It Is But an Olde Wytche Gonne:

Prosecution and Execution for Witchcraft in

Exeter, 15581610
MARK STOYLE
University of Southampton
Abstract
Following the passage of legislation making witchcraft a capital crime during the midsixteenth century, magistrates across England found themselves under increasing pressure to investigate the activities of supposed witches. The present article explores how
the Justices of the Peace of one urban community the city of Exeter reacted to those
pressures. The article shows that, in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the
Elizabethan statute of 1563, the Exeter magistrates were still prepared to punish those
who had been accused of witchcraft in the traditional way by simply banishing them
from the city. Attitudes soon became harsher, however, and by 1581, at the very latest,
the first execution of a convicted witch at the city gallows can be shown to have
occurred. At least one further execution was to follow, in 1610, but although these
cases reveal that the hanging of supposed witches in the south-west began at least a
century earlier than was previously thought the evidence suggests that the Exeter JPs
were generally more keen to restrain than to encourage the popular enthusiasm for
witch-hunting.
hist_511

129..151

he city of Exeter possesses the grim distinction of being the last

place in England in which people are known to have been
executed for the crime of witchcraft. In August 1682, three elderly
women from the North Devon town of Bideford Temperance Lloyd,
Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles were arraigned as witches at
the Exeter assizes, condemned and subsequently hanged, almost certainly at the county gallows at Ringswell in the neighbouring parish of

I should like to thank the members of the History seminar at the University of Warwick and in
particular, Bernard Capp, Steve Hindle and Mark Knights for their comments on an earlier version
of this paper. I am also very grateful to George Bernard, Alistair Dougall, Julie Gammon, the editor
of History and the journals anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of
the text. I am especially indebted to Jannine Crocker and John Draisey for the invaluable assistance
which they gave me in deciphering and translating the original documents on which this article is
based.
2011 The Author. History 2011 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

Heavitree.1 In March 1685 another woman, one Alice Molland,

appeared at the Exeter assizes charged with the same crime and was
likewise condemned to death although, in her case, it remains at least
possible that the sentence was not carried out.2 Because they appear
to have been the last individuals to have suffered the capital penalty
which was laid down by the Elizabethan and Jacobean statutes against
witchcraft, these four women have attained a considerable degree of
posthumous fame. Their names have regularly appeared in general
surveys of the history of English witchcraft, while at the local level, too,
their memory continues to endure.3 A stone tablet commemorating the
women was erected at Exeter Castle where their trials were conducted
during the 1990s, for example, while, more recently still, a colourful
mural featuring the three Bideford witches was emblazoned on a wall
lying just beyond the former castle ditch.4 So well known are the cases
of Lloyd, Edwards, Trembles and Molland, indeed, that by fostering
a hazy impression that the key characteristic of witch-persecution in
the south-west was the unusually late date at which it occurred they
may well have caused previous scholars to jump to some erroneous
conclusions.
Writing in 1911, Wallace Notestein one of the pioneering historians
of English witchcraft observed that, before 1660, so far at any rate as
the printed records show, the south-western counties had been but little
troubled by the witch-terror.5 The work of C. LEstrange Ewen might
well have appeared to support this view for, while Ewens formidably
well-researched book Witchcraft and Demonianism first published in

For contemporary accounts of the trial of the Bideford witches, see Anon., A True and Impartial
Relation of the Informations against Three Witches (1682); Anon., The Tryal, Condemnation and
Execution of Three Witches (1682); Anon., Witchcraft Discovered and Punished (1682); and Anon.,
The Life and Conversation of Temperance Floyd, Mary Lloyd and Susanna Edwards (1687) [hereafter
Anon., Life and Conversation]. For the gallows at Ringswell, see Devon Record Office, Exeter
[hereafter DRO], Exeter City Archives [hereafter ECA], Book 51 (John Hookers Book), fo. 352; and
C. Worthy, The History of the Suburbs of Exeter (1892) [hereafter Worthy, Suburbs], pp. 546.
2
F. A. Inderwick, Sidelights on the Stuarts (1888) [hereafter Inderwick, Sidelights], p. 173; and C.
LEstrange Ewen, Witch Hunting and Witch Trials: The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records
of 1373 Assizes held for the Home Circuit, AD 15591736 (1929) [hereafter Ewen, Witch Hunting],
p. 43.
3
For references to the four women tried and condemned at Exeter in previous surveys of English
witchcraft, see, for example, Inderwick, Sidelights, pp. 1723, 179; Ewen, Witch Hunting, p. 43; C.
LEstrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism: A Concise Account Derived from Sworn Depositions
and Confessions obtained in the Courts of England and Wales (1933) [hereafter Ewen, Witchcraft and
Demonianism], pp. 129, 130, 36573 and 444; C. Hole, Witchcraft in Britain (1986), pp. 1645; and
J. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 15501750 (1996) [hereafter Sharpe,
Instruments], pp. 2267. For references to the Bideford witches in local histories, see, for example, S.
Baring-Gould, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1926), pp. 2747.
4
Personal observation, 20 Jan. 2011.
5
W. Notestein, History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington, 1911) [hereafter
Notestein, History], p. 254. The enduring influence of Notesteins judgement is well illustrated by fact
that, fifty years later, another scholar felt able to observe that the West of England . . . was not much
troubled by witches, see E. Rose, A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in the History
of Witchcraft and Diabolism (Toronto, 1962, 1989 edn.), p. 25.
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MARK STOYLE 131

1933 contained an appendix listing many cases of witchcraft which

had been recorded in the region between 1569 and 1707, all but six of
those cases dated from the period after 1650, thus tending implicitly to
reinforce Notesteins conclusion that witch-hunting in the south-west
had primarily been a late seventeenth-century phenomenon.6 This was
certainly the conclusion of R. Trevor Davies, who declared, in 1947, that
the witch-mania during the reign of Elizabeth had been confined almost
entirely to the south-east part of England, and suggested that it was only
after the Civil War that the witch scare had spread to districts that had
hitherto been spared, including many shires of the West which never
before had indictments.7
Janet Thompson author of the most recent account of witchcraft in
the south-west, published in 1993 took much the same view. Indeed,
Thompson went rather further than Notestein and Davies had done,
claiming that the need to hunt witches came much later [in Devon] than
elsewhere, for example, and that the executions which had taken place at
Exeter in the 1680s the very last, as we have seen, which are known to
have occurred in the whole of England were also the very first to have
occurred in Devon.8 The present article demonstrates that these claims
are incorrect. Using new evidence drawn from the records of the Exeter
quarter sessions court, it shows that the women who were condemned
during the 1680s were categorically not the first individuals to have been
executed for the crime of witchcraft at Exeter. On the contrary, at least
two and possibly as many as four other people had been consigned to
the city gallows for allegedly committing the same crime over the preceding 120 years. This article tells the story of these luckless individuals for
the first time and, in the process, sheds new light on the history of
witchcraft in one of early modern Englands great provincial cities. At the
same time, it demonstrates that, by subjecting the records of individual
urban communities to close scrutiny, it is still possible to achieve incremental advances in our knowledge of witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart
England.
I
A great deal of research has been carried out into witch-prosecution in
the cities of early modern Europe over the past four decades. Thanks to
6
Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, pp. 43946. Ewen also included an extract from an original
pamphlet reproducing the examination of the Dorset wizard, John Walsh, at Exeter in 1566 and
a transcript of a set of depositions relating to accusations of witchcraft at Dartmouth in 1601 (ibid.,
pp. 1467 and pp. 1936). We should note that as Ewen himself was careful to observe the
preponderance of late seventeenth-century cases in this appendix simply reflects the fact that the
surviving Gaol Books for the Western Circuit do not commence until the year 1670 (ibid., p. 439).
7
R. Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs: With Special Reference to the Great Rebellion
(1947) [hereafter Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs], pp. 19, 147, 174.
8
J. A. Thompson, Wives, Widows, Witches and Bitches: Women in Seventeenth Century Devon (New
York, 1993) [hereafter Thompson, Wives], pp. 1012 and 125 (quotation).

