Welcome to Witches Truth Trials and Terrors, a podcast where we explore one of the most enduring, misunderstood, and fascinating ideas in human history. For centuries, witches have stalked through our stories and our imaginations. They've terrified us, they've entertained us, they've amused us, and occasionally inspired us. They've appeared in fairy tales, in folklore, in films, television dramas, horror stories, and even children's books. Yet for all their familiarity, there remained a surprisingly simple question at the heart of it all. What exactly is a witch? Not the Halloween version, not the Hollywood version, not the one with the pointed hat and the broomstick, but the witch that ordinary people genuinely believed existed. The witch that could supposedly blight crops, kill livestock, bring illness, summon storms, ruin marriages, curse families, and threaten entire communities. The witch that thousands of people across Europe and America were accused of being. That seems like the perfect place to begin. Because over the course of this series we'll be exploring everything, from village healers and cunning folk, to witch trials and witch hunts, from the devil and demonology to the notorious witches' sabbats, from the surprising role of men in witchcraft, to the reasons the great persecutions eventually collapse, and finally, to the strange ways witches have survived to become part of modern popular culture. And to help me navigate that world, I'm joined by two people who spent much of their professional lives thinking about witches. Robin Briggs is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and one of the world's foremost historians of witchcraft. Robin has spent decades immersed in the surviving records of witchcraft accusations across Europe. If a frightened villager, a suspicious neighbor, a local magistrate or accused witch has left behind a document, there's a fair chance that Robin has read it. And Professor Alison Rowlands is one of Britain's leading historians of witchcraft in early modern Europe. She's a professor of European history at the University of Essex, and specializes in the communities where accusations emerged, the relationships between neighbours, and the extraordinary ways ordinary disputes could sometimes evolve into accusations of magic and malice. Between them, they've spent so many years studying witches that if either of them suddenly developed an interest in herbal remedies, I suspect the rest of us might be just a little nervous. Oh, and I'm John Briggs, known to some as the original voice of Siri, and others as the purveyor of ghost stories on my annual Christmas and now monthly fireside ghost stories, so my fascination with the dark and the magical is already established. My role is just to ask why a lot. So let's begin with the obvious question. Robin, after a lifetime of studying witchcraft, when you hear the word witch, what image or definition immediately comes to your mind?
SPEAKER_02Well, I guess I'm thinking of a peasant from a long time ago, probably a woman, but by no means necessarily, who has got into difficulties with their neighbors and who um is finding life quite difficult because of the suspicions. I mean, I so I think I see it in a rather quiet way, perhaps, compared with these fantastic imaginings that, of course, I also know about and study. And I think about the sort of thing you've just mentioned. I mean, the the the various harms that are supposed to be done. I should say uh just one thing I'd add is that um studying these trials, I found very quickly you you got sucked into it, really. You started to think these people might really be witches, and you had to stop yourself thinking that. The evidence is really rather compelling in its funny way. I don't know if Alison's found the same.
SPEAKER_01Well, Alison, I'm going to ask you the same question. What about you? What actually is a witch when you think about it, when you picture somebody?
SPEAKER_00I think because I like Robin, I work very much on the uh legal records of the 16th and 17th centuries. I think we are very immersed in that early modern world where the witch is very much in the eye of the beholder. In other words, it's the neighbour who begins to imagine that someone in their community, very often a woman, might be doing them harm, might be a threat to them and their family, and they begin to imagine that they might be a harming witch. And then they can potentially take that person to court. But I think the thing I would add to that, which kind of links back to your introduction, John, is that I think the word witch is immensely powerful, but also immensely kind of flexible and malleable. And I think its meaning changes significantly according to your perspective, according to your profession, according uh to which century you're living in. So I think the ways in which uh witches get imagined is is is also changeable. So I think Robin and I are dealing with this very powerful early modern way of imagining witches, but that's not to say it isn't changing in later centuries.
SPEAKER_01So in our first episode, I thought it might be worth discovering the world in which accusations of witchcraft actually started to emerge. So for that reason, we described this episode as the world before reason. What if you genuinely believed that every failed harvest, every dead cow, and every sudden illness in your community was caused by an unseen force? Alison, look, if I woke up in a medieval village tomorrow morning, what would surprise me most about how people understood the world around them?
