Great Yarmouth's witches
This blue plaque is at the boundary of the St. Nicholas churchyard, where the witches would have been buried, and the cemetery created by the Victorians.
Prior to the mid-sixteenth century witchcraft cases were normally tried in ecclesiastical courts. Punishments were rarely severe and some form of public penance was the most likely sentence. Witchcraft became a secular crime in England for the first time with the passing of a short-lived act of 1542. Elizabethan legislation in 1563 resurrected the crime and provided for the death penalty when
'any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed'.
However, this was repealed in 1604 and replaced by
'An Acte against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealinge with evill and wicked Spirits'.
This provided for even harsher punishments, extending the list of offences to which the death penalty applied to wasting, consuming or laming persons as well as causing their death.
The earliest known references to witches being condemned in Great Yarmouth under the 1563 act date from 1584, when Elizabeth Butcher and Joan Lingwood were condemned to be hanged.
In the autumn of 1645, it was likely the Council of Great Yarmouth was frightened. Witches wreaked havoc in a world turned upside down, fractured by the conflict ushered in by civil war. Cursing their neighbours, distributing blasphemous texts and poisoning the land with sin and malevolence, it would have been clear to the Council that action was required. Conveniently, it was during this time that Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed ‘Witchfinder General’, scoured East Anglia, furiously hunting, interrogating and executing witches with brutal zealotry. Frantically summoning Hopkins, the Council of Great Yarmouth pleaded that he ‘discover and find out’ the witches that operated in the town.
Following spiteful whisperings and pointed fingers, eleven people, including two men, accused of being witches were captured and hauled in front of a court in the Tolhouse on the 10th. September 1645. Several of the defendants were acquitted but five women, Alice Clisswell, Bridgetta Howard, Maria Blackborne, Elizabeth Dudgeon and Elizabeth Bradwell, were found guilty and were hanged.
In the dock, Elizabeth Bradwell confessed to the performance of image magic, that being the creation of wax images in the likeness of her enemies for the purpose of their bewitchment and murder. She recalling how she thrust a nail into the head of a wax image that resembled a neighbour’s child, John Moulton. Bradwell was seen to personified the early modern stereotype of the English witch, a malevolent, spiteful individual with a penchant for inflicting harm upon innocent children.
By 1542 and at the behest of Henry VIII, Parliament had passed an Act which decreed that to
‘use any Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries to destroy any persone’
was a felonious crime and therefore punishable by death. By pleading guilty to this deed, Bradwell had sealed her fate and would soon swing upon the scaffold. Yet Elizabeth was soon to disclose something far darker to the court upon that day. She admitted that she secured her diabolical gifts by signing, in her own blood, a contract given to her by the Devil. Her confession certainly caught the eye of both Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne, who later published a pamphlet that addressed Elizabeth Bradwell and the alarming significance of her demonic pact.
Exactly why Bradwell admitted to such crimes remains unclear. Were these simply the ramblings of a confused old woman? It is no secret that witch hunts claimed the lives of many whose minds were confronted by conditions modern thinking would now acknowledge as mental illness. Such individuals would have proven prime targets for zealots like Hopkins and Stearne, and whilst the application of torture to procure confessions of witchcraft was strictly prohibited in England during this period, it's know that the Witchfinder was liberal in his implementation of sleep deprivation to secure the confession he desired. For Hopkins, such practices had already demonstrated their worth in Manningtree in Essex earlier that year, when Elizabeth Clarke was interrogated and coerced with sleep deprivation whilst being ‘watched’ for any communication with her alleged demonic familiars. Such delirium inducing methods evidently contributed a fantastical confessions that soon followed Clarke’s interrogation.
Irrespective of the accusations levied against her, Elizabeth Bradwell was no witch. A Norfolk born woman, yes, a mother or sister, perhaps, forsaken by her neighbours and swept up in a mass hysteria at the hands of her captor, Matthew Hopkins, but certainly no witch. It is tragic that the only record that remains of Bradwell is that which condemned her to the gallows on 13th. September, 1645. So too is it tragic that, vilified as a demonic agent, Bradwell is likely to have been buried in an unmarked grave and simply forgotten.
The famous witchcraft trials at Salem in Massachusetts in 1692 also had a Great Yarmouth connection. Among those executed were two elderly sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty. They had been born in Great Yarmouth and were the daughters of William Towne, who emigrated with his family to the United States.
