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Show Notes
In this week’s captivating episode, we are excited to welcome Dr. Katie Liddane, an expert in the History and Heritage of Witch Hunting in the North East of England. Katie takes us through her research and her dedicated efforts to illuminate the Newcastle Witch Trials. We delve into why the Newcastle Witch-Hunt remains less known compared to events like the Pendle Witch-Hunt and discuss Newcastle Castle’s creative approach to engaging the community with workshops on witch trial history. Katie also talks about her active role in creating a memorial for the victims of the Newcastle witch trials, stressing the importance of community involvement and historical fidelity. She sheds light on the necessity of merging historical accuracy with the pop-cultural fascination with witchcraft to fully honor and recognize the humanity of the accused. Join us as we explore an intricate blend of history, memory, and cultural engagement in remembering past witch hunts.
Walking with Witches by Lynn Huggins-Cooper
Massachusetts Witch Hunt Justice Project
Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project
Transcript
Josh Hutchinson: Welcome to Witch Hunt, where we unravel the complex global history of witch trials. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
Sarah Jack: And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we are excited to bring you a special discussion from Dr. Katie Liddane.
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Liddane takes us through the Newcastle Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: And tells us about her witch trial history workshop at Newcastle Castle, attended by sixth-year students.
Josh Hutchinson: We also explore why the Newcastle Witch Hunt has been overlooked by many, while the Pendle Witch Trials are much more widely known.
Sarah Jack: This conversation is so engaging, you may catch yourself trying to join in with us.
Josh Hutchinson: And we don't mind if you do.
Sarah Jack: Yay!
Josh Hutchinson: Dr. Liddane's work highlights the large absence [00:01:00] and sense of obscurity around neglected historical events like witch trials, especially when pitted against the more renowned historical events.
Sarah Jack: Dr. Liddane emphasizes the importance of remembering our past and memorializing those accused of witchcraft.
Josh Hutchinson: One of her outreach efforts has been to dress the part of a 17th century woman accused of witchcraft and lead castle tours.
Sarah Jack: Be sure to check out her social media so you can see her in costume. It's awesome.
Josh Hutchinson: It is.
Sarah Jack: Welcome Dr. Katie Liddane. Her expertise spans witchcraft history, folklore, historical fiction, and the intriguing realm of gothic tourism. Her research and creative projects focus on 17th century northeast English witchcraft, and she obtained a PhD from Northumbria University.
Sarah Jack: Could you please introduce yourself and share with the listeners your background, expertise, and professional journey?
Katie Liddane: I'm Katie Liddane. I [00:02:00] recently graduated with my doctorate in December of last year in the History and Heritage of Witch-Hunting in the North East of England. Witch Persecution, I think is in the title. I've been at Northumbria for all three of my degrees and was fortunate enough to get scholarships for both postgraduate degrees. And I guess in the more heritage side of my studies and my experience, I started an internship while I was awaiting the start of my PhD that showed me how heavily influenced by industrial heritage and the Northeast as a center for working class communities and scientific innovation had really eclipsed a lot of the other historical events in Newcastle, including the witch trials.
Katie Liddane: Because the first time I'd heard of the [00:03:00] Newcastle Witch Trials was through a local newspaper article that was from 2008 but had been republished in around 2016 or so. And it was a very brief article that did send me rolling my eyes a little bit, because the article was about the bones of those convicted of witchcraft being accidentally excavated, and the article describes some of the archaeologists or workmen there getting a rash from the bones and describing it as a curse.
Josh Hutchinson: Wow.
Katie Liddane: So
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah.
Katie Liddane: I found that obviously quite a problematic coverage, so I went in search for more to find out more about the Newcastle witches and then to understand how such a large absence and sense of obscurity had developed, especially in comparison with the Pendle Witches that are much more [00:04:00] famous in cultural memory. And I kind of had the idea and the curiosity and then found an opportunity that would fit to allow me to explore it for so long and write about it.
Josh Hutchinson: What a strange thing to put in a newspaper article, getting a rash from handling accused person's bones.
Katie Liddane: And it's not even entirely clear that it was the bones of those convicted of witchcraft. It was just in the general area that we think that the convicted were buried. And again, the article's around Halloween. So I think it was just a kind of spooky ending of the article.
Katie Liddane:
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, yeah. There's always those Halloween articles
Josh Hutchinson: Every year.
Katie Liddane: Yeah. And in terms of what I'd done before the PhD and before working at the North of England Institute for Mining [00:05:00] and Mechanical Engineers, there's an abbreviation for a reason, I had done a Master's of Research in the Heritage Management and History of Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark in London.
Katie Liddane: Have you heard of Crossbones before?
Josh Hutchinson: No, haven't heard before.
Katie Liddane: It's hailed as I think the first sex worker heritage site. And that's because Southwark had a long history as an area for licensed sex work in the medieval period. And Crossbones was a pauper's graveyard for centuries, the kind of two histories had become conflated. And again, it was through the discovery of bones that interest in the site was reignited. I think it was during an Tube in the 1990s that they discovered a pauper's graveyard, and so that kind of gave me, [00:06:00] that masters gave me my foundation to explore the history of the site and the people associated with it, but also how that history morphs through heritage attractions and fiction and public history. So I can see quite a clear link between the two subjects, even though they're like quite different areas of history.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. Is there any links there that you want to talk about?
