Fiona Veitch Smith

North East England, like the rest of Europe in the 17th Century, has a shameful history that it would like to hide. But with Halloween just a short broomstick ride away I’ve started hunting for the old witches of Northumbria and found a cauldron-full of dirty secrets.

If you’re out Riding Mill way and decide to take a walk over the old bridge, make sure you’re not alone. And if it’s a clear night with a full moon think twice about going out at all lest you stumble across a coven of witches dancing naked to Diana’s light. But if you insist, don’t blame us if you fall under their evil spell, and do things you would not normally do.

Witches Brew

“Don’t worry,” you say, “I’ll just pop along to the Wellington for a pint instead.” Well, if you must, take a peek in a window first, in case the witches have flown ahead of you to their old haunt. If this was the 1670s, you might have seen them swinging from a rope tied to the rafters or changing shape into a greyhound or a hare. In fact one of them might have told you about it, and she, history tells us, was stripped naked and tied to a table while hot wax was dripped onto her tortured body. When the wax hardened, her sisters gathered it together, melted it, then poured it into her mouth so she would never talk again.

This group were finally exposed by the notorious witch hunter Anne Armstrong in 1673 during the Northumberland witch trials. They were hanged - like most of their sisters. Unlike the rest of Europe, and particularly Scotland, the English rarely burnt (or worse) boiled their witches, but rather sent them to the gallows. Many though were let off ‘lightly’ with a gaol sentence if they fully repented of their sins.

Burnings in Berwick

It’s a pity that Berwick upon Tweed hadn’t heard about that though. In 1650, 14 suspected witches were burnt to death in a small village on the outskirts of the town. This practically wiped out the entire population as there were only 14 houses in the whole village.

1650 was a good year for witchhunting it seems. The town fathers of Newcastle, worried about rumours of the growth of witchcraft in the city, sent to Scotland for the most famous witch hunter of the day (his name does not appear in the records held at St Nicholas church) and asked him to ply his trade south of the border. The town ringer was sent through the town crying: “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.” Thirty women (and a man) were brought to the town hall.

Drawing Blood

A sympathetic witness tells us what happened: “Each of them was exposed from the waist to the heels in the presence of the ignorant and excited populace, and the witchfinder, who professed to know a witch by her looks, to make assurance doubly sure, tested each of the poor creatures by running a pin into her naked person. If no blood flowed she was set aside as a child of the devil, a vessel of wrath fitted to destruction. If blood flowed she was pronounced innocent.”

One fortunate soul, after being judged to be in the devil’s camp, asked to be tested again, claiming that fear had driven the blood from her veins. She bled the second time around, but 27 others didn’t. Fifteen of them, including one ‘wizard’ were hanged on the Town Moor near Gallowgate, the present site of St James’ Park football stadium.

Profiting from misery

After that, spurred on by his successes in Newcastle, the infamous witch finder moved into the countryside of Northumberland, charging from 20 shillings to £3 a witch. As his charges started to creep up, the local gentry began to suspect that he was making false accusations for profit and drove him back to Scotland. Soon afterwards, he himself was named as a witch and confessed to sending 220 innocent women to the gallows to line his pockets with silver.

Shocking, yes, but not surprising. In the 17th Century, labelling people a witch was as common as accusing politicians of lying. It was mainly women who were named (although in Iceland, 90% of the executed witches were men), and it was mainly women who did the naming. The Durham ecclesiastical courts record charges such as ‘swearing, slandering, backbiting and adultery’ alongside and often interchangeable with ‘witchcraft’. Take the case of Isobel Harrison who accused Alison Vasey of ‘playing the whore in a lane’. Vasey countersued, calling Harrison an ‘arrant whore, theefe and witch.’ Both women were tried for witchcraft. Both were found innocent but given punitive punishment for wasting the court’s time.

In fact, accusing your accuser of witchcraft was a tried and tested defence. Take Alice Armstrong of Haltwhistle, for instance. She was accused of witchcraft by the rector of the local church, Thomas Astell, in the 1620s. She then accused Reverend Astell of the same crime. Confused, the court let them both off. Speaking of men of the cloth batting for the other team, three people were tried for witchcraft in Durham in 1620 - they all claimed to have learnt their trade from Thomas Lyons, former curate of the parish of Earsdon near Tynemouth.

Sexcraft

Sex of course, is never far away from our sordid tale. At Stanhope in 1580, three women from the Emerson family were tried for ‘fornication and witchcraft’; in 1599 in Berwick, a man was accused of being a mere fornicator, while his poor partner was upgraded to a ‘suspected charmer, inchantrix and witche’. She was burnt to death over the border in Scotland, he spent an unpleasant time in gaol. Just like in Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible many of the witchcraft accusations were brought by jealous wives who feared that their husbands had been ‘bewitched’ by other women.

More often than not though, it was the traditional healers who were accused of witchcraft. In 1682, Margaret Stothard from Edlington was brought before the court. Three witnesses appeared and accused her of appearing at the foot of a man’s bed surrounded by light, curing a child of illness by passing the infirm spirit onto a nearby animal, and turning someone’s sour milk pure. Mrs Stothard, it is reported, died in her bed of ‘natural causes.’ Lucky Mrs Stothard.

Unfair game

From the time of Henry VIII, up until the death penalty for witchcraft was revoked in 1736, about a thousand people were executed in England and more than double that in Scotland. Ireland, strangely, never really got into the sport and could only notch up four kills in two hundred years. In Northumbria, we contributed about a hundred to the national statistic.

So next time you’re in Riding Mill having a drink at the Wellington, be careful what secrets you tell - you never know who could be listening.

Originally appeared in Living North, October 2002

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