SPEAKER_00Um, I think that's a very useful exercise to try and to try and do. I get my students to try and do that quite often. Um I think um it's the sense that you're kind of living on the edge of subsistence. Um so those kind of key questions: will I get enough to eat? Will I be healthy? Will I be fit? Will I be able to work? Will I be able to harvest? Will my children survive? I think the the level of sort of existential anxiety and fear would have been a lot higher. But also, I think the other thing that we would struggle to kind of get our heads around is the degree to which magic and the supernatural and the religious permeated aspects of life so much so that I don't think people categorized. I think one of the problems is we're immediately categorizing, you know, that's magic, that's reason, that's religion, that's the supernatural. But I think for them it was just a whole worldview in which on the scene, yet incredibly powerful and potentially manipulable forces were were just part and parcel of their everyday lives.
SPEAKER_01Did people really believe that they there were invisible things all around them, therefore?
SPEAKER_02Oh yes. I mean, they believed in all kinds of, well, we wouldn't perhaps say supernatural or or non-human beings. I mean, and obviously angels and devils are part of that, but many more imaginary creatures and uh are around them. But but also that almost everything somehow has a force attached to it, you might say. I mean that there are emanations, there's a whole n a vast network of influences passing from one thing to another. Um, and you can do something about it. You can use ritual um and magical objects to tr to try and protect yourself, to deflect whatever it is you fear. I mean and I mean this extends into the intellectual sphere, because actually until well into the 17th century at the earliest, there really is no alternative s world system to this vaguely neo-Arist Aristotelian one, where everything is conc really conceived in terms of a kind of binary oppositional arrangement where um you know things are hot and cold, wet and dry, so on. I mean, it's a brilliant fiction, which you think you understand the world when actually you understand virtually nothing about it.
SPEAKER_01But so if a cow died unexpectedly or a crop failed, which we know are the basis of a lot of the initial accusations. Was bad luck even an option, or did that not even come into it?
SPEAKER_00I think it could be. So it's not that people always blame misfortune on witchcraft. I think if they had, we would have had thousands and thousands and thousands more witch trials. So I think people at that time they could blame bad luck, they could blame potentially God's intervention, God's punishment. Um, so it wasn't that they were always looking for magical explanations. So I think there had to be other things in place, such as a perhaps a problematic social relationship with a suspect or a particularly uh severe set of external circumstances. Although, if I might just add, John, just following on from what Robin said, um I think yes, this is all happening in villages, but it's absolutely happening at the elite level as well. So if we think about, you know, Queen Elizabeth and her sort of court magician, astronomer, mathematician John D, who's trying to talk to angels sort of on her behalf. And, you know, we've got James uh the sixth of Scotland who thinks he's being attacked by witches. So I think one thing I would just perhaps be a bit cautious about is suggesting this is just kind of a peasant worldview.
SPEAKER_01Um, this is kings, bishops, and scholars as well. They believed in this this same mm magic or or religion possibility of events occurring or the reasons behind them.
SPEAKER_02Yes, they did. I mean, Queen Elizabeth indeed, I mean, was uh not just Dee. I mean, she was also um funding some alchemists, but thinking that we might solve her financial problems for her. I mean, which was not an irrational thing to to do, given how they understood the world. The idea that you could transmute metals was perfectly reasonable. I think also Alison's point is a very key one. I mean, had they resorted to witchcraft as the first explanation for all misfortune, I uh wouldn't well, life would have been unlivable. And it is interesting, of course, in these cases, we can look at the work of social of anthropologists. I mean, one of the greatest books ever written on witchcraft is by Evans Pritchard, who I actually knew in his old his late career, though he wasn't willing to talk about that sort of thing, really. But um but he in you know in the 1930s he uh uh published a wonderful book on witchcraft oracles and magic in among the Zande, who are pe Nilotic people in um Southern Sudan, as it now is. And uh there there's a m wonderfully pervasive system of witchcraft beliefs, and yet they're awfully sensible, really. They they manage to run their lives without getting too excited about it. And um you know, I think that's true of early modern people, and you do find actually some of the accused when they're put on trial, providing naturalistic explanations. They say, Well, you they they didn't have any hay, did they? They were feeding it on rubbish, you know, and so that's why it died. This sort of I mean, you you know, they're they're not at all stupid.