Katie Liddane: I guess just a shared background of subjects that are usually considered women's history or gendered history, sex work and witchcraft, and the histories, heritage attractions, and businesses sometimes built around the memorialization or lack thereof of marginalized people. But at that time, I'd like to say it was part of a grand scheme, but at that time I'd lived in Newcastle for at least three years and hadn't [00:07:00] heard of the Newcastle witches before. And a lot of people still haven't. So it's been very recently that people are starting to become aware that Newcastle had witch trials. Some people in the town don't even know that Newcastle has a castle. It's something that I've learned from working at Newcastle Castle.
Josh Hutchinson: Some of the work that we've done in Connecticut around the witch trial history is really similar as far as the awareness isn't there in a lot of the community. I have really enjoyed that piece, just having the new learners getting to spread something that is interesting and important. As surprising as it can be when history is just unknown, it's exciting when it gets launched like this.
Katie Liddane: Definitely has been very exciting and the opportunity to talk about it more on podcasts and heritage [00:08:00] attractions has been brilliant as well because that was the intention of my project, really, to explain and understand the obscurity of the Newcastle witches, but also use that to have a wider impact outside of academia. Because I don't think many people are going to read an 80,000 word academic thesis on the role of deindustrialization in the legacy of the Newcastle Witch Trials, but there are opportunities to talk about the Witch Trials and to often clear up a lot of misconceptions that happen a lot with originating in the sort of Halloween articles and popular media that really links the fairy tale or the folk healer witch with those convicted and executed in the 17th century.
Katie Liddane: And I think Newcastle has been especially impacted by what I term in my thesis, but I don't think I coined [00:09:00] the term, 'witch kitsch' in the intervening centuries almost between the trials and their resurgence. Strangely, post 2008, 2008 seems to be a watershed moment for the afterlife of the Newcastle witches. There has been mounds and mounds of witchcraft media that has been drawn upon to a greater extent than the few sources we have of the Newcastle Witches.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you think that is since 2008? Why has that changed?
Katie Liddane: 2008 was the year of the article about the bones, and it was during renovation work of St. Andrew's Churchyard that what may have been the bones of the convicted were unearthed. But that was also the year that Walking with Witches, which is a children's novel by Lynn Huggins Cooper, based on the Newcastle Witches, was released. And then when you go slightly [00:10:00] further back, I have family history journals that do include excerpts from the burial register with the title, 'Was Your Ancestress a Witch?' Then we get small articles and magazines in the 1970s and things like that, but I think post sort of 2008 is the time where you see the solidification of the Northeast as a post-industrial region and there's been a greater exploration of parts of the region's history beyond heavy industry. And it's enabled people to tap into wider witch kitsch with the regional example.
Katie Liddane: That was already quite a mouthful, but there is like an 80,000 word explanation that starts literally with the witch trials, and then you see a snowballing effect of obscurity, and then a kind of redevelopment of interest. I've not been [00:11:00] able to pin down why specifically 2008, but you can tie it into wider witch literature, occult revivals, interest in the supernatural, and I guess there may have been examples of people finding out about the Newcastle Witches in the same way that I have, and then they've gone through and mined the few resources that there are out there, and we're starting to see more representation.
Sarah Jack: I was just thinking, my journey has not led me to a new degree yet, but I was trying to mine resources about my ancestor who was on trial for witchcraft in the 17th century in Connecticut, and I didn't realize I needed to stick my nose in the academic writings, because I wasn't reading academic writings at that point. I was online looking for people talking about it, newspaper articles, that kind of thing. And it [00:12:00] was really similar the type of witch kitsch that we would find, that I would find, or just lack, other people saying, I don't know, what's out there, and can there be a memorial?
Sarah Jack: And so it's interesting how these histories that do come back alive, the voices start to be heard. It's because there's inquiry, and there's a vacuum there.
Katie Liddane: Definitely, and I think with a more obscure case like Newcastle, I think it's quite important that vacuum is filled in a way in a collaboration between historians and heritage professionals, because there is that danger of this rediscovery stopping with the witch kitsch, and I think especially in a situation such as Newcastle's where there is this kind of more grassroots reengagement with the city's [00:13:00] witch-hunting past. There is that danger that the information or lack thereof that we have about the Newcastle Witches becomes supplemented and our understanding of the Newcastle Witches is that of the hag stereotype or the almost fictional caricature, and that these efforts and these interests don't materialize into memorialization and recognition of victimhood.
Josh Hutchinson: Now one way that you've worked on getting more recognition is through workshops you conducted. What can you tell us about those?
