Witches of Scotland - EPISODE 59 - EMERITUS PROFESSOR MALCOLM GASKILL

00:00:00.200 Hi, I'm Clare Mitchell, QC. Welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.

00:00:05.240 I'm a lawyer who specialises in miscarriage of justice cases,

00:00:08.760 and we're bringing you this podcast because we want to tell you 0.61

00:00:11.580 about the women who were accused, prosecuted, convicted,

00:00:15.800 and ultimately executed as witches in Scotland.

00:00:18.800 I'm Zoe Vendetotsi, and I'm a writer who's always had an interest in the witches,

00:00:23.060 and I feel that this dark mark against Scotland needs a reckoning.

00:00:26.500 The campaign Witches of Scotland wants three things.

00:00:29.600 Firstly, a pardon for all those convicted of witchcraft.

00:00:33.240 Secondly, an apology for all those who were accused as witches.

00:00:37.460 And finally, a national monument in recognition of all those who were affected by this terrible miscarriage of justice.

00:00:44.440 Over the forthcoming weeks, we'll be talking to a whole host of experts about the history and the modern day connections to the witches of Scotland.

00:00:52.980 Hello and welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.

00:00:55.840 this week we have got an absolute peach for you because it's one of my favorite favorite writers

00:01:02.200 on the issue of the witch hunts in history really brilliant engaging speaker who I have long been

00:01:08.460 admire of on Twitter so I'm very delighted and excited to have him on today but before we go

00:01:14.500 into today's show Claire on this the 59th episode of six is there anything you want to talk about

00:01:20.960 no I think we should just skip street to Claire come on don't don't be cruel what is what is your

00:01:27.940 witch hunt witch stuff news big news well as you know Zoe since we last spoke there has been

00:01:36.560 an apology from the church in respect of witchcraft trials so as I understand it the

00:01:43.720 theological committee met and considered whether or not to give an apology to those accused of

00:01:49.940 witchcraft between the 16th and 18th century and on the day the General Assembly considered it

00:01:56.820 they passed that motion and gave that apology Zoe what did you think about it? Well I think it's

00:02:02.740 worth stating at this point that obviously the apology sought from the church wasn't one of our

00:02:07.740 campaign no and I think that was for different reasons one of the reasons was that I think that

00:02:13.320 we we wanted to focus on stuff that had kind of a legal and political angle to it that we felt that

00:02:19.160 there was a pretty straightforward route to go about it and the idea of approaching the church

00:02:24.180 for an apology was beset with a slightly more complicated because you can't there isn't

00:02:29.000 necessarily like a route to doing things in the same way as there's the route to doing things

00:02:33.140 politically or legally so we were we were definitely more within well your Claire comfort

00:02:38.040 zone with the legal political side of things okay and also partly for me I don't want to speak for

00:02:44.560 you Claire but the religious side of it I'm uncomfortable with that anyway because I don't

00:02:49.740 think that there would have been the issue obviously with the witch hunts and the people

00:02:54.480 that were accused and executed if people didn't hold strong religious views now as I would say

00:03:00.100 I'm an agnostic I'm happy to be proven wrong on this one if it's a good a good outcome but I I

00:03:06.140 felt uncomfortable um petitioning the church or approaching the church because I think without

00:03:11.620 religion we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in just now I don't know what you think

00:03:15.400 about that Claire wow that is that's not that's not like a can of worms that's like a whole house

00:03:20.620 of worms you just don't know yeah well I you know no harm to the church in this instance um but just

00:03:28.080 for me personally I wanted to focus on the rational and empirical world of facts yeah well I mean I'm

00:03:34.840 a humanist so I don't have any religious belief and my thinking was that the church was part of

00:03:43.200 the aspect of everyone's belief at the time it wasn't separate from the people in that regard

00:03:50.500 and it of course did have a part to play in witchcraft trials especially in relation to the

00:03:54.440 accusations and giving us an insight into the confession so if you had a minister in a particular

00:04:00.860 area that was particularly hell-bent pardon the pun on finding witches then there would be more

00:04:08.480 witchcraft accusations in that particular area so it definitely had an effect but for me these

00:04:15.740 were secular prosecutions they weren't religious prosecutions and that's why I preferred to get

00:04:23.060 an apology from the state as opposed to the church that having been said i'm really glad

00:04:30.780 that the church have apologized well absolutely no it's great and there's obviously lots of people

00:04:35.860 still in the world and in scotland a fair few amount of people that that do have involvement

00:04:41.500 with church with different churches but particularly church scotland obviously here

00:04:45.280 so i think that that's really good and it just shows again what the zeitgeist is really just now

00:04:50.580 you know and and what people's views are towards the issue of the witch hunts and the issue of

00:04:55.100 modern day apologies for past wrongs and of looking at history and you know I'm really

00:04:59.840 pleased that we've been part of that conversation of pushing that forward and really having it

00:05:05.000 talked about in society you know and I think that's something that that I think is really

00:05:08.900 a fantastic outcome you know it's a really thinking outcome that's come from lots of work

00:05:13.980 from our part and also from community campaigners across Scotland and in fact internationally so

00:05:18.980 i'm really really pleased about that that having been said i've got some concerns which back up my

00:05:25.320 initial concerns about approaching the church for an apology which is that there's a really

00:05:30.040 interesting document that the church of scotland have written and this is presumably which is the

00:05:34.820 result of the the consultation they did within their within their members and so on and their

00:05:39.800 current clergy and what i want to focus on is this because this is one area which whenever we have an

00:05:46.140 article that's in the press whenever we're approached whenever the story is covered there

00:05:50.920 will be some as we've discussed before comments underneath under the line which you should never

00:05:55.500 look under the line but obviously I can't help myself don't go there and it has to be said it's

00:06:01.600 a very small amount of criticism it's really not that big of a deal but one of the criticisms that

00:06:06.980 we sometimes get or the campaigns sometimes get is that you can't apportion blame to people of

00:06:13.360 today for what happened to people in the past which i think is really interesting and for me

00:06:18.880 obviously well maybe it's not obvious for me you cannot hold people to account because they're dead

00:06:25.300 naturally right okay i think that part is obvious but i still think that it's important an apology

00:06:30.720 societally is something that's important that we look at and we look at what the function of an

00:06:35.600 apology is so i think that that's really beneficial yes if you have a look on the church of scotland's

00:06:40.820 website there's this document if you'll find it the second objection they have I'm going to read

00:06:45.340 this out Claire if you don't mind and we can have a wee chat about it because I think it's really

00:06:48.780 interesting this is lifted directly from their statement or their essay or whatever we're going

00:06:53.920 to be calling it a second objection is also concerned with blame but this time with the

00:06:58.960 blame of the group's former members rather than its current ones the worry is about whether it's

00:07:03.900 appropriate to apply contemporary standards to past actors for example many current members of

00:07:09.540 the Church of Scotland will think one of the things that made the witch hunts of yesteryear

00:07:13.060 so horrifying is that most, possibly all, of the accused were innocent of the charges

00:07:18.480 lays against them. This may be because we think the accused could not have made a deal

00:07:23.080 with the devil, or because if they did, the devil is not capable of granting humans the

00:07:27.340 sort of magical powers James VI accused them of deploying against him. It may be because

00:07:32.040 we think many of the accused simply suffered from mental health conditions that were poorly

00:07:36.120 understood at the time it may be because we think some of the accused were just ahead of their time

00:07:41.260 having stumbled upon medicinal properties of plants that were not yet widely known

00:07:45.220 it may be because we think testimony that has been acquired through torture the threat of torture

00:07:50.460 or the offer of reprieve is unreliable it may be because the power dynamics displayed in the witch 0.94

00:07:56.060 trials were so manifestly sexist or it may be because we do not think consorting with fairies 0.79

00:08:01.240 is a capital offence so there's six different reasons there that are given the first the thing

00:08:07.320 that i really want to draw our attention to and how do you know what it is i think i can guess

00:08:11.400 do you know what it is it's the very first one there okay so one of the things that made the

00:08:16.560 witch hunts of yesteryear so horrifying is that most possibly all so most possibly all of the

00:08:23.780 accused were innocent of the charges laid against them i think i'm going for all i think all right

00:08:29.840 but say most or all I would definitely be ticking all that's the point that we are making with our

00:08:35.580 campaign which is why it'd be disingenuous of us to say to the church with the belief system that

00:08:40.300 they still hold where clearly there is still a belief that you could be a witch you know with

00:08:45.500 that with that clause there most possibly all means that some people believe that there is such

00:08:51.940 a thing as a witch and that there is such a thing as a witch that's in league with the devil

00:08:55.960 now just absolutely categorically for the record Claire and I do not believe that you can make a

00:09:04.020 pact with the devil okay that's where our whole campaign rests upon all the people accused of

00:09:10.900 witchcraft were innocent of that accusation they may well have been guilty of something else I

00:09:17.120 don't know murder theft adultery singing drunkenly in the street but they were not guilty of being

00:09:25.420 witches and that's what our whole campaign is about which is why I have a certain level of

00:09:30.720 problematic discomfort with the church giving an apology which has still got this little bit where

00:09:36.740 it's like we're sorry but some of them might have been witches I find that uncomfortable I'm happy

00:09:43.520 to have a discussion with the theologian about that on the show and we did about a year ago I

00:09:48.460 think reach out to one of the people that was involved with the apology and they declined to

