Anglo-Scottish Spiritual and Material Economies in the 1649-50 Newcastle Witch Hunt
Lecture
Lecture Room 2, Herschel Building, Newcastle University
Description
In 1649, at the behest of petitioners, a Scottish witchfinder was commissioned by Newcastle upon Tyne’s councilmen to search the town’s suspects for devil’s marks. After the accused were pricked, gaoled, and tried at the 1650 summer assizes, fourteen women and one man were hanged for witchcraft on the Town Moor.
The Newcastle witch-hunt has existed largely in the periphery of English witchcraft historiography and in the broader historiography of the region, with brief analyses characterising the hunt merely as a chronologically isolated instance of scapegoating used by local officials to consolidate control of the town.
This talk put forward a more nuanced understanding of the hunt’s origins; re-examining the surviving evidence directly relating to the trials, but also incorporates evidence of more long-term influences beyond the town’s walls and north of the border. While Newcastle defended against military attacks from Scotland, its population was regularly supplemented by cross-border migration. Alongside migration and the trade in material goods between the two countries, this close cross-border relationship brought with it a heightened interest in news from the bordering regions, including the spread of religious ideas and stories of witchcraft. This ‘spiritual economy’, a shared network of beliefs, created a context in which the character of witch persecution in the North-East was influenced by both English and Scottish witchcraft ideologies.