The History of Witchcraft In Cheshire - Live from The Grange Theatre

The final episode of The Local Mythstorian Podcast is a live recording from Eli's talk at The Grange Theatre on Thursday May 22nd 2025, tracing the story of European witchcraft from its Roman origins through to the English witch-craze and into the county of Cheshire itself!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Good evening everyone. Um it's about a year to the day, I think, since I was here last. Um we're talking about the the history of um Vale Royal a year ago, but this time it's something well a bit different. So tonight we're gonna be running through the history of witchcraft in Cheshire and a little bit about the background to what we consider to be a witch and where that comes from because I think it's it's a journey and a story that well wasn't apparent to me, and I've been into this stuff for years, and then when I started digging into it, it really turned up some genuiness that I just wasn't aware of, but suddenly all made sense. The the primary century of witchcraft in England that we associate is the 17th, the 1600s, and it's one of my two favourite centuries that's about as nerdy as you can get, I think, from a history point of view. Um, because in the 17th century we had the witch craze, we had the civil war, we had the plague, and so it was a time when life in England was really in flux. And when I'm referring to England as a kind of singular nation throughout the evening tonight, so with good reason it'll become apparent, um, but yeah, a unique time in our history changed the world forever in so many ways, and this subject in particular is something that I've always found really fascinating. Definitions of a witch. Everybody in this room, when we talk about witchcraft and witches, will have some kind of idea that springs to mind. It could be uh Harry Potter or Hermione Granger, it could be a hopus pocus, it could be a kind of traditional image of a hovel in the countryside, all kinds of stuff. But the idea of what a witch is isn't necessarily the same the world over, and this is going to feed into that issue about it being quite uniquely English topic that we're gonna be talking about. In the context of tonight, there are two main definitions of a witch, and they're on screen there. One who harnesses uncanny forces to do another person harm, or one who harnesses uncanny forces to influence the world around them. We can split that quite easily. We think about the healer, the wise person, kind of cunning folk. The belief is, of course, that they're harnessing some form of supernatural force to help people, to guide people, to find things, herbal remedies. The other, which is the one that perhaps dominates our thoughts more than ever now when we think about witches, is one more nefarious. It's the person who harnesses those um cali forces, those kind of supernatural gifts to do harm to somebody. That view is the Roman view. So in ancient Rome and that whole kind of period of history, the female witch was born from the beliefs of the Roman people. They blamed strange and uncanny events on people elsewhere, as we'll see, that isn't the case, and that form of the feminine, of a female practitioner, is split into two parts. We've got the old hag, that's their definition, we can all conjure that up in a head, or the temptress, and this is where a lot of those ideas about modern perceptions come into play. You know, the witch is tempting the man away, or the old hag with the hook nose, um, you know, with the cauldron. It's a Roman concept, it really is, and it's a stereotype that is with us to this very day. Elsewhere, places where Rome never went, or tried to, but couldn't get a foot in the door. In Ireland, for example, they don't tend to blame uncanny events in early times on people, they'll blame them on fairies. To this day, fairy law in Ireland is still really strong. There isn't a natural assumption that a human is behind unfortunate or uncanny events that take place. Outside of the Roman world too, it's not always women. In Iceland, it's men, in Scandinavia, it's men, and pretty much anywhere north of the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, they wouldn't look back and blame those kind of events on the idea of a female witch, which is will be men. So I really want to cement that in our thoughts. What's come down to us in history is the Roman concept of the witch. It doesn't exist everywhere, it exists in Western Europe and typically anywhere that the Romans conquered. Outside the Roman world is the same, all of those things have got a pleather of explanations, and it's not the female witch. So now that we know why the idea and the image of the witch presents the way it does, let's have a look at the issue of belief. Because without belief, none of it matters anything. For the majority of the past 2,000 years, a belief in witchcraft has been the norm. Everybody in this room back in time would have held a firm belief in witchcraft just as they would the harvest or the turning of the year or the church. It was set in stone. It's only really since perhaps after the Industrial Revolution, actually, perhaps the last kind of 200 years, 150 years, that it's not been the norm. So when we think about the things that we're going to be talking about in a moment, you have to try and put yourself in that space, that headspace of it being a reality, a living and breathing reality. As we look at this now, we're going to be going back in time. We're going to be back through the more popular periods that we might associate with the witch craze in the 1600s, and back to its origins. But I just want