00:09:53.180 speak to us on the podcast probably because of the point that I'm making right now well and I don't

00:09:58.740 know I'd be guessing because we didn't get a reason but yeah in fairness they did say we can't speak

00:10:04.460 to you at the moment so maybe we should try giving that a go because yeah I mean some of the some of

00:10:11.140 the things you spoke about there are are you know fascinating and sure and then I think it would be

00:10:17.780 really really interesting to see how that concern about there still being witches was overcome

00:10:24.640 in the apology so i would i'd really like to hear from somebody it'd be fascinating and i certainly

00:10:31.140 wouldn't be interested in sort of saying saying to somebody from the church whether it's a minister

00:10:36.020 or whatever that um oh your ideas are wrong like you know that's their belief system i a hundred

00:10:41.760 percent support anybody believing what they want as long as it's not harmful to other people right

00:10:47.180 and i think that the church of scotland these days is probably not harmful to other people and

00:10:51.800 it shows with with a few things that they decided during their um their get together recently that

00:10:57.440 there are various things that they're moving forward on and you know i think that's really

00:11:01.300 cool and all power to them because change is hard for all of us okay but i still have some pause

00:11:07.120 about that particular angle yeah for sure well let's give a shout out to anybody who is in the

00:11:13.120 church will be interested in speaking to us and maybe we'll get in contact again with grey friars

00:11:17.860 remember we spoke to them yeah they were really fascinating we went and gave a talk at their

00:11:22.560 festival of science last year yeah and we were also approached right at the beginning of our

00:11:28.780 campaign so way back in 2020 and we were approached by a retired minister who was very interested in

00:11:37.420 the campaign very interested in taking it forward but for a couple of reasons that we can't go into

00:11:42.880 just now we didn't progress with that but I would be interested to see whether they might actually

00:11:48.700 fancy coming back on talking about their response to it yeah I would really love that well that's

00:11:53.800 maybe something for the future um Zoe is there any news any other news yeah there are there are

00:12:02.320 various really cool community things that are happening just now and we've mentioned um various

00:12:07.700 groups up till now calder west calder and cables obviously nairn as you've mentioned there there

00:12:16.120 are loads of really great well several really great researchers there's judith gorman who's

00:12:20.220 working away in forfer who was recently on the lucy worsley show about witchcraft maybe we should

00:12:25.400 talk about that wee bit claire oh it was it was brilliant to see judith available on iplayer so

00:12:30.720 if you've not watched it you can see an iplayer and my understanding is it's available on bbc

00:12:34.800 america too so hopefully it'll be available around the world um and so people can catch up with it

00:12:40.900 it was really interesting what lucy worsley did she took kind of an overview of the witch hunts

00:12:45.700 give some good history there were some sort of dramatic reenactment parts which i'm i never

00:12:51.020 really super cool with but i know why they do that it makes sense and it makes it real in people's

00:12:55.440 minds and i know that talking to people that um that hadn't really thought about too much so a

00:12:59.500 few people have talked to me about that since then and they really enjoyed that i think it made it

00:13:03.280 much more real it definitely for one of the first times on british tv didn't treat the witchcraft

00:13:11.080 trials as a joke or witchcraft as a joke and it did what our campaign has been trying to do for

00:13:18.400 two years which is make people think about the actual women and men that went through these

00:13:23.900 accusations and if we have to do a wee bit of re-enaginactment for that then i will go with

00:13:30.000 some reimagined actmen that's a good word so we are looking forward to having judith gorman back

00:13:36.000 on the show again she's going to tell us more about what she's been um researching more recently

00:13:40.320 so keep your keep your ears ready peeled no keep your ears open keep keep just pay attention

00:13:49.920 we'll tell you when we've worked out with judith when we're going to get her back on again so

00:13:54.220 as ever um judith's fascinating she's a great speaker so it'll be really good to have her back

00:13:58.600 on again and it was lovely to see her on tv because when the production company approached us

00:14:02.640 about what we might be able to offer them for that that was the first person that came into

00:14:06.660 our heads because judith's doing some really interesting stuff that's really inspiring i

00:14:10.820 think for citizen historians and researchers across well i was going to say scotland but i

00:14:16.820 guess the world really yeah because she shows you how to do it really and talks about it

00:14:21.180 so it was really cool and that was really gratifying to see judith start to um build her

00:14:26.340 tv career yes that's the first program because we now know she's been approached to do something

00:14:30.860 else as well so that's really cool yeah fantastic well we'll keep you updated with all info on that

00:14:36.640 as we can now i think what we should do is move to talk about some people who were accused as witches

00:14:44.840 yep have you got a list of people there claire well usually i name lists of people and i'm able

00:14:51.800 to give you their names and you know we've talked about in the past so sundry witches just listings

00:14:57.820 yeah that always sticks in my head yeah it's horrible where they haven't actually even

00:15:02.800 identified how many people have been accused of witchcraft because they haven't even recorded

00:15:08.760 their names they haven't even bothered to give us that much information about the history

00:15:12.560 but this is an absolutely fascinating story and sadly we don't have the names or the outcomes of

00:15:19.880 any of the people accused but the story of who did the accusing is utterly fascinating

00:15:26.860 I'll tell you how I came about this I was thinking about those people that were accused and executed

00:15:33.220 as witchcraft in England and I was thinking in comparison to Scotland it was a tiny amount of

00:15:39.820 people and I thought one of our biggest witchcraft accusation periods was in the period 1661 to 1662

00:15:50.360 that was one of the big spark points of witchcraft accusations that particular year so I thought I

00:15:58.120 wonder how many people were accused in that very year and I looked up the survey of Scottish

00:16:02.800 witchcraft our bible of information on witchcraft act and between 1661 and 1662 647 witchcraft

00:16:14.420 accusations took place in that year now compare that to the whole of england for the whole period

00:16:22.360 during the 16th to 18th century where we have 500 people that we know were accused and executed

00:16:29.660 as as witches so it just shows you that disparity but one of the first things that i found when i

00:16:35.620 came across that was um an entry in respect of a woman called christian caldwell sometimes spelled

00:16:45.480 cadel now the information i'm going to give everyone is from the survey of scottish witchcraft

00:16:50.340 please do find it you can find it online just by putting in that phrase and you can also find it

00:16:56.480 by using the Scottish Witchcraft Interactive Map.

00:17:00.640 How's her name spelled, sorry?

00:17:02.700 Christian Caldwell, C-A-U-L-D,

00:17:05.800 as in called, W-E-L-L, Caldwell.

00:17:10.580 Well, that's also known as Cadell.

00:17:12.640 Yes, sometimes spelled Cadell, C-A-D-D-E-L-L.

00:17:17.640 So this was a woman called Christian Caldwell,

00:17:20.600 and the reason why I keep saying it's a woman

00:17:22.240 was because her alias, Zoe, was John Dixon.

00:17:26.480 what is going on here? I shall tell you more. John Dixon was indicted for dressing as a man

00:17:34.800 and acting as a witch pricker. Yes so Christian Caldwell dressed up and gave herself an alias

00:17:45.240 John Dixon and she pretended to be a burgess from Forfer and she was going around

00:17:54.840 obtaining jobs as a witch pricker identifying women. So what was said in the records that

00:18:04.100 are identified in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft was that she was held in the

00:18:08.600 tollbooth of Edinburgh on the 30th August 1662 and she was interrogated by the justice deputies.

00:18:15.960 She said that she'd mentioned two unnamed people that she accused of witchcraft and many others

00:18:22.320 from six counties so what the survey of scottish witchcraft did was they estimated the two witches

00:18:28.320 from each county um which they brought to a total of 14 unnamed people accused of witchcraft but you

00:18:35.880 can see how that is a really rough ready reckoner calculation it could be more it could be less but

00:18:43.620 that is what they're seeing so what happened was as a man identifying herself as john dixon

00:18:50.480 she contracted with officials in moray to be their witch pricker for a year zoe not like i'm just

00:18:57.480 going to turn up and go there's a witch there's a witch but for a whole year she contracted to be

00:19:03.180 their witch pricker she was paid and this is a handsome sum six shillings a day and and this is

00:19:10.800 the crucially important part six pounds for every witch who was found guilty it's like that bit on

00:19:18.000 the on the comedy thing that was on recently the finder where where daisy may cooper's character

00:19:24.040 the accused witch says to the witch finder so um you get paid for each witch that you find that's

00:19:31.560 not a very good system is it you know that when what would what would be the purpose of not finding

00:19:36.120 people guilty exactly exactly so there's nothing like a wee bit of a financial incentive to go

00:19:43.280 around accusing people of witches if you are not only going to get six shillings a day but you

00:19:48.380 would get six pounds for every witch that was found guilty. So she travelled and worked with

00:19:55.260 a woman called Isabel Dick and somewhat unsurprisingly she claimed that she could

00:20:01.580 tell witches by sight by looking into their eyes and apparently she said she'd gain that skill

00:20:09.160 from another charlatan, John Kincaid, 0.61

00:20:13.200 a witch pricker, active melodians.

00:20:15.540 I should point out that the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft 0.99

00:20:17.660 doesn't editorialise,

00:20:19.120 and it's me that's calling him a charlatan.

00:20:21.340 So she was accused of pricking many of His Majesty's lieges

00:20:26.520 in the Sheriffsdom of Elgin, Forres, Nairn, Inverness,

00:20:31.960 Ross, and Sutherland.

