Within a year of the arrival of James I in England in 1603, he enlarged the law to make almost all forms of witchcraft punishable by death and inspired a boom in witch hunting. The new Witchcraft Act required prosecutors to show that witches had worshipped the devil or associated with evil spirits. This extra requirement caused a decrease in convictions, from 41 per cent of those charged (1598–1608) to only 17 per cent (1608–17), but the stage was set for the witch-hunting craze of the 1640s.233

  Interrogations changed: sleep deprivation and bullying began to be widely used, and JPs and specialist witch-hunters learned from the witch-hunting handbooks, and the new law, how to prompt accused women with leading questions. English women started to confess to a relationship with the devil in person, and even to having sex with him.234 This emerged as rather a disappointment – the women reported that Satan had a tremendously cold penis and a short span of attention; the Prince of Darkness sounded remarkably like an inconsiderate lover who failed to produce a good dinner or sexual pleasure. Worst of all, the women divulged that Satan sometimes charged them pennies for the experience.

  All the written reports from the 1500s of covens, flying on broomsticks, naked dancing, use of familiars (pet or wild animals) and sacrifice of babies emerged after the genre of witch-fantasy confessions had been established, and they were written by magistrates who had learned what they should be looking for, what questions to ask and what trials a witch should endure. The sometimes gruesome, sometimes pornographic ‘confessions’ read like male sexual fears and fantasies, at a time when men felt increasingly anxious about female sexual appetite. Some humane and sensible JPs never elicited a witchcraft confession and remained unconvinced by the witchcraft scares.

  One of the largest groups of people to be charged and executed for witchcraft – the Pendle witches – were an unpopular local family. In 1612, in rural Lancashire, a young woman, Alizon Device, asked a pedlar for some pins. He refused to sell, and then suffered a fall and a fit. Alizon was accused by the pedlar’s son of using witchcraft. When she was interrogated, she confessed that she had been initiated into witchcraft by her maternal grandmother, an 80-year-old blind widow Elizabeth Sowthernes known as ‘Old Demdike’.235 Alizon also named another local elderly woman as a witch: Anne Whittle, known as ‘Old Chattox’. Both old women confessed to witchcraft and Whittle also confessed to killing two men with magic. Elizabeth Sowthernes’236 daughter, Elizabeth Device, was examined and a ‘witch’s mark’237 – a birthmark or mole – was found. Sowthernes accused her other daughter, Anne Redfearn. The five women were imprisoned in Lancaster Castle. Another Device girl, nine-year-old Jennet, accused her mother Elizabeth of witchcraft and murder, and said that at a meeting at the Demdike family home they had agreed to blow up the castle, release the prisoners and kill the jailer. A further ten people were arrested.238

  At the trial of 19 witches, more than half were found guilty and hanged, including Elizabeth Device, her sister Anne Redfearn, her daugher Alizon and son James, and the old lady, Anne Whittle.239 Eighty-year old Elizabeth Sowthernes died in prison before her trial. Twenty years later, in 1633, a Pendle boy named Edmund Robinson reported being kidnapped by witches and identified 17 alleged witches, including the now adult Jennet Device. She was found to have two witches’ marks and was convicted of killing a woman by witchcraft, but she was not executed. Robinson’s story was eventually discredited but Jennet remained in prison for several years.240

  Witch-hunting peaked in England in 1644–47, during the unrest and anxiety of the first civil war at a time when witch-hunting swept other European countries and was exported to colonial America. The English experience was led by one man: the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, Matthew Hopkins, who was responsible for 250 trials. At least 80 per cent of the witches he accused were women, and perhaps as many as 200 of them were executed.241 The high conviction rate (55 per cent) came down to Hopkins’ interrogation techniques. He used ‘tests’ of witchcraft such as stripping a woman naked to look for witches’ marks, pricking to see if she bled, and ‘swimming her’ – roping her and throwing her into deep water to see if she would float. But he denied that women were ‘extraordinarily walked till their feet were blistered and so forced through that cruelty to confess’.242