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

the work of scholars like Wolfgang Behringer, H. C. E. Midelfort, Lyndal

Roper and Alison Rowlands, we now possess a far better understanding
of the multifarious ways in which witch persecutions developed or
failed to develop in the urban communities of Germany, in particular,
between 1500 and 1700.9 Much less has been written about urban witchcraft in England, however, and, in recent years, the most penetrating
contributions in this field have tended to focus on the prosecution of
witches in smaller towns, rather than on patterns of prosecution in the
seven or eight cities which together made up the first division of the
English urban league table.10 As Exeter fell squarely within the latter
category, an examination of the early history of secular prosecutions for
witchcraft in the city seems especially well worth undertaking. Yet before
turning to conduct that examination, it is worth pausing for a moment in
order to consider both the community and the court in which those
prosecutions took place.
Exeter was the regional capital of south-west England and possessed
some 10,000 inhabitants during the 1550s.11 Exeters fortunes had been
built on the profits of the cloth trade; many of the townsfolk worked as
weavers, fullers and dyers. There was great wealth within the city, but
there was also immense poverty especially in the straggling suburbs
which had grown up outside the town walls and to this social divide
was added the religious divide between Catholics and Protestants
which, during the so-called Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, had briefly
threatened to tear the civic community apart.12 All too well aware of
the potential which such divisions had to cause trouble within the city
and thus to threaten their own positions the town governors cracked
down hard on any signs of internal dissent and Tudor Exeter has been
well described by its foremost historian, W. T. MacCaffrey, as an
9

W. Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason
of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 15621684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, CA, 1972); L.
Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004); and A. Rowlands, Witchcraft
Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 15611652 (Manchester, 2003) [hereafter Rowlands, Witchcraft
Narratives]. See also R. Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford, 2007) [hereafter Briggs, Witches of
Lorraine], ch. 10.
10
I am most grateful to Bernard Capp for discussion of this subject. For recent treatments of witch
prosecutions in Manningtree, New Romney and Rye, see M. Gaskill, Witchfinders: A SeventeenthCentury English Tragedy (2006), passim, esp. pp. 15, 27, 3342, 4854; M. Gaskill, The Devil in the
Shape of a Man: Witchcraft, Conflict and Belief in Jacobean England, Historical Research, lxxii
(1999) [hereafter Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man], 14271; and A. Gregory, Witchcraft,
Politics and Good Neighbourhood in Early Seventeenth-Century Rye, Past and Present [hereafter
P&P], cxxx (1991), 3166. For the quotation, see P. Clark and P. Slack, Crisis and Order in English
Towns, 15001700: Essays in Urban History (1972), p. 5.
11
W. G. Hoskins, The Elizabethan Merchants of Exeter, in The Early Modern Town: A Reader, ed.
P. Clark (1976) [hereafter Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants], p. 149.
12
On the events of 1549 in Exeter, see F. Rose-Troup, The Western Rebellion of 1549 (1913), esp. chs.
9, 11, 12, 13 and 18; W. T. MacCaffrey, Exeter, 15401640 (1958, 1978 edn.) [hereafter MacCaffrey,
Exeter], pp. 1920, 1889, 192, 206; J. Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 1549 (1977), especially chs.
5 and 10; and M. Stoyle, Circled with Stone: Exeters City Walls, 14851660 (Exeter, 2003) [hereafter
Stoyle, Circled with Stone], pp. 7880, 1901.
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MARK STOYLE 133

authoritarian society. Exeters local rulers the twenty-four wealthy

men who made up The Chamber or The Council of 24 were ever on
the alert to check the slightest threat to social order, MacCaffrey
observes, and the most careful precautions were taken not only to prevent . . . outbreaks of violence or crime . . . but also to suppress any criticism of the established social, political and religious order.13
In their constant struggle to maintain what they regarded as good
order in Exeter, the senior members of the Chamber made full use of
their power as local magistrates. During the 1530s, Henry VIII had
constituted Exeter a county of it self and had granted the mayor and the
aldermen the right to sit as justices of the peace.14 Thereafter, the JPs for
the county of Exeter had enjoyed the same wide-ranging powers as JPs
elsewhere including the crucial power of gaol delivery; that is to say, the
power to clear . . . a jail of prisoners by bringing them to trial.15 There
was already one major gaol in Exeter in 1537 the High Gaol for the
county of Devon, which stood within the precincts of Exeter Castle and
which therefore came under the jurisdiction of the crown, rather than of
the city authorities.16 (It was here that the Bideford witches were later to
be held during the 1680s.17) Henry VIII had given the citizens the right to
set up a gaol of their own and by 1556 this had become established in the
South Gate.18 Because justices of gaol delivery possessed the power to
pronounce sentence of death on convicted felons, the king had authorized the citizens to erect their own gallows, too, and this structure
colloquially known as the Forches stood at Magdalen Hill Head, in
the suburban parish of St Sidwells.19
Proceedings at the Exeter sessions court followed the standard procedure. First, a group of men were sworn in to serve on the grand inquest,
or grand jury a body whose members were required, not only to take
part in the forthcoming criminal law process, but also to make formal
presentments about minor offences which had been identified in the city

13

MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 72.

Ibid., p. 19; Report on the Records of the City of Exeter, ed. J. H. Wylie and J. Wylie (Historical
Manuscripts Commission, 1916) [hereafter Wylie, Report], p. 5; and R. Izacke, Remarkable Antiquities of the City of Exeter (1724), p. 118 (quotation).
15
MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 19; and Oxford English Dictionary [hereafter OED].
16
Stoyle, Circled with Stone, p. 26.
17
For the imprisonment of Temperance Lloyd in Exeter Goale, see Anon., The Life and Conversation, p. 5.
18
C. G. Henderson, The Development of the South Gate of Exeter and its Role in the City
Defences, Proceedings of the Devon Archaeological Society, lix (2001) [hereafter Henderson, South
Gate], 1038.
19
A Description of the Citie of Exeter by John Vowell, Alias Hoker: Part II, ed. W. J. Harte et al.
(Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1919), p. 359. For the use of the term the Forches in a plan
of c.1590, see Stoyle, Circled with Stone, pl. 5; for the precise location of the city gallows, see
Henderson, South Gate, p. 117 n. 98; and, for a contemporary reference to the gallowes to Madlin
hilhede, see F. Nesbitt (trans.), Exeter Holy Trinity Burials, 15631729 (typescript volume, held in
the West Country Studies Library, Exeter [hereafter WCSL] 19301) [hereafter Nesbitt, Holy
Trinity Burials], p. 45.
14

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

over the preceding months.20 Then, the jurors were asked to determine
which of the bills of indictment that had been drawn up against those
who had been accused of felonies since the last sessions were true bills.
Once it had been established that a trial in any particular case was
necessary, a trial jury was sworn to consider the evidence.21 Finally, all of
those who had been convicted were brought before the justices to be
sentenced (although it seems probable that especially knotty cases were
sometimes referred by the Exeter JPs to the assize judges, who travelled
to the city on circuit twice each year).22 Once the sessions were over, the
clerk of the peace filed the bills away in the roll of the sessions.23 He also
compiled a separate record which reproduced the indictments and noted
the sentences which had been passed. This record known as the calendar of gaol delivery was filed away in a separate roll.24 It is upon the
evidence contained in the Elizabethan and Jacobean sessions rolls and
gaol delivery rolls that the present article is chiefly based.
Historians have long been aware that the records of the Exeter city
sessions court contain material pertaining to the prosecution of witches.
As early as 1877, two local antiquarians published several depositions
relating to cases of witchcraft in Exeter during the 1650s which they had
unearthed in one of the books of examination: a series of volumes
containing testimonies made by witnesses and suspects before the JPs
from 1618 onwards.25 Notestein referred to these published depositions;
indeed, they may well have helped to confirm him in his view that witchpersecution had come relatively late to the south-west.26 Eighty years
later, Thompson returned to the books of examination and to the sessions rolls for the period 165360 which, unlike all of the previous rolls,
had been kept in English and extracted fresh material from them
relating to witchcraft in Exeter after 1618.27 I drew on these same sources
in my own book about Exeter during the Civil War, published in 1996, as
20
For the presentment function of early modern grand juries, see P. G. Lawson, Lawless Juries?
The Composition and Behaviour of Hertfordshire Juries, 15731624, in Twelve Good Men and True:
The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 12001800, ed. J. S. Cockburn and T. A. Green (Princeton,
1988), pp. 1356; and S. K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local
Administration, 164670 (Exeter, 1985), pp. 689.
21
G. Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials: A History of English Witchcraft and its Legal Perspectives, 1542 to 1736 (Chichester, 2000), pp. 350, 382, 384.
22
From the 1650s onwards, the assize judges are known to have held a special sitting for the county
of Exeter at the Guildhall, either immediately before or immediately after the gaol delivery for the
county of Devon held at Exeter Castle, see J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 15581714
(Cambridge, 1972), pp. 48, 137. It seems probable that this had been the usual practice for many
years before, see DRO, Exeter Receivers Book, 15801, fo. 3r.
23
ECA, Book 51, fos. 176, 176r.
24
See DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 20 (Rolls of the Sessions of the Peace and Gaol Delivery,
344 Elizabeth); and DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 21 (Rolls of the Sessions of the Peace and Gaol
Delivery, 115 James I).
25
W. Cotton and H. Woollcombe, Gleanings from the Municipal and Cathedral Records Relative to
the City of Exeter (Exeter, 1877), pp. 14952. See also DRO, ECA, Exeter Quarter Sessions Minutes
Books, 61 (161821); 62 (162130); 63 (163042) and 64 (164260).
26
Notestein, History, pp. 21617.
27
Thompson, Wives, ch. 4 and app. A.