00:20:34.360 So we know that during this time she was going around there,

00:20:37.960 we know it was for a year,

00:20:39.160 she's clearly managed to get away with this deception for a long period of time Zoe because

00:20:44.000 she's been around all these different places that's nuts that's just a really bonkers story

00:20:50.140 there's definitely a story in there about how they came to find out that she was in fact

00:20:55.440 christian caldwell and not john dixon i wish we had pictures photographs from the olden days

00:21:03.060 there are no photographs from those times Zoe i'm afraid i know it's a wee shame

00:21:08.700 god what a crazy story exactly so what we would like to do today is remember those people who

00:21:15.980 were accused by someone who had decided clearly that they found a way to make money who dressed

00:21:23.540 up as a man because presumably obviously if she'd said that she was a woman she wouldn't be allowed

00:21:30.320 to be a witch pricker so um she was dressing by a man and calling herself um a different name and

00:21:37.440 it would be really interesting to to know why or how she got away with pretending to be a burgess

00:21:45.100 from Forfer I suppose it's it's just because there weren't records at that time so it's not like

00:21:50.060 you'd be able to check up your local area and check who they were so if you if you just said

00:21:55.820 I'm John Dixon from somewhere people would go okay fair enough I wonder if she had any link at all

00:22:01.660 to Forfer if that was just sort of you know randomly picked in some way or can't tell the

00:22:06.860 records as far as we can see them or as far as I can see them here just don't show but it was

00:22:12.940 clearly somebody to very much be avoided around that time unless you looked into your eyes and 0.53

00:22:19.240 decided that you were a witch. So today we remember the 14 or so people unnamed people

00:22:24.900 who were accused of witchcraft by John Dixon aka Christian Caldwell.

00:22:33.380 I mean if I can just say one thing yeah being able to look into somebody's eyes

00:22:41.940 and tell that they're a witch it sounds a bit witchy you know 0.64

00:22:47.280 do you know what I mean that's quite well I kind of what I thought about it was was

00:22:54.720 how I mean how minimal do you have to be at least John Kincaid had some contraptions

00:23:01.740 he put them into people and said oh there's this blood and there's that blood and that's why it's

00:23:08.200 scientific she was obviously you know thinking i'm not going to do any of that stuff i can just

00:23:13.240 tell by looking in your eyes i mean you can tell a lot by looking in people's eyes sometimes but

00:23:21.140 not that not that they're a witch or in league with the devil i mean so on to better stories

00:23:28.660 in better times zoe yes so today's guest i guess is where you're leading with there claire is that

00:23:35.320 correct that was a that was a that was a segue which i liked it it would have been it would have

00:23:41.180 been almost flawless had we not now been talking about the fact that it was a segue that's okay

00:23:46.000 we're just we're just is that the right word or is that the things that you go on that's got just

00:23:50.500 the like one wheel i think it's both things is it yeah i don't think it's just one wheel it's not

00:23:57.400 one wheel it's just it's just a front if you know what i mean it's like it's not like a unicycle

00:24:03.320 that's a different thing cycle no i think it's two wheels with the standy bit in the middle and

00:24:09.040 then the bit that you hold on to i'm acting a segway for the benefit of the tape that's quite

00:24:14.700 yeah this has got nothing to do with segways though no i think it is a segway

00:24:20.940 presumably that the segway is named after a segway because it's joining a to b

00:24:26.360 seamlessly front wheel to the back wheel or joining a person from one place to another

00:24:31.740 no it's the side wheel to side wheel it's from one place to another

00:24:35.520 okay yes for the love of god please just introduce okay okay our guest today is very

00:24:45.740 excitingly mr malcolm gaskell and he is the emeritus professor of early modern history at

00:24:53.140 the University of East Anglia specializing in the social and cultural history of 17th century

00:24:58.780 England and America particularly the history of witchcraft. He's written six books including

00:25:04.400 Between Two Worlds, How the English Became Americans, Witch Finders, A 17th Century English

00:25:09.840 Tragedy and Hellish Nell, Last of Britain's Witches and that's a biography of the spiritualist

00:25:15.400 medium Helen Duncan who as you'll know was the last woman imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act

00:25:20.420 in 1944 in England. His most recent book, which we'll be talking about, is The Ruin

00:25:26.360 of All Witches, Life and Death in the New World, and that's the story of a witch panic

00:25:30.880 in a New England frontier town. I am really excited to welcome to the show today, Malcolm

00:25:37.060 Gaskell.

00:25:43.140 Hi Malcolm, we're so happy to have you on our podcast. We've been looking to get you

00:25:47.700 for a wee while and through our fault through Claire and my fault there's been a couple of

00:25:51.740 missed opportunities so I'm delighted to have you here and I'm actually genuinely quite excited to

00:25:55.760 chat to you so thank you so much for agreeing to come on oh thank you very much indeed Zoe and it's

00:26:00.520 fantastic to uh finally be here I I thought in the end perhaps you didn't want me and I was trying

00:26:05.440 to just let me down gently anyway thank you for your determination I'm here

00:26:10.740 our determination to fight through our own incompetence

00:26:14.320 it's more like thank you for your forbearance i think probably would be more accurate in this

00:26:19.620 situation so malcolm we know of you probably primarily through what you tweet actually that's

00:26:26.020 how i first came to know of you and i've followed what you do but obviously you're a historian and

00:26:30.440 a writer and are well known i think it's fair to say within the historian circles give us a kind

00:26:36.400 of like a potted history of how you've come to this point in your career just now how you started

00:26:40.720 and how this interest developed sure well people have all sorts of weird wonderful ideas about how

00:26:46.000 I might have but sometimes people don't like to ask so I started really when I was a student and

00:26:50.620 I read Keith Thomas's Religion and the Client of Magic and I just really felt this was a world that

00:26:55.960 I could write something about as a student and so for my third year dissertation I lived in grew up

00:27:01.400 in Kent and I did something on Kent Witchers and went into the archives for the first time as a

00:27:06.160 student, found I couldn't read any of the writing, was helped by the archivists, and gradually

00:27:11.620 managed to tell the story about the 1640s and 1650s in the country that I'd grown up in, lots of

00:27:17.680 places that were familiar to me. So it gave me a particular kind of excitement, having that local

00:27:23.020 dimension. And then that really grew into a PhD, which was really about all sorts of heinous crimes

00:27:29.220 in the early modern period across the whole of England. And then from then, gradually, you know,

00:27:34.160 out of all my heinous crimes I just settled on the heinous crime of witchcraft. It just sort of 0.52

00:27:38.960 developed that way it wasn't necessarily that you had any sort of interest in witches pre-university.

00:27:44.380 Well I think I probably did in the sense of you know I was always quite interested in horror films

00:27:48.860 and the occult and slightly morbid things probably like a lot of kids maybe a little bit more than

00:27:54.120 most kids but that really wasn't how I came in I suppose I really got into it because of the legal

00:27:59.740 side. And of course, all my records were legal records. So I understood witchcraft as a crime

00:28:06.040 in the same way I'd studied all sorts of crimes. And that coming at it from that direction, I really 0.80

00:28:11.580 got the understanding of the context of wrongdoing in the early modern period. And therefore, you

00:28:17.140 know, I think there was a danger otherwise of just seeing witchcraft in isolation, perhaps there

00:28:20.780 still is, but understanding it actually as part of everyday life, which was something Keith

00:28:26.080 Thomason had done in Religion, the Client and Magic, and also understanding it as a crime which

00:28:32.420 was part of a legal process and that it was, you know, not just about, say, you know, the kind of

00:28:37.540 stereotype of hysteria, but was actually an administrative and bureaucratic exercise as well,

00:28:43.760 kind of banality of evil type, you know, line of thinking really, where really, you know, people,

00:28:49.800 and by people I mean men, had to sit in a room usually and make decisions and therefore

00:28:55.740 witch hunting again wasn't just about crowds with flaming torches it was like more like a kind of

00:29:00.940 local government meeting and that had its own kind of grim fascination I think. Yeah I think that's

00:29:06.360 something that I mean I'm not a historian as I'm always at pains to point out but it's something

00:29:10.360 that I've really found very interesting over the last two years is to discover that it wasn't

00:29:15.040 anything really like the stereotypes that we have it was just quite a organized and thought through

00:29:20.460 and intelligent way of dealing with a you know a crime i think that's been really fascinating

00:29:26.100 when you were growing up in kent was there much chat about what happened with witches because

00:29:31.020 we've talked about when we were growing up in scotland there was very little chat about you

00:29:35.180 know about what happened in our local area so was it known and talked about in kent

00:29:39.000 no it wasn't really there was a little bit of folklore that occasionally you used to see and

00:29:45.160 i don't know there were you know local histories and societies things there was a little bit but

00:29:49.760 And there was, of course, things were so much worse in Scotland.

00:29:52.960 The intensity of prosecution was 12 times what it is in England.

00:29:56.660 And it wasn't even particularly bad in Kent.

00:29:59.640 I mean, there were areas of Essex and Lancashire and so on in England where there was some quite intense witch hunts.

00:30:05.200 But there was really nothing like that in Kent.

00:30:07.400 And so I suppose I was dealing with a relatively small sample starting off.

00:30:13.260 But rather than it being a quantitative type study, it was very qualitative.

00:30:17.080 So I was already going quite deeply into the cultural background of these accusations and how they came out of communities.