  His first conviction was against Elizabeth Clark, who was accused of bewitching the wife of John Rivet in Manningtree, Essex, in February 1645. Hopkins said that he found marks on her, and his assistant John Stearne claimed to have witnessed her assistants from the devil – imps. Elizabeth confessed and implicated other women, who were investigated by Hopkins and Stearne. Within three weeks, six Manningtree witches had been imprisoned awaiting trial – Elizabeth Clarke, Rebecca West, her daughter Anne West, Elizabeth Gooding, Anne Leech and her daughter Helen Clarke.243 By the end of July, 36 witches had been tried at Chelmsford and 19 of them hanged.244 Hopkins and his associates travelled through the counties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Huntingdon, charging a fee to frightened communities to rid them of witches. Another spate of hangings took place at Bury St Edmunds in August, when 16 women and two men were executed for witchcraft. John Stearne wrote that there were 120 more accused witches imprisoned awaiting trial, of which 103 were women. Mass executions of up to 70 witches were conducted at Bury St Edmunds.245

  One of the women, Susanna Stegold, confessed to killing her abusive husband through malicious thought. She told her investigators in 1645 that she first realised her magical powers when a pig died after she wished it would stop eating. Anna Moats was also found guilty at Bury St Edmunds in August after she confessed within two hours of her arrest that the devil had appeared to her ‘when she was a lone in her howse and after she had been curseinge of her husband and her childeringe’.246

  In early September that year, a woman named Mother Lakeland was accused of killing her husband with witchcraft and was found guilty of petty treason – a worse crime than witchcraft – and condemned to death by burning.247

  Matthew Hopkins died aged only 27 or 28 – he may have been hanged by angry villagers from the Manningtree area in retaliation for the deaths of their relatives and neighbours. The story that he himself was accused of witchcraft and drowned while being ‘swum’ is (sadly) unlikely. Hopkins’ death did not put an end to the witch-hunting craze in the east of England, and in Bury St Edmunds in 1662, two elderly widows – Rose Cullender and Amy Denny – were accused of bewitching local children and causing one death. They were found guilty of 13 charges of using malevolent witchcraft and hanged.248

  Concern that witches were being forced into false confessions, and that the witch-hunting books were coaching inquisitors, caused an increase in scepticism in the 1660s. The Restoration brought in a more sophisticated culture and doubts about witchcraft. Trials for the practice collapsed, conviction rates fell and reprieves and pardons became frequent. On at least one occasion, in 1664–5, the Privy Council stepped in to prevent a major witch hunt, when a Somerset justice of the peace had gathered evidence and the confessions of 25 suspected witches.249

  Faiths

  Women retained their roles as religious leaders and defenders of their faiths. When the civil wars broke out, Dorothy Kelly – who had founded her own separatist church – packed sandbags and defended Bristol’s Frome gate against the attack led by Prince Rupert, and when the Royalist army took the city, the little church went into hiding, with a woman brewer, Mrs Nethway, in Lewin’s Mead. They emerged, with Dorothy Kelly at their head, as a successful church that lasted through the Cromwell years.

  The poet Lady Eleanor Davies acted as a prophetess advisor to Oliver Cromwell himself, after correctly predicting the death of the Duke of Buckingham. Elizabeth Poole bore witness to her visions before the Army Council.

  In 1647, George Fox and Margaret Fell founded the Society of Friends – known as Quakers. Their first convert, Elizabeth Hooton, became a preacher, frequently arrested and imprisoned for her faith. Fell was the mother of seven daughters, three of whom became preachers too. Quaker women had equal status in the movement, and it was two women – Isabel Buttery and her female companion – who established the first meeting of Friends in London, bringing a sermon written by Quaker founder George Fox to the capital in 1654. They stayed with two converts in Watling Street and Moorgate.250 Quaker women took responsibility especially for domestic morals in families, and grew increasingly radical.251

  Margaret Fell spoke for tolerance, both for herself and for others, when she argued in favour of the readmission of Jewish men and women to England. Oliver Cromwell had proposed this to the council without gaining official consent; but from 1655 small numbers of Jewish men and women returned to England. And, in 1659, in a petition composed by Mary Forster, more than 7,000 Quakers lobbied against paying tithes to the Church of England, and Margaret Fell would go on to petition Charles II for the release of 700 Quakers, including the founder George Fox after he had been imprisoned.252

