The Last Witches of England

A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition

John Callow

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350196148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

"Fascinating and vivid." New Statesman
" Thoroughly researched." The Spectator
"Intriguing." BBC History Magazine
" Vividly told." BBC History Revealed
"A timely warning against persecution." Morning Star
"Astute and thoughtful." History Today
"An important work." All About History
"Well-researched." The Tablet On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives. As the result of these allegations, three women of Bideford came to be forever defined as witches. A Secretary of State brushed aside their case and condemned them to the gallows; to hang as the last group of women to be executed in England for the crime. Yet, the hatred of their neighbours endured. For Bideford, it was said, was a place of witches. Though 'pretty much worn away' the belief in witchcraft still lingered on for more than a century after their deaths. In turn, ignored, reviled, and extinguished but never more than half-forgotten, it seems that the memory of these three women - and of their deeds and sufferings, both real and imagined – was transformed from canker to regret, and from regret into celebration in our own age. Indeed, their example was cited during the final Parliamentary debates, in 1951, that saw the last of the witchcraft acts repealed, and their names were chanted, as both inspiration and incantation, by the women beyond the wire at Greenham Common. In this book, John Callow explores this remarkable reversal of fate, and the remarkable tale of the Bideford Witches.

1

Fortune my Foe

The voices of the poor and the dispossessed are rarely listened to in any age. They are too rough, too uncomfortable, too raw and too discordant to sit comfortably within the confines of learned discourse, or to be accommodated within the binary, dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace. Their day-to-day realities of empty bellies, chilled bones, broken sleep patterns and dependency upon the will and charity of others are hardly the stuff of historical romance, or the reassuring teleology of post-modern theory by which individuals are held to self-create, outside the boundaries of host culture, economics and social circumstance. Over the course of the seventeenth century, we encounter them, more often than not, in court records, when those at the margins of society had broken a law or transgressed an established code of conduct. Even then, their words were often interpreted, filtered and shaped by legal procedures and by the prevailing notions of what constituted suitable evidence, the rules regarding cross-examination and the extraction of a confession. On occasion, the accused might even be unaware that such conventions existed. Within this context, Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles – the three poor women who came to be known as the ‘Bideford Witches’ – were marginal in every sense of the word: in terms of their age, gender, economic and marital status, and even through their lack of physical and geographical mobility. Unsuccessful and unwanted, they not only lacked the sympathy of others but aroused feelings of either fear or condescension among their contemporaries.

As a consequence, the judge’s brother soon came to forget their number and their respective fates; the pamphleteers in London conflated their names and gave one of them a face that was not her own; and a Secretary of State brushed aside their case and decided that three women from Bideford were not even worthy of his comment, let alone his consideration.¹ Once the printers and booksellers had made their profits, the last of their stocks in Exeter and London had been sold or pulped, and new strange and exciting stories came along to grip the public imagination, there seemed to be little need to remember their dark tale, or to hum the ballad written about their murderous and diabolical careers to the melody of a purloined, second-hand tune.² Only the hatred of their neighbours endured.

Ironically, it was precisely this extraordinary intense level of animosity that permitted something of their stories, characters and words to be preserved through the judicial procedures conducted against them in 1671, 1679 and 1682, and through the pages of the three main popular, printed accounts of their trials produced in the autumn of 1682.³ Though their long lives are telescoped for us, through the lens of the court proceedings, largely into the space of just two months, when evidence was taken against them first at the makeshift court house at Bideford, and then at the subsequent Exeter Assizes, it is still possible to go in search of the pattern of their lives in the records of the parish, local government and private charities with which they came into contact. While these sources will not necessarily tell us those biographical details that we, now, might wish to know – such as whom they loved, what they valued and truly believed, what shaped them and condemned them to a life of unremitting poverty, and how they attempted to make sense of the two terrible visitations of civil war and of plague that swept over their home town, when they were already approaching middle age – they do reveal something of the contours of their existence that we need to know in order to contextualize them within their own culture and society, within both Devon and Early Modern England.

