WITCHLAND: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain, by Marion Gibson
In the county of Essex in July 1645, against the backdrop of the English Civil War, two obscure men became national celebrities when they succeeded in getting three dozen “witches” convicted at one trial. Their names were Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, and they called themselves “witchfinders.”
Fanatical, paranoid and dangerously literal-minded, they believed, like many of their countrymen, that if your child or cow died, or your barn burned down, it was likely because a disgruntled neighbor had sold their soul to Satan. They devised a series of tortures, which they called “trying ways,” to “prove” which citizens were in league with the Devil. One of the victims was a poor, one-legged unwed mother named Bess Clarke, who had to be helped up the ladder to her noose.
Demand for their brutal services spread quickly. This was not mere vigilantism, the British historian Marion Gibson writes in “Witchland”; it was “well-meaning mass murder.” For the next two years, a wave of witch hunts broke out across Britain, with Hopkins and Stearne, Gibson writes, “taking their witchfinding show on the road — an unprecedented act of religious entrepreneurship which would have horrific consequences for hundreds of people.”
This is the 10th book Gibson has written on the subject of witches, and a sequel to her 2023 cultural history “Witchcraft,” in which Hopkins and Stearne also figure dramatically. But here, Gibson asks readers to divert their gaze from the inquisitors: not only the witchfinders, but scores of “witch-obsessed disrupters” — the judges, mayors, clergymen and civic leaders who played God with the citizenry. Instead, her focus is on those they brutalized.
Until recently, little was known about the victims. But advances in digitization have allowed Gibson to flesh out their histories. Traveling to towns in England and Scotland where witch hunts occurred between 1643 and 1652, she has visited churches, prisons, town halls and squares where the scapegoats suffered, combing records to reconstruct the circumstances and resurrecting in granular detail the individual ordeals of the accused. She intends to “give them back their rounded human identity, some respect and dignity.”
Bess Clarke made her confession after Hopkins and Stearne subjected her to several days of sleep deprivation, forced walking and relentless questioning. Blurting, “I will show you my imps!” she described her supposed demonic familiars — a black rabbit, a polecat and a dog with an ox’s head, whom she dubbed “Vinegar Tom.” Her interrogators took sedulous notes, Gibson writes. “In their minds, they were piecing together the secret rites at the heart of the witches’ anti-Christian religion.” Their notionally pious fixation was shared by the witch hunters who preceded them and by those who followed.
In 1644, a Scotswoman named Agnes Bishop was targeted by an ambitious stripling named Hew Kennedie, who had recently arrived at his first parish, bent on “purification” of his congregation. Kennedie imprisoned Agnes in the church until he obtained permission for her execution from royal authorities.
But the bureaucracy balked when he tried to execute another local woman, Margaret Thomsone, whom Kennedie and his associates had forced to stand intermittently on a stool for 26 days and nights, beating her with cudgels. Margaret refused to confess, and when she complained to Scotland’s Privy Council, they demanded that she be freed. “She was likely released,” Gibson writes. “We can only hope, as no record was made.”
Gibson found more thorough accounts of a 1649 “witch pricking” in which 30 Newcastle accused were tested by a traveling Scottish witchfinder whose specialty was sticking women in the thighs with a pin to see if they bled. If they did not, he would claim they had an “insensible mark made by the Devil.” He earned 20 shillings per “witch.”
Gibson repeatedly demonstrates that the fates of the hundreds who were brutalized during the witch hunts cannot be separated from the political and economic conditions of their communities, or the power struggles and petty grievances of their contemporaries. “It is important to explore localized histories for their own sake,” she writes, “giving the witch trials stories back to the places that made them.” She adds, “Local history is the foundation of national and global history.”
That may sound grandiose. Yet it’s incredible, reading the histories Gibson has assembled, to recognize how puny, how obscure, were these men who kick-started a persecution that would spread across Europe and the Atlantic — and which arguably persists today.
Two centuries ago, the Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle put forth a “great man” theory of universal history, which held that it was visionary, charismatic men who shaped world events. “Witchland” reminds us that small men and villains can exert extraordinary influence on history, too — if their contemporaries let them.
WITCHLAND: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain | By Marion Gibson | Scribner | 320 pp. | $30
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