Just Finished Reading: Royal Witches – Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England by Gemma Hollman (FP: 2020) [275pp]

The accusation of witchcraft has often been used as a weapon directed (for the most part at least) at women. Those accused of such crimes could lose all of their belongings to be distributed by the accuser. It was for some a highly profitable way of removing elderly relatives sitting on valuable land or simply discrediting their perceived enemies. But such accusations were not completely risk free. In England, for most of its history, judges and magistrates were almost universally sceptical about people pointing to witches in their midst. Indeed, even in the midst of the great European witch craze it was in England that accused witches had the greatest chance of surviving the experience. Not surprisingly most witches, the so-called ‘wise women’ and ‘wise men’ within most communities were poor, often living on the margins. But some high-born (or at least high-status) women were also accused of practicing the Black Arts. Here the author tells the tale of four of them and what befell them.

Of the four mentioned women – Joan of Navarre, Eleanor Cobham, Jacquetta of Luxembourg and Elizabeth Woodville – I was only previously aware of the last two by previously reading novels by Philippa Gregory. In each case the accusation was for largely political reasons – to discredit or disinherit the woman herself or to attack another member of her family (usually her husband) by being associated with a witch. Each accusation outlined here resulted in varying consequences. One lost her property and land – essentially a ‘shakedown’ to pay for a war – but a significant part was eventually returned to her, another lost just about everything but kept her life and another merely had people whispering behind her back for the rest of her life. Despite a spell of incarceration – if you can call months spent in rather palatial castles being waited on by servants' ‘incarceration’ - few of these women could be said to have suffered overly much because of their status as ‘maybe witch’. 

Overall, I must admit that I was somewhat less than impressed by this book. Although accusations of witchcraft figured somewhat in the lives of all four women – who were connected by marriage, birth or association – such things were generally peripheral and felt like a rather contrived link to create the book. I wouldn’t say that the title/sub-title was misleading but I think it sometimes flirted with the idea. Whilst generally a reasonable history of the period I often found the focus elsewhere from the women it was supposedly about. The author herself, on multiple occasions, stated that little was known of this period in her life or that incident (a dead giveaway to me is the referencing of bills of payment in lieu of anything else on record) but speculated anyway. But from my perspective the worse ‘sin’ was that I felt that the author spent far too much time speculating on the emotional states of the women filtered through her own feelings of the incidents described – separation from husband/children, loss of property/status, the great unknown of what was going to happen next. Although people living 500 years ago were essentially the same as those living today their culture and upbringing (at any social level) was vastly different. For example, with high infant mortality it was not uncommon for children of poor families not to be named until weeks or months after their birth because there was a greater emotional cost to burying a named child rather than an unnamed one. Such things are practically unthinkable today and such parents would be called ‘unfeeling’ or even ‘monsters’ but 500 years ago it was simply pragmatic. So, assigning unknowable emotional responses based on our present cultures beliefs is questionable at least. Reasonable with caveats.