Chelmsford, a small but bustling commuter city just 30 minutes outside of London, is not somewhere you’d immediately associate with the macabre horrors of 16th and 17th-century witch trials. Yet, my hometown has a dark and largely unknown history. Between 1644 and 1647, Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General, declared a pogrom on witches and witchcraft, which led to 112 executions of women from Hopkins’ prosecutions alone, many of whom were hanged at Chelmsford’s Primrose Hill Gallows. More died while awaiting trial in the squalid conditions of 17th-century jails.
In total, during the 16th and 17th centuries, over 100 women accused of witchcraft were executed on Primrose Hill—significantly more than in the famous events that occurred later in Salem, Massachusetts. Now, the only remnant of these events is a small plaque in the nearby Admiral’s Park. Primrose Hill itself is now covered by rows of small terraced houses. I often wonder how much the residents of these homes know of the dark past of the land on which they now reside.
A terraced house on Primrose Hill, Chelmsford.
Whereas Salem’s grim past has been carefully preserved and used to promote tourism, Chelmsford’s dark history has been concreted over. The assizes court where Hopkins' victims were tried was long ago demolished, and a bank branch now stands on the site.
A sketch of Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder Generale.
Hopkins developed methods described in his book, The Discovery of Witches, later adopted in the New England colonies, such as needles that would retract upon pressure and fail to penetrate the skin, thus ‘proving’ the satanic nature of the accused. He would have other suspected witches strapped to chairs in a rite known as ‘swimming’; if the defendant floated, then, once again, this would be perceived as proof of the occult. If they didn’t float, they would have drowned with an unblemished soul. Another of Hopkins’ obfuscations was to slice the arm of the suspect with a blunt knife; if they did not bleed, it was declared a sure sign of their malevolence.
However, despite his notoriety and being by far the most prolific of all witchfinders, the dark history of Chelmsford both predates Hopkins and continued long after his death in 1647. Elizabeth Lowys and Agnes Waterhouse, from the villages of Great Waltham and Hatfield Peverel respectively, both situated on the city’s outskirts, were hanged on Primrose Hill and were England’s first convicted witches in 1565 and 1566.
Documentation of the case against Agnes Waterhouse is particularly vivid. Waterhouse’s sister, Elizabeth Francis, was initially accused. However, in a bid to save her own skin, she gave testimony against her sister. Francis recounted that she had owned a black-and-white spotted cat named Sathan (Satan), whom she had requested kill a wealthy farmer named Andrew Byles, who had refused to marry her after she became pregnant with his child. She also claimed that she bid the cat kill her six-month-old daughter and make her husband lame. Francis stated that the cat would do whatever she, and later her sister, to whom she gave the cat, requested—in exchange for a drop of blood.
Sketch of Agnes Waterhouse taken from a ‘chapbook’ of the trial.
Agnes confessed to having used witchcraft to kill livestock belonging to those who had crossed her, yet denied ever using such power to take the life of a human. However, it was the account of a 12-year-old neighbor, Agnes Brown, that condemned Waterhouse to the gallows. Brown described seeing a demon in the form of a black dog with the face of an ape and two horns upon its head. In her first encounter with the beast, she claimed it asked her for some butter, which it then took despite her refusal. When the demon returned, it came armed with a knife and threatened to ‘thrust the knife into her heart and make her die.’ In her account, the terrified child asked the apparition ‘who its dame was?’ to which it responded by nodding its head toward the home of Agnes Waterhouse.
The result was that Agnes Waterhouse was hanged on 29 July 1566, only two days after the trial. Her sister, Elizabeth Francis, was given a lighter sentence but was hanged thirteen years later after a second conviction for witchcraft.
As with all witchcraft trials, it is difficult to believe the accounts and confessions of the women due to the unimaginable duress under which they were likely placed. In Agnes Waterhouse’s final confession, she repented and begged God’s forgiveness. She said that she prayed regularly, though only ever in Latin, as the cat Sathan forbade praying in English. This bizarre confession, reported through the lens of the prosecution, says more about the motivation for her trial than any of the evidence.
These events took place within decades of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the Catholic Church in England and the resulting schism. In the years that followed, the reciting of prayer and mass in Latin became the sole preserve of Catholicism, whereas breakaway protestant churches and their puritanical offshoots would only conduct services in English. So, it is more than likely that it was Agnes Waterhouse’s Catholicism, as opposed to any real evidence of the occult, that served as the driving force behind her conviction and subsequent execution.
