He noted that 30 women were brought to the town hall, stripped, and “pricked” by a bodkin or pin, the evidence gleaned resulting in the public execution of 16 people (including one man). In 1655, Ralph Gardiner’s England’s grievance discovered, in relation to the coal-trade recorded an account of the Newcastle witch trials that followed. There was also an implicit financial motive in his endeavours – for each successful prosecution, the Scottish witchfinder would receive 30 shillings, about ten times the average daily wage.

Known as the “bell-man”, he asked “all people that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they should be sent for and tried by the person appointed”. In 1650, towards the end of the English Civil War and within memory of a 1636 outbreak of plague, Newcastle upon Tyne’s Puritan magistrates invited in an unnamed Scottish witchfinder. The simple paradigm of the self-interested mercenary (witchfinder) in pursuit of the disenfranchised victim (witch) is rendered more complex by the social, political, gender, and economic contexts of the age. The 17th century witch trials staged in Newcastle upon Tyne, for example, offer a stark glimpse of the reality, complicating our received understanding of history as represented in film and fiction. And, in some cases, are much more a reflection of contemporary anxieties.

The recent release of the film, The Last Witch Hunter, is yet another example of this cultural fascination.īut the colourful, fictional yarns often are far removed from the reality of witchfinders and the trials that the accused – mostly women – faced. From King James I’s book ((1597) (1597) and the famous Pendle witch trials in Lancaster (1612), to Shakespeare’s Macbeth (first performed 1611) and Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647), there are countless factual and fictional tales of witchcraft. Witches have long been an international obsession.

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