Q&A
A selection of historical conundrums answered by experts
Were witches actually burned at the stake? strangled before the flames took hold. And in Sweden, “witches” were beheaded before being burned. Conversely, in England – as in North America – where cases were tried as felonies in secular courts, those convicted did not burn but were hanged. The English legislation of 1542, 1563 and 1604 focused upon harmful magic – where people, crops or animals had been allegedly damaged by magic – rather than on putting suspects on trial for expressly concluding a pact with the devil. This, combined with the refusal to sanction judicial torture, acted as brakes on large-scale hunts. Not that this came as much consolation to the “Bideford witches”, who, in 1683, became the last women to hang in England. They died at the very moment that Newtonian physics, the politics of Locke, and judicial scepticism promised the dawning of a new age based not upon fear and hatred but upon hope and human reason. John Callow, author of The Last Witches of England (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Women accused of witchcraft are burned at the stake in Derneburg, Germany, in a 1555 engraving. This fate was common in continental Europe – but, in England and North America, “witches” were hanged instead 48
The Mayflower on its 1620 voyage to North America. After it returned to England, the ship met a decidedly unglamorous end
What happened to the Mayflower after it carried the Pilgrims to North America in 1620? Mayflower was a common name for ships in the 17th century, occurring repeatedly in port books, so historians must be careful that any ship they find with this name is in fact the same one that took the Pilgrims to North America. This particular Mayflower had been used to transport all kinds of popular goods including wine, salt, wool and hats. After its journey to the New World, it appears to have sat in the Thames. Following the death of Christopher Jones, the ship’s part-owner, the Mayflower was broken up. It is not known with certainty what became of the timbers, though it’s been suggested that planks purchased from a yard in Rotherhithe, used by one Thomas Russell to extend a barn in Buckinghamshire, came from the vessel. Whether or not that’s true, the story has certainly drawn eager tourists to the barn in the village of Jordans. James Evans, author of Emigrants: Why the English Sailed to the New World (W&N, 2017)
BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY
In songs, stories, horror films and detective fiction, the witch always burns. In continental Europe, people convicted of witchcraft certainly did burn: approximately 40,000 victims, the majority of them women, went to the stake between 1428 and 1782. Indeed, a German chronicler, writing in 1590 in the aftermath of a hunt, described the execution ground as looking “like a small wood from the number of stakes” driven into the earth. Witchcraft was seen as an “exceptional” crime that struck at the foundations of society, Christian belief and governance. As such, it demanded exceptional punishment. Death by fire, previously reserved for heretics, suggested ritual purification and destroyed any hope of a bodily resurrection for the accused at the Last Judgment. The punishment was intended to terrify and obliterate a witch in both the present and the hereafter. However, this picture requires some important qualifications. In France, the German princely states, Scotland and Switzerland, the “witch” was usually
