THE LAST WITCHFINDER

 

Author : James Morrow

Publisher : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Year 2006, Pages 561, including 17 pages of summary etc.

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Excerpts :

( ) Walter Stearne, Witchfinder-General for Mercia and East Anglia was privileged to deliver the English nation from the Devil. He peeled off Mrs Sampson’s burlap shift, strapped her to the table, and shaved her body, head to pudendum. With a magnification lens he scrutinized moles, sorted blemishes, classified warts, and categorized wattles, searching for the insensible Devil’s mark. Even after delving into her most intimate region, he failed to detect any aberrant. Her right shoulder displayed a black blotch, which he touched with the Paracelsus trident. He probed the mark with a long needle, which failed to yield evn a drop of blood, though descending a full quarter of an inch: proof of Satanic aetiology.

( ) Mr Jellaby testified how on the first Sunday in March he’d turned her away from his cottage door, where she’d come begging for a piece of cheese. Before the week was out his hens had stopped laying, and remained so for a fortnight. No sooner had the hens recovered than seven of Jellaby’s pigs died of a strange wasting malady.

Three additional witnesses came forth bearing tales of maleficium. The town blacksmith revealed that he’d provoked Mrs Whittle  by failing to invite her to his ale-brewing party, culminating in the worst case of the flux a man hath ever known. A seamstress explained how, after spurning Alice Sampson’s proposition that they go into business together, she’d suffered ‘a crampin’ in the fingers’ that had cost her a month’s income. An elderly cordwainer who postulated a connection betwixt his refusal to give her a free pair of shoes and the subsequent destruction of his shop, ‘blasted to ashes by Heaven’s fire’.

 The twelve jury reached a consensus of sending Gelie Whittle to the assizes, Alice Sampson to the asylum. Walter delivered his findings and presented his bill, two witches detected at five crowns each, whereupon the magistrate handed over the specified fee.

( ) In Bury St Edmunds the local magistrate had a pair of suspect hags waiting behind bars, and Walter left that agreeable village having obtained two indictments and pocketed ten crowns. In Therford the pious old rector brought Walter three alleged heretics, and through the master pricker’s efforts the trio soon stood revealed not only as perpetrators of maleficium but as recipients of the Devil’s favours. Swaffham yielded four witches, four indictments.

 ( ) A smiling Halifax said, ‘At its forthcoming meeting with His Majesty. The Privy Council will recommend that, pursuant to the Conjuring Statute, you be appointed Witchfinder-Royal for the Crown’s colonies in New-Plymouth and Massachusets Bay, with an annual salary of two hundred pounds, or one guinea per detected Satanist, whichever sum is higher, plus a Basque coach and team.

( ) Throughout his first year in the colony, he could convince only two towns to sponsor witch=hunts and pay him a guinea for each heretic he unmasked. By late winter, four women lay shackled in Massachusetts gaols, awaiting trials that could not occur until the Colony gat a new charter and a new Royal Governor to execute it. To minimize the threat of starvation, he planted a unsuccessful vegetable garden, tried fishing. So it came to pass that the Massachusetts Witchfinder-Royal was reduced to the status of common deer-slayer, a humiliation which his daughter took covert pleasure.

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My Take

The book is very much worth reading, and possessing, to acquaint yourself with the barbaric like conditions of that era in England, Scotland and Europe.

1231 – Germany gets its first Inquisitor.

1320 – Pope John XXII authorizes Inquisition to persecute sorcery and witchcraft.

1428-50 approximately 167 locals burned in Dauphine, Europe.

1484 - The newly installed Pope Innocent VIII conceives his famous ‘Witch Bull’ calling for the extermination of Devil-worshipping heretics wherever they might be. And so for the next quarter-century the odour of roasting witch-flesh becomes as ubiquitous in northern Europe as the aroma of candle wax or cow manure.

1515 – 500 burned at the stake – Geneva

1532 – The ‘Carolina Code’ issued & adopted by the Holy Roman Empire – torture and death for witchcraft.

1557 – Toulouse witch trials – 40 burned.

1563 – Queen Elizabeth I – statute against witchcraft. First hanging in 1566

1590 – Bavarian witch hunt by William V, and North Berwick’s (Scotland) notorious witch trials.

1597 – James VI issues a textbook ‘Daemonologic’for witch hunters.

1604 – James I issues statute by Parliament against witchcraft.

1618-1648 – Witch hunt at its height in Germany.

1692 – Salem witch trials.

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 Subject type : Historical Story telling

Narrative Style : Excellent

Readability : Excellent in most of the book, some portions are lengthy

Reader’s Interest : Good

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