According to all the contemporary accounts, Temperance Lloyd was the prime focus of attention: the dominant figure in the dramas that unfolded on the streets of Bideford and in the legal proceedings at Exeter Castle and Heavitree.⁴ She was a ‘grand Witch’, ‘the most notorious of these Three’, ‘Audacious’ and ‘perfectly Resolute’ in pursuit of her murderous designs.⁵ She was also held to be the oldest, the most lascivious and the cruellest. And it was she who had been ‘the Introducer of their Misery’ through leading the others into making pacts with the Devil and instructing them for the space of ‘Five Years, to learn the Art and Mystery of Hellish, Damnable, Accursed, and most to be Lamented Witch Craft’.⁶ Yet, before the troubles that assailed her at the beginning of February 1671, she had left few imprints upon either the records of Bideford or elsewhere in the land. Though Temperance, alongside other such Puritan names as Prudence and Patience, was relatively common in Bideford, the name of Temperance Lloyd does not appear in any of the parish registers. Nor do the ages and marriage records of the other women christened Temperance fit with what we know of her.⁷ It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that she was an immigrant who arrived in the port by sea, as opposed to road.

As a major hub of Atlantic trade, seventeenth-century Bideford was a cosmopolitan place, where many different ethnicities and nationalities rubbed shoulders on the quayside and transacted business. However, while the arrival of trading vessels might greatly increase the port’s population for short periods, sailors from further afield than Devon appear to have been there to work, trade and to enjoy their shore leave, rather than necessarily to put down roots. The registered population of migrants, though increased during the 1680s by an influx of Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France, does not appear to have been particularly large.⁸ In this manner, the recording of the death of an unfortunate ‘French man being a Traveller’, taken sick at the port in January 1650 and buried ashore, and the baptism of John, the son of Edward Carsh, ‘a Irishman’ on 3 July 1642 were rendered noteworthy for the clerk of the parish on account that they were rare occurrences and, in both cases, reflected events that overtook members of a transitory population rather than the domiciled townsfolk.⁹ The exceptions to these patterns lie in the settling in the port of the Anglo-Irish mercantile family of John Strange, who had been made rich by the trade with Ulster, at the beginning of the century, and by the migration of a number of fresh Welsh families to Bideford, concentrated within the period from 1639 to 1653.

Prior to the Civil War, besides the seemingly well-established Thomas family, from whom Grace and Elizabeth descended, there was no clear imprint of Welsh settlement in the parish. However, with the arrival of what seem to be the extended families of the Edwards, Morgans, Joneses, Philipses, Williamses and Lloyds in Bideford, the parish clerks suddenly found themselves having to struggle with the recording of unfamiliar Welsh Christian names and surnames, making best guesses and spelling them phonetically in the registers.¹⁰ In this way, Jones was rendered as ‘Joons’ or ‘Joones’, Lloyd became ‘Floyd’ and Rhys (a common name among these familial groups) became ‘Rice’.¹¹

