Prosecution and Execution for Witchcraft in Exeter

It Is But an Olde Wytche Gonne:Prosecution and Execution for Witchcraft inExeter, 15581610

MARK STOYLEUniversity of Southampton

AbstractFollowing the passage of legislation making witchcraft a capital crime during the mid-sixteenth century, magistrates across England found themselves under increasing pres-sure to investigate the activities of supposed witches. The present article explores howthe Justices of the Peace of one urban community the city of Exeter reacted to thosepressures. The article shows that, in the immediate aftermath of the passage of theElizabethan statute of 1563, the Exeter magistrates were still prepared to punish thosewho had been accused of witchcraft in the traditional way by simply banishing themfrom the city. Attitudes soon became harsher, however, and by 1581, at the very latest,the first execution of a convicted witch at the city gallows can be shown to haveoccurred. At least one further execution was to follow, in 1610, but although thesecases reveal that the hanging of supposed witches in the south-west began at least acentury earlier than was previously thought the evidence suggests that the Exeter JPswere generally more keen to restrain than to encourage the popular enthusiasm forwitch-hunting.hist_511 129..151

The city of Exeter possesses the grim distinction of being the lastplace in England in which people are known to have beenexecuted for the crime of witchcraft. In August 1682, three elderlywomen from the North Devon town of Bideford Temperance Lloyd,Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles were arraigned as witches atthe Exeter assizes, condemned and subsequently hanged, almost cer-tainly at the county gallows at Ringswell in the neighbouring parish of

I should like to thank the members of the History seminar at the University of Warwick and inparticular, Bernard Capp, Steve Hindle and Mark Knights for their comments on an earlier versionof this paper. I am also very grateful to George Bernard, Alistair Dougall, Julie Gammon, the editorof History and the journals anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts ofthe text. I am especially indebted to Jannine Crocker and John Draisey for the invaluable assistancewhich they gave me in deciphering and translating the original documents on which this article isbased.

2011 The Author. History 2011 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Heavitree.1 In March 1685 another woman, one Alice Molland,appeared at the Exeter assizes charged with the same crime and waslikewise condemned to death although, in her case, it remains at leastpossible that the sentence was not carried out.2 Because they appearto have been the last individuals to have suffered the capital penaltywhich was laid down by the Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes againstwitchcraft, these four women have attained a considerable degree ofposthumous fame. Their names have regularly appeared in generalsurveys of the history of English witchcraft, while at the local level, too,their memory continues to endure.3 A stone tablet commemorating thewomen was erected at Exeter Castle where their trials were conducted during the 1990s, for example, while, more recently still, a colourfulmural featuring the three Bideford witches was emblazoned on a walllying just beyond the former castle ditch.4 So well known are the casesof Lloyd, Edwards, Trembles and Molland, indeed, that by fosteringa hazy impression that the key characteristic of witch-persecution inthe south-west was the unusually late date at which it occurred theymay well have caused previous scholars to jump to some erroneousconclusions.

Writing in 1911, Wallace Notestein one of the pioneering historiansof English witchcraft observed that, before 1660, so far at any rate asthe printed records show, the south-western counties had been but littletroubled by the witch-terror.5 The work of C. LEstrange Ewen mightwell have appeared to support this view for, while Ewens formidablywell-researched book Witchcraft and Demonianism first published in

1 For contemporary accounts of the trial of the Bideford witches, see Anon., A True and ImpartialRelation of the Informations against Three Witches (1682); Anon., The Tryal, Condemnation andExecution of Three Witches (1682); Anon., Witchcraft Discovered and Punished (1682); and Anon.,The Life and Conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd and Susanna Edwards (1687) [hereafterAnon., Life and Conversation]. For the gallows at Ringswell, see Devon Record Office, Exeter[hereafter DRO], Exeter City Archives [hereafter ECA], Book 51 (John Hookers Book), fo. 352; andC. Worthy, The History of the Suburbs of Exeter (1892) [hereafter Worthy, Suburbs], pp. 546.2 F. A. Inderwick, Sidelights on the Stuarts (1888) [hereafter Inderwick, Sidelights], p. 173; and C.LEstrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials: The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Recordsof 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit, AD 15591736 (1929) [hereafter Ewen, Witch Hunting],p. 43.3 For references to the four women tried and condemned at Exeter in previous surveys of Englishwitchcraft, see, for example, Inderwick, Sidelights, pp. 1723, 179; Ewen, Witch Hunting, p. 43; C.LEstrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism: A Concise Account Derived from Sworn Depositionsand Confessions obtained in the Courts of England and Wales (1933) [hereafter Ewen, Witchcraft andDemonianism], pp. 129, 130, 36573 and 444; C. Hole, Witchcraft in Britain (1986), pp. 1645; andJ. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 15501750 (1996) [hereafter Sharpe,Instruments], pp. 2267. For references to the Bideford witches in local histories, see, for example, S.Baring-Gould, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1926), pp. 2747.4 Personal observation, 20 Jan. 2011.5 W. Notestein, History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, 1911) [hereafterNotestein, History], p. 254. The enduring influence of Notesteins judgement is well illustrated by factthat, fifty years later, another scholar felt able to observe that the West of England . . . was not muchtroubled by witches, see E. Rose, A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in the Historyof Witchcraft and Diabolism (Toronto, 1962, 1989 edn.), p. 25.

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2011 The Author. History 2011 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1933 contained an appendix listing many cases of witchcraft whichhad been recorded in the region between 1569 and 1707, all but six ofthose cases dated from the period after 1650, thus tending implicitly toreinforce Notesteins conclusion that witch-hunting in the south-westhad primarily been a late seventeenth-century phenomenon.6 This wascertainly the conclusion of R. Trevor Davies, who declared, in 1947, thatthe witch-mania during the reign of Elizabeth had been confined almostentirely to the south-east part of England, and suggested that it was onlyafter the Civil War that the witch scare had spread to districts that hadhitherto been spared, including many shires of the West which neverbefore had indictments.7

Janet Thompson author of the most recent account of witchcraft inthe south-west, published in 1993 took much the same view. Indeed,Thompson went rather further than Notestein and Davies had done,claiming that the need to hunt witches came much later [in Devon] thanelsewhere, for example, and that the executions which had taken place atExeter in the 1680s the very last, as we have seen, which are known tohave occurred in the whole of England were also the very first to haveoccurred in Devon.8 The present article demonstrates that these claimsare incorrect. Using new evidence drawn from the records of the Exeterquarter sessions court, it shows that the women who were condemnedduring the 1680s were categorically not the first individuals to have beenexecuted for the crime of witchcraft at Exeter. On the contrary, at leasttwo and possibly as many as four other people had been consigned tothe city gallows for allegedly committing the same crime over the preced-ing 120 years. This article tells the story of these luckless individuals forthe first time and, in the process, sheds new light on the history ofwitchcraft in one of early modern Englands great provincial cities. At thesame time, it demonstrates that, by subjecting the records of individualurban communities to close scrutiny, it is still possible to achieve incre-mental advances in our knowledge of witchcraft in Tudor and StuartEngland.

I

A great deal of research has been carried out into witch-prosecution inthe cities of early modern Europe over the past four decades. Thanks to

6 Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, pp. 43946. Ewen also included an extract from an originalpamphlet reproducing the examination of the Dorset wizard, John Walsh, at Exeter in 1566 anda transcript of a set of depositions relating to accusations of witchcraft at Dartmouth in 1601 (ibid.,pp. 1467 and pp. 1936). We should note that as Ewen himself was careful to observe thepreponderance of late seventeenth-century cases in this appendix simply reflects the fact that thesurviving Gaol Books for the Western Circuit do not commence until the year 1670 (ibid., p. 439).7 R. Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs: With Special Reference to the Great Rebellion(1947) [hereafter Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs], pp. 19, 147, 174.8 J. A. Thompson, Wives, Widows, Witches and Bitches: Women in Seventeenth Century Devon (NewYork, 1993) [hereafter Thompson, Wives], pp. 1012 and 125 (quotation).

