 Hello and welcome to the British Library. I'm Brett Walsh of the Cultural Events Department and it's my pleasure to welcome you to tonight's event with Malcolm Gaskill and Susanna Lipscomb and featuring readings by Isabel Pollan. Before I introduce our chair Susanna, I have a few points of housekeeping. If you'd like to buy a copy of Malcolm Gaskill's new book, The Ruinable Witches, you can do that using the bookshop button above the video. You can also give us your feedback and donate to the British Library. Now there will be a Q&A towards the end of the event, so if you'd like to submit a question for our speakers, please use the form just below the video. Chairing tonight's conversation is Professor Susanna Lipscomb. She's an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster, fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a columnist for History Today. She has written five books, presented numerous history documentaries and hosts the Not Just The Tudors podcast. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Susanna and Malcolm. Thank you. Hello everybody, welcome to tonight's event. I'm delighted to say that we have Malcolm Gaskill with us tonight. Malcolm is an emeritus professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia, and to my mind one of the best historians working in the field today. His acclaimed works include Witchfinders, a 17th century English tragedy which explores the witch trials of the Civil War in East Anglia and Essex under the direction of Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed witchfinder general, and between two worlds how the English became Americans, which explores and explodes myths about the emigration of the English and the Irish to America. And bringing these themes together is the book we'll be talking about tonight, his brilliant new book, The Ruin of All Witches, Life and Death in the New World. Malcolm, welcome. Thank you very much indeed and thank you to the British Library for having me. It's great to have the opportunity to have this conversation. Now the witch hunt we're going to be talking about tonight took place in a little town called Springfield. Where was it? When had it been founded? And what were the ambitions in founding it? So Springfield is a very strange place. It's in the furthest reaches of Western Massachusetts, so 100 miles from Boston, so right up there on the frontier, in the Connecticut Valley, high up the Connecticut River, and the town is sort of clustered around the edge of the riverbank. So it's founded in 1635, 1636, and the events that we're going to be talking about seed in about 15 years on from that. So it's still a very young town. It's full of migrants from England and particularly Wales, and they've gone there to seek their fortunes. But the founder of the town, William Pinchon, he's really all about profit. There's lots of other New England towns that have been founded for kind of more godly purposes. Springfield is a sort of godly place, but it really is what we might think of as a company town. Pinchon basically runs and owns everything. And so everyone is kind of beholden to him. And that Pinchon's main motive really is profit, particularly in the beaver fur trade, which is very lucrative trade back to the old world. And that's what Pinchon's doing. He's trying to get right to the source of where the Native Americans bring the beaver fur down the river so you can nab it before it gets to anyone, any of his competitors further east. So here we have the map of New England. Just indicate to us where we can find Springfield. So yes, it's tiny on my screen. So if you look at the bottom and the bottom middle, you can see I'm pretty sure that's the Connecticut River going up. So if you follow that river up, Pinchon's trying to get as far up as possible. There are other communities, Windsor and Hartford and so on that are further down, but really Springfield's at the top and that's so that he can be at the source of the beaver fur. OK, let us hear an extract from your book tonight with a read for us by actor Isabel Pollan that sets the scene. Life in Springfield. The town he founded 15 years earlier stood at the furthest western limits of New England, high in the Connecticut Valley. Unlike so many other plantations, Springfield had not grown out of a Puritan congregation transplanted from England to the American wilderness. It was born of capitalist enterprise, godly yet commercial and confident. Nonetheless, it still comprised fewer than 50 households, a limit set by Pinchon to maintain coherence on a plateau two and a half miles by one third. The homelots, house, barn and garden formed parallel ribbons between the river and the main street. On the opposite bank of the river to the west lay planting grounds and to the east across the street and Hasakie Marsh named for its clumps of grass lay upland woodlots thick with maple, elm, birch, oak and pine. Every family was thereby provided with food, fuel and shelter. Streams meandered down the hillside, feeding fresh water into a brook beside the main street. At the top of a sharp bluff lay the unmanageable pine barrens and beyond the Long Bay path to Boston, 100 miles east. Indians, the people whose land this had been since time immemorial, were employed as messengers and carriers, but mostly the dealings with the English were limited to farming and trade and watching as their ancestral homeland was transformed. The greatest transformation lay in the town's north end where the principal inhabitants lived. This was the heart of Springfield's civic life, centred on a main square. There was no grandeur to it and it flooded when the marshes were saturated. The only prominent building on the square was the meeting house, 40 feet long, faced in clapboard, its gable ends topped with turrets, one for a bell, a recent acquisition, the other a lookout post. All meetings were held there. From the square, a lane led down to the field where, once a month, Hugh Parsons and his fellow militia men trained with muskets and arrow-proof corsets. There, too, lay the burying ground, a two-acre plot rapidly filling up. For these were days of raging infection, of smallpox and other diseases. That gives us a wonderful sense of the scene. What was daily life like for these people? Well, as you heard in the reading, that actually it's very high mortality, so that this is over everything that everyone's doing there. There's always this spectre hanging over them, but it's also a place of very high fertility as well. So that one of the things that really characterised a woman's life in Springfield is that she was pregnant during her years of fertility, really most of the time. And so there is a constant sort of burying, but also of births, too. So the town is burying all the time. Daily life is extremely hard. People have to work. People have to do everything for themselves. Of course, when this town is founded, there's essentially nothing there. So the town has to be built from scratch. So that men are working in the fields, they're sailing across the Connecticut River to their burying grounds on the opposite side in canoes, as the Native Americans have taught them. And then on the other side of the main street, they're up in the wood lots and collecting wood constantly for fuel. And so they're always occupied. And the other thing, of course, men have to do is they have to work for pension as well. So they're often taking pensions first down the Connecticut River to the warehouse and that they will then be shipped around Long Island Sound to Boston and then off into the Old World, too. But women, of course, are working constantly as mothers and childrearing, keeping home and cooking and also collecting fruit, gardening. So, you know, these these people are making shift as they can. They are constantly at work from dawn till dusk every single day. And so really, they're just trying to keep warm. They're trying to keep fed and they're trying to keep the children alive. And that's really what they do day in, day out. So it's relentlessly hard work. It's extraordinary struggle. But Puritans were also required, weren't they, to kind of struggle internally? Yeah. And it talked in the meeting about this being a kind of capitalist enterprise, a capitalist society. So how much was the Puritan culture of, you know, taxing introspection and proving oneself to be a member of God's elite, shaping the society in Springfield? Yeah, so I mean, they don't actually see any conflict between godliness and capitalism, that as the saying goes, profit and religion jump together, they feel that this is actually God's will, they should go there and go forth and multiply and prosper. And so they don't talk about capitalism, you think of them as capitalists, I suppose, but they think that that's actually consonant with God's will as well. But that, of course, that they do become extremely greedy for land as they actually, English migrants do in other New England settlements. But there's just something about this being right there from the start, hardwired into the soul of Springfield. And that it's, you know, there are all sorts of emotions that go with these kinds of desires and jealousy and greed and envy and resentment, and just sheer desire. And that so that I think that the emotion that perhaps the feeling that goes with some of these negative emotions is guilt. So that the and that this is very, as you suggested, you know, question, there's a lot of introspection. And so that some of these these negative feelings latch on to a kind of a polarized sense of the world that people have in their hearts and in their heads, where the god is telling them one thing and the devil is telling them that their minds and their souls are porous to these sorts of influences. And so that in dreams and in their private moments, they may feel that they've been tempted more to a darker side of things, or, you know, or perhaps that they are obeying God's will and behaving more