The Manningtree Witches: A. K. Blakemore

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Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award having already been winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize (its inclusion on the longlist drawing me to this book) As Imogen Simon argues strongly in her documentary, these eight women of Manningtree were victims of misogyny as much as religious fervor. The highlighting of misogyny is correct and is often overlooked in discussions of witch-trials. Eastern England of the 1640s was a Puritan stronghold, a society in which women were considered culturally inferior to men. It was a culture in which women could be accused so readily of being witches.

Did these questions spark a reaction or an idea? Want to discuss it further? Join us for one of our book club meet-ups this month! The reading experience is visceral, immersive and multi-sensory: you are really placed in the mind and body of the narrator; and in the smells, sights, touch, sounds of 1740s Essex. In March 1644, Hopkins learned from his soon-to-be assistant, John Sterne, that there was rumour of witchery in Manningtree and took it upon himself to investigate. Hopkins’ favourite confessional method of torture however was the infamous “swimming test”. This unbelievably simple but effective test involved binding the arms and legs of the accused to a chair before throwing them into the village pond. If they sank and drowned, they would be innocent and received into heaven; if they floated, they would be tried as a witch.In a world with no social safety nets where you made your money any way you could regardless of how morally questionable that was, Hopkins was only too happy to jump on the witchfinding bandwagon. A self-styled investigator, Hopkins set about finding evidence of witchcraft among the group of women Stearne had accused. He subjected the women to sleep deprivation and employed the services of ‘seekers’ - women who would search the accused's' bodies for what was known as the ‘Devil’s Mark’. In reality, this mark of Satan was often little more than a birthmark, a small deformity or a blemish, but if the seekers said they were the dreaded Devil’s Mark, that was good enough for Hopkins and Stearne. The language it's written in is historically appropriate and downright beautiful, without heavy-handed pretensions. This is a re-imagining of the true story of the Essex witch trials of 1644-7, led by Hopkins and resulting in the deaths of many women, several of them from Manningtree and Mistley where the book is set. Hopkins died young and very little is known of him other than his witchfinding, and the women are mostly known only through the records of the trials, so Blakemore has created her story from little more than bare bones. In the afterword, she suggests that her aim was to give a voice to these voiceless women, and to tell the story of the persecuted rather than the persecutor. I’d say she succeeds very well. Unfortunately (for Hopkins and Stearne, at least), clouds were soon gathering on the horizon for this highly lucrative new business. Ever since the executions in Bury, questions had been raised about the men’s activities and the methods they used to extract confessions. A prominent local puritan preacher by the name of John Gaule objected to the methods the men used and began openly preaching against them in his sermons. Gaule also published a book called ‘Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft’ which exposed Hopkins’ and Stearne’s methods and questioned their legitimacy. The book was widely read and led many prominent people to question why two men with no apparent authority were allowed to roam the land torturing the poor for money. This is a fictionalised account of a dark period in English history – the actions of the so-called “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who for a brief period in an East Anglia convulsed by the Civil War, effectively revised the idea of witchcraft trials, widely quoted as being responsible in just 2-3 years for as many executions from witchcraft as seen in England in the previous 150 years.

Given the entrenched misogyny, together with religious zealotry sanctioned by both Church and State in the 1640s, there was little hope for any woman accused of being a witch. Yet those accusations were but one step in the execution of these women by hanging. Next, was the extraction of a confession of Devil worship. As has caught me before, I’d completed my review on the Kindle pop-up, then went to post it, and it popped down, never to be seen again. WITCH!O’Donnell, Paraic (12 March 2021). "The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore review – a darkly witty debut". the Guardian . Retrieved 1 September 2022. Hopkins’ witch-hunting methods were outlined in his 1647 book The Discovery of Witches. Over the following year, the trials and executions for witchcraft began in Massachusetts, with particular note of the ‘hunting’ of Margaret Jones. As described in the 1649 journal of Governor John Winthrop, the man who condemned her, the evidence assembled against Margaret Jones was gathered by the use of Hopkins’ techniques of “searching” and “watching”. A Fitting Finale? Witch hunts and witch trials, metaphorical and otherwise are sadly still very much with us in certain communities and societies. Similarly there's plenty of scope (as recent history has unfortunately shown us) for a pseudo charismatic leader to attain power and galvanise the disenfranchised to believe (more or less) whatever they are told, just in the same way that Matthew Hopkins once did. Rebecca’s ability to read and write is important, and not only in serving Blakemore’s goals. She loves words, and the echoes of her reading appear in her vocabulary. But she also sees that what Hopkins is asking her for are simply words, words she can speak without believing them. Whether she will speak them, and what they would signify, becomes another theme of the novel. Among its perverse delights is the employment of the language of witch-hunting manuals (“inspissated,” “deliquesce”) to drive home the bodily obsessions of the trials. Puritans sought to reform themselves by purifying from their churches the last vestiges of Roman Catholic teaching and practice. It was a movement that gained popular strength in the early 1600s, especially in East Anglia.