Although we can detect many parallels between our present lives and those of 17th-century English villagers—neighborhood disputes, domestic frictions, disparities of wealth—their era was in many ways utterly unlike our own. Cast your mind back, stripping away all contemporary conveniences. No electricity, no telephones, no bright screens flashing information, no lively television chatter to invade the room.
Sound quiet? Indeed. No airplanes, no trains, no automobiles; no constant din of rush hour far away. No plastic, no refrigerator, no supermarket. No reliably clean water, no antibiotics, no anesthetics. Keep going until you arrive at a world that is hard to envision, though not entirely impossible to imagine. Deep, black nights lit only by candles. Evenings spent on gossip, on mending garments and tools. Waking in darkness to a day filled with physical labor. Want some cheese? Make it. Need candles, socks, a snare, or a salve? Make them yourself. Food raised organically, skies crowded with birds, fields crisscrossed by hedgerows. Hunger, plague, and influenza: waves of death that swept through villages every few years, snatching a third of your neighbors, the children next door, the person you loved most. Mandatory worship steeped in stern dogma, capable of guiding you to either heaven or hell. Tight, familial church communities, gathered in isolated villages and small towns; privacy scarce, liberty scarce. Sin, suspicion, fear.
Yet the word “witch” described an unreality: a person in league with the devil, using magic and evil spirits to hurt their neighbors, turning away from God to worship Satan.
Poverty and the subordination of women were particularly tightly controlled by religion in this 17th-century world—individuals such as Alice Cooke of Hempnall illustrate this dynamic. That linkage will matter in the narrative of the witch hunts. Remove religion and its legal framework, and there would be no such thing as a “witch.” The two social groups most often targeted by accusations of witchcraft were the poor and women.
Yet the term “witch” denoted an unreal foe: someone allied with the devil, wielding magic and malevolent spirits to injure neighbors, dedicating themselves away from God to venerate Satan. The construction of that artificial enemy rested on a tangled belief system that regulated church congregations, especially those who least conformed and most needed protection. The confident neighbors of these individuals would frequently seize upon their moments of weakness, aiming to coerce conformity, often by extracting confessions of sin. Unmarried mothers were pressed about their “fornication” and the paternity of their children during labor, their pain believed to reveal truth. The motive was partly to compel fathers to contribute to their offspring, saving taxpayers’ money, but also believed to salvage the souls of both parents.
It may sound monstrous in theory, but it becomes more chilling when you learn this was the reality for particular women: people like Susan Thrower of Kettlethorpe in Suffolk. In 1644, Susan was questioned by her midwife during labor and, in turn, by magistrates who heard that Susan had named Cuthbert Dale as the father of her child in the throes of agony. The court ordered him to pay and threatened a twenty-pound fine or imprisonment if he defaulted. Meanwhile, Susan was dispatched to the house of correction for a year with her infant—a grim institution where unmarried mothers were “punished and set on work,” as the magistrates noted with self-satisfied calm. For the respectable residents of Kettlethorpe, this was a fitting, godly rebuke for the sin of Susan and Cuthbert’s union.
Poorer women faced extraordinary vulnerability if accused of sin. They could be jailed, denied alms from church charity, and expelled from the congregations they had joined. The most precarious were those displaced from their birth parish by conflict or condemnation, who were chased from further parishes for fear they would claim “relief”—welfare funded by parish taxes. Pregnant women and mothers were particularly unwelcome. Some abandoned their children, as in the case of the infant christened Charity after being discovered in the street in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1639, and who died soon after.
Some desperate families trudged from village to village, facing violence, hunger, and the cold. “Samuel Wharton, son of Robert Wharton (a beggarman),” “Mary Wharton, daughter of Robert (a beggarman)” and “Robert Wharton (a beggarman)” were all buried in Manningtree, Essex, on 3 September, 8 September, and 28 September 1624. “A traveling child of thirteen years of age was found dead in a drift of snow,” recorded by the parish clerk at Lawford, Essex, in February 1658. In Newcastle upon Tyne in February 1650, “a poor boy” died outside the grand houses by the Tyne bridge, probably from cold and hunger. In this world, becoming an outcast—begging, alienating neighbors who refused aid—was all too easy, and such frictions often preceded an accusation of witchcraft.
The impulse to hate, rather than love, thy neighbor—especially one who practiced a different version of the same faith—was also depressingly strong.
These vulnerable souls were expected to remain in their birthplace, their identity supposedly anchored by the need for church charity and an all-seeing divine gaze, a belief that the more fortunate would call “security.” Yet such security was always an illusion. And during the civil wars of the 1640s across Britain, that stasis could not be maintained. People fled their villages as war raged, or moved elsewhere to escape, seeking safety, trade, or opportunity.
The wars wrought huge destruction upon religious and civic buildings, mills, mines, homes, crops, livestock, and transport networks, undermining prosperity and forcing many to relocate or starve. Castles and grand houses were blown apart; towns were besieged and their walls stripped away, while defenders removed houses, chapels, almshouses, and barns to clear lines of fire; attackers pounded the towns from outside and within. Some people lost everything without compensation, becoming wanderers on the charity of neighboring parishes. The climate of instability and fear meant that church communities were on constant guard against outsiders and internal enemies alike.