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the work of scholars like Wolfgang Behringer, H. C. E. Midelfort, LyndalRoper and Alison Rowlands, we now possess a far better understandingof the multifarious ways in which witch persecutions developed orfailed to develop in the urban communities of Germany, in particular,between 1500 and 1700.9 Much less has been written about urban witch-craft in England, however, and, in recent years, the most penetratingcontributions in this field have tended to focus on the prosecution ofwitches in smaller towns, rather than on patterns of prosecution in theseven or eight cities which together made up the first division of theEnglish urban league table.10 As Exeter fell squarely within the lattercategory, an examination of the early history of secular prosecutions forwitchcraft in the city seems especially well worth undertaking. Yet beforeturning to conduct that examination, it is worth pausing for a moment inorder to consider both the community and the court in which thoseprosecutions took place.

Exeter was the regional capital of south-west England and possessedsome 10,000 inhabitants during the 1550s.11 Exeters fortunes had beenbuilt on the profits of the cloth trade; many of the townsfolk worked asweavers, fullers and dyers. There was great wealth within the city, butthere was also immense poverty especially in the straggling suburbswhich had grown up outside the town walls and to this social dividewas added the religious divide between Catholics and Protestantswhich, during the so-called Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, had brieflythreatened to tear the civic community apart.12 All too well aware ofthe potential which such divisions had to cause trouble within the city and thus to threaten their own positions the town governors crackeddown hard on any signs of internal dissent and Tudor Exeter has beenwell described by its foremost historian, W. T. MacCaffrey, as an

9 W. Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reasonof State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch Hunting in South-western Germany, 15621684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA, 1972); L.Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004); and A. Rowlands, WitchcraftNarratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 15611652 (Manchester, 2003) [hereafter Rowlands, WitchcraftNarratives]. See also R. Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007) [hereafter Briggs, Witches ofLorraine], ch. 10.10 I am most grateful to Bernard Capp for discussion of this subject. For recent treatments of witchprosecutions in Manningtree, New Romney and Rye, see M. Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2006), passim, esp. pp. 15, 27, 3342, 4854; M. Gaskill, The Devil in theShape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England, Historical Research, lxxii(1999) [hereafter Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man], 14271; and A. Gregory, Witchcraft,Politics and Good Neighbourhood in Early Seventeenth-Century Rye, Past and Present [hereafterP&P], cxxx (1991), 3166. For the quotation, see P. Clark and P. Slack, Crisis and Order in EnglishTowns, 15001700: Essays in Urban History (1972), p. 5.11 W. G. Hoskins, The Elizabethan Merchants of Exeter, in The Early Modern Town: A Reader, ed.P. Clark (1976) [hereafter Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants], p. 149.12 On the events of 1549 in Exeter, see F. Rose-Troup, The Western Rebellion of 1549 (1913), esp. chs.9, 11, 12, 13 and 18; W. T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 15401640 (1958, 1978 edn.) [hereafter MacCaffrey,Exeter], pp. 1920, 1889, 192, 206; J. Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (1977), especially chs.5 and 10; and M. Stoyle, Circled with Stone: Exeters City Walls, 14851660 (Exeter, 2003) [hereafterStoyle, Circled with Stone], pp. 7880, 1901.



authoritarian society. Exeters local rulers the twenty-four wealthymen who made up The Chamber or The Council of 24 were ever onthe alert to check the slightest threat to social order, MacCaffreyobserves, and the most careful precautions were taken not only to pre-vent . . . outbreaks of violence or crime . . . but also to suppress any criti-cism of the established social, political and religious order.13

In their constant struggle to maintain what they regarded as goodorder in Exeter, the senior members of the Chamber made full use oftheir power as local magistrates. During the 1530s, Henry VIII hadconstituted Exeter a county of it self and had granted the mayor and thealdermen the right to sit as justices of the peace.14 Thereafter, the JPs forthe county of Exeter had enjoyed the same wide-ranging powers as JPselsewhere including the crucial power of gaol delivery; that is to say, thepower to clear . . . a jail of prisoners by bringing them to trial.15 Therewas already one major gaol in Exeter in 1537 the High Gaol for thecounty of Devon, which stood within the precincts of Exeter Castle andwhich therefore came under the jurisdiction of the crown, rather than ofthe city authorities.16 (It was here that the Bideford witches were later tobe held during the 1680s.17) Henry VIII had given the citizens the right toset up a gaol of their own and by 1556 this had become established in theSouth Gate.18 Because justices of gaol delivery possessed the power topronounce sentence of death on convicted felons, the king had autho-rized the citizens to erect their own gallows, too, and this structure colloquially known as the Forches stood at Magdalen Hill Head, inthe suburban parish of St Sidwells.19

Proceedings at the Exeter sessions court followed the standard proce-dure. First, a group of men were sworn in to serve on the grand inquest,or grand jury a body whose members were required, not only to takepart in the forthcoming criminal law process, but also to make formalpresentments about minor offences which had been identified in the city

13 MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 72.14 Ibid., p. 19; Report on the Records of the City of Exeter, ed. J. H. Wylie and J. Wylie (HistoricalManuscripts Commission, 1916) [hereafter Wylie, Report], p. 5; and R. Izacke, Remarkable Antiq-uities of the City of Exeter (1724), p. 118 (quotation).15 MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 19; and Oxford English Dictionary [hereafter OED].16 Stoyle, Circled with Stone, p. 26.17 For the imprisonment of Temperance Lloyd in Exeter Goale, see Anon., The Life and Conver-sation, p. 5.18 C. G. Henderson, The Development of the South Gate of Exeter and its Role in the CityDefences, Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Society, lix (2001) [hereafter Henderson, SouthGate], 1038.19 A Description of the Citie of Exeter by John Vowell, Alias Hoker: Part II, ed. W. J. Harte et al.(Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1919), p. 359. For the use of the term the Forches in a planof c.1590, see Stoyle, Circled with Stone, pl. 5; for the precise location of the city gallows, seeHenderson, South Gate, p. 117 n. 98; and, for a contemporary reference to the gallowes to Madlinhilhede, see F. Nesbitt (trans.), Exeter Holy Trinity Burials, 15631729 (typescript volume, held inthe West Country Studies Library, Exeter [hereafter WCSL] 19301) [hereafter Nesbitt, HolyTrinity Burials], p. 45.

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over the preceding months.20 Then, the jurors were asked to determinewhich of the bills of indictment that had been drawn up against thosewho had been accused of felonies since the last sessions were true bills.Once it had been established that a trial in any particular case wasnecessary, a trial jury was sworn to consider the evidence.21 Finally, all ofthose who had been convicted were brought before the justices to besentenced (although it seems probable that especially knotty cases weresometimes referred by the Exeter JPs to the assize judges, who travelledto the city on circuit twice each year).22 Once the sessions were over, theclerk of the peace filed the bills away in the roll of the sessions.23 He alsocompiled a separate record which reproduced the indictments and notedthe sentences which had been passed. This record known as the calen-dar of gaol delivery was filed away in a separate roll.24 It is upon theevidence contained in the Elizabethan and Jacobean sessions rolls andgaol delivery rolls that the present article is chiefly based.