SPEAKER_01Is this also the sort of the human nature in which the the the disaster is what hits the headlines rather than the good news? So would there be any any reasoning behind a great harvest or a successful birth of numerous cows or whatever it might be? Or was that not regarded? It was only the things that went wrong that used to attract this criticism?
SPEAKER_00I think I think it's more the case that um a really high value is placed on on fertility, generally speaking. So I think harvest and childbirth, they're seen in in the same sort of conceptual kind of framework of valuing fertility, procreation, you know, having children, raising children, having successful harvests. So all of that would have been celebrated. And I think a lot of the magical effort that that Robin talked about earlier goes into ensuring that happens. So, you know, you protect your crops, you you try and get rid of caterpillars, you know, you you hang amulets around your baby's neck to protect it against illness and so on.
SPEAKER_01So I think there's a there's a really strong connection between the importance of of sort of fertility in its wider sense and I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the accusation level is because something goes wrong, you would therefore accuse somebody. But if somebody was known to perhaps be magical in averted commas, a wise woman of the uh of the community, would they be praised if things went well?
SPEAKER_00I don't think that wise women tend to be accused of harmful magic as often as you might think. I think there's a real conceptual divide. Magic is so important to ordinary people that they they don't go around accusing their cunning folk very willingly or very quickly of being harming witches because the risk is uh you know you end up having them in court and getting them executed, and then you've lost one of your main sort of modes of protection. Um what you sometimes get, I mean, I've got some cases from from the German area that I work on where actually women who are too good at things get accused of being witches by their neighbours. So women who are too successful at making cheese and butter, for example. People don't see that, they don't say, oh, what a great, you know, dairy woman that that neighbour is. They they say, well, she must be using magical help or the devil's help, she's stealing her neighbour's milk. So it's a kind of this idea of limited good, you know, you can only kind of conceptualize someone else's success, potentially in terms of magical help. Uh so I think it goes back to your point about human nature, perhaps. Sometimes it's very uncharitable. You know, we we don't like saying, Oh, that woman's better than me at making butter. We kind of look for an explanation that brings in uh demonic assistance. So, yeah, success can be conceptualized as magical. But again, I think my my sense of it is that it's more at that scale of able women being being sometimes criticized for being too good at what they do.
SPEAKER_02Yes, but I've had I've found some cases exactly of that kind. Quite interestingly, I I'm I would have to check back, but I I rather think my impression, my memory is that they tended not to actually get convicted, and indeed sometimes weren't even tortured. I mean that um this wasn't a very compelling argument in the eyes of the authorities, I think. And and two or three of them I can remember defended themselves rather adeptly. I mean, saying yes, but I, you know, I took great care and I did this and I did that, and so of course my results were better. So again, they uh they're very commonsensical a lot of the time. I mean, it it's uh you can believe in all this magic and uh and use it, um, but you at the same time you you're very practical. And I think it's very easy to underestimate the skills of our peasant ancestors, you know. They they had to cope and they had to be multitasking non-specialists.
SPEAKER_01It is, though, this thing that you that you describe, it is so hard for us to put ourselves into the shoes of peasants in that era, because we just we don't have any experience of life as lived like that, do we?
SPEAKER_00No, but I think I think imaginative empathy is very helpful. I mean, I actually really enjoy sort of novels about witchcraft, plays about witchcraft, and I use sort of empathy writing when I'm teaching. Because I think you're absolutely right, John. It's very hard, but to try and make that imaginatively, because I think if we don't do that, the danger is we just sort of transport our assumptions about what's going on in into this world. So we think, oh, they must have been accusing conning folk. Because that's what we would have done, that's what would make sense to us. So I think it's about not transposing what what we think would be reasonable or rational back into their into their world.
SPEAKER_01We get into this slightly sort of Monty Python world, don't we? Where where you know that that illustration as which is so mainstream becomes what we think is is reality. Let me talk about uh though the other thing that I'm not sure about, and I'm sure you can can explain this, what what role the church played uh in in this? Was it fighting superstition or was it helping people manage it?