00:30:24.340 But actually, places where there are low, we might think of as a low intensity of prosecutions, you know, they pose their own very interesting question about why there were any prosecutions at all.

00:30:35.420 You know, if it's so rare, why now and again did they crop up?

00:30:38.720 You know, when I was, again, starting out with my dissertation, I got my dad's AA, you know, roadmap, photocopied it because it was pre-internet and so on.

00:30:46.800 So I had these sort of photocopies and I was just putting red dots on every single time I found a case in Kent.

00:30:52.460 But in the end, it was just a scatter across this rather big county.

00:30:56.420 And it was very difficult to draw any lines of connection between them.

00:31:00.040 Whereas, of course, if you compare that to some of the really intense witch hunts in Scotland, say in 1629-30, then you can really see how these panics spread and that beyond a certain point, the more witch trials there are, the more it increases the anxiety that there are lots of witches around and therefore that something should be done about them.

00:31:20.500 So it's not necessarily quite hysteria, but it's certainly the sense that in order to prosecute witches, you've got to feel relatively certain there are, in their minds, witches around.

00:31:30.600 And that's why I think success in witch hunting terms breeds success.

00:31:34.600 It was interesting what you said there about when there's not very many cases, why are there not very many cases? 0.79

00:31:39.880 So if there were just a scattering, what was it that tipped the balance and people went, oh, that person is a witch then?

00:31:45.540 It's a really good question. It's still something that I occasionally grapple with. There were a lot of reasons not to prosecute somebody for witchcraft. There was a lot of scepticism, not necessarily about the concept of witchcraft, but there was a lot of scepticism at law about the evidence.

00:32:01.340 and so that in england as a whole that the acquittal rate is over 70 percent over 75 percent

00:32:08.060 which again goes against our stereotypes and our myths of which where there's this feeling of

00:32:12.020 as soon as somebody finds themselves in court then you know then that then they were doomed but

00:32:17.080 actually most of the time they got off not because of any humanitarian concern for their welfare or

00:32:23.380 anything but because of doubts about the actual evidence so i do think that in some of the cases

00:32:28.720 which do become you know which are successful and there are convictions it's sometimes because

00:32:34.140 that the person accused confesses that's always the gold standard of evidence or it's just a kind

00:32:40.240 of groundswell of emotion in the places where these people live where the the witness testimony

00:32:48.000 is so impassioned and there's so much of it people seem so genuinely afraid and fearful of the people

00:32:54.320 that they believe to be witchers, that it actually makes a deep impression upon a jury who start to

00:32:59.960 think, well, you know, could so many people really think this about this individual and this not be

00:33:06.200 true? In modern terms, this is hearsay. This would be thrown, I was sure that Claire would tell us,

00:33:10.740 would be thrown out of court immediately. But actually, hearsay in the 17th century could have

00:33:15.780 a certain kind of emotional power on behalf of the community that was actually quite hard to resist

00:33:20.200 at law so many legal questions but i'll try to restrict them because this is the witches of

00:33:24.860 scotland and not the law questions i want to ask of scotland firstly you mentioned trial by jury

00:33:30.220 and that's fascinating because in england trial by jury you can get that for even minor offenses

00:33:36.540 whereas in scotland it's always been a sheriff or a judge sitting by themselves for minor offenses

00:33:42.740 so it never even crossed my mind that which trials would be jury trials yeah they are so that the

00:33:49.320 witchcraft is a felony and witchcraft is the 1563 and 1604 witchcraft acts and it really follows

00:33:58.540 common law principles like any other trial so you know when you look at a jail calendar in the

00:34:03.240 national archives for you know a size is 35 a size is 45 whatever then you just get the whole

00:34:09.640 list of all the crimes and they are tried and you will get arson you will get um you know sodomy

00:34:16.220 you'll get murder and then you get a couple of witchcraft trials and then on to the next thing 0.76

00:34:20.020 so there's nothing there's nothing special about witch trials in the order of business

00:34:26.040 at an assize court so that if somebody makes a complaint to a magistrate then the magistrate

00:34:31.760 is duty bound to because in any felony case to have the person detained to get the evidence

00:34:38.740 together testimony and then that's forwarded to the assizes the person is then held on remand

00:34:43.680 in jail until the next visitation of the judges from Westminster, who come right out literally

00:34:50.840 twice a year on their circuits, circuit judges, and then they deliver the jail. And then all those

00:34:57.300 criminals who've been there, all those accused, witches, everything, are then all tried in a

00:35:02.060 session. So again, they don't decide to have a witch trial. They just do this in this very kind

00:35:06.500 of procedural sort of way. And a 70% acquittal rate, does that even include where there were

00:35:11.920 confessions the truth about confessions is there aren't very many confessions yeah it does yeah

00:35:16.860 but there aren't very many because of course torture isn't part of the formal process and so

00:35:23.160 it wasn't in scotland either but we still might we still have to define torture differently and

00:35:29.140 still get a lot of confession that is quite true of course the most effective kind of torture as

00:35:34.300 you know is sleep deprivation intimidation you know all that stuff goes on i mean i'm not making

00:35:39.980 any kind of defense of English magistrates but there are cases where English magistrates are

00:35:44.460 so keen to know whether the confession is genuine or not that they will actually ask whether the

00:35:49.500 person has slept or not or whether they're saying it in a dream because the thing is about these

00:35:54.360 English cases typically is that nobody wants to hang somebody who is innocent because again not

00:36:00.360 because they're nice humanitarian people they live in a totally different moral universe to us

00:36:05.420 But it's because they believe that if you execute an innocent person, their blood cries out to heaven for vengeance and that God's providential judgment will be upon them.

00:36:15.580 That's why juries are actually quite scared of convicting because they feel what the providential consequences upon them might be.

00:36:23.180 So they will ask a judge, they'll say to a judge, please direct us.

00:36:26.480 And the judge will say, oh, well, you know, search your hearts and God will direct you.

00:36:30.900 And they think, well, that's not much good, but they're not really sure.

00:36:34.180 that's really interesting because i hadn't really thought about the kind of the moral

00:36:39.100 weight on those making the decision because i think that that you know and this is probably

00:36:42.920 just the stereotypes of rumbling on that when people made the accusation and then it was

00:36:47.540 investigated and whatever that they were they were convinced that the person was guilty and

00:36:51.080 nothing would sort of sway them i didn't really think about the fact they might actually consider

00:36:55.180 well could this person actually be innocent i thought that the sort of the juggernaut of it

00:36:58.860 would just keep going and they'd be like well that's it and you've got to crack you know eggs

00:37:02.920 to make an omelette sort of approach.

00:37:05.200 The doubts tend to creep in right at the start.

00:37:08.460 Like you say, one of the stereotypes is that

00:37:10.060 the whole community is united against the individual.

00:37:13.980 Whereas there are very many English cases where,

00:37:16.900 well, when the evidence survives for it,

00:37:18.440 but they are deeply suggestive,

00:37:20.780 that they tend to divide communities

00:37:22.500 and that a lot of people think the person is innocent

00:37:25.560 or people think it's guilty.

00:37:27.440 And it's just, you know, when it reaches that tipping point

00:37:30.160 that it will even go forward to trial.

00:37:31.920 even those that make it to trial are a you know quite an exceptional sample and out of those

00:37:39.740 you're talking about 22 to 25 percent success rate one of those questions has always puzzled

00:37:46.380 me on the back of that is you know why did anybody do it they must have been aware that

00:37:51.780 they had low chances of success at law why do people do it and I think that it's actually a

00:37:56.880 lot of the time it's because they are either exceptionally angry and afraid and it's just

00:38:01.780 it's just an emotional override on the the logic of whether you should they're not even thinking

00:38:07.300 whether they should or they shouldn't they just feel they've got to or if there's someone else

00:38:11.480 like a witch finder who gives them the courage to do so gives them that confidence that actually

00:38:18.500 that and that will be by their side which is what Matthew Hopkins does during the English witch hunt

00:38:23.780 of 1645 to seven he's a sort of an enabler a facilitator who just sort of us offers to kind

00:38:30.840 of hold their hand metaphorically so that they will feel that they can you know that they have

00:38:36.420 a chance but even in the Hopkins trials right at the start there are nine reprieves in the very

00:38:41.480 first trial why because there are magistrates and ministers present who are not sure about the

00:38:46.100 evidence and speaking of Hopkins was he um I'm not sure how to phrase this was he a witch finder

00:38:54.280 for the right reasons did he did he really genuinely believe in it or was he just realizing

00:39:02.300 this was a good way to make a name for himself and get status and power the truth is we don't

00:39:06.720 know the assumption always was that he did it for money did it for the wrong reasons by you know

00:39:13.000 your terms. When I wrote my book about the East Anglican Witch Finders 2005, I just wanted to

00:39:21.320 open up the possibility that he was sincere. And it was slightly controversial to some extent. But

00:39:28.220 again, I wasn't saying I definitely could say that was the case. I was saying that there was

00:39:31.720 a possibility. And of course, there were a great many men who were rather like him at the time.

