Dark forces

MARION GIBSON praises a retelling of a 17th-century witchcraft trial that never loses sight of the women at its heart, nor the social and economic factors that contributed to their plight

- MARION GIBSON

John Callow's history of a witchcraft case in late 17th-century England offers the compelling, lively and empathetic stories of three women charged in the north Devon town of Bideford. Often, these “witches” appear in historical accounts as stock figures: bogeywomen said to have killed their neighbours and worshipped the devil. But the best thing about The Last Witches of England - so called as they are labelled the last people to be hanged for witchcraft in England - is the partial biographical recovery of the three women: Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles.

The prime suspect was Lloyd, twice charged with witchcraft in the 1670s and again in 1682. Instead of just repeating the stories of her accusers, Callow fills out her background as a real, ordinary woman. His research links Lloyd persuasively to an influx of Welsh miners into Bideford in the mid17th century, coming to mine coal to power the local pottery industry and munitions workshops. In the 1640s, Temperance Jones, as she was called, married a Rhys Lloyd, who seemed to have left by the 1960s when she began to receive welfare payments from the town authorities. Listed as a 'wife and not a widow”, Lloyd was scandalously abandoned and suspected of prostitution. It was a steep fall for a woman with such a Puritan Christian name. From this beginning, Callow then unfolds the tragedy of the accusations made against her.

The second suspect, Susanna Edwards, was equally unfortunate. The illegitimate daughter of a single mother, she, like Lloyd, married into a Welsh family. Widowed in the 1660s, she was left vulnerable and had already begun to receive welfare payments. And so Edwards joined Lloyd in the dismal world of proto-universal credit, pleading with the Bideford authorities for a few extra pence to tide her over a hard time.