Sixteenth century

The sixteenth century in the novel is not merely a distant setting but the period to which a concealed manuscript traces the origins of the present-day horror. Dated 17 October 1560, Thomas Woolgar’s chronicle recounts his involvement with Einor and a sequence of accusations, communal violence, and punishment whose legacy appears to persist for centuries. The period reaches the modern plot through a record that is both a confession and a self-serving account, leaving its claims in tension with what others say happened.

Dating and Historical Setting

The chronicle places its narrative in 1560, during the reign of Mary I, and recalls the religious changes under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Woolgar invokes the contemporary punishment of heresy and reports witnessing burnings near Lewes; that setting helps explain how accusations of witchcraft and religious transgression could lead to prosecution and violence. The account’s political context is also personal: Woolgar describes his father as a wealthy patron with influence in the Church, a connection that shapes how the local religious authorities respond to the scandal.

The Chronicle’s Account

Woolgar presents Einor as a nun who had been admired for her piety and for tending to the sick, while claiming that she secretly acted otherwise. He recounts the disappearance and deaths of three children and admits that he helped Einor harm them. His version also describes the weakening and death of the prioress, the confession of a novice, and his own eventual denunciation of Einor as a witch and heretic. Rather than presenting himself only as an accuser, Woolgar acknowledges that he was implicated, though he repeatedly shifts responsibility onto Einor and her supposed influence over him.

After Woolgar’s report reached Banfield, it says, villagers gathered at St. Joseph’s Church and attacked Einor. She was accused of witchcraft, subjected to a trial by water, and executed by hanging and burning. The chronicle records that she cursed those present as she died. Its account thus links a local act of collective violence to a continuing supernatural threat, while also making Woolgar’s role in inciting and participating in the events part of the inherited history.

A Contested Record

The manuscript does not stand as an undisputed account. Woolgar’s father and a bishop later tell him that the people of Banfield remember Einor as having confessed to witchcraft and the slaughter of three children, and as having cursed the villagers at her death. They reject his claims of demons and supernatural openings, attributing his visions to madness and drugs. Woolgar, however, insists on the reality of what he saw. The disagreement leaves the chronicle suspended between testimony, guilt, and possible delusion rather than establishing a neutral historical record.

Woolgar was removed from Banfield and assigned to serve at another church on his father’s estate. His father arranged for the parish chest and its records to be transferred there; Woolgar later suspected that his father searched the papers for material that could disgrace the family, but says his hidden chronicle was not among the records he examined. The manuscript’s survival therefore depends on concealment as well as memory: it preserves what Woolgar says the official record and public account left out.

The Sixteenth Century in the Later Plot

The old account becomes consequential when the modern characters connect it to the violence at the shrine. Fenn recognizes that the name Rosemund belongs to one of the novices in Woolgar’s story and wonders whether Molly Pagett could have descended from her; he cannot determine whether the revenant’s use of the name reflects a real connection or confusion. The link is suggestive, not conclusive, and the novel leaves the historical relationship unresolved.

The period’s material traces return in the modern aftermath. A stained-glass window donated by a sixteenth-century nobleman is shattered when St. Joseph’s Church begins to break apart, and the later excavation beneath the fallen oak uncovers a centuries-old, burned skeleton with broken bones. The book does not definitively identify those remains, but their location beneath the shrine’s tree echoes the chronicle’s account of Einor’s execution. Through the manuscript, the inherited church records, and the excavated body, the sixteenth century remains an active and uncertain presence within Banfield’s present.