SPEAKER_02Well, that's uh that's a nice question. I mean, i there were always, I think, some clerics whose instinct was to fight it. And certainly on the whole, it looks as if the earlier medieval church w did if not fight I mean, i it it played a double game. I mean, it it sort of worked with it and and incorporated it at the same time as trying to keep a distance from it. I it's quite hard to characterize this accurately, I think. Then, I mean, of course, it is unquestionably the um, I think the friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, who create the myth of the great diabolical conspiracy in which witches are involved. I mean, we haven't been talking about that, obviously, but but it is part of the imaginative world and the and this animistic world that we're talking about, really. I mean, and and and the way they did it was uh very largely was going round talking to ordinary people and then putting together the s various stories and being rather putting them into a rather more logical system, which at the same time is, of course, a complete fiction and brings in the devil. I mean, I don't think the devil features very much in originally in the minds of villagers who are thinking about witchcraft. I think the witchcraft is much more a personal quality of the other person. But but the church turned it into a diabolical conspiracy. I mean So they could use it to their advantage, as a chance. Well, I don't know if I I don't know whether they how far it's their advantage. I mean, they um I think they were faced with a great evil and something which made sense to them. Their world is one in which they they think there's a um divinely appointed progression through certain ages, which is going to end up with the millennium and the second coming. For instance, I mean, the famous early demonologist Heinrich Kramer, in his Malius Maleficarum, already has this argument: the millennium will only come when the when the prescribed number of the just has been reached. And therefore, what the devil is doing is trying to recruit as many people as possible and cause as much trouble as possible so that people will behave badly and and God will be so-coming won't happen. And I can continue to exist and and be in the world because it because the second coming is postponed. You know, and has ideas like that, which uh quite clearly are widely held, I mean, among the demonologists writing on this. So, yes, I mean there are all sorts of levels of imagination involved. Uh I I doubt you would have found anybody in the village who would have quite picked up on that. Yeah, I mean the the persecution does involve this wider range of of of beliefs, because I mean villagers can, on the whole, think they can deal with this, I think, by um informal sanctions. They might kill, I think they might kill the odd witch in the d in the dark ages, as it were, but but on the whole, what you're doing is trying to get a cure. And the way you get a cure is to get the witch to take off the spell. So so when you go to your cunning man or woman, um first thing you want is to confirm your belief that X has bewitched you. And then you can get them to do something. It's a little too much to say that it's a therapeutic system, but it partly it is. I mean, it's a it's a way of getting the bad vibes removed. I mean, and and a lot of suspects play into that. Very sensitive.
SPEAKER_01Alison, it's so if if if somebody's child became ill, where would they turn first? Would it be a priest, a doctor, or would it be a cunning woman?
SPEAKER_00I think early modern peasants are very practical, they're very pragmatic, they would try lots of different things. Usually a housewife might employ some homemade remedies to start with, because that would have been part of her repertoire of of skills. You might go to a priest, um, you wouldn't obviously go, you know, you wouldn't have the money to access sort of um more educated urban physicians. But um, if the illness didn't sort of cease, if you were particularly concerned, um if there was something perhaps particularly strange about what was going on, you might then go to a cunning person for more remedies, but also as Robin said, quite quite often for it's kind of like they're outsourcing the final sort of identification of a neighbour as a witch to this other magical practitioner. So it was very common for someone to go and sort of talk generally about suspicions they had about so-and-so, and then the cunning person would make the link. Um, and that's why, you know, cunning folk are actually kind of critiqued in some of the uh more skeptical early modern demonologies. Cunning folk are actually um criticized for identifying witches and bringing the weight of the law down on their heads. So um, you know, you get some sceptical demonologists uh in the 16th and 17th centuries actually criticizing cunning folk for what they were doing. Um so I think the kind of key entanglement in the early modern period is this magical belief system is is getting caught up in the law as much as it is in in religion. It's the fact that, you know, magic and harming magic as witchcraft is is criminalized. That's certainly pushed by new religious ideas and by an emphasis on the godly state during the Reformation, for example. But it's the fact that going to law might be another option. So so into that mix of possible things you could do. With the criminalization of harming witchcraft, do you then get at least the possibility of also taking uh a supposedly harming witch to court?