virtuously. But I think in Springfield, it's more than more tipping towards the, the not exactly the diabolical side, but they're actually behaving in ways which are distinctly selfish and unvirtuous. And I think that explains a lot about the background to this, this particular witchcraft case. We've just seen a picture of William Pynchon and our reading mentioned him. And the members of Springfield community also had something else hanging over them, which is that they were indentured to him, and in debt to him as the founder of the town. What effect do you think this had on this community? I think people are very conflicted. There are a lot of migrants of God there to be independent and to to feel that there is land there and their opportunities. And of course, compared to conditions in England, which where there's a rather huge economic demographic pressures, there really are opportunities. But Pynchon provides them so that, yes, you can have a house and you can have work and you can can get married and start a family in a way which may will be denied you back in England. However, you're constantly in Pynchon's thrall. Pynchon is not only the chief landowner, he's the magistrate. You know, he's the provides all the work, he really does everything he runs the whole shop. So I think there may well be feelings alongside, perhaps a sort of gratitude towards Pynchon, feelings of resentment that actually he almost undermines the masculinity, the sort of masculine self determination of many of these migrants and that but of course this can't be spoken. So perhaps it's bottled up or maybe it's actually discharged in some other direction towards some other patriarch who is perhaps not measuring up. And I think this perhaps is where he Parsons comes into the frame, not to jump the gun too much. But I think there is something about that relationship that ordinary people have, particularly men, male householders with Pynchon that explains a lot of their anger and frustration, which definitely comes out in this witchcraft case. Well, let us talk about Hugh Parsons. Hugh and his wife, who was Mary Lewis until they married, are really at the heart of these accusations. Can you introduce them please? Tell us their back stories. Well, with Hugh Parsons, we don't know a great deal or rather there are too many suspects and too many contenders. There's an extraordinary number of Hugh Parsons in early 17th century England, very frustrating. But he almost certainly comes from the West country. I do think this is very likely. We know much more about him when he arrives in Springfield. He's a brickmaker and this is exactly why he's been brought to Springfield because Springfield needs skilled tradesmen. Whenever Pynchon needs skilled tradesmen, he pulls some strings, you know, calls in a favour and someone arrives and Springfield really needs bricks. And that's why Hugh is brought in. Mary Lewis, his wife, to be, I mean, a little bit more about her. She comes from Wales, from the Welsh marches on the borderland between England and Wales, probably somewhere near Monmouth. And she is, she marries a Catholic who treats her very badly, tries to make her convert to Catholicism. She's bullied and then he deserts her. And she really, I think Mary finds sucker in a very charismatic leader, a man called William Roth, and this non-conformist Puritan congregation. And that she finds a tremendous spiritual meaning there. And there are members of this congregation, including one actually one other person who does end up in Springfield, who are very much about, you know, really, we're not going to find the new Jerusalem in England or Wales. We need to go to New England and Roth is quite old, but he's very supportive of this idea. So that Mary does, after a couple of false starts, she does end up emigrating around about 1640. And he finds herself in Springfield by 1641. And that's, you know, within within four years, that's where, you know, these two star-crossed lovers find each other and their fate. You've mentioned that Mary had this previous marriage and that, of course, is going to be quite a burden in Puritan terms. And then let's throw in what you mentioned about Hugh being a bricklayer, a brickmaker. It's a fantastically difficult job. So they they have all these these stresses weighing on them before we even get to the stress of their marriage itself, don't they? Yeah, they do. And they've got to measure up. And this is true of all families. I mean, the slide that was up, we saw just now, this is ideal of the household. The household is supposed to be across the early modern world. It's a microcosm of the of the perfect state. And so there it is again. So that, you know, this is this is sort of visual representation of order and of hierarchy. Now every couple marrying has got to try to measure up for that. And something about Hugh and Mary is that they just get it wrong almost from the start. Now, Mary, as you say, has been married. And of course, it's they have to work quite hard to establish whether or not because her husband has deserted her for seven years, whether actually she is free to marry again, because the last thing that William Pynchon would want to be doing is condoning adultery or even worse, bigamy. So but of course, this is actually okayed by Boston and she can marry. So I think this she's probably hugely relieved and we might think happy. But of course, this thing starts to unravel quite quickly and Hugh's character is very he's dark, he's taciturn, he's moody. He's a rascable. I mean, he really isn't a very nice man at all. I think that comes over very, very clearly. And so that really they're off to a kind of bad start, I think. But that everybody's watching in these communities, everybody's it isn't just about measuring up to Puritan ideals of marriage, it's about the whole morality of the community in the neighborhood. Everybody's watching everybody else. It's a face to face society as early modern historians say. And so they've really got to try to fit the bill if they can, but they are not very good at it. So the pressures of survival, of keeping a home of their marriage before long, chartering quickly become intolerable to them. Let's hear another extract from Isabel talking about Mary and Hugh. Mary and Hugh. As in most households, Hugh and Mary shared the extra work, drawing on mutual understanding and goodwill. To encourage this, the marital ideal was according to one Puritan writer, a continual stream of familiar conversation. Honest, amiable, chatting throughout the day about everything that needed doing. Mary collected eggs and fruit, weeded the garden and looked after the goats, whose milk they drank and sold, and in the autumn she would be expected to help Hugh bring in the maize harvest. Her workload did not abate as her baby quickened inside her and matrimony began to seem more like service, except with greater responsibility. Hugh, too, felt the weight of expectation. With a child on the way, he would have to make a crib with a hood against drafts or borrow one from neighbors enjoying a brief breast-bite between births. But that was only the beginning. Reaching the estate of a householder conferred a steam, yet also put manhood on trial, weighted against custom. He had to balance patriarchal dominance with dependence on his wife as hard to maintain as the temperature in a kiln. Order was everything. As one New England minister preached that year, Hugh, husbands, wives, masters, servants, remember, if you are not good in your places, you are not good at all. Falling short of ideals, however, was the more usual outcome. Marriages were like flawed bricks that exploded during firing, or which looked sturdy but cracked and crumbled under pressure. Often things like a forthcoming harvest or the arrival of a child in a couple's lives. They may not have understood what was happening, what had changed. It may have felt like some malign intervention, unseen and beyond reason or obvious heavenly design. After all, one reliable proof for witchcraft scholars taught was when married people formally loving very well, hate one another without any evident cause. It was easier perhaps to imagine a curse inflicted from without than some affliction incubating within. Unhappy marriages were devastating to the reputations of men and women alike because in the sight of God and the community, it meant they had failed. I just want to remind the audience that you can submit questions using the Q&A form below the video. So be thinking of those as we go on. So following that reading, Malcolm, we know that at the heart of this particular case of witchcraft, these accusations was the unhappy marriage of the Parsons that was this affront to Puritan ideals that we've just heard about. I imagine that this produced guilt that we've talked about anger, sadness. They've already got a whole bunch of anxiety. Do you think some of this might explain why Mary starts talking about her suspicions of witchcraft? Yeah, I do. I think we should remember that in these kinds of communities, that emotions are a sort of a, you know, they're kind of political currency. People sort of deal in them. And again, having said that people are always watching each other, they're always gauging people's reactions to things, whether they're proportionate or disproportionate. And Mary Parsons is somebody who is just from the start seems emotionally unusual. She seems rather fretful. She seems particularly fretful about witches. Now, we might think witch obsessed early modern communities. Why would that mark her out? But actually, people don't talk much about witches. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been so surprised when Mary does start talking about them. I think that Mary has obviously, by going to, simply by going to America has pinned all her hopes on this, her whole future depends upon this one. This is her last chance. And so I think that perhaps that she starts to feel she's failing right from the beginning, whether it's her fault or her husband's fault, or whether it's the frankly, quite unpleasant people around her or some combination of those things, something about the relationship she has with others is not working out. And of course, that the this manifests itself emotionally. And I think that the fact that she starts speaking out loud about what have obviously started as private concerns does mean that she is unburdening herself, I think, or maybe she's testing the waters trying to see whether she can get sympathy or understanding or spiritual help. Who knows? That's, that's, you know, that's too deep in her inner life for a historian to know. But that's certainly what we do see are the reactions, because these are recorded to her emotions from others. And they are very clear that she seems like a, at the beginning, a slightly strange person. But of course, this gets a whole lot worse. That's very interesting, this idea of a currency of emotions. And the idea of everyone being observed, of course, is something we're familiar with from this period. Mary also seems to have been suffering, by some point, some sort of mental illness, perhaps in relation to the birth of her child. What bearing did you think this had on her mindset? Well, it's very difficult to kind of diagnose things in the past, isn't it? Historians do that at their peril. But she certainly does seem to be suffering from some kind of delusion. Some of us actually taking her symptoms together, it does seem as if she might possibly been suffering from not just postnatal depression, but possibly postpartum psychosis with some very severe hallucinations and also delusions. Now, that's about one in a thousand women suffer from postpartum psychosis. So it's quite rare, little understood condition. But the poet Laura Dockerel has said that she suffered from it. And she said she described it as feeling that she'd been hijacked by the devil, which is so interesting. And that's because in the modern age, if something else is inside you and has taken you over, that is tightly consistent with what the way that Mary Parsons goes on to describe, you know, how she feels about herself. So she, I think does start to feel this extreme polarization of good and evil inside her, not just something that's going on out there, but something where she is at fault and that she is somehow maybe even against her will has given in to the devil's temptation. And after all, in this world, that the understanding was the woman was the weaker vessel, that's what the Bible taught. And that didn't mean that the woman was somehow intrinsically wicked. What it meant was that a woman would be more likely to surrender to the devil's temptation, whether it is a weak temptation or something much more serious like witchcraft. And so, and that would explain therefore why the majority of which is we see prosecuted in the early modern world were women. But I think that this is that this is a sort of a, there's a battle ground that Mary Parsons experiences in her own soul, where she feels that she's basically slipping. She's slipping and her mental illness, I think, would obviously mean that she wasn't able to claw back. She wasn't able to get to she she feels in herself that she's surrendering to this temptation, even if we would understand it as a mental decline. But the first thing that she does is actually to project that it's to accuse a widow, newcomer to the town, Mercy Marshfield of witchcraft. Perhaps it's worth having a moment to pause and have a think about the work that you've done on East Anglia and the sort of beliefs about witchcraft that these immigrants had brought with them from the old country. Right. So I mean, there's, there's every reason all the evidence suggests that the witch beliefs that these people have in Springfield are exactly what they've brought with them in their heads from some of them do come from East Anglia. And actually the knowledge of what's going on in the East Anglia witch hunt does make it across the Atlantic. They are very aware in Springfield that there's been a witch hunt. So that they believe in the same things, ghosts and witches and demons and counter magical spells and protective charms against witches. These are all things that we have. But also like the old world that they understand that which beliefs when they're applied to specific situations aren't definite. They're not monolithic. And there's one thing about this whole story where is that these aren't knee jerk reactions to misfortunes where people just think, oh, I can't explain it. Blame it on witchcraft. There's something that's very slow and simmering. So the one of the things about witchcraft is it isn't something that everybody believes in all the time. There's an awful lot of doubt and hesitance. And I think that this is why at Springfield, what they're searching for is some kind of definite proof. They're trying to they're trying to make themselves feel more sure that the Parsons aren't just strange and difficult, but actually that there is something diabolical about them. And this of course does go back to the East Anglian trials as well. What Matthew Hopkins, the witch finder general does there is he makes uncertain people feel sure that their own suspicions, often their emotional feelings of fear and anger are the sort of thing on which a legal case can be built. So something of that same search for certainty is going on in Springfield, as was going on back in in Essex, roughly the same time. Yes, there's a wonderful line in your book where you say the people believed what they had heard less in spite of its outlandishness than because of it. And I thought that was so instructive. Well, there's something in that, I think, where, you know, I suppose we've found in our own times with conspiracy theories is that people don't necessarily believe things entirely based on empirical evidence. There's a there's a sense in Springfield where perhaps there is a fear of not believing of something. Remember, these people aren't just they're not just trying to solve a crime. They're not just suspiciously people. They're actually very afraid. And I think when people are very afraid sometimes they they're they're afraid not to believe something. So that it and that does make witchcraft more plausible in this setting when there seems to be real misfortune, real danger, real fear. And actually then they are, you know, it's as you say that they're believing in the miraculous and the bizarre precisely because it would be dangerous not to believe in it. Which is that that makes a kind of warped sense in this very warped place. Yes, no, it's very, very interesting. So the accusation leads to a trial. But the fascinating thing about it is and this is one of the moments of doubt, I suppose, is that it's not Mercy Marshfield, who's found guilty of witchcraft, but Mary who's found guilty of slander. Now, what does that mean for the Parsons as a family? Well, it's a very interesting little social drama going on in this particular instance. I think that the one of the first things that happens is this is drawing the Parsons as just a sort of a slightly, slightly sort of suspicious couple on the fringes of what's going on. It draws them very much more out into the into the public because there is, of course, there's a court case in Springfield with William Pinch and presiding over it. And so there's a there's a there's an extent to which the fear is made flesh at that moment, I think. But as you say, it's not Mercy Marshfield. But Mercy Marshfield has sort of come slightly under a cloud from Windsor, where there have been witchcraft accusations that has been shame on her family. And so when Mary starts saying to people, oh, you know, that she brought the devil with her from Windsor, it's sort of perhaps something in it. But actually, this is a this is a great opportunity for Mercy Marshfield, because actually by being vindicated at this trial, she can turn it around. She starts having supporters around her, even though she's the newcomer. She's the one that's come under slightly under the shadow of witchcraft behind her. But this is turned around so that Mercy feels like the wrong party. And Mary looks like the wicked one. And there's even a suggestion that if you call, you know, it's almost like takes one to no one, you start calling people which maybe it's your that maybe you're the witch. And I think that that the tables are subtly turned there in that moment. Right. So people are starting to take sides and Mercy's on the up, but the Parsons reputations are deteriorating. How did a web of suspicion build up against the Parsons over time? Well, I think it's interesting, isn't it? That just the fact that it does take time, this web of suspicion, because sometimes some of the cliche myths about witchcraft, we think again, it was just a you just found a scapegoat which you didn't like people and you had to explain things. But this is really starting to take time. And it isn't just about people ganging up on them or them being strange and horrible. It's about their relationships deteriorating. This is really what witchcraft is about. And relations of all sorts of relationships that deteriorate often deteriorate actually very slowly. Then maybe there's a dropping off point at the end. But, you know, it's slow burning until you get to that moment. And this is definitely what happens here. Now, we should also say that Hugh is an extremely difficult man. And that he is he's people who want bricks to build chimneys because wooden chimneys are not a good idea because they're flammable. So people go mad for brick chimneys in spring. But you have to deal with the most difficult man in the town, Hugh Parsons. And so that these brick deals that often involve crisis and delivery dates is only just go wrong. And when Hugh Parsons we have an argument Hugh Parsons, it nearly always ends the same way. He threatens you. He threatens to be even with you. Now, you