Historians have long been aware that the records of the Exeter citysessions court contain material pertaining to the prosecution of witches.As early as 1877, two local antiquarians published several depositionsrelating to cases of witchcraft in Exeter during the 1650s which they hadunearthed in one of the books of examination: a series of volumescontaining testimonies made by witnesses and suspects before the JPsfrom 1618 onwards.25 Notestein referred to these published depositions;indeed, they may well have helped to confirm him in his view that witch-persecution had come relatively late to the south-west.26 Eighty yearslater, Thompson returned to the books of examination and to the ses-sions rolls for the period 165360 which, unlike all of the previous rolls,had been kept in English and extracted fresh material from themrelating to witchcraft in Exeter after 1618.27 I drew on these same sourcesin my own book about Exeter during the Civil War, published in 1996, as

20 For the presentment function of early modern grand juries, see P. G. Lawson, Lawless Juries?The Composition and Behaviour of Hertfordshire Juries, 15731624, in Twelve Good Men and True:The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 12001800, ed. J. S. Cockburn and T. A. Green (Princeton,1988), pp. 1356; and S. K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon LocalAdministration, 164670 (Exeter, 1985), pp. 689.21 G. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials: A History of English Witchcraft and its Legal Perspec-tives, 1542 to 1736 (Chichester, 2000), pp. 350, 382, 384.22 From the 1650s onwards, the assize judges are known to have held a special sitting for the countyof Exeter at the Guildhall, either immediately before or immediately after the gaol delivery for thecounty of Devon held at Exeter Castle, see J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 15581714(Cambridge, 1972), pp. 48, 137. It seems probable that this had been the usual practice for manyyears before, see DRO, Exeter Receivers Book, 15801, fo. 3r.23 ECA, Book 51, fos. 176, 176r.24 See DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 20 (Rolls of the Sessions of the Peace and Gaol Delivery,344 Elizabeth); and DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 21 (Rolls of the Sessions of the Peace and GaolDelivery, 115 James I).25 W. Cotton and H. Woollcombe, Gleanings from the Municipal and Cathedral Records Relative tothe City of Exeter (Exeter, 1877), pp. 14952. See also DRO, ECA, Exeter Quarter Sessions MinutesBooks, 61 (161821); 62 (162130); 63 (163042) and 64 (164260).26 Notestein, History, pp. 21617.27 Thompson, Wives, ch. 4 and app. A.



did James Sharpe in his classic survey of witchcraft in England whichappeared in the same year.28 Yet despite this respectable record of activityon the post-1618 sessions records, no-one has so far gone back to thedocuments which were compiled before that date to those which werecompiled chiefly in Latin, in other words to investigate what they cantell us about the early history of secular witchcraft trials in Exeter. It isto this task and to the wider elucidation of the history of witch-prosecution in Exeter between the reign of Queen Mary and that of JamesI that the present article will now turn.

II

Witch-belief in Exeter already possessed a venerable ancestry by the timethat the fourth Tudor monarch came to the throne in 1553, for a case ofwitchcraft allegedly being practised in the city had been attested as earlyas 1302.29 Such very early references aside, the records of the consistorycourt show that witch-belief was flourishing in the countryside aroundExeter during the mid-sixteenth century.30 This being the case, one mightwell have expected the passage of the first statute against witchcraft, in1542, to have resulted in an upsurge of prosecutions of witches in thelocal secular courts, but in the West Country as across the kingdomas a whole there is no sign of any such upsurge having taken placeduring the five years before the statute was repealed in 1547.31 Admit-tedly, there is one previously unnoted reference to witches being executednear Exeter during the Henrician period. In his book Psonthonphanchia,first published in 1665, the mystical writer John Heydon claimed thatAt Heavy-Tree in the Reign of King Henry the 8 there was twoWitches . . . executed.32 If we were to accept Heydons claim, we wouldhave to accept that Devon was one of the first counties in which peoplecan be shown to have been executed for witchcraft, as well as being thelast. Yet Heydon had clearly modelled his account of a supposed execu-tion at Heavitree during Henry VIIIs reign on a precisely similar accountof an execution at Cambridge under Elizabeth which had been published

28 M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter,1996) [hereafter Stoyle, Deliverance], p. 16; and Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 68, 158 and 223.29 T. Wright, The Municipal Archives of Exeter, The Journal of the British Archaeological Asso-ciation, xviii (1862), 30617, at p. 307.30 See, for example, V.C., Odd Ways in Olden Days Down West: Or Tales of the Reformation inDevon and Cornwall (Birmingham, 1892), pp. xixii and p. 2; T. Gray and J. Draisey, Witchcraft inthe Diocese of Exeter: Part II, Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries [hereafter DCNQ], xxxvi/8(1990), 2817; and Gray and Draisey, Witchcraft in the Diocese of Exeter: Part III, DCNQ, xxxvi/9(1991), 30514.31 Keith Thomas notes that virtually nothing is known about prosecutions for witchcraft inEngland between 1542 and 1547, see Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs inSixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1991 edition) [hereafter Thomas, Religion], p. 535.Barbara Rosen adds that the Henrician act appears to have been repealed without having been putin action more than once: see Witchcraft in England, 15581618 (Amherst, 1991 edn.), p. 22.32 J. Heydon, Elhavarevna . . . Whereunto is Added Psonthonphanchia (1665), p. 86.

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just ten years before.33 Heydons tale may be dismissed as a red-herring,then but fortunately the civic records of Exeter provide us with a muchmore reliable impression of how local people who were suspected ofwitchcraft were being treated by the secular authorities during the mid-Tudor period.

The earliest of the surviving sessions rolls for Exeter dates to 15578; thisdocument contains no reference to prosecutions for witchcraft.34 Duringthat very same year, however, an allusion to an alleged witch was made in amanuscript volume listing the presentments which had been made by thegrand inquest at the sessions court, a volume which has gone almost entirelyunnoticed by previous historians.35 On 22 April 1558 the grand jurorsinformed the magistrates that a certain Thomas Weare was in the habit ofdayly playenge at tables for mony.36 Nor was Weares fondness for gam-bling his only alleged failing, for later that day the jurors presented himagain, this time observing that we accuse Thomas Weare for a charmer & awytchecrafte user.37 There is no evidence of how the JPs reacted to thesecharges, but, whatever punishment they decided to inflict upon Weare, itappears to have had little effect, for four years later Thomas Weare almost certainly the same man who had been presented to the magistrates in1558 came to their attention once again. Contained within one of the ActBooks of the Chamber is a collection of miscellaneous notes relating to theactivities of the sessions court between 1559 and 1569.38 These reveal that, on21 April 1562, the justices were informed that Weare had been a floystererand an idle person, leavinge his wiffe & accompanying himselfe with. . . harlottes. Accordingly, he was ordered to behave better, or to bewhipped as a vagrant & vagabond person.39 Later that same day, Weareappears to have promised the mayor that he would leave the city for good.He clearly reneged on this promise, however, for just seven months later, itwas recorded in the same collection of notes that:

[on this] . . . day Thomas Weare was apprehended & taken as a vagrantperson, And forasmuch as he heretofore, upon the xxi of Aprill 1562 wasfor the lyke offense brought before Mr William Hurst Maior and then byhis free wyll & consent adjudged to be whipped at the cartes tayle whenso ever he sholde be agayne taken within this Citie: and now contrarye tothis sayde order is here taken & apprehended, That therefore accordinge tothe foresaide order he shall receve the said punishment as also depart

33 See H. More, An Antidote Against Atheism (1655), p. 167.34 DRO, Exeter Quarter Sessions Rolls [hereafter EQSR], 45 Philip and Mary (15578).35 DRO, ECA, Book 100. The volume is referred to, very briefly, in Wylie, Report, p. 378. I madeextensive use of this source in my monograph Circled with Stone, published in 2003.36 ECA, Book 100, fo. 21.37 Ibid., fo. 22. The reference to Weare as a charmer may suggest that he was seen as a white witch,rather than as a black one. I owe this point to Bernard Capp.38 DRO, Exeter Chamber Act Book [hereafter ECAB], 1/4 (15827), fos. 1390. For previousdiscussions of this material, see W. J. Harte, Illustrations of Municipal History from the Act Bookof the Chamber of the City of Exeter, 155988, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, xliv(1912) [hereafter Harte, Illustrations], 20630, esp. pp. 2206; and MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 92100.39 ECA, Book 100, fo. 173.



forthwith . . . & no more [to] returne unto this Citie upon the payne to bewhipped agayne.40

The fact that Weare the very first individual who is known to have beenaccused of witchcraft in the sessions court was also regarded as an idleand sexually immoral person is significant, and suggests that, in earlymodern Exeter, as in so many other places, those who had already builtup a reputation for moral deviance or other forms of inappropriate. . . behaviour and had thus exhausted their social credit among theirneighbours were especially likely to find themselves denounced aswitches.41 The evidence relating to the second supposed witch whosename has been traced among the court records points very much the sameway. After having noted how a couple of other cases had been dealt withby the justices on 8 October 1561, the compiler of the sessions notes thenturned to record that:

Also the same daye, Frauncys Dyrym who, for her unquiet lyfe emonge herneighbores & for her suspected wytchcraft heretofore used, hast byn eft-sones rebuked & punyshed as also exyled out of this Citie, and yet hathereturned & doth remayn within this Citie lyving yn her former unquyet lyffe,it is agreed by the Justices . . . that she . . . shall from hensforth depart outof this Citie . . . and that from thensforth she not returne any more.42

It is tempting to suggest that the Frauncys Dyrym who was ordered toleave Exeter in 1561 may be identifiable both with the woman namydFrauncys who had been presented by the grand jurors in 1556 for askold . . . [who] kepeth evell company yn her howse to the disquyetyngof all the neyghbours and with the woman dwellyng by Northgatecallyd Fraunces who had been similarly presented by them in 1557 asa comon skoll[d]e.43 During the early modern period, the term scoldwas frequently applied to those generally women who used unseemlyand quarrelsome language in public.44 As scholars have long been aware,many contemporaries appear to have made an explicit connectionbetween women who rebelled against social and gender norms by hurlingeveryday invective against their neighbours and those who did soby allegedly hurling occult imprecations against them.45 Indeed, the

40 Ibid., fo. 238. For Hurst, see Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, p. 148.41 B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2006) [hereafter Levack, Witch-Hunt], pp. 1601.42 ECA, Book 100, fo. 137. This case was noted by Harte in 1912 see Illustrations, pp. 2212.43 ECA, Book 100, fos. 10, 16.44 OED; and, on scolding in general, see D. Underdown, The Taming of the Scold: The Enforce-ment of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England, in Order and Disorder in Early ModernEngland, ed. A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1987) [hereafter Underdown, Taming], pp.11636.45 See, for example, Thomas, Religion, p. 632; C. Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt inScotland (1981) [hereafter Larner, Enemies of God], pp. 978, 125; Underdown, Taming, p. 120;Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 1534; B. Capp, Separate Domains? Women and Authority in EarlyModern England, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. P. Griffiths et al.(1996), pp. 11745, at 120; and Levack, Witch-Hunt, pp. 1601.

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Elizabethan witch-sceptic Reginald Scot went so far as to observe that, inthe popular mind, the cheefe fault of most supposed witches is that theyare scolds.46 The JPs order against Dyrym did not specifically describeher as a scold, but the fact that she was taxed with her unquiet lyfeemonge her neighbores makes it plain that even if she was not thewoman who had previously been presented for scolding her behaviourcould well have been deemed to fall under that same heading. Here again,then, we see the propensity of Exeter people in the 1560s to associatecertain kinds of inappropriate behaviour with witchcraft and theopinion of the local justices that banishment represented a suitable pun-ishment for both types of offence.

The order relating to Dyrym hints that in Exeter as, indeed, acrossEurope as a whole there may have been a rising vigilance concerningwitchcraft at this time and during the following year a local merchantnamed Thomas Marshall was informed against on several occasions inconnection with attacks on alleged witches.47 Marshall who was aresident of the wealthy intramural parish of St Martins first came to theattention of the magistrates on 5 May 1562, when he was accused ofhaving launched a verbal assault on Old Mastris Tothill: almost cer-tainly his neighbour Elizabeth Tothill, who may herself have been arelative of the city recorder Geoffrey Tothill.48 According to the courtsinformant, Marshall had openly abused Tothill in the street, sklaunder-ously revyl[ing] her and callinge her bawde, queane [i.e. prostitute],wytche & whore. Not content with this, he had then gone on to abuseanother female neighbour, Grace Walter, using the lyke sklaunderousewordes . . . [and] calling her by the same termes.49 Probably becauseMarshall had launched this foul-mouthed tirade against two women ofconsiderable social status, the JPs ordered that he should not only bebound over to keep the peace but that he should also remain in prison forforty days.50 The fact that Marshall had abused one of the city stewardswho had come to the womens defence callinge him knave, with otheropprobryose termes can only have exacerbated the merchants offenceand tends to confirm that he was a truculent character.51 Within days ofMarshall having been committed to jail, moreover, a new witness

46 R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), p. 34.47 W. Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge, 2004), p. 85; and ECAB,1/4, fo. 176.48 Marshall appears to have been a former apprentice of William Hurst, mayor of Exeter in 15612and one of the most influential men in the city see M. M. Rowe and A. M. Jackson (eds.), ExeterFreemen, 12661967 (Exeter, 1973), p. 75; and Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, pp. 1489, 157.For Elizabeth Tothill, see M. M. Rowe (ed.), Tudor Exeter: Tax Assessments, 14891595 (Torquay,1977), pp. 57, 62. For Geoffrey Tothill, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 224, 226; and Wylie, Records,pp. 29, 513, 72 and 315.49 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. MacCaffrey noted Marshalls attack on the two women, but missed its widersignificance (see MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 93).50 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. See also EQSR, 4 Elizabeth 1, recognizance dated 13 May.51 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. See also ECA, Book 100, fo. 74.



appeared to testify to a physical assault which he had allegedly carriedout on another woman.

On 8 May Anne Borough a maidservant in her early twenties informed the JPs that, about three months ago, her master, ThomasMarshall, had carried out a violent physical assault upon a womannamed Mawde, dwelling upon the hollowe waye without the Southgate that is to say, in that part of the parish of Holy Trinity which liesbeyond the city walls.52 Marshall had slipped out of his own house onenight, Anne deposed, and had then gone to Mawdes house and given hera savage beating. When the merchant had later heard the tolling of thepassing bell within the city, moreover, and had been informed incor-rectly that the bell was ringing for the woman whom he had attacked,he had callously replied it is no matter, it is but an olde wytche gonne.53Sadly, we do not know how the justices responded to Annes testimony.The maidservants story is fascinating in itself, however, because it hintsthat Marshall may have believed that he had been bewitched by Mawde and that he had therefore attempted to break the force of her spells bydrawing blood from her. Certainly, this was an expedient which was to becommonly resorted to by those who believed themselves to have beenoverlooked during the following centuries.54 If Marshall really had beenconvinced that he was in the grip of a malign enchantment, then hissubsequent outbursts against Tothill and Walter become more readilyunderstandable, and suggest that even after his assault on Mawde themerchant had continued to look askance at other local women whom hesuspected might have been behind his personal troubles whatever thosetroubles may have been.55 It is possible that Marshall was simply a violentmisogynist, of course, but even if we were to assume that this was thecase, the fact that he chose to term all three of his female victims witcheshints that he was genuinely fearful of enchantresses.

III

Who was the woman whom Marshall had assaulted? The quarter sessionsrolls supply us with the probable answer, for, on 15 July 1563, a certainMatilda Parke, the wife of Roger Parke of Exeter, was bound over tokeep the peace against Thomas Marshalls wife, Eleanor, until the nextsessions, while Marshall and his wife were similarly bound over to keep

52 For a contemporary depiction of Holloway present-day Holloway Street see Stoyle, Circledwith Stone, pl. 4.53 ECAB, 1/4, fos. 1812.54 See G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York 1929, 1956 edn.), pp. 47, 169,236; Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs, pp. 148, 158, 190, 199; Sharpe, Instruments,15960; and T. Waters, Belief in Witchcraft in Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, circa 18601900,Midland History, xxxiv (2009), 98116, at p. 101.55 Annes observation that, on the day of the attack, her master was sicke makes it conceivable thatMarshall was suffering from long-term health problems: see ECAB, 1/4, fo. 181.