to draw your attention to this picture that's on the screen. This is not very far from here, it's a Windsford of St. Charles Church and Over. And as you can see, that's actually on the tower of the church. A witch mark that's been carved in a very kind of bold, um, classic witch mark, actually. Normally they're much more obscure than that. And this speaks to the belief this is a time when people will carve these symbols on doorways, on any kind of threshold in a house, in the belief that it will offer a form of protection against an evil spirit or a witch crossing that threshold. And here, as we can see from the church in Windsford, very atypical. If you visit an old building from kind of the 1500s, 1600s, or any of your local churches, if you look hard enough, you'll often spot something that will be around the threshold. I find that fascinating, you find it literally everywhere we go. But that again speaks to the widespread level and depth of real belief that witchcraft was alive and well in the community. Question, of course, is why did that happen? So, a brief history of witchcraft before we arrived in Cheshire. Before the 1400s, the idea that there were people amongst us who could work magic, cast spells, heal people, um, was tolerated by the church, encouraged at times. Um I guess, on the one hand, with the Catholic Church believing so having miracles, it would seem quite um hypocritical of them espousing that belief and ignoring the fact that that could be commonplace in society. Magic existed, and explorations within the world of magic, within magical texts, were actually sponsored really heavily in certain sects of the church. The Benedictines had a huge library down in Kent full of magical texts, and in between prayer and the daily chores around the abbey, uh the brethren were encouraged to read and perfect anything they could in these texts. The idea was that if anything nefarious was going to happen in the world of evil, it'd be better if we knew how to kind of foresee that happening and to try it out for ourselves to try and control it. So, again, the belief was absolute. But in 1420, something changes. A new idea takes hold in Central Europe, and this idea is that actually the idea of magical practice isn't just something that should be going along alongside religious society. Magical practice is actually sponsored by God wanting people to have their faith tested, and to do that, God would enable people to actually undertake these magical practices by the aid of demons. That belief had never existed previously, and suddenly it comes into focus, and the idea grows and it spreads, and it comes out of the Latin world, and through it's Europe, uh that the world's full of demons being summoned on a heath of a Friday, all this kind of classical stuff, that's where it comes from, and it arrives in England, and therefore Cheshire, about a hundred years later. It germinates, it takes root, and it arrives in England around about 1520. At the same time, a book is published, Malice Malfacarium by Heinrik Kramer, published in the late 1400s. He's a German priest and he's obsessed with this idea. And he publishes a book that actually, if you ever read it, it's quite ridiculous. Um, to the point where some people thought it was a parody on their contemporary views, but nonetheless, it's very powerful and it took hold. And this new thinking now said that not only is the issue of witchcraft a demonic one, but that should mean that anyone associated with it is right for persecution. So that toleration is completely gone, and now it is the church's duty and all godly people's duty to actually go after and persecute witchcrafter and practitioners of witchcraft as a kind of um heresy. And the book was taken up by High Society and became a bit of a Bible on the topic. Then, as that grows through, another book is published. We're getting the end of the 1500s now, and King James I of England, when he was King of Scotland, publishes his own book on witchcraft called Demonology. King James I was obsessed with witchcraft. He saw that this was at every level of society and that he was leading people astray, and he was a challenge for the godly people of earth, and he saw himself as a figurehead of a resistance movement against it. Let's not forget, everyone believed it was real. Everyone believed that this thing existed in everyday society. So in the late 1500s, he has a bit of a nightmare getting back from Scandinavia to Scotland. There's a storm at sea, and of course he blames witches for it. And when he gets back, furthermore, he investigates and he ends up actually presiding over some of these first witch trials that took place. So we're entering a world now where those accused of witchcraft are actively sought out, those accused of witchcraft are put on trial, and again, it's that reason of protecting the godly, but that soon starts to mutate. In 1604, the witchcraft act is passed into law, and what we see here is a piece of legislation that the wording of will be repeated over and over again over the next hundred years in the prosecution of witches and all elements of the witch trial, everything's in that act of 1604. And so a situation arises whereby if you are at a local level trying to get ahead with local landowners, or if you are at a high level nobility to find witches to prosecute witches, actually now becomes a political issue. Because if the king is so obsessed with it and he will let anybody have his ear on that topic if he thinks they know the source, suddenly for you to become involved in the prosecution of these individuals is a real way to get ahead. It's a state-sponsored method of