00:39:36.080 They didn't necessarily hunt witches. But the men who signed the king's death warrant did

00:39:41.460 something at least as extraordinary as rounding up witches they did it out of a kind of passion

00:39:47.540 and zeal and the belief that these were the last days of man and that they needed to deliver

00:39:54.540 England into a different kind of future and so on you know this is there was sincerity into their

00:39:59.420 actions even though to us now they seem like appalling tyrannical people who were zealots

00:40:05.180 who were so sure of themselves in the name of God that they'd commit any amount of violence you think

00:40:10.720 about Cromwell's mission, you know, Cromwell in Drogida and Wexford. Well, he felt he was God's

00:40:16.480 instrument. But of course, now we would think about this as genocidal massacres. And so I think

00:40:22.080 that something of Hopkins, he was the son of a Puritan clergyman. I think he felt like many

00:40:28.300 Puritans in the Stour Valley in the 1640s, that he had a certain kind of mission. And that certainly

00:40:33.960 would be consistent with the context in which he lived, rather than just kind of Vincent Price

00:40:41.720 with a floppy hat on in Witchfinder General in 1968, which makes him into a monster. So it could

00:40:48.300 be a bit of both. I mean, of course, there were people at the time that accused Hopkins of just

00:40:51.880 doing it for the money. This wasn't a totally modern idea. But then by that stage, Hopkins

00:40:57.000 had come to represent something even worse than rounding up witches for money in their eyes.

00:41:02.220 it was fomenting disorder and after the civil war anybody who was to seem to be taking the

00:41:08.040 law into their own hands was to be reviled whatever he was he was certainly a good publicist

00:41:13.640 it would appear if the terminology of which finder general was self-imposed

00:41:18.520 yes but again like many men at this time like many um like gerald winstanley in the diggers

00:41:25.020 they understood that you you went to london and you had your pamphlet printed and you can get

00:41:29.860 people to read I mean again as for self-publicity he was very much a man of his age during the

00:41:36.640 1640s there are over 20,000 separate titles published in London I mean it's just a massive

00:41:41.960 outpouring ever on every subject under the sun everybody who had an idea for a book you know

00:41:48.220 self-publishing starts then that's really we've talked about that recently about how the sharing

00:41:54.160 of confessions and little pamphlets really keep seem to kind of drive things on you know and it

00:41:59.480 They were like just exciting little tabloid stories, essentially, in some ways.

00:42:04.620 Yeah, definitely. You would have Petty Chapman, who are just like hawkers, tinkers, who would pick these pamphlets up from St Paul's Churchyard in London, and then they would hit the road.

00:42:15.960 And so there were probably limits to how far they could take these things, but some of them make it over the Atlantic.

00:42:20.760 They go over in ships. Eight weeks later, someone could be reading about this stuff in Boston.

00:42:24.580 and it gets passed about it gets passed about by word of mouth in the 17th century if anybody

00:42:30.780 new arrived anywhere people clamored and said oh hello uh what news what news and so a lot of this

00:42:37.180 stuff might get read about and then it gets passed on by so that the effect of a printed pamphlet is

00:42:42.240 not just the people who could read it it's the people who listen to the person who can read it

00:42:46.420 and that with when witchcraft's concerned i think it creates first of all a sense that witches are

00:42:52.740 out there secondly it creates a standardized image of who witches are and what they do and

00:42:59.020 thirdly it increases confidence that you can do something about it because these pamphlets are

00:43:03.380 typically about the trials of which witches are convicted not the trials where they are acquitted

00:43:09.360 now talking about witch finders you've recently been now i'm not sure what exactly your official

00:43:15.700 title was historical consultant something along those lines yeah i think so for the tv program

00:43:21.540 witch finder on a bbc which is still available on iplayer is i'll admit when claire and i first

00:43:27.820 heard about it coming out and that it was being launched on international women's day

00:43:31.200 they both kind of went oh god what is this i think that was pretty insensitive uh thing to do

00:43:37.800 yeah um have you watched it all now yeah i've really enjoyed it and i actually found it quite

00:43:43.660 moving but the last episode i thought was really kind of beautiful actually i really enjoyed it

00:43:48.260 And I think that Daisy Mae Cooper's witch, her accused witch, was fantastic.

00:43:53.820 I really enjoyed her.

00:43:54.840 She's great, great to watch.

00:43:56.920 And I thought Reece Shearsmith's Matthew Hopkins was brilliant because I think he really, I mean, I know Reece a bit and I've met him a couple of times and we talked about Hopkins before and he was amazed that he got cast for it.

00:44:09.340 And I think he just really captured something of this self-righteous sort of busybody.

00:44:16.760 I think he is, not to spoil the TV series for anyone who hasn't seen it, but of course he is in it absolutely for the wrong reasons.

00:44:24.200 Yeah.

00:44:24.460 I think that the way that departure from the main character Gideon has from Hopkins' line, you know, tells us something really actually quite important about the history, which is that not everybody agreed.

00:44:39.480 And there was really the capacity for sympathy.

00:44:42.400 so having said that these people lived in a totally different moral universe and that there

00:44:46.800 was no humanitarian reason they didn't acquit witches for humanitarian reasons but there were

00:44:51.180 many voices who said that the people who confessed to witchcraft are old and they are frightened and

00:44:58.560 we'd be much better treating them with medicine and food and kindness and then we might find that

00:45:05.160 the so-called witchcraft that they're accused of goes away and that becomes a very compelling

00:45:09.080 argument right into the early 18th century right into the period of the end of trials and the

00:45:14.640 repeal. It's so nice to hear that degree of nuance about it because for so much of what we understood

00:45:21.880 of witchcraft trials in Scotland we kind of think of everyone as an amorphous group who all absolutely

00:45:28.320 believed in witches who all believed if people confessed they were witches and they had to die

00:45:33.340 it's much nicer and much more comforting in a way to think in a more nuanced sense

00:45:37.800 that people were as worried about it as you say they were they are they're not necessarily worried

00:45:43.160 the same way that we might be worried about things but they're unsure and that witchcraft

00:45:48.120 in many people's minds is something which they absolutely agree on in theory but in practice

00:45:54.420 they don't know and those who are very sure of themselves in practice are either lying or as I

00:46:01.620 said that they are exceptionally afraid and i think that's something which is which does get

00:46:08.140 overlooked i think the key to understanding people who are really who really believe in an

00:46:13.420 individual's guilt are those who are really very very afraid of them and that's at village level

00:46:19.360 i think the idea that there's somebody who lives over the way that you've got it into your head

00:46:25.320 is trying to kill your children then I think we can connect with those kinds of emotions you know

00:46:31.700 those of us with kids those of us who are totally reasonable and law-abiding and decent and love our

00:46:38.080 neighbour you know become feels faintly murderous don't we if somebody was threatening somebody that

00:46:43.560 we loved it's such an interesting concept and it's so I think what's really interesting to explore

00:46:48.800 is when you see people on that straight and narrow way and as you say family people who

00:46:54.300 take one step away from that world and find themselves in a very different world they're

00:46:59.260 the same person but they've got very very different motives is great to explore and

00:47:04.320 you've written not only books about witchcraft but you've also recently written a new book which

00:47:10.400 is is up for an award and that explores the idea of witchcraft a bit can you tell us a bit about

00:47:15.980 your new book? Yeah so I'd written this book Witch Finders which was about the witch hunt in East

00:47:21.160 Anglia in the 1640s and then I wrote a book called Between Two Worlds which was about English American

00:47:27.460 migrations to colonial America across the whole of the 17th century and so that really it was

00:47:32.580 it was kind of logical to do something which blended the two and that everybody knows about

00:47:38.520 Salem that's obviously the Salem witch hunts of 1692 one of the most famous episodes in all of

00:47:44.560 witch hunting but in the Connecticut Valley in a place called Springfield 40 years earlier there

00:47:50.640 was another smaller witch hunt that showed some of the characteristics that were to be seen later on

00:47:56.680 witch hunting is not a big thing in New England there aren't very many trials for the first 20

00:48:01.240 years or so there are no witch trials at all so that to see this little outburst of witch hunting

00:48:07.920 in this rather strange remote place which is a very intense hard-working I suppose we would say

00:48:15.300 sort of pre-capitalist or early capitalist community where people aren't just there

00:48:19.640 because they're a little godly transplanted community community from England but are really

00:48:23.720 there to make money and to work it's very interesting to see that witchcraft the way that

00:48:28.260 witchcraft there grows out of their well their hatred for each other I think which is a lot of

00:48:34.560 the time is because they're very jealous of each other over land and success that doesn't mean to

00:48:40.260 say they get rid of people because they think they're witches but I think actually there's a

00:48:44.180 lot of self-loathing in these people which is then projected onto a married couple called Hugh and

00:48:49.680 Mary Parsons and they're at the centre of the story I have read the book so you've read it too

00:48:55.260 yes yeah I love it I think it's I think it's really fascinating for me what's really fascinating

00:49:00.780 is that our idea well no I'm not going to speak for Claire my idea about the witch hunts was

00:49:05.060 absolutely from like this kind of American lens so it's really interesting to think actually that

00:49:10.380 things weren't as big there and they weren't the way that that we have this concept now I'm an

00:49:15.220 English teacher by training so I've taught the crucibles that was absolutely what my understanding

00:49:19.440 was it was like that so it's really fascinating I know that on Twitter you've got lots of people

00:49:25.000 that absolutely love that book what has the reception been like from americans to sort of

00:49:30.600 learn about that side of their history well it's it's not published uh in the states till later

00:49:35.460 this year so we might might yet find out but you know the early signs i mean you know some people

00:49:41.140 have read it i think that similarly i think there are people who just had heard about salem and

00:49:45.540 thought that was it as i say the history of witch hunting in colonial america is very restricted

00:49:50.600 it indeed and there really aren't that many cases so uh yeah we'll wait and see but I think as you

00:49:58.460 say that I wrote it primarily because I'm you know I'm a historian of England and I'd really

00:50:03.660 written about colonial America in my last book because I wanted to see it from the English

00:50:08.540 direction not as some kind of you know English colonialism or sort of you know recovering this

00:50:14.460 story but I think that the mentality was with a lot of the American historiography was the idea

00:50:20.840 that when you got to when you left old England or Scotland or anywhere in the British Isles and you

00:50:25.820 went to America you were sort of glad to be there you never went back and you sort of magically

00:50:29.140 became an American whatever that is so actually to see these people in say in Springfield

00:50:35.060 Massachusetts in the 1640s 1650s who's still really preserving their English and actually

00:50:41.380 in Springfield a lot of Welsh too identity is very interesting they take with them their beliefs

00:50:47.220 their way of life the way of building houses the way of eating and so on all these things all their

00:50:51.580 culture the other thing that they really take with them is the fact that they are I think not very

00:50:55.960 nice that they really don't really don't like their neighbours very much and they have they

00:51:02.100 hold each other to very very high moral standards and so the Hugh and Mary Parsons fall foul of this

00:51:08.180 So they get all this kind of negative feeling, a lot of which is sort of self-loathing, which is projected outwards onto this rather unfortunate couple who I think she is suffering from mental illness.

