Witches

Long before the word 'witch' carried only fear, many villages contained cunning folk — men and women paid for charms against illness, to find lost property, to divine the future or to undo a rival's curse. Clients included the very neighbours who might later accuse someone of witchcraft; belief in the power of charms and belief in the danger of witches came from the same well.

The material record of these beliefs survives in buildings themselves: daisy-wheel and lattice marks scratched near doors and hearths, shoes and dried animals concealed in walls and under floors, written charms folded into thatch. These were protective customs, made by people who feared the unseen and hoped to hold it off.

Between roughly 1560 and 1730, witch trials swept across Europe and its colonies. Estimates of executions commonly range into the tens of thousands; most of the accused were poor, older, or otherwise vulnerable women, accused after quarrels, misfortunes or illness in the neighbourhood. Confessions were extracted by fear, sleep deprivation and torture.

The trials were documented by their own courts, which is how we know them — records like Thomas Potts's account of the Pendle trials of 1612. Those documents require critical reading: they record what accusers and courts claimed, not what happened. The accused were real people, and historical accusations must not be presented as proof of supernatural wrongdoing.

The last executions under witchcraft laws in Britain came to an end in the eighteenth century — the 1735 Witchcraft Act itself punished pretending to practise witchcraft, treating magic as fraud rather than fact. Folklore, however, kept the witch alive as a figure of caution and memory, and the trials have been re-examined ever since as a lesson in what fear can do to a community.

We explore this history with respect for both those persecuted and people who practise contemporary witchcraft, whose religion and craft are legal and living traditions. Remember the people behind the legend.