know, they mean to I'll get you back or now that if there's anything like a suspicion of witchcraft hanging over the household that Hugh belongs to, then of course that something that we might think of as a kind of an idle threat can take on sinister significance, because maybe he will get you back with witchcraft. And of course, witchcraft is a secret crime. And that of course is the sort of thing you might dismiss in the daytime, but at the night in the nighttime, when you're in your bed, you start you've got you're going over that row in your mind, and you start thinking that Hugh Parsons words maybe are are more dangerous than they appeared when you were just arguing about bricks. Let's hear another reading to pick up from where we've got to so far. Web of suspicion. One night in the spring of 1649, two hours after sundown, Joan Branch was woken by her husband William in a panic. He had been lying there staring at the darkness when in an instant the room was filled with a great flash of light, from which emerged a small boy with a face as red as fire. The boy approached the bed and reached out, resting his glowing hand beneath Branch's chin. Branch was petrified, speechless. Then he told his wife he felt a searing pain down his back, something like scalding water. And heard a voice say, it is done. It is done. Suddenly the room was dark again and the boy had vanished. The following day William Branch could not stop turning this visitation over in his mind and wondering what had caused it. Branch was the town barber who lived next to Griffith Jones, he of the Cunger Knives, and next but one to the Bedorthas. As such, he was already wary of Hugh's sleeveless errands and his wife Joan had known Mercy Marshfield when she lived in Windsor. By this time Hugh Parsons had become a repugnant figure in the eyes of the town. People felt his malign influence when he was present and as Blanche Bedortha and Griffith Jones had found, even when he was not. Hugh even discomforted himself. He, too, had been sleeping badly, tortured by his stressful dreams. It was an orthodox belief, admittedly one William Pynchon disputed in his book, that during his atonement, Christ had been forced to visit hell. This was how it felt for Hugh. His soul dragged to some whole darker than a moonless light to be racked and goaded, suffering severe stomach cramps. He cried out, waking Mary, telling her that he felt as if he was being stabbed. She had an idea why. There was a lovely little phrase in there about Hugh's sleeveless errands. Could you just explain that to us? Hugh's sleeveless errands is basically when he turns up at your house quite often at night, knocks on the door and you open it and he's looming there in the doorway. It doesn't particularly seem to want anything and then goes away. These are basically pointless futile gestures or adventures or a wild goose chase or just a fool's errand. That's what a sleeveless sleeveless errand is. It's an inf should just say that in about 13,000 words of William Pynchon's deposition book, this was the only word sleeveless that myself and my research system couldn't read. And so Twitter came to the rescue and and James put it out there and it was quickly read. And that's when we realized it was sleeveless errand. It's a very unusual phrase. It appears once in Shakespeare the whole of Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida. So it's but it's so it was known at the time. It seems to come from this is sort of into trivia now, but it seems to come from the rough unfinished edge of fabric. If it's sleeveless, it means it's not going to hem and so that it could fray and unravel, which of course is definitely what happens to Hugh Parsons. Anyway, that's that's the history of the sleeveless errand. We did a nice bit of etymology. And I guess the idea being that if he's turning up and he doesn't seem to have any particular purpose, then it feels well, it can be scary once it's in the in the context of all this other evidence. Yeah, I think he feels like an intruder. You know, he's that people are always in and out of each other's houses, but it has to conform to a certain kind of easy sociability. It's got to kind of make sense. So often it's not so much Hugh's or Mary's. It's not sort of the intrinsic things they do, but in the context, they don't just feels wrong. And so that, yeah, it is all his behavior, even when he's not being blatantly unpleasant, takes on sinister import. And that's the key to it already, isn't it? That in the reading, we've had something that to us might seem unpleasant, but, you know, relatively trivial, which is a bad dream. But to William Branch, this appears to be a visitation and it must have a sinister cause. Mary decides that Hugh's stomach cramps must have a similar sinister explanation. Why was witchcraft coming to seem the plausible explanation? Well, I think that the witch I mean, Mary is the one who starts talking about witches, I think before anybody even thinks of accusing either of them. So I think witchcraft and, you know, there are these rumors of witchcraft creeping up the Connecticut Valley, and it's kind of in the air. And the witchcraft accusations again are not random. They're always rooted in difficult, failed social relationships, typically between neighbors. But in this case, it's even more poignant and devastating because it's actually happening within a household itself. So, yeah, so William Branch is a bad dream. You know, it's it takes on different significance because people are starting to draw different kinds of patterns. It's like it's it's which human beings do this. We we see patterns where there are there may be correspondences to things, but these become suddenly become causal. They're no longer coincidental. They're part of some pattern, which again, we might be afraid to ignore because it seemed that it was there in the background all the time. And and we've not been on a garden. And I think this is what's starting to happen. So there are patterns of inference and perceived meaning, which are starting to sort of thicken into this web of danger that people in Springfield are starting to experience. And that turns witchcraft over from the theoretical and the possible into something that's actually rather plausible, maybe even likely in what would otherwise be, as you say, rather these rather mundane situations. Yes, it must have started to feel quite heavy and oppressive. But one of the challenges when it comes to witches is how do you define a witch? How how how did the folk in Springfield think that they could identify witches? Well, just as in the old world, so back in England and in Wales, it's very difficult. But that, you know, there will always be someone who will come along, maybe a cunning folk, cunning man or a wise woman who will tell you how this can be done. Witchers are deceitful and they're sly and they're secretive, but they're not invincible. So that the we can see up on the screen here. This is from the British Library's collections. This is a 17th century list of ways you can discover a witch. And one of the things, ways that's written here is suggested here is that you should put a witch in water, which is a familiar kind of thing. Some people call it ducking, but he's actually swimming a witch in what the idea being that she would be repelled by the whole, the this pure media element of water if she was actually guilty. They don't do that Springfield. And in fact, they don't do it very much in the certainly in the Essex phase of the St Anglia trials because it seemed to be sacrilegious. It's an ordeal. That means it puts God to the test. Puritans don't like that. But it does say also in the the document was up there that it suggests burning any relic or principal ornament belonging to the suspected witch. That's what it says there. And they do do that at Springfield. So that they that again this was almost comically trivial situation where Mr. and Mrs. Langton, that they're bagged puddings like a sort of haggis keeps bursting. I mean, really, so what? But in this significant in this situation, you know, this is food and someone seems to be messing with it. And that's how Hugh Parsons is sort of in the fray. So they someone suggests taking a piece of this pudding, putting it on the fire. Well, no sooner is it done than Hugh Parsons appears at the door in one of his sleeveless errands. And again, that the William Pynchon seems to believe this. And I think that possibly that William Pynchon has persuaded himself that this isn't counter magic. This isn't some other kind of witchcraft. This isn't a superstitious ordeal. It's actually a providential situation. It's actually where God's providence is identifying the witch. And that's certainly another. And that's the way as a sort of a, you know, a puritan cop out or a puritan accommodation with what might otherwise be seen as superstitious counter magic. The need to identify the witches was becoming urgent. Let's hear our final reading. Terror of witchcraft. Within a few days of the row came news of more illness. George Mockson's young daughters, Martha and Rebecca had sickened, writhing and squalling in their beds. Only too aware of what happened to Henry Smith's daughters after Smith crossed Hugh Parsons, Mockson nervously blamed the brickmaker's ill purpose. The minister's household prayed with earnest concentration for their recovery. But God's test, or was it a penalty for Mockson's love of luxury, would not be that simple. Martha and Rebecca's twitches became tremors, which grew in violent intensity into lurching, shuddering conversions, like those exhibited by Sarah Miller. As an ordained minister, Mockson took it upon himself to confront the demons in his daughter's bodies, willing the powers of heaven to evict them. If the devil really did interfere in temporal affairs, he was the proof before their eyes. Visitors came to Mockson's house, prompted by concern, morbid curiosity and a desire to be part of this