Katie Liddane: I wrote a bespoke workshop at the time for a primary school in the west end of Newcastle called Bridgewater. And the workshop is called 'Familiars and Fear,' and it was written because the children in year six, so that's around 11 years old, [00:14:00] were reading Walking with Witches for their literacy class. And the novel touches on a lot of locations in Newcastle, like Newcastle Castle, and the Lit and Phil, which is the Literary and Philosophical Society. And the teachers wanted to have a school trip to actually visit these locations, and luckily at the time I was at placement at Newcastle Castle as part of my PhD studies, so I was able to write the workshop that tied in with what they're reading at school, but also the wider witchcraft history in the region. Eleven years old is quite young to explain some of these issues, so it requires a bit of simplification and talking about suspicion and rumour and issues like that, but also bringing in issues of gender and class. And we also have a game [00:15:00] towards the end, where one of the children plays a witchfinder.
Katie Liddane: And it's quite similar to Wink Murder. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
Sarah Jack: I believe I am. Is that a group game, and you don't wanna get winked at 'cause then you're dead.?
Katie Liddane: Essentially, yeah, and one of the children, or one of the people playing the game is chosen to be a detective and to work out who is committing the murders. But, this time we have someone chosen to be a witchfinder. The child is taken out of the room and told, essentially the witchfinder was given the equivalent of 106 pounds in today's money per witch, that he would find guilty and do not think that might influence your decision a little bit. And the children in the main room are given cards that they are told will say whether they are a villager or a witch. And in reality, none of the cards say that the children, say that anyone is a witch, [00:16:00] and the kind of game escalates as the children start to accuse each other, the witchfinder decides if he's going to send them to trial, essentially, and then at the end we explain to the children that none of them were witches, and it's a really good opportunity to see the shock on their faces, but also to talk about how easily they started accusing one another. So I think it's a really good way to make the session interactive but also through that and through a more tangible and active lesson, get them the core messages across about what we can learn from witch hunting.
Sarah Jack: The prickers and the finders were a strong part of the Newcastle witch trial history.
Katie Liddane: Yes, so how the witch trials originated in Newcastle was through a petition that was submitted in March of [00:17:00] 1649, for a witchfinder to be invited to the town, and unfortunately, the petition doesn't survive, but we get the sense that the witch finder was chosen by name. He was a Scottish professional witch pricker, and unfortunately, we don't know his name today. But he had a reputation that crossed the border into Newcastle, and when he arrived into the town, thirty people, which would have been around 1 percent of the town's population, were brought forward to be tried by him, and he boasted that he could tell if someone was a witch by their looks alone, but his method in court as a sort of preliminary trial method was pricking with a bodkin, which was a long medicinal pin, and he would prick the devil's marks that he found on the [00:18:00] accused, and particularly in English witch hunting, this was a protuberance like a mole or an extra nipple or a skin tag or something like that that was understood to be the teat at which the familiar spirit would feed. And, out of the 30 people, the wich finder found 15 guilty and were passed on to trial, and then they were convicted at the assizes.
Josh Hutchinson: And he was paid per witch that he found?
Katie Liddane: Yeah, he was paid 20 shillings per witch, and later on, he allegedly admitted to being the death of over 220 people across England and Scotland.
Josh Hutchinson: So he made pretty good money.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, and he was actually discovered to be a fraud after his time in Newcastle, and according to the evidence that we have, he was pursued into Scotland and [00:19:00] executed, and it was on the gallows that he gave the figure of 220, but I've unfortunately not been able to verify that anywhere, so I do have some speculation that in the town's kind of constructing of the history of this event in the five years between the event and the first surviving piece of documentation, it certainly makes the town's officials appear better if they've managed to apprehend him but have not found anything to correlate that he was executed for his involvement at Newcastle.
Sarah Jack: Were there also sociopolitical impacts in the Northeast that contributed to the witchcraft persecutions?
Katie Liddane: The 17th century in Newcastle was a very turbulent period. You've got various sieges by the Scottish. There's [00:20:00] a plague outbreak that was proportionally more devastating than London's 1666 plague. There were pirates at the ports in Newcastle in 1649 to 1650, harvest crises, just decades of political upheaval. And whilst, because we don't have the surviving material of the accusations of the individuals, you can definitely see this escalation over the time period and the fact that witch trial accusations and a reputation for witchcraft took sometimes decades to develop, you can really see, again, like this gradual increase that reached a fever pitch in 1649.
Josh Hutchinson: Oh, this sounds so familiar to what we've heard with other witch trial cases. There's this political uncertainty, maybe some [00:21:00] warfare going on, disease, crop issues. Yeah, these seem to be pretty typical contributors to at least the witch panics that happened.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. And you do see this kind of spread outside of Newcastle in 1649 to 1650. There was a peak in Scottish witch hunting in the same time period, but you also see smaller clusters of accusations in Gateshead, which is just across the Tyne, and the Sheriff of Cumberland sent a letter to London to ask for assistance in a witch hunt, and he was told that essentially the legislation, we're not going to offer any more support. And in the case of Newcastle, they did seek that support from north of the border instead.
Sarah Jack: In the Newcastle case, they were tried in Newcastle?
Katie Liddane: [00:22:00] Yes They would have been tried at the Assizes Court in the Guild Hall, which is just on the quayside, and the witch that was likely held at Newcastle Castle, she was a resident of Northumberland, so she would have been tried at the Morpeth Assizes in Northumberland, but because at the time she was in a different jurisdiction, she would have been held at Newcastle Castle because that was acting as the jail for the county of Northumberland. But she was executed alongside the Newcastle Witches too.
