The Manningtree Witches: 'the best historical novel... since Wolf Hall'

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This false equivalence, combined with a desperate need to demonstrate piety and devotion to the Christian triune God, provided a religious justification for the persecution and murder of countless women. Eastern England of the 1640s was a Puritan stronghold, a society in which women were considered culturally inferior to men.

They saw tens of thousands of people—around 90 percent of whom were women—imprisoned, tortured and executed across Europe in the late sixteen and early seventeenth centuries. Her mother, known as the Beldam West, is a doughty widow with a fondness for drink and confrontation. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,’ historical fiction about Kepler’s mother, is Galchen’s first novel since 2008’s ‘Atmospheric Disturbances.Puritans sought to reform themselves by purifying from their churches the last vestiges of Roman Catholic teaching and practice.

AK Blakemore is also a poet, and The Manningtree Witches has been praised for its “poetic” writing style. Most daringly, on Le Guin’s part, Tenar’s perspective serves to interrogate the sexual politics of the earlier Quartet , and the fantasy genre in general. It is surprising that this is the first major novel to focus on women’s experience, given the scale of the witch hunts. Rebecca West's coming-of-age included accusations of witchcraft, imprisonment, teenage angst, stirrings of romance and the reading and understanding of the gospel. Malcolm Gaskill, author of Witchfinders – A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, sums up the era’s uncertainty.The mechanism of persecution was not spontaneous but required official administration and organisation. Quite early on I wanted to bring it in to the gallery in some way and make that presence disturbing and awe inspiring and to explore through that the relationship to place and history and myth. When James I, a public opponent of witchcraft and demonology, ascended the English throne in 1603, the religious permissiveness of witch-finding moved to a more dangerous phase.

But then newcomer Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, pious figure dressed from head to toe in black, takes over The Thorn Inn and begins to ask questions about the women of the margins. It’s also where the self-styled ‘witchfinder general’ Matthew Hopkins’ stepfather, the rector of Mistley and Manningtree, preached his sermons to a largely pious crowd. Despite the title, I, Claudius is a fascinating portrait of a mother whose delicately exerted influence changed the course of history. Ten women were hanged at Chelmsford, while four were taken back to Manningtree to suffer the same fate.

As was true for many Christian sects of the time, Satan was as equally present in the Puritanical world as was their judgemental God. One other recent witch novel, Rivka Galchen’s “ Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,” wrestles with some of these same questions, turning on the intellectual battle between early scientist Johannes Kepler and those who had arrested his mother. Her first novel, The Manningtree Witches, won the Desmond Elliott Prize for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for the Costa and RSL Ondaatje Prizes. Local people here asked John Stearne, who lived in Manningtree, to take their complaints to the JPs. But Rebecca takes his measure more carefully: “There is something about him slant and insubstantial, as though all [his] dramatic outfitting houses none of the usual human meat.

Thanks to his success as a witch-finder, doing “God’s work” in the deeply pious counties of East Anglia, Matthew Hopkins gained tremendous notoriety.

Manningtree railway station is on the Great Eastern Main Line and provides regular, direct services to London, Norwich and Harwich. Fatefully, it was this 1604 statue, An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits, that provided the justification for a young man to begin a campaign of violence in the Eastern counties of England so ruthless that it still reverberates to this day. I have woken and put on my work dress, which is near enough my only dress, and yet she remains asleep.