involving drama. Standing in the girl's bed chamber, Spectator's emotions were purged through such a close encounter with Satan. They could feel the heat of his power and yet stand back and escape his clutches. Marshfield judged the girl's fits to be even more severe than those of his own sister, Sarah Miller, although her convulsions and hallucinations had also worsened since the girls had fallen ill. Some neighbours were convinced that Martha and Rebecca were possessed by demons. But Mockson and his wife lent towards a diagnosis of witchcraft, which stressed the innocence of the victims and banished suspicion that they had brought the affliction upon themselves through faint devotion. By the time Simon Bowman saw the girls struggling in extremis, a consensus had already formed that they were bewitched. If some illegal counter magic was developed as an attempted cure, as it almost certainly was, if not by Mockson than by someone else, it went unrecorded All that mattered in the end was that the girls recovered, which they did, to universal relief and rejoicing. But in the last fortnight of February 1651, Springfield's spiritual crisis became uncontrollable, like a canoe dragged by rapids to the falls. By the time the Mockson girls regained their senses, the contagion had spread to the meeting house where, as one Puritan put it later, townsfolk were supposed to be under an evil hand, meaning either possessed or bewitched. That's quite the choice, isn't it? You either blame or are blamed. Either it's someone else who's done the witchcraft or you haven't been a good enough believer yourself. And I suppose it's certainly true that this is a period in which the devil is thought to be stalking the land abroad in the language of the time. How much do you think that idea about the devil being at work on earth was part of what was going on? I think it's very important. There's something that there's a theory that's been applied to the Salem Witch trials, which are 50 years later, which is about this idea of demonic attack as if you're in this small community, there are all these kind of ructions going on this spiritual battle ground and that you've become vulnerable and the demons are sort of bombarding down on you and that maybe they're sort of infiltrating your dreams, maybe they're inside people's hearts, even that there's the idea that if you're suffering from depression or melancholy like Mary Parsons, that demons would find a way into the black bile inside you in the understanding of how melancholy was caused and would work from within. So a sense of demonic attack and demonic invasion, it might not actually be the sort of the devil of folktales and fairy tales, literally a kind of a black creature stalking the land, although they certainly talked in those terms metaphorically, but I think the idea that there might be invisible or small discrete demons who were really there and were affecting people's, you know, their physical well-being, but also their spiritual well-being, I think certainly for a short period of time at least becomes not just plausible, but again, I think it's about tipping that balance of probability towards a situation where it's sort of a critical mass of opinion, where maybe actually people really start to think that's what's going on. And these cases of these these seizures, which may just be we perhaps think they're from encephalitis, something like that, which does cause hallucinations and seizures and like, you know, again, take on a kind of significance in this place. It isn't just that they can't explain it because it's a 17th century. It's in the context of everything else. This just does not feel right and that that kind of demonic invasion, maybe with Hugh and Mary tempting the demons there or orchestrating in some way for that brief period of time does make complete sense in their world. And that phrase you repeated for that brief period of time seems crucial because it feels like these stories, these accusations, the sort of mud that is sticking is building up and building up and building up to create this illusion. That's my bias, forgive me, to create a picture in the eyes of everyone in Springfield, that these stories are uncontrovertibly true. Why do you think they gathered this sort of weight? Well, I mean, I think, you know, I wouldn't apologize for saying illusion or delusion. It's not it's not necessarily anachronistic because I think sometimes before or after witch trials, people feel exactly the same. It's just that bit in between. It's gathered. Tricky bit in between where the theory becomes, like I said earlier, it's like fear made flesh, that the theory becomes something tangible and that the witch is an important, you know, which is an embodiment of fear and a whole load of other toxic emotions that people at Springfield are undoubted in feeling. And so I think that it's this is a this is a fleeting moment. I mean, there's something about what's going on in the meeting house, which would be tempted to say is mass hysteria. Now, historians of witchcraft don't like hysteria very much. I don't even like talking about hysteria at Salem, because it feels like a cop out, feels like you're explaining things away rather than trying to take their categories of analysis and understanding of the world seriously in their own time. But if there is hysteria at Springfield, I think it's there and it's that it's if we can imagine a situation that isn't about choices and reason thought, it's not about thinking what's going on here, but actually just being swept along by panic and panic is a real thing, whether hysteria is or it isn't. And I do think that there is a moment of panic there. And it does. It's we might think of it as a short circuit of reason to think, oh, well, it must be the Parsons. But there's no short circuit here. This has been building up as we've seen. This has been building up for four or five years. And so again, they're not scapegoats, not a knee jerk reaction. It's something it's a situation which has taken on this dire significance over a long period of time as all these relationships start to fester away and burst out at this moment. Now, Upstope's William Pynchon now in his role as Recording Magistrate, and he took testimonies from all the neighbours around the Parsons, which is, we'll come to talk about sources and how we know about this, and all of these were, how you know about this, and they were sent to Boston for trial. But this is the very interesting thing, the court at Boston was markedly more skeptical than the inhabitants of Springfield. Can we talk a bit about this idea of witchcraft being what you call a slippery crime, and the role played by doubt because it's not, as you've said, that everybody is just throwing the accusation of witchcraft at every possible thing. It's not that everybody is believing every accusation. And here we have a court that is very skeptical. So the court of Boston, like courts in England most of the time, is mostly concerned with the rule of law and assessing evidence, particularly in cases where people are on trial for their life. Nobody wants to execute somebody who might turn out to be innocent. That's because it's very difficult for witchcraft. It's difficult enough to get the grounds for suspicion of witchcraft. Well, they feel that they've got that at Springfield, but to convert that into actual legal proof, which you could use in an indictment for witchcraft, is a much, much harder thing. So it isn't that the judges at Boston are somehow more enlightened about the kind of philosophy or theology of witchcraft. It's that their responsibility is to make sure that there is sufficient evidence on which to hang somebody, given that this is a felony and that if you're found guilty, the punishment is hanging. So that's really the difficulty. That's where this case starts to founder, is about actually converting what everybody at Springfield thinks they know into something that can actually persuade a jury. And of course, it's 100 miles. So there are quite a lot of witnesses at Springfield. They've got to go 100 miles. They've got to leave their work behind. They might have to leave their children behind. And so that actually when Pinchin does end up in Boston, he's got too few witnesses with him. He's got lots of written depositions as we know. That's how we know about this case. But actually really what courts like is if the witness will stand up and tell their story in person that can be checked against the written depositions. And in Boston for there's just not enough of that. Yes, they need those politics of emotions you were talking about as well. They need to see it played out in front of them to believe it. Absolutely right. Because this is the same in England as well. So that we again, we perhaps we have this idea that as soon as somebody suspected of witchcraft, they're automatically executed. Well, that the conviction rate in England is less than 25%. Now, if you again, if you were really trying to scapegoat, if you wanted to get rid of somebody on a trumped up charge of witchcraft, it's actually not a very good way to do it because the conviction rate is actually so low. So and that really it's very low in Boston. In fact, they haven't really had very many cases at all. We don't actually have that many cases afterwards. And Salem really has kind of dominated our picture because obviously that's so dreadful what happens there. But it is rather an aberration that comes quite late in the story of witchcraft in New England. And is this something about the definition of what a witch is again, that that definition of witchcraft as a felony in New England and how that might have differed from kind of folk understandings of what a witch was that's crucial here as well. I think it is because a witch is is someone that you feel is trying to hurt you. So it's where you can't actually prove it. And this is the problem that you feel very, very strongly in your heart that somebody