Sarah Jack: How many executions occurred?
Katie Liddane: So there were 14 from the Newcastle Witch Trials, 13 women and one man. And then Jane Martin was the witch who was accused in Northumberland and convicted alongside the Newcastle Witches. But also on the same day, nine Moss Troopers were executed. Moss Troopers are a local name [00:23:00] for cattle rustlers and border thieves. They would essentially use the difference in legislation and jurisdiction to hop across the border whenever they'd committed a crime. The large number of executions taking place on the same day would have been a huge spectacle for people in the region and reinforced the idea of maintenance of law and order and show some stability in a bizarre way. During this period, the number of executions were so large that a special gallows was built. We have record of the construction of an extra large gallows, and this was what made it more surprising to me that the Newcastle Witches had been so little known for so long was that their hanging was the largest hanging for witchcraft in English history. There's, a group of 18 witches that were executed in Chelmsford in East Anglia under Matthew Hopkins, [00:24:00] but they were executed in different locations and at different dates. So it, at the start of my studies, it seemed even more strange that the Newcastle Witch Trials have faded into obscurity.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, that really stands out differently. With Salem, we had 19 hanged, but there were several different dates.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, and I think similarly with Salem, because in exploring this absence throughout my thesis, I wanted to do a lot of comparison to sites that do engage with their witchcraft history, for better or for worse, in different times throughout history. I think it's really important to follow the example of memorialising those that weren't executed as witches, but died earlier in jail, or died awaiting trial, [00:25:00] things like that, so really good to be able to have that comparison of this is how it's been done in another location, in perhaps the most famous place for witchcraft heritage in the world. So this is how Newcastle can learn from that and build upon that.
Josh Hutchinson: What can you tell us about the memorial effort?
Katie Liddane: We're in the early stages at the moment. It's a project at the moment between myself, the learning team at Newcastle Castle, and Newcastle's Council, the Heritage and Conservation Department. We're working on contacting people that we think would be interested stakeholders, organizations that I've worked with before.
Katie Liddane: And as part of that, I'm quite keen to reach out to other heritage sites in the UK and elsewhere that have witchcraft memorials and to discuss the stories of how they came about [00:26:00] there and really learn from how other sites have engaged with their witch hunting past. Not just to, as I was in my thesis, to look at why Newcastle perhaps hasn't yet but to turn that into an action.
Katie Liddane: We'll look at involving local artists. We've got Bridgewater Primary, the school that I mentioned earlier, involved as well. They did a writing exercise for one of their classes to write a letter requesting a memorial to their local MP. So we are trying to build a communal engagement rather than a sort of top down memorial that someone will read about in the newspaper, like I did the bone discovery.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, Sarah and I are involved in an effort to get a memorial for the witch trial victims in Connecticut. So we're at a similar early stage building the community [00:27:00] and starting to conceptualize what it might look like.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, we're also hoping, we're in the sort of blue sky thinking, shoot for the stars phase at the moment, but we'd love to do a community event each year as well, on the anniversary of the executions. So to keep the memorialization process and recognition alive again, rather than just placing a memorial and that being the end of it, but also, I don't know if you've had a similar thought process, but with it being so long that Newcastle has gone without any sort of recognition or memorialization, the aims are a bit higher. Part of our thinking is that we definitely want the names of each of the people convicted and or accused that might have died during the process that they awaited trial, but a [00:28:00] small plaque doesn't seem enough after so long. Envisioning what the design looks like is definitely being influenced, on my part anyway, by the amount of time that there's been nothing.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah. I'd say shoot for the stars. Definitely.
Katie Liddane: I think looking at the centenaries of other witch hunts and the events around that has been really important in both my research process and in starting to put proposals together for the memorial as well. So the fourth centenary of the Pendle Witch Trials that happened in 2012 has been quite influential in the various events and different means of engaging with different parts of the community. In looking at Salem as well, when I visited Lancaster, it was quite interesting to see the coexistence of serious memorialization, such as the [00:29:00] turset weight markers that were put on the Pendle Witch Trail in 2012, in contrast to the local bus companies having a lady with a pointed hat and a broomstick on the side of their, on the side of their buses.
Katie Liddane: So there's a really, like a really interesting mingling of what the early modern witch means to people and the different ways that regions with a strong witch hunting past engage with that.
Katie Liddane:
Josh Hutchinson: That sounds a lot like Salem. The city emblem is the witch on the broomstick with the pointy hat. So the police and the police cars have that emblem on them, but you do have, you know, multiple memorials to the victims there, where you go, and, they're peaceful, solemn places amidst all the witch kitsch going on all around it. So it's a [00:30:00] this interesting dichotomy.
Katie Liddane: It's really interesting, and I'd say, apart from sites like Newcastle Castle and brief discussion of the trials at the Discovery Museum in the city, Newcastle's engagement is just the witch kitch elements elsewhere, so there are various ghost tours and there's an escape room that do talk about the Newcastle witches, but it is very much in the pointed hat broomstick way.
