From Suffolk to Salem: The deadly price of being different in witch-crazed 17th-century England

On August 26, 1645, 140 people in the village of Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, were rounded up and imprisoned, accused of witchcraft by their own neighbours. The following day, 18 were executed.

In the eyes of their accusers, these witches had used sorcery to sour beer, destroy crops, and even murder townsfolk they’d quarrelled with. Partly because of the works of the region’s self-appointed 'witchfinder' General Matthew Hopkins, Bury St Edmonds wears the dubious crown for holding the largest witch trial in English history. The terrifying antics in Suffolk even helped fuel the Salem Witch Trials in America, less than 50 years later.

England’s witch craze was a period of great fear, paranoia, and death that spanned the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in the executions of at least 500 people. It hit its peak during the English Civil War (1642-51).

‘There were a lot of religious, social, economic, and legal stresses at the time,’ says Malcolm Gaskell, author of Worlds of Fear and Wonder: Living with the Supernatural, Past and Present.

Nearly a century earlier, Henry VIII had passed the Witchcraft Act (1542), making witchcraft a crime punishable by death. It was his appropriation of common land from the Catholic Church, however, that contributed to rising costs and unemployment. The influx of gold and silver from Spanish fleets had driven living costs up, while the Little Ice Age meant it was colder, damper, and harder to grow crops. At a time when the untimely death of a family cow could cause its owners to immediately slip into hunger, disquiet was rife across England.

‘People were looking for a quick and easy answer,’ says Diane Purkiss, author of The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations. ‘What they came up with is witches.’

The very superstitious James VI and I also played a part. In 1589, he narrowly avoided death while sailing through a storm on his way back from Denmark with his new bride, Princess Anne and blamed the violent weather on evil forces and witches. Once back on dry land he instigated the North Berwick Witch Trials in which local healer Agnes Sampson confessed, under torture, to throwing a cursed cat into the sea in order to create the conditions. Shortly after becoming the English King in 1603, James enforced an even stricter Witchcraft Act and re-released his book, Daemonologie, which detailed the existence of widespread witchcraft, sorcery and evil forces.

The idea of magic, spirits and fairies existed long before James’s proclamations, says Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials: ‘In Pagan times, early Christian missionaries spoke about local people venerating hills and streams, and using charms, prayers, and folk magic.’ The English often talked about supernatural entities, which they believed were the restless dead, she adds.

During this period, people would pray upon local herbs and flowers, and candles, for their own success and to bring harm upon their rivals. According to Gibson, the general consensus was that magic caused as much good as it did bad: ‘Before the witch hunts, there was bad and good magic. It was more of a balance. When people started to think that all magic was bad, that’s when they decided to get witches and punish them.’

During the religious turbulence of the Middle Ages, believers began to think that the devil was recruiting his own followers to undermine Christianity. Those people — in particular marginalised figures at the fringes of society — were witches, says Gibson. Ninety percent of the people accused were women who didn’t fit the era’s social expectations. They were almost always poor, usually childless, unmarried, homeless, elderly, argumentative, especially with their neighbours, disfigured or employed as midwives or healers. ‘There were no nurses or doctors in this period,’ Gibson reminds me. ‘If your child, dog, or sheep is sick, you might go to see a cunning woman, who would suggest some kind of magical remedy.’ If the treatment didn’t work, the healer was quickly blamed.

In 1582, a midwife called Ursley Kemper was found guilty of murdering a baby in St Osyth, Essex. The reality was that after Kemper had successfully cared for Grace Thurlow’s sickly first born child, the pair fell out. When Thurlow picked a different midwife for the birth of her second child, and that baby died after accidentally falling from their cradle, Thurlow accused Kemper of murder through witchcraft. Local magistrates even manipulated Kemper’s 8-year-old son, Thomas, into testifying against his mother, while further evidence was that Kempler kept two cats, a lamb, and a toad as pets.

Then in 1645, 14 women from Framlingham, Suffolk — many of whom were widows living on Church handouts were hanged for witchcraft. In the same year, Essex’s Elizabeth Clarke was accused seemingly because she has one leg, was a single, unmarried parent and because her own mother had previously been found guilty. ‘This is neighbours bringing neighbours to the attention of authorities,’ emphasises Gaskell. ‘It’s not between rich and poor. It's between the poor. They're the ones that live with each other. They're the ones where there's the greatest competition. That's often where the animosity is bitterest.’

The accusations were complicated by overly pious parishioners, who believed labelling their neighbors as witches proved how close they were to God. Some of the accused also insisted they really were witches, says Purkiss, because — after years of being ‘unseen in society’ — the label gave them ‘a moment in the spotlight where they were the most important person in the room.’

While the commonly held belief is that the witch craze took place in rural areas, there were trials in London and Newcastle — where the governor used the services of renowned Scottish witch-picker John Kincaid to hunt for sorcerers. At least 16 people were executed on evidence he provided and Scotland became a much-feared place. Despite having a fifth of the population of England, it executed three times as many people. Those numbers, however, pale in comparison to Germany, which is believed to have executed more than 7,000; Switzerland and France are both estimated to have done away with about 5,000.

The brutality of the Civil War went some way to tempering England’s bloodlust. ‘People had seen too much religious fighting and killing and a greater period of tolerance was ushered in,’ says Gibson. And, around this time, scientific discoveries and knowledge were forcing people to think differently about the world. While individuals continued to be accused, most were acquitted. In 1736, James I’s Witchcraft Act was repealed.

The depiction of witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Robert Burns’s Tam o' Shanter, Wilhelm Meinhold's The Amber Witch and Roald Dahl’s The Witches has created an enduring, though not very positive, legacy. ‘They’ve become sort of domesticated into children's stories,’ says Gaskell. ‘If you invert everything we think is good, you create the figure of the witch.’

Even though the witch craze unfolded centuries ago, counties across England are increasingly choosing to pardon and honour those who died. Visitors to Colchester and Lancaster are able to experience how victims were treated by walking around the cramped, damp and dimly lit stone-walled dungeons beneath their castles, where the accused were barely fed, sometimes tortured, and left to rot as they waited to be tried. Newcastle recently erected memorials. The landscapes in Essex and Suffolk are largely unchanged. ‘These are really great places where you can imagine where the history took place and the atrocities that happened,’ says Gaskell.