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MARK STOYLE 135

did James Sharpe in his classic survey of witchcraft in England which

appeared in the same year.28 Yet despite this respectable record of activity
on the post-1618 sessions records, no-one has so far gone back to the
documents which were compiled before that date to those which were
compiled chiefly in Latin, in other words to investigate what they can
tell us about the early history of secular witchcraft trials in Exeter. It is
to this task and to the wider elucidation of the history of witchprosecution in Exeter between the reign of Queen Mary and that of James
I that the present article will now turn.
II
Witch-belief in Exeter already possessed a venerable ancestry by the time
that the fourth Tudor monarch came to the throne in 1553, for a case of
witchcraft allegedly being practised in the city had been attested as early
as 1302.29 Such very early references aside, the records of the consistory
court show that witch-belief was flourishing in the countryside around
Exeter during the mid-sixteenth century.30 This being the case, one might
well have expected the passage of the first statute against witchcraft, in
1542, to have resulted in an upsurge of prosecutions of witches in the
local secular courts, but in the West Country as across the kingdom
as a whole there is no sign of any such upsurge having taken place
during the five years before the statute was repealed in 1547.31 Admittedly, there is one previously unnoted reference to witches being executed
near Exeter during the Henrician period. In his book Psonthonphanchia,
first published in 1665, the mystical writer John Heydon claimed that
At Heavy-Tree in the Reign of King Henry the 8 there was two
Witches . . . executed.32 If we were to accept Heydons claim, we would
have to accept that Devon was one of the first counties in which people
can be shown to have been executed for witchcraft, as well as being the
last. Yet Heydon had clearly modelled his account of a supposed execution at Heavitree during Henry VIIIs reign on a precisely similar account
of an execution at Cambridge under Elizabeth which had been published
28

M. Stoyle, From Deliverance to Destruction: Rebellion and Civil War in an English City (Exeter,
1996) [hereafter Stoyle, Deliverance], p. 16; and Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 68, 158 and 223.
T. Wright, The Municipal Archives of Exeter, The Journal of the British Archaeological Association, xviii (1862), 30617, at p. 307.
30
See, for example, V.C., Odd Ways in Olden Days Down West: Or Tales of the Reformation in
Devon and Cornwall (Birmingham, 1892), pp. xixii and p. 2; T. Gray and J. Draisey, Witchcraft in
the Diocese of Exeter: Part II, Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries [hereafter DCNQ], xxxvi/8
(1990), 2817; and Gray and Draisey, Witchcraft in the Diocese of Exeter: Part III, DCNQ, xxxvi/9
(1991), 30514.
31
Keith Thomas notes that virtually nothing is known about prosecutions for witchcraft in
England between 1542 and 1547, see Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1991 edition) [hereafter Thomas, Religion], p. 535.
Barbara Rosen adds that the Henrician act appears to have been repealed without having been put
in action more than once: see Witchcraft in England, 15581618 (Amherst, 1991 edn.), p. 22.
32
J. Heydon, Elhavarevna . . . Whereunto is Added Psonthonphanchia (1665), p. 86.
29

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

just ten years before.33 Heydons tale may be dismissed as a red-herring,

then but fortunately the civic records of Exeter provide us with a much
more reliable impression of how local people who were suspected of
witchcraft were being treated by the secular authorities during the midTudor period.
The earliest of the surviving sessions rolls for Exeter dates to 15578; this
document contains no reference to prosecutions for witchcraft.34 During
that very same year, however, an allusion to an alleged witch was made in a
manuscript volume listing the presentments which had been made by the
grand inquest at the sessions court, a volume which has gone almost entirely
unnoticed by previous historians.35 On 22 April 1558 the grand jurors
informed the magistrates that a certain Thomas Weare was in the habit of
dayly playenge at tables for mony.36 Nor was Weares fondness for gambling his only alleged failing, for later that day the jurors presented him
again, this time observing that we accuse Thomas Weare for a charmer & a
wytchecrafte user.37 There is no evidence of how the JPs reacted to these
charges, but, whatever punishment they decided to inflict upon Weare, it
appears to have had little effect, for four years later Thomas Weare
almost certainly the same man who had been presented to the magistrates in
1558 came to their attention once again. Contained within one of the Act
Books of the Chamber is a collection of miscellaneous notes relating to the
activities of the sessions court between 1559 and 1569.38 These reveal that, on
21 April 1562, the justices were informed that Weare had been a floysterer
and an idle person, leavinge his wiffe & accompanying himselfe with
. . . harlottes. Accordingly, he was ordered to behave better, or to be
whipped as a vagrant & vagabond person.39 Later that same day, Weare
appears to have promised the mayor that he would leave the city for good.
He clearly reneged on this promise, however, for just seven months later, it
was recorded in the same collection of notes that:
[on this] . . . day Thomas Weare was apprehended & taken as a vagrant
person, And forasmuch as he heretofore, upon the xxi of Aprill 1562 was
for the lyke offense brought before Mr William Hurst Maior and then by
his free wyll & consent adjudged to be whipped at the cartes tayle when
so ever he sholde be agayne taken within this Citie: and now contrarye to
this sayde order is here taken & apprehended, That therefore accordinge to
the foresaide order he shall receve the said punishment as also depart
33

See H. More, An Antidote Against Atheism (1655), p. 167.

DRO, Exeter Quarter Sessions Rolls [hereafter EQSR], 45 Philip and Mary (15578).
35
DRO, ECA, Book 100. The volume is referred to, very briefly, in Wylie, Report, p. 378. I made
extensive use of this source in my monograph Circled with Stone, published in 2003.
36
ECA, Book 100, fo. 21.
37
Ibid., fo. 22. The reference to Weare as a charmer may suggest that he was seen as a white witch,
rather than as a black one. I owe this point to Bernard Capp.
38
DRO, Exeter Chamber Act Book [hereafter ECAB], 1/4 (15827), fos. 1390. For previous
discussions of this material, see W. J. Harte, Illustrations of Municipal History from the Act Book
of the Chamber of the City of Exeter, 155988, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, xliv
(1912) [hereafter Harte, Illustrations], 20630, esp. pp. 2206; and MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 92100.
39
ECA, Book 100, fo. 173.
34

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MARK STOYLE 137

forthwith . . . & no more [to] returne unto this Citie upon the payne to be
whipped agayne.40