So, do the souls of the poor women, brutally condemned to death for witchcraft, haunt the streets of Chelmsford or the little terraced houses upon Primrose Hill? Who knows? But it’s safe to say that beneath the manicured and pedestrianized streets of the modern city—a dark history lies.
Book One
J.W. Hawkins
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Wilderwood Press
Date of Publication: 31 August
ISBN: 9798334501188
ASIN: B0D752QM73
Number of pages: 296
Word Count: 74,000
Book Description:
J.W. Hawkins' "Tales of the Wythenwood" masterfully blends whimsy with darkness, capturing the essence of dark fantasy and classic fairy tales while infusing them with modern sensibilities. The collection is rich in themes of nature, survival, morality, and the complex interplay between good and evil. The author’s love for rhythmic and descriptive language breathes life into the Wythenwood, making it a character in its own right. Each story, while unique, contributes to a cohesive world where the fantastical and the real intertwine seamlessly.
Great Oak, an omnipotent power, hatches plans to crush dissent. Injured Desideria is helped by a mysterious creature—but what is its real intent? The Taker of Faces stalks the night for her next victim. Will this be the one that sates her need and provides all that she craves? Indoli, a benevolent master of manipulation learns the consequences of teaching his ways too well—and soon the fate of the entire wood is at stake.
Excerpt From Tales of the Wythenwood:
The Artfulness of Stupidity
Prologue
The
eagle sat watchfully, the wind ruffling its feathers as it swirled unimpeded
atop of the spindle of rocks on which the eyrie sat. The foliage below swirled
hither and thither in a great maelstrom of assorted detritus. Yet none came so
high as to bother the winged guardian as he remained alert upon his perch
looking down on the outstretched canopy of the seemingly endless Wythenwood
below.
Hand
over hand, foot over foot the troupe climbed upwards; silently. Their simian
faces grimaced as the cold gusts of air bombarded them in a continuous effort
to break their will. Never had they climbed so high, yet they knew not why they
climbed and knew not what they sought. All that was known were the tempting
whispers of a prize beyond prizes, the reward of all rewards that could be
found uttered in the darkest nooks and deepest crannies of the Wythenwood,
where all utterances came under hushed breath.
The
eagle was as eagle-eyed as eagles are and had long since espied the intruders,
yet he waited until the baboons had climbed high enough to ensure that any fall
would return them to the soil once more, to nourish the roots of the endless
number of trees that was the Wythenwood. He must send a message to those who
would consider trespassing on the hallowed stones of Eramana’s needle he
thought. The message needed be to clear— and final.
Higher
and higher they climbed up the thrusting edifice; wrought by rain, winds and
eons passed. The eagle looked down over its beak and upon its sacred charge, a
ward that it had been born to guard and would also die to do just so. It bore
the mottled patterning common to all eggs of eagle kind, yet this egg was
swollen to an enormous size, large enough for an eagle fully grown at birth to
erupt from its dappled shell. Though the shell itself was interspersed with a
multitude of tiny holes and through every hole; like the most intricate and
ornate of weavings grew the most impossible of vines. Leaves of red, leaves of
gold and green, nestled amongst them was every shade between. Leaves of oak,
leaves of acacia, pine and yew holding every color from spring to fall. It was
not one tree; it was them all.
Although
it seemed that the vine belonged perhaps to every tree that ever was, in some
ways it belonged to none at all. For no roots did it bare to earth, instead it
just lay wreathen around the great egg from which it protruded with the long
tentacular strands of the chimaera vine smothering all the other eggs nesting
within the eyrie in a nurturing, motherly embrace.
The
eagle dipped its beak so that it all but touched the leaves of the wreathen egg
and whispered so gently that even the air itself, through which the eagle’s
words did pass could have barely heard.
Hand
over hand, foot over foot still the baboons climbed on, eyes wild with the
greed of anticipation, up and up they rose. And then it happened…
Yellow
beaks and wings as black as the reaper’s cowl descended from the mists above.
Gray tendrils of cloud ran amok as flailing arms grasped for them in panicked
desperation, only for their brief hope of salvation to disappear into corporeal
nothingness upon little more than the promise of a touch. Wrenched from the
rocks by ferocity and talon the baboons one-by-one began to fall. A final glint
of life dancing in their eyes with maddened fright as they plummeted to the
swiftly encroaching ground.
The intruders lay motionless with eyes now
glazed by death. The soil shall have them once more thought Reinhardt.
J.W. Hawkins is a writer of Dark and Epic Fantasy, best known as the author of Tales of the Wythenwood. He is noted for his florid and descriptive use language and use of fantastical allegory that mirrors the empirical world. He lives in the UK with his wife Michelle and two boys Graham and Mark.
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