Witchcraft persecution

Witchcraft persecution is the campaign of accusation and custody directed at Kitty Gosse, Anne Rogers, and Lizzie Carr under Edmund Jordan’s authority. It turns village anxiety about a new landlord into a charge that can be used to detain and interrogate women, while drawing Philip Earle into a purported conspiracy. Walter Thirsk does not witness the interrogations; the account reaches him through John Carr and Charles Kent, so the episode’s violence is conveyed through partial reports, guarded testimony, and the villagers’ response.

The accusation takes hold

The first account reaches Walter from John Carr, who describes villagers seeking an audience with Edmund Jordan after being kept waiting at the manor. Jordan does not receive them. His steward, Baynham, eventually appears, gives little explanation, and raises the possibility of witchcraft. The accusation arrives amid a dispute over authority and belonging: the villagers have been told that the new master is a Jordan, and they do not understand how their land has passed to him. The steward’s suggestion redirects that unease from the change in ownership toward alleged wrongdoing among the villagers themselves.

John says that the villagers rejected the suggestion. He reports that Baynham answered their denial by claiming that three women were already in custody and warning them to leave and gather fuel for a fire. The prospect of punishment changes the encounter. John admits that the villagers’ anger then made them speak imprudently, and that in trying to protect their own they did not help Walter. His account makes the community’s response part of the persecution’s conditions: frightened villagers are not simply witnesses but people forced to weigh solidarity against the danger of being implicated themselves.

Walter is troubled by the accusation partly because witchcraft is not, in his account, an ordinary village explanation for misfortune. The word itself is treated as perilous, something adults warn children not to use even in jest. Walter distinguishes the earlier, less burdened idea of a sorceress from the heavier charge now being raised. For him, naming witches signals that a familiar social boundary has been crossed: an allegation once treated as dangerous talk has become official language backed by detention.

Interrogation and the making of a conspiracy

Charles Kent later tells Walter that the three women endured a night of punishment. Kent was confined to his room and a guard, Jordan’s Groom, was placed at his door to prevent him from intervening. Kent was not an eyewitness to what occurred in the rooms above him; he reports hearing disturbances and cries through the house. Walter likewise distinguishes what Kent heard from what he himself can establish, then makes clear that his reconstruction of the questioning is an inference rather than direct testimony.

According to Kent, Kitty Gosse had confessed before the villagers came to the manor, saying what Edmund Jordan had decided would serve his purposes. The questioning also sought an account that connected Anne Rogers and Lizzie Carr to witchcraft. Walter understands the process as coercive: the captives were not being asked an open question so much as pressed to provide the accusations their captors wanted. The narrative attributes particular scrutiny to Kitty and reports that the examination of the women’s bodies was used to support the interrogators’ suspicions, without making those suspicions evidence of witchcraft.

The accusations then widen to include Philip Earle, whom villagers had called Mr. Quill and the Chart-Maker. Kent reports that the interrogators treated Earle’s artistic work and bodily difference as signs of occult practice. Lizzie, who had been kept tied for much of the afternoon, was promised that she might retain her green sash if she proved herself an honest girl. Her account then served as corroboration: she said Earle had made her Queen and tried to touch her. Edmund Jordan’s party also recast Earle’s earlier account of surviving lightning as evidence of supernatural dealings. These claims are presented as material fashioned to support a conclusion already desired, not as independent proof.

Objects, absences, and the expanding charge

Earle’s room supplied the authorities with a collection of ordinary but unfamiliar objects they could redescribe as incriminating. Kent says that Baynham pointed to small grinding tools, powders, paints, a fiddle, a handwritten natural-history book containing recipes, and pressed plants. Earle’s brightly colored charts were also condemned because they lacked the keys and labels Baynham expected of a landowner’s maps. In the steward’s telling, their colors and forms became a kind of incantation. The episode sets two ways of reading objects against each other: materials associated with Earle’s work are stripped of their context and made to confirm the accusation.

Earle himself was absent when the authorities searched his room. He had already gone to the pillory and then pursued Mistress Beldam, while the officials treated his absence and his possessions as grounds to deepen suspicion. The conspiracy story also drew together the alleged theft of Charles Kent’s late wife’s velvet shawl, the death of the mare, and the presence of a recently arrived woman and her kinsman. Each unresolved matter could be fitted into the same explanation. By the time villagers came to ask for the captives’ release, the three women were being held inside the manor, and the men waiting for Earle’s return were prepared to act against him.

Dispersal and the plea for release

The persecution does not end through a public correction of the allegations. Charles Kent tells Walter that within five or six days the village has been emptied, its inhabitants dispersed by alarm. Once Edmund Jordan’s cousin has the village cleared, Kent says, Jordan’s interest in the captives and in sorcery abruptly diminishes. Philip Earle and Mistress Beldam cease to command attention as well. The change exposes the shifting priority behind the proceedings: as the village’s removal advances, the witchcraft inquiry loses its urgency beside Jordan’s project of progress and wool production.

Kent uses that change to intercede for Kitty, Anne, and Lizzie. He asks Edmund Jordan to treat their alleged offenses as minor and to end their punishments, appealing to kindness, wisdom, and honor. Jordan answers with a taunt about sending them to their deaths and asks whether he may use Kent’s firewood. Kent’s reply asks instead that they be allowed to live and walk away untethered. The evidence here ends with the plea, not a confirmation of what followed. The captives’ fate remains tied to the same imbalance of power that enabled their detention: their freedom depends on the decision of the man who authorized the process.

Narrative significance

Because Walter learns crucial details from people who were themselves restricted or frightened, the account keeps a distinction between testimony, sound heard through a closed door, and inference. Kent’s inability to intervene is especially consequential: even in his own house, he is confined while his cousin’s men control the questioning. John Carr’s account, meanwhile, reveals how the threat of witchcraft fractures the village’s willingness to defend its members. Persecution operates not only through the captives’ treatment but through fear that makes neighbors calculate whom they can safely claim as their own.

The sequence also links accusation to dispossession without reducing every detail to a single proven motive. Edmund Jordan’s authority over the inquiry, the villagers’ fear for their land, and the sudden fading of interest in witchcraft after the village is emptied together make the charge inseparable from the struggle over who may remain. A story about alleged sorcery becomes a practical instrument of control: it isolates women, discredits Earle, and gives official force to a crisis already reshaping the community.