The fact that Weare the very first individual who is known to have been
accused of witchcraft in the sessions court was also regarded as an idle
and sexually immoral person is significant, and suggests that, in early
modern Exeter, as in so many other places, those who had already built
up a reputation for moral deviance or other forms of inappropriate
. . . behaviour and had thus exhausted their social credit among their
neighbours were especially likely to find themselves denounced as
witches.41 The evidence relating to the second supposed witch whose
name has been traced among the court records points very much the same
way. After having noted how a couple of other cases had been dealt with
by the justices on 8 October 1561, the compiler of the sessions notes then
turned to record that:
Also the same daye, Frauncys Dyrym who, for her unquiet lyfe emonge her
neighbores & for her suspected wytchcraft heretofore used, hast byn eftsones rebuked & punyshed as also exyled out of this Citie, and yet hathe
returned & doth remayn within this Citie lyving yn her former unquyet lyffe,
it is agreed by the Justices . . . that she . . . shall from hensforth depart out
of this Citie . . . and that from thensforth she not returne any more.42

It is tempting to suggest that the Frauncys Dyrym who was ordered to

leave Exeter in 1561 may be identifiable both with the woman namyd
Frauncys who had been presented by the grand jurors in 1556 for a
skold . . . [who] kepeth evell company yn her howse to the disquyetyng
of all the neyghbours and with the woman dwellyng by Northgate
callyd Fraunces who had been similarly presented by them in 1557 as
a comon skoll[d]e.43 During the early modern period, the term scold
was frequently applied to those generally women who used unseemly
and quarrelsome language in public.44 As scholars have long been aware,
many contemporaries appear to have made an explicit connection
between women who rebelled against social and gender norms by hurling
everyday invective against their neighbours and those who did so
by allegedly hurling occult imprecations against them.45 Indeed, the
40

Ibid., fo. 238. For Hurst, see Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, p. 148.
B. P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Harlow, 2006) [hereafter Levack, WitchHunt], pp. 1601.
42
ECA, Book 100, fo. 137. This case was noted by Harte in 1912 see Illustrations, pp. 2212.
43
ECA, Book 100, fos. 10, 16.
44
OED; and, on scolding in general, see D. Underdown, The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern
England, ed. A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1987) [hereafter Underdown, Taming], pp.
11636.
45
See, for example, Thomas, Religion, p. 632; C. Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt in
Scotland (1981) [hereafter Larner, Enemies of God], pp. 978, 125; Underdown, Taming, p. 120;
Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 1534; B. Capp, Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early
Modern England, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. P. Griffiths et al.
(1996), pp. 11745, at 120; and Levack, Witch-Hunt, pp. 1601.
41

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

Elizabethan witch-sceptic Reginald Scot went so far as to observe that, in

the popular mind, the cheefe fault of most supposed witches is that they
are scolds.46 The JPs order against Dyrym did not specifically describe
her as a scold, but the fact that she was taxed with her unquiet lyfe
emonge her neighbores makes it plain that even if she was not the
woman who had previously been presented for scolding her behaviour
could well have been deemed to fall under that same heading. Here again,
then, we see the propensity of Exeter people in the 1560s to associate
certain kinds of inappropriate behaviour with witchcraft and the
opinion of the local justices that banishment represented a suitable punishment for both types of offence.
The order relating to Dyrym hints that in Exeter as, indeed, across
Europe as a whole there may have been a rising vigilance concerning
witchcraft at this time and during the following year a local merchant
named Thomas Marshall was informed against on several occasions in
connection with attacks on alleged witches.47 Marshall who was a
resident of the wealthy intramural parish of St Martins first came to the
attention of the magistrates on 5 May 1562, when he was accused of
having launched a verbal assault on Old Mastris Tothill: almost certainly his neighbour Elizabeth Tothill, who may herself have been a
relative of the city recorder Geoffrey Tothill.48 According to the courts
informant, Marshall had openly abused Tothill in the street, sklaunderously revyl[ing] her and callinge her bawde, queane [i.e. prostitute],
wytche & whore. Not content with this, he had then gone on to abuse
another female neighbour, Grace Walter, using the lyke sklaunderouse
wordes . . . [and] calling her by the same termes.49 Probably because
Marshall had launched this foul-mouthed tirade against two women of
considerable social status, the JPs ordered that he should not only be
bound over to keep the peace but that he should also remain in prison for
forty days.50 The fact that Marshall had abused one of the city stewards
who had come to the womens defence callinge him knave, with other
opprobryose termes can only have exacerbated the merchants offence
and tends to confirm that he was a truculent character.51 Within days of
Marshall having been committed to jail, moreover, a new witness

46

R. Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), p. 34.

W. Behringer, Witches and Witch Hunts: A Global History (Cambridge, 2004), p. 85; and ECAB,
1/4, fo. 176.
48
Marshall appears to have been a former apprentice of William Hurst, mayor of Exeter in 15612
and one of the most influential men in the city see M. M. Rowe and A. M. Jackson (eds.), Exeter
Freemen, 12661967 (Exeter, 1973), p. 75; and Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, pp. 1489, 157.
For Elizabeth Tothill, see M. M. Rowe (ed.), Tudor Exeter: Tax Assessments, 14891595 (Torquay,
1977), pp. 57, 62. For Geoffrey Tothill, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 224, 226; and Wylie, Records,
pp. 29, 513, 72 and 315.
49
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. MacCaffrey noted Marshalls attack on the two women, but missed its wider
significance (see MacCaffrey, Exeter, p. 93).
50
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. See also EQSR, 4 Elizabeth 1, recognizance dated 13 May.
51
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 176. See also ECA, Book 100, fo. 74.
47

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MARK STOYLE 139

appeared to testify to a physical assault which he had allegedly carried

out on another woman.
On 8 May Anne Borough a maidservant in her early twenties
informed the JPs that, about three months ago, her master, Thomas
Marshall, had carried out a violent physical assault upon a woman
named Mawde, dwelling upon the hollowe waye without the Southgate
that is to say, in that part of the parish of Holy Trinity which lies
beyond the city walls.52 Marshall had slipped out of his own house one
night, Anne deposed, and had then gone to Mawdes house and given her
a savage beating. When the merchant had later heard the tolling of the
passing bell within the city, moreover, and had been informed incorrectly that the bell was ringing for the woman whom he had attacked,
he had callously replied it is no matter, it is but an olde wytche gonne.53
Sadly, we do not know how the justices responded to Annes testimony.
The maidservants story is fascinating in itself, however, because it hints
that Marshall may have believed that he had been bewitched by Mawde
and that he had therefore attempted to break the force of her spells by
drawing blood from her. Certainly, this was an expedient which was to be
commonly resorted to by those who believed themselves to have been
overlooked during the following centuries.54 If Marshall really had been
convinced that he was in the grip of a malign enchantment, then his
subsequent outbursts against Tothill and Walter become more readily
understandable, and suggest that even after his assault on Mawde the
merchant had continued to look askance at other local women whom he
suspected might have been behind his personal troubles whatever those
troubles may have been.55 It is possible that Marshall was simply a violent
misogynist, of course, but even if we were to assume that this was the
case, the fact that he chose to term all three of his female victims witches
hints that he was genuinely fearful of enchantresses.
III
Who was the woman whom Marshall had assaulted? The quarter sessions
rolls supply us with the probable answer, for, on 15 July 1563, a certain
Matilda Parke, the wife of Roger Parke of Exeter, was bound over to
keep the peace against Thomas Marshalls wife, Eleanor, until the next
sessions, while Marshall and his wife were similarly bound over to keep

52
For a contemporary depiction of Holloway present-day Holloway Street see Stoyle, Circled
with Stone, pl. 4.
53
ECAB, 1/4, fos. 1812.
54
See G. L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York 1929, 1956 edn.), pp. 47, 169,
236; Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs, pp. 148, 158, 190, 199; Sharpe, Instruments,
15960; and T. Waters, Belief in Witchcraft in Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, circa 18601900,
Midland History, xxxiv (2009), 98116, at p. 101.
55
Annes observation that, on the day of the attack, her master was sicke makes it conceivable that
Marshall was suffering from long-term health problems: see ECAB, 1/4, fo. 181.

