.

The nuance window! This is where we allow our expert, Professor Susanna, to launch into a little lecture, just a couple of minutes, on the thing that you think we need to hear, what's really important that we can hear. So I'm going to get my stopwatch up, and if you're ready, Susanna, here we go. We know that most witches were poor, elderly women,

but the question is why? And there are two reasons. One is that it took time to build up a reputation as a witch. So at the trial, people would come up with, you know, she did this five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You know, years had to pass of you doing accumulated events that looked like witchcraft for you to be accused, which tells us that people were thinking more about witches than they actually accused people. So there were lots of people they thought were witches, potentially, but not ready to incriminate them yet. And that makes sense, because the last thing you'd want to do if you thought that someone was a witch was actually to annoy her. But the other thing about it, it plays into an idea of the culture of motherhood

at the time. Professor Linda Roper has argued that the aesthetic of the period was affected by the fact that women were pretty much pregnant every other year once they got married so you see those sort of pictures by Rubens and you've got these big fleshy women with their huge hips and big bellies and heavy breasts and women look like that because they looked like that but witches are never depicted as that witches are depicted as being sagging and shriveled up crones so the crucial thing about them is not that they're old, it's that they're no longer fertile. And so that they are motivated to copulate with the devil because they're no longer having sex, probably widowed.

They're motivated to attack children and young mothers. So they are the symbol of inversion. They are the anti-mother. And so what it comes down to is that we're not just looking at old women, we're looking at menopausal and post-menopausal women who no longer have the power that society gives them and so therefore they must be copulating with the devil and attacking those who have something they don't have.

And I just think that idea is fascinating. Applause and carry on. Yeah. Fascinating. Oh, that's just classic, isn't it? Patriarchal society society what you should see now even our society today doesn't deal with menopausal women in a healthy way at all it is terrible how menopausal women you know are treated it's not discussed and you know there's a lot of

talk now about periods and menstruation everyone's becoming very vocal about it like hey don't be ashamed but even the menopause you can see everyone being like i still don't feel like i know anything about it i still don't feel like i understand it in a way and it's still very hushed and women are still made to feel ashamed of it and i think hopefully this generation of women who are now talking about periods all the time myself included when we hit that menopause we'll be able to hopefully be like no this needs to be talked about more because i still think it's really hard. If we think of maybe some of these women were cunning women who had accumulated knowledge, therefore powerful in their minds, what better way to make them be belittled than by saying they're actually useless in their bodies and therefore they've turned to the dark side.

Therefore they're evil rather than they just don't need men anymore at all. I've worked out the herbs. My husband's dead. I don't need you around. Witch. Well, that's unfortunately about all the time we have today, but it's been really good fun. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please do share it with your friends

and leave a review online. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. Plus, those ones are longer as well, so you get more fun. A big thank you again to my guests. In History Corner, Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in Comedy Corner, the wonderful Cariad Lloyd.

And to you, lovely listeners, join me next time as we venture into another dark corner of the past with two completely different travel companions. Meanwhile, I'm off to go and watch reruns of Charmed. Thanks very much. Bye. Hello, I'm Felicity Finch. You may know me better as Ruth in The Archers. Sorry to delay the pleasure of your podcast, but I'd like a quick word in your ear.

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