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the peace against Matilda.56 The first names Matilda and Maud wereused interchangeably at this time, and, as we shall see, Matilda Parkewas later to be referred to as Mawde Parke in another document. Itseems almost certain that Matilda or Mawde Parke was the womanwhom Marshall had attacked in 1563, then, and that hostilities betweenthe two had continued until well into the following year, by which timeMarshalls wife had also been dragged into the controversy. Quite whathappened next we do not know, but the evidence suggests that Marshallsviolent and sustained pursuit of Matilda Parke eventually succeeded inpersuading many other local people that she was, indeed, a witch. On 4October 1565, more than three years after Anne Borough had providedher dramatic testimony to the justices, John Wolcott, the mayor ofExeter, and his fellow magistrates met at the general sessions.57 Littleevidence survives about the cases which they heard that day, but in thecalendar which was drawn up after proceedings had come to an end reference was made to Matilda Parke, the wife of Roger Parke ofExeter, who had recently been arrested on suspicion of having employedmagical arts.58

Following her apprehension in 1565, Matilda Parke found herself in afar more precarious position than Weare and Dyrym had done just a fewyears before. Although they had also been accused of witchcraft, theyhad been denounced at a time when as a result of the repeal of the actof 33 Henry VIII there had been no statute law in force against allegedwitches. As a result, local magistrates had been free to hand out rela-tively moderate punishments to those who stood accused of dabbling inthe black arts. During the fifth year of Queen Elizabeths reign, however,parliament had passed a new act against witchcraft, one which hadspecified that, in future, those convicted of causing death by diabolic artshould suffer the capital penalty, while those convicted of causing lesserinjuries by the same means should suffer a years imprisonment for thefirst offence and death for the second.59 As far as we know, Parke was thefirst person to be formally denounced to the Exeter JPs as a witchfollowing the passage of the 1563 statute and was thus the first personto confront the possibility of being executed at the Forches for the sameoffence. Nothing specific is know about the charges which were broughtagainst Parke in October 1565, but she was clearly tried and foundguilty, because immediately after the entry relating to her in the calendarappear the contracted annotations Indict[a,] po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis,] Eth[ab]et iudic[ium] iux[t]a formam statut[i,] Et rem[aneat] in p[ri]sonaquousq[ue].60 These contractions may be translated as: she is indicted;

56 EQSR, 5 Elizabeth I, recognizances of 15 July. I am most grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for herassistance in the interpretation of these two documents.57 For Wolcott, see Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, p. 163.58 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 2.59 Statutes of the Realm (11 vols., 181021), iv, pt. 1, p. 446.60 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 2.



she pleads not guilty; she is found guilty; and she has judgment accord-ing to the form of the statute; and let her remain in prison until [deliveredby due course of law].61

The appearance of the phrase judgment according to the . . . statuteon an indictment is usually taken to indicate a hanging, but it is clear that if the magistrates did initially sentence Parke to death then theyquickly granted her a reprieve.62 Five days later, it was recorded thatorder was taken with Mawde Parke [by John Wolcott and one of hisfellow-justices] that she shall departe hensforthe out of this Citie withinthese iii wekes at the furthest & from thensforth she never to retur-ne . . . to which order she hath geven her full consent.63 These wordsmake it clear that, rather than consigning Parke to the gallows or, at thevery least, imprisoning her for a year as the new statute entitled them todo the Exeter JPs had eventually decided to deal with this convictedwitch in exactly the same way that they had dealt with several suspectedwitches in the past, by simply banishing her from the city. All thingsconsidered, Parke may be said to have got off remarkably lightly, but like Thomas Weare before her she proved unable to keep her promiseto stay away from Exeter for good. Indeed, it is possible that she neverleft the city at all, for in December 1565, so it was later alleged, Parkebewitched a woman in Holy Trinity parish. In consequence, she wasre-arrested and committed to gaol. Around the same time, a secondwoman one Alice Meade was also arrested on suspicion of artemagice and likewise committed to South Gate.64

On 24 April 1566 Wolcott and the other justices met at the Guildhallto preside over the Easter sessions.65 It is clear that, earlier that same day,the grand jurors had declared two bills accusing Parke and Meade ofwitchcraft to be true ones, for although the original bills do not survive they are reproduced in the calendar as indictments.66 The indictmentrelating to Parke charged her with having employed Wytchecraftes,Inchauntmentes, Charmes and Sorceries in Holy Trinity parish on 21December 1565 in order to bewitch the person of a certain JoannaClarke. As a result, it was claimed, Clarke had subsequently sufferedexcruciating pains in both her arms and her legs. The indictment relatingto Meade a widow from Exmouth, a few miles to the south of the city charged her with having employed the same dark arts on 21 February1566 in order to bewitch the person of one John Dier of Exeter. As aresult of Meades enchantments, it was alleged, Dier had languished for

61 For discussion of the annotations and endorsements which appear on contemporary legal docu-ments, see Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 3235 and 9297; and M. Gibson (ed.), Witchcraft and Societyin England and America, 15501750 (2003), p. 17. I am very grateful indeed to John Draisey for hisexpert assistance in deciphering the marginal notes in the Exeter gaol delivery roll.62 Ewen, Witch-Hunting, p. 95.63 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 283.64 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.65 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.66 There are no surviving sessions rolls for 8 Elizabeth I (15656).

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a month and had eventually died on 22 March.67 These were graveaccusations, of course, and meant that, if found guilty, both Parke andMeade would face sentence of death in accordance with the statute.Whether or not the two women were held to be partners in crime isunclear. Certainly, the indictment relating to Parke appears immediatelyabove the indictment relating to Meade, and it is hard to believe that theappearance of two alleged witches at the same sessions was entirelycoincidental. Whatever the case, we may be sure that both women werefound guilty, for their indictments were subsequently annotated po[nit]se[,] cul[pabilis].68

Parke and Meade were now in imminent peril of the noose, but itwould appear that the JPs hesitated before proceeding to pass sentence,because above the two womens names in the calendar appear not onlythe words indict[a,] po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis] but also the further annota-tions rem[aneat] de iudic[io] q[uia] iustic[iarius] se advisar[e] vult usq[ue]prox[imam] gaol[e] delib[er]at[ionem].69 These additional endorsementsshow that, although both women had been indicted and convicted, it hadeventually been decided to return them to prison because the justicewants to seek advice until the next gaol delivery. The hesitancy which themagistrates exhibited on this occasion makes it tempting to suggest thatno-one had been executed in Exeter for witchcraft before and that thejustices were therefore especially anxious to make sure that they werefollowing the proper procedures. Alternatively, of course, it is possiblethat new witnesses might have emerged, or even that some influentialfigure(s) might have intervened on the suspects behalf. Sadly, thedenouement to the story may never be known. No calendar survives forthe next gaol delivery, the quarter sessions rolls for 15656 are lost, andthe rolls for 15667 are extremely uninformative. It seems probable thatParke and Meade were hanged, then but at the same time it is perfectlypossible that, like so many other individuals who were convicted offelony in Elizabethan England, either one or both of them eventuallymanaged to escape with their lives.70

IV

Matters are altogether more clear-cut in the case of the next person whois known to have been accused of witchcraft in the Exeter sessions court a woman named Thomasine Short, who was brought to trial in 1581.It seems probable that Shorte like Weare and Dyrym before her hadlong possessed a reputation as an unruly person, for some twenty yearsbefore, in 1562, a certain Thomasin Shorte had been one of a group of

67 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.68 Ibid.69 Ibid.70 On this subject generally, see J. B. Samaha, Hanging for Felony: The Rule of Law in ElizabethanColchester, Historical Journal, xxi (1978) [hereafter Samaha, Hanging for Felony], pp. 76382.



four women whom the justices had ordered to be carried to North Exe a mill-stream which branched off from the River Exe, on the westernside of the city and there cast into the water, to be towed at thesturnne of a bote through the whole Exe befor the weare for . . . [their]skoldinge.71 The choice of this particular spot for the womens punish-ment was almost certainly significant, because it was at North Exe thatthe citys communal washing-place known as Launders Platt stood.72 The decision to punish the scolds in full view of the placewhere the women of Exeter regularly gathered to launder clothes wassurely calculated to speak to a specifically female audience, and to drivehome the message that the city authorities were determined to stampdown hard on the peculiarly female offence of scolding. As we haveseen, those who were regarded as scolds appear to have been peculiarlysusceptible to accusations of witchcraft during the early modern periodand it seems very probable that if the woman who was towed acrossthe Exe in 1562 was, indeed, the same woman who was later to beaccused of sorcery in 1581 Shortes long-standing reputation as ascold had helped to foster the suspicion that she was also a witch. Weshould note, too, that, in 1561, one Thomasyn Shorte, dwellingwithout the East Gate, had been accused of harbouring a girl who hadrecently been banished from the city for sexual misdemeanours, while,ten years later, a certain Thomasina Shorte of St Sidwells had beenbailed for an unspecified felony.73 Again, these references tend to suggestthat the woman charged with witchcraft in 1581 had long been familiarto the Exeter magistrates.

