Although we can see many connections between our own lives and those of 17th-century English villagers—disputes among neighbors, domestic disharmony, wealth disparity—the times were very different indeed from our own. Look around you now and strip away the trappings of the present. No electricity, no phones, no bright screens flashing information, no cackling TV in the corner of the room.
No planes, trains, cars; no distant noise of rush hour. No plastic, no fridge, no supermarket. No water you’d consider clean, no antibiotics, no anesthetics.
Keep going until you stand in a world that’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine. Deep black nights, candlelit. Evenings filled with gossip, mending clothes and tools.
Waking in the dark to a day of physical labor. Want some candles, socks, a snare, a salve? Organic food, skies full of birds, farmland webbed with hedgerows.
Hunger, plague, influenza: waves of death that scoured the villages every few years, tearing away a third of your neighbors, the children next door, the love of your life. Compulsory worship with frightening dogma, which could lead you equally plausibly to heaven or hell. Tight, familial church communities, huddled in isolated villages and small towns; people held in place; a striking lack of privacy and liberty.
Yet the word “witch” described an unreality: a person in league with the devil, using magic and evil spirits to hurt their neighbors, turning away from God to worship Satan. Poorer folk and women were especially firmly regulated by religion in this 17th-century world—people like Alice Cooke of Hempnall. That will matter in the story of the witch hunt.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