is really trying to hurt you and kill you. But if you can't actually make that belief manifest through some kind of physical proof, then it doesn't work. Because this is actually what happens in the East Anglian Witch Trials is that Matthew Hopkins by getting search women and midwives to search the bodies of suspects and finding marks on their bodies. It's a way of saying, oh, look, we don't have to just rely on circumstantial evidence in here. So here is the physical proof. And they do start doing that, of course, in Springfield as well. Mary, and it seems almost certainly few are searched for these devil marks. And William Pynchon has actually sat as a judge in 1648 at a trial in Boston where a woman called Margaret Jones, a midwife, is hanged. And she's hanged. They find not just the devils marks on her, but the witnesses say they saw her with her familiars. And there's something in New England law as well is about which Hugh Parsons picks that William Pynchon up on is that really you need two eyewitnesses. Well, the problem with witchcraft is it is a secret crime. The devil oversees it and you don't tend to get eyewitnesses to it. And that's why it's difficult in the end once you get into a legal setting. Yes, the devil's hidden all the evidence. But he didn't hide it from you because the evidence gathered in these testimonies, this pile of paper that made it to the Boston Court is the stuff that you have worked from. Let's can we talk a bit about how you've used your sources because one thing you haven't done is just recount them as depositions at the end of your book. OK, well, I mean, there's a handful of very good sources that make this reconstruction of life in Springfield possible. Very good records of births marriage and deaths really helps. So you can see where the children are dying and you see where the children are being born. It gives you a real sense of the kind of turnover. If that's not to kind of brutally putting it. And there are also it's a very good map of the town. So we know where everybody lives and William Pynchon's account book so we know it was in credit to him and who's paying off debts and so on. But the by far the most important source of this credible book of depositions which survive in the New York Public Library, which are which really tell us everything that we know about these accusations and how Q and Mary are interrogated by William Pynchon and their reactions getting it right, getting it wrong and so on. That's how we really know. And of course people do talk about their emotions. And so we do know we can really see deeply. So we're reading these rather I read these depositions tried to piece them together to make a narrative so you could see how this story unfolds. I think this has to make sense as a story. But you also read them against the grains. So you can see the nature of daily life. You can see what people ate and you can see what kind of neighbourly relations went on. So they're very good for that purpose. But like all historical sources they have to be treated imaginatively. You have to kind of piece things together and think yourself into the situation possibly triangulating with other kinds of sources in order to things that are going on perhaps in other towns nearby to try to get a sense of probably how things were actually fitting together. So it's a creative work. I mean it's not fiction. I haven't made stuff up. But I think you do have to history always requires imagination and interpretation and that's really what I did with these sources too. Yes you actually quote at the end of your book Catherine Hodgkin that the story of witchcraft is a place where history asks questions of itself. And I wondered if you thought that the history of witchcraft particularly invites this not fictional but kind of fictive historical response. And if you can give us a bit more of a sense of the lines for you between imagination and invention. Well witchcraft has this sort of reality problem I suppose. It has a reality problem for us as historians and it had a reality problem for them. I.e. it's always seemed to be theoretically possible but very hard to apply to particular situations. So you ask somebody in the 17th century do you believe in witchcraft say of course witches are everywhere. Have you ever experienced a witch? Probably not. And so it's of its nature. It is a theory. It is a supernatural crime. So it's hard for them and then of course doubly hard for us as historians to try to reconstruct their supernatural world which they don't even seem to have a firm line on anyway. So I think that there we I mean as Stuart Clarke witchcraft historian once said you know this is a that witchcraft is a subject with a hole in the middle. You know is a real world. There's this thing in it which we can't quite get to grips with. So I do think that we do need to be we need to imagine their imagination not just to imagine something that was solid in the world we're trying to imagine something that was rather ethereal. And so as Tolstoy once said that the you know history would be a wonderful thing if only it were true. What do you mean by this wasn't a cynical you know condemnation of history he was basically saying that there's an awful lot of imagination that has to go into history in order to make the past live again. And if historians didn't use that then we wouldn't be able to communicate it in the way that we do. So yes, fictive not fictional. And I think that there is something about witchcraft where you particularly have to apply those kinds of techniques because witchcraft for many people even in the 17th century it felt like it's it felt like a kind of fiction to them they were dealing in the fictions of witchcraft as well. And only occasionally did those fictions become very terrifyingly real and solid in those social situations where relationships have broke down so badly that people were terrified that someone else was trying to kill them using the devil's power. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about emotions in a second but before we go on to that the last slide we just looked at showed if we could see it again shows a an equivalent sort of source from this period. And it gives some indication to everybody listening in about the sort of thing you've had to work with. This is one from 1645. It's probably something you've worked with before. But you were you were looking at documents like this. And actually, this is a relatively nice hand. But sometimes these can be very difficult sources, even just the sort of practical act of reading them. Can you tell us a bit about that hands on stuff when it's come to being a historian who works with these cases? Well, historians get very kind of mystical and spooky about these about being in the archives. And of course, all historians who work with primary sources are very disappointed when archivists say, oh, you have to read it on the microfilm or I can let you see a digital copy because actually, there's been quite a lot of writing about this recently, this sort of the idea of the archival term where where historians have their own little sort of emotional communing with the past by actually touching those things. And I'd certainly, you know, when I went to Springfield and certain looking at the depositions in in the New York Public Library, but there's a lot of documents still in Springfield as well that have traveled about a mile where they were produced down the road. And there they are in the Springfield Library and there are those moments when you're alone with those kind of dirty scribbly documents and you think that they once belonged to the actual context of the things that they described. You know, I think you'd have to be pretty cold fish not to have a certain kind of for there to be a certain kind of freesome that you'd feel when you were only actually handling those things. So yeah, so historians like to get their hands dirty, as it were, with these often quite dirty documents as you well know, Susie. And and I think that he's actually part of the imagine that's not just the fun bit. That's part of the imaginative exercise too, which I do think that historians need to have their imagination stimulated and the best thing to do it is a piece of authentic 17th century scribble. It certainly is. It certainly is. The last thing I want to ask you about before I show out to see what questions that the audience have for us is about emotions, because one of the sort of most recent developments in history is thinking about the history of emotions. And if we see an image that's going to come up in a second from Hans Bolden-Grion, it shows a witch in a murderous rage. And you talked earlier about emotions and their relationship to this. And one of the accusations made against Hugh Parsons is it doesn't show the right amount of emotion. So what do you think we should be learning about emotions when we think about the history of witchcraft? Well, I think the emotions run through the story. I was actually working on the history of emotions before it really started this. And although I don't go on about the historiography of the history of emotions, that it's there on virtually every page. And the William Pynchon's depositions are just soaked in emotions if you really start becoming sensitive to them. So what's going on in this picture here is that some is you're looking at something, Hans Bolden-Grion showing you something that nobody ever saw, which is the witch present at the scene of her own crime raging. Now, people knew this rage in the witch. They may be saw it in an individual. But this is a kind of a, you know, it's an explicit representation of something that people mostly understood implicitly, but still very much felt it. They just again found it difficult to prove. So I think that the witches can be understood as a personification of a bundle of toxic emotions that everybody grappled with, maybe onto a particular named individual, a projection of some