John Lloyd, his wife, Cissily, and their young children were settled in Bideford, by the early 1640s, together with Rhys Lloyd who was of roughly the same age as John and was, in all probability, his brother or close kinsman.¹² At roughly the same time, the extended Jones family also settled in the town, comprising a William Jones ‘the elder’, his son, William ‘the younger’, and his own growing family, together with Phillemon (or ‘Philemon’) Jones and his sister, Temperance. It may well be that William ‘the elder’ was father to all three young adults, but given the partial recordings of Welsh names and familial groupings in the Bideford parish register we have no way of knowing for sure. What does seem evident is that the naming of Phillemon and Temperance stemmed from a Puritan impulse that sought to recall the early days of the Christian church and to celebrate, respectively, the sufferings of one of St Paul’s followers and a specific female virtue. It is suggestive not only of a particular set of aspirations on the part of parents for their children but also of a strong engagement with scripture that was fuelled by the written word of God. It is, therefore, possible that the elder generation of Jones were literate or, at the very least, semi-literate, and certain that they considered themselves to be part of the ‘godly’ people of the nation. Temperance Jones is recorded as having married Rhys Lloyd, in St Mary’s Church, on 29 October 1648, while Phillemon Jones married Johan (or Joanna), a young woman whose surname went unrecorded, in the same church, on 8 August 1649.¹³ Thus, Temperance Lloyd first appears in the public record not as a harridan or a pauper but as a member of the ‘godly’ elect, married by the Independent minister, William Bartlett, to a working man. This also raises a question over the traditional assumptions made about her great age and infirmity. Two of the three pamphlet writers agree that she was ‘the eldest of the three’ women accused of witchcraft in 1682, and one claimed that she was then ‘70 years old’.¹⁴ However, if Temperance Lloyd was the woman married in October 1648, who was of childbearing age, we are looking at someone who was much younger than previously thought and the junior of Susanna Edwards by a considerable margin. If she followed conventional marriage patterns for her gender and class, then it is not unreasonable to suggest that she was somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-eight at the time of her wedding, and that, therefore, she was born somewhere around 1620–2. This places her in her early twenties at the time of her family’s crossing of the Bristol Channel and settling in Bideford; she would have been in her late forties or early fifties at the time when the initial allegations of witchcraft were brought against her, and in her early sixties when she was tried before Judge Raymond in Exeter. Her haggard appearance, mental confusion and decrepitude that were noted in the summer of 1682 would, therefore, appear to be the product of her growing poverty, her arduous labours in pursuit of a meagre living and an inadequate diet, rather than being the simple product of the ageing process. Life had dealt her a succession of hard blows with which she was ill-equipped to deal, and which had rendered her prematurely weary and worn. From the first, there is a suggestion of an element of marginality in her family’s societal and cultural position in Bideford, inasmuch as her sister-in-law’s surname went unrecorded at her wedding. The local authorities did not bother to inquire about people whose ethnicity, gender and lack of resources did not interest them and seemed to be of no great import.

This said, the mid- to late 1640s appear to have been something of a boom time for the new Welsh immigrants to the town and there is no reason to think that the Joneses and Lloyds did not share in an element of this new-found prosperity. Through intermarriage within the fledgling Welsh community in the town, both families had sought to consolidate their position, put down roots and establish networks of mutual support, while still retaining something of their cultural distinctiveness and links to South Wales. Their arrival in Bideford coincided with the employment of Welsh colliers, recruited from the south of the principality, in order to mine the local seam of culm (or anthracite) that fuelled the town’s pottery kilns, for firing slipware, and the furnaces, for casting metals associated with munitions and shipbuilding. Consequently, the industries that supported and furthered Bideford’s maritime trade required surplus labour and additional expertise to that available in North Devon and looked to the nearest available coalfields in order to supply them both. This accounts for the pattern of short-range migration from the late 1630s to the mid-1650s, and explains the influx of young people, of marriageable age, as young, strong men were ideally suited for such arduous physical work. It also provides valuable evidence that despite the dislocation of trade caused by the Civil War and the rapid militarization of the town, occasioned first by its garrisoning by Parliamentary forces and then through its brief occupation by Royalist troops, local society continued to function and to find new and inventive means by which it could not only survive but prosper. Indeed, it may well be that the spiralling demand for munitions occasioned by the war served as a stimulus for the foundries producing ball, chain and shot which were to be found in Bideford’s Gunstone Lane and which, in turn, placed greater demands for productivity and labour upon the town’s anthracite pits. The construction of the three great earthwork artillery forts that covered the town and controlled the passage of vessels along the river Torridge necessitated skilled labour of precisely the sort provided by the Welsh miners.¹⁵ If they were not quite an aristocracy of labour during this period, then there is no reason to think that they were drawn to Bideford, and chose to remain for over a decade, by anything other than the promise of ample remuneration.

Yet, the sword of war was double-edged. On the one side, it had ge...