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

the peace against Matilda.56 The first names Matilda and Maud were
used interchangeably at this time, and, as we shall see, Matilda Parke
was later to be referred to as Mawde Parke in another document. It
seems almost certain that Matilda or Mawde Parke was the woman
whom Marshall had attacked in 1563, then, and that hostilities between
the two had continued until well into the following year, by which time
Marshalls wife had also been dragged into the controversy. Quite what
happened next we do not know, but the evidence suggests that Marshalls
violent and sustained pursuit of Matilda Parke eventually succeeded in
persuading many other local people that she was, indeed, a witch. On 4
October 1565, more than three years after Anne Borough had provided
her dramatic testimony to the justices, John Wolcott, the mayor of
Exeter, and his fellow magistrates met at the general sessions.57 Little
evidence survives about the cases which they heard that day, but in the
calendar which was drawn up after proceedings had come to an end
reference was made to Matilda Parke, the wife of Roger Parke of
Exeter, who had recently been arrested on suspicion of having employed
magical arts.58
Following her apprehension in 1565, Matilda Parke found herself in a
far more precarious position than Weare and Dyrym had done just a few
years before. Although they had also been accused of witchcraft, they
had been denounced at a time when as a result of the repeal of the act
of 33 Henry VIII there had been no statute law in force against alleged
witches. As a result, local magistrates had been free to hand out relatively moderate punishments to those who stood accused of dabbling in
the black arts. During the fifth year of Queen Elizabeths reign, however,
parliament had passed a new act against witchcraft, one which had
specified that, in future, those convicted of causing death by diabolic art
should suffer the capital penalty, while those convicted of causing lesser
injuries by the same means should suffer a years imprisonment for the
first offence and death for the second.59 As far as we know, Parke was the
first person to be formally denounced to the Exeter JPs as a witch
following the passage of the 1563 statute and was thus the first person
to confront the possibility of being executed at the Forches for the same
offence. Nothing specific is know about the charges which were brought
against Parke in October 1565, but she was clearly tried and found
guilty, because immediately after the entry relating to her in the calendar
appear the contracted annotations Indict[a,] po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis,] Et
h[ab]et iudic[ium] iux[t]a formam statut[i,] Et rem[aneat] in p[ri]sona
quousq[ue].60 These contractions may be translated as: she is indicted;
56
EQSR, 5 Elizabeth I, recognizances of 15 July. I am most grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for her
assistance in the interpretation of these two documents.
57
For Wolcott, see Hoskins, Elizabethan Merchants, p. 163.
58
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 2.
59
Statutes of the Realm (11 vols., 181021), iv, pt. 1, p. 446.
60
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 2.

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MARK STOYLE 141

she pleads not guilty; she is found guilty; and she has judgment according to the form of the statute; and let her remain in prison until [delivered
by due course of law].61
The appearance of the phrase judgment according to the . . . statute
on an indictment is usually taken to indicate a hanging, but it is clear that
if the magistrates did initially sentence Parke to death then they
quickly granted her a reprieve.62 Five days later, it was recorded that
order was taken with Mawde Parke [by John Wolcott and one of his
fellow-justices] that she shall departe hensforthe out of this Citie within
these iii wekes at the furthest & from thensforth she never to returne . . . to which order she hath geven her full consent.63 These words
make it clear that, rather than consigning Parke to the gallows or, at the
very least, imprisoning her for a year as the new statute entitled them to
do the Exeter JPs had eventually decided to deal with this convicted
witch in exactly the same way that they had dealt with several suspected
witches in the past, by simply banishing her from the city. All things
considered, Parke may be said to have got off remarkably lightly, but
like Thomas Weare before her she proved unable to keep her promise
to stay away from Exeter for good. Indeed, it is possible that she never
left the city at all, for in December 1565, so it was later alleged, Parke
bewitched a woman in Holy Trinity parish. In consequence, she was
re-arrested and committed to gaol. Around the same time, a second
woman one Alice Meade was also arrested on suspicion of arte
magice and likewise committed to South Gate.64
On 24 April 1566 Wolcott and the other justices met at the Guildhall
to preside over the Easter sessions.65 It is clear that, earlier that same day,
the grand jurors had declared two bills accusing Parke and Meade of
witchcraft to be true ones, for although the original bills do not survive
they are reproduced in the calendar as indictments.66 The indictment
relating to Parke charged her with having employed Wytchecraftes,
Inchauntmentes, Charmes and Sorceries in Holy Trinity parish on 21
December 1565 in order to bewitch the person of a certain Joanna
Clarke. As a result, it was claimed, Clarke had subsequently suffered
excruciating pains in both her arms and her legs. The indictment relating
to Meade a widow from Exmouth, a few miles to the south of the city
charged her with having employed the same dark arts on 21 February
1566 in order to bewitch the person of one John Dier of Exeter. As a
result of Meades enchantments, it was alleged, Dier had languished for
61
For discussion of the annotations and endorsements which appear on contemporary legal documents, see Ewen, Witch Hunting, pp. 3235 and 9297; and M. Gibson (ed.), Witchcraft and Society
in England and America, 15501750 (2003), p. 17. I am very grateful indeed to John Draisey for his
expert assistance in deciphering the marginal notes in the Exeter gaol delivery roll.
62
Ewen, Witch-Hunting, p. 95.
63
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 283.
64
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.
65
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.
66
There are no surviving sessions rolls for 8 Elizabeth I (15656).

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

a month and had eventually died on 22 March.67 These were grave

accusations, of course, and meant that, if found guilty, both Parke and
Meade would face sentence of death in accordance with the statute.
Whether or not the two women were held to be partners in crime is
unclear. Certainly, the indictment relating to Parke appears immediately
above the indictment relating to Meade, and it is hard to believe that the
appearance of two alleged witches at the same sessions was entirely
coincidental. Whatever the case, we may be sure that both women were
found guilty, for their indictments were subsequently annotated po[nit]
se[,] cul[pabilis].68
Parke and Meade were now in imminent peril of the noose, but it
would appear that the JPs hesitated before proceeding to pass sentence,
because above the two womens names in the calendar appear not only
the words indict[a,] po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis] but also the further annotations rem[aneat] de iudic[io] q[uia] iustic[iarius] se advisar[e] vult usq[ue]
prox[imam] gaol[e] delib[er]at[ionem].69 These additional endorsements
show that, although both women had been indicted and convicted, it had
eventually been decided to return them to prison because the justice
wants to seek advice until the next gaol delivery. The hesitancy which the
magistrates exhibited on this occasion makes it tempting to suggest that
no-one had been executed in Exeter for witchcraft before and that the
justices were therefore especially anxious to make sure that they were
following the proper procedures. Alternatively, of course, it is possible
that new witnesses might have emerged, or even that some influential
figure(s) might have intervened on the suspects behalf. Sadly, the
denouement to the story may never be known. No calendar survives for
the next gaol delivery, the quarter sessions rolls for 15656 are lost, and
the rolls for 15667 are extremely uninformative. It seems probable that
Parke and Meade were hanged, then but at the same time it is perfectly
possible that, like so many other individuals who were convicted of
felony in Elizabethan England, either one or both of them eventually
managed to escape with their lives.70
IV
Matters are altogether more clear-cut in the case of the next person who
is known to have been accused of witchcraft in the Exeter sessions court
a woman named Thomasine Short, who was brought to trial in 1581.
It seems probable that Shorte like Weare and Dyrym before her had
long possessed a reputation as an unruly person, for some twenty years
before, in 1562, a certain Thomasin Shorte had been one of a group of
67

Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 3.

Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
On this subject generally, see J. B. Samaha, Hanging for Felony: The Rule of Law in Elizabethan
Colchester, Historical Journal, xxi (1978) [hereafter Samaha, Hanging for Felony], pp. 76382.
68

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MARK STOYLE 143

four women whom the justices had ordered to be carried to North Exe
a mill-stream which branched off from the River Exe, on the western
side of the city and there cast into the water, to be towed at the
sturnne of a bote through the whole Exe befor the weare for . . . [their]
skoldinge.71 The choice of this particular spot for the womens punishment was almost certainly significant, because it was at North Exe that
the citys communal washing-place known as Launders Platt
stood.72 The decision to punish the scolds in full view of the place
where the women of Exeter regularly gathered to launder clothes was
surely calculated to speak to a specifically female audience, and to drive
home the message that the city authorities were determined to stamp
down hard on the peculiarly female offence of scolding. As we have
seen, those who were regarded as scolds appear to have been peculiarly
susceptible to accusations of witchcraft during the early modern period
and it seems very probable that if the woman who was towed across
the Exe in 1562 was, indeed, the same woman who was later to be
accused of sorcery in 1581 Shortes long-standing reputation as a
scold had helped to foster the suspicion that she was also a witch. We
should note, too, that, in 1561, one Thomasyn Shorte, dwelling
without the East Gate, had been accused of harbouring a girl who had
recently been banished from the city for sexual misdemeanours, while,
ten years later, a certain Thomasina Shorte of St Sidwells had been
bailed for an unspecified felony.73 Again, these references tend to suggest
that the woman charged with witchcraft in 1581 had long been familiar
to the Exeter magistrates.
Be this as it may, the trigger for Shortes ultimate downfall appears to
have occurred on 18 September 1580. Exactly what happened on that day
we will never know, but the phrasing of the indictments against her
makes it plausible to assume that Shorte had issued some kind of dark
threat against the family of one Richard Hewe, a weaver from the suburb
of Exe Island. Over the next four months, Hewes daughter, Maria, his
son, Richard, and his wife, Dionisia, all died one by one. Soon after
Dionisias death, on 20 March 1581, Shorte was accused of murdering
Hewes family through diabolic art and was committed to prison by order
of the mayor.74 Within a fortnight, Shorte found herself facing trial.75
Once the proceedings had begun, three bills of indictment were presented
71
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 187. For North Exe, see DRO, Exeter Deeds, D. 220. The weir referred to was
probably Callabere Weare, which spanned the River Exe just below the point where the mill stream
branched off from the river. Scolding women in early modern London were similarly punished by
being tied behind a boat and dragged across the River Thames, see B. Capp, When Gossips Meet:
Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), p. 282.
72
For the location of Launders Platt, see typescript transcripts of original Exeter deeds, by S. Rees
(n.d.), held by Exeter Archaeology, Exeter, file 1, no. 611; and DRO, Exeter Receivers Roll, 20-1
Elizabeth I (rents in St Pauls).
73
ECAB, 1/4, fo. 149; DRO, ECA, Miscellaneous Roll 19 (Miscellaneous recognizances, temp.
Elizabeth I and James I), recognizance dated 10 Sept. 1571.
74
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.
75
Ibid., m. 16.

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

against Shorte now described as Thomasina Shorte . . . of Exeter

. . . the wife of Robert Shorte which accused her of murdering Hewes
wife, son and daughter. The grand jurors decided that these were all true
bills.76 A petty jury was therefore sworn and Shortes trial began. The fact
that no fewer than twelve witnesses were summoned suggests that the
trial went on for some time, and in the end the petty jury clearly found the
evidence against Shorte compelling, for the bills relating to her alleged
murder of Hewes son and his wife are both annotated po[nit] se[,]
cul[pabilis].77 Added to these annotations in another hand on both bills,
however, are the words reprehensa sine judicio, that is to say, reprisoned without judgment.78 Clearly, in Shortes case, just as in the cases of
Parke and Meade in 1566, the justices were somewhat hesitant about
pronouncing sentence of death upon a suspected witch.
Yet on this occasion we may be sure that for whatever reason the
magistrates scruples were swiftly overcome, for, at the end of the annotations scrawled on the bill relating to Shortes alleged murder of Dionisia Hewe, there appear the five terse words iudic[ium] xi April; ide[o]
suspend: that is to say, Judgment was given on 11 April, therefore she is
to be hanged. The same grim message is conveyed by a series of annotations which appear above Shortes name in the calendar for the sessions
held on 11 May, which read cul[pabilis,] catt[alla] null[a,] suspendet[ur]:
in other words [she] was found guilty; [she] possesses no goods; [she] will
be hanged.79 Finally, we should note that, in the parish register of St
Sidwells, there appears the following ominous entry: the ixth daie of
Maie [1581] was buriede Tamson Sharte: suspensus.80 These words make
it impossible to doubt that soon after sentence had been passed against
her Thomasine Shorte was indeed hanged at Exeter for witchcraft, the
very first person who can be definitely shown to have suffered this fate in
the whole of south-west England. The fact that, after her execution,
Shortes body was interred in the churchyard of St Sidwells combined
with the reference of 1571 to Thomasina Shorte of St Sidwells noted
above suggests that the woman executed in 1581 was an inhabitant of
this sprawling suburban parish. Nor was Shorte the last Exeter witch to
possess close links with St Sidwells.
V
On 23 March 1581, just two months before Shorte was executed, the
baptism was recorded at St Sidwells of Agnes, the daughter of William
76

For these three bills, see EQSR, 23 Elizabeth 1 (15801).

EQSR, 23 Elizabeth I, bills relating to the alleged murders of Richard and Dionisia Hewe.
78
Ibid. The same phrase appears above Shortes name in the calendar of gaol delivery for Easter
1581, see Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.
79
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 16r.
80
DRO, 3429A/PR/1/1 (Exeter St Sidwells, Parish Register, 15691733), unpaginated. Careful
scrutiny of the register suggests that the ix which appears in the text is a slip for xx, and that Shorte
was, in fact, buried on 20 May. I owe this point to John Draisey.
77

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MARK STOYLE 145

Brice. The baby girl died within the year, but William and his (unnamed)
wife clearly had at least one further daughter, for on 1 May 1587 the
baptism was again recorded of Agnes, the daughter of William Brice.81
These apparently unremarkable facts are mentioned here because, a
decade later, rumours began to circulate that Joanna Brice, the wife of
William Brice of St Sidwells, labourer, was a witch. Obviously there, is no
way of knowing for certain that the William Brice mentioned in the
register was Joanna Brices husband, but it seems likely that this was the
case and thus that, when suspicion first began to attach itself to her,
during the mid-1590s, Joanna had already borne several children. As far
as Brices history may be traced from the accusations which were subsequently levelled against her, she had first aroused the suspicion of her
neighbours in 1596. In July that year, it was later alleged, Brice had
bewitched Juliana, the wife of William Gosse, of St Sidwells, weaver. In
consequence, Juliana had fallen most perilously . . . ill and had languished for nearly a year until, in May 1597, she had died. Two years
later, it was claimed, Brice had similarly brought about the death of
William, the son of Nicholas Aulsoppe, of St Sidwells. In May 1600,
finally, Brice was said to have bewitched Margery, the daughter of John
Lippincott, of St Sidwells, with the result that she, too, died soon afterwards.82 What happened in the immediate aftermath of Margerys death
remains unclear, but we may presume that the girls grieving relatives
eventually decided to report Joanna Brice to the authorities, for in early
1602 Brice was committed to South Gate by order of the mayor, Thomas
Walker.83
Walker was present at the Easter sessions, which were held on 12 April
1602.84 On that day, three bills were presented to the grand inquest which
formally accused Brice of having murdered Gosse, Aulsoppe and Lippincott through diabolic art. The prosecutors in the three cases were
William Gosse, Nicholas Aulsoppe and John Lippincote together with
a certain John Lennard, whose relationship to the alleged victims remains
unclear.85 The charges levelled against Brice were very similar to those
which had been levelled against Thomasine Shorte twenty-one years
before, and in the case of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the grand
jurors were clearly convinced that they warranted investigation. In the
case of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the matter proceeded to trial.
And in the case of Brice, just as in the case of Shorte, the petty jury
81
C. A. T. Fursdon (trans.), Exeter St Sidwells Parish Register, Volume 4, Burials, 15691772,
(n.d., WCSL) [hereafter Fursdon, St Sidwells Parish Register], unpaginated.
82
EQSR, 44 Elizabeth I (16012). The bills relating to Joanna Brices alleged crimes are reproduced
in full in M. Stoyle, Two New Seventeenth-Century Witch Cases from Exeter, DCNQ, xl/6 (2009)
[hereafter Stoyle, Witch Cases], pp. 1636.
83
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 24r.
84
Ibid., m. 24.
85
It is possible that Lennard had helped to orchestrate Brices prosecution, in the same way that
other men of some status in their communities are known to have orchestrated similar cases
elsewhere, see C. Holmes, Women: Witnesses and Witches, P&P, cil (1993), pp. 537 and 76
(quotation).

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

returned a guilty verdict on each count. We may be sure of this, for on all
three of the original bills relating to Brice, there appears the annotation
po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis], together with the terse addition Susp
meaning either [she was] hanged or [she is] to be hanged. In a previous
note, I suggested that the fact that the bills had all been marked with this
particular annotation made it seem likely that Joanna Brice had, indeed,
been executed.86 More recently, however, the discovery of fresh material
relating to the case in the gaol delivery rolls has caused me to reverse that
judgement. For while it is evident that the annotation po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis,] . . . suspend was initially written above Brices name in the
calendar for Easter 1602, the last four words were subsequently scratched
out and, in a different hand, the words non cul[pabilis] that is to say,
not guilty were firmly inserted in their place.87 This evidence of a
last-minute change of heart by the justices together with the fact that, as
I remarked in my note, no definite reference to . . . [Brices] execution
. . . has yet been found makes it almost certain that she managed to
escape the gallows.88 But just what it was that had eventually persuaded
the JPs to show clemency in Brices case, when they had shown none in
Shortes, we will probably never know.
Certainly it would be wrong to suggest that a climate of scepticism was
growing up in the city, for most Exeter people clearly remained overwhelmingly convinced of the reality of witchcraft throughout the period
under discussion and perhaps the most remarkable witch-case to occur in
Exeter between 1558 and 1610 that of Richard Wilkyns, of Holy Trinity
was still to come. Nothing is known for certain of Wilkyns before he is
first recorded to have fallen under suspicion in 1599, but it is possible that
he had once lived in Wynards almshouse, a charitable foundation which
lay just beyond the South Gate.89 Wilkyns first seems to have come to the
attention of the magistrates in March 1600, when he was formally
charged at the sessions with having bewitched to death a woman named
Alice Pottell during the previous year.90 The trial jury may well have
decided that Wilkyns was innocent; certainly no further proceedings
against him are known to have been taken on this occasion. Nevertheless,
it is clear that Wilkynss neighbours continued to regard him with intense
fear and suspicion and to attribute all sorts of misfortunes to his
supposed dark powers. It was later alleged that, in 1606, Wilkyns had
bewitched Alice, the wife of Robert Hurle, carpenter, in Holy Trinity
parish, as a result of which she had eventually died. Over the following
three years, he was said to have killed ten pigs belonging to Elizabeth
86

Stoyle, Witch Cases, p. 163.

Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 24r.
88
Stoyle, Witch Cases, p. 163. No subsequent references to Joanna Brice have yet been found, but
we may note that William Brice, possibly her husband, was buried in St Sidwells on 18 April 1610.
See 3429A/PR/1/1.
89
See Nesbitt, Holy Trinity Burials, p. 50, where the burial is recorded, in August 1598, of Wilkins,
William, son of Richard, out of the Wynnards.
90
Miscellaneous Roll 20, m. 22v.
87

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MARK STOYLE 147

Pearce of St Sidwells, a horse belonging to Robert Upton of Holy Trinity

and a cow belonging to Nicholas Stretchley of Holy Trinity through
magical art. Still worse, he was believed to have bewitched Agnes, the
wife of Thomas Luxton of St Sidwells, labourer; Agatha, the wife of
Richard Searle of St Sidwells, labourer; and William Palmer, of Holy
Trinity, blacksmith, so that they all became desperately ill. The final
straw appears to have come in June 1610, when Richard Seward of St
Mary Arches, labourer, died, after having allegedly been bewitched by
Wilkyns a month before.91 Soon afterwards, Wilkyns was committed to
gaol by order of the mayor.92
At the next sessions, which took place on 9 July 1610, the grand jury
pronounced all eight of the bills of indictment which had been drawn up
against Wilkyns to be true ones. The petty jurors who heard from
fourteen witnesses during the course of Wilkynss trial, including several
of his alleged victims were clearly convinced that he was, indeed, a
witch, and recorded a guilty verdict on all of the charges except that
which related to Pearces pigs.93 Confronted with this overwhelming mass
of evidence, the magistrates clearly felt no compunction about passing
sentence of death on Wilkyns straight away. In the calendar, the grim
annotation po[nit] se[,] cul[pabilis,] . . . suspend appears firmly above
the labourers name and it is perhaps indicative of the horror with
which Wilkynss supposed crimes were regarded that his execution took
place just three days later. On 12 July 1610 Richard Wilkyns was conveyed by the sheriffs officers from South Gate prison to the city gallows
at the Magdalen. Sentence was duly carried out and soon afterwards the
following entry was made in the parish register of St Sidwells: the xiith
daie of Julie was buried Richard Wilkines, of this parish and executed at
ye Maudlins for wichcrafte.94 The fact that Wilkyns was buried in the
churchyard of St Sidwells, rather than in that of Holy Trinity and that
he was described in the register as an inhabitant of the former parish is
something of a puzzle. It may well be that, while the indictments which
had been drawn up against Wilkyns had assigned him to the parish in
which he had been living at the time of his supposed crimes, the decision
had eventually been taken to bury him in the parish where he had been
born. Whatever the case, it is a poignant fact that Wilkynss body should
eventually have been laid to rest in the very same churchyard in which his
fellow witch, Thomasine Shorte, had been buried some thirty years
before.

91

The later charges against Wilkyns are reproduced in full in Stoyle, Witch Cases, pp. 16673.
Miscellaneous Roll 21, m. 12r.
Stoyle, Witch Cases, pp. 16673.
94
3429 A/PR/1/1. The entry relating to Wilkyns was noted by Charles Worthy as early as 1892, but
he does not appear to have recognized its wider significance. See Worthy, Suburbs, p. 55; also
Fursdon, St Sidwells Parish Register; and H. Tapley-Soper, Executions recorded in St Sidwells
Parish Register, DCNQ, xv (1929), 32830, at p. 328.
92
93

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

VI
As far as we know, Richard Wilkyns was the last individual to be formally charged with witchcraft in the city sessions court during the reign
of James I though, as has already been observed, a number of further
cases were to occur under Charles I.95 What are the broader points which
may be drawn from this study of witchcraft in Exeter between 1558 and
1610? First and most obvious, the present article has established that
executions for witchcraft in the far south-west began at least a century
earlier than was previously thought. Second, this investigation has added
two new names to the list of those who can be shown to have been hanged
as witches quite a significant addition, when we consider that the total
number of people executed for this crime in England and Wales is now
generally believed to have been around 500.96 Third, the discovery of the
seven new witch-cases from Exeter outlined above has revealed that, in
terms of simple chronology of prosecutions, south-west England may
have been rather less atypical than had previously been assumed with
an appreciable number of cases now known to have occurred in this
region during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, just as they did in
other parts of the country.97
What does the new evidence from Exeter reveal about the nature of
local witch-belief between 1558 and 1610? The fact that hardly any
formal depositions survive among the sessions records for this period
means that we possess none of the vivid personal testimonies about
suspected cases of witchcraft which begin to emerge from those records
after 1618. Nevertheless, the earlier documents still have a good deal to
tell us. They reveal, for example, that in Exeter, just as in many other
places, a significant proportion of those who were accused of witchcraft
in this case, at least two of the seven individuals who came before the
JPs possessed a previous reputation as scolds.98 They reveal that in
Exeter, just as in many other places, most suspected witches were women
yet that men could be accused, and convicted, of witchcraft, too.99 Most

95
A search through EQSR, 8 James I (161011) to 22 James I (16245) and through Misc. Roll 21,
mm. 1339 has failed to unearth any further prosecutions. I hope to consider the prosecutions which
took place in the city sessions court after Jamess death in a separate article.
96
See, for example, C. Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford,
1984), pp. 712; Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man, p. 145; W. Monter, Re-Contextualising
British Witchcraft, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxv (2004), 10511, at p. 106; and Briggs,
Witches of Lorraine, p. 52.
97
For the suggestion that Devon diverges from the classic chronology for witchcraft which Alan
Macfarlane and Keith Thomas set forth, see Thompson, Wives, p. 101.
98
Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives, p. 183.
99
On this subject, see W. Monter, Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, French
Historical Studies, xx (1997), 56395; M. Gaskill, Witchcraft in Early Modern Kent: Stereotypes
and the Background to Accusations, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and
Belief, ed. J. Barry et al. (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2726; Gaskill, Devil in the Shape of a Man,
passim; and M. Gaskill, Masculinity and Witchcraft in Early Modern England, in Witchcraft and
Masculinities in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Rowlands (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 17190.

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MARK STOYLE 149

obviously of all, perhaps, they reveal that, in Exeter, just as in many other
places, the great majority of the suspects came from the lower levels of
society.100
Those who were formally accused of witchcraft in Exeter during this
period were clearly at the very bottom of the social heap; Weare was
described as a vagrant & vagabond person, for example, Brice as a
labourers wife and Wilkyns as a labourer. We should also note that, of
the five Exeter witches discussed above whose places of residence are
either suspected or known, two came from St Sidwells and two from the
extramural part of Holy Trinity, both suburban areas which were among
the poorest districts of early modern Exeter.101 The witches alleged
victims were heavily concentrated in those same areas, too. Thus the
woman whom Parke was said to have bewitched was a resident of Holy
Trinity; the three people whom Short was said to have bewitched were
residents of Exe Island a poor suburb close to the river while the three
people whom Brice was said to have bewitched were residents of St
Sidwells.102 Of Wilkynss many alleged victims, all but one lived either in
St Sidwells or in Holy Trinity. It is striking, too, that it was only after the
death of a man who, though himself a labourer, lived in the wealthy
intramural parish of St Mary Arches, that Wilkyns was arrested and
committed, suggesting that it may have been the apparent irruption of
witchcraft into the very heart of the city which had finally prompted the
town governors to act in this particular case. The association between
poverty and witchcraft surely helps to explain why, in the midseventeenth century, just as in the Tudor and Jacobean periods, the
parish of Holy Trinity appears to have been disproportionately troubled
by Satans human agents and why, in Exeter, just as in many other
places, accusations of witchcraft tended to surface again and again in
certain specific areas.103
One of the most intriguing questions which is raised by these new
witch-cases but also one of the most difficult to answer is whether the
pattern of prosecutions and executions in Exeter reflected the way in
which the politico-religious climate in the city was changing. When I first
discovered the bills of indictment relating to Wilkyns, some years ago, I
wondered if the magistrates willingness to execute a supposed witch in
1610 might conceivably have reflected the quickening pace of godly
reformation in Exeter. Ignatius Jurdain soon to become infamous as
the Arch-puritan of the West had recently been elected to the
Chamber, after all, and there are clear signs that, by the time of Wilkynss
100

Levack, Witch-Hunt, p. 157.

On poverty in St Sidwells and Holy Trinity, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 13, 11213; and M.
Stoyle, Whole Streets Converted to Ashes: Property Destruction in Exeter during the English Civil
War, Southern History, xvi (1994), 6784, at pp. 6869.
102
On Exe Island, see MacCaffrey, Exeter, pp. 9, 11, 13, 19 and 20.
103
For a later case of witchcraft in Holy Trinity parish, see, for example, Exeter Quarter Sessions
Minute Book, 64, fos. 260-1r. On traditions of witch-accusations, see Larner, Enemies of God,
pp. 802.
101

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IT IS BUT AN OLDE WYTCHE GONNE

trial, the godly faction in Exeter was in the ascendant.104 Many scholars
have argued that Calvinist religious predilections were accompanied by
an increased propensity to persecute witches, so it seemed tempting to
suggest that it might have been the triumph of the puritans in Exeter
which had permitted executions for witchcraft in the city to begin. Yet as
further cases began to emerge from the records, it quickly became clear
that to adopt this line of argument would almost certainly be too simplistic.105 The execution of Thomasine Shorte had occurred thirty years
before that of Wilkyns at a time when the godly in Exeter were only just
beginning to flex their muscles while John Wolcott the mayor who
had committed both Parke and Meade to gaol and who had presided
over their trials in 1566 was well known to be a zealous man in the
Romish religion.106 The very first time that local concern about witches
is known to have been raised at the sessions, moreover, was in 1558
during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. All in all, it is hard to
demonstrate that witch-prosecution in Exeter between 1558 and 1610 was
associated with a particular brand of religious faith. Rather, it seems
probable that, in Exeter, as elsewhere, patterns of prosecution for witchcraft were essentially contingent, with the ultimate fate of the unhappy
suspects resting less upon the religious leanings of the civic elite than
upon the perceived strength of the evidence which their terrified neighbours had presented against them.107
There is nothing to suggest that the magistrates of Elizabethan and
Jacobean Exeter were committed witch-hunters. On the contrary, the
justices like their counterparts across much of contemporary Europe
appear to have been reactive rather than proactive in their approach to
supposed witches.108 It is significant that the JPs only took action against
Weare and, probably, Dryham after they had been complained about by
their neighbours and more significant still that, after Thomas Marshall
had launched his assaults upon Tothill, Walter and Parke in 1562, the
JPs initial reaction had been to punish the merchant himself, rather than
to investigate those whom he had denounced. If Old Mastris Tothill
was, indeed, a relative of the citys recorder, then Marshalls attack upon
her may well have had a particular significance for the subsequent
history of witch-prosecutions in Exeter as it would have served to alert
the justices even before the statute of 1563 had been passed to the
potential which witchcraft accusations had to damage the reputation
of themselves and their families, and thus, by extension, to threaten
hierarchy and good order within the city. This, in turn, would surely
have helped to temper whatever enthusiasm for witch-trials they might
104

Stoyle, Deliverance, pp. 1821.

As many other historians have argued, see, for example, Thomas, Religion, pp. 5958.
R. Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 36, 46 (quotation) and 147.
107
On the scrupulous adherence of many contemporary justices to the requirements of legal
proof, see Samaha, Hanging for Felony, p. 769.
108
For this phrase, see Briggs, Witches of Lorraine, pp. 59, 257.
105
106

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MARK STOYLE 151

otherwise have possessed. Admittedly, Parke was eventually brought to

trial presumably as a result of continued pressure from Marshall and
others but, as we have seen, the JPs treated Parke with a surprising
degree of leniency in the wake of her first conviction, reverting to the
normal late medieval punishment of banishment rather than sentencing
her to death, as they could easily have done. A similar inclination to
shrink from inflicting the ultimate penalty upon convicted witches was
evident among the city JPs throughout the entire period. Even Richard
Wilkyns was only hanged for witchcraft in 1610 after he had escaped
execution on precisely the same charge ten years before.
While this article has revealed that executions for witchcraft did take
place in Elizabethan and Jacobean Exeter, therefore, it has also demonstrated that these cases were unusual and that, in general terms, Exeter
experienced a restrained pattern of witch-prosecutions during this period,
much as most other English counties did.109 That this was so presumably
reflected the fact that, while the JPs of Exeter like the great majority of
JPs elsewhere may be supposed to have been convinced of the reality of
witchcraft, they again, like the great majority of JPs elsewhere were
nevertheless anxious to remain within the law and to avoid the dangerous
communal fractures which energetic witch-hunting was only too liable to
provoke. The particular sets of circumstances which resulted in Shorte
and Wilkyns being hanged when a number of other supposed Exeter
witches managed to escape that fate can only be guessed at. It seems
plausible to suggest, however, that in 1581 and 1610, just as in 1682
it may have been a combination of popular rage within the city and the
existence of apparently unimpeachable evidence against the suspects
which eventually persuaded the judges to hand down a death sentence.110
As we have seen, when Thomas Marshall was wrongly informed that
Mawde Parke had died in the wake of his savage attack, he callously
replied it is no matter, it is but an old wytche gonne. The merchants
words betray his conviction that, because witches were the sworn servants of the devil, even the most violent measures were justified against
those who were simply suspected of being sorceresses. The fact that the
city justices did not share Marshalls point of view or, at the very least,
did not dare to act upon it probably does more than anything else to
explain why the toll of executions for witchcraft in Exeter remained so
comparatively low between the passage of the 1563 statute and the death
of King James I.

109

As, indeed, did many European regions and cities. For an excellent discussion of just such a
pattern in the German city of Rothenburg, see Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives, passim.
110
For the role which popular rage appears to have played in persuading the assize judges to
sentence the Bideford witches to death at Exeter in 1682, see Sharpe, Instruments, p. 231.
2011 The Author. History 2011 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.