The Last Witches of England
JOHN CALLOW
(BLOOMSBURY academic, 352 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

The last three witches to be executed in England died because a magpie, well known as a witch’s “familiar”, tapped on the window of an invalid in Bideford, Devon.

The year was 1682, and the invalid in question was Grace Thomas, a young spinster bedridden for months with crippling pains which had defied diagnosis. The nascent medical profession were only too ready to ascribe their failures to darker, supernatural forces – as was the patient herself. As the servants shooed the magpie away, they saw the figure of Temperance Lloyd, a noted local beggar and reputed witch. The connection was made, and the journey to the gallows had begun.

Seventeenth-century Bideford was a busy port on England’s “Golden Bay”, with a thriving North American and European trade. Beneath the prosperity, however, there were deep divisions, both economically, between the rich merchants and poorer townsfolk, and politically, between the ascendant Tories and the Whigs. More pertinent for this story were the scars left by Cromwell’s Interregnum and the Restoration of the monarchy, resulting in a febrile religious atmosphere riven by ­divisions and fear of the “other”.