of those uneasy feelings that people felt in themselves. You feel envious, you feel guilty, maybe you project that onto another. And there's a certainly an element of that, that the greedy people of Springfield project their own impute, their greed onto this man who's supposed to be supremely greedy. Hugh Parsons. But of course, they're actually, they're all pretty much as rotten as each other. Because after when the Parsons aren't there anymore, they don't all become lovely. And there is their after stories that show actually that they carry on being as greedy and venal as the things that they accused him of. So I think that the emotions are again, going back to something we mentioned at the start, that there's a kind of political currency in emotions, because it's one way you work out whether somebody is, you know, part of the team or whether they're actually working against it. You know, are they sort of looking forward or are they working against you? And that people are very acute, acutely sensitive judges of one another and in that regard. And again, as you said, that the thing about one of the key piece of evidence against Hugh Parsons, certainly at Springfield, although they didn't care much about it when he gets to Boston, is that when his son dies, he doesn't show the right emotion. This is a very poignant moment because I think that this is through my editor actually taught me to be more sympathetic towards Hugh Parsons, even though he's so horrible, but actually that he doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know how to behave as a man emotionally when his son dies. And I think, again, you'd have to be made of stone not to feel that there's some sympathy in a man who's now about to get it catastrophic to you on when he thought he was doing the right thing by not shedding tears in public. Well, that's very interesting. Now, I've got a number of questions lining up, but I just want to remind the audience that now's your moment. If you haven't submitted a question, you can use the Q&A form below the video. But I'm going to start with some of those I've already got. Question from Bandit Queen, which is a great name. I would like to ask Bandit Queen says about the children of condemned witches. Were they stained by the charges or were they able to recover their families' reputations? Well, it's a very good question. I mean, sadly, we don't always know. You don't know what happens to the family. Sometimes, you know, witchcraft cases are quite often. They're like a kind of a candle that's lit in the dark and then they're snuffed out again and we return to darkness and we don't know. But there's family cases not necessarily in New England, but in other places, although there are stories that follow Salem about families of children of accused witches. But it can go either way. It sort of depends a lot of the time, whether that the accused which is somehow exonerated, which of course is true at Salem. Or whether actually that sometimes people feel that they were when they're acquitted, that they were people were cheated of their the witchcraft accusation they pray. There is a feeling that witchcraft passes down the matrilineal line that it can be inherited. There are certainly a couple of women who confess to witchcraft in East Anglian trials who feel that they've become witches against their will because their mothers were witches and they just they fought it. They resisted it against themselves. Again, this feeling of intense guilt is polarization in the soul where it's just kind of almost like madness where you're trying to separate one from the other and stay virtuous. So that it's they the stain could pass down that line. It could be because it was this is often about the reputation of households as well. And the you know, witchcraft is lots of things. One thing is, is a total collapse of that personal household's reputation. They've committed the worst crime and that that certainly can be inherited. So it wouldn't necessarily be that the children would be prosecuted, which I've just because the mother was prosecuted, but that, you know, that that that stain could pass down the generations. So I have got a comment and a question from Mark Lawrence. He says, excellent talk and excellent book. And then. It addresses the fact that in East Anglia in the 1640s, Matthew Hopkins and John Stern were the catalysts for the accusations of witchcraft and the persecution and prosecution. And says, by comparison, in Springfield, the community itself appears to have generated the pressures, the ideas and the suspicion of witchcraft and ultimately the accusations. Now, you already address this a little bit, Malcolm, but he says, is there a material difference in how witchcraft persecution arose in New England and old England at the time? Well, it's a very interesting question. I don't know how if I can try and answer it in in just just in a minute or so. But it's I mean, all witchcraft accusations are similar in some fundamental ways. But then in the material differences between them are always very great, too. They are very again, like at Springfield, it's very particular to the very particular kinds of deterioration of social relationships. So that they they always sort of deteriorate in, you know, in rather different ways, I think, depending on what the set up is. So that in the but I think there is a similarity. But of course, you mentioned catalysts. That's exactly what Hopkins and Stern are. They aren't primarily the authors of the accusations. What Hopkins and Stern do, they go around and seeing where there are already suspicions, which have probably been suppressed in during the 1630s when they were very, very low level of witchcraft trials. But during the Civil War, it's becomes witchcraft again becomes more legally plausible and the Hopkins and Sterns are encouraging people to come forward and encouraging them to find the kind of material evidence that could that could succeed at law. So it may seem that it's all coming from below in Springfield and maybe in other New England towns as well. Although there are not actually that many witchcraft trials, but there are no witchfinder generals in the new in the new world that we know of. But that really that the similarity I think is that that Hopkins is exploiting suspicions and accusations, poor social relations, suspicions and so on that are there and have been there for a long time. And those things take a long time to develop its Springfield as well. But they just kind of burst forward. They just burst out on their own as it were. But again, that there isn't a huge amount of confidence that they will be successful because they get knocked back so quickly when they go to Boston. Whereas of course in Essex and Suffolk and other surrounding counties, that the witchfinders are remarkably successful, albeit for a very brief period of time. And a bit like Springfield, that the seeds of the end of the witchfinding campaign in East Anglia are there right at the beginning. It isn't just a trajectory where it's very successful and then it falls away. It's already falling apart as it starts. And that's why it is such an unusual aberration in the history of witch trials as a whole. Okay. My next question comes from Rosamund Rortan who thanks you for your talk and says that you very much enjoyed your book, which was captivating. And notice that much of the story is about the history of people's minds as we've been talking about. Do you think psychology could play a greater role in understanding other events in history? Well, it's a very good question, Rosamund. I think that it's... I mean, historians are quite interested in psychology as they're interested in anthropology and all sorts of other cognate disciplines as historians call them. I think that the like anthropology, psychology is a very good way of giving us models to start fitting around historical evidence and testing it. But one of the problems with social anthropology is that sometimes we're not quite comparing light with light because we're very different. Often in the developing world, societies which aren't really like 17th century England. And similarly with psychology, all the time in a kind of post... We can't sort of unthink Freud. We're on the other side of Freud. Whether we're Freudians or not, it affects everything. So we have a certain kind of self-consciousness about what psychology is that was absent in the 17th century most of the time. But of course we can... These other disciplines are... They're instruments, they're tools which we can use to start shape historical evidence and test it and really look at it from different angles. So the danger is if we import the psychology back into the history, and then it becomes kind of deterministic and once it does that, we slip into the kind of anachronism which is actually inimical to exactly the thing that we're trying to achieve, which is try to understand people on their own terms in their own time. Now I've got an interesting personal question from Lucy. She says, what brought you to have this interest in the subject of the witch hunts? What was your personal journey into this specialism? I get asked that quite a lot and I get a little bit defensive sometimes because I was thinking actually, it's a bit weird. Well I started off actually just being very interested in 17th century England and about the transformations in society and culture and religion at that time. And I started working on crime originally and so I was very interested in the particularly the social history of the law, the way in which communities responded to crimes and then I specialised a bit more and I did counterfeiting and I did murder, but then I also did witchcraft as well. And you take these crimes and they were rather random in some ways, but they were very good at opening up a window and onto all sorts of other areas of life and particularly of change. So you learnt about popular culture and you learnt about literacy, you learnt about the reformation and popular beliefs, you learnt about gender and households and politics and all these things. So the things about witchcraft cases is that they're very, as we've seen, they're these very intense moments in what might otherwise be slightly kind of mundane lives. And so that suddenly the light comes on, you see everything for a short period of time and it's a very good wormhole into understanding lives and relationships and inner lives and psychology of the time that otherwise perhaps would be lost to us. So that's how I really started out and I just out of all the crimes I just think witchcraft is the best one for understanding that whole range of things but particularly moments of change and that's what the early modern period is, it's not a discrete thing, it's a transition. Very interesting question here from Lyndon who says that they enjoyed your book very much and asked whether you think the geographical situation of Springfield on the edge of the wilderness could have played on people's emotions. Lyndon says, we lived in Upper New York State and had friends with woods you could get lost in. You could hear sounds from those woods at night that would make your blood run cold, cast your mind back to the 1640s or 50s and such sounds could be animal, human or supernatural. Well, I mean, the short answer is yes, I do think there's something about Springfield. I mean, I spent a bit of time in Springfield, it's kind of, you know, I found it quite spooky and it's for different reasons but I won't go into that now, but I think that sense of being isolated and maybe then feeling, because the feelings of demonic attack, of course, that's only the half of it, that these are people who feel that they are, you know, they may be under attack from Native Americans soon, that relations are not good, they deteriorate. In the 1670s, Springfield is almost completely destroyed during Metacom's War, where the relations are catastrophically broken down with the local Native Americans. So that feeling, of course, there are predators there, there are wolves crying, you know, these are not things that they experienced at home, it's a frightening environment. And the thing about this, there's an existential thing about New England as well, is that England's got its problems in the mid 17th century. Of course it has, nobody in England worries that England might cease to exist, but in New England, that's a very real fear, because especially for Puritans who feel that they are, you know, they've formed this covenant with God, he's testing them, will he support them? Will he ignore them? Will he destroy them? That feeling that New England could yet be wiped off the map and Springfield with it is a very real one. So I do think that they feel beleaguered, they feel besieged, they feel isolated, they feel rather cut off. They don't like the neighbours, I mean, they don't even get on with the English people who live downriver. Intense competition between these communities, there's no fraternity between them just because they're English. So actually, ironically, perhaps all the enemies that these people of Springfield have, the very worst ones are each other. I'm very glad that you weren't particularly rude about Springfield, because my next question comes from Louise Lookt, who is in Northampton, Massachusetts, just north of Springfield. She finds this fascinating and asks actually a question that springs off what you've just said. Did the fact that settlers in Springfield were Puritans, feed into their more imaginative view of witchcraft and their punitive reaction to it as opposed to England? Yeah. Well, Northampton is a lovely place. But, and of course, Northampton was a kind of, you know, was an offshoot from Springfield. Springfield people, of course, they go all over the place because it gets too big and off they go. Anyway, that's another story. Puritanism. So that it's, I mean, the thing is about Springfield is that it's, I think it's a bit of stretch to call it Puritan Springfield. If you're talking about some of the, the kind of the satellite towns or Dorchester or Watertown or Ipswich around Boston, they feel, they feel more Puritan to me. Although there are people obsessed with land there and they are no strangers to capitalism and so on. But that in Springfield, I think that it's, you know, William Pynchon is a Puritan, but, you know, we don't have church records, unfortunately. So we don't actually really know how absolutely godly they were. Moxham the minister is a Puritan and he, we know, we've got his sermon notes. We know that what he's teaching them is godly doctrine. He's teaching, you know, that's what they're being told. So it's not that they, they, they surrender to capitalism and therefore that when they, and they become strangely kind of godless out on the frontier. I think the very fact that they are expected to be good Puritans, but that I actually are, you know, behaving in such a venal way as part of the tension. But I think that the, the thing about Puritanism in England and witch hunting as well is that Puritanism is about tension. It's about famously, you know, one half of a stressful relationship. It's not, it's, it's not Puritanism itself. It's the suspicion that there are Catholics nearby or that there are devils or there are demons or that some people or even, you know, Church of England, bishops, whatever, you know, these, you know, and Puritans themselves don't even agree with each other. So the William Pynchon, the great Puritan forces are exposed as a heretic because he doesn't toe the Orthodox Puritan line of what's going on. So it's a huge kind of muddle, but that of course what Puritans do have in common is that they are, they are fixed on the idea that the devil is very proximate and that he is controlling your imagination and your emotions if you let him. Okay. I think I might just have time for two more. One that jumps off that. Zach Moore asks, do you believe that the tensions around the town's patriarchs being in debt to William Pynchon is related to his later exile from America? I don't particularly think that, but there's the sort of germ of an answer or an idea there, which is that given that in the early years, everything is built on William Pynchon's authority, his natural authority. He is a charismatic commanding figure. There's no doubt about it, but that his through his very outspoken heterodox ideas about the atonement, you find that really that some of his authority starts to ebb away and that he is, that certainly he falls foul of the Boston authorities. I think at Springfield, they would have been very happy for him to carry on, but in the end, he cannot stay if he doesn't absolutely recount his opinions and he does it in such a half hearted way that really in the end, I don't know whether they would have kicked him out or not. I think in the end, he just decides it's time to go. And of course, he hands over to his son, John Pynchon, John Pynchon carries on running Springfield right into the end, right at the end of the 17th century. So I think that, you know, there's an incredible arc in William Pynchon's life. He starts off as a country church warden in a little hamlet in Essex and he goes on this extraordinary adventure and then he comes back and you know, and his life sort of comes full circle, ends up humdrum as it started and in between this extraordinary thing and that extraordinary thing in Springfield. Okay. The last one, you've got about a minute for this one. So this is from Harry. He gives lots of praise, but to skip forward to the he says, as a PhD English student specializing in witchcraft, what advice would you give to someone researching this subject matter? Okay. One minute. All right. Okay. Well, I think that, you know, if you're an English scholar, I think the fact that there are so many texts which are available at the time, I mean, study witchcraft pamphlets because they aren't, they are their own kind of truth. They're not, you know, pamphlets are mediated and they're distorted and they're propagandist and all sorts of things. But in pamphlets, you can see the way in which, because they are a commercial product, a printed pamphlet about witchcraft, that they both reflect people's stereotypes, prejudices, fears, preconceptions, like kind of little horror films. But then rooted within them, there are actually the very real fears of society and the real threat that witches might pose. And so I think that they're a very good sort of, they're a kind of little mirror of two types of society, the society that wants to kind of engage the witches for fun and the kind of society that wants to see witches as a very real threat to politics and society. Thank you for that very succinct answer. And I apologize to everyone whose question I didn't have a chance to pose. There were lots and lots of them. Malcolm, you've been an absolute star. This has been a really, really fantastic talk and you've answered so many questions and done so with such virtuosity and your inimitable intelligence. And I thank you very much for all the energy and attention you've given to everything we've posed to you. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for being such a brilliant interviewer. And so kind. And thank you to everyone who's taken part in all those great questions and to British Library for having me. It's been really enjoyable. Thank you very much. Thank you to the British Library for having us. A massive thank you to Malcolm, Susanna and Isabelle for that fascinating event. Just a reminder that if you want to buy a copy of Malcolm's new book, The Room of All Witches, use the bookshop button just above the video. Please do also give us your feedback and if you're able, donate to the British Library as we are a charity. And please check out the British Library Player where you can find lots more of our cultural events and watch them for free. Thank you and good night from the British Library.