furthering your career. And beneath that swell of politics, at a local level, people see what's happening. They've seen that somebody's been carted off to the big house on the hill, never to be seen again. You see all this that goes on, and what do people do? They realise I've got a grudge with this neighbour, I've had a family feud with that family going back 50 years. Now I've got a way of getting rid of them if I point my finger convincingly enough and accuse them of being a witch. And so a social pandemic is born, and we arrive at a point in time now known as the English witchcraze. So, yeah, come the early 1600s, the witchcraze is born, and it is mostly an English phenomenon right the way through society, and this is really important because elsewhere it's not happening. So, yes, it's been born in Europe, and some people here tonight may be familiar with the things that were happening in Spain, etc., you know, um finding witches that way, but that is a different thing, it arrives in England in a unique form, but it's not happening in Scotland. In fact, the highlands of Scotland, they don't have any witch trials, it's all in the low ones, like the ones that King James presided over, where there's English settlers. In Wales, too, unless it's predominantly long-standing English communities, they're not trying witches. In Ireland, they're not trying witches, and the only time it is again, is if there's an Englishman at the root of them, because their culture, the idea of the Roman image of a witch, just doesn't exist there. So it becomes a really um acute English phenomenon. You'll hear stories about people being burnt at the stake and things like that. But in general, it was hanging, and we'll come across there. So anywhere that is Celts or Gaelic speakers, you won't find any witch trials or the idea of wanting witches within their community. So, what's happening in England? Broadly, this is broken down into three categories that we've touched on before. Number one, people who communities really believe to be practicing the dark arts, because again, don't forget, that was a real thing. They've had been whipped into a frenzy. Number two, people who will uh throw the accusation of witchcraft as a way of settling scores and grudges, and then number three, people who are marked out as outcasts of society, inconvenient people, odd people, strange people, they're an easy target. They tend to be the ones that have been focused on by the kind of people trying to get ahead in the political sphere, and alongside that, you've got all of these everyday grudges being borne out now with an authority that can actually do something about them. Dragged before a local justice and at times tortured. We see any museum in England will have something in there from the witch craze, and we see people who will have thumb screws and all this kind of nasty stuff, and this is where we get the classic image of dunking stools. That didn't actually happen. Uh, the dunking stool was a punishment for medieval tradesmen who weren't doing the jobs properly, but it's been it's been brought through. Accusations ranged from murder by the making of clay dolls. That's the thing I think of when I think of witchcraft, you know, voodoo dolls, but much before. To the bewitching of a neighbour's cow where the milk has gone sour. Um, and then you've got all of your cavorting with him some heath and you know, meeting up with the devil at midnight, giving him a kiss. So you can imagine all that stuff's going on as well. It's a real mix, but it doesn't matter what you're accused of, the outcome could be just the same. As we move into Cheshire, because we can see here, in total, around 500 witches across England were brought to trial. Um, about 100, 105 in Kirk's Avenue were executed, um, hanged. And in Cheshire, this was carried out at Chester, 34 trials and eight hangings, the peak being a 10-year period uh from the end of the 1640s to uh 1659. But then all the good sort of key fears down in this world, this maelstrom of strangeness that's taking place in Cheshire during the period, uh, because there's a couple of people who we'll get to the actual witches, but there's a couple of people that we have to mention just because of what bizarre and incredible lives they had connected to the time. John Bradshaw was born near Stockport in 1602. He was a lawyer, a major political figure, Chief Justice of Cheshire, and he was most famous, I think, to history for being one of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant. So he was someone who helped bring that through at the end of the Civil War period and really make it stick because they had a problem with the king of the Civil War, no one knew what to the other, and actually a lot of people did not want him dead, they just wanted him controlled. But when the faction moved forward and they needed man of legal standing to actually sign his death warrant, he was at the front of the king. If Cheshire had anything like a Witch Finder General, it was him. He's connected in so many cases. Uh, personal connections in the background. Um, again, there's an a business dealer and a politics there, but he was also a man who kind of took to the situation of zeal. He had a very gruesome end though, just as a point of this chap. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, as you may be aware, there was this bizarre situation that developed where the people who signed the death warrant of King Charles I were, or if they were dead, were dug up, and their remains handed, and he was one of them. So for everything that happened, um, yeah, things did not end well for John Bradshaw. But he's the chapter to be reminded when we talk about the traumas that follow. This Jack Thomas Kuma goes missing a lot when we talk about witchcraft in general, um, especially in the north of England, he shouldn't do. Because it's quite an incredible situation. He came to Great Budworth, um, the village of Great Budworth of Cheshire at the end of the 1500s, so just as that kind of fever for witchcraft was starting to bubble away in the church and in politics. And he has a bizarre time in Great Budworth. For those who know the village today, it's so picture perfect and lovely. It kind of blows my mind when we think about the sky knocking around there. So while he's there, he creates a diary. He's already interested in witchcraft, but he starts a diary because it would seem the level of activity or perceived activity of witches around Northwich and Granny Budworth is astonishing. He comments that he's constantly at the buffering of Satan in his deadly chores. He does battle with a Confederacy of Witches in Northwich. And this goes on throughout his time there. And then he plays witness to an event that's largely been a loss to history. And the reason I'm giving this background before we get to the actual witch trials is just to show the level of and the depth of this subject permeating through the local region. All of these stories are in the textbooks. If you buy a word of witchcraft, you might barely get mentioned. And this must be the case for people in every village, in every town all across England. But local records we can came out. So something happens whereby there's this character left to us the records called the Boyd of Northridge. I think his name was Thomas Harrison. We don't know who the witches were, and we don't really know what happened to him. But what we know is what was left. And this is that he was apparently possessed again by demons, that whole kind of rhetoric coming in, was so severe that when we get way into the future, past this age of persecution for witches, his case has still been referred to when legal speak into the 1700s. He must have been really severe. And he makes a mark on Charles Cooper. So he leaves Go Pop about 1610, and he goes to Coventry and then he goes to London. And he advocates for the royal uh for a royal society to be set up to study witchcraft. Um and it almost happens. So again, this this idea, this kind of weird magical thinking, is so strong that when someone says they sing these things, he's believed, and when he takes it to the powers of being in the capital, they consider this study group. It's uh it's a it's amazing. So Thomas Cooper always want to give him a shout out when I'm talking about witches. Those witches, those people from society who were accused of various misdemeanours, would all follow pretty much the same path. They would be brought to a local justice and they'd end up in Chester. And when they were in Chester, large at the Northgate prison, they would then be transferred to trial at the Court of Common Please, which is in St. Werber Street, is now super drunk. So the next time you're in Chester getting your deodron, I don't know. Um yeah, strange things have gone on in that building. From there, executions would take place on Gallows Hill, which is now Barrelwell Hill in Broughton. That is a very strange place historically, so I can understand an area of your town, your city being the designated place for execution. That happens everywhere. But what we actually have on Gallows Hill is a kind of theme park of the Macaw. So you've got the gallows, you've got I think there's four sets of stocks, you've got um a pitch pyre where some people who were burned, not for witchcraft, but other things, were like 50 yards away for people being hanged. Um, and apparently at times it'll draw crowds of 15 to 20,000 people for a full day's worth of death. Um, so perhaps not the same as Chester on a Saturday night now, but rough times indeed. From there, the bodies will be taken down and they'd typically be buried in a castle ditch just outside the graveyard of uh St. Mary on the Hill. So as we look at these on the screen, these are the witches executed in Chester. Civil Mercer from Acton, 1631, bewitching cows. And that would literally be that somebody's cow had a porter of milk. So again, we can see that low-level country grudge by uh Alan and Elizabeth Stoppes from Chalford, 1654 murder. Well, at least that's worth getting hung for, I guess. Um Stanley from Chalford, again, Death of a Cow. Yeah, couldn't just drop dead, couldn't be alien, been witched. Alan Beach and Osburston, who we'll be moving on to in detail in a moment. Um murder, cavalry with imps, that's my favourite. And Thornton from Eton, murder, and then the last one, Mary Bagley from World of the Clough, or Wild Bull Clough, as you're supposed to say. She's really late on, 1675. Um, Mary was arrested by the parish constables and taken before the Assired Chester for the murder of somebody called Robert Hall, who she'd visited several times in the days before his death. Mary was a healer, she was a herbalist. And the problem was she admitted that she'd been to see Robert Hall, she admitted that she should try to treat him, but when they got an expert in to ask her what was this tincture that she'd made, what was this ointment, they used different names than Mary did. Same plants, different names, and so it was obvious Mary was a witch, and um and she cocked it for us. On the 16th of October, she was convicted of killing Robert Hall, and the following morning she was hanged. Now, each of these cases has got a long litany of ducking attention. Impossible for us to cover tonight, and we'd be here