Be this as it may, the trigger for Shortes ultimate downfall appears tohave occurred on 18 September 1580. Exactly what happened on that daywe will never know, but the phrasing of the indictments against hermakes it plausible to assume that Shorte had issued some kind of darkthreat against the family of one Richard Hewe, a weaver from the suburbof Exe Island. Over the next four months, Hewes daughter, Maria, hisson, Richard, and his wife, Dionisia, all died one by one. Soon afterDionisias death, on 20 March 1581, Shorte was accused of murderingHewes family through diabolic art and was committed to prison by orderof the mayor.74 Within a fortnight, Shorte found herself facing trial.75Once the proceedings had begun, three bills of indictment were presented

71 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 187. For North Exe, see DRO, Exeter Deeds, D. 220. The weir referred to wasprobably Callabere Weare, which spanned the River Exe just below the point where the mill streambranched off from the river. Scolding women in early modern London were similarly punished bybeing tied behind a boat and dragged across the River Thames, see B. Capp, When Gossips Meet:Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. 282.72 For the location of Launders Platt, see typescript transcripts of original Exeter deeds, by S. Rees(n.d.), held by Exeter Archaeology, Exeter, file 1, no. 611; and DRO, Exeter Receivers Roll, 20-1Elizabeth I (rents in St Pauls).73 ECAB, 1/4, fo. 149; DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 19 (Miscellaneous recognizances, temp.Elizabeth I and James I), recognizance dated 10 Sept. 1571.74 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.75 Ibid., m. 16.

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against Shorte now described as Thomasina Shorte . . . of Exeter. . . the wife of Robert Shorte which accused her of murdering Heweswife, son and daughter. The grand jurors decided that these were all truebills.76 A petty jury was therefore sworn and Shortes trial began. The factthat no fewer than twelve witnesses were summoned suggests that thetrial went on for some time, and in the end the petty jury clearly found theevidence against Shorte compelling, for the bills relating to her allegedmurder of Hewes son and his wife are both annotated po[nit] se[,]cul[pabilis].77 Added to these annotations in another hand on both bills,however, are the words reprehensa sine judicio, that is to say, repris-oned without judgment.78 Clearly, in Shortes case, just as in the cases ofParke and Meade in 1566, the justices were somewhat hesitant aboutpronouncing sentence of death upon a suspected witch.

Yet on this occasion we may be sure that for whatever reason themagistrates scruples were swiftly overcome, for, at the end of the anno-tations scrawled on the bill relating to Shortes alleged murder of Dioni-sia Hewe, there appear the five terse words iudic[ium] xi April; ide[o]suspend: that is to say, Judgment was given on 11 April, therefore she isto be hanged. The same grim message is conveyed by a series of anno-tations which appear above Shortes name in the calendar for the sessionsheld on 11 May, which read cul[pabilis,] catt[alla] null[a,] suspendet[ur]:in other words [she] was found guilty; [she] possesses no goods; [she] willbe hanged.79 Finally, we should note that, in the parish register of StSidwells, there appears the following ominous entry: the ixth daie ofMaie [1581] was buriede Tamson Sharte: suspensus.80 These words makeit impossible to doubt that soon after sentence had been passed againsther Thomasine Shorte was indeed hanged at Exeter for witchcraft, thevery first person who can be definitely shown to have suffered this fate inthe whole of south-west England. The fact that, after her execution,Shortes body was interred in the churchyard of St Sidwells combinedwith the reference of 1571 to Thomasina Shorte of St Sidwells notedabove suggests that the woman executed in 1581 was an inhabitant ofthis sprawling suburban parish. Nor was Shorte the last Exeter witch topossess close links with St Sidwells.

V

On 23 March 1581, just two months before Shorte was executed, thebaptism was recorded at St Sidwells of Agnes, the daughter of William

76 For these three bills, see EQSR, 23 Elizabeth 1 (15801).77 EQSR, 23 Elizabeth I, bills relating to the alleged murders of Richard and Dionisia Hewe.78 Ibid. The same phrase appears above Shortes name in the calendar of gaol delivery for Easter1581, see Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.79 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.80 DRO, 3429A/PR/1/1 (Exeter St Sidwells, Parish Register, 15691733), unpaginated. Carefulscrutiny of the register suggests that the ix which appears in the text is a slip for xx, and that Shortewas, in fact, buried on 20 May. I owe this point to John Draisey.



Brice. The baby girl died within the year, but William and his (unnamed)wife clearly had at least one further daughter, for on 1 May 1587 thebaptism was again recorded of Agnes, the daughter of William Brice.81These apparently unremarkable facts are mentioned here because, adecade later, rumours began to circulate that Joanna Brice, the wife ofWilliam Brice of St Sidwells, labourer, was a witch. Obviously there, is noway of knowing for certain that the William Brice mentioned in theregister was Joanna Brices husband, but it seems likely that this was thecase and thus that, when suspicion first began to attach itself to her,during the mid-1590s, Joanna had already borne several children. As faras Brices history may be traced from the accusations which were subse-quently levelled against her, she had first aroused the suspicion of herneighbours in 1596. In July that year, it was later alleged, Brice hadbewitched Juliana, the wife of William Gosse, of St Sidwells, weaver. Inconsequence, Juliana had fallen most perilously . . . ill and had lan-guished for nearly a year until, in May 1597, she had died. Two yearslater, it was claimed, Brice had similarly brought about the death ofWilliam, the son of Nicholas Aulsoppe, of St Sidwells. In May 1600,finally, Brice was said to have bewitched Margery, the daughter of JohnLippincott, of St Sidwells, with the result that she, too, died soon after-wards.82 What happened in the immediate aftermath of Margerys deathremains unclear, but we may presume that the girls grieving relativeseventually decided to report Joanna Brice to the authorities, for in early1602 Brice was committed to South Gate by order of the mayor, ThomasWalker.83

Walker was present at the Easter sessions, which were held on 12 April1602.84 On that day, three bills were presented to the grand inquest whichformally accused Brice of having murdered Gosse, Aulsoppe and Lip-pincott through diabolic art. The prosecutors in the three cases wereWilliam Gosse, Nicholas Aulsoppe and John Lippincote together witha certain John Lennard, whose relationship to the alleged victims remainsunclear.85 The charges levelled against Brice were very similar to thosewhich had been levelled against Thomasine Shorte twenty-one yearsbefore, and in the case of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the grandjurors were clearly convinced that they warranted investigation. In thecase of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the matter proceeded to trial.And in the case of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the petty jury

81 C. A. T. Fursdon (trans.), Exeter St Sidwells Parish Register, Volume 4, Burials, 15691772,(n.d., WCSL) [hereafter Fursdon, St Sidwells Parish Register], unpaginated.82 EQSR, 44 Elizabeth I (16012). The bills relating to Joanna Brices alleged crimes are reproducedin full in M. Stoyle, Two New Seventeenth-Century Witch Cases from Exeter, DCNQ, xl/6 (2009)[hereafter Stoyle, Witch Cases], pp. 1636.83 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 24r.84 Ibid., m. 24.85 It is possible that Lennard had helped to orchestrate Brices prosecution, in the same way thatother men of some status in their communities are known to have orchestrated similar caseselsewhere, see C. Holmes, Women: Witnesses and Witches, P&P, cil (1993), pp. 537 and 76(quotation).