  Women at Play

  A celebration of sport and games for men and women was started by Robert Dover in 1632 in Chipping Campden. The collection Annalia Dubrensia described the Cotswold ‘Olimpick Games’, with women shown dancing jigs on the frontispiece to the book. A song recorded by diarist Nicholas Blundell described how the girls ‘daunced till thire bones did ake . . . and did swett themselves into a Jelly’.253

  In 1638, Sir Dudley Digges of Kent left money in his will for prizes for annual footraces, for bachelors and for maids, to commemorate his birthday, 19 May. The prize money of £10 was the same for each category, making it the most valuable running prize in the whole of England till the nineteenth century. There were so many entrants that there had to be qualifying races to choose the contenders to race at Old Wives Lees.

  Frontispiece, Annalia Dubrensia, 1636, showing Robert Dover’s Olimpick Games – see women competing in dancing in the top-left corner

  [And Cover] Frontispiece, Annalia Dubrensia, 1636 (Public domain)

  Not all sport was sponsored and encouraged by the elite. Football was banned on more than 30 occasions between 1314 and 1667 because so many matches – rival teams chasing cross-country after a ball – ended in violence and disruption. Women played, sometimes as teams of married women against single women.254

  The Invention of ‘Women’s Work’

  Elizabethan regulations kept workers in their villages at low pay and enforced lower wages for women, so the guilds and even the hiring fairs tried to exclude women workers to keep up wages and favour male workers.255 An understanding that women’s work was underpaid, less skilled and without prospects took root. The idea of ‘women’s work’ was invented to identify work so disagreeable or badly paid that men did not want it.

  By the end of the 1400s young men were more and more favoured for apprenticeships.256 Even London – the city of female opportunity – had become oversupplied with labour, and women were being squeezed out of business and property owning. Men rather than women were making, inheriting and consolidating fortunes.257 In Bristol in 1461, and in Norwich in 1511, male weavers protested against women workers entering the trade.258 The 1550 Ordinance of the Weavers’ Company ruled that no weaver could reveal trade secrets to ‘any maiden, damsel, or other woman’.259 A study of women in the Oxford guilds shows husbands and wives entering their names as equal members until 1540. After then, the name of the wife tended to be omitted.

  A London draper was refused by the guild officers to register his female apprentice in 1570, despite ‘much murmuring, since many in the company suspected that the woman did indeed have the right to be enrolled’.260

  Only 73 girls are known to have enrolled as apprentices in the first half of sixteenth-century London, and they worked, often for a woman master, in trades regarded as ‘suitable’ for women. From 1580 to 1640, there are no girls’ names recorded as entering craft guilds in London.261

  Exeter women were only allowed to apply to be freemen of the city if they were widows who had worked alongside their deceased husband and were continuing their trade after his death.262 Every town admitted fewer women into the ‘freedom’, and male workers competed strongly with women for work in all the skilled trades and profitable work.263 Bristol had used the convention of femme sole to enable women to enter trade in the city, and as late as the 1530s about five girls a year were being signed as apprentices and training as ‘sempstresses and tailors’. Later in the century, the apprenticeship system for girls steered them into domestic work. Bristol girl apprentices were to be found in food production, while some trained as ‘housewives and sempstresses’ – in effect, domestic servants. Since they were said to be ‘apprenticed’, they could be unpaid or work only for their keep. Helen ap Richard moved to Bristol from Tintern in Gloucestershire in October 1542 and signed up for a seven-year apprenticeship – to serve in a shop and sew. Her master was a grocer, Roger Jones, and his wife was a seamstress.264

  Apprenticeship contracts started to name housework and spinning as a ‘skill’ that would be ‘taught’, allowing employers to take on girls for seven years of unpaid work.265 In Coventry in 1595, there were 12 female apprentices working for female spinners. William Copeland took on a female apprentice at his inn at Romford in 1594: she served as his cook.266 Elizabeth Deacon was bound as an apprentice in Salisbury in 1612 to study ‘the mystery and sciences of housewifery and flaxdressing’: housework and spinning, ordinary domestic work with no training or promotion.267

