With All Hallow's Eve and The Day of the Dead now behind us for another year, why not snuggle-up with a stunning debut novel from a writer on the threshold of her 80th birthday. This is a fascinating
and utterly compelling fictionalised but fact-based account of the
‘witch hunt’ that gripped the county in the summer of 1612.
Four hundred years after their deaths, the Pendle witches continue to
fire the imagination of readers and historians all over the world.
The mystery of their alleged dark arts and deeds has
spawned hundreds of books and articles ... but who were these nine
Lancashire women and two men, tried and condemned as evil, supernatural
murderers?
Retired lecturer Christine Middleton from Samlesbury,
one of the centres of Lancashire witching folklore, has returned to the
scene of the ‘crimes’ to reconstruct the lives of the leading players,
deconstruct the myths that have grown around them and give the witches a
human makeover.
Middleton
succeeds where many other writers have failed by humanising this group
of disparate characters, putting their ‘offences’ into the context of a
period of religious suspicion and turmoil, and allowing us to see them
as innocents pursued by authoritarians and fanatics.
This is the
tale of the Pendle witches told through the eyes of Jane Southworth,
illegitimate daughter of Sir Richard Shireburn of Stonyhurst and later
wife of Sir John Southworth of Samlesbury Hall.
And the result is
moving, shocking and brutal... the realities of persecution, treachery
and frenzied accusation are reborn in the graphically re-enacted trials
and traumas of those closely involved in the terrible events that led to
the gallows at Lancaster Castle.
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| Lancaster Castle |
As she sits at her dying
husband’s bedside in 1612, Jane Southworth begins her extraordinary
diary, her confessional into which she commits a series of raw,
evocative, deeply personal writings revealing her world, her forbidden
beliefs and her desires.
Around her, the pursuit of those accused
of witchcraft is just beginning in a county reputed to be one of the
most unruly parts of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth’s realm.
From
her early years at rural Stonyhurst, Jane was surrounded by controversy.
Despite being a bastard child of Sir Richard, she was brought up in the
main house alongside her mother and siblings.
It was a household
that courted danger by secretly keeping alive the old and forbidden
Catholic faith in a country where harbouring priests could still be
legally punished by being crushed beneath a wooden slab.
After a
brush with two local crones, old Mother Goggins and the Demdike
Elizabeth Southern, Jane is convinced she has a special ‘power.’
But
when she is sent to lodge with widow farmer and philanthropist Alice
Nutter at Crow Tree Farm in Roughlee, near Pendle, Jane sees another
side to life and faith because principled Alice practises a secret
religion called the Family of Love, ‘a litany of sweet congratulation’
totally at odds with the harsher Catholic tenets of hellfire and
punishment.
Slow to judge and quick to see the good in others,
Alice publicly speaks out against the mistreatment of so-called witches,
declaring that they have no real power to do harm and ‘it is only
ignorance and fear that lend them reputation.’
However, the
whispers that Alice sees as ‘malevolent but insubstantial’ start to grow
and powerful enemies from both inside and outside Lancashire are
waiting for an opportunity to take terrible revenge...
Middleton’s
writing is elegant and richly descriptive, enabling the past to spring
to life with startling authenticity and compelling drama.
The
Witch and Her Soul is about flesh-and-blood women – not witches, not
murderers, not purveyors of magic and mayhem but real, complex,
vulnerable characters, downtrodden, often poverty-stricken,
marginalised, misguided and abused.
Seventeenth century Lancashire
revisited is an eye-opening, unforgettable experience; a history
lesson, a page-turning thriller and a window into the soul of an age
whose queen famously declared that she had ‘no desire to make windows
into men’s souls.’
(Palatine Books, paperback, £7.99)
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| The witches of Pendle |