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returned a guilty verdict on each count. We may be sure of this, for on allthree of the original bills relating to Brice, there appears the annotationpo[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis], together with the terse addition Susp meaning either [she was] hanged or [she is] to be hanged. In a previousnote, I suggested that the fact that the bills had all been marked with thisparticular annotation made it seem likely that Joanna Brice had, indeed,been executed.86 More recently, however, the discovery of fresh materialrelating to the case in the gaol delivery rolls has caused me to reverse thatjudgement. For while it is evident that the annotation po[nit] se[,] cul-[pabilis,] . . . suspend was initially written above Brices name in thecalendar for Easter 1602, the last four words were subsequently scratchedout and, in a different hand, the words non cul[pabilis] that is to say,not guilty were firmly inserted in their place.87 This evidence of alast-minute change of heart by the justices together with the fact that, asI remarked in my note, no definite reference to . . . [Brices] execution. . . has yet been found makes it almost certain that she managed toescape the gallows.88 But just what it was that had eventually persuadedthe JPs to show clemency in Brices case, when they had shown none inShortes, we will probably never know.

Certainly it would be wrong to suggest that a climate of scepticism wasgrowing up in the city, for most Exeter people clearly remained over-whelmingly convinced of the reality of witchcraft throughout the periodunder discussion and perhaps the most remarkable witch-case to occur inExeter between 1558 and 1610 that of Richard Wilkyns, of Holy Trinity was still to come. Nothing is known for certain of Wilkyns before he isfirst recorded to have fallen under suspicion in 1599, but it is possible thathe had once lived in Wynards almshouse, a charitable foundation whichlay just beyond the South Gate.89 Wilkyns first seems to have come to theattention of the magistrates in March 1600, when he was formallycharged at the sessions with having bewitched to death a woman namedAlice Pottell during the previous year.90 The trial jury may well havedecided that Wilkyns was innocent; certainly no further proceedingsagainst him are known to have been taken on this occasion. Nevertheless,it is clear that Wilkynss neighbours continued to regard him with intensefear and suspicion and to attribute all sorts of misfortunes to hissupposed dark powers. It was later alleged that, in 1606, Wilkyns hadbewitched Alice, the wife of Robert Hurle, carpenter, in Holy Trinityparish, as a result of which she had eventually died. Over the followingthree years, he was said to have killed ten pigs belonging to Elizabeth

86 Stoyle, Witch Cases, p. 163.87 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 24r.88 Stoyle, Witch Cases, p. 163. No subsequent references to Joanna Brice have yet been found, butwe may note that William Brice, possibly her husband, was buried in St Sidwells on 18 April 1610.See 3429A/PR/1/1.89 See Nesbitt, Holy Trinity Burials, p. 50, where the burial is recorded, in August 1598, of Wilkins,William, son of Richard, out of the Wynnards.90 Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 22v.



Pearce of St Sidwells, a horse belonging to Robert Upton of Holy Trinityand a cow belonging to Nicholas Stretchley of Holy Trinity throughmagical art. Still worse, he was believed to have bewitched Agnes, thewife of Thomas Luxton of St Sidwells, labourer; Agatha, the wife ofRichard Searle of St Sidwells, labourer; and William Palmer, of HolyTrinity, blacksmith, so that they all became desperately ill. The finalstraw appears to have come in June 1610, when Richard Seward of StMary Arches, labourer, died, after having allegedly been bewitched byWilkyns a month before.91 Soon afterwards, Wilkyns was committed togaol by order of the mayor.92

At the next sessions, which took place on 9 July 1610, the grand jurypronounced all eight of the bills of indictment which had been drawn upagainst Wilkyns to be true ones. The petty jurors who heard fromfourteen witnesses during the course of Wilkynss trial, including severalof his alleged victims were clearly convinced that he was, indeed, awitch, and recorded a guilty verdict on all of the charges except thatwhich related to Pearces pigs.93 Confronted with this overwhelming massof evidence, the magistrates clearly felt no compunction about passingsentence of death on Wilkyns straight away. In the calendar, the grimannotation po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis,] . . . suspend appears firmly abovethe labourers name and it is perhaps indicative of the horror withwhich Wilkynss supposed crimes were regarded that his execution tookplace just three days later. On 12 July 1610 Richard Wilkyns was con-veyed by the sheriffs officers from South Gate prison to the city gallowsat the Magdalen. Sentence was duly carried out and soon afterwards thefollowing entry was made in the parish register of St Sidwells: the xiithdaie of Julie was buried Richard Wilkines, of this parish and executed atye Maudlins for wichcrafte.94 The fact that Wilkyns was buried in thechurchyard of St Sidwells, rather than in that of Holy Trinity and thathe was described in the register as an inhabitant of the former parish issomething of a puzzle. It may well be that, while the indictments whichhad been drawn up against Wilkyns had assigned him to the parish inwhich he had been living at the time of his supposed crimes, the decisionhad eventually been taken to bury him in the parish where he had beenborn. Whatever the case, it is a poignant fact that Wilkynss body shouldeventually have been laid to rest in the very same churchyard in which hisfellow witch, Thomasine Shorte, had been buried some thirty yearsbefore.

91 The later charges against Wilkyns are reproduced in full in Stoyle, Witch Cases, pp. 16673.92 Miscellaneous Roll 21, m. 12r.93 Stoyle, Witch Cases, pp. 16673.94 3429 A/PR/1/1. The entry relating to Wilkyns was noted by Charles Worthy as early as 1892, buthe does not appear to have recognized its wider significance. See Worthy, Suburbs, p. 55; alsoFursdon, St Sidwells Parish Register; and H. Tapley-Soper, Executions recorded in St SidwellsParish Register, DCNQ, xv (1929), 32830, at p. 328.

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VI

As far as we know, Richard Wilkyns was the last individual to be for-mally charged with witchcraft in the city sessions court during the reignof James I though, as has already been observed, a number of furthercases were to occur under Charles I.95 What are the broader points whichmay be drawn from this study of witchcraft in Exeter between 1558 and1610? First and most obvious, the present article has established thatexecutions for witchcraft in the far south-west began at least a centuryearlier than was previously thought. Second, this investigation has addedtwo new names to the list of those who can be shown to have been hangedas witches quite a significant addition, when we consider that the totalnumber of people executed for this crime in England and Wales is nowgenerally believed to have been around 500.96 Third, the discovery of theseven new witch-cases from Exeter outlined above has revealed that, interms of simple chronology of prosecutions, south-west England mayhave been rather less atypical than had previously been assumed withan appreciable number of cases now known to have occurred in thisregion during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, just as they did inother parts of the country.97

What does the new evidence from Exeter reveal about the nature oflocal witch-belief between 1558 and 1610? The fact that hardly anyformal depositions survive among the sessions records for this periodmeans that we possess none of the vivid personal testimonies aboutsuspected cases of witchcraft which begin to emerge from those recordsafter 1618. Nevertheless, the earlier documents still have a good deal totell us. They reveal, for example, that in Exeter, just as in many otherplaces, a significant proportion of those who were accused of witchcraft in this case, at least two of the seven individuals who came before theJPs possessed a previous reputation as scolds.98 They reveal that inExeter, just as in many other places, most suspected witches were women yet that men could be accused, and convicted, of witchcraft, too.99 Most

95 A search through EQSR, 8 James I (161011) to 22 James I (16245) and through Misc. Roll 21,mm. 1339 has failed to unearth any further prosecutions. I hope to consider the prosecutions whichtook place in the city sessions court after Jamess death in a separate article.96 See, for example, C. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford,1984), pp. 712; Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man, p. 145; W. Monter, Re-ContextualisingBritish Witchcraft, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxv (2004), 10511, at p. 106; and Briggs,Witches of Lorraine, p. 52.97 For the suggestion that Devon diverges from the classic chronology for witchcraft which AlanMacfarlane and Keith Thomas set forth, see Thompson, Wives, p. 101.98 Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives, p. 183.99 On this subject, see W. Monter, Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, FrenchHistorical Studies, xx (1997), 56395; M. Gaskill, Witchcraft in Early Modern Kent: Stereotypesand the Background to Accusations, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture andBelief, ed. J. Barry et al. (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2726; Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man,passim; and M. Gaskill, Masculinity and Witchcraft in Early Modern England, in Witchcraft andMasculinities in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Rowlands (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 17190.