SPEAKER_02To some extent, uh the belief system clashed there because the um there was also this idea that that the witch uh couldn't remove the evil once they'd been arrested and accused, which uh gets put about. So so there is in a way a discouragement to to taking formal action. Of course, if the baby is dead, then I suppose that you know then that does in a way release you. I would add that one would expect women to already have some ideas. But of course, a lot of mothers are still relatively young, and women did, I think, very much form groups in the village, you know. I mean, and and they would have their their friends whom they would call I mean, you know, childbirth itself, women are surrounded by a group of female friends, no men, usually. But then with sick babies, you might go to a relative or you might go to one of your friends, perhaps one who's a little bit older and had children and get advice from them. And and of course that's one of the ways in which opinion can form as well. So what is shaping all of this?
SPEAKER_01Because the the the descriptions you're giving, there's almost a a maelstrom of different ideas and different beliefs. Why does one become the biggest belief, the one that that shapes opinion within the community? Because you you you talked about them saying, well, actually, do you know what? If she's arrested, she can't lift the hex. So my child or my crops won't get better. But that's only one idea in a maelstrom of different ideas that will be circulating. So, how does the definition of what is correct and what is not correct, what is believed and what is not believed within this group of people come to ab come to be?
SPEAKER_00I think it's very, it's very complicated and very messy, and that's kind of one of the challenges is that there's no easy explanation, there's no one explanation. It's regionally varied. Um, so the the area that I work on in in Germany, people don't tend to take suspected witches to court. And that's partly because the local authorities there are very reluctant to interrogate people under torture. They're very, very, very sceptical about the idea of the witch's Sabbath. And you're not very successful in inverted commas. If you take someone to court, you're actually more likely to get prosecuted for slander yourself for having slandered someone for witchcraft. So in that region, you develop a way of managing witches that's probably much more like that kind of pragmatic, sort of self-managing community way of dealing with concerns. Um, in other parts of Europe, you get much more willingness on the part of the governing elite to actually run with these accusations in court. And that could be for a whole range of very strategic political reasons, religious reasons, personal reasons, particular judges are much more zealous than others, and they might run with accusations. Belief in the witches' Sabbath, I think, is really important because once you get the idea of a demonic conspiracy taken a bit more seriously, that could encourage communities. And people learn by doing. So mass executions make some people think, oh yeah, we can take witches to court. But in other parts of Europe, mass executions make people think, gosh, that's a really bad idea taking witches to court. So I think it's that kind of regional complexity that is, for me anyway, the one of the most interesting things. But sometimes I think people nowadays they want a kind of a really straightforward answer, and I don't think that's possible, and I don't see why it should be. We don't expect any other historical issue to be kind of straightforward. So I think the the history of witch trials, particularly witch persecution, which I think is distinct from the beliefs. Um you can have the beliefs, but they don't necessarily always lead to trials, and it's what's kind of tipping that point over that I think is so intriguing.
SPEAKER_01Robin, I mean the areas you studied in are very different, are they? Because there were those they seem to be much more willing to take witches to trial. There are numerous examples of it, sometimes more so than one would be expected in the level of population there.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I mean, I worked on Lorraine, which was an independent duchy on the edge of between France and the Holy Roman Empire at this time. And there you have one of the highest measured rates of persecution, I mean, setting numbers of trials against population in Europe.
SPEAKER_01Um why are your areas more intense than the areas that Allison has studied?
SPEAKER_02Well, uh that's a question to which I think nobody would give a would have a confident answer. I mean, I because there are other regions where you'd think the same thing's operated, and yet it doesn't happen. So uh I mean you have a a judicial system which seems, because the evidence is actually very scanty, seems more or less to have been borrowed from the neighboring kingdom of France, but but it does have it could also have been borrowed from the German lands, but we don't really know how they developed what they had. But but it was a system where the re the decision lay at the local level, and you have a court, but that court, a few local big whigs, and I say bigwigs, they might just be slightly richer peasants, um, who don't have any legal training and seem really to play almost no part in the whole thing. And you have a a scribe and you have a local provost who's just, you know, sort of all-man, sort of all-purpose administrator, judge, and whatnot, you know, it's all happening locally. It is that they do have to get approval to torture people from a central court, but that's almost always given. And then when they've confessed, to get approval to kill them. Well, I mean, that's not problematic because they've confessed, so, you know, that's it. And uh so they I think they've produced a structure which is very well suited to producing a steady f trickle. I mean, uh it is a trickle, really, when you look at it village by village, of trials and convictions. It's 80% conviction rate. Some people do resist the torture. A few, the evidence is so weak they're not even tortured, but almost everybody is or threatened with it. But the thing which I've realized, and many things surprised me over the years I've worked on this material. And one of them was that I could perceive that there were lots of other suspects who weren't tried and executed. You know, I mean, and there are villages that don't have any trials, and it's impossible, given the picture you get from the villages where there are trials, to think these villages didn't have suspects. They just don't get to that point. I think the majority of them would have a reputation of at least ten years, and there would have been a series of little crises during that time, which were overcome by some sort of local negotiation by the suspect doing something which was perceived as at least intended to help the supposed victim, and so on. And you know, so so even where you have one of the highest known rates, actually, there are lots of other suspects around.