Sarah Jack: Yeah, I've seen some local community events that embrace the history of a single witch trial victim from their town. And there's a lot of lore that has grown and then been embraced for communities. And then there's these fresher efforts of bringing their humanity to the forefront. But they're just, the lore is just envelopes [00:31:00] that woman.
Sarah Jack: And so I'm learning that, they're forever intertwined, but the life can be spoken about more, and her humanity and the dignity has to be a constant part of the conversation to grow that piece of her story. And one of the recent memorial plaques that went up, it's very brief what it says about her, but you can tell they are recognizing her as a real woman who hanged, but they are also, there's this endearment of the folklore that's been around her that they identify with as the town.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. I think it would be really hard to just engage directly with what we know from the 17th century records and not let any other awareness of what witchcraft and or witch hunting means to [00:32:00] us today to influence that. I think the, it's the coexistence of the pop cultural witch with the recognition of the humanity of those accused is most important.
Katie Liddane: I saw a similar memorial in Forfar in Scotland. That memorial has, it's just a stone pillar with one indentation in the stone per victim and then beneath it just says, 'they were just people.' And I think the demystifying aspect is really important there to, like I say, recognize the humanity and to a certain extent the distinction between those accused in the 17th century and our more modern understandings of the witch figure, whether it be historical or fantasy.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, it's so true. They [00:33:00] were just people. And I think what you're hoping to do with the annual event is so critical. Hopefully, we can do something like that too, because it's so important to give these victims their humanity and know about them outside of just the kitsch element, get a sense of who they are as real human people just like us.
Katie Liddane: Yeah. And we do fortunately have some small glimpses of what the Newcastle Witches were like as people. So Matthew Boomer, the only male defendant. We know that he was a smith of some form, and he appears in the quarter session records in the years leading up to the Newcastle Witch Trials in petty disputes with his neighbors.
Katie Liddane: We don't have much detail about much detail of what they were about [00:34:00] because the clerk didn't seem too interested by it so he didn't write much down, unfortunately. Men implicated in English witch trials are related to, or married to, female defendants, but we can't find that connection there with Matthew. And we also know a little bit more about Margaret Brown.
Katie Liddane: And in the only account that we do have in depth on the Newcastle Witch Trials and the execution again, we can't really verify this but Margaret Brown is said to have asked for a sign from God for her innocence as she was about to drop, and her blood sprayed across the crowd to the amazement of onlookers. And often when I do public engagement work, I try to explain that amazement meant something different in the 17th century than it does today. But Margaret Brown has a further connection in that one of the [00:35:00] witnesses that gave their testimony to support this account of the witch hunts was her friend Eleanor Loomsdale, and Eleanor spent a year in jail for trying to deter people from giving evidence against Margaret and the co-accused. So we can see evidence of opposition to the witch hunting at the time, and Eleanor getting in contact with the writer of the account years later to give her version of events.
Sarah Jack: Wow. And those that were executed, were they identified early on? How, I know we have the length of the event, but I wondered how quickly some of these people went from not being accused to finding themselves convicted.
Katie Liddane: From the glimpses that we can get from the brief [00:36:00] discussion of the Newcastle Witch Hunt in a kind of full length book that is actually about Ralph Gardner's grievances with Newcastle's council. About four pages of the large book are about the witch hunt and this is essentially, apart from the burial register and financial records for how much it cost to jail the witches while they awaited trial, this four page account is all we have.
Katie Liddane: And in Gardner's version of events there was bubbling unrest and informal accusations being made that caused the petition to be submitted. And the petition was submitted in March of 1649, as I said, but the witchfinder wasn't sought until 1650. So we do see a kind of reluctance, hesitance, for Newcastle's authorities to invite a [00:37:00] witchfinder, or to pay for a witchfinder, possibly. There is a suggestion that there was a sense of informal suspicion and reputation for those that were brought forward. But when the witchfinder did arrive, a bellman was sent out into the town to encourage accusations to be formalized. But I highly doubt that those accusations were generated when the witchfinder was riding through. I think it will have been years in the making for a lot of the people accused.
Josh Hutchinson: Why do you think that it is that we only have that one four page account?
Katie Liddane: The survival of the assizes records is very scarce for Newcastle in that time period. It's hard to trace when they disappear, but they were already gone by the 19th century, when criminal histories and folklore collections were beginning to be compiled of the [00:38:00] region. In terms of why there were few accounts aside from that, I think it was probably the exposure of the witchfinder as a fraud that meant that we don't see the same sort of pamphlets that were produced about Lancaster and the Pendle Witch Trials and things like that, because, and that sort of In the sense of constructing a narrative about a successful witch hunt and the kind of defeat of evil and the defeat of the devil's agents on earth, that witches were understood to be, the exposure of the witch finder as a fraud kind of undermined a lot of that, and it would have been quite severe that the town's authorities had been taken in by a charlatan, so you can see the sense of why they wouldn't have been happy with the trial being discussed.
Katie Liddane: And we do have evidence of that with the four page account, actually, because the 200 [00:39:00] page, 200, 300 page book that it's contained within was actively suppressed by Newcastle's authorities, so we see a kind of censorship of the trial being committed to print, whether it's contained within Ralph Gardner's text against the town's authorities as a whole, or whether it's specifically about the witch trial.
