John Callow's history of a witchcraft case in late 17th-century England offers the compelling, lively and empathetic stories of three women charged in the north Devon town of Bideford. Often, these “witches” appear in historical accounts as stock figures: bogeywomen said to have killed their neighbours and worshipped the devil. But the best thing about The Last Witches of England - so called as they are labelled the last people to be hanged for witchcraft in England - is the partial biographical recovery of the three women: Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles.
The prime suspect was Lloyd, twice charged with witchcraft in the 1670s and again in 1682. Instead of just repeating the stories of her accusers, Callow fills out her background as a real, ordinary woman. His research links Lloyd persuasively to an influx of Welsh miners into Bideford in the mid17th century, coming to mine coal to power the local pottery industry and munitions workshops. In the 1640s, Temperance Jones, as she was called, married a Rhys Lloyd, who seemed to have left by the 1960s when she began to receive welfare payments from the town authorities. Listed as a 'wife and not a widow”, Lloyd was scandalously abandoned and suspected of prostitution. It was a steep fall for a woman with such a Puritan Christian name. From this beginning, Callow then unfolds the tragedy of the accusations made against her.
The second suspect, Susanna Edwards, was equally unfortunate. The illegitimate daughter of a single mother, she, like Lloyd, married into a Welsh family. Widowed in the 1660s, she was left vulnerable and had already begun to receive welfare payments. And so Edwards joined Lloyd in the dismal world of proto-universal credit, pleading with the Bideford authorities for a few extra pence to tide her over a hard time.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2021 من BBC History Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2021 من BBC History Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
The Long Road Back - The Election Was Tough for the Conservatives but the Past Holds Clues on How Parties Can Return From the Brink
It’s election night 1997, and Jeremy Paxman is grilling Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson. “You’re the chairman of a fertiliser firm,” the famously pugnacious broadcaster asked Parkinson. “How deep is the mess you’re in?” Twenty-seven years later, as the Conservative party comes to terms with another landslide defeat, it’s worth applying the same question to the present day. How does this result compare with previous devastating losses – not only those suffered by the Tories themselves, but also those experienced by the other major parties? And what can history teach us about the tools that politicians use to dig themselves out of the dung heap and set themselves back on the road to power?
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What a summer it’s been so far, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton. Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work. And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative
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According to ancient Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, Apicius was “the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts”. The cookbook attributed to him, known simply as Apicius or as De Re Coquinaria (On the Art of Cooking), is one of the oldest collections of recipes surviving from antiquity. Its author may have been Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet of the first century AD who reputedly travelled all the way from Campania to Libya on the hunt for the largest, juiciest prawns.
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Henry’s wary nature is typically attributed to his shaky claim to the throne. The first Tudor monarch was unable to escape the taunt that he was a usurper with no right to call himself king. In fact, his renowned paranoia was the inevitable consequence of a traumatic youth – a trait ingrained long before he harboured ambitions to wear a crown. If we delve deeper into Henry’s background, we can draw a fuller picture of one of our most circumspect of monarchs – one that might elicit sympathy for a long misunderstood king.
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A Pole apart
ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries
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From Magna Carta to parliament, taxation to the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for the modern British state
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Æthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?