SPEAKER_01You you made an interesting point in in the in the notes before you know we we put this little series together, that there wasn't really any other alternative way of understanding the world. And we now have vast alternatives and vast uh different ideas and cultural themes that we can draw upon to understand what happens to us and and and happens around us. But then there wasn't. And and that's probably it is that what creates this this storm, as it were?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, I think it makes it very hard for critics to really get to the bottom of it. Um, which and and what is actually to me amazing is is the number of people who are skeptical and critical. And I mean, you know, don't think our ancestors are fools. That's a thing to which you know historians I think and are always rather liable to fall into. You know, some of the sixteenth century critics who have no way of challenging this neo-Aristotelian magical worldview, nonetheless, I mean, perceive very clearly what's going on at village level and don't like it, and and and think they're being sucked into something which is perverse and wrong. I mean, had had the elites all behaved, you know, as credulous, just people who accepted everything on trust, then it would have been terrible, or could have been terrible, but it wasn't in that way. And was that what you noticed, Allison, and the communities that you studied?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think the the the con the key context for me is is going back to your earlier point about the church. I mean, we're talking about a period of religious division after the Reformation. And I think one problem that our sceptics have is the Bible says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. And if you're living through a period of religious division and religious conflict, part of being a godly state was rooting out the enemies of of of God. And that I think raises the raises the sort of the temperature in relation to to witchcraft. So a problem that sceptics have is partly kind of thinking beyond this magical worldview and trying to challenge it, um, you know, which which they ultimately do. But it's also a worldview that has, you know, the authority of of the godly state behind it. But I think, you know, there's there's a lot more scepticism and a lot more willingness to explain things through through natural explanations in the early modern period. I think we we we tend to see the the witch trials as as explaining everything, but I think in many ways they're at the tip of a sort of a bigger iceberg.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I've which is why I wanted to kind of lay out the ground about what it was like to live then and what you would therefore believe before we start talking about, you know, the high levels of persecution. Is there an a modern equivalent to this way of thinking? I mean, are our modern-day conspiracy theories the sort of same thing as might have gone on back then, or is d are they not relevant?
SPEAKER_02Well, I think I think there is a fundamental likeness. I mean, I I would say that human beings are very quick to construct explanations for things, and very bad at negative reasoning. I mean, very bad at at saying, well, yes, but it won't work. It's often said, and I think there is some force in it, that um some of the 17th century episodes where you get diabolical possession generated skepticism. I mean, that other people from outside, and and the ways in which you could test um these supposedly possessed women, usually girls, and and you know, and and show that actually they didn't have the strength they were supposed to have, or they didn't know these foreign languages, which you know, and I mean, and what you see, I think, is that you know, you have, for instance, some in one of the most famous cases, you have some very smart Jesuits involved. They get sucked into this. I mean, they they they behave in almost idiotic ways, you would say, I think, because the they're in the scene. I mean, they can't really think outside it. And but rather beautiful case because the um the general of the Jesuits in Rome is getting f very cross indeed about all this. And he says, Can't you find someone else who's less naive and superstitious? I mean, that's what he actually wrote. Um, you know, I mean, uh he's discrediting us.
SPEAKER_01We we don't want to be but that that sort of level of superstition has has has existed for years. I mean, I just I was trying to think of comparative examples, and I just thought, well, the moon landings. There are vast numbers of people who still believe to this day that man did not step on the moon. It was all a backlot in Hollywood, contrary to all the evidence that they might see against it.