00:51:19.820 And I think he is just horrible. And so they make it, you know, they make it kind of quite easy to become the centre of the fear and loathing of the community.

00:51:29.220 When you were researching it, are their descendants still living?

00:51:32.360 goodness well we'll probably I mean certainly with Salem that you know there are I mean I've

00:51:38.280 had many emails from people who say I am the great great great great great great granddaughter

00:51:42.680 because when you get that far back there are lots of people who are you know you family trees grow

00:51:47.800 out go sideways as well as long ways because it becomes huge so you know you and I are probably

00:51:53.500 related to them at some somewhere somewhere along the line but they're very obscure people you see

00:51:57.980 unlike a lot of the Salem characters where their names were you know names are actually quite well

00:52:03.280 known and they were even quite well known even before the crucible there's a memorial to them

00:52:08.040 and there have been lots and there've been films and so on you know these people are quite well

00:52:12.340 known now but Springfield no I mean they're these who's heard of Hugh and Mary Parsons they're

00:52:17.020 totally obscure characters really no memorial they have now now they have now yeah I hope so

00:52:23.560 yeah yeah another book that you've written that i'd really like to talk to you about is about

00:52:29.400 helen duncan who is somebody that sometimes it kind of people cross their wires when they're

00:52:35.680 talking about our campaign and they say well what about helen duncan he was the last witch and so

00:52:40.480 on and you know obviously that isn't really what happened in her story can you tell us a wee bit

00:52:46.080 about that her nickname as a child she came from calendar and born at the end of the 19th century

00:52:51.500 and her nickname as a child was hellish now that's how she was known and i heard that from a guy who

00:52:57.160 ran a bed and breakfast i stayed in in calendar on a brand about new year's day and he said what

00:53:02.920 are you doing here and i said i'm researching he said oh hellish now and from that point i found

00:53:06.820 out that there was a local memory of uh of her as this rather strange child but she grew into a

00:53:13.680 spiritualist medium by the 1930s she was doing the kind of rolls royce of of spiritualist mediumship

00:53:20.660 which was materialization so she purported at seances to produce ectoplasm this strange 0.56

00:53:27.760 swirling white plastic substance from her body that she would clothe the spirits of the dead

00:53:32.360 so you could go along to these seances and be reunited with your loved ones well some people

00:53:37.580 believed in that some people still believe in it some people thought it was nonsense she was

00:53:43.280 exposed in fraud several times some people said oh well she was a genuine medium and she was pushed

00:53:48.540 into that by the pressure of her followers and her clients well you never win these kinds of

00:53:53.780 arguments with spiritualists about whether she was genuine or not she certainly was exposed in fraud

00:53:58.400 and that really reached a head during the second world war because she was talking about shipping

00:54:04.400 because of obviously worried and bereaved women were going to her asking about sons and husbands

00:54:11.340 and brothers and uh she was watched by the authorities then in 1944 a seance was broken

00:54:19.060 up in Portsmouth and she was tried at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act and that's where

00:54:24.140 we get to the love of the witch so they used the Witchcraft Act because it carried a because this

00:54:28.420 is from 1735 so when the English and the Scottish Witchcraft Acts were repealed in 1735-36 they were

00:54:35.940 replaced with another act called the witchcraft act confusingly but that made it a crime to

00:54:41.340 pretend to the act of conjuration so basically it was for fraud but they used it in 1944 although

00:54:49.520 it seemed antiquated because they could actually meant they could put her in prison and they wanted

00:54:53.480 to because it was just before d-day and they wanted her to shut up and keep her out of circulation

00:54:58.360 so the judge at the trial that all all the journalists from fleet street came in there

00:55:02.360 And he said, can I just remind gentlemen of the press that this is not a witch trial, right?

00:55:07.280 So, of course, all the journalists wrote down witch trial.

00:55:10.820 Of course they did. 0.87

00:55:13.360 And the fact they used the witchcraft, I think that they were really asking for it.

00:55:17.440 And the trial was very interesting.

00:55:19.120 The trial goes on for a week or so.

00:55:20.800 And there was a spiritualist defence barrister, Charles Lowsby.

00:55:25.000 And Lowsby, what he decided to do was to try and prove that Helen Duncan was a real, genuine medium

00:55:30.440 by getting lots and lots and lots of witnesses but of course the crime was pretending to do this

00:55:36.200 was actually trying to do it so all the defense witnesses all they were doing was working for the

00:55:40.560 prosecution by actually proving that she tried to do it and Lowsby just just didn't get it and uh

00:55:48.180 the um can I just check he was a spiritualist you said so he himself was a believer absolutely and

00:55:55.140 that's why he was hired he'd been in the first world war and had very traumatic experience of

00:56:00.180 Passchendaele and he came at a very committed spiritualist so you know what that meant was he

00:56:06.400 missed the point which seems extraordinary but the prosecuting barrister for the crown he was

00:56:14.720 actually an MI5 officer so you know that really it was you know it was I think it was obviously

00:56:23.160 going to go the crown's way I mean Loesby said oh look you know Mrs Duncan will perform a seance

00:56:28.520 in court to prove she's genuine and of course this very dry judge said oh no that won't be

00:56:33.500 necessary I'm not having my court turned into a circus and so on but the thing is that by 1944

00:56:39.140 going going back to talking about you know the importance of print and pamphlets when we were

00:56:44.100 talking about the 17th century that by 1944 the people are very very tired of the war and they

00:56:50.480 become very sort of inured to the headlines and so actually to have this witch trial in inverted

00:56:56.580 comes happening created a lot of excitement so it really was for a short period of time quite a

00:57:01.420 core celeb and Churchill heard about it Churchill issued a memo and said why why are we doing this

00:57:06.880 why are we wasting resources you know we're just before D-Day and never really got an answer

00:57:12.900 but actually that you know what the police were very concerned that she was lowering morale by

00:57:18.740 telling lies about people's loved ones ah what I was wondering was why did the authorities bother 1.00

00:57:24.560 because in one view you've got a woman performing what many people would think is a circus act or

00:57:31.400 you know something of the like there were lots of people that were disbelievers as well as lots of

00:57:36.480 people who were believers but there was enough people who disbelieved for her not to be doing

00:57:41.880 I suppose broad harm in the community so I had understood that in fact she had told a specific 1.00

00:57:49.960 person that their loved one was dead and that shouldn't have been known by her and is that right

00:57:58.840 she did uh she told told a woman that her uh husband as i recall was uh on hms bar he was on

00:58:06.980 hms barham and the barham had been sunk but actually it was very well known in portsmouth

00:58:11.880 because half the women in portsmouth hadn't had a husband on that ship and the admiralty wrote to

00:58:16.440 them and said your husband is dead but please don't tell anyone oh no well for all this time

00:58:23.300 I had harbored just a little secret because I'm I don't believe in ghosts or devils but I am

00:58:28.240 wildly superstitious and if left alone in an empty house would start seeing ghosts you know

00:58:33.540 that kind of way I don't believe in them but that part of your brain so I had always harbored just

00:58:38.500 a little kind of fantasy I suppose that although she'd done all these vaudeville things although

00:58:44.520 she'd produced ectoplasm that wasn't real and she'd been found out and all those things the

00:58:49.500 true story was that she had actually told somebody that their loved one had died and she couldn't

00:58:55.480 have known it but she could have it's not special knowledge you see what people really wanted from

00:59:00.700 her seances was not uh sort of information they wanted to be reunited and so that this man who

00:59:09.060 died on the ship supposedly appeared and uh that was the thing so it wasn't that this was

00:59:15.920 the authorities were concerned it wasn't like how did she know this she must be a german spy

00:59:22.020 it was that she's talking about shipping again because in 1940 she'd earlier 1941 she talked

00:59:27.340 about uh hms hood as well and so she seemed to have a bit of previous now in wartime you see

00:59:32.840 Part of the spiritual storytelling about this was always that she was considered to be extremely dangerous and therefore they had to do something about it.

00:59:42.140 And, you know, the injustice lay in the fact that they got all the powers of the state against her.

