Witch trials – a living hell

Despite being an historian, I have no desire to live in the past, and especially not in mid-seventeenth-century Britain. For as Marion Gibson explains in her excellent Witchland, this was a time of bitter political and religious divisions leading to the bloodiest conflict ever fought on these shores. Throw famine, plague, strained community relations and a heavy dollop of godly self-righteousness into the cauldron, and you have the toxic brew that caused a witch craze. Its human cost was enormous. Hundreds of people were falsely accused, in many cases, tortured, and then judicially murdered for “crimes” they could not possibly have committed.

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