  In the 1600s, the number of girls taking up apprenticeships doubled but the girls were not getting a training that would lead to them being ‘masters’ of their trades; they were doing domestic chores and sewing, spinning or keeping the shop – the so-called ‘apprenticeships’ were hidden servitude.268 The young women signed up for as many as seven years, working unpaid, receiving only food and lodging. Being apprenticed to a guild had been a specialist traineeship, leading to a skilled job and full membership of a guild. For boys it still was.

  In the later sixteenth century, skilled women traders and even full guild members found themselves squeezed out of work by local licensing arrangements. Control and discipline of women increased and many women owning or managing ale houses came under suspicion. Ale houses were profitable; and the local authorities helped men into the ale business. In 1540, the town of Chester ruled that no woman aged between 14 and 40 years could keep an ale house or serve as a tapster, imposing the staggering fine of 40 shillings. In 1566, 16 women were prosecuted for trying to work in their traditional trade.269 York, where almost all the brewers had been women, including some single women, changed the licensing system in 1562, specifying that licences should go only to ‘honest citizens’. The city fathers found 139 honest citizens to licence – 125 of them happened to be men; only 14 women were deemed suitable for a licence.270

  More women disappeared from the inn and brewing business in the seventeenth century as tastes changed from ale, which could be brewed on a small scale domestically from malt, to beer – which was brewed in greater amounts, in specialist brew houses from hops. Brewers of beer had to have capital or credit to set up breweries with vats, pipes, fuel, kegs and a transport and distribution system. They had to be able to buy large supplies of hops for large-scale brewing. Beer kept for longer than ale and could be transported to distant customers, or even exported overseas. Traditional ale wives could not compete with the male brewers of beer. The widow who had raked her malt in her little malt house, advertised that she had fresh-brewed ale by putting out a branch of a tree over her door and served till the keg was dry, could not enter such a capital-intensive business. The drink trade, which had been almost all-female, became capitalised, extended, mechanised – and passed into the hands of men to make their fortunes.

  From 1600, women hucksters had to have licences to sell their wares in the streets and markets, and these became more and more difficult for a single woman to obtain, and would be withdrawn if there were any complaints against her.271 When times were hard, poor men applied for huckster licences and moved into the work. Even a woman working with her husband as a pedlar could come under scrutiny. Isabel Wyld was arrested with her husband Thomas under the Vagrancy Laws in 1582, although she was a pedlar, covering 260 miles in a fortnight, over 18 miles per day, through six counties, selling the goods she carried in her pack.272

  The fortunes of upper-class women declined as well. By the 1600s, only a few wealthy women were able to enter the new booming money market. Lending developed into formal mortgages, secured against land, so women found themselves unable to compete with men, as they could not hold the title deeds or pursue defaulters in the courts unless they were registered as a femme sole. Women were almost entirely excluded from the growing credit economy and could not borrow capital to set up businesses in the expanding manufacturing industries, nor international trade.273 They continued as moneylenders and credit agents only at a small level, between trusted partners. A woman’s ‘credit’ rested on her reputation and her good name, personal attributes, not on the quantity of her business.

  Shops and shopping became ‘women’s work’. In the early Elizabethan years, women owned shops, inherited them or entered into partnership with their husbands to buy or rent them.274 Women shopworkers were preferred to serve customers in the fashionable retail shops such as those in the Royal Exchange in London. But after an early flourish of elegance, the Exchange became a magnet for assignations and prostitution; and male customers joked that female shopkeepers were themselves for sale.275 In other later shopping ‘exchanges’, women retailers bought or rented nearly half the shop spaces in their own names. The majority of shopworkers were poorly paid women.

  Buying goods in the towns and in London had been the work of gentlemen – who visited urban areas for business and networking more frequently than the wives they left at home. Two generations of women from the Thynne family, running Caus Castle and Longleat while their husbands were in London, sent detailed lists. Joan Thynne wrote to her husband John on 15 November 1600: