15 witches: the fascinating case of the 1650 Newcastle witch trials.

21st August is the anniversary of the Newcastle Witch trials. Lucy Atkinson writes about 15 witches who were murdered in Newcastle in 1650.

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

We all have something different in our heads when we hear the word witch. Maybe you think of a warty old woman who sells herbs and tinctures or the evil stepmother who stops the princess from living out her dreams. For most of us, we have encountered witches all our lives from the Halloween parties we had as a kid to the films we watch as adults. There was a time though when that word witch posed a very real threat to people in the North East of England.

In Newcastle in 1649 a witch pricker was brought to town to convict people of the crime of witchcraft. Around thirty men and women of the town are brought to be tried and some twenty-seven of those were found to be guilty. The process of witch-pricking involves thrusting a bodkin (or a small pin) into a mark on the suspected witch's body. These marks could be anything from freckles to birthmarks but were suspected by witch prickers to be a ‘Witch’s mark’—the spot on her body where her familiar comes to suckle. The theory was that these marks were insensible to pain and would not bleed when pierced. So, if the mark did not bleed and the suspect did not cry out in pain, the witch prickers would find them guilty. In the end, fourteen women and one man were hung for witchcraft in August 1650, making it the largest mass execution for witchcraft on a single day in the country. It is said that the witch pricker was paid twenty shillings for every witch he could convict. 

I first heard about the Newcastle witch trials in a small footnote at the back of a book of Northern folklore. My childhood was consumed by traipsing through every English Heritage and Natural Trust site in County Durham and Northumberland so it was remarkable to me to find a part of the history of the North that I had never heard of.  I had an interest in the witch trials in East Anglia and Pendle but didn’t know anything of witch trials in this part of the country. The more I learned about the witch trials, the more interesting the subject became. When it came time to start my next writing project, I knew almost immediately that this was the subject that would be the perfect basis for my first novel 15 Witches.

Writing about witch trials means encountering the darkest parts of the human condition and being forced to ask yourself unfathomable questions of history. The witch trials in Newcastle take place towards the end of the civil war and the fifteen years preceding the witch trials have been rife with plague, turmoil and political unrest. Yet still, what would make someone believe in such bizarre and impossible things? How could someone have been so sure in their belief, on so little evidence, that they would sentence another person to die? What would make someone turn on their neighbours, their family and their friends to accuse them of witchcraft? All of these things have been so interesting to explore within the landscape of the changing city of Early Modern Newcastle.

Lucy Atkinson is a writer from the north east of England. She is currently completing a PhD in witchcraft literature and working in a novel about the 1650 Newcastle witch trials. Her work has been published both online and in print in publications such as: Acumen, Agenda and Ink, Sweat and Tears. Her award winning plays for young people As It Was and Survive the Night have been performed around the world

PLUS Don’t forget… event with author Sue Reed tonight

Author Sue Reed will be leading a gathering at The Garden Coffee House in Hexham. 

Sue will be sharing her writing journey and reading from her novel The Rewilding of Molly McFlynn which features Ann Watson one of 16 hanged on the Town Moor on accusations of witchcraft in 1650. 

Discussions will follow on othering, particularly of women and of daring to be different.

Doors at 6.30 to begin at 7pm 

Tickets can be booked via Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-rewilding-of-molly-mcflynn-anniversary-author-event-tickets-940864750797