SPEAKER_00I think it goes back to what I said earlier about it's what you want to believe. So much of this is what the individual wants or needs to believe, which then gets projected onto a perception of reality. And no, I mean, I again I I talk about that quite a lot when I'm when I'm teaching. Um, you know, I have I have students who say, Well, how could they have possibly believed all this stuff? And and then we start talking about how many people believe in in things like UFOs, in in things like, you know, the moon landings not having happened, in things like um, you know, COVID being caused by by phone masts. So so there is a body of evidence which we nowadays would argue is is scientific and rational.
SPEAKER_01It was just back then it was easier to accuse a member of your community.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. But but but it's it's no more or less rational to do that than it is for us to to have beliefs in in conspiracy theory or or fake news nowadays. And that that's I think part of the problem. It's it's it's a recurring thing, as as Robin was saying.
SPEAKER_01It is actually humankind that is behind all of this and our inability to accept what might be staring us in the face. When did people begin to stop seeing magic behind every event?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, the I I think it's to do with um the emergence of of a new, as we would think, scientific view of the world. I mean, the new natural philosophy, which um, you know, is sort of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, you know, I mean, there's some sort of great heroes within this.
SPEAKER_01But were they not too also regarded with significant suspicion because of what they gave up came up with?
SPEAKER_02Uh no, I don't think not not in not not in the sense of being servants of the devil, as far as I know.
SPEAKER_01No, but but we were also doubtful of what they produced because uh it was new and it was a different way to think.
SPEAKER_02Galileo certainly got in trouble, admittedly, he was a particularly combative and difficult person, and he was actually wrong on some of the key things which he claimed. And Descartes thought that he needed to take refuge in the Netherlands, which was noticeably the notably the most tolerant place in Europe. There was opposition, but it's a rather curious phenomenon. I agree with my friend Michael Hunter, who's written recently about um the end of magic or the decline of magic. I mean, you see, whatever it is, um almost fifty-odd years ago, Keith Thomas wrote this famous book about religion and the decline of magic, which isn't really about the decline of magic at all. The title was a last-minute choice, which is rather misleading, and he d he really more or less says he doesn't have an explanation. And Michael Hunter, who's one of Keith's students, um, argues really for almost a sort of upper class intellectual snobbery, you might say. I mean, the the wits, these smart chaps around town in the age of Charles II and uh so I mean, you know, who who poo-poo all this stuff, you know, w without really having uh uh any very, shall we say, formally um developed view, I think, about the world, but but they they know about the new ideas and they and they and uh you know I think they're they're being smart and they're ridiculing people. And we do hear of episodes like that where you know some stodgy old um conventional cleric is arguing, oh, but you know, the the Bible says this, and and these people are are laughing at them. And I mean, so it it may not be intellectually totally respectable, is what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_00I think it depends as well which people again we're talking about. So I think there's a kind of a level of kind of elite intellectual changing thinking, but I think the vast majority of the population who are still living in villages, they're tied to the agrarian cycle, they're tied to the weather, they're tied to the land. For for many of them, belief in magic, belief in witchcraft, there have been studies, Owen Davies uh, for example, has shown how long many of these beliefs in in magic and counter-magic continue well into the 19th, even into the early 20th century. And the uh Essex, the county that I live in, has the um claim to fame that the very last swimming of an alleged uh witch um happened in uh Sybil Haddingham in Essex in 1863. So I think at the at the agrarian level of society, there's much, much more continuity. And I think Robin's point about the sort of the class differences are really important um because it it's the men who are who are beginning to sneer at these beliefs, they change the legislation, so they they change the law about witchcraft and they stop making it possible to take to take people to court for harming magic. So um I think the changes are going on at one level um and continuity is actually quite important at another level.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's a good place to pause our conversation, I think. Today we've discovered that for most people living in medieval and early modern Europe, the world was a very different place from the one that we inhabit today. A place where almost nothing happened by accident. But here is the thing: for thousands of years, people believed in magic, curses, and harmful supernatural powers. Yet the great European witch hunts only erupted over a relatively short period of history. So what did they happen then? Why did suspicion turn into accusation and why did accusation turn into trial? And just how many people paid the ultimate price. That is where we are heading next time. My thanks to Robin Briggs and to Dr. Alison Rowlands. Join us for episode two of Witches Truth, Trials, and Terrors, as we separate the myths from the reality. I'm John Briggs. Thank you for listening. And remember, next time your milk goes sour, blame your neighbor. That's what they would have done.