Witchland

Witchland tells the sensational story of a series of witch trials that convulsed Britain between 1640 and 1650. It was a witch hunt that began separately in south-east England and Lowland Scotland in the early 1640s and grew into a mass panic that killed hundreds of convicted 'witches' over the next decade. Most of these people lived in England’s eastern counties, where around 200-300 probably died – records are incomplete – but there were also important trials across Britain from West Lothian to Cornwall to Northamptonshire to Northumbia during this time. These trials were all related – by the puritan theology that drove them and by the violence and economic disruption that encouraged people to turn on each other. Some of the witch hunts' stories have been told individually before, but this book brings together ten cases demonstrating the huge national scale of the crisis. The ten cases each explore a community in turmoil, with a strong focus on the characters of the accused and accusers.

The British civil wars of the seventeenth century can seem intimidating in their complexity, but this book keeps the focus tightly on personal stories. The war rages in the background, but the reader will be fascinated by what happened to Anne West, Ellen Driver, Henry Maggs, Ann Jefferies and the other accused people whose stories structure each chapter in turn. One accused witch shares the author’s name – Marion Gibson – with provides a unique opportunity for the author to explore the personal impact of a witch trial and the sense that ‘it could have been me’.

The 1640-50 witch hunt shows us an unreasonable, angry and polarised Britain with echoes in the present. It deals with topics such as inequality, the refugee crisis of the civil war, and the violence that can develop from name-calling and stereotyping. Based on three years of archival research across Britain, it offers a completely new history of the country’s biggest witch hunt, explaining why it is relevant today.