obviously of all, perhaps, they reveal that, in Exeter, just as in many otherplaces, the great majority of the suspects came from the lower levels ofsociety.100

Those who were formally accused of witchcraft in Exeter during thisperiod were clearly at the very bottom of the social heap; Weare wasdescribed as a vagrant & vagabond person, for example, Brice as alabourers wife and Wilkyns as a labourer. We should also note that, ofthe five Exeter witches discussed above whose places of residence areeither suspected or known, two came from St Sidwells and two from theextramural part of Holy Trinity, both suburban areas which were amongthe poorest districts of early modern Exeter.101 The witches allegedvictims were heavily concentrated in those same areas, too. Thus thewoman whom Parke was said to have bewitched was a resident of HolyTrinity; the three people whom Short was said to have bewitched wereresidents of Exe Island a poor suburb close to the river while the threepeople whom Brice was said to have bewitched were residents of StSidwells.102 Of Wilkynss many alleged victims, all but one lived either inSt Sidwells or in Holy Trinity. It is striking, too, that it was only after thedeath of a man who, though himself a labourer, lived in the wealthyintramural parish of St Mary Arches, that Wilkyns was arrested andcommitted, suggesting that it may have been the apparent irruption ofwitchcraft into the very heart of the city which had finally prompted thetown governors to act in this particular case. The association betweenpoverty and witchcraft surely helps to explain why, in the mid-seventeenth century, just as in the Tudor and Jacobean periods, theparish of Holy Trinity appears to have been disproportionately troubledby Satans human agents and why, in Exeter, just as in many otherplaces, accusations of witchcraft tended to surface again and again incertain specific areas.103

One of the most intriguing questions which is raised by these newwitch-cases but also one of the most difficult to answer is whether thepattern of prosecutions and executions in Exeter reflected the way inwhich the politico-religious climate in the city was changing. When I firstdiscovered the bills of indictment relating to Wilkyns, some years ago, Iwondered if the magistrates willingness to execute a supposed witch in1610 might conceivably have reflected the quickening pace of godlyreformation in Exeter. Ignatius Jurdain soon to become infamous asthe Arch-puritan of the West had recently been elected to theChamber, after all, and there are clear signs that, by the time of Wilkynss

100 Levack, Witch-Hunt, p. 157.101 On poverty in St Sidwells and Holy Trinity, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 13, 11213; and M.Stoyle, Whole Streets Converted to Ashes: Property Destruction in Exeter during the English CivilWar, Southern History, xvi (1994), 6784, at pp. 6869.102 On Exe Island, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 9, 11, 13, 19 and 20.103 For a later case of witchcraft in Holy Trinity parish, see, for example, Exeter Quarter SessionsMinute Book, 64, fos. 260-1r. On traditions of witch-accusations, see Larner, Enemies of God,pp. 802.

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trial, the godly faction in Exeter was in the ascendant.104 Many scholarshave argued that Calvinist religious predilections were accompanied byan increased propensity to persecute witches, so it seemed tempting tosuggest that it might have been the triumph of the puritans in Exeterwhich had permitted executions for witchcraft in the city to begin. Yet asfurther cases began to emerge from the records, it quickly became clearthat to adopt this line of argument would almost certainly be too sim-plistic.105 The execution of Thomasine Shorte had occurred thirty yearsbefore that of Wilkyns at a time when the godly in Exeter were only justbeginning to flex their muscles while John Wolcott the mayor whohad committed both Parke and Meade to gaol and who had presidedover their trials in 1566 was well known to be a zealous man in theRomish religion.106 The very first time that local concern about witchesis known to have been raised at the sessions, moreover, was in 1558 during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. All in all, it is hard todemonstrate that witch-prosecution in Exeter between 1558 and 1610 wasassociated with a particular brand of religious faith. Rather, it seemsprobable that, in Exeter, as elsewhere, patterns of prosecution for witch-craft were essentially contingent, with the ultimate fate of the unhappysuspects resting less upon the religious leanings of the civic elite thanupon the perceived strength of the evidence which their terrified neigh-bours had presented against them.107

There is nothing to suggest that the magistrates of Elizabethan andJacobean Exeter were committed witch-hunters. On the contrary, thejustices like their counterparts across much of contemporary Europe appear to have been reactive rather than proactive in their approach tosupposed witches.108 It is significant that the JPs only took action againstWeare and, probably, Dryham after they had been complained about bytheir neighbours and more significant still that, after Thomas Marshallhad launched his assaults upon Tothill, Walter and Parke in 1562, theJPs initial reaction had been to punish the merchant himself, rather thanto investigate those whom he had denounced. If Old Mastris Tothillwas, indeed, a relative of the citys recorder, then Marshalls attack uponher may well have had a particular significance for the subsequenthistory of witch-prosecutions in Exeter as it would have served to alertthe justices even before the statute of 1563 had been passed to thepotential which witchcraft accusations had to damage the reputationof themselves and their families, and thus, by extension, to threatenhierarchy and good order within the city. This, in turn, would surelyhave helped to temper whatever enthusiasm for witch-trials they might

104 Stoyle, Deliverance, pp. 1821.105 As many other historians have argued, see, for example, Thomas, Religion, pp. 5958.106 R. Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 36, 46 (quotation) and 147.107 On the scrupulous adherence of many contemporary justices to the requirements of legalproof, see Samaha, Hanging for Felony, p. 769.108 For this phrase, see Briggs, Witches of Lorraine, pp. 59, 257.



otherwise have possessed. Admittedly, Parke was eventually brought totrial presumably as a result of continued pressure from Marshall andothers but, as we have seen, the JPs treated Parke with a surprisingdegree of leniency in the wake of her first conviction, reverting to thenormal late medieval punishment of banishment rather than sentencingher to death, as they could easily have done. A similar inclination toshrink from inflicting the ultimate penalty upon convicted witches wasevident among the city JPs throughout the entire period. Even RichardWilkyns was only hanged for witchcraft in 1610 after he had escapedexecution on precisely the same charge ten years before.

While this article has revealed that executions for witchcraft did takeplace in Elizabethan and Jacobean Exeter, therefore, it has also demon-strated that these cases were unusual and that, in general terms, Exeterexperienced a restrained pattern of witch-prosecutions during this period,much as most other English counties did.109 That this was so presumablyreflected the fact that, while the JPs of Exeter like the great majority ofJPs elsewhere may be supposed to have been convinced of the reality ofwitchcraft, they again, like the great majority of JPs elsewhere werenevertheless anxious to remain within the law and to avoid the dangerouscommunal fractures which energetic witch-hunting was only too liable toprovoke. The particular sets of circumstances which resulted in Shorteand Wilkyns being hanged when a number of other supposed Exeterwitches managed to escape that fate can only be guessed at. It seemsplausible to suggest, however, that in 1581 and 1610, just as in 1682 it may have been a combination of popular rage within the city and theexistence of apparently unimpeachable evidence against the suspectswhich eventually persuaded the judges to hand down a death sentence.110As we have seen, when Thomas Marshall was wrongly informed thatMawde Parke had died in the wake of his savage attack, he callouslyreplied it is no matter, it is but an old wytche gonne. The merchantswords betray his conviction that, because witches were the sworn ser-vants of the devil, even the most violent measures were justified againstthose who were simply suspected of being sorceresses. The fact that thecity justices did not share Marshalls point of view or, at the very least,did not dare to act upon it probably does more than anything else toexplain why the toll of executions for witchcraft in Exeter remained socomparatively low between the passage of the 1563 statute and the deathof King James I.

109 As, indeed, did many European regions and cities. For an excellent discussion of just such apattern in the German city of Rothenburg, see Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives, passim.110 For the role which popular rage appears to have played in persuading the assize judges tosentence the Bideford witches to death at Exeter in 1682, see Sharpe, Instruments, p. 231.

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Prosecution and Execution for Witchcraft in Exeter

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