Katie Liddane: In the same year, a pamphlet called Wonderful News from the North Again, that's a term that I have to explain how language evolves over time. It wasn't considered wonderful news at the time in the way that we would talk about it now. But Wonderful News from the North details Jane Martin's accusations, and Jane was the witch held at Newcastle Castle, and the writer of that pamphlet chose to have it printed in London, even though there was a printer [00:40:00] working in Newcastle at the time. Just the brief detail like that gives us a sense that there was an attempt to spread this news outside of the immediate area, or perhaps a reluctance from Newcastle's printer to discuss witch hunting so close to their executions and the exposure of the fraud.
Josh Hutchinson: Interesting. Is there a victim's story that you'd be interested in telling us?
Katie Liddane: In the case of the core Newcastle Witch Trials, we have very, very little information. But I think Jane Martin's story would probably be quite interesting to go into. Like the Newcastle Witches, Jane never made a confession, but her sister did, on her behalf, Margaret White. And Jane and Margaret became involved with the [00:41:00] story presented in Wonderful News because they were named by a cunning man named John Hutton, who was himself being accused of possessing a nine to eleven year old child called Margaret Moore. Yeah, Margaret Muschamp, her mother was Mary Moore, sorry.
Katie Liddane: And as I say, Jane didn't confess. But Margaret White, on her behalf, said that she had entertained the devil and that he knew her so well that that he nicknamed her Bessie, and that she had a black greyhound familiar. And the pamphlet itself was constructed over about four to five years and released to coincide with the Newcastle Witch Trials, quite interestingly.
Katie Liddane: There's quite a long list of Jane's alleged crimes. She was accused of using telekinesis to launch a kiln of oats at a man's head and to kill him. John Hutton, as I say, was accused of shapeshifting into the [00:42:00] form of a dragon, a bear, a horse, and a cow, of causing shipwrecks. And again to go back to Jane, she was also accused of causing a man to have a sore leg. So going from like shapeshifting into a dragon and causing shipwrecks to a sore leg, we see quite a breadth of accusations and forms of magic being used at the time.
Katie Liddane: And in the pamphlet we know that Jane was indicted, tried, and convicted, and taken to Newcastle to be executed. But, she seems to have been, in a bizarre way collateral damage of sorts. Because the mother, Mary Moore, who wrote the pamphlet, was pursuing Dorothy Swinnow, who was a wealthy widow of a colonel. And we know that she fled to Berwick, and the officials at Berwick wouldn't send her back down to Chatham for a trial, but because [00:43:00] Jane was only the wife of a miller, she gets swept up, and because a conviction can be put through with Jane, we see her executed.
Katie Liddane: And I think her tie to Newcastle Castle and the fact that we do know so much more about Jane is why she was chosen to be a castle character, and the design of the castle character that I did in collaboration with the Master's students at Newcastle came after the original Familiars and Fear workshop, but it's been really good to be able to merge those two parts of interpretation together, and the kids engage really well seeing the 17th century costume, and again, with the understanding that these were real people rather than fairy tale villains. So I think that's been a really helpful method of interpretation.
Josh Hutchinson: Is Jane who you portrayed in the costume last year?
Katie Liddane: [00:44:00] Yeah. The castle characters are the illustrations that are commissioned. So there is an illustration of Jane, too, but the castle commissioned the costume to be made by a woman known as the Rogue Needlewoman that does a lot of the costumes for the castle and for local reenactment societies, but Jane Martin is the character that I was dressed as last year, yeah.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, we love seeing people in a period costume presenting the information.
Sarah Jack: Yeah. It really caught my eye too, because it was children's education.
Katie Liddane: Yeah, I think it's a really important opportunity as well and to have such an interactive session where the children can directly ask me questions, and I can directly answer them rather than just having these methods of interpretation be released out there. And if people have questions, it's [00:45:00] much harder to ask those and to research to a certain extent, because a lot of people, especially teachers in school, aren't necessarily going to go to academic theses, but to have the opportunity to speak directly to people has been brilliant.
Katie Liddane: The teachers are sometimes a bit reluctant to let the children ask me questions, because they prefer the classroom environment of putting their hand up and or they don't want the children to bother me sometimes, but I think it's brilliant like, I like to wait around at the end of the sessions and have children come and ask me 'what if witches weren't real, then why were people still saying that there were witches? Why did this happen?' And I think that one-on-one engagement is really important, as well.
Josh Hutchinson: What lessons do the children draw from the engagement?
Katie Liddane: Again, it is the breakdown of [00:46:00] kind of very complicated ideas about class and gender. So we discuss the fact that some people who, looked different, may have been accused, people who were ostracized by their communities in certain ways, so it breaks this sort of complex and very historically distant phenomenon of witch hunting into its basic themes to show what we can learn about acceptance and social justice in terms of what, what has happened to the most vulnerable members of society in the past. And through the game especially, the children gain a sense of empathy of what it would have felt like to be accused, or to recognise in themselves impulse to make accusations based on very little evidence.