00:59:47.700 Well, most local police stations had an MI5 officer attached to them during the war.

00:59:52.160 It was really very normal to report on anyone who seemed to be saying or doing anything.

00:59:57.700 and especially towards D-Day when there was such incredible sensitivity

01:00:01.420 about trying to preserve the secret of landing in Normandy

01:00:06.920 and not landing in the Pas de Calais.

01:00:10.160 So that really anyone doing anything was liable to have something. 0.74

01:00:13.440 And the fact that there was a woman who seemed to routinely

01:00:15.880 go around the country talking about shipping

01:00:18.540 was really enough for them to do something about it.

01:00:21.160 Now, the authorities would have been very happy 1.00

01:00:23.440 to have basically prosecuted her in Portsmouth Magistrates' Court 0.96

01:00:27.260 and had done with it and fined her but actually what then happened was the spiritualist national

01:00:33.260 union said no we are going to use all our empty our war chest we're going to get a barrister let's

01:00:38.840 have an old bailey trial and of course the crown said okay let's have it at the old bailey we can

01:00:45.100 we can put up a kc against yours you know against your your uh your barrister so let's do it so

01:00:52.180 that really the spritish national union i think actually rather you know escalated that rather

01:00:57.620 than the the british state coming down and this whole idea of a sledgehammer to crack a nut you

01:01:02.240 know was she sentenced for long so she's sentenced for nine months in holloway and she served six of

01:01:08.440 them it seems to me a bit of a shame to tell people not to talk about ships and stuff like

01:01:14.720 that and not to talk about them but then to have told people themselves their family members to say

01:01:19.660 your husband had been killed you didn't you didn't then go out with a brave face and not

01:01:25.280 tell anybody of course these people were devastated and i don't know how many went

01:01:30.080 down the bar but i mean we're talking about 900 a thousand men i think something like this is a

01:01:35.520 catastrophic emotional uh wound upon these working class communities of portsmouth who

01:01:43.500 were already very tight-knit as it were i mean it's it's a totally absurd and cruel and insensitive

01:01:48.340 thing to do but there were so few battleships you see at that time that they that the the admiralty

01:01:54.240 thought that perhaps if they could keep this a secret a bit longer it might confuse the germans

01:01:58.680 or something but how helen duncan knew the bar i mean sunk i think is doesn't really bear too much

01:02:05.020 and it's fairly fairly obvious what was always very interesting to me was just again the i am

01:02:11.520 sort of at summit level a historian of emotions and i i think even that story was just just really

01:02:17.040 showed that belief isn't some absolute intellectual thing it follows your emotional need and so that

01:02:26.040 to the people saw incredible things I met people who saw incredible things at Helen Duncan

01:02:31.260 Seances I don't think that those things were there but these are perfectly rational decent

01:02:36.060 people who saw them and they saw them because they were emotionally predisposed to see those

01:02:42.960 see bits of cheesecloth on coat hangers and so on as their loved ones and that's a really

01:02:47.760 extraordinary story. Yeah absolutely did Helen Duncan have a sidekick at some point and I'll

01:02:55.580 tell you why I'm asking I got into a taxi with a with a taxi driver once a very knowledgeable man

01:03:02.140 a retired man who said that his great aunt had been a sidekick to Helen Duncan when she lived

01:03:11.940 in scotland and helped her with her helped her with her meetings and seances and then went on

01:03:19.500 to have a sort of low-level career herself after helen moved south the gentleman that was telling

01:03:24.840 me was telling me as truth but i just wonder whether or not the great aunt had told him the

01:03:29.840 truth he she always did have a sidekick yeah because she needed somebody who and i think

01:03:36.500 certainly when she was working in portsmouth in the southeast she needed someone who basically

01:03:41.280 found little bits of information who booked the you know she used to put ads in the local papers

01:03:46.980 saying you know she'll be appearing she didn't like traveling that much her life was a bit chaotic

01:03:53.420 she needed a kind of PA type person who so she always did have some kind of helper my book that

01:04:01.160 I wrote about it was never about um oh let's expose Helen Duncan as a fraud and somehow laugh

01:04:06.480 I mean, I just really wanted to recreate the world in which she lived and where the things that she did were for some people possible, which is a bit like the stuff I've written about witchcraft since, nuanced on a knife edge of possibility.

01:04:21.880 But Helen Duncan did always depend on someone. Her health was very poor. 0.52

01:04:26.500 I think certainly some part of her life, she may have been dependent on alcohol, certainly later on, because she carries on after the war.

01:04:33.420 and there are reports from spiritualists who say we went and she's we could smell whiskey on her

01:04:39.980 breath and so on she seemed chaotic and so I think she was a very troubled person I think she was

01:04:44.600 very troubled from a very early age and I have a lot of sympathy for her as a character. And there's

01:04:50.580 a possibility that our listeners might see her on the big screen sometime. Well we hope so it's been

01:04:58.060 a long time coming but the the the rights of hellish now have gone off to a production company

01:05:04.300 and there is a script um i've worked with an american screenwriter and the last couple of

01:05:10.920 years and he produced a fantastic script which is a real insight into i think into helen duncan's

01:05:16.100 life and particularly her marriage and the sort of triangle between her her husband and her spirit

01:05:22.280 guide uh albert who is a sort of projection of her ideal husband i think and poor old henry

01:05:29.500 duncan has to put up with living with the three of them in this um this this strange earth to

01:05:34.840 spirit uh relationship but that's really that's hopefully what the there's going to be the spine

01:05:40.340 of the story so watch this space uh we hope that um in the next couple of years it may it may yet

01:05:46.280 see the light of day great i really hope that that does come up because i think that sounds

01:05:49.940 like such a brilliant story it's so interesting because she got like from what I remember from

01:05:54.480 reading about it she she had support the family didn't she that her husband was injured in the

01:05:59.560 war and and they had several children and you know that was just a way of making money yeah he was

01:06:05.800 he was invalided out of the war he did have a cabinet making business but he didn't make much

01:06:10.540 money and yes they had a family and this was their means of income and again it's I say it's like

01:06:17.200 Matthew Hopkins it's not really like Matthew Hopkins at all but I think she certainly did

01:06:20.900 make money but she didn't make as much money as people think that she made and she certainly

01:06:27.560 didn't become hugely rich out of it and I think you know to some extent it was you know the whole

01:06:33.440 story is about gender and it's about religion but it's also about class and so that they were

01:06:40.700 when she was in the early 1930s when she was taken to London to be tested by spiritualist

01:06:46.160 organizations you know when she went to the london spiritualist alliance to be tested these were

01:06:51.420 kind of very well healed educated men and women of london society would go to her stances but she

01:06:58.260 didn't go in through the main entrance she went through the tradesman's entrance back

01:07:01.840 so the situation still those those very rigid class distinctions the day were preserved but

01:07:09.420 these middle class spiritualists had a reverence for the working class medium because they felt

01:07:16.540 that in this incredibly patronizing way that they were innocents and that they were uncorrupted

01:07:22.600 and that they couldn't possibly have some malicious or you know devious motive they were

01:07:28.000 too pure the working classes were too pure to have the connivance is that the idea yeah i think

01:07:33.700 that's that's certainly the idea and i think also because she perhaps you know i don't know whether

01:07:37.980 she had she she was certainly uneducated i think she was a you know simple soul in many ways and i

01:07:44.000 think that that they these these gentlemen thought this was terribly interesting to have the because

01:07:48.940 she was just a a conduit in their minds for the spirits and the left you know because her perhaps

01:07:55.200 her head wasn't cluttered up with educational breeding that somehow she would she would be a 1.00

01:08:00.140 purer instrument for uh broadcasting the voices from beyond the veil like a sort of empty vessel 0.99

01:08:06.520 allowing to be filled with the most sound absolutely I wonder if those spiritualists

01:08:11.560 believed that there was a class system in the spirit world that's a very interesting question

01:08:15.600 I mean I interviewed a lot of spiritualists and in fact I did go to a medium with a man who

01:08:22.180 known Helen Duncan very well and he was again very educated middle class chap in Pearlie in Surrey

01:08:28.460 and he took me to his medium who was a very ordinary working class medium and she did

01:08:36.840 put me in touch with Helen Duncan supposedly Helen Duncan did come through in spirit

01:08:41.540 and uh and she was and she put on a bit of a silly Scottish accent for a bit and I wasn't

01:08:48.260 terribly convinced but he thought this was we saw the same thing me and the chap that took me

01:08:52.140 he thought this was incredible and I thought it was just a story you know but I started asking him

01:08:58.960 really what's the spirit world like he said oh well I'm amazed Mrs Duncan came through to you

01:09:02.620 because the it's so incredibly busy up there and it's so and I said well yeah but what's it like

01:09:07.900 he said well it's just like down here and of course when you start pushing at what spirit

01:09:12.820 was like it really the only way that the spiritualists that I met had to describe it

01:09:16.940 was that it was just a nicer version of here but people you end up saying things like do people have

01:09:21.940 to do the laundry and you know go to Sainsbury of course well yes they do and it's like and this

01:09:26.840 is why George Bernard Shaw you know once said that you know I really hope that the spirit I hope

01:09:31.540 there's no life after death because an eternity of doing the same stuff as you did on earth with

01:09:35.920 the same people would be absolutely unbearable please let death be an end to it you know so

01:09:43.460 imagining the spirit world is a really really tricky thing I think. Can I ask what your what