This sense of threat, braided with a harsh reading of religious morality, dominated life in the seventeenth century, with the brighter, more hopeful, compassionate aspects of Christianity often overshadowed by fear and punitive judgment. The urge to hate one’s neighbor—particularly someone who followed a different version of the same faith—was all too common.
The British civil conflicts were, in part, a struggle to carve out new religious paths, but that freedom did not automatically yield a kinder Christianity. Some new groups—such as those who later became known as Quakers—promoted love, fellowship, and justice, while others (including Presbyterians) stirred fresh fears, new sins, new tests, and new punishments. This mood—a narrowing, harsher claim to religious truth—had been fermenting since the Reformation had begun reshaping British religion about a century earlier. It was a sentiment that grew alongside the Reformation’s reach in England and Wales, with the Church of England’s headship assumed by Henry VIII in 1534 and the Church of Ireland in 1536, followed by Scotland’s Protestantization in the 1560s. Many English, Welsh, and Scottish people remained Catholic and resisted the state churches’ drift away from Catholicism, even as the institutions pressed ahead with reform.
Yet for some Britons, reform did not proceed quickly enough. These fundamentalists found the new Protestant establishment too ritualistic and affluent, recalling the Catholic past they believed had shaped national religion until mid-century. They formed independent groups that broke away from the state church. The most disruptive innovators, and the sources of some of the harshest repressions—including witch hunts—were the extreme Protestant sectarians often labeled “Puritans” by their adversaries (they preferred to call themselves “reformers” or “the godly”).
And, of course, such self-righteousness and entitled aggression created the perfect atmosphere in which to hunt witches: the ultimate, devil-loving heretics.
This broad label encompassed Anabaptists, Baptists, Brownists, Levelers, Antinomians, Presbyterians, Ranters, and many of the idiosyncratic prophets and seers who flourished in 1640s Britain. These various sects differed as much as they sought reform; some accommodated women preachers and deaconesses, some worshipped in fields or barns rather than traditional church buildings, which they viewed as compromised by conventional doctrine. Some even opposed witch-hunting; others actively promoted it. Yet every sect tended to treat its own interpretation as the sole truth, making rival churches and dissenters appear heretical or even demonic. The slightest doctrinal deviation could be invoked to justify coercion, shaming, and, in extreme cases, forceful suppression. In sectarian conflicts, Baptists mocked Quakers, Presbyterians oppressed Anabaptists, and individuals suffered terribly for their beliefs.
In September 1644, Thomasine Stott, a Suffolk housewife, was arrested for refusing to attend her state church. She admitted to being Anabaptist and having recently undergone adult re-baptism. For this, she was jailed—confined to a damp, foul-smelling stone cell swarming with rats and lice—in the effort to coerce her to renounce her beliefs.
There’s no need to know every sect to grasp the witch-hunt arc, but the broader picture of religious infighting in 1640s Britain is vital to understanding how many people—particularly the poor and especially women—found themselves on the unfavorable side of stern, devout opponents. And such sanctimonious, self-defensive arrogance created an ideal climate for witch-hunting: the ultimate, devil-worshiping heretics. It should hardly be surprising that the era’s largest single witch trial—roughly 140 suspects—took place in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, a town overlooking the ruins of a former Catholic abbey. When the abbey was dissolved in 1539, its treasures and lands were sold off, and the building itself was dismantled for stone, lead, glass, and timber by the very hands of those who resented its former authority.
By the period of the witch trial, the sacred structure stood stripped of its roof and outer walls—a naked, skeletal frame; the vast west window emptied, as if in a stone scream. The pride with which the abbey’s dismantling had been carried out reflected long‑standing tension between the town authorities and the monks. Once Protestants controlled national governance, it might have looked as though the town had won—but that triumph was hollow, because it tore apart the social fabric and the economy that knit Bury and much of Suffolk together.
Then, in 1608, a fire began in a malthouse to the east of the ruined abbey complex. It raged for three days, destroying nearly half of the town. Warehouses filled with fish, salt, sugar, and spices, as well as stores of corn and hay, plus horses and cattle, were consumed. The end result was more than two hundred homes, public buildings, and shops reduced to heaps of stones and splinters. Wealthy families who once thrived were driven to beggary; the price of rebuilding soared to about a hundred thousand pounds (roughly £22 million today). The scars of that catastrophe would endure for decades, providing the grim context for the 1640s’ events. And in the seventeenth century, such disasters were read as divine punishment. A pamphlet printed at the time described the blaze as “an imposition of calamity laid upon [the townspeople] by the hand and power of God for their secret sins and offenses,” insisting that strange occurrences foretold worse to come unless the people amended their lives.
When the civil wars began and witches were believed to stalk the land, many took the view that eradicating these foes would redeem their communities, offering a comforting illusion of power and control amid religious uncertainty and upheaval.
__________________________________
Excerpted from Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Copyright © 2026, Marion Gibson. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