Katie Liddane:
Katie Liddane: It's been really fun at the castle, especially, to directly [00:47:00] integrate my research and real examples from the region into these activities. I go through various cases and ask the children, ' do you think this person was a witch or what else might have been happening?' And in the game, as well, we see the children are handed curse cards that are real complaints that people made in their accusations about their cow's milk failing or crops failing and things like that and shipwrecks. So it's again been really good to be able to break down PhD level research, speak to children about it, and have them engage and understand.
Sarah Jack: It's amazing. And I really see this long game impact that what you have done is creating, especially with the memorial developing [00:48:00] and the annual tribute that will be happening as these children are growing. It just strengthens that community acknowledgement of the heritage and making memorialization an important part of looking at the history.
Sarah Jack: It's wonderful.
Katie Liddane: Has been a really fulfilling project, and again, as I say, the intention when I started out with my thesis was community engagement and changing this absence rather than just observing it from academia to a certain extent is to be able to build on the memorialisation process, and as I say, recently we're hearing more and more interest from local schools and groups, so it is really nice to see the development and spread of sometimes very surface level awareness that witch trials did happen in Newcastle, and then to have people reach out to the castle and myself [00:49:00] to learn more. So it's a really exciting time for the kind of legacy of the Newcastle Witch Trials.
Josh Hutchinson: As a way of paying tribute, would you be able to read the names of the victims?
Katie Liddane: So the names of those executed in Newcastle on the 21st of August of 1650 were Isabel Brown, Margret Maddeson, Anne Watson, Eleanor Henderson, Elsabeth Dobson, Matthew Bulmer o r Bonner, Ellsabeth Anderson, Jane Huntor, Jane Koupling, Margret Brown, Margret Moffet, Katteren Welsh, alias Coulter, Aylles Hume, and Marie Pootes.
Josh Hutchinson: Katie, I can't tell you how much I've learned from everything that you, I've really learned a lot from you. And I look at how you mentioned how you were looking at other memorials and what other communities have done with the history to [00:50:00] implement and look at what, how you can reach your goals in Newcastle, but I feel like what you've done is so historic and is such a case study in itself and something for other communities to model after. It's incredible.
Katie Liddane: That's really nice to hear, thank you. I again, when I started the PhD, and with the blue sky thinking of the memorial project, I would really like to build a network or engage in a community of areas with witch hunting histories and to learn from each other, to a certain extent, and build an awareness of the witch hunts that fit into a wider understanding of the phenomenon and how you do find specific details that tie the cases to a region, but that also tap into a wider sense of communal memorialization and [00:51:00] its continuing relevance today. It would be great to be able to be further in touch with, with the people.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah we do know a few people in Salem and Danvers, Massachusetts that were involved in the memorials. Have you been able to talk to anyone there?
Katie Liddane: We're still in the early stages of reaching out to that extent, but I did read a lot about the 2016 memorial determining the execution site, and that seems like it was a very intensive project with a lot of researchers and historians that are referenced in my thesis.
Josh Hutchinson: So again, when we have a kind of firmer idea of where we're going with this project, would be brilliant to reach out to those people, too. I've already been in contact with people at Colchester Castle, where some of Matthew Hopkins' [00:52:00] accused were held and in discussion with Lancaster Castle, who were very helpful during my thesis, too.
Sarah Jack: I don't know that I've paid attention enough or I just haven't heard it, but hearing those two terms together, the Witchcraft Heritage, just is like a wake up call for me on messaging and the community engagement piece. I'm so appreciative of that layer of your work.
Katie Liddane: Thank you. It was really, a really interesting thing to be able to explore and to go back to what we were talking about earlier too. It's quite hard to articulate in my thesis of this, in a sense, dichotomy between witch kitsch and memorialization, but to articulate the idea that there is an interwoven relationship between the two.
Katie Liddane: And as you said earlier, I don't think we're ever going to be able to separate them entirely, but I think [00:53:00] witchcraft heritage is a very nuanced topic, and a community to discuss that in is very valuable, especially with regards to sites that are only just moving towards memorialization or moving towards the more nuanced look at their region's witch hunting past.
Josh Hutchinson: Yeah, one thing that I believe, and I think this especially about Salem, is that the witch kitsch draws people in, and then it gives the historians the opportunity to present the nuanced history to new learners, because there's always a supply of tourists coming in willing to learn.
Katie Liddane: So the relationship is definitely much more complicated than witch kitsch tourism businesses and historians. And so far as we can know about what [00:54:00] happened in places like Salem and Lancaster and Pendle, the detailed documented evidence that we do have does, have to engage with witch kitsch in order for that message to be heard, in a way, so a lot of the way that people do learn about Newcastle Witch Trials in the first instance is through ghost tours, the escape room, and the article, but the important part is when they want to find out more where historians and heritage professionals can step in, so I definitely agree with the witch kitsch being a huge draw at Salem, the interpretation definitely doesn't stop there.
Sarah Jack: I'm just I've just had this realization with Connecticut, one of the questions that we keep having to answer is how can we move forward with highlighting the history and memorials [00:55:00] without the sensationalizing happening? Of course, I'm also seeing this lore that is important to the local culture, but I know that what has the answer is we embrace and develop the heritage, just like we do the other heritage of the history, and we haven't been highlighting that in an articulated way, and I think that can be an answer for that question on gathering some support from stakeholders there.