01:09:48.700 your next book might be about if you're working on another book okay so it's been 30 years on

01:09:54.640 witches and now i'm writing a book not about witches i don't know whether i don't know whether

01:09:59.060 this is a heretical thing to say on the witches of scotland no it's fine it's actually um i'll

01:10:04.720 tell you very quickly it's actually about prisons of war um in um italy in 1943 to 5 so my great

01:10:12.640 uncle Ralph left an incredible memoir about escaping from prisoner of war camps and going

01:10:19.360 on the run and becoming a partisan and I'm just researching that story but also how we write

01:10:27.340 about stories like that too so it's a little bit about you know how a historian like me would start

01:10:32.680 thinking of those things and I suppose really that the although that might seem like a total

01:10:37.320 shift away from anything I've done before anybody who's read the epilogue to the Rune of All Witchers

01:10:42.400 it's a bit like that it's about really the kind of you know sort of imaginative relationship that

01:10:49.940 a historian has with the subject matter and how much of that you put into it and how much of it

01:10:55.180 becomes a kind of flight of fancy and so on so that you know it's it's it's really me as a

01:11:00.860 historian trying to be honest I suppose about what we put into our stories and about how historians

01:11:06.960 need to use imagination to bring the information from dry documents and so on to life that sounds

01:11:13.520 great i'll very much look forward to that one so you're just in the midst of writing that just now

01:11:18.020 researching it just just at the beginning of it now just doing lots of research into i mean it

01:11:23.040 does kind of remind me of doing hellish nell in a way because i'm you know really trying to put

01:11:27.240 together people's childhoods and the um so my uncle ralph he escapes with an amazing guy called

01:11:33.340 Charlie West anybody listening to this you can tell me anything about Charlie West of Plymouth

01:11:38.480 please get in touch but I have actually managed to find the family now but it's just building up

01:11:44.220 a story of someone's rather difficult childhood I think and trying to get a sense of the sort of

01:11:50.300 person they become later on because as historians we're always trying to understand who these people

01:11:55.720 are and we nearly always get them wrong at the start but the more you start putting together

01:12:00.940 their lives from their earliest age you know they make more and more sense I think and that's really

01:12:06.540 what I'm trying to do. I love the idea of telling stories of the history of ordinary people

01:12:12.780 doing extraordinary things or living in extraordinary times because we hear about

01:12:18.260 kings we hear about queens we hear about Churchill we hear about people making big decisions on wars

01:12:23.180 but in fact much more interesting history is what were those people doing then what did they think

01:12:28.500 how did they interact with the world how did they do their laundry that sort of thing yeah

01:12:33.740 well again it's not that long ago you know even going back to the 1650s we're only talking about

01:12:40.260 15 16 generations ago something like that and so when we're into just even into the early 20th

01:12:46.740 century you know it's it's it's just just about passing out of living memory i think but we grew

01:12:52.800 up with people we knew who were victorians you know i think it's really that's amazing link that

01:12:58.980 we have to people who lived in a totally different age and thought very differently but you're quite

01:13:03.920 right so that in hellish now for example it's not a book about churchill churchill has a walk-on

01:13:08.600 path and then he walks off again but helen duncan's there and center stage all the time and she's a

01:13:13.680 very ordinary person who becomes very extraordinary for a short period and then fades back into

01:13:20.940 obscurity and they're the kind of stories I like. I never thought of Hela Schnell's story or her

01:13:27.100 prosecution actually as being a witch hunt but I'm now starting to think that the last person

01:13:31.540 accused of witchcraft it was a witch hunt in a way because they were they were pursuing her for

01:13:37.480 something. Well the interesting thing you know that there's in the there were lots of letters

01:13:43.000 written to the home office not all from spiritualists from people who heard about

01:13:48.340 Helen Duncan's prosecution and thought it was a witch hunt and wrote so that all these letters

01:13:53.880 are all preserved in the Home Office archives, in the National Archives in London. The letters say

01:13:59.000 things like, didn't we just fight a war against the Nazis who were persecuting people? Why are

01:14:06.240 we persecuting this woman? And actually, the Witchcraft Act is repealed quite soon afterwards,

01:14:12.840 1950 and it's almost certainly with this kind of wind of complaint in their sales and that the act

01:14:21.920 is then in 1951 the witchcraft act is replaced with the fraudulent mediums act that means

01:14:26.660 that spiritualists will no longer be persecuted for their religion um because it was and remains

01:14:34.600 their religion and they're absolutely entitled uh to practice that but because the witchcraft act

01:14:41.040 And also the Vagrancy Act of 1824 that made it illegal to tell fortunes meant that, in effect, all spiritualists up to that point were potentially persecuted.

01:14:51.580 So, yeah, I think it was. But whether it was a witch or not against Helen Duncan, a lot of people who had been through the war and had seen Nazism defeated felt like it was a kind of persecution that the victorious Britain should distance itself from.

01:15:11.040 such an interesting perspective thank you so much for speaking to us it's been brilliant talking to

01:15:17.160 you and there's there's lots of reading to do there and to sort of go on with for for listeners

01:15:20.900 too we will keep our eyes peeled for the film adaptation of of hellishnell that'd be very

01:15:27.420 interesting and also of course for your next book whenever it does come out it's been a real

01:15:32.060 pleasure talking to you and thank you so much for giving up your time to talk to us

01:15:35.520 the pleasure has been mine thank you so much for having me

01:15:41.040 thank you so much for joining us for this week's episode that's 59 episodes I actually can't really

01:15:49.580 believe that Claire I know I always make a joke of this but that does seem ridiculous 59 episodes

01:15:53.620 it does and we've still got so many people to speak we've got Melissa Fox who's coming to speak

01:15:59.440 to us we hope to be speaking to her soon we have the senator in the US who was involved with the

01:16:06.320 school children who got the last woman elizabeth johnston pardoned in salem we have other we've

01:16:14.520 got more academics that right stop giving it away you need to you need to give you need to give like

01:16:19.960 a certain amount of like oh what's next right oh mystique it's a mystique on your segway podcast

01:16:27.540 there i have just maybe we should record an episode on segways no i don't i i think that

01:16:34.760 definitely wouldn't work and i have now just looked up a segway and now realize what you

01:16:40.680 mean with two wheels at the side i don't know i thought i was thinking of i don't know i'm a

01:16:45.300 bicycle in fairness to me i think it was more like a scooter but i don't know why i thought it had one

01:16:54.060 wheel yeah no no anyway this is definitely not the content people join us for can i can i say

01:17:01.100 You know, we like contact people on Twitter and we have Instagram and we have Facebook.

01:17:05.980 Should be time to make TikTok number three.

01:17:09.080 I mean, OK, but I'm not doing a dance.

01:17:12.300 You don't have to do that. There are lots of people not doing dances.

01:17:15.540 Well, the content that I've seen on the few TikToks I've watched have been dances, hilarious parenting stories, wigs, makeup things and hauls from Primark.

01:17:28.420 like all of those things are hugely interesting on their own but I don't know that I want to make

01:17:33.080 necessarily a short film about any of them Zoe are you telling me that you haven't seen raccoon talk

01:17:38.540 on TikTok shut the front door Zoe there's not a raccoon talk TikTok of course millions of people

01:17:48.520 watching raccoons every day well-trained raccoons not like you're imagining one Zoe I don't like

01:17:54.680 the implication that how dare you they're not made up can i'm not a fantasist can i just tell

01:18:02.480 you it's not an implication when you directly accuse somebody of it well okay legal expert

01:18:09.220 i think it is slander you're slandering me that i am not some sort of raccoon impresario trainer

01:18:17.780 circus lady that's outrageous have you ever heard of the phrase of veritas is away

01:18:23.600 i i take quite a flexible approach to veritas i see flexible veritas is what i term it

01:18:32.220 yes it's funny that because that's what one of my raccoons is called yeah i've got veritas i've

01:18:38.880 got fabulous and darcy darcy we don't talk about darcy he's naughty anyway let's move on do get in

01:18:48.960 touch with us on instagram on twitter that's the best place to go for a chat facebook is mostly

01:18:56.160 info we don't really comment or chat too much on there um obviously keep your eyes peeled for new

01:19:02.140 tiktok content i'm frowning and shaking my head into the camera and anywhere else claire i think

01:19:09.200 that's all i think that's all unless you want to open up a linkedin page no because isn't that for

01:19:15.580 people being professional well we're professionals yeah okay professional podcasters zoe yeah i

01:19:24.720 suppose though i mean again veritas rears a beautiful head depends on your definition of

01:19:32.560 professional yeah okay we'll just need professional indicates one you're getting paid and two that

01:19:38.440 you're really good at it and serious okay well given the last sort of hour or so i think we

01:19:44.460 should just maybe stick with the socials we're on yes that's very sensible okay so over and out

01:19:51.320 toodle pip

01:19:52.080 bye

01:19:53.220 bye

01:19:54.300 if you'd like to learn more about the witches of scotland

01:20:01.460 please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

01:20:04.080 sign up for our mailing list

01:20:06.160 at www.witchesofscotland.com

01:20:10.200 to keep updated with the campaign

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01:20:13.600 you'll be able to find how to link with us

01:20:15.460 on twitter, facebook and instagram

01:20:21.320 Amen.

Witches of Scotland - July 04, 2022

EPISODE 59 - EMERITUS PROFESSOR MALCOLM GASKILL

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