West Country witchcraft and the hanged women of urban Exeter

West Country witchcraft and the hanged women of urban Exeter

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‘Conjurations, enchantment and witchcrafts’ were made a capital offence in England in 1563. Photograph: Octavio Passos/Getty Images


Exeter is believed to hold the ignoble record of having hanged the last women convicted of witchcraft in England. Now research by a West Country academic suggests it may also have been the first place to convict and execute such unfortunates, for crimes such as being seen with a large toad. In 2014 hundreds of modern witches converged on the city, demanding a retrospective pardon for three elderly women hanged in 1682, Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles, who were followed in 1685 by Alice Molland, whose execution was believed to be the last of its kind although the law was not changed until 1735.

New research by Mark Stoyle, professor of early modern history at the University of Southampton, who lives in Exeter, suggests that the city may also have been the first to execute witches more than a century earlier. Maud Park and Alice Mead were convicted soon after the law was changed in 1563 to make “conjurations, enchantment and witchcrafts” a capital offence, and though Stoyle has been unable to find a record of their execution, he fears that was almost certainly their fate. In 1585 Thomasine Shorte was hanged, convicted of bewitching and killing the entire family of an Exeter weaver. Men met the same fate: in 1610 Richard Wilkyns was hanged for injuring or killing livestock and people through witchcraft.

Stoyle, whose research is published this week in a book, Witchcraft in Exeter 1558-1660, said: “When you go through the records of the assizes, it is really striking how far such cases stretch back, and it’s not easy to explain why there should have been so many in Exeter. These cases do not match the traditional image of rural witches living in isolated cottages – these are urban witches, often elderly women mostly living a hand-to-mouth existence on the poor fringes of the city – but in some ways this was the ideal setting for the spread of disease, fires, the unexplained death of children and animals, exactly the sort of crimes the witches were believed to commit.”


Familiars, animals believed to be manifestations of evil spirits, were common features, Stoyle said. “Toads, for some reason, are particularly common. One unfortunate old woman was spotted by a neighbour sitting by the fire with a toad in her lap, and that was enough to condemn her.” Mary Stone, an Exeter widow, was accused of having as a familiar a rat that spied on her neighbours. She was accused of killing chickens, infesting a household with lice and killing a man by bewitching him into falling from a field stile. Stoyle believes Stone was a rare acquittal, a woman who survived and continued to live among her presumably deeply suspicious neighbours

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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/31/west-country-witches-witchcraft-witches-hanged