Katie Liddane: Definitely. I think the witch kitsch is always going to be there in some form, but being able to build something else from that and around that does recognize, again, the humanity of the accused and having a relationship with witch kitsch to a certain extent is very important in raising awareness and recognition of these people as [00:56:00] people. I had a particularly frustrating time in trying to track down one of the strangest misconceptions about the Newcastle Witches, and it was that Matthew Bulmer, the only male defendant, transformed into a black cat and led a load of children to fall down a well in Winleton or Winlayton, the a village in Gateshead.
Katie Liddane: And I haven't been able to substantiate that at all, but the black cat figure is so prominent within witchcraft history that I can, not academically, but I can speculate as to where that came from. But I spent a lot of time emailing the different places that it pops up, and they all assumed that they'd picked it up from the other person.
Katie Liddane: Trying to disentangle where folklore, myth, and witch kitsch becomes involved has been quite difficult, [00:57:00] but has really illustrated the kind of inextricable relationship between 17th century witchcraft history and pop cultural engagements with the witch as a figure in general. And unfortunately, I think the kind of black cat into a well story is more exciting for a lot of people than Matthew Bulmer being a blacksmith that had arguments with his neighbours.
Sarah Jack: And now for a minute with Mary.
Mary Louise Bingham: Rebecca Fox was distraught, because her daughter, Rebecca Jacobs, was arrested under false pretenses for the capital crime of witchcraft at Salem, Massachusetts Bay, British America, in 1692. Rebecca Jacobs languished in the Salem jail for six months when her mother drafted the second of two petitions on her daughter's behalf. This petition was addressed to the Governor's Council at Boston. Rebecca [00:58:00] Fox advised the magistrates that her daughter was, quote, 'crazed and distracted in her mind for the last 12 years,' end quote. Rebecca asked them to show leniency, because she feared her daughter's mental illness could not withstand the deplorable prison conditions. Rebecca's petitions remain unanswered.
Mary Louise Bingham: Because these petitions have been preserved, we know today that Rebecca Fox's love and devotion for her daughter, Rebecca Jacobs, was unwavering. Here is a short quote by Rebecca Fox to the council, quote, 'Your petitioner, her tender mother, has many great sorrows and almost overcoming burdens on her mind upon my daughter's account. Your petitioner has no way for help but to make my afflicted daughter's condition known to you, end quote.' And she signed this document, 'your [00:59:00] sorrowful and distressed petitioner, Rebecca Fox.' Thank you.
Sarah Jack: Thank you, Mary.
Josh Hutchinson: Here's Sarah with End Witch Hunts News.
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This is National Women's History Month. Women have been pivotal and influential across all facets of human history. In March, the United States pays tribute to the enduring legacy and contributions of women throughout its history. National Women's History Month celebrates U. S. women's achievements and struggles. Originating from an 1857 protest by garment workers in New York City against poor working conditions, it evolved into the nation's first Women's Day in 1909 after a significant march for labor rights and suffrage. Official recognition came in 1981 when Congress designated the second week of March as National Women's History Week, later expanding it to a month in 1987. The month is a reflection on women's progress.
During Women's History Month, End Witch Hunts extends a heartfelt appreciation to the exceptional contributions and resilience of marginalized American women. Their narratives, deeply embedded in a diverse tapestry of rich cultural heritages, are essential to the fabric of our collective history. As [01:01:00] educators, these women have imparted wisdom and knowledge across generations, shaping the minds and spirits of future leaders. Their leadership in social and political arenas has been pivotal, driving forward movements of justice, equality, and transformative change with unwavering courage and vision.
Who are our marginalized women? Marginalized women encompass a diverse array of identities and face unique challenges and barriers. These are women of color, indigenous women, LGBTQ women, those with disabilities, the elderly, the impoverished, immigrants and refugees, survivors of violence, single mothers, and those living in conflict zones. Their experiences, marked by intersectional forms of discrimination, underline the pressing need for inclusive support and advocacy. This list is not exhaustive and can intersect, leading to compounded forms of discrimination and marginalization.
Despite marginalization, women have broken through barriers across the arts, sciences, and business, introducing bold perspectives [01:02:00] that challenge restrictive narratives and significantly enhance our collective insight. Their creativity and intelligence has been a beacon of innovation, redefining what it means to lead and excel in a myriad of fields. As entrepreneurs, they have fueled economic growth and community development, highlighting the strength that lies in diversity. Their achievements are monumental, not only in their communities, but in shaping the course of American history.
As we celebrate American women, let us commit to recognizing their invaluable contributions, advocating for their rights, and ensuring that their voices are heard and celebrated. Read about their stories, write their stories, amplify their voices. Their voices, frequently sidelined in dominant narratives must play a pivotal role in leading future generations.
Josh Hutchinson: Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah Jack: You're welcome.
Josh Hutchinson: And thank you for listening to Witch Hunt.
Sarah Jack: Join us next week.
Josh Hutchinson: Have a great today and a beautiful tomorrow.
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