Why did witches confess?
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Why did hundreds of ordinary people confess to being in league with the devil in the 17th century? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Marianne Gibson takes us back to the witch trials of the 1640s and reveals the real identities and stories of those who were accused. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Maureen explains why so many of these seemingly ordinary individuals actually agreed to the witchcraft accusations. You begin the book with the story of a man called Megs, or as we later discover, Henry Mags. He was a man who, during the 1640s,
came to a witchfinder to be checked for signs of witchcraft voluntarily. For this, he was hanged in 1645. Why did you decide to open the book with this example? How does it set the tone? I thought Henry Mags was really important because I'd known his name from an account by the witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins, who calls him Megs, and there's just this kind of flipped
comment about, oh, this man Megs a baker, he came to be tested for witchcraft and and we hanged him for his trouble, ha ha ha. And I just thought that was such a horrible way for somebody to be remembered in history. So I set out to look for the real Henry Mags, as he turned out to be called, and tell his story in a way that would be more from his point of view, would treat him with dignity and respect and kind of give him back his voice. So One of the things the book aimed to do really was look for the victims of witch trials and see if we could tell the story as they might have wanted it to be told, rather than listening to the witch finder sneering at them and saying how he had trapped them and how clever he was.
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