forever. So we're gonna zoned in on one, and I think is perhaps the best case of the lot to really show how these things played out. Then you've got the memorial stone that's there to this day, and it's quite the tale. So the Autumn Assize Court in 1656, three witches were brought to trial in Chester. Anne Thornton from Eton, completely separate case, and these two from the village of Rayna, Alan and Anne. The following accounts of their actions are taken from that court testimony of September 1656, a session of which they were both hanged, uh convicted, sorry, and then hanged on October the 8th and buried in the castle ditch the next morning. Alan, wife of John Beach, later of Rainnow in Cheshire, Collier, on the 12th of September 1651, and on diverse other days as well, before as after at Rainnow, did exercise and practice the invocation and conjuration of evil and wicked spirits with which she consulted, entertained and rewarded. On the said 12th of September, Alan Beach did exercise certain witchcrafts upon Elizabeth Cowper, later Rainnow, Spinster, whereby she, from the 12th day to the 20th of September, did languish and then die. Regarding Anne Osburston, Alan's neighbour, her account states a considerable number of charges relating to her involvement with witchcraft. Anne Osburston, on that same 12th of September, practiced certain wicked and devilish acts upon John Steenson, husbandman, so he's a farmer, which caused his death on the 20th of November. And on the 30th of November, Anne used enchantments upon Anthony Booth of Maclesfield, a gentleman, causing his death on April the 1st following. So that's six months later. Two more entries are mentioned for Anne. That a Barbara Potts was cursed on the 20th of November 1651, dying on the 20th of January the following year. And that four years later, much closer to the time of the apprehension, a yeoman of Reynau too died following the encounter with her on the heath where she was walking a demon. Make of that what you will. Clearly, not the most popular woman in Cheshire, by all accounts. But as the 1600s wore on, the idea of these witch hunts, witch trials, become less and less fashionable. They still happened, but they weren't prosecuted with the same kind of rigour and zeal as they had been before. And come the 1680s, we had a major political event, obviously, with the Glorious Revolution going with Orange comes to the throne, and all of that stuff kind of just threw a lot of the uh more frivolous, as it became by then, the more kind of magical aspects of what judges should be spending their times doing kind of got thrown out of the bath water. And it was in 1685 that the last person in England was hanging for witchcraft, um, Alice Marlett down in Exeter. There would be other characters that pop up in the Cheshire records to do with witchcraft. One of the most popular is Bridget Bostock, a woman from Cockenole who became known as the Cheshire Doctress during the 1700s. She was a healer. She was never really accused of anything nefarious because, again, the world was changing. And she became so famous for her ability to cure all manner of ills that around 500 people a day were said to have travelled to her home asking for help. To the point that she had to refuse and retire. And then things got really weird when she got local gentry asking her to raise the dead of their family. And it was just it was the opposite, it was like suddenly not being shunned, everyone wanted to see the action on Bridget Bostock. But she's remembered to us today as a white witch. From Bostock's time through to the end of the 18th century, we of course passed through the Industrial Revolution, and everything changes. All of those rural communities, they're now resettled and brought into the cities, the new urban centres that are developing, and we see a big kind of exchange of folklore. That's the point in time whereby a legend that had been doing the rounds, say here in Hartford for 500 years, would now spring up anew north of Manchester. Because people have moved and exchanged stories, that's when it happens, the industrial revolution. But through that, people aren't so concerned about witchcraft anymore. So as we move forward and we're talking about the blood and witch. When we talk about witches today, there may be even less room to consider themselves a witch up for. And we've broadly got four kind of areas that breaks down into. We've got the wicker, we have our wicker a lot. Wicca is a 20th-century reinterpretation or invention of magical practice from earlier in history. Think about people like the Golden Dawn, Margaret Murray. So we've got that with that waking kind of side of things. It's all very spiritual and it's connecting into the earth. We have the earth goddess, kind of new age feelings, lots of crystals, and that kind of positive energy. That's another form when the beliefs of the past have migrated into the present. Obviously, in the media, it's big business, we mentioned before, Harry Potter. And druidism. Druidism came out of the Victorian period. As again, a bit like Wicker, where really progression of beliefs that want possibly trying to understand from thousands of years ago. But people broke into groups and find something in the same wheelhouse as the magical thinking that has inspired us for thousands of years. That's what I find fascinating by the modern view of witchcraft in its various guises. When you peel back the way it's dressed up, and you peel about the ceremony and the ideas, the TV shows, and all this, it's coming back to that central place that people have always had a belief in witchcraft. Well, thank you very much, Perhaps.