Great Yarmouth's witches
This blue plaque is at the boundary of the St. Nicholas churchyard, where the witches would have been buried, and the cemetery created by the Victorians.
Prior to the mid-sixteenth century witchcraft cases were normally tried in ecclesiastical courts. Punishments were rarely severe and some form of public penance was the most likely sentence. Witchcraft became a secular crime in England for the first time with the passing of a short-lived act of 1542. Elizabethan legislation in 1563 resurrected the crime and provided for the death penalty when
'any person shall happen to be killed or destroyed'.
However, this was repealed in 1604 and replaced by
'An Acte against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealinge with evill and wicked Spirits'.
This provided for even harsher punishments, extending the list of offences to which the death penalty applied to wasting, consuming or laming persons as well as causing their death.
The earliest known references to witches being condemned in Great Yarmouth under the 1563 act date from 1584, when Elizabeth Butcher and Joan Lingwood were condemned to be hanged.
In the autumn of 1645, it was likely the Council of Great Yarmouth was frightened. Witches wreaked havoc in a world turned upside down, fractured by the conflict ushered in by civil war. Cursing their neighbours, distributing blasphemous texts and poisoning the land with sin and malevolence, it would have been clear to the Council that action was required. Conveniently, it was during this time that Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed ‘Witchfinder General’, scoured East Anglia, furiously hunting, interrogating and executing witches with brutal zealotry. Frantically summoning Hopkins, the Council of Great Yarmouth pleaded that he ‘discover and find out’ the witches that operated in the town.
Following spiteful whisperings and pointed fingers, eleven people, including two men, accused of being witches were captured and hauled in front of a court in the Tolhouse on the 10th. September 1645. Several of the defendants were acquitted but five women, Alice Clisswell, Bridgetta Howard, Maria Blackborne, Elizabeth Dudgeon and Elizabeth Bradwell, were found guilty and were hanged.
In the dock, Elizabeth Bradwell confessed to the performance of image magic, that being the creation of wax images in the likeness of her enemies for the purpose of their bewitchment and murder. She recalling how she thrust a nail into the head of a wax image that resembled a neighbour’s child, John Moulton. Bradwell was seen to personified the early modern stereotype of the English witch, a malevolent, spiteful individual with a penchant for inflicting harm upon innocent children.
By 1542 and at the behest of Henry VIII, Parliament had passed an Act which decreed that to
‘use any Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries to destroy any persone’
was a felonious crime and therefore punishable by death. By pleading guilty to this deed, Bradwell had sealed her fate and would soon swing upon the scaffold. Yet Elizabeth was soon to disclose something far darker to the court upon that day. She admitted that she secured her diabolical gifts by signing, in her own blood, a contract given to her by the Devil. Her confession certainly caught the eye of both Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne, who later published a pamphlet that addressed Elizabeth Bradwell and the alarming significance of her demonic pact.
Exactly why Bradwell admitted to such crimes remains unclear. Were these simply the ramblings of a confused old woman? It is no secret that witch hunts claimed the lives of many whose minds were confronted by conditions modern thinking would now acknowledge as mental illness. Such individuals would have proven prime targets for zealots like Hopkins and Stearne, and whilst the application of torture to procure confessions of witchcraft was strictly prohibited in England during this period, it's know that the Witchfinder was liberal in his implementation of sleep deprivation to secure the confession he desired. For Hopkins, such practices had already demonstrated their worth in Manningtree in Essex earlier that year, when Elizabeth Clarke was interrogated and coerced with sleep deprivation whilst being ‘watched’ for any communication with her alleged demonic familiars. Such delirium inducing methods evidently contributed a fantastical confessions that soon followed Clarke’s interrogation.
Irrespective of the accusations levied against her, Elizabeth Bradwell was no witch. A Norfolk born woman, yes, a mother or sister, perhaps, forsaken by her neighbours and swept up in a mass hysteria at the hands of her captor, Matthew Hopkins, but certainly no witch. It is tragic that the only record that remains of Bradwell is that which condemned her to the gallows on 13th. September, 1645. So too is it tragic that, vilified as a demonic agent, Bradwell is likely to have been buried in an unmarked grave and simply forgotten.
The famous witchcraft trials at Salem in Massachusetts in 1692 also had a Great Yarmouth connection. Among those executed were two elderly sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty. They had been born in Great Yarmouth and were the daughters of William Towne, who emigrated with his family to the United States.